by Maurice Gee
She says she wants to know the rest of it. Is that any more, Kate, than a way of keeping an old man quiet? I don’t make too much noise, do I? There’s noise in my head, a constant buzzing. There are loud bangs now and then – that’s my old tympanum heart persuading itself to keep on the job, stepping up the beat; or it’s someone dying. It’s some huge word from my past, weighing like lead, hitting the floor. There’s a gonging too from that direction, potent with meaning, ripe with extensions, but always failing to signify. And flashes of light that spit like sodium. The faces they illumine are important but featureless. Does this make me sound mad? It’s all quite normal. Maypole dancing as the body gives up its powers.
Phil came and sat by my bed on the kitchen chair. It’s catching up with Phil. His knee joints are not working too well. He totters, though I keep that word to myself. He put his hand on the chair back and eased himself down. He’s still strong in the shoulders, and strong in his colour too, strong in his eyes, although the whites are criss-crossed with veins and have a sore look. Phil is sore. He feels hard done by. Shane has let him down – and I wonder if Phil wasn’t a bit infatuated. He doesn’t trust, he doesn’t give himself. But he’s been hurt, he’s in a flushed condition, and some wasting process is in train.
We didn’t do each other much good. In fact, I bored him, he bored me. I would have thought Phil in love – for want of a term – would be fascinating, but I was tired and had a touch of the nausea I get now and then. I wanted him to go away. He had nowhere to go, said as much. So, helped himself to a drink and went over his troubles a second time. He told me if I saw Shane, if he came here, to send him straight out to Long Tom’s. ‘He’s chasing some sheila,’ Phil said. That was the sort of thing he would forgive.
Kate is going to fill her life with strangers. Lost back-packers. She knows the sad ones by their eyes, and picks them up and brings them home and feeds them. So far we’ve had a loud Swiss girl who was off-hand with me, taking me for a charity patient too and a threat to her. She walked naked down my hall in the night and peed like a draught mare in a paddock, with the door open. More liquid in her than in the cistern. When I opened my bedroom door to see what was leaking she shouted at me in her language.
‘Get rid of her, Kate,’ I said in the morning.
‘She thinks you’re a dirty old man. Yes, she’s going. I don’t like her.’
Next came an American from Boulder, Colorado (she’ll tolerate a Yank now, in her need), a pasty boy who talked about his Mom. He ate us out of ice cream and went into a foetal trance in the shower, using all the hot water Kate needed for the washing. She had to lift him out and dry and dress him. He’s on his way, tears in his eyes. And Kate’s gone out fishing again. She says she’ll be more careful this time.
It’s a huge Dane, shambles like a bear. The Hiking Viking his banner says. Cheerful fellow, crushed my hand. Although he isn’t sad he looks as if he’ll eat a lot.
I’ve had enough of this, I’m going back.
45
Where to go? that’s the question. I can think of a dozen places, but none is necessary. The gonging is still there but all it signifies is, time was.
I’ll put down a story that restored peace between Kitty and me. She laughed until her cheeks were sore. It’s this: they knighted me in 1966 and I made a fool of myself at the investiture. It was time for a knighthood to science. John Dye had been in line for one in the mid-fifties, but he died – saving himself, Kitty said, from the indignity. Borland from the DSIR got it instead. I became director of the Lomax.
Ten years later I was to be Sir Noel and I practised him in front of the bathroom mirror, and practised saying the honour was for science and the Lomax not for me and I hoped my friends would still call me Noel. The usual thing. I’m still waiting for some honest knight to cry, ‘Whoopee! ’
Kitty stopped speaking to me when it was announced. (Some years later she refused to be Dame Kitty.) She was out of parliament, beaten in 1963, and was Jessop’s mayor – mayor, she insisted, not mayoress. Honours routed through Buckingham Palace were a national disgrace; and, with Empire in their name, an insult to the Commonwealth as well. I wouldn’t put it so strongly. I just found it ridiculous. It’s a pity I didn’t find the strength to say no.
