Owen Marshall Selected Stories

by Vincent O'Sullivan

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I’ll tow her in and have a look at things now,’ said Charles. ‘If you come up in an hour or so, I should know what the story is.’ He took a carrot from Evonne’s hand, as if she should know better than to grip such a thing, and walked back through the hall. His shoulder blades showed clearly under the singlet and his boots seemed clumsy on the ends of such thin legs.

  ‘Goodbye Charles,’ said Judith sweetly. He didn’t turn at their laughter, but waggled his fingers with his hand behind his back.

  As a break from the vegetables, Len and Ivan were taken through the back door of the hall to be shown the camp. There were no goalposts on the domain because of summer, but at the far end some pony-jumps were still set up, and on the hall side two lines of bell tents with a flagpole in between. Ivan thought the scene like a limited budget set for a Boer War movie, with a minimum authenticity of the grass worn between the two rows of off-white tents, the flagpole, the heat shimmer beginning over the brown landscape, and the blue, hollow infinity of the sky. He thought things might look like that at the end of the world: all people spirited away, and just the props, the objects, left to get on with it.

  ‘Where are they all?’ said Len.

  ‘They’re on a badge trek in the hills. A six-hour round hike from the dropping off point, and they have to carry their lunch and emergency clothing in case the weather turns. All the qualified people have gone with them, and we’re left here to prepare tea,’ said Judith, ‘and look after Suzie Allenton, who was sick last night and is sleeping now in her tent.’

  ‘We’re supposed to make an inspection of the tents sometimeduring the day,’ said Evonne, ‘and give points to the tidy ones, which go towards the top tent competition.’

  Ivan was about to ask what happened if the Boer commandos attacked while the camp was undefended, but he remembered he had said nothing to the others about the impression the tents had created. Yet he imagined Botha’s or de Wette’s horsemen cantering in to surprise the mother helpers and sick, sleeping Suzie Allenton. ‘Were you ever in the Scouts, Ivan?’ said Len from the back steps of the hall.

  ‘No.’

  ‘It wasn’t my thing either. I never had anything to do with Scouts or Boys’ Brigade, and although I was roped into National Service the only tents I remember were bivouac things which we had to carry ourselves. They were so small you had to crawl into them.’

  ‘Time for your confessions now,’ said Ivan to Judith and Evonne.

  ‘I was brought up on a farm,’ said Judith. ‘I could never be in group things.’

  ‘I was in the city, but don’t remember going to Brownies, Guides or anything like that. I don’t think anybody ever invited me.’ Evonne looked carefully at the tents and flagpole, as if for the first time. ‘Have I missed out on something important, do you think?’

  ‘You can do your penance as mother helper,’ said Len. ‘Girl Guides, like any other army, march on their stomachs.’

  ‘I’d like to march on the stomachs of a few of them,’ said Judith.

  The direct sunlight was intense. Len’s head lolled back to rest against the door jamb, and his eyes closed. The others rested their heads in their hands, and supported both by propping their elbows on their knees. Ivan wished he had a hat, and found himself breathing through his mouth. ‘Should we make a round of the tents now?’ said Evonne after a time. The two women lifted their heads enough to see across the grass to the tents, and assessed the effort it would take to visit them all, and compared that with whatever energy and duty they felt.

  ‘Maybe later,’ said Judith.

  ‘I’ll just check on Suzie then,’ said Evonne. She stood up, pulled her shorts down at the back of her thighs, and walked across grass so dry that it crunched beneath her sneakers.

  ‘I could sleep the day away in a tent myself,’ said Len. ‘The less you do the less you want to do.’

  ‘She’s a good sort,’ said Judith, watching Evonne as she neared the tents. ‘Her husband’s wealthy, but she still comes to take her turn. She pitches in just like everybody else. She even cleaned up on the bus when one of the girls was sick after fish and chips. It’s not very pleasant then in the confined space of a bus when you’re travelling so far.’ Ivan and Len watched Evonne at the tents, her banana shorts and sneakers, her graceful, brown legs. The men kept their faces noncommittal in Judith’s presence, and they made no comment. ‘Yes,’ said Judith. ‘Beaut legs. She’s lucky there, don’t you think? Mine keep getting thicker year by year.’ She pulled her dress up to show her strong legs and big knees with a smiling crease on each. ‘What about your legs?’ she said to Ivan.

