Owen Marshall Selected Stories

by Vincent O'Sullivan

  The world is divided between the vices of free will, and the virtues of necessity; between those who know where be Wold Jar the tinker, and those cast into darkness; between those who delight in games, and those who lack even that saving grace; between Tyrannosaurus Rex, and civilised marriages; between New Zealanders, and those people with a culture; between our adult selves, and the blue remembered hills.

  The world is divided between those who boast of their climate, and those who rejoice in secret that a cold wind isolates a landscape. The world is divided between those who accept the division, and those who instigated it; between books on the Royal Family or gardens, and the remaining ten percent of publishers’ products; between those who are proud, and those who have lost their self-respect and so become the most dangerous of men. The world is divided on the merits of everything; on all questions raised (at this point in time). The world is divided between optimism and Mr Weston’s good wine; between those who see, and those who understand between confiding voluble people, and those we wish to know; between those on the inside looking out, and those on the outside looking in.

  The world is divided between men who despise others for being what they are, and women who despise them for what they are not. The world is divided between those anxious concerning the physical, and those in terror of the mind; between those who love sausages and onions, and those who are effete; between the people we always suspected, and the butlers who did it; between idlers, and those who work hard all their lives to be able to do nothing when they die.

  The world is divided between the few now, and the great majority on the other side. The world is divided above all, while we sleep, beneath our noses, and before we notice. The world is divided as we are all divided. The world is divided between you and me, you and me for a time, you and me.

  The Seed Merchant

  Father very worse, the telegram read. I had it folded in my pocket during the flight south. The wording itched in my mind, and the irritation diverted my worry. I imagined my mother being told that both very and much were an unnecessary expense, and agreeing without caring to cut one out. I was mowing the lawn when it came. I caught a flight so soon afterwards that in the hair of my wrist were fine pieces of cut grass, held out from the skin. At such times the senses are capable of meticulous observation. Birdy Watson was thirteen when he tried to climb the cenotaph, fell off and killed himself. As the taxi passed I saw, far above the stone figures, the ledge that Birdy reached, and the concrete steps below that broke him on his fall. Even his nickname had not saved him. The town had grown rapidly, the driver told me, though it held no progeny of Birdy’s or of mine.

  My father had rallied by the time I reached him. You will recognise the terminology. He had rallied surprisingly well, the doctor said. So my father was able to return home and wait a little longer. He lay in his own bed, and as I talked first in the hall with my mother and sister, I could hear him clearing his throat as he waited to welcome me. A questing smile as he tried to see in my face a picture of himself before I could disguise it. He clasped my hand rather than shook it, and looked away, asked about Susan and the children as a defence against his own predicament. The rowan trees by the fence were in berry amidst the fingered leaves, and I could see the hardwood chopping block where roosters had been sacrificed. All of us had lived together in the place, yet each had a separate experience of it: in the same way we share life, I suppose.

  ‘Lately I’ve often thought of things to say to you,’ my father said. ‘No one argues about books anymore. No one cares. It’s all politics and entertainment now, you see.’

  ‘Reading and writing are too slow for them,’ I said.

  My father nodded against the pillow. ‘Even in sport,’ he said. ‘Even in sport all they’re interested in is finishes, and the money.’

  I sat in the cane chair by the window and talked with my father. I hadn’t been there long before he mentioned Ivy. He asked if I remembered her, and said what a close friend of my mother’s she’d been. He turned his head and looked at the window with flat eyes, the symptom of the inverted vision of memory. The skin lay loosely on the tendons of his neck, and stubble was salt and pepper beneath his jaw-line. After a time he said, ‘You remember Ivy.’ He took my silence as forgetfulness. ‘You stayed with her at times as a boy. You mustn’t forget Ivy. People used to take her and your mother as sisters. Did you know that?’

