Before I Forget

by Fahey, Jacqueline

  I then recalled a funny story that Harry had once told me, that this exclusive couple were embarrassed by Wellington’s Communist Party members. The leather sandals, the smelly black polo-necked sweaters, their beer and pies. Absolutely no style whatsoever. They were not the sort of people they had in mind for dinner parties at the embassy.

  As things evolved I was invited to the Embassy ball. At the time, Fraser was seriously ill and laid up at Wellington Hospital. John Hoyle, a friend of ours, was the second secretary at the Australian embassy and his wife was a psychiatrist who had worked with Fraser at Porirua Hospital. She had returned early to Australia to take up a position there and John was to join her at the end of the year. We were both, it would seem, bereft, and it was my social duty to accompany him. I explained to John that I had already promised to accompany Cath Eichelbaum and Paul Potiki to see the first Russian film to come to New Zealand since the war. (By the way Cath Eichelbaum was largely responsible for women gaining equal pay in the public service; surely she should have some recognition for her dedication.) John explained that I could not possibly go to that film as it would be crawling with spies, informers, agents, CIA guys, whatever – they were all going to be there. He said if I went to that film I would most certainly get on the list. We all by that time knew what the list was. It was a sort of pathetic New Zealand imitation of what was going on in America at that time. John’s warning made it certain that I would see the film with my two supposedly subversive friends.

  Anyway, to get back to the film. I am not sure of its name, it was a film made during the Second World War, and I think it was called The Swans Are Flying. Or something was flying, but I can’t remember with certainty just what. But whatever the title it was a real tear-jerker and I sobbed hysterically all the way through.

  Two weeks later, Fraser was visited by an old army friend who was by this time a professor at the university and whom it would seem had been put in charge of New Zealand’s security. Very interesting. This friend had discovered that for two weeks I had been followed by government agents, and made enquiries as to why. He found that I had been reported as a dangerous person. Fraser’s friend called off the bloodhounds, explaining that it was a great waste of taxpayer’s money.

  Fraser and I thought this was completely farcical – we were quite unaware of just how disturbing we could be to some people. In my case, my painting, my talk and the company I kept had appeared suspicious to someone observing me from the outside. Years later, I heard an old CIA man being interviewed by the BBC and he was asked if he was still involved or if he had now got out. He said there was no getting out, no getting out ever, just as there was no getting your name off the lists.

  But where am I going with this? To get back to that jumbo jet winging its way to Atlanta, it was curious how I could function on two levels. On one level brooding about Wellington in the ’50s and if it had any relevance at all to my present life; and on another keeping up an immediate interaction with my companion. In a sense, I was completely absorbed in that moment. His attention flattered me and I responded to his expectations eloquently. Seldom have I held forth with such wit. Many passengers within earshot joined in our repartee. But for heaven’s sakes, he could easily have been just what he seemed to be, a charming and decent guy with a conscience. I might have been indulging in senile paranoia. It takes a certain conceit to imagine that foreign powers would be interested in little old me. But then again it takes a certain conceit to imagine that a charming pilot would be so fascinated by a seventy-eight-year-old. Of course I don’t know either way; I can only guess. His loss of faith in the empire seemed genuine; he had all the intensity and despair of a medieval monk who doubts the existence of God. This supposed state of mind, however, made no difference to his glowing good health or charming vitality. He was Brad Pitt before Angelina. But surely such agony of mind would leave some mark: a few grey hairs perhaps, some tense lines around the mouth. Something?

  He filled in my forms, accompanied me on the mechanism that took us into the airport. When I couldn’t see Augusta where I thought she was meant to be, he went with me to the luggage area and dialled Augusta’s mobile number. He had a mobile of course and predictably I didn’t.

  But then, like two goddesses dropped out of a cloud, Augusta and Maggie took human form, materialised. Whether Bud was other than he seemed to be immediately became irrelevant. I introduced him, thanked him and the episode ended with his departure.

