Prowlers

by Maurice Gee

  But, I thought, with sour prurience, her whopping thigh denied them consummation for a while.

  19

  She’s raising him from the sea. She’s finding out his coastline. He’s a big one. It’s a kind of epeirogenesis she’s about and she’ll be Asia to his Africa.

  When I first saw Kate I thought she swayed, but that was just her youth misleading me. Now I know her better I’m aware she doesn’t move from side to side but straight ahead. Her steps, mental, physical, are blunt and short, lacking grace in everything but their quickness. Whether to touch, pick up, put away, she begins all movements of her hands as though she’s making slaps or throwing punches; and moves her mind in that sudden way.

  But now she’s softened, now she’s slowed to half-pace. She’s not in love, she’s in a state of satisfaction. I said, ‘Kate, I don’t want to see. You keep it in your bedroom.’

  ‘Damn it, Noel,’ she answered, ‘I don’t go in for exhibitions.’

  ‘No parties. No loud music. No pot.’

  ‘I don’t use it. Nor does Shane.’

  ‘You keep him out of my liquor cupboard. He can buy his own.’

  He pays rent too, and puts in money for the ‘kai’. There’s an affectation, he’s not a Maori. In the mornings he says to me, ‘Kia ora, gran’pop.’ ‘Au revoir,’ I reply, waving him out of my way, ‘sayonara, auf wiedersehen, ciao.’ It makes him laugh – not what I intend – and makes Kate frown. He calls me Sir, salutes me lazily, like a Yank. This morning he called me Lancelot. It’s all good-humoured. I don’t believe he knows what malice is.

  There’s malice in Chimp.

  This is not what I set out to do. I wanted to be exact, and look at me, all over the place. It’s time to sit quiet for a while, and then perhaps make a second start.

  Things take on their own life, grow too large, grow extra limbs, and what should be purposeful and more in my control rushes ahead or jumps sideways. I mean to stop it. There has to be a centre and a line. There’s too much stimulation in the present and so I must make an act of will and face away. I’m interested in structure, but what I’ve made already’s just a mess.

  When Tup Ogier started me off in science I knew my first intellectual joy. There was joy even in working on paper. When I balanced an equation, no matter how simple, I felt I’d added a piece to the universe. I must try to do that again.

  Here’s an equation, a simple one. When Kitty put her fingers in Miss Montez’s eyes she did not stop there. She withdrew her hand and felt her own eye socket. She held Miss Montez’s jaw in fingers and thumb and worked it up and down, then worked her own. She put her finger in the hole where Miss Montez’s nose had been; and pressed the tip of her own nose like a button. What it meant exactly I can’t say, but I know she was engaged in giving things their proper magnitude.

  Then she gave a nod and turned away.

  20

  I won a Junior National Scholarship and graduated MSc from Canterbury University, where I was awarded the Travis Martin Scholarship for chemical research. Then came an 1851 Exhibition Science Scholarship and the Orient Shipping Co’s Travelling Scholarship, which paid my fare to England. I was at St John’s College, Cambridge from 1925 to 1927.

  This part of my life, the English part, is not available to memory. It’s an object rounded off, put aside. I can admire it and be glad it’s mine but soon I want to turn away and look at more interesting things. I was busy, successful, I was happy most of the time, but happiness, it seems, is not a measure. It leaves things aside, waiting another sort of possession, and I have no instruments for that. There are connections I cannot make in streets, in rooms, in gardens not my own. That place is there. Here predicates. It makes a fizz and ferment, it’s rude and beautiful. There lies dull and idle, won’t be moved. There’s inert. I have a hold on myself in Jessop, although I wriggle and slip free. In Cambridge, in London, I’m fashioned, I’m complete – stone fish on a mantelpiece. I’m real fish in my streets; I dart about, there’s life hard and slippery in me.

  Will that do, Kit? It’s you supplying images.

  I stayed in Britain until 1933, working at the Fuel Research Station in Greenwich, then came back to Jessop and joined the Lomax Institute as Agricultural Chemist.

  Many things were the same and many changed. My mother and father had moved to a smaller house. He still baked the best pies and bread in town and I spent my first night in Jessop down at the bakehouse, feeding the stove, watching this fat little man perform his dance. He told me all the news, giving it a different slant from Mum’s, and putting in details she missed out. Les Dockery had died on a seat in the park; but I learned from Dad that he’d sat there dead till the end of the day, when a woman tapped his shoulder and he fell with a sigh along the seat as though trying to find a more comfortable position. Phil had surprised everyone by being upset at his father’s death; but from Dad I learned he had cried at the funeral, and made big sniffing sobs like a boy and wiped his nose on his sleeve. Tup Ogier, frail as matchsticks, had to hold the six-footer up and slip a handkerchief into his hand.

