Something for the Birds

by Fahey, Jacqueline

  … Flu gone thank heaven, am feeling much better. Would be wonderful if you had that job. John Weston is a cousin of a great friend of mine from my university days. Shealaugh Weston, he’s at the Christchurch Public Hospital. Ran into him in Christchurch and he wanted to know if you knew John his cousin, isn’t that an amazing coincidence. Darling I am pleased I am coming up as I rather suspect you are up to your old tricks. That depression is creeping into your letters again, are you fighting with your mother? I rather suspect it. It is foolish to have been depressed about no letters from me, you knew that I had the flu and the flu made my eyes so sore and watery, I do hope you don’t get it. Do be careful. My darling, be a good cheerful chap, do not fall into those depressions that beset you.

  Love Jack.

  We had plans, it seems, for what we would do when we got married:

  … I will try to do something in the afternoon darling and paint at night so you could swot at night. Then we would both be working at what is important to us together. At least honey I could try to cover the cost of the food that we are eating. I so loved you being here, I must come up to Wellington once before the wedding. I am so happy about it. Darling must go.

  Love Jack.

  PS: Darling, now everything has changed again. The Dude suddenly insists on Wellington because the numbers here already are getting so high which is awful. Just don’t say anything until we decide but in Wellington we could have fewer people from Timaru which would be marvellous. As you know I do not want a big wedding. Have you ever known such people for changing their minds?

  Love Jack.

  There’s something about how I am having dinner again the next night with the Turnbulls who are very sweet, and will get the address for Marshal, Fraser’s friend at the hospital. I am collecting the wedding dress the next day, and that will make me feel very real about the whole thing. I go on:

  … Wrote all my thank you letters today and Barbie is so thrilled about her bridesmaid’s dress. We tried it on her and she looked quite lovely. It is a little bit big but it can be fixed. Am so pleased you did not go on that retreat. I think it is altogether wrong for a whole lot of men to go off together. I don’t like it when they go off together on hunting trips. Men should be able to bring their wives or girlfriends with them. They should want to bring them with them. It’s ookey! It helps to separate men and women. However I will not rave on about this any longer as I know you could find it peculiarly irritating.

  Mrs Meehan put on a really amazing soiree for me. It was such fun and everybody came. Miss Dickey, you know the headmistress from the High School, and Ian Donnelly, our darling Ianie, were there and were so sweet. Ian farewelled me in the most loving manner and I replied. I was really pleased with myself, I managed to do it without being self conscious and silly.

  Ormond has refused his invitation which is, I suppose, a very good thing but I must say you really have no right to feel jealous about Ormond. It’s true I did like him a whole lot, and I found it very painful to hurt his feelings. Anyway Fraser, what about Jean, you expected me on my first date to go with you and with her to the pictures. Whatever were you thinking about? I do realise you didn’t love her but she certainly had you behaving as guilty as hell about her. I’m also amazed that you would even listen to what she has to say about me. Of course she has to be very jealous of me, she is in love with you Fraser, so have some common sense.

  I ended that letter in a more conciliatory mood, but I must say I am surprised at how stroppy I was.

  There is a curious bit in another of my letters, something I had forgotten. It begins like this:

  I am all tearful about what I take to be your last will and testament.

  But from there I go on to say:

  … I hope before our wedding, or after our wedding, you are not contemplating anything gruesome like locking yourself and your mother in the garage, blocking up any airholes and turning on the engine. It is too awful for you, I know that your mother is so possessive of you but don’t forget that she nearly lost you. If you must marry, she would much prefer a rich motherly nurse. An opinionated painter is not what anybody, any mother, has in mind for her son.

