Towards Another Summer

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

Books by Janet Frame:

 

The Lagoon and other Stories
(1951) short stories

Owls Do Cry
(1957) novel

Faces in the Water
(1961) novel

The Edge of the Alphabet
(1962) novel

Scented Gardens for the Blind
(1963) novel

Snowman Snowman: Fables and Fantasies
(1963) short stories
The Reservoir: Stories and Sketches
(1963) short stories

The Adaptable Man
(1965) novel

A State of Siege
(1966) novel

The Reservoir and other stories
(1966) short stories

The Pocket Mirror
(1967) poetry

The Rainbirds
(1968) novel (also published as
Yellow Flowers in the Antipodean Room
)

Mona Minim and the Smell of the Sun
(1969) children’s book
Intensive Care
(1970) novel

Daughter Buffalo
(1972) novel

Living in the Maniototo
(1979) novel

To The Is-Land
(1982) autobiography

You Are Now Entering the Human Heart
(1983) short stories

An Angel at My
Table
(1984) autobiography

The Envoy from Mirror City
(1985) autobiography

The Carpathians
(1988) novel

The Goose Bath
(2006) poetry

Towards Another Summer
(2007) novel

‘. . . and from their haunted bay
The godwits vanish towards another summer.
Everywhere in light and calm the murmuring
Shadow of departure; distance looks our way;
And none knows where he will lie down at night.’

—Charles Brasch, from ‘The Islands’

When she came to this country her body had stopped growing, her bones had accepted enough Antipodean deposit to last until her death, her hair that once flamed ginger in the southern sun was fading and dust-coloured in the new hemisphere, and she was thirty, unmarried except for a few adulterous months with an American writer (self-styled) who woke in the morning, said

—I write best on an empty stomach, pulled a small piece of paper from his tweed coat hanging on the end of the double bed, and wrote one line. One line every day. She too was a writer, self-styled, and it was in between the second and third parts of her novel ‘in progress’ that the weekend intruded itself; it stuck in the gullet of her novel; nothing could move out or in, her book was in danger of becoming a ‘fosterchild of silence’.

Therefore she applied literary surgery to free her characters for their impelled dance or flight; she wrote the story of the weekend.

 

It snowed. For weeks the plants in the garden had a shocked grey look that made you think they’d had a stroke and would die - the same look was in the face of the old man who collapsed on the pavement outside Victoria Station, and the ambulance men wrapped him in a grey blanket, and the crowd said

—Is he dead, Can you tell, when their face is grey like that . . .

Soot left fingerprints everywhere; after the first night of glossy snowfilled sleep the city had its way with its own lust of smoke, torn paper and bus tickets. The twelve crocuses in the front garden of her flat softened in their tawny shell and pushed forth limp cream-coloured shoots. The tree by the wall in the
corner that had shed its leaves before Christmas, continued mysteriously to release dry crackling skeletons that drifted against the back door and over the drains, covering the small coral reef of rust that spattered at the mouth of the downpipe. In the back yard there were three tubs of plants - two of evergreen trees, evergreen in name only, for their stout leathery leaves were shrouded in soot; and one geranium, its leaves withered, its stalks like tendrils of ageing hair growing from the soot and slush-covered earth. Were the geraniums dead? Every time she looked at them she asked were they dead, for in her own country she had never known geraniums not to be in blossom, they possessed too much fire to let themselves lie dormant, ‘banked’ during the long winter night with their own death-grey ashes.

In my own country.

She didn’t use that phrase as much now as when she had first arrived. Then it was At Home, Back Home, Where I come from . . . It’s funny over here, you . . . whereas we always . . . you do this, we do that . . . you . . . we . . . here . . . there . . .

And then there was the matter of the Southern Cross, trying to fit shadowy stars into an already crowded northern sky, pushing out Aldebaran, the Bear, dizzy with trying to replace even the swimming city lights with lonely southern stars, but not being able to reach far enough across the earth to capture them; then giving up, forgetting We, there, us, back home, where I come from, in my country; reminded now by only one or two things - the weather in its climate; the drooping geranium - surely if the geranium died everything would die?

 

Inside, the electric fires sucked in and blew out the same tired stuffy air; the pedal dustbin in the kitchen was filled with empty soup tins; the bathroom walls glittered with damp moss, the congealed moisture of last week’s wet washing.

She sat typing her novel.

End of Part Two.

Part Three, page one, page two, page three, ‘they told me you had been to her, and mentioned me to him’ . . .

Page four.

Then one morning the
Times
for Mr Burton, the
Director’s Journal
for Mr Willow, a letter from Nigeria for Mr and Mrs Mill-Semple, a circular for Grace - Dailies Bureau - are your dailies clean, efficient, punctual? Also for Grace the carefully addressed postcard—Miss Grace Cleave: Do you know the temperature is point one-five degrees warmer in Relham than in London. Come and bask in it! Philip Thirkettle.

