The Diviners (23 page)

“Which cruel lines did you have in mind?” Dr. Skelton enquires, looking surprised.

The class is beginning to enjoy this. Morag is beginning not to enjoy it. But will not stop now–pride forbids it.

“Well, like ‘For God’s sake hold your tongue and let me love.’ That’s a very cruel line. Supposing the lady had been able to write poetry–I mean, you wonder what she might have said to
him
.”

“You would not take it kindly, Miss Gunn, to be asked to hold your tongue?”

Laughter from the class. Morag’s face feels unpleasantly warm–does it show?

“No. No, I would not.”

“Well, quite right, too,” Dr. Skelton says, seriously, frowning a little at the class’s general levity. “But Donne, surely, must be seen as a man of his historical time.”

“Oh, of course. I understand that. But you can accept it with Milton, better, somehow, despite all those really awful things he says–‘He for God only; she for God in him.’ You think, well, he was all bound up with so many things that were going on in England at the time, and where people’s feelings were concerned, except his own, maybe he just didn’t know any better. But–well, you wouldn’t have expected it of Donne, so much.”

“You admire his poetry to a large enough extent that you would like to admire all his concepts as well?”

“I guess so. Yes.”

“But concepts were different then.”

“Yes. I–guess so.”

“I’m not sure that particular theme is really integral to an understanding of Donne’s poetry,” Dr. Skelton says. “But on the other hand, it can only be a good thing to care enough about a poet’s works to want to go back in time and discuss the matter with him. Which is what you almost seem to want to do, Miss Gunn.”

Morag considers. Then smiles.

“That’s right.”

The class convulses. Laughter is rampant. Which does not matter at all, because Morag is well beyond the reach of it.

Morag is sitting in Dr. Skelton’s office. He is leaning back a little in his swivel chair behind his desk. He has just finished
reading one of Morag’s stories, and is thinking what to say about it. The story is about an Austrian nobleman who comes to this country complete with the peasants from his family’s lost estate and who tries to create a replica of that feudal system here. Needless to say, he does not succeed, and his end is both nasty and mysterious.

“Quite frankly, it seems a little implausible to me, Morag,” says Dr. Skelton, who has taken to calling her by her first name out of class.

“Yes, I guess so. That’s my fault for not being able to do it properly. Because it’s based on something that really happened.”

“Good Lord–where?”

“Up Galloping Mountain way.”

“I like your idiomatic expressions,” Dr. Skelton says, smiling.

Morag draws herself away from the desk. Country girl. Up Galloping Mountain way indeed. Illiterate.

He sees her face.

“Did you think I meant that sarcastically, Morag? I didn’t. Your speech has a directness which one often does not encounter in academic circumstances. Where do you come from?”

She does not say.

“Oh–nowhere, really. A small town.”

“Your family lives there?”

“I don’t have any family, actually. I was brought up by–”

By no one. She cannot speak Christie’s name, Prin’s name.

“I was brought up by some friends, well, acquaintances of my parents,” she finishes. “They’re no relation to me. My parents died when I was very young.”

“You seem very calm about it,” he says, looking at her as though from a great distance, behind his glasses. Then his face
relents and she sees that what she has taken for disapproval is in fact a kind of admiration.

“It happened when I was really very young,” Morag says. “I don’t remember it. Or at least hardly at all. I guess I was too young to be affected much.”

Untrue. But she does not want to pose as brave, which would be even more untrue.

“And these–acquaintances who brought you up?”

“We were never–close.”

“Have you had a lonely sort of life, Morag?” His voice is not prying; he needs to know, though, for some reason.

“In a way, I guess. Perhaps no more than most.”

Dr. Skelton smiles, as though touching her, not in either amusement or pity.

“You’re proud, I would guess. Am I right?”

“I can’t bear pity,” Morag says.

Dr. Skelton’s face is no longer smiling.

“You needn’t worry,” he says. “You’ll not get that from me, ever.”

Ever? That is a long time. She does not feel able to interpret him.

“I had a relatively solitary life myself, as a boy,” he says. “I was born in India. My father was Headmaster of a boys’ school not far from Calcutta. Church of England school. I was pretty much alone as a youngster.”

