He shifted the inscribed copies of Alice’s books in the kete and kept his voice calm. Friendly but calm. ‘Yes?’
‘Aunt left a bit of money.’
What revelation had he been hoping for. ‘That’s great,’ he said hugging her. ‘Great. I mean it.’ He could not find the words he wanted. Words to rejoice in her good fortune, to tell her she deserved it, to say he was sorry yet again for his crassness.
She did not look particularly happy. ‘It’s all very odd. I thought she didn’t have a bean, the way we lived.’
He put his arms around her and kissed her.
‘Thank you so much,’ said Emmeline.
Seven
Robin sat in the car on Lyall Bay foreshore, his eyes on the grey surf as he tried Aunt’s system for the denial of guilt. He found it interesting but not very effective.
Emmeline had turned to him after they made love, had stroked his chest, licked it. ‘Doesn’t need cream,’ she murmured. ‘Now stop feeling guilty.’ He rolled into her arms. She held him for a moment then wriggled free to grab tissues, mopped her chest and handed some on in silence. ‘Stop now,’ she said, ‘and I’ll tell you Aunt’s system.’
Naked beside him, backed by crumpled sheets, slipped duvet and tissues, Emmie told him how Aunt had taught her to deal with ‘this guilt rubbish’. ‘When I feel guilty I work it out. I say to myself there is no point in this unless I can do something about what’s causing it, or don’t want to—and that’s the catch. It’s all in the head. If I cant, or don’t want to change things, then there’s no point in it so shut up O’Malley and stop being wet.’ She glanced at him, a careful sideways peek. ‘Get it?’
He screwed the tissues tight, slid his closed fist along her thigh. ‘And then what happens?’
One arm was reaching for the light switch. ‘You’ve got a good smile,’ she said. The underarm was carved not moulded, interesting in its hollows, its red tuft of hair.
‘It works.’ She paused, examined a hangnail. ‘Usually. Like Aunt said. Face it, do something, or ditch it.’
‘Leave it on,’ he said. ‘I want to talk.’
‘I talk better in the dark.’
‘I want to see.’
She lowered her arm, stroked her armpit drowsily. ‘Lisa,’ she said, ‘is dead. That’s tragic. But you can’t do anything about that, right, because …’ She turned to him, her nipples framed by a few pale hairs at eye level. ‘What was that thing you had at your wedding?’
He remembered instantly, wished she hadn’t.
‘“For life goes not backwards, nor tarries with yesterday.”’
‘That’s it,’ said Emmie. ‘That’s what I mean.’ She turned off the light and rolled over. ‘Night.’
‘Emmie?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I just wanted to say I didn’t
‘Oh shut up, for heaven’s sake.’
He glanced at his watch. Four-fifteen. There was a heave of the duvet.
‘Are you awake?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good.’ Her arm reached for the light. ‘Funny. I usually sleep like a log after.’
He lay blinking against the glare. Distance was a haze without his glasses.
‘There are a lot of grey areas in my life,’ said Emmeline.
He thought of Murray.
She bounced over to face him, her body tense. ‘People like you who know where you come from, you think what’s she on about? It’s now that matters, people like you say. But you don’t know how bizarre it is. Who was this Vermont lawyer? What if Aunt was lying and I wasn’t her sister’s child and I wasn’t hers? Why the hell didn’t she tell me and whose am I?’ She was now on another tack, fingers waving in front of clavicles. ‘It’s like Aunt used to say about health. If you’ve got it you never think about it. Not until bits start dropping off; then you think shit, I’ve lost it. Or never had it, or whatever. People say, who needs red tape? Well I can tell you—I do. OK I’m not stateless, I’m not half-starved in some hell camp. I’m here and I’m lucky but …’
He stifled another yawn. ‘Emmie, Miss Bowman was the most honest woman who ever lived. And you can find out. I’ll help you.’
‘Sure. Sure. But …’ She paused, stared straight ahead at the misty head of Christ. ‘There’s a guy at rehearsals who’s in recovery. I wonder if that might help. What d’you reckon?’ She was now burrowing beside the bed. There was a dimple above each buttock. He put out his hand. Too late. She came up with her arms full of papers, brochures, books, and dumped them on him. ‘Here.’
