Something for the Birds

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Something for the Birds Page 11

by Fahey, Jacqueline


  Fairhaven says, ‘Bloody decent chap, Fahey. Drinks like a fish and never turns a hair. You’d never guess, you know, that his father was a cop.’

  ‘That right?’ says Brownlie, and Fairhaven says, ‘Good God, yes. You know how they are. Pubs and the police force. Can’t help themselves.’

  ‘Don’t trust ’em myself,’ says Brownlie, turning to order another drink.

  O’Brien, clearing away the glasses, thinking, come the revolution.

  But Cecil Fahey is gazing transported out the big bay windows of the club, down onto Caroline Bay. Transported back to Sling camp at the end of the First World War when, with that devastating love of place he had inherited from his ancestors, all he had longed for was to be able to walk just one more time up Caroline Bay.

  Now the real Cecil Fahey lives in his stronghold: on one side a huge concrete wall and in front great wooden gates. A state of siege. In his forays out into the community he goes heavily disguised as an English gentleman. He deceives no one. There is no way he can pass. There is a dancer’s grace to his movements. That edge to his wit exposes the insight of the outsider: antennae twanging, picking up messages. Native sons, inheritors of established power, don’t suffer from a skin-off, exposed nerves.

  Timaru did admire Dad, but also they feared him, feared all the things he didn’t know about himself and which they guessed at.

  Margaret Fahey lying in the bath, dribbling in the hot water, dribbling in more hot water and enveloped in steam, dreams of the past: ‘Oh, why did I come back to live in a state of exile? The girl with the brilliant career coming home to marry her childhood sweetheart. But there’s no going back to where my mother and my grandmother are exiled in past time. That Timaru is lost now forever. No returning either to Melbourne, Uncle Dennis and the Conservatoire of Music. That escape hatch snapped shut some time ago.’

  Oh, the anguish of tearing up roots only to return to find that the foreign soil had been the home soil all the time, that home is the foreign soil now. She could inhabit the life of music, though, couldn’t she? Chopin, Mozart, Beethoven, the way her own sisters breathed sustenance from the Mass so naturally they didn’t even think about it. Just like the past Mass on Sunday – friends in for a drink, roast lamb, new potatoes, peas from the garden, rich gravy. Mint sauce served on heavy Aran plates amidst roars of laughter, time honoured.

  But tonight she strolls arm in arm with Cecil Fahey down the main drag in Timaru. She is a lovely woman, and being a lovely woman is how she presents herself. You could be a good woman in Timaru. This meant you were plain, earnest and tried very hard. You could be a character. Usually this meant you talked too much, clothes were getting a bit loud, and house or children or husband or the whole lot running amok. A lovely woman, however, smiles serenely so that all right-thinking men get the message. They know that smile comes from fulfilment. Fulfilment from her man who protects her from the real world. She has her children, her sewing, cooking, baking and cleaning. In Margaret Fahey’s case, she does only one of the above – cooking. However, her large calm brow, warm brown eyes and her own big white teeth make up for her lack of domestic skills. She projects an eager innocence which comes from being brought up on the classics. With this lifestyle, virtue has always triumphed. No glimpse of that nasty soft underbelly where rude bums lurk, crude gestures are signalled. These are not to intrude into Margaret Fahey’s world.

  This evening Margaret will perform at the Women’s Club. With much puffing and heaving she presses her surplus fat into her boned corset. Her boned corset is old pink in colour, studded with great eyelets, and festooned with what look like long pink shoelaces. These shoelaces have sturdy metal ends. The bony strong whalebone insets slip easily in and out of their grooves. Long, amazingly complicated metal suspenders, four of them, dangle at the bottom. Then the black silk petticoat and then, over that, her superb black silk evening dress. Subtle jet embossing and a cunning cut to the skirt make this dress exclusive. This is a present from her sister-in-law, designed by Worth, bought in London before the war. Did her Timaru audience feel she was overdoing it? That only great pianists lived in Europe and wore evening dresses by Worth? But I am forgetting the Baltic amber beads: perfect, pale, clear yellow. Long and actually magic. Worn next to the skin, they lived; some essence passed into the wearer. Margaret felt an ancient connection to her amber beads. They were her good luck charm. She had left her tribe, however. Was there anywhere else to go? Circle the edges of other people’s tribes? Cecil can’t make that sort of a break. Margaret could, but if she does Cecil won’t. Or if he might, she won’t. The no man’s land of the lapsed Catholic is a place where you can hear yourself think, it’s hard to leave, you’re not up for grabs here. This is a no man’s land that you get used to, used to being alone ….

