Robin tipped back on the heels of his new shoes, his eyes on his bride still meeting and greeting and having fun. ‘So does Lisa.’
Emmeline ran her tongue in front of her top teeth. ‘Is that right?’
‘And it’s not Henry James any more.’
‘Good.’ She grinned, shrugged off the weight of fat books. ‘Who then?’ Her face changed, became sly with self send-up. ‘Anyone I know?’
‘Alice O’Leary.’
‘Oh, Aunt knew her.’
‘Whaaat!’
Her eyes were following Calvin’s flight course about the room. He was busy having a ball; being spoilt, hugged, cosseted or avoided. He ran round and round, up and down, in and out, weaving through the configurations of the party like a manic and diminutive figure at a hoedown. ‘Yeah,’ said Emmie. ‘She stayed with us when she first came out. Weeks and weeks. I was about eight or nine. She came from Vermont as well.’
Rob shook his reeling head. She had no idea. No idea in the world. He wanted to seize her bony hands, to shock sense into her, to make her understand the astonishment of her gift.
‘But that’s amazing.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, because …’ Because she’s my thesis. I can talk to someone who knew her, a friend of hers, as well as the half-dead husband down south. All this and Lisa too. Robin stood still, awestruck, surrounded by revelry and the shrieks of friends. There were balloons, icing, icing on the cake. ‘Hey.’ He breathed the word out. ‘Hey, I’ve met her.’ Well, glimpsed her, heard her voice. He had met Alice O’Leary.
*
The hut was a hide for bird-watching; flattened grocery cartons begged from Bernie had been reconstituted into a lopsided structure stuck together with wide brown sticky tape (commercial grade). Rain had not yet reduced it to sludge but its days were numbered. The smell was distinctive, the sour furry smell of damp cardboard.
Robin had not told Eileen its real purpose. She had disliked the eyesore but been brave. All small boys had huts. She knew that, though she also knew she would have to wait for an inorganic collection to remove the mess eventually. In the meantime Robin hid. There were few birds, but those that came he watched and waited for and hugged himself with joy. He drank cocoa and sugar and cold water from a plastic medicine glass from the bathroom as starlings goose-stepped feet from the slits in the hide. A blackbird came frequently, his mate less often. Why? Why was that? The sparrows were regulars, known by name: Fat, Jim, Boss. He liked them but they came too often. They had not the rarity value of chaffinches or robber gulls or the occasional silvereyes.
The hide was at the back of the section by the nearly defunct woodshed. Rampant bignonia had almost engulfed it and moved on to overflow Miss Bowman’s shed alongside a leather-leafed loquat and a straggling lilac. (Miss Bowman disliked pruning.)
A woman ran out Miss Bowman’s back door and stood still, both hands covering her mouth as she stood rocking back and forward, back and forward.
He knew who she was. ‘I have a house guest coming to stay Robin,’ Miss Bowman had told him last week, polishing the glass of her pictures in her front room.
‘A house guest,’ he said carefully.
‘Yes. A guest in the house. You know about guests.’
Did he? ‘Yes.’
‘A house guest is a guest who stays in the house.’
‘Oh.’
‘So, don’t come over till I ask you again.’
He looked at her. She shook her head. ‘No,’ said Miss Bowman.
‘Mum, why can’t we have a house guest?’
The things they come out with. ‘What on earth for?’
‘I don’t know.’
And here was the house guest, tall, dark and weeping on the back steps. She ran to the shed door and tugged hard. He could see her hair, more hair than he had ever seen, rolled and twisted about her head.
‘It’s locked,’ Robin told her from his hide. It was always locked; always had been. The woman turned and headed for the lilac and sank down. ‘No!’ she cried at the late-afternoon stillness, the bright light. ‘No. No. No,’ wept the house guest.
Robin watched in alarm. He crouched lower, hid deeper in his shyness and waited for her to go away. But she was sad, so still … He crept out of his shelter and moved to the sagging fence. ‘What’s the matter, lady?’
Her head snapped up from her hands. She gasped and scrambled to her feet. There was mud on her frock, mud on her clutching hands, a streak across one cheek.
