by Cowley, Joy
They shouted at each other while Uncle Jack ran down the engine and then Dad came to the front and unsnipped the hatch door. He took off Delia’s harness, undid her helmet.
‘Did you see the barrel roll, Dad?’
‘I saw it,’ he said but his smile was now so small it didn’t count. ‘You’d better go and see your mother.’
Uncle Jack’s leather flying jacket was hanging over a fencepost. Delia would have liked to have wrapped it around her cold shoulders but she didn’t care. They walked fast back to the house. Mum was holding Bea’s hand and pulling her along whenever her snivelling slowed her down. ‘He promised me!’ Bea sobbed. ‘It was my turn!’
Delia ran until she was ahead of them. She scuffed her sandals in the dry grass. ‘I flew the plane,’ she wanted to say. ‘I flew it.’ But that would only make things worse.
‘What made you think you had the right?’ her mother said to her back. ‘You could have been killed.’
She didn’t answer.
‘I forbid you to ever go in that aeroplane again. Do you hear me, Delia? Delia?’
‘Yes.’
Bea wailed, ‘Uncle Jack promised me!’
‘He is not your Uncle Jack,’ her mother replied. ‘He’s your father’s friend and that’s it.’
‘He’s a good flier,’ said Delia, flattening a clump of grass with her heel. ‘I wouldn’t have got killed. That’s just stupid. Why can’t we go in his plane?’
Her mother swept past her so fast that Bea was running. ‘I don’t have to give you a reason why, Delia.’
‘Uncle Jack is our friend too,’ she said.
‘You girls have your own friends,’ said her mother.
That was all she would say on the matter except to remind Delia from time to time that it was a wonder she wasn’t killed. That prospect interested Bea who shut off her tears long enough to wonder what people looked like after they fell out of aeroplanes
‘I expect they split open like watermelons,’ Delia said.
Dad and Uncle Jack did not come down to the house until tea time. Delia saw them on the path, Uncle Jack’s arm across Dad’s shoulders, their heads bowed together in laughter. It looked to be a really big joke, yet by the time they got to the door, it had gone and they came in with separate quietness to wash their hands. Uncle Jack ran his hands through his hair to dry them and then tucked his shirt into his pants. He grinned at Mum, ‘Aw, come on, lamb chop, it isn’t the end of the world.’
She turned her back to him and spooned dressing over the salad.
‘Aggie?’ He tried again. ‘Agnes?’
‘Everyone sit down at the table,’ she said.
Delia and Bea ran to their places, while Uncle Jack slowly shook his head. ‘I got two thousand hours, Aggie. Just over two thousand friggin’, sorry, hours. I know flying as well as you know that piano and nobody tells me I put kids’ lives in danger.’
‘We know that, Jack,’ Dad said. ‘Agnes was just a bit concerned because Delia went without permission.’
‘She had my permission,’ he said, slumping into a chair. ‘Doesn’t that count?’ He leaned towards Mum who was carefully scraping out the salad dressing jug. ‘Why don’t you come for a spin, Aggie? Then you’d know. Safe as bloody houses, cross my heart and hope to die.’
‘No thank you,’ she said.
‘Bloody great vote of confidence,’ he said. ‘Future instructor of the Middle District Flying School and she wouldn’t trust me with a tricycle.’ He reached across the table and stabbed cold mutton with his fork. ‘This your own meat, Frankie?’
Dad said to Mum, ‘Jack’s got a job with the aero club in Palmerston North.’
‘Oh?’ Mum looked at Uncle Jack. ‘You’re not going back to Australia then?’
‘Nah.’ He shook the meat off his fork and onto his plate. ‘Been offered a job as instructor. Bloody boring, excuse my French, but good enough pay. It’s time I settled down like this old dingo.’ He punched Dad on the arm. ‘Find myself my own little lamb chop and breed a couple of scallywags.’ He reached for the dish of boiled potatoes.
‘Mum and me, we saw the plane falling down,’ said Bea.
‘You did not. A controlled spin from five and a half thousand feet and then a quick barrel roll. No falling down about it, Buzzy Bea.’ He put a forkful of meat in his mouth.
‘Who will bless the food?’ Mum said.
He put down his fork. ‘Sorry, I forgot. Better do a Jack grace. Two, four, six, eight. Bog in, don’t wait.’