  Come, there is no need to get this far into Margaret Fahey’s life, and on the whole these were happy days.

  What I want to get into here is our Timaru, the Timaru of us four girls. It’s summer holidays forever stretching before us, the gleaming sea, electric sky, and we go dancing and skipping past the Grand Hotel – lovely girls, all lipstick, nail polish and energetic expectation. The high-pitched beach roar of Timaru at play. Under the viaduct and into the changing sheds, and when we come out of the water the beach is nearly empty, so that means it’s 5.30 and the buses are going. But there is Mr Ian Donnelly, the editor of the Timaru Herald, hurrying to the water. Ancient bathing trunks and threadbare towel. Irish Catholic. A good Catholic.

  Cecil Fahey says, ‘Ianie pees in the pockets of the bishops.’

  Margaret says, ‘He is so popular, always being asked into other people’s houses.’

  ‘Well, Mum,’ Terry says, ‘we love having him in our house, so why wouldn’t everybody else want to have him in their house?’

  But Ianie is moving on, toddling, striding, lurching, tripping, a Chestertonian figure. He jabs his cane ahead of him just as he remembers Chesterton, the integrated literary gentleman, the humanist theologian of the Catholic Church, doing. Yes, Ianie met him in London and Chesterton featured in his book of travels. As indeed did Walter De la Mare and Alfred Noyes, men of letters, fine Catholic men who received him graciously. That pilgrimage sufficed him. After that he had no need to stay or return to England. He was now spiritually one of their company and could spread the literary word to the outposts of God’s empire. Already, like a lyric poem, his next leader article is emerging in some sort of concrete shape just as he approaches Shrouder’s Bakery. Shrouder’s Bakery is very special. In a town where every housewife prides herself on her baking Shrouder’s, with skill and delicacy, shows them how they could move on to another level. (Actually it was a sort of delicatessen but I don’t remember anything called that in New Zealand at that time. Certainly not in Timaru anyway.) Ian is in food heaven. The pipe he clenches hasn’t yet damaged his sense of smell, and he’s wallowing in it all, those heavy fragrant aromas. Superb and different pies, sponge rolls, Madeira cake, chocolate cake, asparagus rolls, hams, sausages. You name it they had it and so clean and organised. In a safe corner, out of sight, Ianie eats to his heart’s content.

  Ianie continues on his way, up past Don’s Haberdashery. The Don’s son got religion at art school – well, in those days you didn’t get religion at the actual art school although you could now. He must have got it in his spare time. He would say, ‘I am praying for you,’ and you really felt insulted. It was just so rude. All Timaru knew Don’s boy got religion but only Ianie knew about his insulting people by praying for them. Jacqueline Fahey told him, and Ianie liked that: she was dead right. He hoped the boy would get over it, he was such a lovely boy at heart.

  In an important way, being a Catholic had nothing to do with religion, or that’s what Ianie thought. He thought of Faulkner: ‘And so why should not their religion drive them to crucifixion of themselves and of one another…? And they will do it gladly, gladly. Since to pity him would be to admit to self doubt and to hope and need pity themselves. They do
it gladly, gladly. That is what is so terrible. Terrible.’ Ianie, thinking about Faulkner, fears that Calvinist spirit among the people of Timaru. Pleasure and ecstasy they cannot seem to bear. They will also escape into violence, drinking, fighting and praying. Ianie is happy now back in the company of his elitist friends – yes, even Faulkner could be included, although of course he was not a Catholic. He feels safe in their communion of letters. Oh, he cries, I pray to the son of the living God that I shall write a leader pure as water, pure in intent. He will punish their bigotry with a shaft of the truth.

  But how about he should have a drink with Kennedy first? Although Kennedy’s Theatre stands at the wrong end of town, it is truly a gilded palace of entertainment, organised to the point of obsession, spotlessly clean. Mr Kennedy himself is tall and handsome and of such aristocratic good looks that one fears him to be some regal prince in disguise. His manner proud, his glance benevolent. Perhaps he’s hiding out in Timaru until the coup that deposed him is over? His distinctive limp? Maimed in a getaway? A club foot? Never. Wounded the foot in a bloody exit fray. Mr Kennedy personally ushers in the more illustrious members of the community. He is host to the local squires. Mrs Miniver, Goodbye, Mr Chips, The Scarlet Pimpernel, The Count of Monte Cristo: the most select family fare. But Ianie still broods: ‘Help me write the perfect leader, Jesus and Mary. The leader of balance and judgement, educated insight. The leader as a weapon against jingoism. Must get a word with Kennedy before the pictures start.’

