by Maurice Gee
14
Kate has been going through my photographs. She brought them to my bed in three shoeboxes and tipped them out on the blanket. Then it was, ‘Who’s this? Who’s that?’ I set myself to see how many faces I knew and did very well. Occasions defeated me though. That fellow holding Kitty by the hand was Billy Simpson, who went on to be a Presbyterian minister. An earnest fellow, worried about his soul even then, and Kitty’s too, which amused her. The girl laughing at Phil was Jessie Mills. She was a nurse. Me and my girl (wasn’t that a song?), my girl and I, were laughing too. Nancy Rosser, another nurse. She went out with me for a while but wanted Phil, and that’s why she laughed with her mouth so wide. He stood behind Billy Simpson, pretending to be a devil, with forefingers sprouting from his head. His widow’s peak and pale mad eyes and grin are devilish. Nancy is pointing at his behind and no doubt saying he should have a tail. Billy frowned. He guessed what was behind him.
I know them all. And know that Nancy Rosser married Billy Simpson and became the moderator’s wife. And Jessie Mills never married but ran a nursing home which was closed because the lavatories were dirty. I know that. She was quite rich and went to live in Queensland. But I can’t remember where the photograph was taken. There’s a banner in the trees but you can’t read the name, and two men on a greasy pole are whacking each other with sugar bags full of straw. Perhaps it was a Presbyterian picnic, although we look too smart for that, in boaters and blazers and white trousers. Kate doesn’t care. She’s interested in Billy Simpson. I told her not to waste her time. Kitty only went out with him because he borrowed his father’s car. She told me he was a total sap.
Here’s a photo I know more about. We’re on a beach, standing in a group, with two dinghies pulled up on the sand. The sea sparkles behind us and an island shaped like a scone sits off the shore. The Papps family and Irene and Royce Lomax came in one dinghy. The Ogiers and Phil and Les Dockery in the other. The beach is Long Tom’s. It’s quite a row from Stallards but Phil and I were fit young fellows. We’ve got our boaters pushed back on our foreheads and we’re grinning with achievement. There’s his widow’s peak again. It’s like a pick-axe.
My father took the snap with his box Brownie. I’m standing next to Irene, with whom, by then, I was in love, head over heels; or, as Phil said (interested in violence more than sentiment), arse over kite. Royce, aged four, holds on to her skirt from the other side. I hated Royce. I remember thinking, as I rowed, how marvellous it would be if he fell in and didn’t come up. I dived for him, thirty, forty feet, but little Royce was nowhere to be found. Irene wept on my sodden breast. But I’ll tell you now, in real life I never even managed to hold her hand.
Phil and I and the girls walked along the beach to the place where the creek flowed out. Phil carried Royce on his shoulders. Small boys are supposed to enjoy that but I saw the way he looked at Irene, and the anxious way she looked at him, and felt their longing for each other. I took up a handful of sand and lectured on it – believing I had arts, and betraying one love for the other.
‘Oh, shut up, Noel. We’ve left school,’ Kitty said.
‘What a beach,’ Phil said. ‘I’d like to own this place, eh. And keep everyone off.’
‘Why?’ Kitty said – or is that simply what she would have said after meeting her husband? Beaches, like the moon, belong to everyone. But she and Phil were out of tune already. He’d seen a place that moved him with its loneliness and beauty, and perhaps as a way of affirming, perhaps in defence, he wanted to own it. Kitty simply wanted to enjoy. Nature’s child was one of her personae, genuine – as they all were genuine – and I believe she wanted to strip her clothes off and run naked. Instead she tucked her skirt up and waded across the creek and climbed halfway up the cliff on the other side. Irene, who had Royce back by now, called at her to be careful. What beautiful pitch and tone, what bell-notes in her voice. I was not the least bit worried about Kitty.
We left her and walked back to the dinghies and Phil and I and Tup and my father went for a swim. Irene changed into her togs but Royce screamed whenever she waded out so she stayed in the shallows with him.
‘Let’s drown the little bugger,’ Phil said.
‘Let’s use him for fish-bait.’
‘Now now, boys.’