‘How long’ve you been here?’
‘Hours.’
She shook her head, mopped her eyes.
‘You’re the house guest,’ he told her.
Her eyes closed briefly. Her voice was funny. ‘Something like that,’ she said.
‘Can I come and see Miss Bowman?’ he asked Emmie. ‘Soon.’
There was a smear of cream on her jodhpurs. She wiped it angrily, then licked the finger. ‘Bugger. What? Oh sure. She’ll tell you all about her.’
‘The bridegroom,’ said a man by Robin’s side, ‘the bridegroom who should be dancing, stands without a glass at his own wedding. How can this be?’
Spiro Daskalakis seized his arm, planted a full glass of sparkling white in his hand and hugged him. ‘For you Robin I break my rule. Never to drink on the job. My first rule. How many years is it since you came? Since you are with me and they say to drink. How many times? Tell me.’ The fingers of the hand without the glass snapped open and shut begging for numbers. ‘Many, many, many.’ Spiro drank, wiped his moustache with the back of his hand and beamed at them. ‘And the lady …?
‘Hi. Emmeline O’Malley.’
He bowed. ‘Daskalakis. Spiro Daskalakis.’
‘She’s an actress,’ said Robin.
The bubbles got up his nose.
Spiro Daskalakis came from Kalives in Crete; a small hill village near Chania where he had sat with booted friends in tavernas drinking raki as the piles of broad-bean pods and peanut shells mounted on plastic table-covers. Had burst occasionally into fierce stamping song, had danced with men weaving in arm-locked camaraderie. A war buff from childhood, Robin knew about Crete and Cretans. About Maleme and Galatas and ‘Stand for New Zealand.’
People were called Agamemnon. Euripides, Spiro told him, had given him a kitten when he was small.
Spiro retold old stories. Stories of heroism, of dead fathers and uncles and child cousins and women during the war who smuggled food to Allied soldiers hiding in the hills. Of love and poverty and wild dances and caves where Gods were born, of a village by the sea where the hippies had lived in the nearby caves with their looseness and their drugs and their women who were whores. The caves, he told Robin, had been left filthy.
He had a good face Spiro, tough, honest and calm. Magnanimity flowed from the man. His trust had almost embarrassed Robin years ago as they sealed the deal with a fierce clench of hands. Three nights a week and weekend engagements starting as dishwasher but would move up. In time, if it happened. In time. No promise.
Robin, to no one’s surprise, moved up quickly. He was neat, quick, kept his knives sharp and cleaned up as he went. His sandwiches were a dream. He was promoted to mains, had the right touch with souvláki and dolmades and not only the Greek. He was Spiro’s right-hand man, his offsider. He was still invaluable, even though he had now reduced his time to one night per week and weekend extras if required.
Dionysus Caterers worked in what looked like chaos but was not. My girls knew what they were doing, as did my casuals. Caterers’ manners is what we have, boy. No please, no thank you, no excusings while we work. Just getting on, getting there is all. All done. Nice and easy, Spiro explained, leaping to an overflowing pot, his tongue clicking to calm it.
He was a childless widower and had lived for many years in a tall house on the hill in Island Bay, alone except for his tropical fish. ‘They are the best thing, fish, for being alone. Every morning I come down and they are there. Swim this way, swim that way. Why do
they do that?’ he had asked Robin years ago. ‘You know fish. You learn fish. How do they know which way to go? Which one decides? You study. You know.’
‘No, I don’t know.’
Spiro had put down his small coffee cup, patted Robin’s cheek, his lips smacking the air with approval. ‘Don’t know,’ he says. ‘Don’t know and says so.’ He traced a dreamy circling spiral of approbation in the air with one forefinger. ‘An honest man. A good man.’
Robin’s move to the humanities had been a wise one. It was not just that too much of zoology was dead. Statistics and computers bored him and you couldn’t get into the back row of the research chorus without them. Dionysus Caterers kept him solvent and he had broken free from the contents of the steel tubs and pale shapes drifting.