  This could have been happening any year for most of the forties. When we were home for the holidays from Teschemakers, when I was home for the holidays from art school. Mum is still in the bath, we girls are still patrolling the beach, and Dad is playing snooker at the club. Lots of times we are off to the pictures again. Learning how to walk and talk from Elizabeth Taylor. Or learning to take ourselves seriously from Joan Crawford. From Mildred Pierce who did the woman sacrificing herself for her man. But didn’t they all? Mum so extolled Greta Garbo that she seemed totally out of reach. Only Timaru’s lovely ash-blonde Ann Gabities dared to emulate her, and believe me that brought her nothing but trouble. But Garbo was only a rumour by the forties, and we made do with Marlene Dietrich. I could do a pretty good imitation of her singing; I also rather fancied myself as Judy Garland, and tried Lena Horne too. I was very keen on singing. But the big lesson to be learnt from going to the films wasn’t how to be a torch singer but how to give up one’s self-worth. That lesson was driven home again and again. The two lovely talented girls from the sticks hit town. They work so hard; they network, get into trouble and then comes the crunch. The big time can be theirs. The hard, ambitious girl grabs her fate and her fortune, but the lovely, good girl follows her heart. She gets back on that bus heading home to her small-town sweetheart and domestic bliss. We didn’t need the nuns to press home the message of domestic servitude: Hollywood had taken up the cause.

  His Majesty’s was on the hill, Caroline Bay just over the hill, but the crowd in town were more properly attired. You did not wear beach attire in town if you were properly brought up, and certainly not for Friday night shopping – a big family occasion. There, dimly perceived on the perimeter, were Marlon Brando-type motorbike riders, milk-bar cowboys. The Fahey girls recognise some of them. They are Catholic boys, and their mother is widowed and a truly saintly woman. She runs a boarding house and raises those four boys on her own. They are somehow embarrassing for Timaru, those boys, for they are excruciatingly good-looking. All of them close together in age, just like the Fahey girls. In a glance there is an honest but immediately suppressed bodily need, an acute awareness of a hopeless unsuitability, yet there remain those electric glances as the boys rev their motorbikes and skilfully, recklessly take off up the main street. Jacqueline thinks of a poem: ‘Shame on my thoughts, How they stray from me. I fear great danger from it on the day of eternal doom.’

  But we girls are protected in thick cotton Horrocks dresses, clean shiny straight black hair and white skin, red lipstick and pearly teeth. We are also involved in an unpractical striving towards a utopia of justice. Brooding on Oscar Wilde’s sayings, conversations with Rebecca West, the Brontë sisters. All sisters under the skin. All it will take is understanding and truly caring. Those boys know different. It isn’t going anywhere.

  The girls make their way up the street while Cecil moves on to have a word with Kennedy before the film starts. Cecil Fahey gets there first, and says in an easy way, just as Ian walks in, ‘Come on, Kennedy, they don’t want the flock educated, you have to know that. That way they may lose control. Keep them poor, humble and stupid, waiting for life ever after. It’s a big con, while they forgive the rich and the powerful so long as they pay up. Sin themselves silly, murder and steal, marry who you like. The innocent pleasures of the rich.’

  Ianie is jovial. ‘Off that hobbyhorse, Cecil. What about this news. This Suez thing!’

  Kennedy says, ‘It’s amazing the reaction. What are they so surprised about? What’s so surprising? So Jews want to be Jews and feel good about themselves, and Egyptians want to be Egyptians.’

  ‘No!’ Cecil says. ‘Divide and conquer. They are interfering in the game. It is not to be, you know that. Why fight yourself when you can get them to fight each other for you? They won’t allow them to unite.’

  ‘A quick snifter, Cecil?’ says Kennedy.

  Cecil looks at his watch. ‘Meeting the girls in the foyer. Sorry, another time.’

  Ian, however, accepts his drink while saying, ‘With Cecil it’s that James Joyce thing. I will not serve. But the church says you gain grace by serving.’

