by Maurice Gee
She sat a moment with her hands in her lap. Then she looked at my mother.
‘Your piano needs tuning, Mrs Papps.’
‘Oh?’
Irene pressed a key and made a face. ‘It’s really not a very good piano.’
‘We’ll have to get a new one just for you.’
‘Could we, Mum?’ Kitty cried. It was rare for her to misread Mum.
‘Be thankful for what you’ve got.’ Mum went back to the kitchen and would not come out, even though Irene played some more. She was showing off most of the time. But now and then she seemed to forget about that, and I saw the equal skill of going slow, I heard the music. She created it, and ruined it for me, did Irene. Ever after, I’ve thought of music as from her. Music seemed to hum about her like a swarm of bees. Don’t laugh at that. She was harmonious, like her blacksmith (hers, you see, not Handel’s), and even when she was being ‘bloody’, to use Kitty’s term, or when she was depressed or sour or self-pitying, and when she was sick, and sick and dying, nothing was ever out of tune, sounds answered each other and compensated and everything found a proper place. In one thing only, in one thing, I heard the clash of discords, and even about that I’m not certain any more. And I can’t hear anything, even the Sallies playing for dollars on the tray of a truck, even the Saturday night heavy rock beating up to the circle from parties on the flat, without hearing it through Irene.
She was back with Frau Reinbold – Mrs Ogier now, acceptable though only just. Kitty had lessons from her too, but Kitty, as I’ve said, was not to be pointed. In any case, Irene was way ahead and out of sight, so what was the use of going on there? I don’t mean Kitty was a quitter. She had taken what she needed from the piano, but still had many other things to learn; and at the end of it, who she was and where to go. For Irene piano was a passion and a way. She loved what she hadn’t learned about it more than what she had. She gathered in new skills greedily. I think of the mantis eating the fly. Insatiable but fantastically neat.
Mrs Lomax died. Mortification was the cause, the hard birth of Royce opportunity. Lomax didn’t have the appearance of a lecher, he had pained eyes and pinched face and slanting-sideways jaw and an elongated nose that some invisible goblin seemed to be stretching. He had a hollow chest and one of those pot-bellies of a sharply-defined sort, like a football pumped up hard in his trouserfront, and down at ground level turned in toes. I never really believed in his mistresses because I could not picture him ‘doing it’, as we said. Even now I can’t. I try to see his cold nose nuzzling in the valley of his secretary’s bosom and the picture’s ludicrous. But he had her all right, and several others. It was never a scandal, it was a whisper, and it grew so loud it made a kind of sub-ethereal roar in our town. He resigned from the mayoralty ‘for business reasons’, and his poor wife, poor, high-flying, nose-in-air Mrs Lomax, English-vowelled, county-bred, shamed already by a pregnancy in her forties, went into labour early and did not survive.
Royce survived. Irene survived. Lomax survived, triumphantly. He hired a nurse for the baby and a housekeeper for himself. His business – many businesses – prospered in the war years. He grew very rich and in today’s money would have been a millionaire several times over. This made him respectable again. His benefactions included a new roof for his church.
As Irene’s friend, Kitty saw more of Lomax than I did. She never said much about him, apart from the fact that he lived upstairs and put his hands behind his back when he talked to her. I was in the house only once when he was alive. Phil and I came down Montrose Street on our way home from college. (Have I mentioned that Phil’s father, Les Dockery, had gone to the war and Phil lived with the Ogiers now? And here he was in a uniform as well pressed as mine, and the flea-bites gone from his wrists and ankles, walking on Nob Hill as though he belonged there.) Lomax, with a handkerchief round his hand, was trying to crank his car and barely managing to turn the handle.
‘If that was a sheila he’d get ’er started,’ Phil said. ‘Need any help, Mr Lomax,’ he sang out.
‘Ah boys,’ Lomax said, ‘I’ve hurt my hand.’
‘Let’s have a go,’ Phil said. He turned the crank-handle two or three times. ‘She’s not firing.’ He had less idea of what went on in engines than I did but had heard some mechanic use the phrase. ‘Hop in Mr Lomax and give her some choke.’
Lomax did as he was told but still the engine would not start. ‘I’ll have to call a tow-wagon, unless you boys…?’
