Towards Another Summer (15 page)

So often in Grace’s home the food had been prepared as a love-or peace-offering, with her mother flying to the girdle to bring forth the calming pikelets, or rushing the date scones into the oven in order that the family might enjoy a few moments of hot buttered forgetfulness; or with morning sternness, accentuating the struggle for survival after the long unconsciousness of night and sleep, their mother, ignoring their chants of would thrust their breakfast before them,—No one will ever say I didn’t feed my kiddies!

It seemed to Grace that when Anne, Philip, Noel, Sarah sat down to eat they were not eating directly for survival, prestige, love, peace; nor were they alone; nor were they eating in their kitchen at Holly Road, Winchley. Grace had a strange feeling that their meal had been set thousands of years ago: they shared it with all sorts and conditions of people, sitting in a vast hall at a banqueting table extending to a part of the hall where darkness swirled, changing the host from a human being to an invisible presence. Grace could sense the unknown host in the room. She looked at Philip and knew, by the seriousness in his eyes, that the host was important to him; while Anne’s face showed a sensuous pleasure in being alive, in sharing a meal at once with so many unknown guests and so few known, intimately loved.

They believe in God, Grace thought, as she observed them. Yet there were no mystical pretensions about their eating. They ate, they talked, they laughed. The children burped and were persuaded to say
Pardon
.

Out of her dream Grace heard Philip talking of New Zealand writers. He was speaking to her.

—Yes? she said, questioning.

—I mean the pre-War ones who are still writing.

Grace recited a list of names.

—I’ve met some of them, she said, proud to announce that she had some small connection with human beings. Lightly she began to gossip about this and that writer, then stopped suddenly in dismay,

—Oh, I’m gossiping, she exclaimed.—But I’m not saying anything personal. All the same, I’m gossiping.

—Yes, but pleasantly, Philip said.

Grace spoke of guilt-ridden X whose wife worked to keep him.

Philip laughed heartily,

—No danger of that here!
I
bring home the money in this house. He turned from Grace to Anne,

—As soon as these kids are old enough, off you go back to teaching while I retire to the attic and write.

Grace felt alarmed and afraid at his words. She was so fiercely self-centred that she supposed that any strong emotion which affected her must also affect others, and if there were no evidence of this, in her mind she would shake and shake those who had refused to admit her excess emotion, till it seemed that their thoughts dropped out, like poppy-seeds, and they wilted and died . . .

I don’t want to return to teaching, she thought, trying to subdue her panic. I can’t. There’s the scheme to prepare, the work book, the daily attendance, all those little crosses in volumes and volumes, intended in some way to
prove
that a pupil has been absent or present; such an unsophisticated way of recording the movements of human beings; when we know that children are perpetual mental tourists who slip through the most elaborate customs barriers. Morning Talk. Written Expression. Social Studies. Playground duty. The dreaded
morning tea
in the staff room. Conversation with the other probationer, Bill Todd, a vacuous creature for whom I couldn’t even feel pity, only resentment that I never had the company of an
interesting
man, never; even when my sister and I paired off with two students it
was she who captured the brave intelligent exciting one, while I spent evenings with an inarticulate (no pity, no pity) fool from down south who kept humming a song he had on the brain,
Don’t Get around Much Anymore
.

 

—What do you say? Go back to teaching?

Grace was stricken with the terrible certainties and uncertainties of speech. Philip had looked at Anne, had spoken to Anne. The ritual of spoken communication is so firmly accepted that few people question it or dare to rearrange it. If you look towards someone, speak to that person, saying You, you, you, then what you say refers to that person; it’s all so simple.

Not being a human being and not being practised in the art of verbal communication, Grace was used to experiencing moments of terror when her mind questioned or rearranged the established ritual; when commonplace certainties became, from her point of view, alarming uncertainties. Philip had been speaking to Anne. Yet Grace had been Anne. It was Grace whom Philip addressed now,

—Yes. As soon as these kids are old enough.