Sans peur et sans reproche. That’s not me. What I am is sans dignity. The clever monkey knelt, he received the ennobling touch – and couldn’t stand up. Tipped over on the floor, lay there arched, with face as anguished as the Kaiser’s, and fingers dug in thigh, and little yelps coming from his mouth, and some thought he was having a fit and some a heart attack. But Stan Duckham the All Black coach, there to get his OBE, recognized it for what it was, and grabbed my foot and bent my toes back, cured my cramp in good Athletic Park style. He enjoyed it. So did the Governor-General, I think. Most of the others thought I’d let the side down. Duckham helped me to a chair and I sat there, face mottled red and leg out straight: Sir Noel, with gong on chest. As soon as it was over I knew what to do. I telephoned Jessop and told Kitty and heard her laugh. That cramp is a good old friend of mine. I’m fond of him.
He calls me Noel.
Women. Work. There’s nothing I need to say about those years. Amusements. Friends. Failures. Trips abroad. Did I tell you I failed to visit Dachau? I thought it might threaten my will to live. So I watched the Glockenspiel instead – well, I went to the science museum too, and some galleries, but Glockenspiel is how it seems to me now. And I measure the loss of self in that choice by the fact that in Holland, the following week, I saw no point in calling on Ruth. I could not find a Noel Papps to present to her.
Deaths: several. Few entrances. That’s not to say there were no new things. One of them called for entrances from me. I filled my nights with prancings on a stage. No tragedies, no problems. My face was more for stretching wide than long. We had full houses at the Theatre Royal in the fifties. I became master of the double take – in Charley’s Aunt, in Arsenic and Old Lace. Bodies in window boxes, how I loved finding them. How I loved hitching up my bloomers. It did not matter that I was too old for most of my roles, I made up in bounce, smart-alecry.
Kitty came when she was able to. I heard her laugh. Heard Irene trill. And once I heard Phil Dockery’s guffaw. He loved it when the husband hung his hat on me hiding in the wardrobe.
Pleasant affairs came from it. They started, ran their course, stopped with no complications. I’m sure the women would agree with me. We were not even breathing hard. It never crossed my mind that I might marry.
Where did I go? That’s a wrong question. I deny being absent at any time. Why can’t I find that Noel Papps? All I can find for him is occasions. I know he was with people a good deal – in meetings, at conferences, at concerts and parties. He slides out of focus all the time. The truth is, he was happy and doesn’t need me interfering with him. But haven’t I said that happiness is not a measure?
One of my mistakes is plain to see. My work, about which I’ve said very little, exists as the large fact at the centre of my life. If I were drawing a picture of that thing which is no thing, no distinguishable object of thought – my life – it would have work at the centre, so dominant as to be almost invisible. I should put it in with two strokes, a mountain, inverted V, and then not bother with it again but draw in trees and houses, parks and playgrounds at the foot, as I’ve done. I don’t forget my work, but it was mine. Kitty, Ruth, Rhona, Irene, Phil, do not stroll in and out. My work was never open to their question.
Then I gave it up. I was scientist no more, I was director. I chose ‘importance’, and nothing important was left to me. Many things happened but nothing was done. I did no work, I made no examination. I filled my life with small difficulties and did no one big difficult thing. They knighted me, oh yes. And in those years I had – there’s a fine three-letter word – most of my women. But no wife. I need to write down none of their names.
You’ll forgive me dramatizing myself? It indicates that my judgement’s gone – hooray for t
hat! I’m dizzy with old age and my years are jumbled up and that makes for strange juxtapositions. Things are heightened as if by their natures, and my metaphors are legitimate.
There’s something onanistic about this. See how that phallic ‘I’ stands in my pages. I write it fat, with a swollen head, and rub it up.
Phil would enjoy this.
I was fit companion for Phil.
His marriages produced no children. I’ve never asked him why. His wives were pretty women, pleased with their rich husband but wanting an ordinary marriage after a while. Unhappy girls. One by one they turned to other men. Phil believes he got rid of them. He’s without fallibility, that’s the fact he sees when he looks inside. That’s his carbon skeleton.