  ‘Skinny and hairy. Not a pretty sight.’

  ‘It’s just as well we’re both wearing longs,’ said Len. ‘I’ve nothing much to offer in the way of legs either.’

  ‘Charles’s have a good natural tan, but they’re skinny too,’ said Judith.

  ‘Evonne will have to win first prize for legs then,’ said Ivan. Evonne looked back towards the hall and laid her head to one side on her hands to show that Suzie Allenton was still sleeping.

  Len and Ivan didn’t wait for Evonne to reach them across the domain, but gave a wave and told Judith they might be back if Charles wasn’t able to fix the truck in time.

  ‘Oh, God,’ she said. ‘Do come back and rescue us.’

  ‘We haven’t lost a mother helper yet,’ Len said.

  Once the habitual responsibility for events had been shifted from him by forces beyond his control, Len became increasingly relaxed. He was in no hurry on their walk back to the garage, and he talked with Ivan of seeing the original subdivision plan of Dungarvie in the council files: two hundred private sections had been surveyed in the flush of colonial enthusiasm, and sites for shops and churches, but even the gold rushes didn’t create that Dungarvie, didn’t build its churches or fill its cemeteries. Dungarvie had never been much more than they could see. Ivan noted that there was not even a pub in the place, and his interest was not historical. At least the high, red barn of the garage offered some shade.

  ‘She’s never been any Rolls-Royce,’ said Charles when they joined him. ‘However, you shouldn’t have any trouble getting to Dunedin and back.’ Len and Ivan looked without enthusiasm at the ute, its patch of pink undercoat, soft tyres, and stains weeping from the various rust spots on the body. The carrots in the back were bleached and wrinkled, a sign face-up announced road works ahead. Len thought of the drive to Dunedin in the heat, and the attention that would be drawn to them by their late arrival at the seminar. ‘On the other hand,’ said Charles as one of life’s entrepreneurs, ‘we could declare a Dungarvie Festival if you wanted to stay for a while, and give Evonne and Judith some company. I’ve even got a carton of beer that we could all chip in on.’

  Len opened his mouth as if to say no in his role as administration officer, but then was seized by the wonderful implausibility of it all as he stood in the garage doorway. The few ill-hung bell tents he could see not blocked by the hall, the dozing store, the barley grass in the free sections, the sheep crates with dung burnt to an inoffensive crust, the old smithy garage he stood in, Charles smiling from the shadows which matched his skin. ‘Well, why not,’ Len said and, having said it and not been struck down by conscience or by lightning, he repeated it boldly. ‘Well, why not. We’re too late to bother going on anyway, don’t you think?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ivan and Charles with certainty. Charles hoisted the carton of beer into the rear of the truck, and they drove back slowly towards the hall through the welling shimmer of the road and grass.

  The mother helpers had gone inside again, and were preparing a vat of mince and onion to go with the potatoes. The sight of the beer on Charles’s shoulder was enough to start them laughing. The sooner the meal was prepared, the sooner they could relax, Judith said, so Ivan and Len chopped carrots directly into the mince while Charles sliced onions. Tears ran down his face, and his brows lifted oddly as he tried to keep his eyes from clo
sing.

  ‘Come on, come on,’ said Charles. The women took some apples and apricots, everyone took a mug, and Charles led the way across the domain to the culvert where the road crossed the stream. There was a small, scoured pool where the concrete ended. Charles took the bottles of beer from the carton, and dropped them on to the shingle bottom, reaching down till his shoulder was in the water so that the bottles would land gently. Part of his singlet became bright again with the water, and the drops skated across the oil of his hands. There were small grasshoppers at the pool’s edge, and a silver skink for a moment on the concrete of the culvert bridge. Len tasted his share of the first bottle, which was given no time to cool.

  ‘I love the salty taste good beer has,’ he said. ‘Ah, it’s needed in this weather.’