We pushed the car home with Lomax sitting up at the wheel.
‘Aren’t you the ones who caught Edgar Le Grice?’
‘Yes,’ we said.
‘I hope I gave you something.’
‘Half a crown.’
‘That’s all right then. I think you’ve earned a piece of cake today.’
We followed him up a path spread with scoria. I put a piece in my pocket and Tup identified it later on: volcanic slag, all the way from Auckland, and shipping it down must have cost a mint. The sound of Irene playing exercises came over the lawns. We saw flashes of white inside a dark room and I knew that must be her hands.
‘Tiddily-pomp,’ Lomax said, not jocular so much as defensive. Then looked at me sharp. ‘You’re Papps, of course. You’ve got that pretty sister.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘She’ll grow up to be a beauty. But you boys mark my words, good looks are not that important. Good looks often get in the way.’
‘What of, Mr Lomax?’ Phil asked.
Lomax saw his phoney innocence. ‘Now now,’ he said, ‘now now,’ and looked severe. ‘You’re young chaps yet. You concentrate on getting ahead.’
He opened the front door and took us down the hall into the kitchen. There we found the housekeeper, Mrs Clark, a woman with a small head on a large body and arms as quilted with fat as a baby’s. Shiny flattened curls covered her head like silver beetles. Her fatness was the fatness of indulgence and her air of pained bewilderment came, I guess, from her having to work in the kitchen although a fancy lady.
‘Ah, Mrs Clark,’ Lomax said, ‘give these lads a slice of cake, will you? And a glass of fizz-pop.’ He sat down at the table and took a small notebook and a gold propelling pencil from his pocket. He wrote and tore the page out and folded it and gave it to Phil. ‘Be a good lad and drop that off to Mr Drayton at the garage on your way home.’
‘Good as gold, Mr Lomax,’ Phil said. He expected another half crown. But Lomax only said, ‘Go easy with that cake, Mrs Clark. I’ll want a piece with my cup of tea.’
She put two mingy slices on a plate: seed-cake, which I loathed, and not baked by my father. The fizz came from a bottle already opened and was flat.
‘There boys, tuck in,’ Lomax said, while Mrs Clark dabbed up crumbs half-heartedly and put them on her tongue.
Lomax went to the door. ‘Oh Mrs Clark, blisters on my hand. I wonder if you’d come upstairs and put some ointment on?’
‘Now?’ Mrs Clark said. Her eyes went ointmenty.
‘It’s rather sore. Immediate relief, that’s what I need. You boys can let yourself out, eh?’ He gave us a tiny wink from his slanting face.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And rinse them glasses,’ Mrs Clark said. Going up the stairs, she made a glottal cry. Phil, at the door, said, ‘Pinched her bum.’ I ran to see but they were gone. He came back to the table, looked at his cake, and pushed it aside. ‘They must have better stuff than this.’ He found a tin of biscuits in a cupboard and a new bottle of fizz in the safe. ‘We can tell them Teeny-Reen said we could.’
We feasted, and left our glasses unrinsed on our plates, and stood in the hall to see if the chandelier was moving. Irene was doing chords in some difficult sequence and I was sure it was her sound that made the lustres tremble. Phil wouldn’t have it. The rhythm was all different, he said. ‘I wish she’d shut up so we could hear.’ He crept up the stairs and peered through the railings. I went the other way and looked in the open door at Irene practising. It seemed impossi
ble to me her skinny hands could make such thunderous sounds. She sat upright, in her Girls’ College uniform, with her hair pulled back and tied with a ribbon. Her profile was severe, the line cut sharp, as though with scissors. Odours and vapours filled the house, stirrings in a moral atmosphere, and Irene seemed to me breakable. I wanted to break her. I wanted to save her as well. The two upstairs, her father and Mrs Clark, had me excited; and Irene had me hot and had me cold. The vapours and the odours coiled in me.
Royce sat on the floor, chewing a rusk. Coloured wooden blocks lay all about him. He looked at me and seemed uncertain whether to laugh or cry. I made faces at him and brought him down on the side of tears. Irene stopped playing.