Irene got dressed and she and Royce went to look for Kitty on the swamp flats by the creek. I have better photos in my mind than this smudgy one. Irene with loose hair and yellow dress, shining elbows, shining ankles, walks on the beach, away from me. (A small boy in a sailor suit trots at her side but I snip him off.) She spins round once – movie, not a snap – to see if Kitty’s gone up to the other end of the beach; then climbs among dune grass, pulling with her hands. I’ve got a slippery eel in my togs and have to wait until it becomes a sprat before I can get out and follow her. Lotte Ogier, sitting on a rug, wags her head. My mother gives a sympathetic smile. Les Dockery, on a driftwood log stripped of its bark, converses with the inside of his head as I walk by.
‘Attaboy,’ Phil yells from the sea.
Do I catch her? No, I don’t. Is violation in my thought? Never! Never! Possession, a spilling of desire, yes, that much, but she’s an actor in it too; we adhere, we enter each other by osmosis. How did she reach this willing state? By processes of logic reversed by chemistry. I mean reason was about-faced in my mind by bodily and emotional needs.
It was a painful event and that’s why I’m coming at it sideways. I’ll try now to look squarely at it. Irene had not found Kitty but had discovered a little tumble-down house at the edge of the swamp. Wild bees had made a hive in the ceiling and homed in from the valley, pellets of light zipping across the face of the trees. I followed her footprints in the mud, saw where she had picked up Royce, and crept on to the porch and looked in a window. What did I see? The termination of my desires? Death of hope. Say it plainly. I saw Irene in an empty room with Royce in her arms, and the child dozing on her shoulder. She walked slowly, meditatively – yet I know part of her slowness, a part of her thoughtful air, came from the pressure that lumpish child made on her arms and hips – and she hummed a tune, something I did not know, a lullaby. Watching, I knew she was never mine. It’s as simple as that. Knowledge can come from odd conjunctions that uncover in one things not yet arrived at by the mind, or things suppressed. It’s like the discovery of some natural law. One does not argue. A small girl – she never grew more than five feet tall – with high narrow forehead and slanting jaw, walking in a room in a ruined house, with a child too big for her in her arms, and one hand cupping the back plate of his skull: my exclusion, now, forever, was demonstrated. Did Royce’s glazing eyes take note of me, and a fat smile show before he slept? Maybe, maybe. Did Irene, turning, spot me in the window and purse her mouth into a silent sshh? Yes, that happened. She closed her eyes as she paced one length of the room, on creaking boards, in dusty light. I backed off and slunk away. The dangerous bees skimmed over my head with their loads of honey.
Kitty was waiting in the sandhills. ‘You’d better give up that idea,’ she said.
‘What idea?’
‘Irene.’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
She smiled at my feebleness and patted my arm. ‘It’s not only you she doesn’t like. She doesn’t like boys.’
‘Why not?’
Kitty shrugged. ‘She’s going to have a different sort of life.’
I sneered at that and made coarse jokes and Kitty laughed – at me, at the jokes. She liked being coarse herself and said what she’d enjoy most would be to pickle Roycie in a jar and put him on the top shelf in a cupboard. But she wouldn’t make jokes about Irene.
We went back to the dinghies, where Lotte Ogier and Mum had lunch spread on a cloth, and we ate Ogier cakes and Papps savouries. Irene arrived with Royce asleep on her shoulder, and saved a pie and a cream bun for him.
Later I climbed a cliff and went too high and scared myself. Five feet off the ground is high enough for me. Phil and Kitty cro
ssed the swamp to explore the ruined house – Long Tom’s house. Safe again, sitting on a ledge, I saw them walk around it and stop to watch the bees. Then they went inside. If he claims he kissed her there he’s a liar. Irene was the girl I couldn’t have. Kitty was the girl Phil couldn’t have. Natural law.
The day ended – the day ends for me – with the only conversation I ever had with Les Dockery. He was still sitting on the log, had even had his cup of tea and cake there. We made the dinghies ready and I walked along to fetch him. ‘Mr Dockery,’ I said, ‘we’re going now.’
‘Ah,’ he said, and put his hands on his knees and levered himself on to his feet. I went two steps ahead of him. It seemed bad manners to run away. His chest was turning over like a counter-weighted wheel. Halfway to the dinghies he said, ‘Noel.’ I was surprised he knew my name. ‘Wait on, son.’ It was not only the first time I’d spoken with him but the first time I’d looked in his face. He was younger than I’d thought. The greyness of his skin made him seem old; the razor scrapes, his Adam’s apple like an empty box, and hands, all dry knob and softened callous. His overcoat was like a part of him, half-shed skin. Now I saw what I can only call the young man lost. I saw, startled, what I hadn’t known: he was alive.