“But if it were a boys’ school–”

“No. I didn’t go to school there. I was sent to England to boardingschool when I was six.”

“That’s–awful. Like that kid in that Kipling story, ‘Ba Ba Black Sheep.’”

“Not quite like that,” Dr. Skelton says. “I wasn’t so easily
browbeaten. Nor quite so shortsighted, either. I liked the school once I got used to it. Still, in retrospect, I don’t remember childhood as a golden era.”

“It must be interesting to have a past like that, though,” Morag says, regretting the naive words as soon as they are uttered. “I mean, India and like that.”

“Fascinating.” Dr. Skelton grins. “Exotic as all hell. Don’t hunch up your shoulders, Morag. I didn’t mean that as any slur against your response. It
was
interesting. I loved India as a child. I used to go back on holidays. I still miss it. What sort of a past do you feel yours was, then? Or perhaps you’re still too young to have considered it very much.”

“I’m twenty,” Morag says. “Or nearly. I don’t feel–I don’t know, I just feel as though I don’t have a past. As though it was more or less blank.”

She will not–she will
not
–tell him about the town, and Christie, and all. Scavenger Logan. No. Not ever.

“That’s a strange thing to say, Morag. Almost more interesting than having a past.”

“You mean–
An aura of mystery surrounded her
?”

They laugh. Morag feels she has never felt so close to anyone before, except of course Ella, which is different.

“Come on, mysterious one,” Dr. Skelton says. “I’ll drive you home.”

“You can’t. I live away to hell and–I mean, my boardinghouse is away out in the North End.”

“No matter.”

The car finally skids and slithers successfully through the snow, and they reach the Crawleys’ house.

“You were right,” Dr. Skelton says. “It
is
away to hell and gone. Why do you live here?”

“It was the first place I looked at, and I thought I wouldn’t find another. Now I don’t like to move. They’re nice people.”

“I like you, Morag.” He reaches up and removes her glasses, simultaneously removing his own. “Life has many hazards for the not-fully-sighted–have you noticed?”

He then kisses her. It is not a friendly or teacherly salute. It is knowledgeably hard, his tongue exploring her mouth, not coolly or hesitantly but with insistence. Morag responds, as usual, instantly, but more so than ever before. If he should ask her to strip in the exposed and icy car and make love with him here and now, no holds barred, she would do so.

Dr. Skelton breaks away. Heavy breathing from them both. “I’ve wanted to do that for quite a while,” he says. “Here–have a cigarette.”

Cigarettes for safety. Morag, shaking, takes one.

“Dr. Skelton–”

She stops. You cannot call a man Dr. Skelton when he has just kissed you with his entire body.

“Brooke,” Brooke says. “At least, out of class.”

He sounds miserable, and she enquires with her eyes.

“Oh, nothing,” he says. “It’s just–well, goddamn, I’m thirty-four and you are a child.”

“No,” Morag says clearly. “I am far from a child, Brooke–you know that.”

“Do I? When you’re fifty, I’ll be sixty-four. You wouldn’t be happy.”

“I would. I would. I’ve never before–”

“You seem very sure.”

“I am,” Morag says. “I always am, over things that matter. I always know. But what–what do you
like
about me?”

He kisses her some more before replying.

“What do I like about you? I don’t even think I can say. You’re not exactly beautiful, but you will be. I don’t know. You’ve got a kind of presence.”

He laughs, as though being serious is a treat at the moment.

“Perhaps it’s your mysterious nonexistent past,” he says. “I like that. It’s as though you are starting life now, newly.”

Morag’s feelings exactly. Now, however, now that it matters, she would like to tell Brooke everything, to make sure. Clowny Macpherson. Piper Gunn and the Bitch Duchess. Gunner Gunn and the War. The snapshots. Christie ranting the Logans’ war cry, the pathetic motto and crest. The Nuisance Grounds. Prin, so long ago. The valley–the Tonnerre shack.

No.
No.

“You’d better go now, Morag,” Brooke says gently. “Go now, my dear. If you stay here, I’ll turn the car around and drive you back to my flat, and that wouldn’t be a good idea.”

Why not? But she does as he says. His car chuffs off through the loose whiteness of the road.