What does it make other people? Goods, I suppose. Disposable property. Do I need to illustrate him again? I don’t think so. I’ll tell you about one of his wives, Isobel. She was number three, and a real looker, to use his phrase. He chose her for that and for her youth – and from our town’s social register, which is not a thing written down but a system of acceptance based on old money, professional status, early coming, established name. No one speaks of it but everyone hears. Phil plucked her out and set her up at his place and enjoyed her in a variety of ways. He swelled visibly. No, rephrase that. He put on condition, his muscles grew springy, a healthier red was in his face. He married her in Victoria Gardens, close by the Eelpond there, making it fashionable for a year or two. But getting her home to his place, having her – this lawyer’s daughter (not just any lawyer, Jessop’s oldest), private-school girl, debutante, horse-rider, champion golfer – that was the real ceremony, that was ceremony prolonged, Port-boy Phil’s announcement of self. No act of joining took place, but an act, continuing acts, of possession.
Of the public kind, let’s have a bit of sunlight, good fresh air, let’s go golfing on our links by the white-sand beach, with Soddy’s Point over the sparkling sea. When I think of Isobel swinging I think of willow wand. She whacked that little ball, that buffalo pill, several hundred yards, or dropped it parabolic on the green, where it stopped as though a gravitational field lay underneath. She had white socks and golden calves and freckled forearms and wore a sun visor that threw green light on her face, making her ethereal even as she whacked. It sounds as though I loved her, but you’re wrong. For three hours on a Saturday she was my vision of beauty – I’ll not break it down more than that, although I could, I see well enough the molecules cluster – and I tried to put my will in her, make her win.
It was the final of the Jessop Golf Club Ladies Championship. Isobel was favourite, was going for her third straight title in fact. She played off a two handicap, whatever that means, and had been a provincial representative that year, competing for some rosebowl or pennant; and was expected, that Saturday, to have an easy time with the lady (no names) who was my reason for being there. (We had rather pleasant, dull Monday evenings, while her husband was at Rotary. ‘Come and watch me, Noel, but don’t let me see you or I’ll miss my putts.’ Those evenings, I think, weren’t dull for her. I mustn’t boast.) But Isobel quickly fell behind, one hole, two holes, three holes down; and my lady-friend grew hard-mouthed, glittery-eyed, and punched the ball and made it go straight, and roll and roll. No gravitational field worked for her. She drew no arcs, but grew sweaty patches in her armpits (now Kate I am unfair), hitched up her skirt, snapped her teeth, and finally chewed PKs, a thing she believed no lady should do in public. Isobel, with pale green face, began to play. She picked up one hole, two, but could not get the third, for my partner in adultery, who must be admired, found, she told me Monday, found herself contracted to a little iron dwarf, dwarfess, sitting between the lobes of her brain, expressing itself as motion to the green, to the hole; and sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, off went her drives, down went her putts. This isn’t her story – although I start to like her – but Isobel’s. And Phil’s of course. He was there. Natty-dressed. Sporting-hatted. He marked Isobel’s score on a card for use later on. I saw her look up from a putt that failed to drop, saw them find each other and Isobel look away, back to her task, with a dragging of her eye, as though it were held on his face by a fascination. It’s a kind of muted melodrama. I want to laugh. How can I take this thing, this game of golf, whacking of balls, at their valuation? But I can’t laugh. I saw what her function was for him – which she strove to fulfil.
My square-built lady won. Good on her. I took her chocolates Monday and enjoyed her muscly strength more than was usual. Later in the week I called on Isobel. I’ll be honest – I knew Phil was likely to be out and she alone. I wanted to have a look at her, wanted to settle, name her in a sense, and so take my own sort of possession. I do not often do this for I don’t have the vision frequently. Isobel had not left me from the Saturday to the Thursday (Monday night excepted, but that’s in the normal course of living); had been there green and freckled, wristy, delicate, beaten, drugged. She opened the door to me without turning on the porch light, and I thought, Ha! what’s wrong? Very alert. Receptive beyond what was natural. She told me Phil was out. ‘Oh well,’ I said, ‘I’m here so I’ll come in.’ She walked ahead of me to the lounge and turned by the fireplace, with a lifting of her jaw, and showed the damaged face I was ready for. A delicate stain of yellow on her cheek, a pastel blush; and round her eye lavender, on which her silver lashes lay like stitching.
