Towards Another Summer (6 page)

 

—Four thousand pound houses.

—Three thousand pound houses.

—Two thousand pound houses.

—Just under two thousand pound houses. Here we are.

The suburbs of Relham were replaced by the town of Winchley, and here was the Thirkettles’ house almost at the end of Holly Road, on the edge of the moor. The trees were naked ragged sticks with ribbed ice heaped about their roots, and the dark street shone with mirrors of ice obscured by dark blots of snow. Alone among the other houses in the street the Thirkettles’ house bore no name; not the Nook, Rydal Mount, Dell Lane, Coral Cottage; merely number five - semidetached, old, heavy, comfortable, with its other half in silence and darkness like a sleeping limb.

Philip rattled at the chained door.

—This is Anne’s doing, he said.

Footsteps. The chain was withdrawn. The door opened.

—This is Anne.

Anne was rosycheeked, almost buxom, certainly beautiful, although (Grace noted with pleasure) she had a double chin. She was followed to the door by a sudden swirl of white like tiny moving candle-flames and Sarah and Noel, stumbling, guttering, arrived to cling to their mother’s skirt, to welcome their father and stare curiously at Grace.

—Grace-Cleave’s come to stay, Sarah whispered knowingly.

Grace smiled a prim smile. She was terrified they might want to embrace her but they stayed clinging to their mother as she led them along the passage into the kitchen while Philip and Grace followed. Grace tripped over toys and books and blocks. Anne laughed.

—Someone had a throwing session today.

She spoke with a strong New Zealand accent.

The room was big, untidy, with shelves in one corner filled with provisions as if the family expected to be marooned for months. Children’s clothes, toys, kitchen equipment, newspapers, were slung and bundled here and there in a marvellous conglomeration. Grace looked mournfully at what, to her, seemed the scattered evidence of a house full of love; she was remembering her own home as a child, where the rooms had been a muddle of possessions and furniture and food and chamberpots, and how the man from the ‘Welfare’ who came one day to inspect the house, following complaints from the neighbours, had not enough perception to discern the roots of love in the wild untidy blossoming; nor, Grace remembered, had their father; nor had the tidy powdered relatives who came for holidays, sleeping in the front room in a bed with sheets with a vase of dahlias on the dressing-table, sitting on the edge of the kitchen chairs,

—Oh no Lottie, oh yes Lottie,
looking with horror at the muddled kitchen.

—Tidy the place up, the ‘Welfare’ man had said sternly.

—And have all these dogs put to sleep!

(He meant the stray spaniels who kept having puppies because there was so much new tar on the road that when the dogs went outside they stuck to other dogs.)

—Can’t you keep the place clean? their father had said to their mother who, shame-faced, replied,

—Oh Curly it’s the best I can do.

Meanwhile the relatives returning from their holidays had spread the news through the Northern, the Southern, and even the Australian branches of the family that ‘Lottie was a hopelessly bad manager’.

 

Staring solemnly the two children flickered around Grace. They wore long white nighties with ragged edges; honey-coloured snot dribbled from their noses, and now and again Anne reached to a roll of blue toilet paper on the mantelpiece, tore a square, and wiped their noses. Grace could not keep her eyes from Sarah and Noel. How beautiful they were! They were waifs with pointed ears and their father’s amber eyes; they were like beggars’ children. Anne explained to Grace that they had stayed up to see ‘Grace-Cleave’ arrive, and now they must go to bed. She surged them towards the door; they whimpered their protest. Grace stared at them, her eyes shining.

—Do you know, she whispered,—these children are like little illustrations for
The Borrowers
.

—I’m not a ’stration, Sarah protested.

Philip and Anne exchanged glances which Grace could not read and which embarrassed her - had she said something out of place, perhaps the Thirkettles objected to remarks about their children but they were forced to tolerate visitors who couldn’t be expected to understand the plans of intelligent parents?

Suddenly Noel wanted to be kissed goodnight. He moved towards Grace, half-crawling, half-walking, muttering in Martian language, which Anne translated.

—He wants to kiss you goodnight.

Grace kissed him, her face burning.

—I’m quite used to children, she said defensively, adding
with reckless inaccuracy,—I used to look after children this age.

Now Sarah, evading her mother’s grasp, ran to Grace pleading, —Let me climb on your knee!

Timidly Grace looked at Philip and Anne. Anne nodded.

—Yes, you can climb on Grace’s knee.

Awkwardly Grace lifted Sarah who bounced restlessly once or twice, then complained,

—You’ve got no knee. Grace-Cleave’s got no knee.

