Prowlers

by Maurice Gee

Ruth had two bargains with her husband. The first was she would help him to New Zealand, help him settle down, start his work, if he would let her go after a year. The second, made after she and I had met again, was that she would give him her days but he must let her have her nights, and Saturday or Sunday now and then. He agreed. He did not need her in the nights. Ruth cooked and cleaned for him. She typed his notes and filed his research – and found it hard but would not give him one day less than 365. I stood in the loquat tree and watched her work, a Dutch wife in her kitchen, scouring pots, while Piet Verryt sat dreaming in the sun. She said to me that night, ‘If you spy on me we’re finished, Noel.’

  ‘I just want to know what you do.’

  ‘Here I am me. Over there I am someone else. Do not spy.’

  Now and then she went to look at him; walked to the garden wall, mounted the ladder. She let me stand beside her several times. We watched Piet sitting in a deckchair on the veranda. He drew a five-sided figure in the air, and smiled and considered it, and drew it again, all afternoon. I had the sense of spying over the Garden wall, of Piet Verryt as pre-lapsarian, and had to remind myself that he was mad. Dependent too on his sinful wife.

  She said, ‘They are ideal creatures, his bees. They reach perfection. And far beyond his science to discover. Now is mysticism and poetry.’

  I thought that a coming down, and said so. She patted me, ambiguous act, and held my belt to keep her balance. ‘The life of bees is a magic spring, someone says. The more one lets it run the more abundantly it flows. My poor Piet is swimmer in it now.’

  ‘Drowning,’ I said. ‘What’s he doing with his hands?’

  ‘He meditates on the cell. He makes the cell, one after one. Zeshoekig. How do you say?’

  ‘Hexagonal?’

  ‘He draws it, you see, in the air. Perhaps it is new science, Noel, who knows?’

  I made a grunt, ambiguous too, and we watched a little longer, then came down and went inside; but I’ll say, from my standpoint, Jessop, 1985, that we’re all obsessed, and all alone, and live with the creature in our heads. I was lucky to find Ruth, and she find me. We were freed from our prowling at the window, in the dark. That figure (my obsession) recedes and we are two people holding hands; and that, if we’re lucky, we can have, for a while. Do I generalize from insufficient data? Perhaps. But it comes back, that image of the scratcher on the glass; and it won’t leave, it will never leave me for long, so I take it as truth, and I’m glad if it’s not absolute. As I’ve said, we held hands, Ruth and I.

  Sometimes she knitted by my fire. Sometimes we played chess. She never cooked for me, not once. She never even made a cup of tea. I did that, and took her out for meals, and took her for picnics on Saturday afternoons. But more and more, as the year went on, she wrote down ideas for a book. I did not understand how she could work without a library. I thought history needed research and watched with scepticism as she filled page after page, sitting with her tongue stuck out at my kitchen table. ‘I know it all. I have it in my head. When I get home I will put in dates. If you insist. And – ’ she wrenched with her fists – ‘make it have shape. And this, anyway, is just ideas.’

  She was writing a history of ‘the Spanish occupation’. ‘What’s that?’ I thought for a moment she had lost her mind. She gave me small lessons in Netherlands history – as much as I could take in, who did not have my own country’s history clear in my mind. By some accident of succession the thrones of Spain and the Low Countries were united. She told me in detail and I objected, ‘It’s outside your period, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’ve got no period now. Just a subject.’ It was man’s inhumanity and the feast of unreason. Spanish occupation, German occupation, they were one. Philip II, Cardinal Granvelle, Hitler, Himmler, Nicholas of Egmond (‘the madman with a sword’) – they all came from one time, Ruth said.

  She had heroes, though she was not uncritical. Erasmus seemed to be the chief. And villains whose villainies were accidental: Aristotle, Augustine, those ‘splitters of our nature’, those ‘creators of halfmen’. I could follow, although it was hard for me, and now and then I caught her passion. I saw how the inquisition and the auto-da-fé and the tearing out of tongues and the burning on hooks over slow fires, and Titelmann, mad strangler, joking killer (see Motley, I read Motley), followed Aristotle, Augustine, and saw the line Ruth followed through to Auschwitz, Belsen. But there I did not want to go with her. I could not face the things that happened there.

