by Janet Frame
The matter of the dance dress was perhaps the sourest part she had tasted. To be given a long purple lacy dance dress (with some of it more holey than lacy) and not to be allowed to dance in it was like being told that because you had feet you must be crippled, or because you were given eyes you must shut them and never look out at the world.
‘You see,’ Joan was explaining to Emily Gull, ‘Dad said.’
Dad said was always final, could never be argued against or changed.
‘I told him it’s on at the Scottish and Bill Grant will be there, and Nance Murphy and lots of others.’
‘And what did he say to that?’
Joan frowned.
‘He said, Who does Bill Grant think he is?’
‘And who does Bill Grant think he is?’
Joan shrugged a don’t-care shrug,
(Don’t care was made to care,
Don’t care was hung,
Don’t care was put in jail
And made to hold his tongue!)
put her head on one side so that her blonde hair could fall the way she’d practised it to fall, and smiled.
‘Who in the world,’ she said knowingly, ‘does Bill Grant think he is? I’ve no idea. He doesn’t interest me one iota.’
She had caught that word from Dad who made it sound impressive.
‘Not one iota,’ Dad would say.
Before she heard that expression Joan used to say Not a jot, which hadn’t half the power and challenge of an iota.
‘I suppose you’d better do as he says and not go to the dance,’ Emily Gull said mildly, while I marvelled at the calm way Joan accepted from her almost the same words that, spoken by Mum or Dad, would have sent her into a rage. Perhaps when parents said anything to their children they always wrapped up the words in something else that could be felt but not seen?
‘Do as he says and don’t go.’
If Mum had said that it would have had Joan in tears with Why, why if so-and-so can go why can’t I?
Dad’s answer to that was always,
‘If I put my hand in the fire do I expect you to put your hand in too?’
But Dad had never put his hand in the fire. He was careful not to when he was shovelling on the coal.
‘I would any other time,’ Joan said obediently to Emily Gull. ‘But there’s the dance dress all ready to wear. I might have to wait years if I don’t go on Friday night. I might even die before I can wear it. And that will serve Mum and Dad right!’
Emily Gull said nothing. We knew she was thinking hard, on our side.
‘I’m flummoxed, stumped, bamboozled.’
We were, too.
‘He said he’d lock me in the bedroom to stop me from going.’
‘Where’s your dress?’
‘He can’t get that from me. I’ve hidden it.’
‘Where?’
Joan burst into tears, though why she should cry now I didn’t know, and when she spoke she sounded small and strange as if she lived in a fairytale.
‘I’ve hidden it in a . . . a . . . a hollow tree!’
Surely there were no hollow trees in real life! I’d spent years searching for them and had never found one. The way Joan said ‘hollow tree’ you would have thought she’d hidden something precious there when it was only a purple, lacy, pretty holey too, mind you, dance dress.
‘You mean down in the branches of the pear tree?’ I said smartly. ‘They’re not hollow.’
Joan looked bewildered. ‘It’s sort of hollow. I had to hide it somewhere.’
I was practical.
‘What if it gets wet?’
Emily Gull was practical too. She nodded approval at my question.
‘Well where else could I have hidden it?’
‘In the wardrobe?’
‘Dad would find it.’
‘What about the dance shoes?’
(These had been a gift with the dress.)
‘Everything’s there, in the pear tree.’
I was beginning to feel strange, for I remembered the story where the silver and gold dress had been hidden in the pear tree (or was it a hazel tree) at the bottom of the garden, and though our pear tree was only halfway down the garden it was near enough to make me shiver, with all the stories I knew coming into the shiver, for in fairy stories fathers, and mothers too, roasted their children alive, cut out their tongues, changed them into wild creatures of the woods or — worse — into stones that could not move. Imagine if you were a stone trying to drag your heavy body even a fraction of an inch! The earth would cling to you to prevent you from moving, and the grass growing up near and sometimes through you would bind you with knots that you could not untie; you would have to squat your life there, heavy, the colour of thunder, with your thoughts packed into you, unable to get out, and no ripples going over your grey skin because you were set in the same shape forever!