Beatrice sniggered and Delia kicked her under the table.
‘Frank?’ said Mum.
Dad crossed himself and raced through his usual slow blessing like Charlie Chaplin in a speeded-up movie. Then Mum passed around the salad, potatoes, cold meat. She had closed the windows to keep the flies out and the room was hot, the low sun firing straight in across the table.
Uncle Jack got talking about the war days when he and Dad were at the Rongotai air base together, Uncle Jack flying, Dad in the engineering workshops. It was a conversation about people Delia didn’t know and parties and getting beer after the pubs were closed and Uncle Jack would say swearwords when he got excited. Mum was silent. Even if Uncle Jack said something terrible, she still wouldn’t comment because he was Dad’s best friend and it would show Dad up. But Delia knew that Mum would have something to say to Dad when Uncle Jack had gone and they were in the bedroom where the girls could not hear anything but a murmur through the walls.
After tea, Uncle Jack walked through to the living room and lifted the lid of the piano and poked a key with his forefinger. Mum, who was clearing the table, went still.
‘How about a tune?’ Uncle Jack called to her.
‘I’m busy,’ she said. ‘Delia will play for you.’
‘No!’ Delia was filled with alarm. ‘I can’t. I’m just learning.’
Her mother said, ‘Schumann’s Melody, Delia. You play it very well.’
‘No!’ Delia backed away, ready to flee outside.
‘Come on, Aggie,’ Uncle Jack looked at Mum. ‘One little tune and then you’ll be rid of me, girl. Promise.’
Mum didn’t answer but went on stacking dishes and Dad, not quite laughing, took the dishes from her hands and leaned his face against her hair. Maybe he was kissing her cheek. Maybe he was saying something. She wiped her hands on the dish towel and then ran them down the sides of her skirt as she went through to the piano. Uncle Jack stood back a bit as she sat down. She rubbed her hands together and rested her fingertips for a moment on the edge of the keyboard. He leaned against the piano, watching her.
She raised her hands and then brought them down on an uncomfortable chord. Delia had heard the music before. It was a Kabalevsky piece, full of sad slow notes, heavy and angular, offset by little arguing arpeggios that never quite connected. The sounds filled the long space that ran from kitchen to dining room to living room and became molten in the sunset. They reminded Delia of war and bombs and people crying.
Dad was watching Mum and smiling but Uncle Jack was tapping his fingers on the piano and shifting his feet. After two or three minutes, he said, ‘That’s enough!’
Mum stopped.
‘You mean someone actually wrote that stuff?’ he said. ‘Shit a brick, girl, it’s out of tune. Play something we can sing.’ He clicked his fingers and did a few fancy steps around the piano. ‘Crazy ’bout you, Baby. Sh-boom, sh-boom. Now don’t you tell me maybe. Sh-boom, sh-boom.’
Mum sat with her head bowed, her hands in her lap.
‘You know “Sweet Violets”? “Ghost Riders in the Sky”?’
‘I don’t play that kind of music,’ Mum said.
‘Course you can. Frankie tells me you can play anything.’
Dad came forward, ‘What about the “Moonlight Sonata”?’ he said and Mum turned to him with a long look.
‘Nah!’ said Uncle Jack. ‘None of that classical rubbish. An ordinary tune. Hey! If you want to do something fancy, what about “Black and White
Rag”? You must know that. Winifred Atwell plays it. Dah-de-dah-de-dah-dah –’
Mum put down the piano lid and pushed back the stool. She stood up, her head still bent and said, ‘I’m sorry. I’ve got things to do.’ Then she walked back to the kitchen, her cheeks glowing red and her eyes bright with tears.
Uncle Jack said to Delia, ‘Can you play “Black and White Rag”?’
‘No! No!’ Delia shook her head hard and went to the sink to help with the dishes.
‘Ah well.’ He looked up at the window and the setting sun. Then he checked his watch. ‘I’ve got to get back, anyway.’ He slapped Dad on the shoulder. ‘Nice talking to me old mate again, and thanks for the tucker, Aggie. Tell you what. I’ll see if I can find you the sheet music for “Black and White Rag”. I bet you’d love it.’
Mum didn’t look up from the dishes.
Beatrice grabbed Uncle Jack’s wrist in both hands. ‘When are you coming again, Uncle Jack?’
