Prowlers

by Maurice Gee

  ‘You did not.’

  Royce, for the first time, looked sharp. His nose became a pecking instrument. ‘Oh yes I did. Quiet Prince, she’s not going to hurt me.’

  Kate clenched and unclenched her fists. She controlled herself. ‘Fire, rats and female relations.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The enemies of…’ Still no acceptable term. ‘All right. They’re burned. The lot, I suppose? There’s nothing left?’

  ‘Oh, the lot.’

  ‘You said you read some. Do you remember what they said?’

  ‘Not much. I didn’t read much. The tone was, well, malicious. Irene was malicious too. I’ve got no illusions about her.’

  ‘If there’s anything you remember, it’ll help.’ She had become heavy, dull.

  ‘I remember about Nash. He was Prime Minister, wasn’t he? The cough drops man.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘It was rather clever. She said he had a widdler – she bet he had one curled up like a little caterpillar.’

  I laughed, but Kate, frowning – she’d got a scratch pad out – wrote it down. ‘Are you sure it was widdler?’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t. Here.’ He held out his hand for Kate’s pad and wrote a word. Blushing, he gave it back, and Kate grunted.

  ‘They egged each other on a bit, with language,’ Royce said.

  ‘What about the others? Fraser? Semple?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Holland?’

  ‘Oh yes. She said he had a mouth like a baboon’s posterior. I remember that. It wasn’t original, I thought.’

  ‘It wasn’t posterior either,’ Kate said.

  He blushed again; and Kate wrote ‘bum’.

  ‘What else?’

  ‘I can’t remember. Honestly, I didn’t take much notice. I thought it was all a bit – I don’t know – juvenile.’

  ‘She had to relax. She was human too.’

  ‘Oh, of course. I remember – there were other women, weren’t there? In parliament? A Labour one?’

  ‘Mabel Howard?’

  ‘Yes. And a National.’

  ‘Hilda Ross.’

  ‘That’s right. She said some dreadful things about them. And a woman on the radio, who gabbled…’

  ‘Aunt Daisy.’

  ‘Kitty did a marvellous Aunt Daisy imitation,’ I said. And I tried to do it, and managed well, having some talent in that way. ‘Good morning, everybody. Good moo-orning. And it’s glorious weather here in Wellington. The birds are singing, the sky’s a lovely blue, and when I got up this morning the sun was shining right up my back passage.’

  Kate laughed, and said, ‘An old joke. The voice is OK though.’

  ‘She called milk cow-juice. And eggs cackle-berries. Little girl stuff. With Irene, I mean. Not in letters. They were always giggling.’

  ‘And in the letters,’ Royce said, ‘she was always slinging off. And skiting. And whining.’

  ‘Hardly.’

  ‘Oh yes. People weren’t fair. They did things behind her back. That sort of thing.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound like Kitty.’

  ‘What you’ve got to remember,’ I said, ‘is that Irene was the only person she had. Outside family. Outside politics. Somewhere she could go and be herself. Without being judged.’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘I judged her.’

  ‘God,’ Royce said, and blushed again, ‘God was the Pieman.’

  ‘The Pieman in the Sky.’

  ‘Yes. She said, let me see – he was served a mouldy pie by the Pieman in the Sky. She was served…’ He shot a look at me and trailed away.

  ‘Who?’ I said.

  He shook his head. But I’m in a state of preternatural receptivity to things rising out of that time. Rhona, that was who. I said her name, and although Royce claimed not to remember, I was right. I seemed to feel muddy water lapping at my mouth, and ignorance and squalor all about me. Calculating niece, blushing dauber, unsavoury dog – I won’t say where he fell to licking – locked me in. And Irene and Kitty locked me in. Malice, squalor, ignorance. I wanted Rhona’s long clear open gaze. Empty. Blue.

  I’ll be fair to Royce Lomax, he’s impressive. He’s unpindownable, with his clownish body, comic and soft, but that hard privateness in his mind. He’s squashable, he’s inviolable. Remember those clowns with huge stiff pants open like a barrel at the waist, and all sorts of things stored down there. Sausages, sledgehammers, boots, balloons. Am I right in thinking they wore just singlets on top, and were thin, pale, bony up there? Breakable. And sad in face, but unbreakable. It’s no accurate description of Royce, but it comes a little way at the fracture in his being.

