Loving Ways

by Gee, Maurice

  Then he was on his route: Stoke, Richmond, Appleby, the river, the hills. The changes brought an unreality – the roads too smooth, the trees too regulated. Corners were rubbed out and hills reduced. New yellow cuttings were sliced like cake. He did not like it but could not feel that outrage was justified. This had ceased to be his place many years ago. Yet the changes put a warp and side-slipping on his approach.

  He passed the Mapua school, where because of his size and quickness he had been boss in standard six. The building he had sat in through those years was still there. It seemed like a door he might walk through into a familiar ordered room. He said the headmaster’s name and the name of his best friend – who had not stayed his best friend at Nelson College. There cleverness counted: he had stepped up a level. It had been a natural movement, like stepping up to Duntroon after that, and then to his life in the army. It was a long way back to this place, it was going deep down, and no, the room could not be familiar or ordered. The years had turned things on their base and made his orientation wrong.

  Past the Ruby Bay store he turned on to the grass and walked for half an hour on the beach, going back towards Mapua and the estuary – reversing, he thought, his approach. But he had the right, didn’t he, perhaps he had the duty, if he was to be of any use, to get himself set, to get his stance right? There was no point in going in otherwise.

  He walked on sliding pebbles above sundried kelp and mussel shells and plastic bottles labelled in Japanese, until a curve showed him the inlet mouth and the five-mile beach on Rabbit Island running away. Nelson was beyond, across the sea, like a settlement on the edge of a new continent. It made him want the north, his job and house, Devonport village, and the high-rise city just a ferry ride away. The emptiness of land and sea here made him uneasy. Then he saw a naked man and woman lying on striped towels, and for a moment seemed to be back in his dream. But they were sunning, not copulating – and others, naked too, walked on the sand or swam in the sea. It must be a nudist club. Had he missed a warning notice? He turned back, embarrassed. Too many changes; too much dislocation. He walked a hundred metres and glanced back to make sure they were out of sight. Then he sat down with his back against a log stripped by the sea and waited until his mind was calm; and he asked again for clearness of sight and usefulness in the situation he was soon to find himself in, and peace and happiness for his father and his sister and his brother, even though he did not know who they might be.

  He was born in Auckland and lived there until he was seven. The 1940s town will not overlap with the city of today but stays off to one side and floats above the ground, not like a cloud or a magic carpet but like a tray on a waiter’s hand. Alan might fall off the edge if he steps too far, and come to earth not in the metropolis of the nineties but in the yard of the house set amongst apple trees above Ruby Bay. When he and his father left Auckland and travelled there, they seemed to swerve and tumble down the roads. Twice Alan had to leave the car and be sick, and he remembers better than main streets and rivers and bridges the coarse grass at the roadside and a black beetle drowning in his vomit. He remembers a broken gate at the end, and a leaning porch, and his father cursing a key that will not turn. A black and white cat bolts under the house. ‘There’s your bed. You’d better go to sleep,’ his father said, and Alan pulled used blankets over himself and listened to rain on the iron roof and cried a moment, silently, from loneliness. He was frightened of the dark, and of his father stepping on boards in another room, and the new school he would go to tomorrow. He tried to remember his mother but no face came, although perhaps it floated up when he was going to sleep and no longer trying.

  She had been dead only a month. When he was ten or twelve and prone to think of her idealistically, he decided that her death was self-willed, even though his father said TB was the cause. (She lay on a bed and told Alan she was sorry to leave him. That is no memory, although it’s hard to tell now, but something manufactured for himself.) He blamed her sometimes, but understood why she had to go, and when he was older and tougher was able to say, ‘Good on you, Mum.’ By that time he had learned how to hold his father off. He put a shell over himself – sometimes touched his skin and felt it hard – and words and looks and judgements bounced away. Robert Macpherson came at him with a leather belt but the boy let it wrap around his arm and held on. He raised his right hand against his father’s left and showed his fist. ‘You hit me, Dad, and I’ll hit you.’ After that there were only words, but words slid off. And there was, strangely, a kind of affection. He ignored it. When he was ready he would do what his mother had done – step out the door and not come back.

  May and David troubled him. He suffered bouts of fondness and guilt. They took hidings that were meant for him. He might have protected them, and would have been able when he was in his mid-teens and taller than his father and just as strong, but was frightened of the increase in affection it might bring – his father’s for him and his for the children. It was safer to walk away. The hidings did not seem, anyway, as severe as those Robert Macpherson had given him. The orchard was doing well. And his wife, Judith, took an edge off him in the house.

  Alan worked in the orchard, pruning, thinning, grafting. He learned to drive the tractor and the car, and watched while his father drained the oil and changed the plugs and soon learned to do those things himself. He never had pay, only pocket money – did not ask for pay. He wanted no stake in the orchard but was seeing out his time; was paying, so he worked it out, for the freedom he would have in a year or two – freedom from these people and this place.

  But May – May and David – troubled him. He barely remembered May’s mother: she was there and gone. She baked bread, she made stews, and she shouted once, ‘Tell him. Go on, tell him about us.’ Alan did not need to be told. He knew where she slept, he heard the bed – and he saw her departure as a slinking off, not the exit his mother had made. He did not miss her cooking or her presence because in a few days his stepmother took possession of the kitchen and the bed.