I woke up.
‘What if it rains?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Joan said. ‘All I know is I want to go to the dance.’
She looked hopefully at Emily Gull.
‘I could run away from home and live at your place?’
‘And I’d be had up for chicken-stealing,’ Emily said, considering the risk and translating it into her own language, as a gypsy would.
After a while when we gave up trying to find a solution we had a slice of Emily Gull’s cake. It had a frothy top, like soapsuds, and it tasted like sweet snow, the kind that crusts the houses — walls and roofs — in stories, and that you could eat at anytime, just break off a piece of windowsill and eat it if you felt hungry; and that was the way, with stories, for if you were in peril of having your tongue cut out or of being left in the woods for the wild beasts to eat, you also had the pleasure of eating sweet windows and walls and shaking from the very tree where you hid your dance dress a heavenly fruit that you never tasted in real life.
Home and everything in it seemed uninteresting after Emily Gull’s place — her cake and her swear words and her bottle of gin and the crowing noises she made when she laughed and the exciting way she listened to everything you said as if she had been waiting all her life, or ever since she got rid of her horrible father and mother, to listen. I could feel my resentment and sense Joan’s when someone — Mum or Dad — said,
‘I hope you haven’t been to that Mrs Gull’s. I’m warning you to keep away from her and the company she keeps.’
Now that was strange, for we were her company, she kept us! I’d seen for myself, hadn’t I, that Emily Gull, the kindest woman in the world, knew what no one at home knew, that if Joan didn’t get to the dance she might die of grief; that to go to the Friday night dance at the Scottish and wear her purple lacy dance dress was Joan’s one and only ambition in life.
Why, I could scarcely believe it when I heard Dad say,
‘You don’t want to go to the dance. You just think you do. You’ll get over it.’
Three lies — one after the other — from our own father, with no contradiction from our mother, made me want to spit on my hands for a blessing and remember again how the parents took their children into the wood to starve and be eaten by wild beasts.
Every night that week Joan brought the dress in from the pear tree and slept with it under the mattress where it was safe and the creases of the day were pressed out of it. While it was in the pear tree she kept it well wrapped to protect it from the rain, but luck or something was with her and the week stayed fine and one morning we woke up and found it was Friday. Now I know that during this time I was going to school each day and perhaps Joan was too but I can’t remember going to school, I remember only the purple lacy dance dress, in and out of the pear tree, and the vision of the bedroom door locked and Joan inside wanting to get out to the dance. Yet I must have spent, even on Friday, the usual six hours at school, beginning with hymns,
We are but little children weak
Nor born in any high estate
and the sad hymn about the ‘green hill�
��
There is a green hill far away
Without a city wall.
Everyone knew what it felt like to be without something, and even a green hill without a city wall must have had its feelings of sadness.
Hymns, observation, sums, composition. Silent Reading and raffia-work (a teapot stand). And after school there were games to be played — hopscotch, baseball, He and She, School, Ranches, Windmills and Sharkie — but that afternoon I did not play games. I could see that Joan had been crying. I wondered if the dance dress was in the pear tree or under the mattress. I wondered if fairy godmothers existed. The nearest to one was Emily Gull and she had advised Joan to do as Dad said! She was on our side, but that was her advice.
Then, because I myself wasn’t interested in dancing I tried to cheer Joan up by saying,
‘What’s an old dance, anyway? Stay home and play with me.’
‘Play with you!’
I deserved it. I was only a child and she was grown-up, and smelt grown-up. Also there was Professor Plot’s Free Book on Dancing that kept arriving in the post and promising a free book on dancing and though it was a free book it kept promising and never telling, unless you spent money — and that wasn’t free! But Joan kept hoping. She was full of hope. She was even hoping she would still be allowed to go to the dance.
We had tea. My mother, trying to make peace, murmured,
‘After all, she was given the dance dress, Curly.’
My father did not relent. Looking up from his meal he spoke a warning to everyone, grown-up or growing up.