‘Quiet, Royce.’ She looked at me and seemed to go cross-eyed. I saw her father in her long-nosed face. ‘What do you want?’
‘Nothing. We helped with the car.’
‘Well I’m practising, so go away.’
Phil came along the hall and pushed by me into the room. ‘Gidday, Teeny-Reen. Play us a tune.’
‘I will not.’
‘Something with trills in it, eh?’ He stepped his fingers along the keys. Irene brought her knuckles down on his wrist.
‘Ow! That hurt.’
‘Don’t touch my piano.’ She closed the lid.
‘You’re a bitch, Irene.’
Royce wailed and crawled across to her. She picked him up and he buried his face in her shoulder, leaving mucky rusk-smears on her dress.
‘Your old man’s upstairs with Mrs Clark.’ Phil put up his forearm, waggled it. ‘Rumpity-bump.’
‘I know what my father does. And you stink, Phil Dockery. So get out.’
‘Come on, Phil.’ I pulled him to the door. ‘Sorry, Irene.’
‘You should charge a shilling to watch. Build a grandstand, Reen. You’d get rich.’
She put her hand on the back of Royce’s head and pressed so hard he made a cry. She bunched up the skin about her eyes, and was not holding tears in but rage. And I’m aware now of a quality in Irene I’ll call acidic. I must liken her to some substance that burns, something with an ammoniac smell, clean but uric. If that suggests breaking down, she also had a crystalline self; she presented perfect faces, impenetrable.
In hindsight, I’m aware of both, as Irene faces us from her music room; and the mystery – no mystery now – of her holding of the baby’s head. She kicked the door and slammed it in our faces.
Phil grinned, cheeky and sore. He rubbed his wrist. ‘That got her going. Let’s have another biscuit, eh?’ We went to the kitchen and ate some more. ‘I bet old Lomax sticks it up her too.’
I’d never heard of anything like that. Yet I saw it was possible. I wanted it, desperately, unsaid. I wanted to kill Phil, and rush upstairs and kill Lomax too; and wanted to try Irene myself. A standard set of confusions. It’s no wonder we grow old. I grew old. I grew another year or two standing in that kitchen. Phil, though knowing more than I, kept his age.
Outside, I stepped off the scoria path, and heard Irene practising again. It was clean, hard, mathematical, ascending. Pythagorean. It swept my confusions away; and I saw that she was saved, as far as one can be. I mean from being twisted, defiled, not just by her father, by all the many things that work on us. And Kate, I’ll tell you this, in case you wonder, Phil was wrong. I hinted the thing to Irene many years later, thinking we were close enough for it, and she screeched and flew in my face like a bat and bloodied my forehead with her nails, and it was more than seven years before she let me speak to her again.
As for Lomax, it comes to me that along with his pointy-faced glitter he had an air of more than defeat, of doom. He was not the shaper but the shaped. When he died in 1922 he left more than a quarter of a million pounds to set up an institute for agricultural research. That, I think, was his cry of rage at himself from beyond the grave.
9
I’m exhausted by all that. He said. She said. It’s like tying tabs on specimens and that’s not what I set out to do. I want to split things open and see what they’re like inside and memory is not the instrument. I’ll find out more by saying what should have been.
She should have grown with music all about her. She should have eaten it, bathed in it. (I know, young Noel, you can’t eat music.) There should have been singing uncles, fiddling aunts, and trios and quartets in drawing-rooms, and a town full of symphony concerts; then study overseas, London, Vienna; famous teachers; and excellence, perfection, triumph, fame. Instead: a mother who wouldn’t have a Bechstein in the house and a father saying tiddilypomp. There should have been Europe not New Zealand. And no ties on her instead of Royce. Then – but was she strong enough? Wasn’t she too fine? And isn’t that fineness laughable, isn’t it pathetic, keeping one on the sidelines while coarser folk play the muddy game: in her case, keeping her all her life in a house in Jessop, with a wimpish brother, keeping her a tinkler all her life? (I too am saying tiddily-pomp.)
What do I mean by fineness? I mean a kind of fine mesh in her feelings that trapped all painful things as they passed through, and she was sick with them all her life, and grew a slanting face like her dad’s.