  May was the elder by seven months but David was first to arrive. His mother loved him as well as she was able, for Robert Macpherson did not believe in love – in touching, in kissing, in words of endearment. He would not allow the existence of feelings he did not have. She hugged her son when they were alone, and did not mind if Alan came on them embracing, but she pushed the child off and faced away when she heard her husband walk into the house. She ran into the apple trees when Robert Macpherson whipped the boy and later on she bathed the welts raised by the strap on his legs. Robert did not mind that: it gave him, Alan saw, a kind of satisfaction.

  No one bathed or hugged May, even on the night when she arrived at the orchard. The stepmother stood her naked in a basin on the lino and washed her down with a soapy cloth. She fed her and instructed her, not unkindly. ‘Find a name for her,’ Robert Macpherson said, and the woman answered timidly, ‘May is nice and short.’ ‘It’ll do,’ Robert said. ‘You’re May now, girl, does everybody hear? That other thing is out the door.’ Alan does not know if the new name was made legal. ‘That other thing’, he remembers, was Clare. It would not have suited the slow dim child with the fat legs. ‘May’, he sees now, was little better.

  When he found the word ‘sibling’, he was able to put ‘sister’ and ‘brother’ aside. Their connection with him was through the father, and sibling, new and ugly, fitted that. It placed them in a hole: May in her dress with the colour washed out, and her runny nose and her teeth black-filled, and David with his stained face and – so it always seemed – his runny nose too. They had nothing to do with him on his steady course. Nor did his stepmother, more and more in her room, and scarcely able to lift her hand from some weakness in her blood. He heard medical names and forgot them; he would not know her disease. His own health depended on his singleness of mind.

  He played three years at fullback in the school first fifteen – liked the solitariness and the catching and long kicking and the knowledge that never failed
him of the angle for the tackle and for touch. He scored in the final against Christ’s, coming up from nowhere outside his wing and rounding the opposition fullback easily. His father drove in for the match and stood on the windy hill with his collar up and his hat pulled low: solitary too. Alan felt no kinship with him. On the drive home he said, ‘An army recruiting officer came round last week.’

  ‘Yes?’ Robert Macpherson said.

  ‘I’m going to Duntroon. It won’t cost you anything.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘Four years.’

  ‘I suppose I have to sign something, do I?’

  Alan saw that he was pleased. By accident he had chosen a course his father approved of. He would have liked to say that he was going into the army so that he need never come home, but that might make it harder getting away – and it was not the only reason. He had risen quickly in the school cadets – again without trying. He enjoyed seeing things done by rule. Lines were laid down and you walked on them. He found an excitement in that, in finding a way that was straight. And he liked the special knowledge of command, and its formality: closeness was there but nothing personal. Adventure, which the recruiting officer had stressed, made little attraction. He saw it as something he would bring in control – enjoy in a military way.

  ‘You can get killed in the army,’ his father said.

  ‘You can get killed anywhere. Anyway, I’m going.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘In the new year.’

  ‘If you get in.’

  ‘I’ll get in.’

  May got ringworm just before he left. He kept even further away from her. He was not taking ringworm to Duntroon.

  ‘It’s that cat she’s feeding,’ Robert Macpherson said. ‘You’d better take the gun and shoot it, Alan.’

  ‘Not me.’

  ‘Scared of guns are you, Mister Soldier?’

  ‘You shoot it. It’s got nothing to do with me.’

  Robert Macpherson took David with him to the pickers’ hut. He showed him how to load and aim the .22. Then he made May put mincemeat in the cat’s plate. He sent her away and lay down in the grass with David. It was the first time Alan had seen him do anything with the boy. When the cat came out from under the hut David shot it. The bullet smashed its hindquarters and the cat thrashed on the ground, fighting itself. Robert Macpherson ran up and stamped on its neck. He let David shoot another bullet into its head, then made him dig a hole and bury it. Alan saw how pleased the boy was but could not tell whether it came from his father’s approval or the killing.

  When he left on the bus next day he put them out of his mind – his father shaking hands and giving him a pound note folded to the size of a penny stamp, his stepmother in hospital, David gleaming in his eye from yesterday’s murder, and May slinking in the trees to watch him drive away. He felt the miles lengthening behind him. The road ahead unrolled like a tape and he could travel on it but they could not. He crossed the strait and went by train to Auckland and got on a plane at Whenuapai. It took only a moment to break out over the west coast beaches. In six hours flying they reached Sydney. The Tasman Sea stood behind him like a wall.

  He could not make it lie flat until, four years later, as Lieutenant Macpherson, he made the flight in reverse, and the train ride and the ferry, to Burnham Depot, outside Christchurch. He did not need roads unrolling or seas as barriers after that. He had turned in a spiral not a circle, and although he was close again was further away. If he thought of them at all – May and his father and David – they were as flat as paper, they lay like photographs on a page, and he turned them and forgot; or they were like cut grass lying on its side. There was nothing to keep him; and although he knew you did not get rid of the past, he had secured his a long way off. As for the continuity, that would not break, he turned in the spiral, turned again, through the years, and the stretching out of time made far-off things grow thin.