  That experience has sometimes resurfaced in my mind over the last two years. It has not then completely dissolved. An irritating puzzle – but a puzzle that I fear will never be resolved.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Just One of Those Things

  Way down the other end of the supermarket aisle I glimpsed a guy I sort of knew. I wasn’t sure and turned sharply down the next aisle hoping that I might remember a name. No, mostly hoping to avoid him all together. His name remained lost but I could now give him a background. It was Elam art school, some years after me. Couldn’t place his painting but suspected he was maybe involved with art theory. Then, just as he approached me, an illumination that was his name, it was there on the tip of my tongue: Sebastian. I was so relieved to have solved this problem that I greeted him warmly.

  With a manner quite stylish he explained how he had just attended a funeral and he was all pumped up. All funeralled out, he said. He had a bit of charm going for him here, an easy-going performer. ‘I mean,’ he said, ‘twelve eulogies for God’s sake. I thought I was trapped there for life.’ He added, all bland, ‘You didn’t go?’

  I resented the question. The guy was on a fact-finding mission and I said, cool and blank, ‘Now that everyone is falling off the perch we should be prepared. Design our own funerals. I think for me Mozart, yes Mozart’s Requiem Mass. This of course for purely aesthetic reasons. None of that “would anyone like to say a few words” crap.’ As a further red herring, I added, ‘Did you know Colin is dead, Bunny told me?’

  ‘Yeah, right.’ And then he got straight back to the funeral. ‘But it won’t be up to you.’

  ‘What,’ I enquired, ‘what won’t be up to me?’

  ‘Your funeral. It won’t be up to you.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, still playing for time, ‘this isn’t entirely all about my funeral. I assume you are going to die also. We must leave clear instructions as to what sort of funeral we want.’

  I was angry with Sebastian for persisting. He clearly knew that a long time ago I was involved in a brief affair with this dead person. Brief because he was what my father called a blabbermouth, which he obviously had retained, I mean the blabbermouth.

  I was angry at the idea that Sebastian somehow seemed to imply by his manner that I should be upset. Upset about something that happened a hundred years ago? I don’t think so. A suspicion that he was deriving some sort of perverted pleasure out of my discomfort? Yes, that made me angry. However, as I pushed my trolley out of the supermarket I had the first flickers of genuine creative inspiration that I had had for some time. Something about the effervescence of passion, the potion that the Fairy Queen is given in A Midsummer Night’s Dream which sends her to sleep. And when the Fairy Queen wakes up, she can’t remember. It’s out of mind, but then I believe it’s meant to be. A magic glimpse, a captured moment, but seasonal. Not meant to be remembered.

  But then a new thought interrupted my insight. Why do I have to get angry and upset before a good idea is able to emerge? Separate itself from the mucky turmoil that is my everyday consciousness. I wasn’t angry any more, just obsessed with hanging on to that insight; my distress of mind had been totally displaced. What emerged from that flash of rage was a construct for my new paintings. I pictured myself as I am now addressing my young self way back in Porirua. My young, hormone-driven self can’t hear me, doesn’t want to hear me. She tells me it’s none of my business, to leave her alone, butt out. I don’t know who this woman who once was me is – the more I try the less I am able to know her. As
it developed, I painted what I did know. What Fraser and I professed to believe at that time. What we had emerged from, a Catholic background with a socialist sense of decency, but from that a confusion of motives.

  These paintings needed time to shake down, to come into proper view. There was a lot of criticism of the green, seen as much too green. A green that they have never seen in New Zealand. They are not looking, they are educated to see something more muted.

  As I’ve said, hydrangea bushes were emblematic of mental hospitals. Hieronymus Bosch’s the Lame and the Halt serve the same purpose. They tell us where these paintings are set. They flower in all these paintings as indicators. In my paintings this is our home but it also is a mental hospital, Porirua Hospital. The colour of the hydrangeas blazes forth against the brilliant green of late spring.