  Kate kept jabbing him with questions. She got her tape recorder and made a new start; and wanted my imitation of Kitty’s Aunt Daisy. I said I’d do it later. Royce was obliging. Up to a point. He said ‘bum’ (for posterity) but wouldn’t say the other word. Kate said it for him. Then he had another cup of tea. He’s a great tea-drinker. That’s probably what has dragged all his weight down to his middle and shortened him.

  Clouds with grey torn bellies came at eye level from the sea, dropping rain as fat as bantam eggs. It thickened up and thundered on my roof. When I put the new living-room on I made the roof iron (wriggly tin) so I could bring storms inside my house. It’s like living at the back of a waterfall sometimes.

  Royce likes it. He stood at the window and sucked the weather in through his nose. Lightning cracked like a whip down the hill. ‘Nice,’ he said. Another Royce. I’ll have to start counting. The dog whined and he flattened it on the mat with a finger dab. Thunder came, a hard shallow crack, then a long deep rumble. ‘Indigestion,’ Kate said, but he made that same finger dab at her. ‘Will the river come up?’

  ‘Depends what the weather’s been like up in the catchment. It looks like it though.’ And I became eloquent. I have a little love affair with the river. ‘More moods than a woman,’ I said – offensive and trite, it made Kate hiss – and showed how it had changed colour and got a new liveliness on its surface, which meant it was up an inch already.

  ‘When it touches the sewer pipe we’ve got a flood.’

  ‘Breaks the pipe?’

  ‘Every two or three years. Here come the ducks.’

  They boated down, buoyant as corks. The river turned yellow, then brown, and covered the pediment of the bridge. Islands of dead leaves and twigs floated by. ‘The logs will start in a moment,’ I said, showing off my river.

  ‘She’s quick. She’s sudden.’

  I was jealous of that ‘she’. How had he become so intimate with her? I never questioned that it was genuine.

  We watched for half an hour and saw a rise of three feet or so. A fresh not a flood, but full of little coils and whips and tongues. Two or three black logs, a piece of foam plastic. A van went up the valley with canoes lashed on top and shortly afterwards the fleet came down, with two metres of headroom under the pipe.

  ‘Sometimes we get jet boats going up.’

  Now I suffered that finger dab. He wanted nothing but what he could see and I felt myself anxious that he should have it. Kate had gone to her room. The dog was sleeping. The rain made the roar of tipping shingle on my roof. Houses, cold houses. Gleaming cars. Misty hill with red and yellow, leached and cold. On the bridge, two women. White coat, red coat, slick as satin ball gowns. The quarry face, flayed muscle, slippery. I felt I should offer him that, I felt I was seeing, but he kept me quiet and kept me still; and in the end I stopped collecting things and saw just the moving river and the hill.

  At last, when he’d turned away and had his dog at his hip, I fell to grinning and spilled some chatter. I was feeling good. My river, my storm. I’d had him round for a kind of meal and felt the thing had gone off very well. I called Kate and gave her my car keys and told her to run Royce home. ‘No, no,’ he said; but I gave a lordly wave. My turn now. Last words in my house were my right.

  Kate was grumpy, but saw he couldn’t w
alk in the rain. Off they went, and drove over the bridge with the dog sitting up like royalty on the back seat. When Kate came back she parodied him. ‘He had a widdler like a caterpillar.’ She sat in his chair and put her clasped hands between her thighs in just his way, and made me laugh. She has names for him now – the Caterpillar, the Widdler, the Female Relation. And because she’s still sore about those letters the last will win in spite of her feminism.

  I didn’t want his visit but I’m glad he came. A bit of pain, a bit of pleasure, a dash of mystery. It’s perked me up.

  I’ve known Royce all his life and though I snicker at him, and sneer, I find now certain things to admire, and things to like.

  37

  I’ll do a soirée. Sam Weller called them swarry. My father did a good Sam Weller act. That’s by the way. A swarry at the Lomax house, 1948.

  Who was there? Irene and Royce Lomax. Kitty Hughes. Pam Hughes. Noel Papps and Ruth Verryt. Phil and Sylvia Dockery. A lawyer, Bagley. A music teacher, Pauli. The principal of the School of Music. The Dean of the cathedral. Several others, nondescript (important to themselves of course).

