by Gee, Maurice
“I love you, Joyce.”
“I love you, Paul.”
I was proud of the ease with which I slew the tiny dragons of lust that sprang to life in my loins. Soon, I said, wait, not long now; striking off their heads. Zing, went my little sword, and blood reversed its motion. Soon. I gazed in Joyce’s deep blue eyes and wanted nothing more for the moment.
On Saturday nights I took her to the pictures. I, who was reading The Idiot, agreed that Dangerous Moonlight was beautiful, profound. We drove to Muriwai in my father’s Ford Prefect. The huge waves frightened her, the desolate track of sand vanishing into haze made her feel unhappy. I drove her home, tenderly aware of how much she needed me. The next Sunday we went to Mission Bay, where she swam happily in the six-inch waves and kept a critical eye on the new season’s bathing suits. I was proud to see how people (other men) looked at her. Hands off, I said, dropping mine on her shoulders.
My father met Joyce one Saturday at the stall. He had asked me about my “new girl”; I had told him things were serious, I was in love. He dropped by casually to look her over. I’d forgotten how shy he was with women. They both blushed when I introduced them. Then Joyce fitted her murderous poise about her, and my father talked jerkily about the glorious weather. He went away soon. The only comment he made that night was that she seemed to be a “lady”. Joyce, I saw, was shaken by my father’s ugliness. She said he was “nice”. For an hour or so she worried about my ugliness. But mine, she must have told herself then, was interesting, it made me seem strong, different, clever, hers; it woke a gentle lust in her innocent nature. So everything was soon all right again. We sold fruit. We kissed. We held hands. We went to an Abbott and Costello movie.
Three more weeks went by. The “soon” began to change shape; became “very soon”; became, one afternoon in the orchard, “now”. I had shown her the den that day. She said Henry Bear was ugly, and Hope profound. She didn’t notice the books. We closed the stall and took our rug to the bottom of the orchard. No girl had seen the den before. There was only one way of possession left to take.
We lay on the blanket and kissed in our usual way. I told her I loved her. And on the strength of that, put my hand on her breast. She let it stay. I kissed her deeply. She responded, looked at me with surprise, came back. I stroked her body outside her clothes; and did not neglect to say that I wanted to marry her. “Yes,” she said in a frightened voice, frightened not at this.
After an hour of forward stepping, subtle or naive, and shifts of clothing, cunningly made, I lay on her in a gentlemanly way and made the small penetration her virgin state allowed. And there I stayed for a long while, gazing at her closed eyes. I would not hurt her, I promised; we would wait, we would only go a little way at a time, only when she felt like it. (Hero of the latest manual I’d read was Considerate Husband.) She made no reply. From time to time her body gave a delicate shiver. Then she opened her eyes and looked at me with fright. She shivered again and moaned three or four times; then lay still and quiet. I looked at her, open-mouthed. It wasn’t true. She had had an orgasm. I began to climb off, but she said, “No,” and held me where I was. So I did my thinking there. I was shocked. Nice girls didn’t have orgasms —not so easily, not so soon. And those involuntary shivers— had they been, after all, controlled? Had I been used? But soon, looking at her pink averted face, I was able to believe that a huge compliment had been paid me. Even nice girls, even Joyce—and when I’d hardly been trying! She must be crazy about me. Mine.
“Do you hate me?” she asked.
“I love you.”
“I’m not a bad girl.”
“Of course not.” I tried to think of something comforting. “You’re still a virgin.”
She considered this. I saw her agree. “I feel so much closer to you now.”
“So do I.” Nevertheless, it was time to get off. At once tender and proprietorial, I pulled down the front of her dress. Demi-vierge, I thought. That “demi” made her mine.
For the rest of the afternoon we talked and kissed and wrestled. We hopped back and forth like birds from late to early adolescence. She ran shrieking through the apple trees. I brought her down with a flying tackle—boy; and man I thought, gazed in her eyes and asked, “When will you tell your parents?” Once, lying half across her (both flushed from running), I said, “Come my Celia, let us prove, While we may, the sports of love.”
“What?” she said.
“Time will not be ours for ever: He, at length, our goods will sever. It’s a poem I wrote for you.”
“Liar.”
“I did.”
“Why did you call me Celia, then?”
Her mood changed. She said the poem was beautiful and asked me to say it again. So, holding her under me, I recited without a blush,
“Come my Celia, let us prove,
While we may, the sports of love;
Time will not be ours for ever:
He too soon our goods will sever.”
“It’s profound.” She was quiet. “Time will not be ours for ever.”
“Don’t get unhappy, now.”
“Why is poetry always about sad things?”
At half-past five I put the blanket over our shoulders and we walked up to the house. Andrew was feeding his fowls as we went past the fowl-run. He scattered the last of the wheat and stood looking at us with a kind of dogged outrage as we went past the wire. I realized that the blanket over our shoulders had belonged to mother. I slipped out of it.
With a feeble attempt at jocularity, I said, “Andrew, this is Celia—I mean Joyce.”
He came to the gate and let himself out. His movements were so clumsy and his face so still, thickened somehow, I thought he looked imbecilc. Joyce smiled at him. She offered her hand through the opening in the blanket. “How do you do?” she said.