‘What I say in this house goes.’
It did, too. There was no further argument. And when after tea my father said sternly to Joan, ‘Into the bedroom,’ and she obeyed, I marvelled that she obeyed until I remembered that it was Mrs Gull, not my father, she was obeying. Mrs Gull had said there was no way out, and Joan had accepted her word. My father locked the bedroom door.
‘That will put an end to the nonsense about going to the dance,’ he said sternly.
I listened. There was no sound from the room. Was the dance dress in the pear tree or under the mattress? Joan couldn’t get out of the window even if she wanted to, for it was stuck with paint and wouldn’t open.
She was very proud! She didn’t bang on the door or kick or scream or shout or plead. I think my father expected her to, for he had a listening look on his face and he was frowning and his eyes looked as if he’d been sent all the bills in the world and couldn’t pay them. She’ll be crying, I thought, to herself. In the silence of the bedroom she seemed to have gone so far away, beyond the bedroom, beyond me and everyone. She seemed to have gone where no one could touch her. To a secret place. I wondered what she was thinking about. I was envious of her thoughts. Was she thinking of Emily Gull? Had Emily Gull given her a magic spell to use? I listened and listened. Outside, the night was stern and dark and the edges of the holly leaves were stiff and sharp as if no wind could ever again shake them this way or that; and the light from the window of the nextdoor house was shining through them, not wavering as light does, but hard and firm like bars of gold set across a window. I grew afraid. There was still no sound from the bedroom. To be locked in and to make no sign that you were locked in meant that you had gone away, though you were still there. I think my father was afraid too. He must have sensed that by locking the door to prevent Joan from going out to the dance he had set her free to go wherever she desired, and he could never again prevent her.
It was a silent gloomy house that evening. At times I thought my father was about to open the door and call out,
‘Go to the dance if you want to, and enjoy yourself into the bargain.’
Into the bargain.
I wondered what would happen if Joan died in the room. I guessed that she might be thinking this too. And then I had proof that she must have been thinking about dying for she began to sing softly one of Emily Gull’s favourite songs that both Mum and Dad had forbidden us to sing.
And when I die (and when I die)
Don’t bury me at all (don’t bury me at all)
Just pickle my bones (just pickle my bones)
in Alco Hall.
I did not think I had heard such a sad song. To lie in Alco Hall when you were dead seemed to me the loneliest fate anyone could choose; and Joan had chosen it. She was grown-up and had chosen it for herself and she was singing about it and it didn’t matter that she had been locked in and was not allowed to go to the dance and wear her purple lacy dance dress. When she died she would not be laid in a grave as Grandma and Grandad and Aunty Molly had been, nor Uncle John who died of typhoid in the war. She was never going to be buried. She would stay, and her bones would stay in Alco Hall. I did not know where Alco Hall might be nor what it might look like and I thought perhaps it was a vast place in the sky with a soaring roof like a railway station and an icy wind blowing, and clouds white as flour and black and shining as silk drifting in and out below the roof. And Joan would be there; but not quite alone, for Emily Gull would be there too when she died; and there might be other people, too, in Alco Hall.
That night when I got into bed beside Joan she was asleep and I could see by the marks on her face that she had been crying, and I looked under my pillow, feeling a bunch in it, and the purple lacy dance dress was there, all crumpled, and I knew she’d been wearing it all the time in the bedroom, and her shoes too, and that when she died she’d not leave her dance dress in the pear tree or under the mattress, she’d take it with her to Alco Hall where there’d be plenty of room for her to dance, knowing how without Professor Plot’s free lessons, up and down beneath the clouds drifting white as flour, black and shining as silk.
University Entrance
In those days when you came home from school you felt unhappy, you didn’t know why. As if all day you had been locked with happy things like school and Miss Heafy reading French poetry or reciting with her grey eyes fixed earnestly on her book, and her voice full of sadness, ‘Once Paumanok, when the lilac-scent was in the air’. As if you had been inside the real world but now, at four-fifteen walking up the path to the funny little house with the rusty roof and the cracked front window, you were being unlocked from all that mattered. Unlocked and made lonely.
