by Pat Rosier
Take it easy
A novel
© Pat Rosier 2008
‘Rest, and take it easy from the wild crying,’
From “Interlude” by Robin Hyde, The Book of Iris: A life of Robin Hyde, by Derek Challis and Gloria Rawlinson, Auckland University Press, 2002.
Published by Pat Rosier at Smashwords,2009
Smashwords Edition, Licence Notes:
This ebook is licenced for your personal enjoyment only. this ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the work of this author.
This book is also available in print at www.womensbookshop.co.nz
~~~~~
Part One
No there there
“…anyway what was the use of my having come from Oakland it was not natural to have come from there yes write about it if I like or anything if I like but not there, there is no there there.”
From, Everybody’s Autobiography by Gertrude Stein New York, Random House, 1937, page 289
~~~~
Chapter 01
On a hot summer afternoon in early February Isobel was at her desk in the air-conditioned bowels of Wellington’s Parliamentary Buildings absorbed in a planning document, when Paul from Human Resources appeared beside her with a stranger. ‘Isobel Goodison, William Borsholdt,’ said Paul gesturing vaguely at each of them in turn. ‘William is the new man in Corporate Services.’ Isobel stood up to shake his hand.
‘Well, hullo! The mysterious disappearing Isobel.' She froze. William laughed. ‘Bit of a bombshell, eh, after all these years. When was it? No, don’t tell me.’ William Borscholdt made exaggerated ‘let me think’ motions. Isobel was bewildered. Then anxiety took over. She couldn’t tell whether her face had gone pale or red but Paul was very interested in her reaction.
‘Sixty-five!’ William said. ‘Nineteen sixty-five if I’m not mistaken! One day you’re a fine example of a budding public servant and the next you’ve gone. Vanished, without trace. The stories that went aro…….’
Paul looked again at Isobel then interrupted him. ‘No time for reminiscences now, old chap, more people to meet,’ he said heartily and took William bloody-Russian-soup by the arm and walked him off. Isobel went from cold to hot and back again, grateful no one else had been there to see.
Later, Paul came into her office, conspiratorial, closing the door carefully behind him. ‘I, um, reminded William why women sometimes went away suddenly in the sixties …,’ he actually blushed. ‘You know, across to Sydney for an — um— or to relatives in the country —. I, uh, suggested he might leave it, you know, wait and see if you bring it up.’
‘Oh.’ Of course. Close to the truth — and far from it. ‘Thank you, Paul.' Neither confirm nor deny. ‘I appreciate you….’
‘I could tell.' Paul looked pleased with himself and Isobel supposed she could allow him a smug moment in the circumstances.
‘Thanks again. I owe you,’ she said, and gestured at the papers in front of her. ‘Our favourite Minister is waiting on these for the Finance and Expenditure Committee, I’d better get on with checking that everything is in order.’
‘Yes. Absolutely. Bit of a stickler that one.' Paul left and Isobel forced herself to concentrate on checking schedules.
That night she lay in bed beside an oblivious Iris and wondered at her buried past being exploded into her present, just like that. Her belief that she had done the right thing was unshaken, but she wanted to know, suddenly, fiercely, what had got her to the point of deciding and acting in such a way. Before smart-ass William and his smart-ass comments she’d have said she was settled with it all.
Isobel and Iris had met at a lunch for women in the public service in 1989. The woman sitting opposite Isobel was talking angrily of being ‘tossed’ from the dis-established Ministry of Works. She was sorry, she had said, this would be her last lunch, she was fed up with working for a government crazy for change and had found a job in the private sector.
‘Who is that?’ Isobel had turned to her friend Rhonda, sitting alongside her. ‘She’s ah …….’
‘Stunning,’ said Rhonda. ‘Iris someone. She’s got a child, a boy I think.’
Isobel couldn’t stop looking. Iris had almost-black hair, straight, shiny, long enough to swing across her face as she turned to the women on either side of her, talking passionately, seeking agreement.
‘What do you think?’ Blue eyes, light, bright blue, startling against the dark hair and olive skin, had turned to Isobel,.
‘Awful,’ Isobel managed, ‘it’s just awful.’ Then a woman at the other end of the table had gotten Iris’s attention and Isobel was left staring as the glossy hair swung between her and those intense eyes. Later, standing shoulder to shoulder at the counter while the bill was calculated — which makes her about my five foot eight, Isobel had thought — she said, ‘It’s been nice to meet you. I wish we could have talked mo ….’
‘Come to the Occidental, Thursday after work, it’s my farewell bash. Really, I’d like you to.’ Watching Iris walk off Isobel saw the high-heeled boots.
Isobel had gone to the Occidental, and one thing had led to another — coffees, lunches, walks at Oriental Bay and in the Botanical Gardens. Rhonda encouraged Isobel to bring Iris to the New Year’s Eve party she and husband Ben were having to celebrate the completion of a new deck. The two women had left early together and on New Year’s Day morning were sitting over coffee in Iris’s Brooklyn cottage. Iris was talking about fourteen-year-old Chris who was with his grandparents in Nelson for the holiday weekend.
