by Maurice Gee
I won’t talk about it. It’s not your business. Nobody’s business but my own.
Rhona, when I knew her first, could laugh. It was a small sound, enclosed by her mouth, and she seemed surprised and swallowed it, and seemed to like the taste for she smiled to herself. She could be passionate. I don’t mean in bed. How you people trim language back. Passionate about ending small injustices. Her movements became definite and her sentences stood in parcels above her head – speech balloons, are they called? Large injustices she never saw. But she marched out into the frozen night and told our milkman that if he didn’t get boots and mittens for his delivery boy she’d report him to the police. She prised the boy’s fingers from the handle of the urn and ordered the man to take off his gloves and feel; which he did, and said he was sorry. She hacked at a frozen puddle with her heel, as though making a mark to kick a goal. ‘That’s ice, Mr Boyd. And look at his feet.’ She shone her torch on them. ‘Yes, all right,’ said Mr Boyd. I suspect he watered our milk after that.
Stupidities, sickness, accident – she was good. But cruelties and betrayals she could not handle.
I’m surprised more people don’t go mad. We must have minds made of leather.
I married Rhona because I was back home and thought Dr Papps should have a wife. I worried at first that she wouldn’t live up to me, but I took her through the Lomax, showed her my lab, talked about my work, and she understood, she saw how important I would be, and gave my arm a squeeze of encouragement. I married her because of my need; and from pity, from my perception of her state; and notions of my strength and maturity. With all that mixed in a brew anyone might believe himself in love. She fitted so neatly into the hole left by Irene. She freed me from the need to discover where it was I had arrived. I can’t leave Phil out either. So many phases in our contest, so many battles; and you see how each of us supposed himself victor – though it needed more self-deception on my part. Anyway, there we were, Noel and Rhona Papps, in a villa on Bishops Drive, and Doris Clews in the back bedroom, with a chamber-pot of port wine under her bed.
I grew up. I went into it a boy but in four years was as much a man as I’ll ever be. Whole geographies changed. Sandy coasts sank beneath the sea – by that I mean my self-esteem took a proper shape, my notion of myself began to accord with reality. What came up out of the sea was habitable, only just, but, by God, it was real. The soil might be thin and sour, and rocks break out all over the place: but it was mine and would not vanish in a dream…It’s time I let this figure go. It’s leading me to self-praise and I’d sooner keep my cold eye, an instrument of measure.
I’ll bring back Kitty as it’s Kitty you want. She knocked at our door one night, just after tea. We’d managed to get Doris to eat a mouthful of pumpkin and the eye of a chop, and had her at the sitting-room fire with her port wine watered down; and we were warm and fed and moderately pleased with ourselves. Rhona was darning a hole in my socks, a needless activity but it pleased her.
Rat-tat-tat on the front door, and, ‘Who’s that?’ I said, thinking, as I always did, of Irene, then of Phil. But when I’d padded down the hall in my slippers and opened the door, it was Kitty, shaking rain out of her hair. She stepped inside and closed the door with a bang. ‘I’ve left that bastard. And his bloody kids.’
She had no bag. I saw no marks on her, though I looked. ‘Did he hit you?’
‘I hit him. And kicked their arses. Bloody parasites.’ She grinned fiercely. ‘They’re howling like the Sally Army band. Let him sort it out.’
‘Where are you going, Kitty?’
‘To Mum’s. I just stopped off to get shickered with Doris.’
‘No, Kitty. Rhona…’
At once Kitty changed. It was as if I’d spoken the magic word and changed her from a scullery maid into a princess. (She’d hate that simile; would choose to stay scullery maid and start a revolution in the kitchen.) That softness I’ve spoken of came on her and rounded her face and smoothed the angles of her body.
‘How is she? She all right?’
‘She’s fine. She’s good tonight.’
‘Want me to go?’
‘No, come in. Don’t talk about Des, eh? Don’t say the kids are howling.’
‘They’re all right, little buggers. A kick on the bum does them good. Where’s Rhona?’
We went down the hall to the sitting room and Kitty touched Rhona on the head and put her hand under Rhona’s chin and looked in her face; then kissed her brow. She sat down and grinned at Doris.
‘That stuff will give you constipation, Doris.’