  There are other people you can talk to, remember that. At least you see someone every day. I am locked up with mummy and the Dude. Just as I write that, the doorbell rang, and mummy saw shadowed in the glass two nuns. They are now in the drawing room and I am hiding in the dining room. It’s all your fault for being such a lovely Catholic boy and a doctor to boot. This visitation makes me remember something but it is a big secret. It seems that the Father Murphy who tried to ruin Dudie here acted out of fear. After the war, on that dreadful troop ship returning to New Zealand, Father Murphy accosted the Dude, presented himself as a lover. Dude repulsed him with rather excessive loathing, I gather, and that fellow, fearing Dude would expose him, got in first. Weird isn’t it that he should have been appointed to Timaru. No wonder the Dude is suspicious of the clergy here. The tradition to condemn the Dude was handed down. Dude has never told a soul about the incident until now. When Murphy left Timaru he turned up in the Dude’s rooms blubbering on his shoulder and begging publicly for forgiveness. The whole episode was too ghastly for words.

  It seems the nuns came for money. It is no fault of theirs that he has got any money at all to give them. Even now he has hardly one catholic patient but every week they are around here demanding money. Look I needed to tell you that, to point out that the church expelled the Dude, he did not expel the church. Murphy actually denounced him from the pulpit. The very fact that he bought a Catholic practice is proof that my father was fully of good intentions.

  I know that you would ask me not to confuse the personal with the spiritual base. But it’s more than that. I don’t want to put my signature to the decisions that the catholic church makes. I don’t want to join anything in fact. The Anglican church wallows in hypocrisy and the Protestants believe success is proof of virtue. I so prefer St Francis embracing a leper. Anyway, as I say I don’t have to make any choices, do I?

  After that outpouring I must ask you to tell me how you really are. Don’t be put off by the fear of upsetting me and I will try very hard just to listen, and not give you advice.

  Moving on to another letter, I find something else that is of real interest to me. After an introduction all to do with giving people presents and receiving presents I say:

  I am going to Dunedin to Dr Walsh in two weeks time to have my jaw x-rayed as it is quite acute at the moment. We would love to be rid of my final ailment as otherwise I am so very well. It is like something apart from my general health, like toothache except that it isn’t, or headaches.

  So my preoccupation with my jaw, teeth, sinus, whatever, was as acute then as it has been for me later in life. Well, as Fraser said, it can’t be a killer if I’m not dead yet.

  A letter a few days later begins with my eldest sister Cecil and Dennis, her husband, apparently having Fraser’s brother Murray to dinner at a pub in Rotorua. They liked him very much, but Cecil preferred what she called the ‘rougher diamond’. I continue:

  … Darling, that’s why I was determined on a small wedding so that the emphasis could be on us going away together not on the wedding. I do not think that we will have an anticlimax but let’s have hardly anything to drink at the reception and then bring some champers with us when we leave. Then we can have our party together. Honey could you write to Cecil and Dennis and so will I, telling them that because Cecil is less than 8 months pregnant is no reason for not coming to our wedding. They will need a break by then and can bring Claire with them. Lots of people still go to things at that stage. She missed Barbie’s wedding, a shame if she also misses ours. Nearly put mine, then remembered that you will be there too.

  I then go on to talk about Dr Hawse’s party:

  … Dr Hawse’s party was the greatest fun with the best and nicest medico’s there, all the best in Timaru. I really enjoyed it, so also did mummy and Dude. Dr Sutherland, you remem
ber the Professor of Medicine from Dunedin, he was there as guest of honour. He said he had not realised you were engaged to me. He said yes, I had picked a winner. Asked then if I had picked you or you picked me. He also said that going into chest was a bit of a dead-end these days and that what you must do is go overseas. Seemed to like you very much. Mummy and Dude had such a good time.

  Wonderful news, Hawes says I am clear. Have to have another test in a month but he says it all looks very good indeed.

  Pleased you’re marrying a healthy girl? Isn’t it marvellous. Have still a bit of a pain in my back at times but no doubt that will go. My honey, my dearest darling don’t be sad it’s only a wee while now. Must go and make my bed, to lie in, of course by myself.

  Love Jack.

