The Reed Warbler

by Ian Wedde

  She could imagine fifteen-year-old Frederick immersed in Captain Marrayat’s ripping yarn Mister Midshipman Easy, though not perhaps in its seesawing libertarian politics, but who was Persival – the Knight of the Round Table? And Kearne?

  The entries for the following Monday, Tuesday and Thursday all included visits to the Baths. At the back of the diary there were pages for Cash Accounts. Pedantically responsible and un-teen-like entries for the 15th, 16th, 17th and 19th all included the costs of going to the Baths, along with ‘Peaches’, ‘Paper’, ‘Gullivers Travels’, ‘Tattooed Man’, ‘Shout’ (6 pence) and others. But the most persistent cash entry was Baths, and usually specified ‘Self and Will’, a combined cost of 6 pence a time. Frederick was also shouting a Fritz to the Baths, and there were other entries for Shouts (‘Alex & self’, ‘Pies’).

  Turning pages. On Bank Holiday, Friday 18th March, which Frederick noted was after Saint Patrick’s Day, he went for a walk up to Wadestown in the morning with Will, and then for a ‘stroll up stream’. Then this: ‘Liked the smell of his cock but he was too rough and in a hurry.’

  The closed diary was on the table beside her while she looked out at the garden and managed the sense of shame and intrusion. But what was so surprising about two teenage boys sharing a wank in the bush? Or at the Baths, for that matter? What was more surprising was that he’d risked writing about it in his diary. But she put the diary back in the box with the others. She’d have another look at them later – or not. There were a lot of them, the little pocket-sized ones but also large journals. Then she had a shower, trying not to think about washing away prurience, and got dressed for lunch.

  Her fortnightly at the Staff Club was fun and she looked forward to it, especially since Noel’s death, though she had to stop the conversation bogging down in university politics. Taking early retirement to look after Noel had been one of the best decisions in her life. Her postgrad courses in postwar German prose, German literature and film, and German culture and the Pacific were in need of makeovers she couldn’t be bothered doing – even the course titles wearied her with their airs of resigned anachronism – and so she was becoming what she despised, a bored teacher on repeat. Instead, she could sit with Noel while his mind reinvented entire tranches of their lives together, or go for lovely walks while his presence and consciousness meandered through unconnected timescapes and weirdly off-target locations. They’d be walking through Cornwall Park in the week the spring daffodils came out along the oak boulevard, and he’d be in the flower markets of Kashmir as the civil war tore the place apart – his look of dismay switching back and forth with one of ecstasy. Then after a while she was his sister, or Joe’s ex-wife, or nobody he knew, and then he was no longer able to walk safely. Then, as she’d liked to repeat for a while, he was gone before he went.

  The same could be said of her lunch friends’ sympathy, but today she caught them looking at her, quick glances that became a collective, unspoken interrogation: Was something wrong?

  They were sitting outside under a large sun umbrella, with a nice view across the freshly mowed lawn and the well-kept shrubs and flowerbeds, very tidy and organised and responsibility-free. It all smelled warm and summery and was where she wanted to be, unlike the dim, musty interior of the Common Room. Of course there were birds hopping about or flitting among the trees – she was noticing them since getting Frank’s parcel.

  Sorry to be a bit distracted. She’d begun to be haunted.

  A beat. Then variations on awkward condolences.

  No, not Noel, it was her great-granduncle Frederick Wenczel.

  Ah, so a secret project! But why hadn’t she told them?

  Because there’d been nothing to tell. Some material had just come to light.

  What she couldn’t, or just didn’t, say to her former colleagues, whose manner was at once solicitous and envious, was that the ‘material’ had begun to light up – wake up? – the part of her that her German ancestors might have called Geist, her soul-mind or spirit-mind or something like that, the capacity that had become dull or lazy or perhaps self-protective once Noel had gone. Nothing as grandiose as Hegel’s version, something more like the bright, alert attention of her blackbird which, on most days, would hardly be noticing the human sitting motionless on the deck with a cup of coffee and a book or finding useful enough things to do in the garden.

