Towards Another Summer (23 page)

—The line, the texture, the dimensional interest.

—You say you like Bach? I’m crazy about him.

Philip looked at her, waiting for her reply.

—Yes, I like Bach.

Philip was silent, still looking at her, waiting, in that disconcertingly persistent manner, for Grace to
speak
. Why can’t he understand, Grace thought, that all my words are platitudes, that when I juggle and empty out a sentence there’s nothing left, no sediment of thought or imagination lies in my speech. Why
does Philip wait and wait, like an old peasant at the well, for the bucketful of gold?

—Yes, I like Bach. He’s . . . His music’s . . . I like him. When I listen to Bach -

It was no use; she could not explain without tripping and falling headlong over clichés, and they were dangerous always, impressing on your mind a stain more deadly because you could not quite identify it, you kept mistaking it for a meaningful spatter of original thought. ‘Music of the spheres’ indeed! Most music began on earth - in the tradition of the mythmakers who named a definite place of departure to Heaven or Hell; setting out for other worlds you journeyed first to Land’s End or North Cape of New Zealand or some spot in Italy, and when you felt the need to return you retraced your steps and were comforted by the sight of familiar land- or sky-marks: rising (or descending) ‘we beheld the stars.’

The music of Bach seemed to provide no such place of departure. Earth dissolved; you moved immediately to heaven.

—What were you going to say, Grace? When you listen to Bach -?

—When I listen to Bach, I - I mean - he-

It’s no use. I can see it.

His music is a delousing of the spirit, all those little black brain-sucking faith-sucking insects are killed; they shrivel and drop, you can pick them up between finger and thumb, burn them, crush them. Bach’s an institutional shower of sound, he’s the perfect prison system if you want to know, since we must always pay, sentenced to music. Bach is life-imprisonment with no remission, but what a prison! The routine of a fugue is enough to leave the mind free to hobby ourselves to God. Is God a hobby? You may laugh, Philip, but when I return to London I shall talk to my clergyman about this - the clergyman of my novel.

—You were meaning to say?

—I was saying nothing. I’ve nothing to say. I’m sorry I cried. It’s absurd. Forgive me.

The meal was served - Roast Lamb which Philip had shown to Grace on Saturday afternoon, flipping the muslin cover from the plate, thrusting before her the blue-pencilled, censored joint.

—This is your tomorrow’s dinner. Genuine down-under fare!

Noel in his high chair, being fed, was grizzling.

—It’s his teeth, love. Give him half an aspro.

—Yes, it’s his teeth. I noticed one coming.

—The problems of being a parent, Philip exclaimed, addressing Grace.

—Yes, she said knowingly, but it was the clock on the mantelpiece which claimed her attention.

—You’ll be all right, Philip said.—We’ll leave here in plenty of time to catch the train.

Noting Grace’s puzzled expression, Anne said,

—Philip’s coming with you, on the bus.

Grace’s first thought was

—He wants to escape from the family. The weekend is too much for him.

He seemed to read her thoughts; he laughed, making a joke of the matter,

—Yes, I’ll come to the station with you, get away from the howling kids for a while; leave them to Anne. Do you know what Anne’s father calls women? The
womenfolk
, he says. He’s always advising me,

—Leave that to the
womenfolk
. That kind of job’s for the
women
folk.

Grace and Anne laughed together. Grace remembered her own father and his insistence that the ‘womenfolk’ should see to this and that; and underneath Philip’s bantering demeanour she
sensed a certain measure of relief that there were indeed times when, infected by his father-in-law’s attitude he could excuse himself by referring an unpleasant task to the ‘womenfolk’. Philip disliked domestic details. Grace recalled that on Saturday morning when Anne had been clearing the ashes from the sitting room fire, and Philip had walked in and, seeing her there bowed before the ashes in the traditional Cinderella pose, had commendably rushed forward with,

—I’ll do that, love. Let me do that, love!, he had appeared relieved when Anne, conditioned to the role of ‘womenfolk’ urged,

—No, No, it’s all right thanks,
and he was able, with a mild,

—All right, love,
to withdraw from the scene.

They continued eating in silence broken only by Noel’s whimpering. They finished the meal. They were drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. Dreamily Anne stubbed her cigarette in the melamine coffee-saucer.