‘You remember my sister?’ It was several weeks since Kitty had been round and Doris’s memories did not last so long. All the same, throned in her chair, heavy as a basilisk (though shedding her flesh at this time), and basilisk-eyed, she looked full of ancient knowledge, evil knowledge. Her massive head – I’ve known no other head give such an impression of being compacted – turned on her neck and her eyes closed and opened in a crocodile, a holy crocodile, way. How misleading it all was. But not deliberately. Doris was not capable of deliberation. Or thought, coherence, memory; and barely of speech. Her life was jumbled in her head like the pieces of a puzzle in a box. Only in the hunt for her next drink could she arrange one thing to follow another. Then she could be clever and move in directions Rhona and I could not foresee.
Her breath was like a basilisk’s, poisonous.
I made a pot of tea and brought it in and gave Doris a new glass of watered wine. ‘Last one, Doris.’ She took no notice.
‘Is it still raining out there?’ Rhona said; and she and Kitty talked about the drizzle, and then about Kitty’s children, and Rhona said she’d knit Pam a pullover – and all the while Kitty made a globe of warmth about them. We put Doris to bed and closed her door and Kitty and I entertained Rhona with stories about our childhood. Kitty discovered memories, and rediscovered a way of looking at things; of shedding toughness, shedding calloused skin. She returned to what I shall call her poetical manner, although it was a good deal more than manner. She saw through an eye that took in surfaces and penetrated deeps; and she spoke old words as though they were spoken for the first time and held in them the magic of new-naming. You probably haven’t heard of phlogiston, Kate. When I try to put myself at a distance from the Kitty of that night I think of her as being in her phlogisticating mood. That’s not altogether accurate. Phlogiston, in the Old Chemistry, was an element supposed to be present in all combustible matter. Flame was the escape of phlogiston. I see Kitty’s memories, issuing in language and spirit both, as a dance of flame. Perhaps I’d be more accurate if I said she worked through to her base element that night. She found a kind of carbon skeleton. I don’t know. Perhaps I shouldn’t look for metaphors in chemistry.
You see, I’m at a distance. It works. Then I creep back and look between my fingers and see as much as I care to see. Whether I should or shouldn’t behave in this way isn’t the question. It’s a question of keeping calm.
We talked about the bakehouse and our father beating dough, hopping and humming and pretending his white hands were not his own: ghost hands, skeleton hands; then, when we were frightened, turtle doves. Kitty made their cooing perfectly. We talked about Tup Ogier, Mrs Beattie, the patriotic pageant, Miss Montez. And swimming in the river, diving down and seeing the sand puff into cumulus clouds at the touch of your hand, and seeing brown trout resting under the bank. Kitty spoke of rescuing Mrs Le Grice. I told of Edgar Le Grice leaping through the warehouse in his raven coat and the fire running at his side – I left Phil out – and how we faced each other in the yard and how he rose in my dreams to that day; and it was Kitty, I remember now, who gave me the term basalt moon.
We told funny stories and made Rhona laugh. Then we drank more tea and ate wine biscuits and Kitty sighed. ‘I suppose I’d better get home and pick up the pieces.’
‘Ha!’ I said.
‘Ha what? We have our fights, Noel. Des is a funny blighter. But I wouldn’t swap him
for one of your fancy friends. Before I met Des I was nothing.’
‘Now you’re something?’
‘I’m getting there. I’ll be branch delegate next time round. Nothing surer.’
‘And Des will stay home and mind the kids?’
‘Why not? Des is pretty sick, Noel.’
‘So you’ll do his work?’
‘Who says it’s his? It’s mine.’
‘You should stand for parliament, Kitty.’
I was way behind her. She’d thought of it and knew just when it would be. The war made little difference to her plan.
Rhona said, ‘I’ll come round and measure Pam. And show her some patterns.’
‘Better show me. Pam’s got no sense. And make it brown or grey so it won’t show the dirt.’
‘I’d like to make something pretty,’ Rhona complained. But Kitty was up putting on her coat and her softness was gone, and her brightness gone. She was swathed and dumpy, and back home in her family, and somewhere forward too, in her future, which could not help being practical and square on its feet. She gave Rhona a peck on the forehead and grunted goodnight to me at the front door. She dug her hands in her pockets and put down her head. Off she went into the swarming drizzle. She hooked with her foot and closed the gate, and didn’t look back to see it spring open. Her dark coat – brown or grey, I don’t remember – sank in the night and her white calves gleamed.