‘It’s been just the two of us since he was four,’ Iris said, ‘and I have to go carefully into any new relationship because I can’t — won’t — rush him into something new.’
That was when Isobel had told her. Iris’s ‘How could you?’ and Isobel’s ‘I had to, and really, it was best for everyone,’ were never actually reconciled. The threatening crack between them had closed over as their relationship deepened. Son Chris accepted Isobel as ‘pretty cool.’ Woman and boy became friends, leaving ‘mother’ to Iris.
Ten years on, it was a new century. No computers had failed, no medical equipment or airline had suffered a catastrophic collapse. All that had been shut down on the night between the years 1999 and 2000 were the doomsayers.
A grown up Chris was an engineer working in Australia, while the two women were settled in their jointly owned house overlooking the harbour in Wellington’s Hataitai, with Barney the dog and Ginger the cat. Both had interesting jobs that paid well enough for them to live comfortably. Their lives were rich with friends.
~~~
Chapter 02
Isobel told the therapist that her partner of over ten years was a woman and that was not what had brought her to therapy. She wanted to make sense of some old experiences that had jumped up and bitten her recently and she supposed that meant delving back into her past, her childhood even. There was a long pause when she finished, then the therapist said,
‘By your age many people can’t do much with their childhood. There’s too much adult life laid on top, and they’ve interpreted and reinterpreted their memories so the child has, in a real sense, disappeared.' The therapist went on to say that if a person was willing to take risks, work could be done that would be of benefit to them, but Isobel heard that only as a pleasant, kind voice murmuring in the background; she was wondering whether what she was feeling was relief or regret. She could give up now, she was thinking, this was probably a silly idea anyway, and then s
he could tell Iris as a joke on herself, an over-reaction to an unexpected reminder. That would be a relief. The regret was that there was something to find and she might never know. She sighed.
‘Do that again.’
Isobel was irritated then, really, really irritated. She didn’t want to sigh, she wanted to talk, talk non-stop without bothering about what the other person was thinking, for a long time, if necessary, flat, matter-of-fact, without crying or laughing, or even sighing until it all made sense to her. The trouble was there wasn’t much to talk about.
There was hardly anything to say about her childhood and it must be her childhood she needed to drag up, give me the child and all that. But there were only a few isolated memories, about nothing much. Not talking about her early life had become a habit. ‘Respectable and boring,’ she would say if she had to. Mostly, other people were keen to talk about their own early experiences, so it had never been difficult to hold back. However, she had decided in the depths of a second sleepless night, that she would go right back to her earliest memories and see if she could find reasons for her act of — defiance, maybe. The shock of William bloody Borsholdt and the threat of exposure more than thirty years after the event had her wanting reasons, reasons that came from inside her, reasons different from the explanations that feminism offered, reasons that would make sense to her now, and perhaps even to other people, starting with Iris.
‘One day, when I was about four,’ she began, ‘my mother left me being looked after by a neighbour. I think she might have gone without telling me because apparently I tended to make a fuss if I was left and I know I wasn’t five because I hadn’t started school yet.' Isobel paused. The therapist didn’t say anything, just nodded very slightly so Isobel ploughed on. ‘I can’t remember the neighbour’s name, but I do remember that she wasn’t very well and she lay on the sofa a lot. My mother never lay on the sofa, and when she was sitting down she would be doing something, like knitting or embroidery or reading. Sometimes she would have the radio on, always with people talking, never with music. She didn’t like music. Or art. She’d say she didn’t have a creative bone in her body, and when she wanted to embroider a tablecloth in autumn colours, she used a template in a leaf shape, and we all went out one Sunday afternoon and gathered leaves and I had never believed until then that there really was red, proper fire engine red, in autumn leaves. She took the leaves to the shop to match the colours with embroidery cotton.’ Isobel stopped. She was rambling. She felt silly. The therapist said, ‘Go back to the day your mother left you.’
‘She didn’t!’ Isobel protested, then stopped when she realised the therapist had meant, ‘she left you to go shopping,’ not, ‘she abandoned you’.
‘Go on.’ The kind understanding voice brought prickles to the back of Isobel’s eyes so she started talking again.
‘The bit I remember is going inside the neighbour’s house from being in their back yard, I don’t know why, and walking down the hallway and the neighbour was lying on the sofa and she told me off and I didn’t know what she was telling me off for. I think she was saying something like how could I do that, or what an inconsiderate child I was or something but I don’t really remember what she said. There was just her lying on the sofa across the other side of the room and me standing in the doorway not knowing what I had done wrong.