  They surrounded the small pool. Len and Judith stepped over the trickle of its outlet and sat on the other side, but that put them hardly any further apart than the others. All of them were soon barefoot. Charles’s feet were dainty alongside his work-boots. Judith tucked her floral dress up like pantaloons, and hung her legs in the water so that the effect of refraction had them broken at the calf. Ivan leaned forward to eat a ripe apricot so that the juice would fall on to the grass and not his best shirt or suit trousers. He had knotted the corners of his handkerchief, soaked it, and it lay on his dark head as a first defence from the sun. Occasionally a truck or car went by in the midday heat. The growing whine of any approach gave all five a chance to compose their faces. Sometimes drivers or passengers happened to look down and saw with envy, surprise or condescension the group around the culvert pool celebrating the festival of Dungarvie. But as time went on, the road, its travellers, its starting points and destinations, ceased to be a relevant awareness, and no disguise or provision for them was made at all.

  ‘Let’s hope no one breaks down,’ said Evonne to Charles, ‘otherwise you’d have to leave our picnic and fix the car.’

  ‘Actually I never meant to be a mechanic,’ he said. ‘I wanted to be a physicist.’

  Judith’s laugh exploded pod-like in the dry air. She had difficulty in holding her mug of beer. Len’s laugh was almost as loud, almost as distinctive: high-pitched and abrupt, it was not the social laugh that Ivan had heard from him in the past, but a new laugh. It was a laugh of instinctive delight and lack of inhibition. ‘No, I did, fair go,’ said Charles. Laughter feeds on itself, so that they were all drawn in. Charles himself found his voice so collapsed with laughter that it was husky when he managed to carry on. ‘Look, look, I was a marvel at physics at school and could have easily gone on, but at Vic I got sidetracked into a heavy metal band, and lost my bursary because I failed everything except physics.’

  What a depth of humour and irony there is in actuality. Evonne lay back because her stomach was sore from laughing. There must be a hundred reasonable ways to explain the move from physics and a Wellington rock band to sole charge of the Dungarvie garage in the old smithy. It had the freakish likelihood of truth. ‘I wanted to be a wildlife officer,’ said Len, sudden in his decision to be confidential as well. He had dipped his hands into the pool, and cooled his face with the water. The hair of his forehead was stuck together. ‘I wanted to save the black robin, the takahe, the kakapo and so on.’ At his ears amid the short sideburns were the first grey hairs, and on the sides of his nose the sheen where his glasses normally rested. ‘More than anything else, that’s what I was set on doing, and somehow I’ve ended up as an accountant, a council administration officer.’ He was still sufficiently self-conscious to add that of course he had remained a financial member of the Forest and Bird Society. It set the others off again, particularly Judith. She considered it a great one-liner. Her feet jerked beneath the water and her laughter cracked like a stock whip across the domain. Did any accountant ever dream of becoming an accountant, any more than the day-shift foreman of the chicken nugget factory dreamt of his success, or a man sold his soul to the devil for the right to be caretaker at the Shangri-La Lodge and Cabin Park? How many shopping reporters, high school language teachers, rural delivery drivers, one-term politicians, or Pleasant Valley inmates could point to a constant ambition?

  The bottles of beer lay on the gravel bottom of the pool, and quivered like trout in the ripple of Judith’s feet. The stones had a fuzz of slime because the water was barely flowing, the label from one bottle had come adrift and undulated like a fin. The pool had a thin lip of green cress and clover before the brown grass began. ‘How can you work day after day in this heat?’ said Evonne to Charles, who was reaching down into the pool to bring up another prize.

  ‘You tell me,’ he said. ‘This part of the country is stranger to me than to most of you, I’d say. I’m Tuhoe, you see, children of the mist, and so on. This isn’t my place.’ It was a final incongruity. Len was delighted with it.

  ‘I don’t suppose there are many Tuhoe physicists in Dungarvie when you come to think of it,’ he said.

  Everything seemed amusing to them in that afternoon. Sometimes there is an intoxication of the heart which has little to do with drink: some combination of circumstances and personalities which slips past defences and brings a mood of goodwill and acceptance. All of which may be just another way of saying how hot it was in Central that day, how influential the beer and fruit on empty stomachs, how each person felt release in a new role and company, knowing it was just for one day. Ivan noticed that Len rolled his trousers higher as time went on, and that his face was almost impetuous. They had left the office, yet not arrived at the seminar. They had shrugged off routine, yet not assumed interim responsibility. They were in a pleasant limbo, and yet with some excuse.