  Yes, the road trip with Frank had been the start of it, his asymmetrical provocations and kindnesses, and the blurred memories he’d revived. But it was the little diary that had now begun to insert itself into the uncanny gap where her memory seemed to have lost its purchase on how she knew what. The little fragment of a fifteen-year-old’s secret life back in 1898, a kid at once overconfident and vulnerable – weren’t they all? – who could easily have been one of her own kids or grandkids, and who was, in any case, connected to her through some thin filament that her sensible mind told her was too ephemeral to matter but that had wrapped itself around her heart in spite of that.

  ‘Growing in Wisdom and Stature’ at the front of the diary, and at the back the earnestly diligent and try-hard adult Cash Account entries – May 9 1895: Treasure Island 2/-, June 3: Lollies 6d, July 29: Shout Ma to Play 2/-. They made her smile, or laugh sometimes, and they were breaking her heart.

  Catharina

  ‘Mutti?’ she said. She heard the faint hint of a plea in her tone before she’d even said what she was going to. She saw her mutti hear the tone but also saw that she’d been expecting it. Or had expected something other than their usual coffee-time chat – Catharina’s reports on what she was doing at the university college that Mutti listened to as if with those attentive blue eyes rather than with her ears, and Mutti’s reports, increasingly sarcastic, on the ‘appearances’ of her ‘Thorndons’. One of them had described her newly commissioned table linens as ‘impoverished’. The word had caused Mutti to show her teeth in a smile across the coffee table – there were some gaps in the smile now and she seldom revealed them unless the joke was especially ‘schlau’, which meant smart.

  ‘Schlau, nicht wahr?’

  Her mutti had been on the electoral roll for almost nine years. Her English was good if sometimes oddly imprecise and she often chose, now, to use it at home. She interpolated German words where she deemed them ‘better’. She liked schlau, and also ‘echt’ for truthful because it sounded ‘more sincere’. Her accounts of the ‘impoverished linens’ and other such topics were delivered with mocking relish, and with the interpolation of certain indispensable German expressions. ‘Bitte, verschone mich! Please spare me impoverished!’

  Papa Hein had also liked to say ‘Verschone mich!’

  Mutti reached up and took off the scarf she’d knotted over her head. She gave her hair a shake, as if to free her thoughts. There were now white threads in her fair hair, which she requested Catharina cut shorter than before.

  ‘Oh Catha, have you been unwise?’

  Of course it was no secret that she and Professor Hugo von Welden had become friends during her final year. There was gossip. And she had graduated with top honours by her own capacities despite what the gossips thought. She’d seen that her mutti was both proud and envious, but that her envy was also a kind of pride.

  But even though Wolf’s bulky occupancy of their cottage had been transferred to the house on Mount Cook that he now filled up proudly and manfully along with Ettie and their infant Agatha, the place she still shared with Mutti and Freddy remained an intimate one in which to sustain or conceal a bodily secret, especially as she shared a bedroom with her little Mutti whose sleep-whisperings and mutterings were the same as they had always been, though now Catharina heard more of them through the wakeful nights that had become longer since Hugo.

  There was a pressure and a pain in her chest. It was where two answers to Mutti’s question as to whether she had been ‘unwise’ were contesting. Yes, she had been unwise to permit her affair with Professor Hugo von Welden to come to this; no, she had not b
een unwise – what had happened was a natural consequence of a decision she had made – to have the relationship.

  She was ten years older than her mutti had been when her unequal and unchosen encounter with the Prussian had made her a young mother – the same age as Ettie! – whose future had to be hidden not only from those close by but also from herself, until she was able at last, after much difficulty, by the economical account she had given Catharina but also by what Catharina had witnessed, to take large control of her own fate and the decisions both of the heart and also of the mind that had put her where she was now, across the table with its coffee pot and cups and the slices of a plum cake, the rich aroma of which had made Catharina nauseous.

  Mutti’s fingernail tapped the edge of the plate with the slices of cake on it.

  Ah yes, those eyes. That had seen it.

