Towards Another Summer (2 page)

She buried her face in her pillow; she tried to find reasons among the coloured lights flashing from the back of her eyes, among the red and yellow stripes, the brown trees, the sun moving in the west corner on the end of a crimson string. Why a migratory bird? No doubt because I’ve journeyed from the other side of the world. Perhaps I’m homesick for my own country and have not realised it. Am I homesick? I haven’t thought of my land for so long; my land and my people, that’s how it is spoken, like a prayer, the kind which murmurs I possess rather than I want,
an arrangement of congratulation between myself and God; I’ve tried to forget my land and my people; when the magazines arrive I thrust them unopened at the back of the wardrobe; but I read the letters - Do you remember Willy Flute, you know Willy Flute who used to hang round Mary Macintosh, well he’s dead. Willy Flute? With the sunlit eyes? Mary Macintosh? The stuck-up tart in the Post Office at the Motor Licence Counter? No, I don’t remember them, I am rocked to sleep, numbed, at least
I’m
not going to write poems and stories which begin
In My Country
, and are filled with nostalgia for ‘branches stirring’ ‘across the moon’ - where? At Oamaru, Timaru, Waianakarua? No, that way of thinking and dreaming is not for me.

 

I’m a migratory bird. Stork, swallow, nightingale, cuckoo, shearwater. Sooty shearwater - you remember they live in burrows, you catch them down south, and they cover your mouth and face with dark brown grease, it’s like eating earth made into flesh and fat, and afterwards you’re so heavy you seem to sink into a fat-swilled grave, deep, warm as a muttonbird burrow - there, I’ve said it. Mutton-bird. No. Sooty shearwater. And there’s the Maori name
titi
, old Jimmy Wanaka knew it, he was my father’s oldest friend, the first Maori engine-driver in the country - you remember the weekends they fished together for salmon, the time they left their fish in the engine shed ‘out the Waitaki’ while they went for a meal, and the fish was stolen, and mother composed the inevitable ditty, - there followed a mumbled last line which no one could understand, the kind of tone used for putting across vulgarity, except that my mother could never be ‘vulgar’ . . .

Oh no, I must not remember, Grace thought. I’m a migratory bird. I live in London. The Southern Cross cuts through my heart instead of through the sky, and I can’t see it or walk beneath it, and I don’t care, I don’t care. I no longer milk cows or sit all day watching a flock of sheep, or walk beneath the bark-stripped gum trees by creeks and waterfalls bedded with golden pebbles; what sparkling air; I’ve never seen so many leaves, spring, summer, autumn and winter, I’m buried in leaves, see my hand reaching up from their softness, Help.

 

 

 

 

Here - the trembling ever unbroken shell of traffic. Blossoming cars at the wayside. The trap of comparisons as futile as racing to put potatoes in a basket.

Smiling, Grace Cleave got up, washed, dressed, made her bed, and no longer afraid of being a migratory bird she went to the window and looked out again at the slow thaw arriving, with rain, from the west. Then she unbolted the back and front doors, slid the chains from their grooves (burglars! a robbery every night!), unsnipped the Yale snib, released the Chubb lock, and opening the front door she went upstairs to collect the mail.

—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.

Grace Cleave, as I’ve told you, was a writer, although landlords with financial fears preferred her to introduce herself as a ‘journalist’ or a ‘private student’ or ‘someone engaged in professional work’. It was those who described themselves as writers, she learned, who appeared in Court on the charge of not having paid their rent, fares, bills for meals eaten recklessly in cafes. In a mocking voice the prosecuting counsel would remark,

—He describes himself as a writer, Sir.

—A writer? Dear me, I thought writers were highly paid these days. Television, films etc. Why not pull yourself together young man and try to get into television, write something the public want, don’t get mixed up with these fringe people crusading for peace and poetry, put yourself in a well-paid job, and then I won’t have you before me month after month for defrauding estate agents, restaurants, British Railways . . . these offences can lead to something worse . . . your father was a civil servant, too . . .