  It is that time of the year now, when I matched that green in my paintings to the green in my garden and the neighbouring park. That vibrant lush green of late spring. I saw it first in all its clarity, flying over New Zealand on our return from Australia. The scales fell from my eyes.

  But what about those red lines around some figures and objects from my early 1960s paintings? When they emerged in my new paintings I didn’t initially remember them as having any specific meaning at all. However, in due course it came to me. The red lines indicated how we were perceived by other people at that time at Porirua Hospital. We were reds under the bed, fellow travellers.

  That we were communists was simply not true. Fraser and I were more influenced by the lives of the saints. By this I don’t mean we were saintly but we were in pursuit of a life of meaning. We wanted to find out. We could no more stay in the Catholic Church than join the Communist Party. We were obsessed with defining our own individualities, something that would have made us very unsuitable as candidates for the Communist Party. We were making life up as we went along, hoping that somehow it would be revealed to us what we could become.

  But what of all that effervescent stuff? That insight I received emerging from the supermarket the day of the funeral. What about that, how was it all connected? The effervescence of passion – it is hard to recall momentary blurred qualities. It was an irrational concupiscent moment, a once-upon-a-time moment. I believe that there is something greedy and selfish about trying to make moments mean more than they were ever meant to mean. Why is it so hard to admit that what we claim to remember, in fact, we can’t remember? Shakespeare got it right. I should leave it at that, not go struggling on with this as a theme. The Fairy Queen, and the magic love potion, and in the morning she remembers nothing. It was just one of those things.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Hello and Goodbye

  In order to write this book with suitable concentration, I decided on a retreat. Emily, my youngest daughter, was at home, recovering from a decade of music teaching and being head of department in our traumatic secondary school system. A retreat suited her just fine.

  A retreat at Teschemakers, the boarding school I had attended, entailed no speaking for three days. It involved listening to readings of a mind-elevating kind and eating sensible but frugal food. Music was the high Mass, liturgical music, constant and sometimes quite ominous. Emily and I did not subject ourselves to sermons of the scary kind, that is damnation and hell fire, that sort of thing. However, when I come to think of it our reading at that time took an end-of-the-world tendency of its own. Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood. The Vanishing Liberal by Kevin Baker.

  To protect this mentality there was also no answering the telephone or the door. Very rarely indeed did we have visitors, and with this structure in place, a studious atmosphere was achieved. It has remained a steadfast routine from the end of my last exhibition in March 2010 until now.

  At home, what held the structure in place was my constant companion, Hello. Hello died as I finished this book. I do not approve of genteel ways of speaking of death, so I must write it like it was. I had Hello put down. He had been going blind for all of a year and then, after an agony of time involving gruesome proceedings and painful eye-drops, he went blind. Hello was deeply ashamed of this and Emily would carry him into the front garden in the mornings so he could do his business. He would then make his way to the back steps and up into the kitchen. When I went to bed he would somehow manage to join me. Give my head and arm an intimate sniffing to make sure I was no impostor and then roll onto his back for me to tickle his stomach. He also liked me to sing to him. I had made him some special songs. After, say, a quarter of an hour of that he would drift off to sleep.

  Then the vet said that if he didn’t take Hello’s eye out, Hello would die. He might also have to have his other eye out. We would have to wait and see. We were by this time running out of cash – vets are expensive. I decided yes, he would have his operation. I would go into debt to pay for it. As soon as I decided that that was what I would do, get him the operation, I realised it was a stupid decision. I was making this decision to placate my own conscience; I was not considering Hello’s state of mind. When I thought about it, I could not bear the idea of him staggering about with a hole in his head, possibly two holes in his head. Oh his huge emerald-green eyes, gone forever. For a proud top cat it was all too much. A prolonged decline! Too awful.

  Emily held him as he died. I had such a shock. I saw Emily driving in and I felt him dead. So desolate. The grave was dug at the front of the house and we covered him with bougainvillea petals. Emily somehow managed to drag a big flat stone from the Coromandel over him.