  It depended what one meant by ‘unwise’, she began in answer to Mutti’s question, but felt herself almost slip ridiculously back into girlhood and her fear of appearing foolish to her mutti, who would always wait for her to find a way to finish saying what she had begun, even if it was likely to make her sound stupid to herself as well as to Mutti.

  So she began again, with the intention of finishing.

  ‘Unwise, perhaps, unlucky perhaps, but then perhaps neither.’

  The woman who was now as much her friend as her mother maintained her steady gaze, though she had begun to blink more often as if in preparation for clenching her eyes against her anger, or perhaps because she might be about to weep, though the latter was unlikely.

  ‘I am twenty-seven years old, Mutti, you began early to teach me to make my own decisions.’

  Across the table, the woman who was both her mother and her friend tilted her head from side to side three or four times, as if to ask, Which is it, then: that you are almost what they call eine alte Jungfer, a spinster, or that I am to blame for your predicament because of my example?

  ‘To be clear,’ said her mutti in that ‘to be clear’ way of hers, ‘you are pregnant to that professor?’

  ‘Yes, Mutti, I am.’ The relief of saying it so simply.

  The professor and Mutti had met twice, both times at the kiosk in the Botanic Garden. His charm had failed to get past her sceptical scrutiny, though she had given him credit for having it.

  ‘Reizvoll, the Herr Professor, and he has very good manners. And also a very fine watch.’

  The Herr Professor had consulted his ‘very fine watch’ at a certain point, and had excused himself on account of some urgent matter.

  ‘Reiz’ of course mostly signified something like ‘appeal’, and so the professor had been deemed to be ‘full of appeal’, indeed perhaps ‘appealing’, but appealing for what, exactly? Her mutti’s approval?

  As usual, then, her mutti had enjoyed wrapping her approving comments in these hints. But now she gave a deep sigh with ‘Ah Catha!’ in it, and at last allowed her eyes to fill with tears that spilled briefly until she stopped them with her handkerchief. It was one of those she had edged with the swan motif in her favourite blue silk thread. Half a dozen dabs, and the swans swam back inside her sleeve.

  So now the blunt question. Did the Herr Professor know? And another – had the Herr Professor indicated that his intentions were serious ‘in the longer term’? She uttered the formally respectful term ‘Herr Professor’ with a little smile that was more like a sceptical grimace.

  ‘Ah.’ That was all the small straight-backed woman with unbound hair had to say at that point, when Catharina shook her head, not trusting herself to speak words.

  But then Mutti stood up in that quick way she had and walked around the table and stood behind Catharina and took her cheeks between her small, dry palms, and put her mouth in Catharina’s hair so that she felt her warm breath on the top of her head, and her kiss there.

  ‘Well, then,’ said Mutti into her daughter’s hair, ‘it’s time surely that the Professor heard the good news.’ Was that a huff of laughter like a quick cough, or of anger, or of determination that she then felt in her hair? And then, ‘Notfalls, Catha, don’t you think?’

  Of course the word was even somewhat historical.

  And then Mutti returned to her side of the table and stood behind her chair with her hands resting on its back. Her fingers were long and had always looked too delicate for work, but now the knuckles and joints had become somewhat thickened. She tapped the fingers two or three times against the chair. Wolf had burned fern-leaf patterns in the back with a red-hot poker.

  ‘Wolf can do it,’ she said. And yes, it was a little Mutti smile that briefly straightened her lips as she made an encircling gesture to indicate the persuasive height and bulk of him.

  Of course Catharina could ‘do it’ herself, and it would not be her muscular dimensions that mattered when she confronted Hugo with the news that he would be the fortunate father of her child! But what mattered more at this moment was that she was glad to be having a baby – indeed ‘glad’ could not begin to describe something that had not been spoken of so far, her happiness. The happiness filled every part of her from head to toe, her mind no less than her body. She had never experienced anything like this happiness or known it might be possible. The happiness had first overcome dismay at what had perhaps been a moment of recklessness, then fear of its immediate consequence, the painful birth of a child, then dread of the longer consequence, which would be her certain disgrace and perhaps the uncertain future of her child; lastly the happiness had overcome her apprehension about another uncertain future, which she had not fully imagined with Hugo installed in it. But the happiness had nonetheless recovered and fastened in her the memory of utter undefended pleasure when, feeling his cock seeming to thicken inside her, she had closed her legs more tightly across his back and heard him exclaim, or curse – ‘Gott!’ – before he pulled away.