 

A writer collected complications, like the sooty dust that made an indelible stain on your clothes when you walked through a paddock of paspalum - that was in Auckland. Province full of ticking insects, loud-throated birds, warbling, chirruping, striking bells, the air like polished silver . . .

Being a writer, and returning home tired after every venture, you are so surprised to find on yourself a slowly spreading stain of publisher, critic, agent. You turn in panic to the household hints in
Pears Cyclopaedia
; running your finger down the list of stains - acid, blacklead, blood, candlegrease, green ink, marking ink, Indian ink, nailpolish, nicotine rust scorch sealingwax soot tar whitewash wine, and the remedies - water, turpentine,
methylated spirits, carbon tetrachloride, photographic hypo, vinegar. You wonder which stain and which remedy would apply to publisher, agent, critic. Nailpolish? Blood? Wine? Candlegrease? Photographic hypo? Then you realise there’s nothing, you can neither identify the stain nor remove it. Feeling resigned, depressed, you set out on your new venture, returning once more through the paddock of paspalum; and the stain spreads.

 

At the close of her latest venture when she was walking slowly back home, Grace collected an interview with someone from a magazine. Bother. Acetic acid? Photographic hypo? It was no use, there was only the time-proved long-drawn-out remedy that her mother used to adopt, inspiring fury and impatience by her faith in it.

—The air will take it out. Exposure to the air is the best remedy.

But there was so much air, and how could you communicate with it, to tell it to stop by and help, and how did you know which air to address?

 

 

 

 

The man from the magazine came to the flat. From the second armchair of the suite with floral covers he asked Grace questions to which she replied from the first armchair. All was in order. She muttered,

—I’ve nothing much to say, I can’t talk of anything. Influences? Oh let me see, let me see.

Silence.

Philip Thirkettle had the newly-bathed, immersed look of English intellectuals. He gestured readily, he was eager, lively. Grace had put on her blue checked skirt and her blue nylon cardigan with the dipped front and plucked one or two hairs from between her breasts in case they showed when she leaned down, but she needn’t have worried. She had been liberal with
deodorant too, gritty white neutral-smelling substance in a small pink jar, but again she needn’t have worried. It was her mind he wanted to reach, and nobody, by conversation, could ever reach Grace’s mind. Like the grave, it was a ‘private place’, and could not be shared.

Influences?

Oh the usual I suppose.

—How do you go about your work?

—Oh, I, wait a minute, I can’t think, I’ve never been interviewed in my life before, I can’t think, I’m senile - do you think I’m going senile?

She made tea. They stood drinking it in the kitchen. She waved towards the refrigerator which throbbed like an incubator surrounded by nursery-coloured walls and ‘working surfaces’.

—I’m not used to this. I’ve just moved in. I’ve never had a flat of my own before.

He told her about his wife, his father-in-law, the time he had spent in New Zealand.

—New Zealand? Well, I wouldn’t know, she said, dismissing the country.—I’ve been so long away. This is my home now. There’s gentleness here.

He insisted. Remember this, remember that.

—I don’t remember. I wouldn’t know. It wasn’t in my time. That was after I left . . .

—Don’t you ever want to go back?

Grace smiled thoughtfully, choosing her answer from an uncomplicated store of samples put aside for the purpose.

—I was a certified lunatic in New Zealand. Go back? I was advised to sell hats for my salvation.

A spasm of sympathy crossed Philip’s face. Good God, she thought, I’ve said the wrong thing, the tender mind etc.

—But don’t you miss it all, I mean . . . don’t you miss it? Don’t you prefer it to - this?

—I don’t know, I don’t know. I miss the rivers of course. Oh yes, I miss the rivers, and the mountain chains. I’ve never been interviewed before.

—Forget about being interviewed. We’re drinking tea.

—I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’ve never been interviewed before. Philip Thirkettle looked embarrassed.

—Don’t apologise. Listen, why not come up and stay with us, anytime. You’ll like Anne, you’ll like Anne’s father, he was a sheep-farmer once, you can talk to him about sheep, diseases of sheep, liver fluke, footrot-

—Pulpy kidney, pulpy kidney-

—Do come. Anytime. Why not Christmas?