I closed the door and went back to my wife and we sat a while by the fire, holding hands. I believe, though I’m not sure, Rhona and I made love that night. If so, it was the last time.
27
Five degrees of frost this morning. Snow on the mountains over the bay and the old man wraps himself in scarves and pulls on bed socks over his socks before coming out to sit on his sundeck. Not a cloud in the sky. Autumn reds and yellows, English colours, deck the hills. I’m trying to write the way Kitty would speak when phlogisticating, but Kitty would never say ‘deck’. What a word! I considered this: the colours lay spread on the hills like jam and butter, but that’s going too far, even though some of those yellows are buttery and one tree – liquid amber – has the colour of strawberry jam. Too much straining for effect. Kitty was not after effects.
Ducks quack and squabble on the river. Thirty-seven ducks sitting out the shooting season on the edge of town. They boat down the rapids and enjoy themselves. Others waddle in the street and cars make a detour round them. I hope they don’t decide to fly away because they won’t last half an hour out on the inlet.
Kate is being gentle. I don’t know why. Does she think I won’t make it through the winter? I’ll make it. Or not. I won’t put in a special effort but I won’t give up. Death may be just a step away, nevertheless it doesn’t show itself on my horizon. Here I sit enjoying this Pongolian autumn display and it’s not an ‘issue’ with me that it could be my last.
She said, broaching it with hesitation: ‘Don’t you see, Noel, if there was so much blood she must have tried something. It couldn’t be spontaneous. Or else…’ She means a back-street abortion; arranged by Phil Dockery, of course. She wants me to judge and sentence him. I’m no more interested in that than I am in my death. Leave Phil alone. Leave Rhona alone.
Kate is planting ivy round the base of the piles. In a year or two, she says, I’ll have it climbing over the sundeck rail to shake hands. She can’t be expecting me to die. Shane has built a scaffold along the front wall and is painting the house. That’s good of him. The paint and brushes etc. cost me a devil of a lot. But it’s good of him. It keeps him busy. If he falls off the scaffold he’ll kill himself. It’s more than a hundred feet down to the river and nothing to catch hold of before he hits the rocks. He’s wearing one of those radios, a Walkman, and God knows where he is while he’s on that plank. I wonder if Kate has thought her boyfriend mightn’t last as long as me.
She chose the colour, dull green. I don’t like it but women say I’ve got no colour sense – Kitty, Irene, Ruth, all said that. When I told Kate I wanted white she laughed and said all my taste was in my mouth. Green, she said, would make the house merge into the hillside and make it belong there with the trees. Is that what a house should do? She patted me and asked me to trust her, which I’ve done, because, as a matter of fact, I don’t care. White, green, strawberry? Who cares? ‘Kate,’ I yelled a moment ago, ‘tell him to put a pink stripe down the middle. Diagonal. Tell him to paint a mural if he likes.’ She squinted up at me and showed her eye teeth. Sometimes I make her uneasy.
‘I do like her,’ I said. ‘In fact,’ I said, experiencing one of those surges like water coming back in a plughole, ‘in fact I loved her. More than anyone. Anyone in my life. Except Rhona, and Irene, and Ruth. And my mother. But as much.’
Kate laughed. ‘Anyone else?’
‘You’re the one making me confused.’
‘For someone you claim to love you say some nasty things about her.’
‘Kitty had enough people trying to butter her up. I thought you wanted her warts and all.’
‘Yeah.’ Kate patted my hand. ‘She had more warts than you think.’
I wanted to know what that meant but Kate wouldn’t say. I think she’s as confused about Kitty as I am and can’t decide what to put in and what to leave out. Her book is going not too well, she says. It’s got the wobbles. She’s even thinking of giving it up. ‘Let me read it.’ No, she says. She’ll keep on, or maybe not, maybe put it away for a bit and see how it looks in three month’s time.
‘You won’t finish.’ I was angry. Kitty deserves a book. When wankers like Nash get a book Kitty deserves two or three. Shane’s to blame. I told her so. If she put half the energy into Kitty she puts into him she’d have it finished.