  Emily painted in big plain words ‘Hello and Goodbye’, surrounded with a delicate filigree of leaves. All in vibrant green, the green of his eyes, and she will wait to varnish it when the rain stops.

  But I must not be sentimental about him because Hello was not a sentimental cat, far from it. Whenever I tried to baby-talk him I pretty soon felt embarrassed. He went stiff all over and wide-eyed, staring straight ahead, waiting for me to stop. When he eventually moved in I thought he would be grateful, well at least put on a show about a willingness to please. Nothing of the sort happened. He made himself comfortable but kept a wary eye out in case I turned nasty. I knew nothing I had done suggested that I had a rage problem, so I decided he was going on past experiences. The you-never-can-tell sort of caution.

  After my old cat Spider had died and I first glimpsed Hello, I thought he was a large opossum. He was the same colour and big and fat. Hello had been hanging over the side of the deck staring at rats. I knew about the rats and felt sorry for them. So I gave a big clap. Now any other cat that had invaded my place would make a run for it but not this guy, he quite slowly turned to take a good look at me and then went back to waiting for rats. He had decided I was harmless, for today anyway.

  Now and then I glimpsed him foraging about in the garden and then after a month or so he made a new move. Under the house there was a whole lot of stuff stored, paintings that were best forgotten about, boxes of Fraser’s papers and useless furniture, including a 1920s settee, and that’s where he was sitting, on that settee. I had gone down there to hide my diaries and didn’t spot him for some time. When I did I got a fright. He was sitting up quite straight and staring at me. That went on for some time, the staring, and then he spoke. He was speaking even though I didn’t know the language. In a factual way, he told me some things that were very wrong and rather awful. When he had finished, he sat there waiting for some reply. I couldn’t think of anything so I went upstairs and got him some of Spider’s old cat biscuits. I didn’t touch him but left him to gobble up the bikkies.

  Every day I went down under the house to check on him. He still sat on the settee and he reminded me of someone. Something about him, some unease, his self-consciousness. Just who he reminded me of hung uneasily on the edge of consciousness, slipping away a fraction of a second before recognition. I decided to stop trying and maybe it would come to me, float up into my head. All this time I believed Hello was a pregnant woman cat, very pregnant, and for the next few weeks I w
ent down to check on ‘her’. Once I even believed I heard through the floorboards the high-pitched mewing of newborn kittens. I went down under the house in the middle of the night to see. It later became clear that Hello was a done male cat.

  It is quite obvious how he got his name. Whenever I ran into him I would say ‘Oh, hello’, and then I started saying for some reason I don’t know, ‘Hello, Hello’ and it turned into his name. I liked it because it was a factual sort of a name and he was a factual sort of a cat.

  Something else bothered me. If he was homeless, how come he was so fat? Walking a block would have been a long trek for that lad. I was pretty sure he hadn’t come very far. But really, did I want to know how far he had come? One thing was very clear, he was keeping out of sight of the street. He continued to lurk under the house for maybe six weeks, like he feared, well, maybe kidnappers.

  His first proper manifestation upstairs, in the house itself, happened when I was entertaining. I was telling Noel Chapman, an old friend, about my new lodger. I possibly mentioned his name a few times, which might have inspired his visit. By the time of this manifestation our conversation had moved on to Noel’s mission in life at that time. She was working to preserve the life work of Bob Chapman, her husband. All his records, carefully monitored and written down, and his interpretation of the politics of the New Zealand Labour Party over at least the last forty years. But then Noel stopped in mid-sentence, enquiring, ‘And who pray is this gentleman?’ And, yes, I could have called him Gentleman, like a portly chap featuring at the Auckland Club white-tie-and-tails night. There he was, calmly surveying us from the centre of the room. Then he moved round the room, rather like an experienced detective taking in the crime scene. Satisfied, he departed.