You felt lonelier that day in October because Miss Heafy had reminded you about the two guineas. She had been correcting your précis and she had suddenly looked up at you. ‘By the way, Doreen, I don’t think you’ve given me your two guineas. Can you let me have them tomorrow?’ And you had smiled and said carelessly, ‘I’ll bring them tomorrow, Miss Heafy. I forgot all about it.’ And then you had blushed because you hadn’t forgotten about it at all; it was only because you were frightened to ask Dad.
You were still frightened to ask him and as you walked up the path you tried to imagine what you would say.
‘It’s for matric. The entries have to be in by the end of the week. The entry fee’s two guineas, Dad. I promised Miss Heafy I’d bring it tomorrow.’ Dad would be reading his paper or talking politics with Don. He’d say something about bills and you’ll have to wait till the end of the month till I’ve settled with Mason’s and then he’d go on talking about the government and farming and maybe he’d raise his voice if Don didn’t agree with him.
It was silly, you supposed, to be frightened of Dad — who had taken you for picnics when you were small, who had caught butterfish and crabs for you, and let you handle the Greenwell’s Glory and Red-Tipped Governor, and wind his fishing reel and sit in the front of the car; who had sung you to sleep at nights —
Come for a trip in my airship,
Come for a sail midst the stars;
who had brought home coconuts and oranges on Saturday nights and made Santa Claus come twice in one year when you and Don and Susie and Joan had chickenpox. But it was funny about Dad. He shouted at and sometimes struck Don when they argued and he spoke harshly to you and anyway you had always been frightened about money — ever since the time Mr Mason’s bi
ll had been twenty pounds and you told your best friend about it and Dad found out and was angry, you didn’t know why. You had felt proud and awed to have a bill of twenty pounds. Of course it made Mum cry and Dad thump his fist on the table, but hadn’t you and Susie and Joan and Don sworn a secret oath in the bedroom — we’ll be millionaires, see if we don’t?
You didn’t care about money now of course. You were fifteen. You were in love with Miss Heafy and you used notepaper that folded in two, and you read Keats, pretending to be Madeline with Porphyro’s heart on fire for you, and Isabella weeping over her pot of basil, and La Belle Dame Sans Merci, ‘full beautiful — a faery’s child’: you read Shelley too, and Shelley had renounced all worldly wealth, so you didn’t much care about money, except of course about the two guineas and Miss Heafy smiling and saying, ‘Thank you, Doreen,’ as if she had known all along that you would bring them and that you weren’t poor even if you did have to wear your uniform in the weekends.
So you walked into the kitchen that afternoon. Mum was there writing a letter to Aunty Winifred and Gypsy the cat was purring knottily three-threads-in-a-thrum, three-threads-in-a-thrum, under her chair.
‘Well, Dor,’ she said. ‘How did school go today?’ You wanted to say, ‘Mum, Miss Heafy’s awfully nice. I love her smile. She read us “Once Paumanok”, and “Dans le Nord . . . est arrivée une petite créole”. And she gave me Very Good for my paraphrase,’ but because you were thinking of the two guineas you said abruptly, ‘School’s okay, Mum. Where’s Susie?’ And then Don and Susie came in and Don started talking about the freezing works and the foundry and the war news, and everybody seemed to be talking at once, but you sat, not speaking because you were thinking about the two guineas and what you would say to Dad.
‘I specially promised Miss Heafy. May I, Dad?’ And Dad would say, ‘You’ll have to wait till the end of the month, Dor.’ And you would say, ‘All right’ and then go into your bedroom and Mum would half-open the door, and know you were almost crying and say it wouldn’t be long till the end of the month; but she wouldn’t understand because you couldn’t tell her about Miss Heafy, smiling and saying, ‘Thank you, Doreen.’ Miss Heafy who was even lovelier than Imogen or Desdemona or Miranda.