  Mum was especially dry about Kitty. ‘She’s all right. They get by. I suppose the children will grow up somehow.’ Kitty disappointed us by not going to university. She became a probationer nurse and this seemed a poor choice for such a clever girl. ‘I want to start doing something now, not spend years getting ready,’ she explained. She was five years at Jessop Public Hospital and married Desmond Hughes shortly after I left for England. ‘She broke the rules,’ Dad sighed. ‘She didn’t marry a doctor she married a patient.’ It did not bother them that Desmond, or Des as he preferred, was only a working man. Only is a word they’d have rejected. My mother was a saw-mill worker’s daughter and her moral cornerstone was that physical labour disposed one to virtue. On this she was unshakeable. In her version of the story, the ruin of the Le Grices began with the father’s habit of strolling. She had no objection to a bricklayer as son-in-law. She objected to his drawing attention to himself. And anything short of rude physical health in a man was a dereliction. Desmond Hughes chose politics instead of good health.

  She was not being completely unreasonable. Des did not look after himself. He was out at meetings on winter nights, he was on street corners in the rain, and on the stage in halls that draughts moved through like rag-ends from a Chatham Islands gale. He smoked, of course, chain-smoked, but we didn’t know the dangers then. All the same, his doctor must have warned him that a man with his bad lungs should treat himself better. But Des put all his problems down to the Imperialist war and made use of them as a property. Like Les Dockery he’d been caught in a gas attack. He spent months in hospital in England before coming home. When Kitty met him he had pneumonia and she wondered what kept him alive. It was his passion for a better world, she came to think.

  I met Des on my second day home in Jessop. He was sitting on a kitchen chair in his back yard, reading a book. We shook hands, he looked at me and found nothing to alter judgements made on the basis of my type; which was, if I have the terminology, petty bourgeois. He had no curiosity about me or my work. Lack of curiosity horrifies me; and when I found it in Kitty too I felt bereaved, I wanted to weep. And then I wanted to destroy Des Hughes and put things back in their proper shape. I began to hate him and have not conquered it, so you’d better take what I say as lacking balance. Kitty loved him, that much is certain; but I think she loved a Des Hughes she’d made for herself.

  He was tall and saucer-chested. A great lump seemed gouged out of him and you felt if you poked where his chest should be you’d find empty space and feel his vertebrae at the back slipping about under a layer of skin. Is that unbalanced? I came to detest the shape of him. I felt his fleshless bones were a figure for the coldness in his mind. He had sunken cheeks and falcate nose and a burning eye – that cold fire that feeds on abstractions – and red hair springing from his brow. There was rude health. I imagined papillae feeding on him and all his sap drawn into his hair.

  He tried
my hand with fingers strong as a builder’s clamp. I winced and he moved me further from his centre. That would have suited me, except that he had Kitty there and I did not mean to give her up. Embracing her, I knew that she had lipic qualities and did not have her tissues burned away. The day I left for England in 1925 my father took a photo of us clowning. I’ve lost it now. No matter, I can see it in my head. Kitty, in her nurse’s uniform, kneels on the floor with her arms wrapped about my leg. With raised face she pleads with me to stay. I stride with my other foot at the door. I’m natty in my new suit and gloves, with overcoat on my arm and trilby in my hand. I look into the future manfully. But really I’m a chimpanzee dressed up. She’s Mary Pickford.

  There was no going back to that sort of thing. Kitty was Mrs Hughes, with sick husband and three barefoot children in hand-me-downs.

  ‘Noel,’ she said, stepping back, holding me by the shoulders. She gave me a shake, another hug, and pushed me away. ‘You still haven’t grown.’

  ‘I’m five foot six.’ Her husband’s lankiness might be her standard but I wasn’t going to have her apply it to me. I was used by now to thinking I was someone.

  ‘A moustache! Oh Noel, you’ve got to shave that off. Straight away.’

  ‘Don’t you like it?’

  ‘You look like a crook. You look like a burglar. Noel, Noel, why aren’t you married yet? What happened to that English girl?’