  ‘Well, who are the lucky people who are going to get served, Donnelly?’ But Kennedy asks this question in an indifferent sort of a way as if he is thinking of something else, and so indeed he is. He says, ‘I would only say this to you, Donnelly, but it pays to know what side you’re on. Trouble with Fahey, he thinks there is a civilised place out there somewhere. All right, so he is accepted into the club, but you know the joke and that one hasn’t gone away. Would you want your daughter to marry one of them? He just hasn’t got the time of day. A good Catholic mother and father wouldn’t look at a Fahey girl as a suitable wife for their son. Those girls have some pretty radical ideas, and the same goes for the Protestant mummies and daddies. They would say, “You will end up, you foolish boy, with ten children and having priests and bishops for dinner every night.”’

  Ian says, ‘Now come on, don’t people fall in love, Kennedy?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t say that they won’t marry, just that they are doomed. They will have to make all the adjustments themselves, whoever they marry.’

  Ian broods. There are things he knows about Kennedy. Kennedy opening the first picture theatre in Timaru – this very theatre they are now in. Margaret Fahey played for the silent movies all during the First World War and Kennedy was her most loving and trusted guardian. When his picture theatre closed, Kennedy saw to it that Margaret always got safely home. Well, nearly always. There was an occasion, just before Cecil Fahey went off to the war, when Kennedy felt he failed in his duty to Margaret. Cecil Fahey turned up with his sister and, against his better instincts, he allowed that they accompany Margaret home. When he heard how very late she was getting home he felt resentful. Ianie suspects he still does.

  But here come the Fahey girls again, off to the pictures. Sweet-smelling skin, like flowers. Pristine girls. Draped around each other’s necks, entwined, slim, long waists, bright child-like voices. They are such melodious bleaters. ‘You are Natasha on the night of the ball,’ and then, ‘Oh Barbie, if only I had your milky skin so pure and clear. You look quite perfect. You are perfect.’ Cecil, the eldest, a little apart, taller, proud and classical. Not in a Horrocks dress but a mild floral skirt, a ‘family at war’ skirt, and a three-quarter-length coat where her long hands uneasily finger that truncated length. Where did it go? Was it wise? Is it too dashing, or is it common? Should she put her gloves on or take them off? On, po
ssibly too prim. Off, too lax? Eyes flash uneasily.

  Off to the pictures. ‘God Save the King’ and everyone stands for England and the British Empire. Daddy says, ‘England no longer rules the world.’ Mr Kennedy says, ‘America rules the world. Look how fast they got those bridges up across the Rhine.’

  Daddy is still Daddy while they’re at the pictures, but by the time they emerge out into the foyer, by the time Terry, Barbie, Mummy, Daddy, Cecil and Jacqueline emerge out of the hot, smelly dark, he will be the Dude. Daddy is reinterpreted. The Dude Goes West has done it for the girls. It is all so funny, absolutely hilarious. Ha! Ha! Ha! Daddy’s not a cowboy. He doesn’t fit in. He’s the Dude. He strikes a pose in cowboy town. He’s an alien, just like Bob Hope out west. Everyone sees it but pretends they don’t notice. Those expensive polished shoes, tailor-made suit, quality shirts and, most of all, practised manner: it’s a disguise.

  He stayed the Dude, our daddy, softened sometimes to Dudie on fun days. Humanising Daddy. Getting an angle on Dudie, a playful, taking-the-mickey angle. Ha, ha, ha, it’s just a joke. We love you really, Dudie.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Exit from Christchurch

  At the art school I was a victim of impulse, never consistent. Staring down into the past, I only catch glimpses of any sort of authentic reflection of myself at that time.

  Those impulses I was a victim of were often contradictory and played out without any awareness of other people. I had just turned sixteen, was an oversensitive and immature teenager, when I went to Bishop Julius. Quite often I hovered perilously close to expulsion, and then behaved like a Victorian heroine unjustly accused of adultery.

  Whatever was I doing to provoke expulsion? Irritating the hell out of people? I think so. In the life room and the landscape morning classes Russell Clark kept me concentrating on my work, but for the rest I was not able to control those impulses. There were in the painting department quite clear-cut groups. The Christchurch private school girls or women made up the largest number. There were a few returned servicemen, then the boys from small-town high schools, a few dribs and drabs like myself, and Jeremy Hope, a Christ’s College boy from a North Island estate. There was one Maori guy, charming and gay, I think – the Christchurch women called him Prince. Was that some sort of patronising joke or was that his real name? I don’t know.

 

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