Andrew looked at her heavily for a moment. “My hands have got wheat on them.” He turned and walked away.
That night I borrowed my father’s car and took Joyce to the Fruitgrowers’ Ball. Waiting in her sitting-room, I endured the scrutiny of her anxious Dad and Mum. I passed: my hair was short in those days, my ugliness was young, an out-of-doors kind. I wore the expression I called my “glow of decency”. Above all, my prospects were good: so said my varsity scarf.
“Look after my girl,” Mr. Poole said.
I promised.
Joyce wore a simple white three-quarter gown and a black Spanish-lace shawl. It was a great triumph for me when I saw Charlie Inverarity’s black little eyes take a radar fix on her as we entered the hall. The match between us was still going on—right through our friendship it had gone on—and now I could call myself winner. There was only one Joyce Poole and she was mine. Charlie understood.
The committee had tried to decorate the hall like a barn/ packing shed/saddler’s shop. Country objects hung on the walls. The band sounded like a sawmill. It was playing a foxtrot when we came in. I took Joyce formally in my arms and we danced. In the years since my mother’s death I had learned to dance fairly well. But Joyce was so light I hardly knew she was there. Her movements were oiled. When I told her how fantastic she was she smiled complacently and said she had a medal for ballroom dancing. We spun magnificently in front of Charlie.
After the foxtrot he came across the hall to us—in a curved line, homing in. It was a way of stating a purpose; fair warning. Confident, I introduced him to Joyce. He asked her short, gruff questions. How long had she been in Wadesville? What did she do for a living? How had she met old Paul Prior, here? Joyce was embarrassed. Then she drew her poise about her; became cool, faintly amused. I let my amusement show. But Charlie was no quitter. Doggedly he asked Joyce for the next dance.
“I’ve promised the first three to Paul,” she smiled.
“All right, the one after that?”
“Perhaps. Come back then.”
He went away—outside for a drink, I said. But she was troubled and could not relax.
“He’s funny.”
“Creepy.”
I smiled with delight. We danced another two dances. She began to enjoy herself again. Charlie came back and claimed her. The dance was an excuse-me. I soon got her away from him.
“Thank you. What a clown.”
“What did he say?”
She giggled. “I shouldn’t tell you.”
“Come on.”
“He said he was worth two of Paul Prior any day.”
“The bastard.”
“Don’t swear.”
“The poor little dope.”
“I’m not going to dance with him again. Do you mind?”
I didn’t. The lights went out during the supper waltz. We kissed until we almost fainted.
The dance after supper was a three-step polonaise, “to shake down all that food”, the M.C. said. Joyce and I spun like Catherine wheels. Her bright excited face slipped from my sight, I went on to my next partner; danced, spun, moved on. Then I saw Joyce running from the hall, and Charlie standing stiff where she had left him. I shook my partner off. “What did you do to her?” I yelled.
He looked at me without expression, shrugged. I ran past him, out into the parked cars. I saw the white of Joyce’s dress as she went down the line towards the Prefect. The silk of her shawl glittered in the light; the clip that fastened her hair winked like an eye.
“Joyce.” I caught up with her. “What happened? What did he say?”
She got in the car and shivered. “I’m cold.”
I closed the door and went round the driver’s side. “Did he touch you?”
“No.”
“What did he say, then? Tell me.”
“Nothing.”
“Why did you run?”
“I got dizzy. I thought I was going to be sick.”
“Are you all right now?”
“I want to go home.”
“Joyce—”
“Take me home, please.”
“I’ll murder that little bastard.”
“It wasn’t him. Take me home. Please, Paul.”
On the way she leaned on her door. “I don’t feel like talking,” she said. I stopped in front of her house. I tried to embrace her, but she got out quickly.
“Good night, Paul. I’m sorry.” Then she was gone. She was letting herself into the house before I could reach the gate.
“I’ll call you tomorrow,” I cried.
No reply. The porch light went out.
So I lost Joyce Poole. She wasn’t home when I called the next day. On Monday her father told me on the phone that she didn’t want to see me again: if I was a gentleman (he was sure I was) I wouldn’t pester her. She must have known I would try an ambush. It took me three days to learn her new timetable. I stepped gangster-like from a shop doorway and said, “Don’t try to get away.” She gave a small shriek. Then she stared at me like a fly faced by a jumping spider. She knew she was caught, but in the fly’s drugged way hoped that if she turned round and wobbled away everything might be all right, I might vanish.
I grabbed her arm. She started to buzz. “How dare you? Take your hands off me. I don’t know how I could ever have thought you were a gentleman.”
I could only plead. An explanation. Didn’t she owe me an explanation?
“All right,” she said, “all right, just let me go.”
I took my hand from her arm and she started to walk quickly towards home. I tagged along at her side.
“Why didn’t you tell me about your brother? Don’t you think you should have told me?”