  Ivy must have been thirty odd when I stayed with her. She laughed a lot. There was always reason for a laugh at things, even though she did have her mother to look after. The trams came right past their house. Over thirty years ago. The noise and smell of the trams on the street straight through to the square. Ivy and her mother made painted eggs of wood. Ivy was a nurse as well at a private hospital, but I remember them sitting with trays of eggs. The old woman sanded the eggs wet and dry. She had a slight moustache. Ivy painted them: several coats and then designs and varnish. Patterns like Fair Isle, or hooped colours, or little circles like the seeds of silver birch. I don’t know what they were for: darning, or paperweights, or to be valued for their own sake perhaps, on a mantelpiece in deep blue and gold.

  ‘She came sometimes to stay with us. A great friend of your mother’s.’ And of my father. ‘You remember staying there now?’ he said. Yes, I remembered things that had a new interpretation with the years. Like the seed merchant. Some friend was with Ivy. They laughed in the bedroom as Ivy finished dressing to go out, and the trams rattled past to the square. I was to remain behind with the old lady, and fill the coal scuttle from time to time. Ivy called to me from her room. The two of them were laughing again. How they were laughing, and there was powder smudged on the dark polish of the duchess, and underclothes on the bed like the limp, pink petals of a rose. Ivy stopped me with her hand, and brushed the hair from my forehead.

  ‘This is Frank’s boy,’ she said. Her friend started to laugh. ‘Oh stop it,’ said Ivy, laughing herself, and swaying back to ease the effort of the laughter. She brushed my hair again to show she wasn’t meaning to laugh at me.

  ‘How is your father? How is the seed merchant?’ said Ivy’s friend. Her top teeth were slightly buck, yet white and of a size.

  ‘He’s not a seed merchant,’ I said. ‘He works for the paper.’

  ‘Oh, Ivy always told me he was,’ she said.

  ‘He proved to be, by God!’ said Ivy.

  I was disappointed not to be going with them into the city, for at night the noise and lights of the tram blurred its outline, fusing the tram with the other colours and movement of the city night.

  My father slept a good deal. I spent much of each day working in the section which had been neglected because of his illness. I cleared and levelled several garden plots, and put them down in grass. I lacked the resignation of my mother and sister to sit and talk quietly in the living room with his medicines on a tray, while they waited for him to wake. Each task served to exorcise some small ghost of time past, trivial familiars that were in wait within the simplest things. My father’s fishing rod above the garage door, and the breadboard shaped like a pig.

  Sport was my father’s realm as a journalist. He was given his own column when I was in the fourth form, and stayed so long in the hotel that my brother and I divided his scallops between us, and enjoyed the celebration on his behalf. I read to him about sport, and wildlife, which was his other interest. For years he said that he would write a book on that great man Anthony Wilding, but it was never done. ‘Ivy married, you know,’ he said. ‘Went to live in Tasmania, but it didn’t last.’ We were quiet for a time. My father seemed to want me to remember Ivy, and I did, but not in his way. ‘It didn’t last,’ my father said. ‘She came back to New Zealand again, but we never saw her.’ Ivy took me to the pictures in the square at night. On the tram I stood by the driver and watched him use the solid metal levers in place of a steering wheel. The noise, and the lights of the square in the distance. Ivy bought chocolates loose in a bag, and she laughed with the manager,
who looked at the front of her dress. She told me that she used to go to the pictures often with my mother when they were nurses together. I hadn’t thought about Ivy for a long time before coming to see my father: the trams, the painted wooden eggs, the seed merchant. Sitting with my father I realised more clearly that my age had prevented me from knowing Ivy as she was to a man, though even then I was conscious I think of warmth, fluidity of movement, and laughter both generous and knowing. ‘They were fine lasses, those two. Ivy and your mother. A lot of people thought they were sisters,’ said my father. I had no clear recollection of my mother at Ivy’s age. We make present appearance retrospective for those close to us. ‘You were only a boy,’ said my father, recalling not so much my age then, as his own. Frank the snappy dresser and journalist perhaps.

  ‘Trams ran right past her gate,’ I said. ‘Right past and rattling on down into the square.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And Ivy’s old mother who was always cold, always sitting over the fire or heater.’