  So he went on. In the chronology he sometimes makes, he is on patrol with his platoon in Sarawak, checking for Indonesian infiltration. There is danger but the Ghurkas next door see all the action. Then he is a captain at Narrow Neck, where he learns Auckland and the pleasure of sailing small boats. Then company second-in-command in Vietnam, an Anzac battalion – feels professional, keeps a critical eye on the Aussie talent spread too thin. It is quiet at Nui Dat. He would like more action and feels less in danger than in Sarawak. Waiouru then; and the even staircase of promotion after that: a staff job in Wellington, Major Macpherson in Army Plans; Queenscliff, in Victoria, the Staff College; senior major, brigade major, middle command, but again no action, and no real soldiers here, territorials. He is commandant, Army Schools, Waiouru – lieutenant-colonel. Then desk in Wellington, Defence HQ, where blue fights light blue and green fights both of them. He tires of it. One day he will make full colonel, and maybe brigadier after that. But being single is a disadvantage. And he has never had a battalion, that counts too. So Alan Macpherson retires from the army and takes his pension. He steps out into the world with little knowledge of it; and finds himself poor in all sorts of ways.

  There is no chronology for his years from thirty-nine to fifty-four. He finds a job but finds no wife. Phoebe occurs like a storm, and then is gone, leaving ruin in her wake. He rebuilds, but cannot make a safe dwelling without Christ. That incoming is no blinding light; he feels his way, then he thinks it out – and seems to think himself out of it several times, but is drawn back. In the end he has faith, it lies beyond question, although all around it questions never stop. There is so much in religion he can’t be sure of and doesn’t like, but doubt exists to one side of the Son, the Man of perfect goodness placed by God on Earth. He needs no other knowledge outside that – but has, of course, knowledge of all sorts.

  Some of it stands in very close. He has always had women and he cannot let them go. But he cannot accept them, after Phoebe. The next woman in his life must come to him across that ruined ground. Nothing can be easy any more, and nothing is for pleasure. (Nothing is for pleasure alone.) He sees her coming, picking her way, but she will not take a face. She must possess his knowledge and that seems impossible.

  He longs to cut through this, to treat it as a military problem. But he has lost certainty in gaining faith. He has lost his old strength: to learn the situation, choose the option, execute. I need to get her out of my head, I need just to bump into her, Alan thinks. He thinks too much. But does not show it. The women who get two or three steps with him, and no more, come to believe he is afraid – of affection, possibly of sex. His life in the army has spoiled him, they believe. They think him, in fact, empty headed, even simple, and do not regret moving on. Some of them stay friends. They are fond of him. He takes them to dinner, in rotation, which they enjoy, although his conversation has no substance and in the end is repetitive. By some trick they can’t understand, he continues to give the impression that he might at any moment spring into action. He is a handsome man too. (They are surprised, in the end, how little that counts for.)

  Family does not come close, even when a knock sounds on the door and his father steps into the house. The old man turns down tea and asks for a beer, and tells Alan he should have stayed in the army and been a general. ‘Haven’t you got a wife?’ he asks. Alan says, ‘No. I’m not a homosexual if that’s what you’re thinking.’ Robert Macpherson makes a sound of disgust and pushes such notions away with a thrust of his hand. He stays only half an hour. Alan drives him to the ferry, and his father passes into a kind of oblivion. He draws away backwards like a spider into its hole and when Alan gets home he is surprised to find a beer can on the table. He crushes it in his hand and drops it in the rubbish.

  Then it is early April 1994. The telephone rings. A woman’s voice says, ‘Am I speaking to Alan Macpherson?’

  ‘Speaking.’

  ‘This is May, from Nelson. I’m ringing for my father.’

  The past comes spinning up and holds him hard.

  He is more and more possessed by it a
s he drives south.

  Ben Alder Orchard. In his day it had been Macpherson’s, but naming was part of marketing now. You had to have something snappy or suggestive, so his father had gone to the book again, and had taken secret pleasure, no doubt, from naming this green lowland place after a bare hill in the Scottish Highlands.

  Alan drove in slowly and parked at the side of the house: a new house, brick veneer, with a concrete patio behind a wrought-iron fence. He was not surprised or sorry to find the old weatherboard, iron-roofed one gone, and he went up the steps, put his hand inside the slider doors and tapped on the glass. The unhurried walking, unhurried knocking, settled him down. ‘Anyone home?’ A breeze was stirring curtains and turning pages of a book left open on the arm of a chair. Whoever was reading it would have lost her place. He stepped inside and stood still, looking for something that might give him bearings. Picture, vase, table, chair? There was nothing. It was not to be expected after so long. Hostile ground, he thought: watch out for the trap. He felt that May might charge at him from a doorway and knock him sideways off his feet. The absurdity of it made him smile. Just take it calm and easy, one thing at a time. He stepped across the room and looked through a door held open by a rubber doorstop.