‘Not now.’
‘Oh all right.’
She rolled away. ‘Her name was Candida,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘Aunt’s. How about that?’
There were two or three surfers creaming in on the slow winter rollers. Another ambled down to join them, his wetsuit hanging from his waist in welts of rubber, his face blue. He dragged on the rest of his suit and paddled his board out to lie flat-bellied beside the rest. Patient as predators they waited for the big one then vaulted upright to sail in or crash from sight.
A bundled child in pink gumboots was helping Dad. It raced the ribbons of sand blowing along the beach, picked up driftwood, fell over, tried again, resolute in its conviction that life goes not backwards nor tarries with yesterday. It was right. The gut-slicing despair of grief had begun to fade, would continue perhaps to fade. Otherwise, he thought, rifling through the pile of guff Emmie had insisted he take home as well as Alice O’Leary’s books, he would become dependent on grief and would not be able to save the world until he had saved himself from this addiction. The books said so. Neat eh.
There was information about access to co-dependency workshops to find the cause of the canker, the Inner Child trapped within, represented often by hand-held soft toys clutched by participants. The frog was particularly popular. Followed by bears.
Robin read on with increasing interest. Parents did not do well. They had a bad press. He was astonished to learn that some recovery experts believed most people in the United States have been the victim of child abuse until he discovered how widely the term was applied.
Very widely indeed. Parents abused their children by invalidating their creativity and their experiences. They belittled, they thwarted the spiritual growth of their children who could be marred both by parents who worked too hard to make money and thus did not give their children sufficient attention and by those who did not make enough money and thus failed their offspring in other ways. Solo mothers with seven or eight dependent children had frequently provided insufficient time for bonding and inadequate resource material within the home.
Nazism, he read, was the direct result of Hitler having been abused as a child.
It was all very informative, this pile of papers. Sitting around clutching cuddly toys and overcoming your dysfunctions by releasing the Inner Child was not, he read, a privilege granted only to the affluent and the safe and the fed and the housed. It was essential for the future of humankind. The Inner Child wished to fly first class in its mission to heal the world. Like Saint Thomas Aquinas it was aware that man naturally desires happiness.
As who does not? Robin sat white-knuckled in the cold car, his eyes on the oyster-coloured horizon beyond the passing ferry, his head spinning with gurus who blamed parents, politicians who blamed the poor, experts who blamed other experts and change agents with the quick fix. He wanted to shout at the watchful flattened surfers—‘There is no quick fix. You can’t love everyone. Just feed them.’
And where was he in all this? Ah, there you go man, there you go. What about the boy wonder for disinterested generosity, for solving the problems of the world, for getting things weighed off, for understanding that we are all different and some are more different than others and the trick is to know that we don’t know.
And what about Emmie? ‘OK,’ he promised a group of marauding dogs cruising the pavement. Marauding. On the maraud à la plage. His eyes itched. He made an odd sound, something betwee
n a snort and a sob. ‘OK,’ he said again.
The dogs came at a fast clip, tails up, paws pacing, eyes and ears sharp for action. A bitser, a collie, a corgi with a plumed tail and another more genetically sound one, a bassett hound, its bandy legs motoring in an effort to keep up with the boys as they searched this way, that way, come on gang, she must be somewhere.
It puzzled him that Emmie had not only given this stuff house room but had wanted him to read it. Emmeline O’Malley who had been born in the state which glories in the fall then sheds the lot to regroup for next year. A state which is various and stoic as is Emmeline.
He piled the brochures, pamphlets and books back into her kete. A phrase caught his eye. There was one condition which was more resistant to therapy than all the rest. Addiction to God, he read, is more insidious than alcohol, drugs, sex, food, gambling or bad relationships. He should tell Eileen, but would not. He felt a sudden stab of affection for his mother, for the thin purple thread of vein on the tip of her nose, for her tongue which flicked, her pale hands still offering him the comfort and salvation of her fix. He must help her more; mend her fence, her shower curtain as well as his own, must shoulder her problems with promptness. Look after her better. Of course it was easier to like Maureen. She was not his and she had not drifted away, disappeared somewhere else a long time ago.