‘The next part I remember is sitting on the stile at the back of our place. The school playground ran down the backs of our houses and my mother would take a short-cut across the big kids’ football field to the shops, and I was sitting waiting for her to come home so I could tell her about the neighbour being angry with me. When I first saw her she was really small and far away and as I watched she got bigger and bigger, and when she had grown to her proper size she asked me why I was sitting there or something like that. I said Mrs Nextdoor had told me off, and I didn’t know what for, and I thought my mother would be sorry for me and say something nice, but she wasn’t, she was worried about what had happened and what the neighbour was cross about, and so she was cross at me and went to see the neighbour. So I sat on the stile a bit longer and felt lonely I think, though I probably didn’t know then that I was lonely, and I never did find out what I had done wrong.'
‘How do you feel now about that little girl on the stile?’
‘It was hard on her, not knowing what she had done, and everybody being cross with her.’
‘Uh huh. That’s what you think, how do you feel?’
‘Sorry for her I suppose. Sad. I wish someone had been kind to her.’
‘Do you feel angry with your mother?’
‘Why would I be angry with her?’ Irritation again. Isobel hoped she was keeping it out of her voice, then wondered whether she should bother trying to hide it, then just went on talking. ‘She did her best. It wasn’t long after the war and her brother had been killed and my father was away with his work and her parents were ill way down country. The war had ended but it was still at the centre of everything. Well, no, sort of “over there,” far away, but here, too, because it affected everything, like you could hardly get any sugar and my mother couldn’t get proper shoes for me because I had such small feet. So probably the last thing she was thinking about was being kind, she was more likely thinking about how she would do everything she had to do.’
‘Was your father kind?’
‘When he was home he was either sleeping and mustn’t be disturbed, or busy in his shed or had a headache. It didn’t make much difference if he was there or if he wasn’t.’
‘Who else is in your family?’ The threat of tears had gone and Isobel relaxed back into her chair, then stiffened again as she noticed the therapist notice her relax.
‘There was my brother. He was older, by nearly five years. And my sister, older again by another four years. They fought with each other but didn’t bother me mostly and I didn’t bother them much. I used to think of it as the three of us on separate islands, and there was a bridge between their two islands and sometimes they would go on the bridge and have a fight – shouting at each other kind of fighting. My island never had any bridges.' Was that true? Had she really thought then about islands and bridges or was that how it looked to her now? Was this what the therapist meant about reinterpreting?
‘What about your parents, did they have islands?’
‘One. They were both on one island.’
‘Was there any bridge between your island and theirs?’
‘My island didn’t have any bridges.’ She’d already said that.
‘What do you feel talking about these islands?’
‘I don’t feel anything.’
‘If you were feeling something, what would it be?’
Isobel sighed again. They both sat in silence and Isobel wanted to get up and walk out, then she remembered something.
‘There was one time,’ she said, and nearly stopped when she saw the therapist looking pleased. But she sighed again without noticing herself and carried on. ‘I’d had my tonsils out. I was five I think, or maybe nearly five and my tonsils were being taken out before I went to school. I don’t remember being in hospital but I do remember at home afterwards, probably because all I could eat was ice cream and jelly. Shop ice cream. And one of the days I was at home with my mother — it must have been a school day because my brother and sister weren’t there — I had to have these poultices that my mother heated on the element, I had to have them on my neck. They were too hot and they hurt but I didn’t really mind because she was taking care with them, trying not to have them too hot, and she was talking to me in a kind way, not a busy way or a cross way.’
‘What was she saying?’
‘I don’t remember what she said I just remember she was talking to me in a kind way. I wanted her to do that some more.’
‘And did she?’
‘Not that I remember. Most likely she got busy again.’
‘Your mother was often busy?’
‘She was always doing things and they we
re always things that had to be done and she wanted to get on and do them to get them done and you mustn’t get in her way. Sometimes the lady across the road came for a cup of tea and then they were busy talking and I had to go away. I used to sit on the back steps. I could hear what they were saying sometimes. If my mother came out and saw me there she would tell me to stop ear-wigging and I would have to go somewhere else.’ Talking was easy if she thought of it as like being on a treadmill at the gym; she could stop any time simply by stepping off the damn thing.
‘What else would you do?’
‘Wait.’
‘Wait?’
‘Yes. Wait for someone to tell me something so I would know it or wait for something to happen that I was part of. Except it never did that I remember. There was always something that everyone else knew that I didn’t and it was the most important thing and I was always waiting to find out what it was. Sometimes I asked questions but that made people cross. One time my mother was in the back garden talking to a neighbour over the fence. Not the neighbour I was talking about before, a different one. We were in a different house actually, we had shifted to another town for my father’s work and my mother was glad to get away from his mother. Anyway, my mother was talking to this neighbour and I asked a question, I don’t remember what the question was, but my mother was really cross, and said she didn’t want me around if I was going to talk like that and I was to go to my room. Well, our room, because I shared it with my sister and really it was her room and I was in it and she didn’t like sharing a room with her little sister but there weren’t many rooms in our house. That was another time I didn’t know what I had done wrong. My mother expected that I would know I suppose and I didn’t. She never told me. And I didn’t ask because she was already cross and that would make her crosser. So I was often not knowing.’