‘What’s the name of this beach?’
‘Long Tom’s.’
His eyelids closed down slowly and the orbs seemed to roll back and look into his head. He gave a little nod and spoke two words that made no sound. Then raised his lids, easy, unfussed, like those garage doors that lift with a finger. I saw something gleam there, in the dark. Thank you, son.’ With a movement of his hand, he sent me on.
Those are the things I know about this photograph.
15
Today I walked as far as the letter-box and found that Kate has an anti-nuclear sticker on the gate. What’s the idea? I wanted to know when I got back to the house. We argued, and I agreed I didn’t disagree. I wouldn’t back down though, she should have asked me. OK, OK, she said, I should have asked; then accused me of being scared. There’s truth in that. I’ve never been one for declarations. It’s more my style to stand in a corner, smiling privately at my better knowledge.
She’s being very aggressive. Last week she sent my Watchtower lady away with a flea in her ear. I like talking with religious loons, I like their certainty, being a dealer in certainties myself; and I enjoy my better knowledge. The Watchtower lady has been coming here for years and we’ve covered her ground in more ways than I can count, and enjoyed ourselves immensely. Now Kate’s spoiled it.
And she told the man who came round with the petition against homosexual law reform to get his grubby bit of paper off her property. Her property! She didn’t ask me if I wanted to sign. ‘If you’d signed it,’ she said, ‘I’d have walked out that door and not come back.’ She read me a letter she’s written to the paper. Something like this: In the matter of homosexual law reform, there’s a lot of hatred around, and all of it seems to be coming from Christians. I’m not a Christian myself or I’d quote some texts at them. ‘Punchy,’ she said.
‘Are you sure you should lay yourself open like that?’
She asked if I was afraid they’d come and fire-bomb the house, and that, just for a moment, frightened me. I believe these fundamentalists can be dangerous. If they get in a majority people like Kate will find themselves burned at the stake. Me too – but I’ll be safely dead and they’ll have to deal with me in effigy. I won’t mind that. I mind though the new dark age they’ll bring. I don’t know what we’re here for but it isn’t that.
She’s been reading my notebooks again. That’s what makes her cross. She’s decided that Irene wasn’t a small-town failure after all but a feminist martyr.
Now she’s even crosser. She borrowed some Jessop Girls College magazines from the Public Library and discovered that Kitty was a leading light in the Young Helpers League and was found at the box-opening to have £1. 1S. 1½d, a record.
‘Kitty liked being first,’ I said.
‘They collected clothes for Sir John Kirk’s Ragged School. Jesus!’
‘Your life seems full of pitfalls, Kate.’
‘The Christian Union. She wasn’t in that?’
‘Oh yes she was. She went through a very devout phase. Most girls do. Or they did in my day.’
I told her we had been Lutheran, but back-sliding had been our direction, and our church visits far between. These had been to St Bede’s, there being large areas of agreement in Anglican and Lutheran doctrine. Irene took Kitty to the Cathedral to sing in the choir, and Kitty was hooked. (Kate approves of that word.) For six months she was a pain in the neck, scolding me when I blasphemed, and crying silently in her bedroom at Mum and Dad’s lack of faith. Then she came out. It was as if she’d taken a walk through the fun-house. I mean, things were extravagant inside, with haunted rooms and distorting mirrors, and she found a preference for natural shapes. That was her way, always to come back to her base, with pockets full of interesting things. And through her life she found religion fascinating – not doctrine but belief, and the things it made people do. Billy Simpson might have been a sap but his concern for his soul and for hers, while it amused her, gave him some weight in her eyes.
‘She didn’t stay in the Christian Union long. Look in 1920.’
I wish I’d been more careful. Kitty wrote the editorial. There’s no mistake, it was signed K.P. and no other senior girl and no member of the staff had those initials. Kate read it, breathing through her nose. Poor Kate. She’s as reliable as litmus paper. The dislike I announced so firmly is gone; and with it my senescent desire, but curiosity moves me to another sort of possession. Let me begin by treating her as a specimen. I’ll name her parts, I’ll map her, north to south. And come back to Kitty in good time.