—Don’t do that, love. It will melt it.

Tense, trembling, Grace looked out of the window, pretending herself into invisibility.

—But I’ve done it before and the saucer hasn’t melted or burned.

—It does, though, with that kind of material.

Anne’s voice was calm.

—I’m always stubbing my cigarette like this. It’s never harmed the saucer, not as far as I know.

—All right, love.

 

It was over. Was it? Grace made herself visible once more, ceased her distant gazing from the window, stayed silent, her eyes lowered; waiting, unsure, trapped in her own dread; feeling very much like - an oyster which, believing itself safe, opens its shell, then suddenly sensing danger, snaps within itself, in its haste leaving a part of its body exposed in the shape of a pale fawn pleated frill of dread. Grace could feel herself clamped
shut . . . she was home again . . . the everlasting ticket to Fifty-six Eden Street, and it was evening and she was at the state of tiredness where the light from the unshaded electric bulb in the kitchen was a misty pattern of flickering yellow stripes, a hazy waterfall seen through drooping lashes; again and again Grace forced her eyes open and tried not to put her head down on the velvet cushion where the roses painted there by her father dug sharply against the skin; she was waiting, waiting, engaged with dwindling interest and consciousness in the important childhood process of ‘staying-up’. Her father had gone ‘out the Kakanui’ for oysters and her sisters and brother were in bed, and her mother was sitting at the end of the kitchen table patching blueys and a black Italian cloth work-shirt and singing softly to herself the song which she had composed and which was going to earn her enough royalties to pay all the bills and buy a present for everyone - for each of her daughters a ‘white fox fur cape’.

—But I don’t want a white fox fur cape!

—I’ll buy good health for everyone, kind words, a happy home - and a white fox fur cape!

So that was that!

‘New Zealand, New Zealand, the land of the fern’, she sang, for she couldn’t seem to escape from ferns, bellbirds, tuis, kowhai blossoms, the bush - they were a code which everyone understood, which held no surprises, handled and exchanged as currency between Grace’s mother and her friends who also wrote verse and composed songs. The bellbirds, the tuis, the kowhai blossoms were always there, like the elves and fairies which their mother tried to persuade them to think about at night instead of being frightened by Dracula, Werewolves, the Phantom of the Opera.

Grace jerked her eyes open. She was trying so hard to concentrate on ‘staying-up’, to justify the pleas which had earned for her what seemed now more of a penance than a privilege. Soon her father would be home with a sack of oysters which he would spill on to the table; the smell of salt would be so strong that even the bin in the corner where Grace was sitting would seem like a rock in a nest of sea while the waves of sleep,
unresisted, lapped and flowed; and Grace would wake up her legs which had gone to sleep, climb from the bin, go to the table and stare at the oysters, sniff the sack-and-salt smell, poke at the few shells adventurously opening and watch them clamp shut leaving part of themselves trapped outside and too scared to open their shell to retrieve it; perhaps it was their tongue which they left exposed, although Grace’s big sister had said their eyes were there too, and their ears, that you couldn’t really tell with oysters, just as you couldn’t tell with snails or with worms whose mouth - she said - was their behind as well, so that when worms opened their mouth you didn’t know whether they were speaking or shitting, it was the same thing, not like with people, at least you could always tell, with people.

—Where’s the oyster-knife Mum?

A moment of panic; things never stay in their place; oh yes, it’s on the shelf in the corner in the scullery. And there it would be, on the shelf, under a dirty tea-towel and a few clothes-pegs, and while Grace was looking at and smelling the oysters and thinking that nothing ever seemed to be gathered by itself from the sea, that what their father had set out to catch, and what he had brought home, could be called a sack of oysters, yet the sea had put in miscellaneous bits of itself - salt, pipis, fanshells, golden and brown weed, grit, sand; all kinds of specimens of the clinging furniture of the sea . . .