  Ruth could. She terrified me. And she exhausted herself, and burned with hatreds, and she was cold and wrung out with our failure. I believe I helped keep her sane, and other times, and other where, she kept herself sane with scholarship. That’s my guess. She did not go, as so many do, looking for God to trust in or revile. She tried simply, harder and harder, to know. She’s written half a dozen big big books – the one on the Spanish occupation, and one on the Reformation in Holland, and one on Dutch Humanism, and a life of Erasmus. That’s the best known. That’s the one I’ve read (not all her books are translated). It’s as much elegy as biography. She says, in her preface, mankind took a wrong turning, she can’t say where, and is doomed and soon will end. It’s getting dark now and soon no lights will go on. She concedes to Erasmus all that part of his life and mind animated by religious faith – could scarcely do less – yet presents him as ‘living in his own illumination’. He is ‘a figure for our longings’. I’m not sure I know what she means. I seemed to know once. It’s more important to me that she doesn’t deny him imperfections.

  The book has a dedication: To Noel, over the fence. It’s the only message she’s sent me since she left.

  39

  She stole an hour on a Saturday afternoon. We were sitting in the sunshine in my yard when Kitty came round the corner, wearing a red rosette on her jacket. She was canvassing in my street and she was hot. ‘Rustle me up a cuppa, Noel. I’ll never make it through to six o’clock.’

  I wasn’t pleased to see her. I was conscious of Ruth’s shrinking time. Her passage was booked, she would sail away. We had seventeen days. And she and Kitty always talked politics and became a couple of quacking ducks. I made tea and watched them from the window: two plain women, two honest girls, being silly. Both were smarter than me, and both knew there was no answer in politics. When I came out with tea and made that complaint Ruth agreed, but said there was no answer anywhere so Kitty might as well keep busy there. ‘You vote for her or you’ll answer to me.’

  ‘I wish it was always as easy as that,’ Kitty said. She took off her jacket and fanned herself with the front of her blouse. Slurp she went at her tea. She had that technique, learned from Des, of sucking and cooling the scalding stuff; and when I objected, as I always did, lectured me on the need of working men to get their tea down quickly in the few minutes they were allowed. Drinking tea, or the style of it, was a class thing and Kitty knew where she belonged. Ruth clapped her hands. She enjoyed Kitty. She practised drinking tea the working man’s way; and the pair of them rolled in their chairs, laughing at my face. Then Kitty was up and off again, jacket on, rosette straight. Her hard heels clattered on the path, the gate went bang, and soon her knock sounded next door and her laugh, her great har har, made sparrows fly. They were National next door, I’d told her that, but she wasn’t going to let them get away.

  Kitty had to shoulder her way to the candidature. Bernie Molloy didn’t want her for a start, didn’t want a woman. She bounced him aside. Who was he? Last year’s man. Last year in politics was nowhere. And what, she asked, though not publicly, had Bernie done in his thirteen years? There was no reason to let him do something now. Didn’t want a woman? She bounced him aside like a prop forward with a nine stone half-back. They carted Bernie off on a stretcher. Then there were those who wanted another Catholic. They were a cloak-and-dagger group and Kitty countered them by being hearty, being dumb. In private she called them the Irish gang or the Bog boys and when she caught one of them off his ground she trampled him. A Cas
sidy or Brady who challenged her on some union matter would end up with sprig marks on his face.

  She had a lot of union support. For three years she had been secretary of the Carpenters’ Union. Perhaps she had taken note of Mabel Howard’s career. She had the women on her side too (except those who thought her too bold, too loud, too sweaty, too coarse), but most importantly, three or four cabinet ministers wanted her. They’d had enough of Back-bench Bernie and did not want another one like him. They knew Kitty could talk, they knew she could work, they knew she was smart, and they saw how much support she had among locals – those people who remembered Kitty in the depression riding her bike out to the freezing works and coming back with soup-bones and cheap meat, or a sack of swedes from a farm on the handle-bars, and sharing them round the worst off in the street. Besides, they owed no one a seat or a favour. And Jessop was hardly a safe seat. Bernie held it by eight hundred votes. They wanted someone who could rally voters round. That was Kitty.