  ‘Me?’ Evonne was saying. ‘I wanted to be a school dental nurse, and make snowmen with red ink faces from cotton wool wads. The uniform quite suited me, I thought, and as well you had your own special room. Instead, I’m just a rich bitch, I suppose.’

  ‘A toast to the mother helpers,’ said Charles amid the talk of Bertie Germ and money, and the mother helpers drank deeply to themselves as a sign that they recognised their worth.

  Ivan wondered about himself: what he had intended as distinct from what he had become. The physicist, the wildlife ranger, the dental nurse, and Judith still with her mystery, all wanted to hear of his lost life. Judith shaded her eyes the better to watch him, and her mouth was open for her explosive, benevolent laugh. ‘An actor,’ he said. There was joy that he had not disappointed them. Charles threw his head back as if to dislodge something in his throat. ‘I did a fair bit at school, and then a polytech course. We had a group that toured schools and hospitals but, when the funding was withdrawn, I switched to office management.’ As he said it, he was amazed how the exigencies of the moment become, in retrospect, a seamless process of inevitable selection.

  ‘Oh, but you would have been good on the stage,’ said Evonne loyally. ‘You could be a gentleman caller for Laura, or a rebel in a kitchen-sink play.’

  ‘Or the fool in Lear,’ said Len, ‘who knows more than the king.’

  ‘Give us something now,’ said Judith.

  ‘I’ve forgotten it all.’

  ‘Yes, come on, Ivan,’ said Len. He was delighted that his colleague had revealed such an exotic past. A chant began.

  ‘We want Ivan. We want Ivan.’

  In any other setting, any other time or people, Ivan would have suspected an edge of vindictiveness, an underlying hope of some humiliation, but the Dungarvie Festival was all goodwill. None of them knew each other well enough to wish for any harm. Ivan stood up to free his breathing, and gave them one of Biff’s speeches from Death of a Salesman about the dangerous gap between self-image and reality.

  As part of his concentration on it, Ivan had an exact awareness of the others listening; their combined physical existence on the grass there, around the culvert pool. A grass stem turned in Len’s fingers, and on one pale ankle bone a green vein was looped. Judith’s sunburnt face was full on to him to give support, and Charles nodded as h
e listened and dabbed an insect from his beer. The Boer War tents were in their two rows at a distance, the hall and store and garage becalmed in heat and time. Then Ivan quoted Willie to his friends in the Dungarvie domain, isolated from the rest of the world with a bird singing up high somewhere, one great, strutted pylon glinting on the hill, two lines of sagging tents and, in one of them somewhere, sick, sleeping Suzie Allenton whom he never saw.

  Ivan had his immediate appreciation, however, and a stock truck happened to pass at just that time and made a roar of approval upon the little bridge above them. Judith had seen the film version and talked of it with Len and Evonne, while Charles gave Ivan his ideas on the importance of sustaining enthusiasms. Ivan was breathing heavily because of the heat and his nervousness at reciting. He was content to listen for a while. ‘You must keep the idea of your life being special,’ Charles said. ‘Of having nothing to do with any historical generalisations or social trends, but instead as a free-wheeling thing with all the possibilities still there if you want to explore them.’

  ‘There’s an underlying feeling of time past,’ Ivan heard Judith saying, ‘and it’s pressing forward into the present and the future more and more.’ For a moment Ivan thought that Charles would accept that as an answer in their own conversation, but Charles still waited.

  ‘Sometimes I doubt the depth of what we see,’ said Ivan. ‘Sometimes, despite the exact, connecting detail before us, I feel it bulging, and just a shimmer at the seams to hint at things quite different beneath.’

  ‘That’s it,’ said Charles, and he topped another bottle.

  ‘Didn’t he marry Marilyn Monroe or something?’ asked Len. ‘I thought I read that he married Marilyn Monroe.’ He picked blemishes from his apple with his fingernail.

  ‘At our last staff meeting,’ said Ivan, ‘we were discussing the computer training programme, and for an uneasy moment the words spoken didn’t fit the movements of the people’s mouths, and there was the scent of the open sea that I haven’t thought of for years.’