She has hair that my mother would have called summer hair but I’ll call blonde. It’s rather streaky, inclined to oiliness, and needs more care than she gives it. Her skin is pinkish, not much melanin, and should not be exposed to the sun. I’ve told her that but she takes no notice. Forehead square, squarer than I like, with a sharp angle at the temple. There’s a handsome rounding of the parietal and occipital bones, the sort that leads one, falsely, to think of good brain power. (I don’t mean, Kate, you don’t have a good brain, that question’s open.) She has blue eyes that squint in bright light, but she won’t wear sun glasses because they’re ‘phoney’. They’re smallish eyes, lively when not dulled by her resentments. Nose, generous. I’m being less scientific than I intended. What’s generous? For that matter, what is handsome? I mean her nose is plumply winged, with broad passages, not the narrow sort poor Irene had. Mouth a little down-turning, lips very red, always unpainted, sharply outlined. She protects them from the sun with a cream that makes them shine, and sometimes makes her look as if she’s eaten greasy food. Her front teeth overlap, left to right. Big teeth, saved from goofiness by those spiky canines. She’s not too old for orthodontic treatment, but I know better than to suggest it. Small ears, mouse-thin ears. Chin, squarish again, almost mannish, with an overdevelopment of the masseter muscles. She should try not to be so determined.
Those are the parts. How can I make them cohere? How can I demonstrate that, all together, Kate Adams has a lovely face? I can’t say where it comes from, this loveliness, though it needs me to see it, and therefore a part of it’s from me. There’s a tension between what was there to start with and what she puts in, and tension is a well-known provider of balance. There’s a tension between perfection and imperfection, using those terms in a structural sense, and between rest and dynamism, and between ageing and youth. Temperament and character also play their part, the tension between them sometimes seems to hum in the air surrounding her.
You don’t think you’re much to look at, Kate. And you don’t care – or, as you put it, don’t give a stuff. Why must you prefer ugliness? I think there’s a tension in you between what’s hard and soft, but hard will win and turn you into stone. You still have time to do
something about it.
Her body? Generous. Yes, that will do. But lighter in the upper than the lower part. She seems to have a lot of bones round the shoulder, too many bones – but I’ll keep seeming out of it. She’s small-bodied to the waist and several sizes larger from there down. Big in the bum. (You don’t mind a bit of crudeness, Kate? I’ll stop if you will, there’s a bargain.) But she has the apple bum, not the pear, chunky not sloping. That’s an observation, not a statement of preference. I simply note that one will lose its shape quicker than the other. Her thighs are large and her calves muscular; sprinter’s calves. And skinny feet: a corrugation of metatarsals, and elongated toes, monkey toes. She could pick fruit with them. Long fingers too, stretched-out middle phalanges, and short nails like little dabs of glue.
When I think of her body I can dislike her. This is the product of my sour regrets and so worth nothing. There’s a tension between wanting and not wanting, and no sort of balance is achieved. But her body’s not Kate, and I’ll maintain this wanting and not wanting isn’t me.
Her mind is Kate. And that’s more difficult. Rage and disappointment make a large part of her mental life. There’s probably too much idealism there. Idealism always brings ruin in its train: there’s nothing like it for denaturing. It deals in simplification, then multiplication, and in the end there’s too much to see, monochrome, gigantically single-celled, and assertion is the only road left open. That’s a digression – but it’s a fact that Kate simply, endlessly, asserts. That this is so, and this; and both are bad. I wish I could get her out of it. Must I be wishful, like Tup?
She doesn’t read much but when she does it’s mostly about wrongs done to women – believes in Iphigenia, she does, but won’t let Helen have a place – or books about creatures with furry feet and wizards with long beards and magic stones (pebbles I mean, not the other things). Juvenile stuff. She listens to music. She’s passionate about homoeopathy and knows a thousand names, and knows all symptoms and complaints and remedies, and has a carry-box, professionally made, that rattles as she totes it about, with tiny bottles filled with tiny pills like snails’ eggs. I’ve asked her to treat my old age, like with like, and she’s not amused; gives me bryonia for bilious attacks, nux vomica to keep me calm, and when that fails, cocculus ‘to knock my bad temper on the head’. What would she dose me with for fear of death? And herself for lack of curiosity? She knows remedies and symptoms all right, but nothing about the history of homoeopathy. I mentioned Hahnemann and she said, ‘Who?’ and yawned at him proving quinine on himself. I felt as if I’d discovered some part of her dead.