  ‘Someone’s got to wash the socks, eh? Someone’s got to scrub the kitchen floor.’ That was the way she promised to work in parliament. ‘I’ll go into that House as though it was my kitchen. And I’ll put plain porridge on the table, I promise you.’ Her speeches were full of kitchen imagery. ‘You can’t thicken the stew without any flour.’ It was almost too late for that sort of thing. Kitty just made it to parliament in time. Her style was never right for the fifties. But by then she was a character. Kitty, in her own fifties, became a relic of other times. She realized it and it made her sour, but she was trapped in her role. She talked of peeling spuds and elbowgrease, she rolled her own, and in the end she dredged up language no one had heard in years. Dinky-di. Corker. Biff him on the nose. Poor Kit.

  But I mustn’t forget, she did huge amounts of work. She held her seat for sixteen years.

  Kate knows all this. She has it written down. Why should I bother?

  Kitty took Jessop but Labour lost the election. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘you can’t have everything.’ I had misjudged her. She wasn’t crying because Labour had lost but because her majority was down on Bernie Molloy’s.

  Ruth and I looked in at the party in the Choral Hall. We did not stay, we did not belong, and after our moment at her side, a kiss, a pat, no hug like that she got from other men, we stood by the door and admired her from a distance. Her cheeks were smeared, her lipstick crooked, and she was overlarge, with meaty biceps, meaty calves, and sweat rings in her armpits again. I remembered her in the blue dress, pirouetting to rouse Phil, and remembered her, with skirt hitched up, wading the river mouth at Long Tom’s. This was no deliberate memory, and I felt it did more than register a loss; it marked a recognition of her growth and signalled to me that Kitty was free, was separate. Kitty from there had come here, had come to this – and as much as it’s possible she had done it. I felt – how sad I felt – I felt like cheering.

  Ruth and I walked home along the river. Now and then, from houses we passed, we heard the sound of parties, and car horns beeped more frequently than usual. King Log, King Stork, King Log, King Stork again. The frogs were keeping their spirits up. Ruth scolded me for my cynicism. But she took no optimistic view herself. She simply thought New Zealanders were lucky – look at all the things they were exempt from by an accident of geography. She was sad to be leaving and not so clear-headed that night as usual. Gardeners of Arcady, she called us. ‘You sit down here and make your apples grow.’ I knew she was remembering friends shot and friends tortured, and would have kept quiet; but it seemed I had to claim humanity for us, and our share of evil and pain. I told her we had thousands dead in the war, and the one before it; and told her we had our torturers too, waiting their time. They would come out when they were called. We were not exempt, we had just been lucky up to now. I seemed to be pleading that we too were atrocious. As for suffering – look at Les Dockery and Kitty’s husband, Des.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘yes. Everywhere.’

  I asked her if she’d ever believed in God. ‘Once,’ she said. ‘Not now. There’s no dispensation. Good and evil, they belong to us.’

  We strolled along, being wise, being silly – take your pick – moving towards the end of our close touching. On the wooden foot-bridge at the end of her street we leaned on the rail and watched the water. It slithered like a creature with a scaly back, but I pushed myself beyond susceptibilities and it became water in the light. And Ruth was Ruth, here, now, and not my wife whom I was losing. Down-river, over trees, the roof of Lomax’s warehouse made a black rectangle on the sky. I told her about Edgar Le Grice. I told her how I had dirtied my pants.

  ‘He’s come back. Edgar Le Grice.’

  I could see the nursing home a quarter mile away on the bend of the river. Jessie Mills owned the place but Phil Dockery had money in it. He’d called on me that week, dragged me out of my lab, and driven me round to Jessie’s – Golden West as it was called. ‘There’s someone I want you to see.’ We went through the building to the lawns at the back and he pointed out an old man on a bench. ‘Recognize him?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Take a good look.’

  I didn’t care for the game, even though the man seemed to be deaf. He sat with his hands tight on his knees, gripping stone, anchoring himself against a trembling in his torso. He was wearing a ravelled cardigan and a green tartan shirt, and slippers and striped pyjama pants. The flies gaped and I saw a grey-haired patch of his belly. Face – nothing to get hold of, stock old man. It had been a big face but gave the impression of being reduced, as though a string enclosing his features was pulled tight.