The car was tossing in the wind. The dogs were still circling. The bitser squatted briefly then bounded after the rest as they disappeared. The pink-booted infant and the trailer of driftwood had vanished. He must go and see Eileen. Now.
He inspected Alice’s books. Emmeline had blown dust from them, run a finger along the top before piling them into the kete. ‘I haven’t read them for years.’
‘Did Miss Bowman?’
Emmie was still huffing. ‘Doesn’t look like it.’
She handed the bag. ‘I’ve put in a few photographs. Some of her first husband. Can’t think where they came from.’
The photograph of Edwin Calder reminded Robin of a naive portrait by some itinerant Early American painter. The tight lips, the small wary eyes; the loving attention to background did not display the quill pens of old-time lawyers or the pumped-up livestock of prosperous farmers, but Edwin also had been portrayed at his workplace. He sat in charge of a flat-topped desk supported by a telephone, blotters both rocking and flat, a brass inkwell and an ornate pen-holder. His large hands clasped wooden chair ends, his boots gleamed, his pleats were knife edge and his moustache large. One or two other photographs featured Alice; standing beside the solid figure, her eyes, like his, fixed beyond the viewer. Edwin looked tough, Alice merely distracted. There was none of the serenity evident in Miss Bowman’s photograph in these ones. Robin had not seen it for years but Emmeline remembered it. ‘The cloak one? Yeah, that was her when she was young. I’ll try and find it.’
Robin opened Alice’s Poems ’47 and propped it on the steering wheel. He should go back to the flat, flake out onto the Indian bedspread (they would get a duvet later; Lisa would pop out at lunchtime) instead of bumping about in the cold car. He had finished with recovery.
The poems were not good; they were trite, bad and of little interest except for occasional unexpectedness of subject matter among the paeans to nature.
I know little of Mexico, well, not much.
Hearts plucked for chucking. Aztecs.
There was no wheel.
Montezuma declining heaven
Then Frieda, and Lawrence in the new one.
The handwriting on the inscription was small and neat, grade-school neatness with careful loops and crossed Ts. One in Poems ’47 read,
My darling Candida,
As always.
Alice.
Yes, well. Interesting. He looked at the other books, flicked through each title page searching like Cara for latent lights.
The Mystic Scroll (1957) was inscribed For you.
The Hand of Time (1959) For you again.
All Fall Down (1960) No words.
The Load (1962), thought by some critics to be her best work and by some her worst, was inscribed simply Later. None of them except the early poems was signed with her name. Robin had known The Load was her best ever since he discovered her in American Lit where she had featured briefly, very briefly, as an enigmatic fringe figure with no obvious antecedents who specialised in despair; who occasionally overwrote but usually sliced to the bone. The last book was a ‘simple tale of a dysfunctional family’. A family who should have loved each other and didn’t, who hated each other with self-destructive loathing, though not at the beginning, no, not at the beginning at all. The beginning was an idyll. If there was a false note in the book it was the excessive lyricism of the first few chapters, the overwhelming sense of a cornucopia bursting at the seams with tumbling children, russet apples, wide red barns and plenty. An Eden waiting to be lost as lost it was. Betrayal, violence and bitter grief took over as the writing tightened to laconic understatement. A child hanged itself. Not in the barn, that had been done before. From a tree by the river, feet touching.
Robin read on. A slip of airmail paper lay face down on page one hundred and forty nine. There was no heading and no date.
He is dead. I am coming immediately. I’ll cable. Hurray.
Alice.