  ‘She married someone else.’

  ‘No wonder, with that mo.’

  Although she made me angry, this was Kitty; but it was only the dance of flame before the fire goes out. It surprised her and her eyes grew wide, then she turned to Des and said, ‘Well, old boy,’ and I knew that meant she was choosing him and was letting him know I was no more than a distraction. All this, you’ll say, is as it should be, and I’ll agree husband comes before brother. But old affections and shared memories should not just be booted out of the way, and that’s what Kitty did. She shoved me into the basement like a piece of furniture she found no use for. Over the next hour I felt as if I’d put my head through a window and some slow wheel, some machine turning counter-clockwise, twisted it off. Extravagant, I know. But that’s how it felt – slow, excruciating, against nature. And that lipic quality she had, that weight, that body, was something she drew from Desmond Hughes. I had to alter Kitty in my mind. I had to learn I had no sister now.

  ‘How’s Irene?’

  For a moment she could not remember Irene. ‘Oh, her. Still up there. Living off her fat.’ She smiled at Des and he gave a nod.

  ‘Does she do any concerts?’

  ‘How would I know? And where the hell have you been living, Noel? People are starving here. They don’t want concerts. They want food and jobs and roofs over their heads. Not music from some tart on some piano.’

  To everything I asked she had an answer of that sort. Kitty, I wanted to cry, listen to me, where have you gone? Don’t misunderstand me, I didn’t object to her politics, never did. They’re better than the sort on the other side. I objected to the killing off of Kitty and this clumsy being in her place.

  To see how far she’d go, and perhaps twist the screw harder on myself, I asked her if she’d seen Phil Dockery. Kitty hissed. Spit flew from her mouth; and Des, at the kitchen table, reading still, looked up and gave a grin of rage. It was the first visceral response I’d seen from him.

  ‘Dockery? Your mate?’ Kitty said. ‘If you’re being pals with him, Noel, you’re not coming in my house.’

  ‘What’s he done?’

  ‘Trying to be a rentier,’ Des said.

  The word was new to me. I looked at Kitty.

  ‘He wants to be the boss of Jessop, Noel. And sit on his bum and rake in the money. But we’ll get him.’

  ‘What’s he done?’

  ‘Buying houses. Putting up the rent. He goes round collecting it himself. But he doesn’t dare stick his nose in my door. No fear.’

  ‘Do you mean he owns this house?’ I gave a snort. It struck me as funny: Port-rat Phil growing fat on rents from run-down houses. Then I looked at Kitty’s children (the youngest, Pam, would grow up and be Kate Adams’ mother) sitting three-in-a-row on the wooden bench that served as sofa, with bare feet dangling and darns in their jersey sleeves, and saw that while a circle might be closed and pleasure felt in it, anger was justified in her.

  ‘Does he charge too much?’

  ‘He put it up last month. Des went to see him.’ But now she was confused, and I felt a flash of hatred for Hughes, seeing a kind of deference close to fear in the look she gave him. It seems that Phil had waived the rent increase for Kitty’s sake – it was a shilling – and Des refused the favour and the two had a shouting match. Des called Phil a capitalist, a gangster, and Phil – brick-red, plum-red perhaps – replied that Des was a socialist rabble-rouser who’d married a girl too good for him. Des told me that with relish, punishing Kitty; and I was close to saying Phil was right.

  ‘We pay the same as everyone else,’ Kitty said. ‘We couldn’t walk down the street if we took any favours from him.’

  Phil returned the shilling by postal note every week, and they tore it in half and posted it back. So the battle went on. I saw the passion spent on it; the energy that went into Kitty’s hatred. She was prepared to hate me too, and I saw that she might shrivel up and be a dry shrill woman in a kitchen, wasted thing; or that she might swell, grow huge, and push us all, every one of us, out of her way. I could not retain either picture. Both of those Kittys went away; but just for a moment I understood that Des Hughes would make Kitty into nothing, or that she’d survive and he would be the one who shrivelled up.

  21

  Now these two, Irene, Phil, who shall I go to? Each visit carries risks. But with Irene I move close to my centre and it’s a kind of gravity draws me there.