  ‘Of course. Old Mrs Ransumeen. But she was deaf, you remember. Yes, that’s right. Ivy’s mother, Mrs Ransumeen. She didn’t sleep well, but she was rather deaf.’ My father laughed quietly. I couldn’t remember the old lady being all that deaf. My father’s laugh was even and subdued. It seemed the laugh of a younger man, just that once.

  I asked my mother about Ivy one afternoon. My father had fallen asleep while I read aloud from his articles on Anthony Wilding. He started to weep in his sleep: the tears soaked into the white, cotton pillow, yet he lay without sound or movement, apart from his breathing. I hope never to see that again. I told my mother that he asked about Ivy quite often. She said he never mentioned Ivy to her. She’d known Ivy longer than the rest of us, but then perhaps a friend’s view of Ivy was not what my father wanted.

  The wind was strong outside. It set up a persistent and familiar whine around one of the protruding barge-boards. ‘Could you cut back the twisted willow by the study again sometime?’ my father said. ‘The branches rub on the side of the house in the wind, and the leaves block the guttering.’

  ‘You cut it down years ago,’ I told him. He was quiet for a time, smiling.

  ‘What an old fool I’ve become,’ he said. ‘Jesus, just an old fool. Even my sense of taste is playing up. I get a sudden taste of onions or marmalade when I’m lying in bed. It makes me sick at times, the taste of things I haven’t eaten, suddenly there in my throat.’ Ivy’s mother had kept clearing her throat all the time — arp, arp, arp. Indignities come with age, it seems. She used to wet the eggs to give them a last buffing with a leather cloth. She always reminded us to check the coal bin before we left her alone in the winter. I don’t think my brother ever went to stay with Ivy, it was always me.

  Ivy took me to the knick-knack and souvenir shop by the river once. She had her eggs in a shoe box, each wrapped in tissue. She took some out to impress the shopkeeper, and spread them on the counter, and moved them with her fingers to show how even, bright and smooth they were. He touched each in turn after she had, his hands following hers. Ivy laughed, making the eggs brighter than ever on the counter, and her dress rustled on her stockings. I wonder if he knew better than I did what use they were, and I wonder why I never thought to ask her.

  My father had become a noisy breather, not snoring, but the air forced in and out, whispering in his nose, resounding in his chest, so that the mechanism by which life is sustained was always emphasised. His thoughts turned back, and I couldn’t follow him all the way. We started out as equals, with the same perspective in that at least we were adults, but as we went back my sight became that of a boy, while he remembered Ivy as a man. I don’t know if my father realised that, or what he expected of me. Any interpretation of what we knew as a child is dangerous. ‘I took them both to the Industries Fair once,’ he said. ‘I was working for the old Herald and had complimentary tickets. There was a demonstration of working machinery from the woollen mills, and a glass blower who made goblets and ships as you watched. Your mother and Ivy wore dresses with puffed sleeves.’ My father paused. ‘The skin that girls had then,’ he said. I had a vision of my father then as in his old photos, with a soft brim hat, and two-tone shoes. With a smooth, thin face, and one hand in his pocket.

  These questions and offerings of Ivy occurred among many other things not relevant to them in my talks with my father, but the reiteration was not in my imagination, I thought. I told my sister that in a way it embarrassed me, for I wasn’t sure what was required. I was going to tell her of the seed merchant, but closed my mouth on it. She is a shrewd and handsome woman, my sister. About the age that Ivy had been, when I think of it. She said that he had a history with Ivy, odd expression, but that it was the time back he wanted, not just Ivy. She said the ache was for the time of it: Ivy and our mother like sisters, and he himself as he was. My sister may be right, and I too insensitive to understand. Perhaps my father did in fact see Ivy as the image of what they both were, my mother and her: even the image of what all three were then. He never knew Ivy old, never saw her since he knew her, and she had never seen him old.