Robin swallowed, picked the transparent slip from the page and held it in his hand. He glanced over his shoulder in a quick idiotic gesture and laid the letter flat on the passenger’s seat. Astonished, unnerved by the bonus of the Great Find, he shifted his buttocks and discovered something else. His bladder was bursting. He glanced at his watch. No wonder. He turned the car to head for the nearest Gents. Where? Kilbirnie’s he knew, an ornate little edifice of a bog on a corner but could he make it. He was not going to. Impossible. Not impossible, not impossible at all. He swung the car into the Sunday calm of a supermarket car park, fell out of the car and walked stiff-legged behind a pile of battens, unzipped and pissed against the wall. There is no relief but relief. The strong head of steam, the splatter of the cascade was satisfying. He rezipped and sauntered back across the asphalt then remembered and broke into a bounding headlong dash for the car. He had not locked the door.
No one had glanced, no one had cared, or if they had had walked past his hoard with the dead eyes of the unknowing. Not surprising really.
He was still reading when the telephone rang. He had always avoided telephones, had been glad that Lisa had leaped to answer at all times. ‘Sandy. How did it go? No! Tell me. Seventeen? Wow! On a Sunday.’
‘Hullo,’ he said.
‘Hullo, dear.’
‘Oh hi Mum.’ He had not got there; his mother had remained unvisited. ‘Hi,’ he said again.
‘Robin?’
He turned on the news, left the sound off. ‘Yeah?’
Eileen sounded slightly breathless. ‘I wondered if you’d like to come over tonight for a drink …’
The newsreader dipped her chin slightly, swapped her competent calm face for her competent sad face. The news from Rwanda was worse.
‘A drink? Now?’
‘Yes. Now.’
‘What for?’
‘I just thought it would be nice. There’s something …’
He overreacted in compensation. ‘Yeah, that’d be great. I’ll come straight over. Great.’ Wow. Gee. Hang. ‘I’ll bring a bottle,’ he said.
‘Oh, you don’t need a bottle,’ said Eileen.
He pulled up at her gate, aligned the wheel, got it right, did not abandon the thing yards from the kerb like some. He was tired though you don’t say that and was bored by people who did. He sat at the wheel with slouched shoulders, smiling at Emmie’s house. ‘You’re overstimulated,’ had been Eileen’s comment on the rare occasions when he had ‘played up’ as a child. It had not happened often and there had been little stimulation. He grinned again. Good kind generous Emmie would forgive him, had already done so. He must see her, tell her. Emmie, I found a scrap of paper I’d like to keep for a
while. No, a letter. He would not diminish the find, nor resort to his mother’s diminutives—women to girls, girls to lasses and finally littlies who were the best of all. Emmie, I found a letter in The Load and I’d like to keep it for a while if that’s OK.
Her casual reply. Sure, sure.
He walked past the rockery which Eileen had given up on and how could you weed around those Crown of Thorns’ spikes anyway. The concrete birdbath now veered slightly to the south. His feet scuffed the whiskery grass which he should mow and would. The globe above the front door was lit, its tideline of dead insects obvious. Access to Eileen’s house was usually from the back, not past the dingdong of the front door.
It opened immediately. Eileen was wearing a garden print whose history he remembered. It had been created from a short sale length eked out by Maureen with a wide insert of black at the waist and black collar and cuffs. The flowers were pink and white; their stalks had been picked out for contrast. The star-spangled brooch gleamed red and gold on her left breast. ‘Hello dear,’ said Eileen.
He kissed her soft powdered pinkness. ‘Hi.’
‘Well.’ She almost clapped her hands. ‘Come in,’ she said and darted sideways into the front room. Robin, who had not been watching, headed automatically towards the dining-room and the telly and my little papers and the crocheted afghan and the iridescent birdman on the wall.
‘No, no, no, Robin,’ laughed his mother, her voice high. ‘We’re in the front room.’
‘Oh.’
‘There’s someone I’d like you to meet.’
‘Meet,’ he said.
He backtracked to the floral carpet, the unlit fireplace, the stamp album on the mantelpiece and Nana Dromgoole’s books between the wild-eyed heads of the brass horses. There were one or two studio photographs but no recent ones. They cost money and snaps showed you just as much anyhow: Terence in a hat laughing, offering a black and white fish; Robin as a baby, fat-cheeked and earnest above rompers and soft white boots. Wedding groups with lasses in their slimlines and the boys in tight suits and shame-faced grins and murderous hair cuts.
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