Yet she was saved. I’ll go on saying that. She had no fame or triumph, but in her music room were excellence, perfection. Irene, sick, had only to reach out her hands and pain had no dominion, pain was put in its proper place, and knowledge and beauty became hers.
I loved her, of course. I love her still.
10
I’ve been sick. I must take care. I want to go on living for a while.
The date is February the first. Kate promised my notebooks back on the first, and stuck to her word, although she doesn’t think I’m ready yet. I sit here like a small boy with the mumps. Next week she says I can go on the sundeck and reckons she’ll carry me there if I can’t walk.
Sitting high, I see mountains and bay but not the town. Helicopters are going back and forth on sight-seeing trips. Their flight path is over my house. They make the spoon rattle in my plate. Motor bikes are kicking up their racket and children are yelling in the river and a crazy dog barking. That’s Fonzie from the Tucker house. I watched him all last summer. The kids dive under him and he can’t work out where they’ve gone.
There’s a cricket match on in the park. I hear bursts of cheering and shouts as someone asks for leg before. That’s all the sounds. Except for a wasp on the window pane.
I called Kate to let him out but she took my notebook and whacked him with it, then picked him up by the wing and carried him out. I had to wipe wasp innards off my book.
Town’s a madhouse, Kate says. The tourists won’t go home. I’m glad I’m up here. The place is full of Yanks and Scandies with flags sewn on their back-packs. She likes the Scandies, doesn’t like the Yanks. They’re too well fed, they look as if they’ve all had second helpings. ‘But,’ I said, ‘the Danes live on pig-meat and pastry, they’re well fed.’
‘Maybe. But it’s not a question of food.’
I had never thought it was. It’s a question of politics. She drew breath and began – went on and on. I stopped listening after a while. Looked at her instead. That’s the sort of thing that interests me. One. you can see. One. you can almost understand.
She came on that Friday and found me shivering in bed, and she’s been here ever since. Through Christmas and New Year. I don’t remember those days. I remember Archie Penfold standing over me and remember a dispute about homoeopathy – he and Kate making mouths at each other; but their words rustled like paper and I don’t know who won.
‘I’m sending you to hospital, Noel.’ I remember that.
‘No,’ I said; and ‘No,’ Kate said, ‘I’ll look after him. Besides, I need a place to stay.’
‘It’s all right, Archie, she won’t let me die. She wants to write my life.’
I remember bottles rattling one night. Voices. Music. She must have had a party. That’s the first time I’ve thought of it. I hope they brought their own drink and didn’t steal
mine. I remember something else now. Girls in the door. Frizzy hair, with light in it. They had no faces; glint of tooth as though they meant to bite me. ‘So that’s what a Sir looks like.’ ‘Sir Loin.’ One of them came in and pinched my cheek. ‘Out of there,’ Kate said, and closed the door. She had a face.
‘Kate,’ I yelled, ‘I want you.’ It came out as a whisper. There’s not much more than rags of me left. Rags of flesh. Voice like a bit of used-over bandage. I forgot why I wanted her. She sat on the bed, stitching the sleeve of a blouse, and it’s so long since I saw a woman sewing I felt tears in my eyes. My mother sewed, Rhona sewed, and darned my socks, Ruth sewed, and knitted too in the continental fashion, with her fingers going so fast I couldn’t work out the sequence of movements. They came about my bed, frowning, soft-footed. I felt a stinging in my eyes and a sense of loss so intense I must have whimpered, for Kate looked at me and said, ‘What’s up?’
‘I didn’t think women sewed any more.’
‘I can’t say I like it. I’m fixing this sleeve so you won’t go sticking your tongue in.’ That sounds ugly. She spoke with humour and kindness.
‘Did I say that?’ I remembered that once I’d wanted to. Then I realized I’d written it down. ‘You’ve been reading my notebooks.’
‘There wasn’t much else to do round here.’
‘Except have parties. And drink my liquor. And show me off to your friends through the door.’
‘We didn’t touch your drink,’ she said. ‘Not much, anyway. I’ll buy you some more. And they looked in before I could stop them.’ I was pleased to see her colouring up. Her cheeks go mottled when she’s embarrassed. But Kate doesn’t spend any time defending. She likes to be swinging, scoring hits.