Grace blushed with shame at her deficiency.

Indignant, Sarah slipped from Grace’s arms, went towards Anne and clasped her skirt, hiding her face in it, and then, rubbing her eyes, she was suddenly almost asleep. Moving her gently before her, carrying Noel with a practised encircling arm, Anne went upstairs to put them to bed.

—I’ll show you your room, Philip said as they went out. —And I’ll show you the study at the top of the house.

Tired and confused Grace followed him.

 

 

 

 

She stood alone in the centre of the room, noting its particulars. Philip had explained that it was less Spartan than the room where she would have slept if ‘Dad’ hadn’t been away in Edinburgh. This was ‘Dad’s room’. Rush matting on the floor, a comfortable single bed; one or two pieces of heavy polished furniture; a tray of seed potatoes on the sideboard; two or three shelves of books - bagpipe music;
The First War Rifle Brigade
; Lord Montgomery’s
Memoirs
; poems by Robert Burns; the Authorised and New versions of the
Bible
; stories by Sapper. Framed photographs of New Zealand scenes were hung on the wall, and over the fireplace a large map of New Zealand - blue seas, green plains, white-capped mountains. Grace reached up and ran her finger around the coastline tracing the once-familiar towns between Oamaru and Dunedin and farther south, pausing at each one to try to capture a memory of it. Maheno: there was
a picnic spot near the river - The Willows - where girls from School used to go for their Saturday bike-rides, and the boys and girls for their Bible-Class picnics; where lovers used to bathe naked in the earth-tasting beerbrown swimming hole. Maheno, where the Limited Expresses from North and South used to pass, near Waianakarua, a plantation of gum trees crackling smooth grey flames of leaf, shaking blue dusty smoke as the wind touched them; the rust-coloured engine-sheds; cabbage trees, tussock, swamps, sheep - with her finger on the map Grace catalogued the physical details of the land. She was in the train travelling from Oamaru to Dunedin - why did it seem such a tiny train yet why did the black canopy shrouding the platform between carriages seem of such shiveringly-fearful importance? The usual slow train that stopped at every station to unload and load or merely to loiter and which travelled seventy-eight miles in seven or eight hours did not possess these luxurious black canopies which enabled you to pass, hidden, from carriage to carriage. If you wanted to move along the slow train you had to risk the rush of air on the unsheltered platform, you were jolted, blown on, rained on, and never had there been such a noise in your ears, so much soot in your eyes.

Grace looked about her at the sweaty redfaced passengers whose possession of the train, beginning for most of them when they had left the Cook Strait Ferry at Lyttelton, seemed to provide them with so much influence and power; they stared with disdain at the scattered few boarding at Oamaru, the Refreshment Stop; cream buns and fizz. Then Grace looked out at the sea, the cliffs, the hooded wayside stations Waitati, Puketeraki, Mihiwaka . . .

She drew her finger quickly from the map. No, she would not travel in the Limited from Oamaru to Dunedin.

She stayed in the room. The colours of the map were such delicate pastel shades, as if agriculture were a cosmetic. There
was no sign of Empire blood; only a peaceful burnt umber, leaf-green, gold, and the collections of punctuation marks or blots and stains which implied people - living, dying, buried; and then up and down the map all the silver threads that were rivers, real rivers, not English puddles or Spanish valleys where the water had disappeared for so long that people picnicked on the river-bed. Grace could not forget the snowcapped peaks and snowfilled torrents; during her stay in Great Britain she had not been to sit humbly, politely, by a narrow stream beside a hill and afterwards write home about her visit to a river near a mountain. Only Keats could write ‘I stood tiptoe upon a little hill’, without offending his sensitive countrymen!

The room was cold. Grace lit the gas fire and warmed her hands. She looked out of the window at the darkening Winchley landscape. She touched the clean-shaven dormant potatoes. She pulled her nightdress from her bag and put it under her pillow. Then no longer able to delay the act of sitting to a meal with Philip and Anne, she went slowly downstairs into the kitchen, taking her place as if she had lived with the family all her life; waiting with her mouth slightly open, like a child, like a helpless ‘younker’, for the dispensed meat pie and peaches.

Philip asked her again if she had a pleasant journey from London. She replied, Yes thank you.

Philip seemed to listen for sounds from upstairs.

—Silence, he said.—This is the best part of the day, when the children are asleep.

—I suppose it is, Grace said.

When people spoke to her she was in the habit of punctuating their remarks with Yes, yes, I see, yes, with sometimes a murmured m-m-m-m. She never said No, no, no. How alarmed she and others would have been had she said No, no, no! no I don’t see, I don’t understand! But, yes, she saw, she understood, yes yes of course, m-m-m-m.