‘Ah,’ I said, ‘you’re hurt.’
‘I slipped, Noel. I hit my face on the edge of the bath.’ And as I stepped towards her she took her putter up from the settee to carry on with the practice I’d interrupted. Several balls lay by her feet and a flattened rubber cup like a model volcano fifteen feet away over the carpet. She took a grip on the club, a slanting of ranked fingers, a folding of pigeon wings, lovely strength, amazing delicacy, and hung her head over the ball with a forward slide of the hair she tied with white ribbon on the course, and tapped the silly thing, and sent it running on the carpet to the cup where it fitted in and sat, and waited there, useless egg. Yes, Kate, I can see it, you needn’t come smirking at me tomorrow. She didn’t want golf she wanted babies. I’m the one doing it, after all. I don’t suppose I’ll surprise you with what happened next. Tears happened next, love-making on the settee after that; if ‘love-making’ can be loosely used.
She looked at the ball in the cup and laid down her club and started to cry big slippery tears. I put my arms around her, knowing roles – no, no, damn it, enough of that – because I was overcome by pity, and instantly in a sexual state. ‘He shouldn’t,’ she said, ‘he shouldn’t have hit me.’
‘Where is he?’
‘Out tomcatting. He’s been out every night this week.’
‘Just because you didn’t win at golf?’
‘I didn’t do what I’m supposed to do.’
There were natural progressions followed then, and very good for both of us it was. You don’t mind a veil of decency? We were, of course, strangers to each other, but touched at a point as we passed by, and there’s a kind of jewel glitter I see, of red and gold and green, in the memory; a flash in a dark velvet night. I don’t wish to dress the thing up, but see it bare, and see it clean, and I’m sorry if I’ve failed in that.
Low comedy came after: scrambling on of clothes at the sound of a car that was not Phil’s. And lowness in my thoughts later on: I’d paid him back for Rhona, cuckolded him, lovely term. I was triumphant, terrified, and my heart jumped in my chest when we met, for a good long time. But it settled down, I settled down, and take no pleasure from my victory now, if victory is what it is; but have a small treasure that I keep.
Isobel stayed with Phil another year and won the golf title a third time. Then she left. ‘I fitted her up with the riding instructor,’ he said. ‘But she don’t need instructing after me. That lucky sod’s going on a ride.’
I thought of my own ride for a moment; and was angry at my cheapening of the occasion. Almost said: You didn’t fit her up with anyone, she left you, mate. Bu
t kept my silence, had another drink, heard him out. He had some fun with Isobel, put her in a mucky yard, with bandy-legged husband, scabby nags; then forgot her, having her in place. But Isobel and her husband did very well. They opened a sports store in Christchurch and owned three or four by the time they’d done. They had a son and daughter and lived together happily as far as I know.
When I see people standing alone I have a sense of their reality. Isobel alone, without husband, without Phil. And Kate, without Shane, there’s a solid object. Shane without Kate. Standing together, supposedly interacting – substance is gone. They become shadowy, they’re movements in a pool and have no existence I can hold.
Kitty alone. Phil alone. Irene, little Reen. That’s how they present themselves. Yet I think of our lives as a territory and attempt a kind of quadrature.
Perhaps I’ve made it up, it’s all lies. But if I tried again I’d do no better. Let the whole thing stand, all these pages. Let it stand as an approximation.
I’ve been thinking about Kitty, and I say: In parliament she learned big talk and discovered how small she was. That covers fourteen years neatly. But what about her triumph? After the first loss anything we manage is a triumph.
46
I remember her distress when she lost her seat. Just for the record, her career: MP for Jessop 1949–63. Minister of Health 1957–60. Shadow Minister 1960–63. When she got her portfolio she answered her critics thus: ‘I’m a nurse. I can deal with doctors. You watch me.’ Not a very clever thing to say, but Kitty was a character by that time and she got away with it. When Labour lost in 1960 she was bitter. She was just getting into things, she said. But 1963 – oh dear, oh dear.