‘Dunno, Buzzy Bea. Soon.’
She put her feet on his shoe and swung on his arm from side to side. ‘Why don’t you come with us when we go on holiday?’
He laughed. ‘I’ll have to think about that.’
‘Think now,’ she said. ‘Now, now, now!’
‘Bea!’ said Delia. ‘Mum, tell Bea to stop annoying Uncle Jack.’
‘That’s enough, Beatrice,’ said Mum.
Delia wiped the tea towel around the inside of a cup and smiled up at him. ‘Goodbye, Uncle Jack.’ She noted the light in his fizzy blue eyes as he smiled back. ‘Atta girl,’ he said. ‘Next time I need a co-pilot you’ll be top of my list.’
They were cleaning up the last of the dishes when the Tiger Moth took off, circled once over the house and then flew towards Palmerston North. Long after the noise of its engine had gone, they saw it as small as a dragonfly heading straight into the sunset.
Dad was busy outside for a while, feeding the dogs and putting away the tools and the machinery. He came in just on dark and stood behind Mum who was reading at the table. He rubbed up and down her arms, crackling the material of her blouse with his rough farm hands and when she smiled at him and rested her head back, he bent over to kiss her.
Delia sat down at the piano. She had heard “Black and White Rag”. It was played on the radio request sessions and her friend Susan had the record. Slowly, she picked out the melody with one hand. I-flew-the-plane-I-flew-the-plane-I-flew.
4
Delia
Breakfast is finished and people are moving about the first-class compartment of the plane, involved in earnest conversations. It is too early in the day to be reshaping the world to fit personal preferences, especially with strangers. I close my eyes on a forthright opinion of the Asian economy and pretend to drift back to sleep. The man sighs, or perhaps I just imagine a sigh, and moves away as I rest my head against the window, using the endless space behind my eyelids as a screen for the old movies of memory.
Unfortunately, the movies are not endless, nor even plentiful. I am surprised by the amount I have forgotten. The latter half of my life has so eclipsed the first that I don’t know who the old New Zealand self was. My childhood is like a part I once had in a play. I was the actress but not the author and now I can’t remember any of my lines, although the stage sets are still so vivid that they dominate my dreams. I see the towns of Napier and Hastings as they were in the 1950s and 60s, the network of Hawke’s Bay roads, the beaches, but mostly, I see the farm. In memory it is nearly always summer, and even when I am reconstructing winter with snow on the ranges and ice in the puddles, I am feeling summer warmth. Frank and Agnes Munro are part of the stage set but I can’t see clearly their faces, only their hands. Hers were very strong. The popular image of a pianist’s hands suggests a long and delicate structure with expressive, beautifully tapered fingers. Mum’s fingers were rather short and immensely sturdy. When you looked at them you thought, wire, and then wondered why. The pads of muscle on the backs of the hands and fingers rippled like biceps but that solid could turn to liquid on the keys, fingers moving so fast that they disappeared like some Leger painting into images of their own multiple vibrations. Dad’s hands were strong too, but so different, big paws that had the stiffness of thick leather gloves. The slowness of his fingers on a washer or bolt could make you ache with impatience. He was slow in everything. You’d see him in the yards with hundreds of sheep bleating and churning, barking dogs running across woolly backs, the air filled with the smell of dust and dung and frenzy, and he would be moving in this sweet slowness as though he were counting sheep in a dream. He didn’t talk much, not even to her. Looking back now, I realise that they were both quite inarticulate. They could make one or two sentences last an entire evening.
‘Excuse me, Ms Munro. Excuse me.’
The steward is offering me a hot towel.
‘Please, will you put the back of your seat up and stow your footrest for landing at Auckland airport?’
I glance at the window and am caught again by the loveliness of it, expected but always a surprise, such greenness, trees and paddocks sharp in the clear air, wet clouds, the white rim of sea. So much space. Houses spread out like tiny building blocks on a land that resonates with the power of the Saint-Saens organ symphony. That music always reminds me of this country, boom, boom, great chords of mountains, oceans, earthquakes and storms, and, perched on it, the grace notes of a little people. I look down and ache for the population’s vulnerability.
‘You been here before?’ The man next to me snaps his seat belt.
I nod and turn from the window. ‘Everything’s so small.’