If she cannot be with him from now on, and live with him inside her and outside her in every way, she will not be able to bear the pain. She is all at once without shame of any kind, totally unscrupulous in what she would do, totally vulnerable. She will do whatever he wants her to do.

It will never happen. He would never consider marrying anyone like her. If he knew where she had come from. Or if he knew what she was really like, for that matter. Could she be exactly what he wants? What does he want? She will find out. She will conceal everything about herself which he might not like. None of Christie’s swearing.

It will be useless, though. It will never happen. He will change his mind. Or believe the age difference matters.

She is numb with too much hope, too little hope.

They are walking down Portage Avenue. Brooke reaches out for her hand. Students may see. This matters less and less.

“You know, love, you have a quality of innocence that’s very moving,” he says. “I don’t mean naïveté. I mean genuine innocence. I’m not like that. I’ve lived too long for that, and in too many places. But it’s a quality I love in you.”

She wants to tell him she is not like that, either. She also has lived too long for that. The state of original grace ended a long time ago.

“Brooke–I think I should tell you about my childhood. All about it. I think I should.”

He laughs a little.

“All right, if you really want to.”

Brooke’s apartment is the size of five minutes. A miniature livingroom with hideous pale mauve walls which the previous tenant fancied and which he cannot be bothered to repaint. Bookshelves everywhere. A worn sofa covered with a very large and elegant white Kashmir shawl with intricately embroidered flowers and strange unworldlike birds in coral and black and leafgreen. A leather chair. A table. Prints of Renoir and van Gogh on the walls. Some pieces of Benares brass–a vase, several bowls enamelled in soft turquoise and clear brilliant red, patterns of birds and flowers and leaves, from a world too far from this one. The kitchen is actually more of a large cupboard with sink and two-burner hotplate. The bedroom contains a large and beautiful walnut spool bed, Brooke’s desk, an austere dresser. The bathroom is so small you couldn’t swing a cat in it (if you should ever desire to engage
in such an activity–where do these phrases come from?). Morag thinks the apartment (
flat
, to Brooke) is beautiful.

“Shall we have some sherry before you tackle the eggs and bacon, which is all there is here at the moment for dinner?”

“Please,” Morag says, having recently learned to say, simply,
Please
, instead of
Oh yes thanks I’d just love some
, or, worse,
Okay that’d be fine.

“Now what’s all this about your nefarious past?” Brooke says, smiling.

“Not nefarious. But–well–Christie and Prin Logan, the people who brought me up–”

“
Prin?
”

“She was christened Princess.”

Brooke bursts out laughing.

“No–it wasn’t all that funny. She–they–were quite poor, you see, and–”

She cannot go on. She looks away from Brooke and sees Hill Street.

Brooke is holding her now. She realizes she is crying.

“Hush,” he says. “Hush, love. Listen–
don’t
tell me. All I want to know is this–were they cruel to you? I mean, did they ever–well, mistreat you? Or did the man–you know–ever try anything?”

Morag stops crying instantly.

“No. Of course not. It was nothing like that. Nothing like that at all.”

“Well,” Brooke says, “it has been known to happen, you know.”

“Yes,” Morag says. “I know.”

“You know in theory,” Brooke says, “but you don’t really know. My dearest love, you’re very young.”

She knows in more than theory, about some things. Vernon Winkler, as a small boy, being beaten by Gus. Eva crying in the dancehall, and the night that followed, and Christie taking the small unformed corpse (could it be called that? what would it have looked like?) and giving it burial. The valley, the snow and the fire.

“I don’t think I ever felt all that really young,” Morag says apologetically.

“Nonsense,” Brooke says, holding her more tightly. “You were and
are
. That’s one thing I love about you. You’re serious, but you’re happy, too. You’ve got a talent of laughter that’s lovely and heartwarming. It restores me, and I love it.”

“Brooke–I
am
happy, with you. And anything else–Manawaka and that–it’s over. It doesn’t exist. It’s unimportant.”

“That’s right, my love. Don’t talk about it–it only upsets you. I only want to know you as you are now, my tall and lovely dark-haired Morag, my love, with your very touching seriousness and your light heart. Never be any different, will you?”

“Never. I promise.”

Then they are exploring one another’s bodies, and Brooke, lying on her, is hard and demanding, and she rises to him. Now neither of them wants to stop, or can.