‘Mind your business,’ she said.
All right, I will. But I hope that cowboy falls off his horse.
Phil called to see me yesterday. Kate was out shopping or he wouldn’t have got past the door. Is that right, Captain Kate? It’s my door, remember, and I’ll have what guests I like. In fact, you’re a guest here yourself, remember that!
He kept honking into his handkerchief. I had a shot of Redoxon before sitting down with him. With winter coming on the last thing I want is a cold. Phil looked his age yesterday. When he was a boy he looked a man. When he was a man he looked a boy. Always in disguise, always playing roles – that’s just Phil Dockery being himself. As tycoon he was chomper of cigars, or malevolent gnome, or number eight putting in the boot. As womanizer he was smoothie, bottom-slapper, winking lecher – dozens of roles. Unbuttoned his wad of notes like his male member. But yesterday the old man of eighty-three with a cold was out of costume – an old man with a cold, sick of things.
I poured him a Scotch and had one myself, hoping it would help kill his germs. We sat on the sundeck in the hot hour of the day and watched a tribe of waxeyes feeding in the fennel. I’m fond of them, their spryness, each a little cupful of life. The ducks quacked on the river and Phil said, ‘So that’s where the buggers are hiding. Bloody doc wouldn’t let me go this year. I reckon I could’ve frozen this cold out.’
‘You’d have killed yourself.’
‘Maybe. It’s a better way to go than sitting in a chair. In bloody slippers and a bloody scarf.’
He was describing me and I said sharply, ‘I’m not going, Phil. Not for a while. As a matter of fact I reckon I’ll see you out.’
‘Want to bet?’
‘All right. You’re on. Ten dollars.’
‘You always were a piker, Noel. Make it worth my while.’
So we bet five hundred dollars and gave ourselves something to live for. I wrote an agreement on a page of my notebook and tore it out and gave it to Phil to sign.
‘We need a witness. Hey, you,’ he yelled at Shane, ‘come and stick your monicker on this.’
‘He’s got his music on, he can’t hear.’
Phil went to the rail and wobbled Shane’s plank. He hooked with his thumb and Shane climbed the rail and took his e
arphones off.
‘We need a witness, sonny.’
Shane read the page. ‘Yous jokers know what you’re doing?’
‘Just sign it,’ Phil said, ‘and get back to work.’
‘I reckon I’ll run a book on this.’
‘Come on, Shane,’ I said. ‘Put your name.’
‘What’s in it for me?’
‘If I win you can have the five hundred dollars.’
‘Fair enough. Put that down.’ He went into the kitchen for a glass.
‘Cheeky sod. Who is he?’ Phil said.
‘Kate’s boyfriend.’
‘Lives here?’
Shane came back and poured himself a drink. He witnessed the agreement; and I signed and Phil witnessed the second part.
‘Long life,’ Shane grinned at me, and swallowed his drink. He put on his earphones and went back to work.
‘Cheeky bugger.’
‘He’s all right.’
‘A stickman, eh?’ Phil was taken with Shane. ‘He’s bloody big. Dong like a draught horse, I’ll bet.’
If you read this, Kate, don’t come at me. Go and throw your wobbly somewhere else. I didn’t talk about it. You or Shane. I draw the line. But I was pleased to see Phil perking up. Old men sorry for themselves are unlovely creatures.
What else did we say? He made some comment about the trees – how ours were better than the pommie ones, they didn’t drop their leaves everywhere; and I asked him what he had against the English. ‘You name it,’ he said. But it comes down to this: his father didn’t say much, couldn’t say much, too hard to speak; but he told Phil, ‘Those English bastards murdered us.’
‘The pommie generals,’ Phil said, ‘with their riding boots all polished up and their little conductor’s batons under their arms. Conducting the war. Ten thousand here, eh? Ten thousand there. Poor buggers getting chopped up with machine guns or lying down and drowning in the mud. For some bloody hill with a shithouse on top. Swagger sticks, that’s what they called those things. They bloody swaggered while my old man was getting gassed.’ Tears stood in his eyes. He wiped them with his handkerchief. ‘I hate bloody colds.’