  Dear Fraser

  Darling when I think how barbaric I am, I feel you are overestimating the control I have over myself. Think of how much I make an issue of my dislikes, once I had Dorothy taped, Dorothy in the flat, I was incapable of hiding my feelings …

  Darling it doesn’t matter if we don’t have a bean. I will get a job in the afternoons, or do drawing classes at night. I know that we will both work hard but anyway we can talk about our plans for the future when I see you. Darling I think that is why I am not so keen on the catholic religion, something to do with your mother’s mindset. For it presumes life on earth is a valley of tears, that our bodies are an old suit of clothes the soul throws off at death and that we struggle against misery and in the end we must be overcome by it. The cheek of Marg telling me that I could not face the blows of life (this was apropos of my missing that scholarship) because I had no religion to sustain me. I feel the adjustments you make with reality, the better ones, and accepting the responsibility for what happens to yourself rather than to fly to God to help you, this is, to my mind, a form of self pity. If God were a human how fed up he would get. The church seems to suggest you grapple your troubles and ailments to your breast and cherish them, instead of taking no notice of them. Pain cancels out sin, so you wallow in the pain. Bearing with fortitude is all very fine but perhaps the old English thinking always being fine and completely accepting, is part of normal happy living, the trials of life are at least happier that way. Anyway darling must go.

  Love Jack.

  I found three rather chewed pieces of notepaper, Wellington Hospital notepaper. I believe this must be the letter Fraser told me he couldn’t send to me because it was too silly. Reading it, I am very glad he didn’t send it. I understood that he did not like my short haircut or the perm I had when we married, but I had not understood what a trauma it had caused him. The letter is like an agonised examination of his conscience. It goes something like:

  What do you mean when you say you love Jack? Surely it means you are to be automatically happy if she is, and because she is, what does it matter what her hair looks like. It was only that you thought she was being independent, that she hadn’t always asked you first if she could cut off her hair. Looking for trouble like you always look for it. The way you look for insults, and interfering in every remark of mum’s, and react selfishly. How it reduces you, how it makes you so much less, diminishes you, you react, you must use this as practice for giving up your own desires for Jack’s. Remember this night about her hair. Slow at first, you were in that self-pitying mood, wallowing in the fact that you were ineffective with a bad temper (and loving your bad temper) and Mum spouted for hours about how she was sure it would all fail and Jack was a snob and not as good as Marie, and you would have to be a brilliant paediatrician with pots of dough to hold onto her, that you knew it was an impossible love. And then Jack came onto the phone only wanting some support from you. She wanted you to say that she would look lovely no matter what her hair was like, even if it was all shaved off, that’s all she wanted. But no, all you could do in a complaining whining voice was tell her how badly you felt. ‘Oh darling you know how I loved your hair, long shiny and black.’ And she said eagerly, hopefully, ‘But darling it makes me look much more conventional and beautiful and younger,’ hoping you would say anything to help her in her new insecurity, but oh no you said poutingly, simperingly, ‘But I don’t want you to look conventional. Hell and as for looking younger, that will make you about 10 years old.’ So cruel and selfish and very non-loving, you are a bastard, and it’s your worst fault.

  Yes, I must say I am glad he didn’t send it to me. I wouldn’t really have wanted to know how much both his mother and his sister didn’t really want him to marry me.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Party in a Submarine

  Writing to Fraser from Timaru in the months before our marriage I mentioned meeting Liffy Page and her mother when I was visiting Christchurch. They had told me that a friend of theirs was interested in Crawford’s job. That same Crawford whom I had stupidly stood up. I must have suspected that Fraser was applying for that position because I was very cautious with them. Fraser was, in fact, chosen for the job, and he was also granted the flat in the superintendent’s house. Immediately after we were married, we moved in. For three months we lived in wedded bliss, and then in quick order Fraser’s mother died and his tuberculosis returned. Our brief pretence at leading normal lives was over.