 

Now journeys were not simple matters for Grace; nothing is simple if your mind is a fetch-and-carry wanderer from sliced perilous outer world to secret safe inner world; if when night comes your thought creeps out like a furred animal concealed in the dark, to find, seize, and kill its food and drag it back to the secret house in the secret world, only to discover that the secret world has disappeared or has so enlarged that it’s a public nightmare; if then strange beasts walk upside down like flies on the ceiling; crimson wings flap, the curtains fly; a sad man wearing a blue waistcoat with green buttons sits in the centre of the room, crying because he has swallowed the mirror and it hurts and he burps in flashes of glass and light; if crakes move and cry; the world is flipped, unrolled down the vast marble stair; a stained threadbare carpet; the hollow silver dancing shoes, hunting-horns . . .

It’s no use saying Freud, Freud. People do, you know. Like squeezing a stale sponge.

Nothing was simple, known, safe, believed, identified. Boundaries were not possible, where nothing finished, shapes encircled, and there was no beginning. A storm raged, and Grace Cleave was standing in the midst of it, one hand pressing her skirt against her knees, the other pressing her dust-coloured fading hair fast against her skull. In these circumstances it needed courage to go among people, even for five or ten minutes. A weekend in Relham with Philip Thirkettle, his wife Anne, her father Reuben, and perhaps - Grace did not know - one or two children - seemed a promise of nightmare. No escape. Two or three days. The problems of what time to get up, go to bed, what to say, where to go, and when, had reached, for Grace, the
limits of insolubility: you see, during the night Grace Cleave had changed to a migratory bird.

 

Oh she could laugh at the fact now, although at first she had been frightened. In the afternoon the announcer reading the weather report before the one o’clock news had said,

—A thaw warning. A slow thaw is spreading, with rain, from the west.

Grace went to the window of the sitting room and looked out and felt in her bones the slow thaw moving from the west, and felt her blood stop, swirl to left, to right, in order to rehearse its warm spring flowing; a porous grey raincloud moved in her head and stayed, soaking her once clear cold precise thoughts, exuding them as ragged links of silver, raindrops of vague mist.

She looked beyond the lights of the car saleroom - European Cars, and the tall flats with their floating staircases, underfloor heating, nine hundred and ninety-nine years’ lease, into the dark sky where a small ray of sunlight pushed its way through the dense hedge of cloud and stood, green-sleeved, yellow-capped, in a suddenly-summer lane, shining. Her skin grew warm, she released the skirt held stonily-fast against her knees, moved from the window and flopped, anyhow, legs spread, in the deep easy chair which the agent, checking the inventory of the furniture, had described as part of a ‘three-piece suite, cushioned, with floral covers’. And that night Grace didn’t continue with page four of the third part of her novel. She went to bed early, carrying a sleeping tablet in a little aluminium foil dish which had held a Lyons’ Individual Apple Pie. She took the pill, slept, and woke at midnight, and lay thinking of temperature, light, migratory birds, Coriolis force; and the slow thaw spreading, with rain, from the west; and the misty cloud gathering in her head, and her freely flowing blood released from its glacial well; and her heart beat faster as she felt on the skin of her arms and legs, her breasts and belly, and even on top of her head the tiny prickling beginning of the growth of feathers. She jerked her arm from the bedclothes and plunged the white knob which switched on the bedlamp; she threw back the blankets and examined her
skin. No feathers. Only a sensation of down and quill and these, with other manifestations of the other world, could be kept secret; no one else need learn of it. In a way, it was a relief to discover her true identity. For so long she had felt not-human, yet had been unable to move towards an alternative species; now the solution had been found for her; she was a migratory bird; warbler, wagtail, yellowhammer? cuckoo-shrike, bobolink, skua? albatross, orange bishop, godwit?

 

 

 

 

She slept, and woke again when the early morning traffic had begun to flow and the first underground trains shuddered through the earth, they seemed quite near, she wondered if the line were directly beneath her flat, she always meant to ask about it but kept forgetting to locate the regular five-minute shudder. Ah, then she remembered. She knew she had been concentrating on traffic in order to forget her most urgent topic of thought; she had changed to a migratory bird.

How do you feel? she asked herself, no longer afraid, almost enjoying the humour of the situation.

—OK, she replied. Not much different, only relieved that at last I know; but it’s going to be lonelier than ever now, there’s the thought that once I’ve established myself as a bird there’ll be no stopping me, I might change to another species, I might move on and on - where? I don’t know, but farther and farther away from the human world.