He crossed the road to the English department, two floors of which crawled between German and classics in a tower block designed around a lift well. The tutorial rooms were boxlike after the labs. There was no shiny technological equipment, and few teaching aids. The pursuit of English literature was assumed to take place inside the head; eyes, ears, books, an occasional film or tape were all that was required. The minimalism suited Robin. The spectrophotometers and the other machines across the road had held little charm. The Vibros respirometer shaking its guts out, lights flashing as for blast-off which never happened, had been impressive at first but soon palled.
He had a second chance and was lucky. He had found his natural habitat and dug himself in, put down roots and settled in like a gentian on a well-drained scree.
He planned his course with his usual caution. He must have a firm base on which to build. He must leave his options open at this stage. The thought of school teaching appalled him as much as ever. He would become an academic despite Lawson’s adverse comments, ulcers and miserable death.
He thought fondly of the poor old guy when he discovered how much he enjoyed the release from ‘relevance’. He had enjoyed English at school and the academic approach to books and their authors slipped on like a well-powdered surgical glove. It dawned on him after a while that it was possible to get good marks without too much effort. You did not have to worship the stuff, though some did. Not the law students of course, most of whom suffered their year’s grind through English literature with distaste ranging from catatonic silence to yawning obscenities. But there were some.
The range of enthusiasm for their subject among the teaching staff also interested him. Some of them were so emphatic, so fiery and insistent that you should love the dead writer to whom they had devoted their lives, that it was advisable not to sit in the front row during lectures. Some were so laid-back they could scarcely get in the door before, sighing deeply, they grasped the lectern for support and held on. One or two were brilliant; made him see, briefly, that passion and commitment might be the only way.
But only briefly. Robin became adept at tracking down references, looking up sources, studying the text and not the author. Sylvia Plath’s life and death held little interest for him, that of Lawrence surprised him. Literary influences researched for years by dead critics seemed obvious to him, strange bedfellows of admired and admiring did not surprise him, comparisons could be approached analytically, a pecking list of writing and writers as rigid as the Periodic Table could be established with ease. The precision appealed to him.
He was workmanlike also in his approach to exams. He studied old papers with care and picked likely questions with accuracy. His prepared answers seldom failed him and he enjoyed the spin-of-the-wheel challenge. He was pleased with life. He had made the right decision. He and Lisa would marry and move to Lyall Bay. The study grant and Dionysus Catering should be enough to survive.
He accumulated As as an undergraduate and moved on to his Master’s. He nodded at members of the staff in the lifts, washed his tea cup, worked harder and nodded again. He refilled the Zip. When he was appointed a tutor in 1988 he had hoped for something slightly more in the way of … well, not friendship, of course, not even conversation, but some faint acknowledgement from his colleagues of this able student now working on his doctoral thesis on Henry James.
His first choice, as Emmeline remembered, had been The unreliable narrator. A contrary view. It was obvious to Robin from the moment he read The Turn of the Screw that the female narrator was stable and unbiased, both as a witness and woman. It was some of the critics, in his view, whose games were suspect; who flew their own kites, pushed their own barrows, then dumped their own eggs in the well-feathered nests of their lit crit opponents and waited for carnage.
‘I think you’re making a mistake, Robin,’ said his supervisor Owen Braithwaite, his brown curls tight as carpet wool as he turned from his computer to peer at him. ‘Its been done to death, The Turn of the Screw and the reliable/unreliable narrator business. Far too often, surely.’ His face brightened momentarily. ‘Perhaps I exaggerate, but then again … I agree there’s always room for one more in anyone as convoluted and subtle as James. But that particular controversy … Is it still,’ his hand touched his mouth to give warning of the joke, ‘still relevant? There’s been so much. Stern of the Crew, all that nonsense, quite apart from the rest. Of course, Robin, it’s your choice. It must always be but … Well, let me know when you’ve thought about it. Read it again. It won’t take long. Great deal to be said for novellas.’ Owen pressed a button. The winged toasters of the screen-saver disappeared. ‘Let me know,’ he said again. ‘Think about it.’