Anne smiled calmly, with no hint of having been threatened. She thinks he’s talking to her, Grace thought; then, with a sudden unclouding of her head, she returned thankfully to her own identity as Grace, and sat now, listening, listening, fearful of the threat to Anne who smiled again and laughed aloud.

Grace could have wept with relief. So it was all right then, everyone was safe. She stared hard at her plate, in order to pretend, now, that she hadn’t heard Philip’s words and Anne’s smiling reply,

—We’ll see about that.

It was a challenge.

Grace prayed to any God who might have been near, Let them not kill each other, please let them not kill each other. He is angry, she is afraid. He will kill her, and be hanged for murder, or strapped in the electric chair in Sing-Sing where they have their own song,

Sparrows? Swallows? Cuckoos? The godwits flying ‘towards another summer’?

Let all the world be calm, Grace thought. Let Philip not murder Anne. This is my plate, my cheese on toast, this is my coffee in the yellow cup, and - oh my god! - Philip and Anne will kill each other. You see, they are my mother and father.

I remember now, Grace said to herself. It was this way:

Sores covered her body and because she could not resist the urge to scratch them they were always bleeding or covered with thin brown scabs; the calves of her legs and her upper arms were marked with great patches of red, and every few minutes as she went about her endless housework she would sit on the coal-bin in the corner by the fire, roll down her stockings, or roll up her sleeves, and begin to scratch; her sores were mapped red like the countries of the British Empire in the
Atlas
. She did not know the name of the disease that afflicted her. She hesitated to mention it to the doctor, that is, Dr Oliver who came to attend to our chickenpox and whooping cough; it was strange that he did not notice her sores. On hot days she wore no stockings and no sleeves. You could see her heavy upper arms that she had once revealed so proudly to us;—Look at my muscle, I could floor any man with that muscle, and we children would go amongst each other displaying our rabbit-giggles of little arms and saying, Look at my muscle, look at my muscle!

The aunt from Dunedin, and my father, and the neighbours who noticed the sores asked,

—Why don’t you have them seen to?

But my mother was afraid or proud, or perhaps she thought it might cost too much money, for there was no Social Security then, and doctors’ bills were so impossible that my father used to groan and sigh and then thrust them on the mantelpiece as ornaments and reminders, and soon their transparent windows were sealed with dust.

On the back page of
Truth
there was a weekly feature
Truth’s Doctor Tells
. Perhaps my mother wrote to him for advice. I don’t know. Or perhaps she sent to a mail order firm. A green ointment
with an overpowering smell, like cabbage being cooked in petrol, began to arrive through the post and during the day my mother would sit down to rub the green ointment on her legs. But it was no use. The table in Mum-and-Dad’s room was littered with ointment tins, empty except for a smear of melting ointment at the base of the tin. I think that at that time I was as tall as the top of my mother’s legs. When I looked at her I could see scabs and running sores. It was like looking at the diseased trunks of two trees - there were such trees in the plantation, their bark rotten and soft with spotted toadstools growing from it and beetles devouring it.

It seemed that for years my mother walked about with her sores, unable to rid herself of them. She no longer ventured outside the gate; soon she did not go very far from the back door. Years afterwards, in her habitual way establishing the period as a crucial time in her life, to be compared with the flood, the time when her arm was ‘up for six weeks’ and the time when Tommy Lyles was killed, she used to talk of ‘When you were little and I didn’t go outside the gate for two years.’

I remember that when I lifted my head to look up at her face I would see her crying. If my father had come home and was speaking sharply about the bills and money, I could see that my mother was afraid; or it seemed so; but perhaps it was I who was afraid, but there was my mother with her Godfrey chin and her face like the Archbishop of Canterbury, all in a tremble of tears, and my father saying,

—As soon as these kids are old enough-

—I bring home the money in this house. As soon as these kids are old enough-

Please God let them not kill each other, I said. Let my father not kill my mother because the bills are high and she has sores and the world is full of green ointment, even the green leaves on the pear tree and the plum tree are smelling like green ointment. What will happen when I am old enough? Old enough for what? The cow had a calf and when it was a few weeks old a man came to look at it; he said It’s not old enough yet. I said What for? My father said—Don’t poke your nose into what doesn’t concern
you, but the man, unthinking, said,—The freezing works.