  Living in our imagination, time is elastic. Three months can occupy the space of a year, and a year may shoot by hardly noticed. I find it so hard to believe that the time together in the superintendent’s house at the Wellington Hospital was only three months – though I did continue to live there for another two months before I was ejected.

  There are fragments that break away from the forgotten bulk of that past. Small, meaningful bits that suddenly shoot to the surface of my consciousness. Fraser and I booking a passage on a freighter to England, Fraser as ship’s doctor and, yes, they said they would find something for me to do. We would sail at the end of 1956 when Fraser finished his year as Registrar at Wellington Hospital. I would become a famous painter; he would win a scholarship and study paediatrics at the London School of Medicine. We touched each other in excitement at the very idea of such a magic escape. We were, of course, both suffering from my father’s delusion that there was, out there, some rational oasis, free of bigotry, spreading enlightenment. We never even started to get there anyhow. In our third month of marriage Fraser lost weight, had trouble breathing and we could no longer put off the inevitable. His tuberculosis had reactivated.

  A few weeks before Fraser went back into hospital his mother died very suddenly. That was an awful confusing time of families, grief and guilt. Fraser’s mother, always known as Nell, was a remarkable woman. After her husband died she kept Fraser at university in Dunedin, and she supported Murray, his younger brother, through medicine too. She had an excellent position in the Correspondence School and she often spoke on radio. She had quite a following, for her voice was charming, persuasive and yet somehow full of authority. She was, however, a woman of power and instinct, and she would never deny that instinct. Her gut feeling told her I was wrong for her son, and as things were panning out I wasn’t looking good for him. I couldn’t help having a sense of relief that she wasn’t there to say, ‘I told you so.’

  Olga, my darling corgi, also overloads that time span, stretching it to the limit. Olga was a child of scandal. Just before Fraser and I moved into the flat in the superintendent’s house it erupted, the scandal in the paper. Dr Durand and Mrs Durand, superintendent and wife, had a corgi bitch. She was pregnant. The trouble was getting her puppies out and it wasn’t happening. Dr Durand performed a Caesarean on his darling dog in the operating room in the maternity ward of the public hospital. All puppies were born, three lived, and Olga was the runt of the litter. The scandal raved on in the newspapers in Wellington for days: filthy curs; nurses coerced into delivering animals in our hospital ward where human babies were born; Welsh cattle dog pampered while human babies die of neglect! Then the defence came: Dr Durand, hero of the Blitz, decorated and honoured, physician to the Queen. The Queen who, in gratitude for
his gallantry and for his bedside manner, presented him with one of her very own corgis.

  I myself treated Olga like royalty. She was a clear case of baby substitute and she went everywhere with me. However, my total indulgence nearly had her put down. Outside our garden were the hospital gardens which included a pretty, tree-lined path. This path ran between the nurses’ home and the hospital. The nurses’ smart-moving ankles excited in Olga ancient instincts: herding cattle in the Welsh hills, nipping hooves, nasty nerve-wrenching yelps. It all surfaced at the sight of the young women’s feet and ankles clipping along the path. It seemed that Olga went off to work when Fraser went to work. She had found her vocation, and we had no idea what she was up to until the matron visited me. She explained that if Olga kept up her harassment of the nurses, then she would be put down.

  The result was that for the first and last time in my life I hit another living creature. The next morning Olga and I left for her workplace together. When we got to her hiding place, I attached her lead to her collar, then we hid in the bushes beside the footpath and waited. Olga, hearing her first victim approaching, was wild with excitement. I lifted the end of the lead, and as Olga leapt forward I gave her a sharp crack across her rump. This actually went on for half an hour, and continued for half an hour for the next four days. On the fifth day Olga decided to find some other occupation. As a reward I took her for a long walk in the trees that lay between the hospital gardens and the Governor-General’s house. I didn’t know then that Olga’s true love lived in the Governor-General’s house. It was there Olga later found another as well bred as herself and had all her dreams come true.