  Phil saw I wasn’t going to recognize him. ‘Put a balaclava on his head.’

  My bowels went loose, but I was grown up and controlled myself. The hammer-blow, the missed beat of the heart, I gave them no more than their beat in time; and I said, ‘It’s him all right. Where’s he been?’

  ‘Living with some sheila out in the country. She brought him in. He’s paid for. Jessie’ll boot him out when he gets behind.’

  ‘Does he know you?’

  ‘Doesn’t know anyone. He’s still a bit loopy. Harmless though. Likes his grub, Jessie says.’ He bent at the waist, put his face level with Le Grice’s. ‘Hey, Le Grice.’ The old man took no notice, but kept up the fight against his palsy. Phil tapped him under the chin with bent forefinger. ‘Lit any fires lately, Le Grice?’

  ‘Leave him, Phil.’

  ‘I should pay the bugger back.’ He jerked the cord of Le Grice’s pyjama pants, undoing the bow. ‘He’s going to lose his pants when he stands up.’

  I pulled Phil away. It astonished me that he should feel malice. Perhaps it was that which gave Le Grice his power again, over me – Phil seeing him as someone who still had to be got even with. I saw Le Grice. I focused on him, just as he had narrowed himself on to me in the warehouse yard. He sat there, on the bench, hands on knees, power of one. Free from susceptibilities did I say? He narrowed down again to his obsession, that thing before which everything gives way. As Ruth, at times, narrowed down in her obsessive search for glimmers of light. That’s why he’s here, mixed in with her. I want to allow one no space and let the other have it all. But it doesn’t work that way. Those two are equal, those two mix.

  Ruth said, ‘Come through my house. Climb the fence with me.’ We went along by the bedroom, where Piet Verryt hummed like a hive of bees, and down the back path, and I climbed first, Ruth followed, ladder to ladder, pepper to loquat tree. No, no, it’s not symbolical. They are just the trees that were there. And our climbing marked nothing significant. It was a bit of foreplay, she was inventive. But I don’t intend to make my reader intimate with her. (Who is my reader, anyway?) Or give you ammunition, Kate. The smell of pepper stayed on our palms. And loquats, spring-fruiters, spread their sour-sweetness on our tongues as we paused to try if they were ripe. We whispered and we laughed, I helped her down, and over the lawn we scampered to my bed.

  Damn it, words breed words, and the fancier th
ey are the faster they breed. I’ve just killed fifty. You’ll never know what they are.

  I won’t spread words over Ruth like jam.

  She put her glasses on, transformed herself from blind mole into lemur.

  ‘Well, you’re not Plotinus any more.’

  ‘Is that all it’s been? Just a lesson?’

  ‘Ah no, love. I’m sorry. I’m being clever. That time perhaps. Not any more. I love you, Noel. I don’t want to go away.’

  ‘But you’re going?’

  ‘Yes. I’m going. I have to go. Don’t argue. I don’t want to cry.’ I put her on the ferry two days later. It sailed out of Jessop through the cut and its plume of smoke leaned backwards as it gathered speed. I drove home and the years went by. I lived my life in my earthly fashion, and had my share of happiness and satisfaction. But I haven’t loved anyone again.

  40

  There is always, isn’t there, that Greek, I forget his name, who led the Persian army through the mountain track at Thermopylae and took the Spartans in the rear? There always is a fellow of that sort.

  Kate is reading my notebooks again. Things must be going wrong for her. Is that right, Kate? Have you and Shane reached the bottom of the honey pot? Do you fall upon the thorns of life and bleed? You don’t mind my being literary? I’m in good company. Kitty was always spouting Shelley.

  Wherefore feed, and clothe, and save,

  From the cradle to the grave,

  Those ungrateful drones who would

  Drain your sweat – nay, drink your blood?

  She quoted that in the House once, caused a real uproar in what she called the Top-dogs party on the other side.

  I’m still bringing you stuff Kate, see? How about this? Kitty had lop-ears. Did you never notice those pink question marks peeping from her hair? My mother knitted her a cap, an open-work thing like a basket fungus, and slipped it on her head every night when she was asleep. Didn’t work, those ears just wouldn’t lie down. But Kitty had thick hair and managed to hide them. Mum closed her mouth too, made her sleep breathing through her nose.