—Christmas?

—Think about it. Goodbye now.

—Goodbye, Grace said, adding desperately as he went out

—I’ve never been interviewed in my life before!

A month before Christmas Grace went into hospital, into the wrong zone for her ‘residential area’, and during her four weeks in hospital she was terrified of being spirited away to a different ‘zone’ where there would not be as much kindness or understanding. Intermittently, she felt safe. She learned two songs - ’I want to be Bobby’s girl’ and ‘Let’s twist again as we did last summer’.

There was much activity - dancing, painting, games. Once Grace played a game of chess with the doctor in one of the side rooms. He had a bald patch as round as a penny on the back of his head. Leaning forward, carefully, deliberately moving his black pawn, he snatched her bishop en passant.

—I’ll mate you yet, he said.—I’ll mate you.

The room was small and hot. Grace blushed.

 

She left the hospital, returned to the flat, and spent Christmas reading Samuel Pepys, To My Accounts, and only once or twice she remembered the Thirkettles and the hurried notes they had written.

—So glad you’re coming for Christmas. There’s a train in the afternoon. Book or you’ll have to stand in the corridor. Philip will meet you at the station.

—I’ve had to go into hospital . . .

—We’re sorry about this. Why not come when you’ve left hospital? You can stay in bed all day if you wish.

—OK. Later then, the end of January, early February.

And then, suddenly, between Part Two and Part Three of the new novel, this card,
Come and bask in it
. This card, arriving just when the decision had been made which she had been awaiting for years, ever since she ceased being human, ever since she retired to her private world, although keeping open certain necessary vague lines of fatuous communication with the outside world: she was a migratory bird. Stork, swallow, muttonbird? Godwit?

How could she explain to anyone? How could she go anywhere for the weekend without remarking at some time, in some place, causing everyone to look terrified or sympathetic or embarrassed,

—You know, of course, that I’m not a human being, I’m a migratory bird.

She laughed hysterically when she thought of the situations which might arise.

—There’s a possible explanation, her doctor said wisely when she told him.—Are you eating, sleeping? You must eat, you know. Let me put it on record that you must eat.

Sitting at the terrible banquet she thought herself like the comedian in the films who waiting in vain for his food, signalling waiters who ignore him, finally seizes the menu and begins to chew it, then starts on the tablecloth, breaks off a leg of the chair or the table, his hunger can’t wait any longer, and what a screaming of laughter from the audience, oh was ever anything so amusing, such eating is so amusing.

—Of course I eat, Grace said coldly.

—Fine, fine. I just wanted to put it on record.

She caught the forty-five bus back to her flat and looked miserably out of the sitting room window at the pile of dead leaves, packets, papers, bus tickets - there was a man this moment passing the flat. There. Screwing up his bus ticket and throwing it over the low brick wall into the garden. Bus tickets, cigarette packets and papers, chocolate wrappers, all kinds of refuse were thrown into the garden. Sometimes Grace took the hard broom from the coat cupboard in the hall and swept vigorously at the pile of tickets, while people passing (clean, affluent, with leather
cases and confident glances) looked astonished, thinking, at the sight of Grace, What a treasure of a daily. When the snow had melted and the shocked plants were revealed in all their ragged lifelessness, impatient for signs of green growth, Grace tugged many of them from the earth. Immediately regretting her impulse, she tried to plant them again although their roots were severed. Against the wall of the Offices of the Examining Board the row of severed plants still stood in brave deceit, and no one would have guessed that the sap in their stems had drained for ever, cut off from the source. Grace gave these plants extra attention. When she entered the flat through the garden she was careful to walk just once or twice beside them, in the hope that her nearness would provide the reassurance necessary for resurrection, but it was no use, she had never been deceived in matters of life and death, she could not hope to deceive the plants she had uprooted. News had to be broken quickly, cleanly; snap; a mound of earth or of special care was no concealment.