‘Yeah.’ He laughs. ‘Makes you wonder what happens when the tide comes in.’
Lightheaded from sleep deprivation I check my luggage at the counter for the Napier flight and then wander through the airport looking for a card phone. When I finally get through to the office, I hear two bars of the Brandenburg Concerto and Philippa’s voice, ‘This is the office of Delia Munro and Associates, Decorators –’
‘Philippa! It’s Delia.’
‘We are busy right now but we want you to know your call is important to us. Please leave a message after the tone and we’ll get right back –’
I hang up and go to the gate for the Napier plane. It’s not only jet-lag. I’m still carrying an emptiness that’s as dense as a black hole. I can’t name it but what’s new? Life is full of the unnameable. It could be somehow connected with the stage set, and the way it has been dismantled piece by piece over the years. At one time I considered the farm to be a prison but even prisons become a part of us, absorbed by familiarity until they are a habit to our thinking. The farm buildings, the trees, those hills which were at one time an extension of ourselves, now belong to other lives and with Dad finally gone it seems there is nothing. Yes, I think the emptiness can be defined as a huge hole cut out of the map of belonging, but having said that I don’t feel any better. Beatrice? Oh, she was never really a part of my personal landscape.
She is at the Napier airport, looking much the same as she was last visit, large in a sacklike dress, long frizzy hair going grey. Her face still has the roundness of childhood, round eyes, small round nose, lips as fat and round as two bee stings. ‘Diddy!’ she screams. ‘Diddy! Over here!’ Behind her is a well-presented young couple, a blonde woman in a cream dress and straw hat, the man standing square in a navy suit. Bea engulfs me, imprinting her heavy floral perfume and without meaning to, I back away from her eagerness and her unpleasant body heat. ‘Diddy, you know Francis?’ she says.
‘Why hello, Francis.’ I am truly surprised. ‘Just look at you. I haven’t seen you since – when? Your grandmother’s funeral?’
‘I didn’t get over for that,’ he said. ‘The last time I saw you, Mother took me to Disneyland and you met us in Los Angeles. Aunt Delia, this is my wife Chloe.’
‘Chloe. It’s so nice to meet you at last.’ I take her hand. She is a smiling young woman with cool quick eyes and a pregna
nt bulge in her dress. ‘Now let me get this right. You and Francis have two children?’
Bea says, ‘Three. They have two boys and a girl. The youngest girl is very good on the piano.’
Chloe places her hand on her abdomen. ‘Three and a half,’ she says. ‘May I call you Aunt Delia? I’m dying to hear about your work.’
‘Just Delia, please.’ I try to move. We are standing in a stream of arriving passengers and the noise of flight announcements.
‘Plenty of time for talk over lunch,’ says Bea, grabbing my arm and steering me towards the exit. ‘We’re going to a nice restaurant on the Esplanade and then we’ll take you back to the motel to unpack. You and I are sharing a unit but it’s got two bedrooms. Will that be all right? Oh Diddy, it’s wonderful having you back home.’
‘Sure, Bea. Do you mind if I get my luggage first?’
She laughs and puts her hand over her mouth. ‘Of course! I meant that. You’ve got such an accent, Diddy. Doesn’t she sound American, Frank?’
My clothing still smells of stale aircraft and my eyes feel full of grit. There’s nothing I want more than a shower and a nap. I also need to phone Lal. But the luncheon has been planned and I don’t have the energy to run against Bea’s enthusiasm. As we drive from the airport she tries to bring me up to date with New Zealand politics while Francis and Chloe slide under her voice with questions about my work.
‘Did you really redecorate a house for Robert Kennedy?’ Chloe asks. ‘What about the Welsch building? Was that your firm?’
‘Where do you advertise?’ says Francis.
‘Francis is a land agent,’ says Bea. ‘He’s got an office in Forrest Hills. That’s near Sydney. A very busy area with absolutely beautiful homes.’
‘A realtor,’ Chloe says.
I always forget how bright the light is here, how the sun throws itself against every surface so that the eyes are being constantly fire-bombed. Within minutes I feel as though I’ve suffered an entire fourth of July fireworks display and I can’t find my shades.
‘This ex-New Yorker,’ says Francis, ‘he told me you had such a reputation that you didn’t have to advertise. People came to you and you could pick and choose, he said.’