Did it snow at the freezing works?

 

 

 

 

—You know what he’s doing, don’t you love?

 

That was Philip speaking. Grace was overwhelmed with relief.

Certainly it was Philip speaking. And there was Anne, Sarah, Noel-

Grunt grunt from Noel.

—Yes. Anne smiled.—I guessed as much.

—You’re not nice to know, son.

Anne washed and changed the suddenly undesirable and stinking Noel.

—Shall I get the talc, love?

—No thanks. I never use it now.

Philip looked admiringly at Anne, as if by relinquishing powder she had made a kind of sacrifice which he would never have dared to consider. How brave she was! He’d always thought talcum powder was so necessary, as much a part of infancy as nappies. Anne was unhurried, calm, dextrous. Philip’s face asked the unspoken question addressed more to the human race than to Noel - Does it have to be like this?

He turned apologetically to Grace, almost divining that not being a human being she might seek an explanation.

—Sorry about this. Just one of those things.

—Yes, Anne said looking towards Grace,—we’re awfully sorry. They’ve done nothing but crawl around you since you came and now this has to happen.

—Oh I don’t mind, it’s
quite
all right.

—But there’s a limit, Anne said.—They don’t usually hang around visitors in this way.

Grace felt flattered until she realised that there was no peculiar virtue in herself which had made Sarah want to talk to her and Noel crawl over the table to reach her. They behaved
thus because they were used to human beings as visitors - people who spoke to them, who perhaps played games with them, who knew what to say, what to do, who did not sit like trees or stones waiting for an invisible power to shift them or speak for them.

—Oh it’s
quite
all right, Grace repeated.

And now there was Noel, the little beggar-boy in the nightshirt, ready to be taken up to bed, and Grace felt a fleeting loneliness as she saw him borne away to his infant Styx and Underworld surrounded by the farewell embraces of his family. He had not asked to kiss Grace. Nor did Sarah plead to climb on her knee; she merely said Goodnight, calmly, and followed Anne and Noel upstairs, while Grace, watching them, smiled to herself, remembering that when one is a child and visitors come to stay the first night is for exploration, the second night is for judgment. She remembered the first night’s attractive jumble of bags and coats and talkative aunts and uncles, and wanting to stay up to take part in it, to listen, to explore; then on the second night the ordinary calm slightly disillusioned glance about the room at the visitors, seen now in daylight and all day, and the unprotesting journey to bed.

On the third day interest sometimes revived. The pros and cons had been weighed with awful honesty; the balance was known.

Philip gave a sigh of relief.

—Well that’s over.

Grace smiled the understanding smile of the privileged spinster as Philip got up, shook the day from him, went into the sitting room, and sank into the sympathetically embracing armchair by the fire. Grace sat opposite, and comforted by the presence and nearness of books she turned to study the titles. Ah, there was the
Book of New Zealand Verse
!

That, Grace said to herself, a migratory bird instantly in her New Zealand world, was written to commemorate the sailor-explorer Abel Tasman. Perhaps the sailor who helped most to put a stain of blood into our island story was, after all, not Abel Janszoon Tasman, sixteen forty-two sailing the ocean blue, but the American Marine who came during the War to Wellington; that was a time of lust and blood and history when the hearts of all the women came from the wool-sheds and the rabbiters’ huts to adventure on the streets of Wellington. I was a school-girl at the time, but I remember we had our fifth-form jokes about the American Marines; and after the War, when they returned to that illusory place ‘their own country’ (as illusory as a piece of writing which claims to express ‘in my own words’ - whose words?), the stain of blood showed in all the rivers from the Waikato and Wanganui down to the Clutha; even the mudfilled Mataura had its share of blood mixed with the snow. Now
there
was an effortless Tasman for you, commemorated by no named day or sea!