“Andrew?” I said. “What about him?” But this trailed away. Not Andrew. Of course not. John. That was what Charlie had told her in the twenty second chance the polonaise had given him. “You’d never think old Paul Prior had a loony brother.” I put my hand on her arm again, urgently explained: he was dead. He had died four years ago. She need not worry, everyone had forgotten. It wasn’t in the family. No, no, John was a freak, an accident. A joke of God, I joked. But I was on her side—on the side of ending. Behind our busy encounter was the tableau of myself picnicking in father’s den, while up in the house John died of convulsions.
In the end I let her go; and she, I suppose, marched home to her father and mother and told them they need not be afraid of the Poole blood becoming tainted. I tried to write to her—a few facts about mongolism—but the letter always petered out. The thing was over. And although I was unhappy my aesthetic sense was pleased by the shape of this event and the way it was joined to my past.
I didn’t try to see Charlie Inverarity. I could think of no punishment for him. I guessed almost to the day when Joyce would start going out with him. (New year-she had a great sense of fitness.) By that time my father was ill. In the winter he had had an operation for an enlarged prostate. He came home, tried to go out too soon, and caught a chill. When this was over he was a tiny cavernous old man, so weak he could hardly lift a spoon. In the summer he came out into the sun and seemed to grow a little stronger. One day I found him in the den, where he had gone to fetch a book.
“It’s hard to believe I spent so much of my life here.” He was worried that I locked myself away. “There were so many other things I could have done.”
I took his arm and we walked in the orchard. The picking gang was busy in the Gravenstein trees. One of them brought him an apple. He tried to eat it but the skin was too hard for his teeth. I went to the house for my pocket knife and cut thin slices for him.
“These trees are at their best, Paul… I don’t think you’ll end up an orchardist.”
“No.”
“Or Andrew.”
“No.”
I told him I thought I would be a teacher. He tried to develop an analogy between growing fruit and teaching children; but suddenly grew impatient with it. “I’ve always been light-minded. That’s my trouble.” He was warning me.
We sat down and enjoyed the sun. At four o’clock when we went back to the house he complained of feeling cold. By ten o’clock he was delirious. I called the doctor, who was angry with me for keeping him in the orchard so long. I have no guilt about it. He enjoyed that afternoon.
My father lingered for a week and died without any pain. On the last day he had moments of dim consciousness. In one of these he offered me a piece of his experience. “Paul,” he said, “women are so damned biological.”
1949–1967
I left Wadesville when I was twenty-one. As a tool for unlocking the world my arts degree turned out to be blunt. It opened chalky classrooms. Other equipment I carried proved more useful: my knowledge of how to make a den and hibernate; kitchen skill; an armour of generalizations about women. I built a persona that gave an impression of toughness. “What you’ve got to do,” I said, “is get rid of your sense of justice”—this usually to people I was hurting, but also to Paul Prior when hurt (a rare event, at last). I cultivated detachment. The years went easily, with some pleasure, a little pain. I found myself quite often in a state of honest self-approval. “You’re getting by,” I said, “you’re minding your own business. People should be more reasonable.”
I taught in a country town for two years, in Wellington for two; in Sydney; in Vancouver. I taught English in Italy. I lived four years in a flat in Ladbroke Grove and came to believe myself a Londoner. My only news of Wadesville came from Andrew. He wrote each year on our mother’s birthday (“she’d be upset if she thought we were strangers to each other”) and at Christmas. I replied on postcards showing cathedrals, bullfights, vineyards, Gauguin nudes. He told me he was still living with the Webbers—he called them Uncle and Auntie—and working in the bank. Wadesville was booming. There were shops going up all along the road between the bridges. The orchard had been zoned as indus- trial land. Claude Webber thought we should sell when the lease ran out. The Apple and Pear Marketing Board had made an offer for ten acres, a battery factory and a timber yard wanted the rest. The sums offered were huge. Sell, I wrote back. The idea of holidays in luxury hotels i
ntoxicated me. Later I thought of paintings and rare books and wine in cobwebby bottles. But at last what moved me was the thought of bulldozers knocking down the original den and tearing out the fruit trees I had lain on blankets under with Joyce Poole. Sell, I told Andrew. I gave him power of attorney.
In the letter in which he told me the orchard was sold Andrew announced his engagement to the Webber’s niece, Penelope. He sent me a snapshot of them taken in the back yard. She was a pretty girl, though she had a butter-fed look. She reminded me of Miss Weaver, with whom I had been in love for a day. Their styles too seemed roughly the same: twin-set, artificial pearls, permed hair. Her home life, Andrew told me, wasn’t all it should be. Her mother (the Webber) was a Theosophist, her father had taken refuge in science fiction. Some of this had rubbed off on Penelope. But since she had come to live with the Webbers, said Andrew, she had started to think more correctly. The political phrase surprised me. Did it mean Andrew’s religion was now on the surface of his mind? I hoped so. I sent my congratulations on a card showing Botticelli’s Birth of Venus.
A year after his marriage Andrew came up with “a gilt-edged proposition”. He had bought a small furniture factory on the North Shore. The market was wide open; he could sign a dozen contracts tomorrow. The problem was expansion. More capital was needed. Although investors were clamouring, he had made up his mind to give me first chance. It would be, on his honour, like buying shares in a gold mine. And Priors, he felt, should be a family concern. Our mother would have wanted it. Father too, he supposed.