  Night-time of course, starless night. The sky invisible and drizzle in the air. I walk along the empty streets from one fuzz-ball of light to the next. The houses have porticoes and English names and I could be in Dulwich or Esher. But I’m not impressed with English things. I’ve ambitions to rescue Irene from a life that’s secondhand. I’ve had thoughts of her, thinned-out, beaten flat, while away; persistent nevertheless. The fact I learned standing at Long Tom’s window is flattened too. Stood on edge, it’s invisible. Many things are like that in the light of my importance. So – coming back to Jessop was one step; coming back to Irene was the next.

  The house, in drizzle, swells impressively. The black trees on the lawn are posted in defence. They have the shape of crouching men, but I’m reassured by weeds growing in the path and the absence of red scoria from Auckland. I’m sad for Irene in advance. She has known hard times, that is plain, and I’ll rescue her from faded elegance and set her life moving forward again. She welcomes me with music. It comes from a room diffusing light in the warm wet dark, has properties of light as well as sound. It shines into the backs of my eyes and penetrates dark places in my mind, it gleams on water. All music is from Irene, I’ve not forgotten that, but not, till now, had knowledge of it run like a woman’s fingers, her own fingers, on my skin. Do I sound eighteen instead of thirty-one? That is because I stopped off at Irene and could not move, and my experience – by that I mean experience of women, quite extensive – was pre – not post-Irene. Though I spent passion in a prodigal way I was the being who had not loved her yet, so the man-things that I did were boy in fact. Women found me out and married someone else, someone grown up.

  I must change this. I’ll be deliberate. I didn’t choose the present tense, it grabbed me; but I’ll shake it off – it wants to stay – and look not only back but down as well. Sharp and cold. Why not impatient? I’ve little patience with a boy who should have been a man. I’m angry to find him hanging about.

  So, back to that wet night, and the music, and the path. I did not want to stop her playing. It seemed the right thing, romantic thing, to listen in the dark and let her finish, and come in on the last chord, so to spea
k. What’s novelettish now struck me on that night as mature. How I seemed to control the event! I stepped off the path and crossed the lawn and stood at the window, to one side, and looked at Irene Lomax at her Bechstein. And strangely enough, though I’m looking hard (and sharp and cold) I can’t see her, I can’t work my way under the shell I’ve cased her in. I see myself clearly, I’m in the rain, which is heavier now, and water drips from the brim of my hat. I see my wetness recommending me, as proof of devotion; but Irene, surely, doesn’t have her hair up. She doesn’t wear a satin gown.

  That succubine tense! I’m in it again. Did not! Did not! Let me think. She wore, yes this is it, a cardigan. She wore a brown skirt of some heavy weave, and slippers, and her hair was buster cut. But still the music was the informing agent. I write that after thinking very hard. It’s the music that makes me slide about and dresses her up. Music is the thing that sucks at me, music is light and memory, and physical being, and Irene, and Noel Papps; and reason is the thing it defeats.

  Let’s be still. Let’s be calm. Now then.

  Irene played. I cannot name the piece. Liquid, slow, connections smooth. Her face is tender. It slopes to one side. It sloped to one side. She was in profile to me, but turned her face, floated her face round to semi-full. Her eyes closed down and opened again. I saw the Lomax slant from mid-face to jaw-point. Those are good words. Mid-face. Jaw-point. Two hits to me. The man who came into the frame wants to present himself in a smoking jacket and white silk scarf, but I’ve got him, I see him, big-bummed boy: big-hipped, fat-thighed, slab-cheeked, with jacket sleeves too short and hands too long, and Charlie Chaplin boots, and slicked-down hair. I did not recognize him. I did not see his age, which was eighteen. I saw what he did. It’s cinematic: Papps at the window (it’s usually the murderer at the point of view), they inside, contained in themselves, like a moon.

  He walked to her and put his hand on her shoulder, and I saw his face, his Lomax face, fatter than Irene’s, fatter too than old man Lomax’s, but with the same fracture in its line, as though someone with two strong hands had given it a wrench. He listened for a while. (Water trickled inside my collar and made a band of cold about my chest.) Then he stood behind her and put his hands on her throat and began an upward stroking as though working fluids through that column to her brain. I saw Irene shiver. Some little sac of pleasure in her broke. She kept on playing, and Royce maintained the moulding of his palms. Then he touched her ears. He spanned them, finger and thumb; and slipped his fingers into her hair and felt the shape of her, moved across and round her skull, round her cheekbones, over her mouth, and across the hard orbs of her eyes. She closed them to make it easy for him, and kept them closed when he was gone. He moved his fingers back into her hair and laid them full length above her ears; and with them, I knew, had possession of her.