Then Grace’s father would insert the oyster-knife at a vulnerable part of the shell, force the two halves open, with a quick movement separate the milky-grey oyster from its bed, slide it on to a plate, the oyster-water with it, and offer it to Grace who would tip the edge of the plate (or the shell), drink the oyster-water and suck the slippery oyster into her mouth, shuddering with pleasurable distaste as her teeth sank into the oyster and she realised, too late, that she was eating its
stomach
, probably with giggles inside it; but before she could change her mind and spit it out she had swallowed it, and if she had the shell in her hand she would bite at the small white parking-place where the oyster had begun and had stayed glued and safe.

—More coffee? Still dreaming of our Organ Concerto? You know I’m flattered that you appreciate it. So many of our friends sit there dull and stolid.

—Dad hates it. ‘Classical’ he says. I don’t know if you were brought up in this way, Grace, but in our home the wireless was always tuned to the commercial stations and classical music was looked upon with horror.

—Yes, yes, our home was the same, Grace said.

—There. Uncivilised. What did I tell you?

Philip smiled with teasing satisfaction.

—Oh? Grace said.—I didn’t know classical music until I was a College student. I had a friend then . . . I had a friend . . .

(I’m not going to tell them, she thought. ‘Poor Tom’s acold.’ There were crocuses in the Octagon, the footpaths were wet with spring rain, and the students, sprawled on the damp grass in Logan Park, were singing,

—Did you ever learn music?

—Yes. Once. For a time.

(My mother wore gloves to listen to me playing the piano in the front room of a house at the end of a long long path bordered by
aquilegias
.)

Grace glanced uneasily at the clock -

—But I must go . . . I mean . . . I must get ready, but first . . . may I help with the dishes?

—Oh no, oh no. Thanks all the same.

 

‘Getting ready’ took no more than five minutes. Grace tried to prolong it by packing and repacking her bag, stripping her bed and folding the blankets as if she had died, turning the pages of
the books on the shelf, rearranging the seed potatoes - one had a small brown sprout like a poised horn; looking from the window at the house next door, wondering at the silence, knowing that in the room with the polished window and the widely-drawn curtains there was a tea-trolley in the corner, just inside the door; a clock ticked on the mantelpiece, sturdily, involved in no pathetic fallacies, never confusing its life, like the fabled Grandfather clock, with the beating of the human heart. Oh! Grace smiled, remembering the rude childhood parody,

Then consulting her watch, deciding that she was ‘ready’, she went slowly downstairs, lured to the kitchen. She knocked lightly on the door and went in. Anne was washing the dishes, Philip was drying. They were standing side by side, looking at each other, smiling, sharing. Grace wanted to retreat but it was too late. They are complete, she thought. She sat down with a shocked feeling of exclusion. The doors slid silently together and the lips moved, through glass, and she could hear nothing but a slight swish-swish of departure. She almost moved towards them and cried,

—I’m a migratory bird.
Distance looks our way; the godwits vanish towards another summer, and none knows where he will lie down at night
, but she did not move and she said nothing, and

—So you’re ready, they exclaimed, pouring instant hospitality into all the empty pockets and corners, and the room was once again fat with warmth.

Yet Grace repeated to herself,—I’ve said nothing, I’ve said nothing. They are used to my silence and stupidity. I’ve failed, like an automatic machine which is not quite empty but which through a fault in its mechanism can never respond. I wonder what is the fate of those machines choked with sweets, tickets, fortunes, weights, hot chocolate, which are finally abandoned on deserted corners in ghost towns because they have failed to respond?

It was as a migratory bird, silent, apart from all human beings, that Grace went with Philip, Anne, Noel and Sarah (together in the pram) to wait for the Relham bus.

In ceremonial procession she and Philip boarded the bus (‘we’ll go up the front, eh, to get a better view’), and stared through the window at Anne looking so vague and tired that Grace surged now with a guilty consciousness of having herself to herself, preserved, isolated, distributing no gifts night and day to demanding husband, father, children. As the bus passed the forlorn little domestic group Philip waved cheerfully, and Grace waved, a token flutter of her hand up and down. She remembered her fantasies of meeting Anne and Philip - Do have a cocktail! and of herself coping magnificently with conversation (‘What wit, what intelligence,’ Philip Thirkettle said to his young wife Anne as he donned his silk pyjamas. They were talking of their weekend guest, Grace Cleave, the writer, of limited ability, occasional perception, but in company how dazzling, how articulate: the perfect weekend guest.)