  I had been two or three years reinstated as Irene’s friend. I’d come back to the Lomax at the end of the war. Fred Gooch was gone. Most of the old-timers were gone. John Dye was the new Director and I was Assistant-Director. That was only partly administrative. I was in the field and in my lab most of the time.

  I wrote to Irene. I suppose that letter went up in smoke along with Kitty’s. I said – and I believed – a new age had started. Wars were over, human foolishness too (I wrote that the year after the atom bomb was dropped), and I hoped Irene would let me call.

  She allowed it but did not make me welcome. She found it necessary to make me suffer – so Kitty put it – and playing the grand lady was her way. She always had somebody else there: little Pauli (a big fat fellow), Bagley in his hair-piece that made him look as if he’d had a new top fitted on his head. Bagley sang lieder in bad German and sounded as if his teeth were hurting him. Pauli turned the pages. I stood in a corner and smiled. It didn’t punish me, it simply made me fonder of silly Irene. My cheerfulness made her curious, and we talked; and she stopped being silly and we found that we were forty and our minds had taken weight. I don’t mean we’d grown intelligent (see above), we just had expectations (some of them) that could be met. We soon arrived back on a good footing. And Irene turned to me as Bagley sang, and gave a wink. Poor Bagley had false expectations. ‘He is quite good though,’ Irene said. ‘He’s Jessop good.’

  So, I was back, and Kitty was back, both modified; and Phil came once, on the night of the swarry. He came in looking cocky as a defence. ‘This ain’t my sort of shebang.’ Sylvia had dragged him. She sang duets with Baldy Bagley, the Jessop Cuckoo. ‘Try not to rock the boat,’ I said.

  ‘You playing butler? Buttle me up a drink.’ And when I’d brought it – ‘So that’s your little wop sheila, eh? Sooner you than me, mate.’

  I nearly hit him. It was the closest I ever came. Phil’s requirements are inhuman – that women at parties be ravishing and submit to him on the spot. I’m calm about it now, yes, I’m calm. I’ve never told him that my times in bed with Ruth Verryt brought me pleasures he could only dream of. If sex is what we must talk about –

  No, why should I? He always manages to lower the tone. Ruth was more than bed-mate. I’ll come to it, and how she showed up in my life again. I’ll even let Phil have a last word here. The Dutch pronunciation of Ruth was a gift, he smirked and cackled at it, gleamed his teeth, and all year long asked how she was getting on. I answered straight and easy, ‘Good as gold.’ Phil made no mark on us, did not come near, and when we noticed him felt him deprived. Last word to me.

  Now, this swarry. Which had me in a state of edginess. One of the reasons I was there was to prove to Ruth that Jessop could produce something worthwhile. At some point in the evening the silliness would stop, Irene would play. ‘You expect me to believe that? She is good? That silly lady in the silly dress?’ Sometimes I was close to hitting Ruth. But she was there, enjoying it. She drank up people when they puffed themselves, she savoured their pretentions like wine; they made her very quiet, and gay inside.

  I guided her across the room and said, ‘Ruth, this is my sister Kitty. And this is my niece Pam. Kitty shouldn’t be here. She should be in disguise.’

  ‘Ah,’ Ruth said, ‘because you are a socialist. Then I should not be here. I am socialist too.’

  Kitty was forty-five and in her prime. She had a majestic full-chinned beauty. Double-barrelled words describe her best: deep-eyed, straight-nosed, heavy-bosomed, lively-minded. This was the time of Kitty at her most open. She had not come to roll and lumber yet, like a water beast, and her mind was free of the ponderous forward thrust, lightened only by anger, that made her so formidable in the years most people think of as her prime. They are wrong. Kitty’s prime was now, two or three years in which she marked time and was happy.

  Irene had tried to improve her dress, tried to teach her make-up, and had failed. Kitty was neat, Kitty was clean, and that, she claimed, was enough. Her dresses and skirts were simple and she usually wore a hand-knitted cardigan. And a brooch. And her wedding ring. That was all. She hated hats, which made her feel as if something was sitting on her brain, some silly rule she had to obey. (Irene loved hats.) On state occasions people used to watch, and nudge each other: there, off it came, as soon as Kitty could get away with it. Another thing they watched for was her smokes. She rolled her own, fine-cut Greys from a Desert Gold tin, and it showed, they said, how genuine she was. But I’m getting ahead. She took out her Desert Gold tin that night at the swarry. Her papers – tishies, she called them – were inside with the tobacco. And Ruth watched with delight the paper held on the lower lip, the stretching of tobacco on the palm; then finger flick, and roll, and lick, all in the space of a breath or two. She asked if she could try it.