  ‘I’m very happy, Mutti,’ she said.

  Her mother’s hand reaching across the table.

  ‘Then so am I, my darling.’

  It wasn’t at all clear whether her mutti’s happiness was because she believed Catha had agreed to Wolf being the official bearer of glad tidings to the ‘Herr Professor’, or because she’d heard finally that Catha was happy to be pregnant with the professor’s child. The latter was unlikely to be uncomplicated by anger, fear and disappointment on her mutti’s part. One day, without doubt, they would have a conversation about that – but not now, or not yet. In the meantime, as was not unusual – indeed, as was only to be expected – her mutti’s brevity and straightforwardness disguised clever knots that would need to be unpicked in due course.

  Nor was it yet time for her and Mutti to talk about what it might mean for them to live apart, should that happen, despite it being unimaginable.

  But no more or less unimaginable than when Wolf married Ettie and left the little house in Bute Street that he had crowded with his quiet bulk and his presence within which Mutti had stood even a little incongruously.

  *

  Yes – oh yes it was a beautiful day, Mutti had agreed.

  But she was looking in the opposite direction from the early-morning sunlight that fell grudgingly between the neighbouring buildings and across the narrow back yard of their house in Bute Street. She was looking at the back door of the house that the sunlight had not yet reached – pausing as if impeded by an invisible obstacle in her brisk movements around the washing line. Then she put out a hand to open the door though she was still two or three steps from its handle.

  ‘Perhaps we should move,’ she said, without turning around. Then she took the necessary two steps to the back door and went inside. She had Wolf’s best white shirt and was going to iron it while it was still damp.

  What had Catharina just witnessed? She herself had begun to reach out towards Mutti, fearing there was something wrong, but was left holding her absence.

  It was like a little jolt in the passage of time. Her mutti’s motion stopped momentarily as she approached this juncture i
n her future.

  Catharina stood there looking at the door as it closed, and caught a brief glimpse of Wolf’s tall shadowy bulk within the room. He moved out of sight a moment before Mutti pulled the door shut.

  Wolf’s former master at the smithy, Mister Kelly, had agreed to be his best man and witness. Ettie’s uncle, City Councillor Hastings (known as Councillor ‘Hasty’), the well-known master carpenter and now house builder who was ‘throwing up’ wooden dwellings and getting rich quickly, led her to the altar, since Ettie’s father had recently died of pneumonia – the family had come to New Zealand because of his ‘weak chest’ but had not anticipated the southerly winds in a land they’d been led to believe was tropical with fruits and land aplenty.

  Now, however, they were ‘making the most of it’, which was the theme of the councillor’s droll wedding-breakfast speech as he wagged his finger in the direction of Wolf. Wolf stood with his hands clasped in front of him – his expression suggested he was paying attention, but whether to the councillor or to an interior voice was not clear. He seemed to be restraining his hands from reaching towards Ettie who stood beside him with a polite smile for her enthusiastic uncle.

  The wedding had taken place in the same little church on the corner of Ghuznee Street where Papa Hein’s funeral had been conducted when Wolf was ten years old. Now he was barely twenty, and Ettie in her hat with its descending veil was not yet quite eighteen and looked as though she was ‘dressing up’. They ran a gauntlet of rice-throwing guests and were driven off to the wedding breakfast in a buggy. They were to live in a house that had been built by Councillor Hasty on the slope of Mount Cook. He had ‘helped them into it’ but Wolf was expected to work off the debt, not least, it was clear, by discounting his own expertise with the hammer and anvil and the moulding of wrought iron.