 

They ate without speaking, although sometimes Philip turned to glance at Grace as he made a casual guest-warming and including remark. She realised that she had lived almost entirely in a world
of blue-eyed people. Philip’s eyes were hazel - no, not hazel, nor yellow nor amber; an autumn colouring with flecks like the veins of golden leaves; yet not autumnal - there was something - why, his eyes were like the yellowish flesh of a cooked trout, they had the earthy golden taste too and the soft separation of flesh from bone; there showed in them, too, the innocent meanness of a small boy in a school playground; also a ‘brown-eye-pick-the-pie’ greed; then a pure truthful wintry concern for clarity, an autumnal dissolving of all foliage, all blossoming masses of obscurity from - say - a grove of thought, landscape of human behaviour.

When Grace studied Philip’s eyes she could feel at the back of her mind the movement of sliding doors opening to let out small furry evil-smelling animals with sharp claws and teeth, into the sunlight; Grace could feel the door moving, she sniffed the stench that followed the little animal as it crept inquisitively yet cautiously out of its cage; its bright eyes closed quickly in the glare of the light, then growing used to the new enclosure it opened its eyes and began exploring, until it discovered the wire-netting, the boundaries; it was not free, after all; it had been let out to blink in the sun only while its cage was being cleaned!

 

 

 

 

After dinner Grace went with Philip and Anne to the sitting room where a coal fire was burning. Grace sat in an armchair by the fire near bookshelves filled with books, Philip sat opposite her, while Anne sat facing the fire, a new copy of
Ulysses
open on her lap. Grace studied the books - New Zealand Year Books, New Zealand Histories, New Zealand, New Zealand . . .

She tensed herself for the after-dinner fireside conversation. Philip opened the latest copy of the
Church Times
and began to read.

—Listen to this. You won’t like it.

He was talking to Anne who dutifully listened.

—Do you see the
Church Times
, Grace?

—Yes, once or twice.

Philip and Anne did not discuss what Philip had read. Anne returned to her book, Philip to his newspaper, while Grace cast stealthy glances at both, trying to penetrate their secrets.

—Have you read
Ulysses
, Grace?

—Yes, a long time ago.

—However did you manage to read it?

—Oh, Grace said, suddenly terrified that perhaps she had sounded too bold and proud, almost boastful, for evidently one boasted when one had read
Ulysses
—Oh I read it. Of course, she said firmly, lessening her glory,—I didn’t understand much of it, but I liked reading it.

—I don’t know, Anne said wearily,—how anyone can get through it.

Perceiving in her tone a reference to housewifery, motherhood, life in Winchley, as well as to the reading of
Ulysses
, Philip looked warmly at her, and with an in-spite-of-Winchley-and-all cheering note in his voice he said to Grace,

—Anne’s been very good, you know; she attends a WEA course on Modern Novels, and they’re studying James Joyce. She’s been doing a hell of a lot of reading. She’s been awfully good.

He looked admiringly at Anne. He had spoken rather loudly, as if to drown the voice of Winchley-and-all.

Meanwhile Grace was dividing her mind between studying Philip and Anne and their life together, and trying to arrange, ready for its appearance in speech, the truth of her relationship with
Ulysses
. She found that her memory had placed
Ulysses
, not under the heading of Literature, but in the file which held the embarrassing and painful facts of College Life. She read
Ulysses
at College. Roll-call - Childs, Cleave, Coster, Crawley - the only names, apart from the usual brilliant, beautiful or eccentric characters, that she could remember from the alphabetical roll-call. She had not even a clear image of the Childs, Coster, Crawley which surrounded her - Childs played hockey, was a ‘sporting type’; Coster was a swot, clever at making puppets; Crawley . . . Grace could remember nothing of her personally, only that she
came from Timaru, the rival of Grace’s hometown - Oamaru, and she remained in Grace’s mind more a symbol of Timaru than a human being, so much that if Grace thought of Crawley (Joyce? Noeline? Bertha?) she thought at once of Caroline Bay, its rivalry with Oamaru’s Friendly Bay, and the humiliation suffered by Oamaru when each year in the Tourist Guides Caroline Bay was praised, Friendly Bay ignored. Why, Grace used to think, sitting moodily in a geomorphology lecture, Friendly Bay has everything, Caroline Bay has nothing, nothing, nothing. Yet through her two years at College, and long afterwards, Childs, Coster, and the Crawley from Timaru, acted as escorts to Grace’s name.