  Phil came across and joined in but it was Pam who attracted him. A robust girl, big-bodied like her Ma but with a golden colouring, and with that lovely freshness of the young. You want to touch and taste them. They’re like apples. To Phil though Pam was a peach. ‘That’s a peach of a daughter, Kitty.’ Kitty said flatly, ‘Hands off, Phil.’ The girl was out of earshot, rolling cigarettes with Ruth. ‘Hey, hey,’ Phil said, holding up his hands to show he had no bad intentions.

  ‘My daughter’s no bit of property. Look after your wife.’ That was Kitty’s blunt way. Phil enjoyed it. Her antagonism complimented him. He did not go his ox-blood red but a kind of lolly pleasure-pink. He grinned at Kitty and patted her rump.

  ‘You’ll cop one, Phil. I’m warning you.’

  He stepped out of range. ‘OK, comrade. Don’t shoot.’ Halfway through the night he started calling her Olga; and this remained his name for her for the rest of her life. (Olga, Comrade Olga, Olga Pappski, and, in his ox-blood state, Comrade Crappski.)

  Ruth and Pam had made cigarettes and were giggling in a corner. They looked both delightful and depraved with those white droopers on their lips. Irene sent a frown at them. She was, as Kitty said, dressed up to the nines. The full-length dress, crimson and, I thought, a bit like a nightie, hid her feet and made her seem to slide about the room on castors. Irene up to Kitty and Phil in a sweet curve that glanced off several people on the way: ‘I hope you two aren’t going to stage a wrestling match.’

  ‘If it’ll help to get your party cracking.’

  ‘It’s not a party Phil, it’s a musical evening.’

  ‘You’re not going to let Baldy Bagley sing? Gimme another drink, Noel. And some cotton wool for me ears.’

  I can’t think of another time the four of us were together. That’s why the swarry suggests itself. But what am I to say about us, Irene, Kitty, Phil, Noel Papps? The brainy ones from Standard six, Tup Ogier’s 1915 quartet. Thirty years, thirty-three years later, would Tup have been proud of us? Would he have been even satisfied? Let me think of some words. Adulterer. That�
�s me. Poseur, schemer, profiteer, dissembler; OK, lecher, liar, cheat, let’s get tough. Adjectives: violent – no, murderous – indifferent (callous, uncaring, that’s to say), pretentious, hypocritical, envious, and secretive, and greedy, and proud: cruel (in many ways), and afraid. I could go on, but that’s enough. Share those round. And I could balance things with another list. Generous, loyal. Take it as read. But when they’re both complete what have we learned? I can’t see anything there except that we were an ordinary bunch. Each one special to himself, herself. That’s it, eh? One gets back to being alone. I can say nothing true about the others: well, name and age and outward circumstances. But of course I’m going to try more than that. The whole truth about us is not that we made a set, but the whole truth is impossible and I don’t need it anyway. I’ll only get the part I need by letting the occasion run along, letting the geometry take shape.

  Tup? He wouldn’t have been proud or satisfied. Happy. Unhappy. I think he’d have been interested.

  Now and then Phil approached his wife. He sidled up, or glided, waltzing step, and squeezed her arm or tapped her jaw, then winked at Bagley and clicked his tongue. She spent her time with Bagley and sang a gluey duet with him late in the night; and several months later, when Phil had kicked her out or she’d left him, she took the ferry with Bagley and started life anew. (That was in the song.) I saw them once, old and bravely smiling, in a television talent quest. They sang about strangers meeting in a crowded room, and they didn’t win. They were far from being strangers to each other at Irene’s, but the plan they were following was Phil’s. He sent them sharky grins across the room.

  ‘Your wife is looking very lovely, Phil,’ Irene said.

  ‘Yup,’ he replied.

  ‘She and Alan,’ that was Bagley, ‘sing so well together.’ Irene knew something. Phil knew she knew.