  My father would sweat a lot sometimes as he lay in bed. Not on his face, but at the base of his neck, the pit where neck met chest, and the sweat would glisten there with the movement of his chest and the forced breathing. When I went down to the living room my mother would ask me if he was awake. Ivy’s mother fell asleep in front of the fire in the evenings. Ivy placed a patterned tea cosy on her head, and we laughed without noise, or malice. ‘We lost touch with her after her marriage broke up and she came back. Even that we heard about through someone else,’ my father said. ‘Like a sister to your mother, like a mother to you.’

  ‘I remember her better when I stayed with her, than when she came to visit us.’

  ‘It was different,’ my father said.

  My father asked me to clean out the desk in his study, and yes, I found one of Ivy’s eggs lying with Forest and Bird annual reports, typewriter ribbons, dry fountain pens and pieces of kauri gum. The egg was royal blue, with gold and red rosettes. Still shiny, but old-fashioned in a way I couldn’t pick. The decoration gave a false impression of jewelled solidity, for when I lifted up that Trojan egg it lay lightly in my hand, as if already hatched. I could see faint cracks in the paint, which compensated for the drying of the wood through many years. The tram-lines were shiny in the street outside Ivy’s house, as if someone from the council polished the top surface. On a hot day the sun caught the lines for blocks ahead, and the trams shook and shimmered all the more in the currents of heat. Ivy used to push my hair off my forehead, and make a part using her own comb. I felt ashamed of the egg in a way. I put it in my pocket as I stood in the study, and my fingers caught on the edges of the telegram still there. Father very worse, it said, and it was true again.

  The Paper Parcel

  For a long time I thought everybody could see the future in the way I could myself: an expectation based upon desire. The dream logic of the mind. Even though events were often very different, it was the reality I blamed and not the vision. The reality failed to match the vision, which was the first and greater view. The actual encroached, but expectation drew off, and set up again upon the high ground of the future.

  I remember asking Dusty Rhodes what he thought being in a submarine was like. I dunno, he said, I dunno do I, until I’ve been in one. What a way to live. He didn’t know any better. He was spared any disillusion at least. No matter how many times it happened, I felt a sense of loss and betrayal when things proved other than I had seen them. Not different only, but also less in fitness and in unity.

  Like the fancy dress ball, for instance. I was twelve when the senior classes had a fancy dress ball to end the year. It was a strict convention that you had to have a partner in advance. Anyone not paired off would hold his hand in fire rather than turn up that night. As far as I knew I had only three attributes to attract the opposite sex. I was the second fastest runner in the school,
I was top in maths and I had blue eyes. Dusty Rhodes was fastest boy, I never beat him, although sometimes I dreamt I might. I became accustomed to despair, and his greasy hair in front of me as we ran race after race. Dusty drowned in the Wairau the next year, by the berth of the coaster which used to come over from Wellington and up the river. For years I had a guilt that I might have wished it. I was second fastest in the school to Dusty. I used to boast to the others that my legs just went that fast without any effort from the rest of me. To enhance this I had the habit of looking sideways as I ran, as if to see the cars on the road to the bridge, and escape the boredom of my automatic legs. Being top of maths was the second thing, and quite beyond my control. I was always top and never had an explanation for it. I was fearful I would lose the trick of it. And the blue eyes. There were only four boys with blue eyes in the class, and Fiona McCartney told Bodger that she liked blue eyes best. The class had been singing beautiful, beautiful brown eyes, and Bodger asked her which she preferred. Fiona McCartney blushed and said blue eyes, and the other girls giggled. I didn’t forget that. I was beginning to store up points of knowledge about girls. Fiona McCartney was the oracle about such things at that school.

  So those were the advantages I had going for me, and I exploited them to the full in the weeks before the fancy dress dance. I never ran so often or so fast. I was closer to first and further from third than ever before. I turned my head to the side with casual indifference and the old legs went with a will. I took to answering more maths questions in class, and fluked most of them right, and I used to widen my eyes when I was close to girls so that the blue of them would be more conspicuous.