Robin thought about it and was convinced. He could get bogged down in an over-ploughed field. He would find someone unexpected, different, new: somebody like Alice O’Leary (1928–1979).
The man jumped the other way when he proposed Alice O’Leary. A case in point.
‘A bit slight, isn’t she? For a doctorate?’
‘I don’t think so.’
Owen puffed air through his nose, adjusted his spectacles. ‘I agree of course that as a symbol of sudden cessation of creative endeavour, blasted hopes, etc, she has few equals but … She’s such a rara avis, that one. A one-off. And so little to go on.’
‘We know all her early life,’ said Rob. ‘While she was writing in Vermont, marriage, no children, widowed, came to New Zealand, remarried and stopped. Why she stopped will explain a lot. There must be something more than just that “married and gone to New Zealand” crap.’
‘Yes,’ murmured Braithwaite drowsily stroking his chin. He sighed, tugged a long pink ear. ‘Possibly, possibly, but all that loss, that bitter acidity.’
Robin smiled. ‘That’s why I like her. I think she’s clear-sighted.’
‘Yes, yes, I do see that. And you’re going to rescue her.’ The lips smiled. ‘Suffrage year’s over, you know. You do realise that.’
You dim prick with your stroking fingers and your rara avis and your flying toasters. Robin breathed deeply, was filled with forgiveness. He had found his subject. The more he read of her stuff the more he liked it. A few grim stories, fragments, poems, four novels. Why had she stopped writing? Why had she come to New Zealand, married and stopped? A case history. A case in point. He disliked the implication and wished to prove it wrong even though it meant he would have to change his thinking. The texts alone would not be sufficient here. He would have to dig further. A misfiled quotation from Henry James surfaced unexpectedly on his screen. Here truly is the tip of a tail to catch, a trail to scout, a latent light to follow up.
He agreed with Owen Braithwaite about one thing. It was odd that Alice, a woman of talent prematurely silenced, had not been done before. Very odd. Not a good role model, perhaps.
‘You still have this one,’ said Martha, touching the head of the surviving twin. ‘That’s something.’
It is best to learn betrayal at an early age. It strengthens the heart muscles and the sky does not fall.
No woman has wet her pillow for her sister’s grief.
When babies open their mouths their gums are new and their teeth, they tell me, are pearls. They have not been here
long.
All grief is self-pity.
His colleagues did not consciously avoid him. It was probably the design of the place: no common room, no tea room, pigeon-holes for mail. Plaintive notices begging for individual responsibility and cleanliness in the cubbyhole with the Zip. Men and women padded to and fro to their rooms clutching steaming mugs of their own Instant. Dead-mouse teabags lay stained and leaking in the sink. A certain amount of hissing together beyond closed doors went on but very little. Occasionally someone laughed. They worked hard. There was much to be done and not enough money.
Robin joined the Staff Club when he was offered the tutorship; he ate explosive egg sandwiches, read the Guardian Weekly and the New Scientist and watched the tie-dyed cloud shadows drift across the harbour. Somes Island floated on air, the marina was half empty. Where had they gone, those sleek shining toys which normally berthed there. It was too calm for sailing, too calm by half. They must be lying on their sides with their keels showing, being scraped for barnacles which feed by standing on their heads and waving their legs in water. Emmie, he remembered, had had a tie-dye phase. The results had been variable.
*
His English One tutorials were held in room 4B. He knew it well, had sat for years among men and women almost identical to those who now lounged or stretched or fidgeted in front of him, indolent, bored, inattentive or hopelessly pathetically keen. An older man sat fussing in the front row with a tape recorder beside a blond hunk in ripped jeans and a shrieking T-shirt. Two mature women students, colour co-ordinated and smiling nervously, sat in the next row; attentive, pens poised—wood from the neck up. A dark wellbarbered man opened a briefcase (law). There were a few other men and several women; dark and silent, wide and chatty or sleek as mice, they looked at him. One cushioned her breasts on crossed arms and stared. An Asian woman with club-cut black hair waited in what looked like a trance. She was sweating lightly. He glanced at his list. Japanese? Yes.
The House Guest Page 6