Going West

by Gee, Maurice

  ‘I’m going back next year though, I’ll be free.’

  ‘What will you do?’

  ‘I don’t know. Training College, I suppose.’

  ‘Don’t do that.’ I quoted Shaw, ‘those who can’ etc. Harry told me to mind my own business.

  ‘Go and tell Valmai. She likes it here.’

  ‘I’m finished with Valmai,’ I grinned.

  ‘That was quick.’ Harry grinned back.

  ‘She looks as if she needs an extra joint in her legs.’ I betrayed the poor girl – let ‘poor’ stand – and Harry laughed, doing the same. (And ever after I was put off by Valmai, her long legs seemed unnatural.) She looked out shortly afterwards and saw me using her cushion, and went inside and did not come back. But her afternoon seems as interesting now as mine; I can never know it – and I mustn’t let this complex molecule, Jack Skeat, lock on to her by speculation or else every other will join too – a monstrous explosion – and I’m not equipped to speak about that. Just me and Harry. We talked for an hour or two and I called for her that night and took her to the pictures, kissed her at the door, and was back on Sunday …

  Harry, what am I doing with this pen and exercise book? Can I write down how we went on? Whose business is it anyway? I can answer that. It has turned into story. It’s story’s business. If you ever read this don’t tear it up or burn it. Add your version, make corrections, be selective, disagree. You’ll start to see what has happened then. You’ll see that what I write is no betrayal.

  Long before I left that day the places were reversed – Harry (Valmai).

  And now I come to that midwinter night when we made love for the first time. When I think of it I’m joyful, and we must not leave joy out, there’s too little of it anywhere. Memory sometimes seems the important thing – after, of course, the event. Their magical interdependence is our condition of good health. Neither can exist without the other. Without memory there is no event.

  Wind and sleet, Wellington weather. The flatmates stayed in so out we went, in oilskins, and gumboots for Harry, and turned our backs to the southerly and climbed by way of Salamanca Road to the botanical gardens. We splashed in running gutters and skated on the grass and Harry sat down and slid. I took her by the legs and ran with her and when she had enough speed let her go and she went a hundred feet on her back, turning slowly, sliding quick, down the hill towards the trees. I thought I had killed her. She went between two trunks, curving fast, with her legs crooked upwards and her oilskin flaps between her thighs, and gave a dying shriek – what was it, pain, delight? – as the flat ground slowed her down. I ran after her and spun off trees, skinned my palms, and overtook her as she came to a stop. She lay in the dark with her white face shining at me. ‘I want to do it again.’ Now isn’t that better than sex? But we didn’t do it again, we turned to that. In a shelter rocked by wind I put her hand inside my outer layers, guided it.

  ‘I just want you to know it’s there. We don’t have to use it.’

  ‘I know it’s there, I’m not silly – why can’t we use it?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Have you got an Alphonse?’ (Now Harry, that will embarrass you. Alphonse was french-letter in girl-talk that year.)

  ‘Yes, but we can’t lie down.’ Puddles on the asphalt floor. (And at my place a landlady guarding the door, beside which the rules were tacked, no alcohol, no noise, no visitors – meaning no girls. The roofs should have blown off some of those Wellington houses with the suppressed pressures inside.)

  ‘Valmai told me once she did it against a wall.’

  Valmai had long legs though. ‘You’re too short.’

  ‘I’ll get some bricks.’ And because I was unable to stand down she went into the rain and fetched them in, one at a time, four trips, and placed them properly – so far apart, a little further, loving it – and stood on them and we were matched; and coupled; and complete; and very pleased with ourselves, though dressed, uncomfortable and wet.

  That is all that story asks.

  ‘Your bum’s cold.’

  ‘So’s yours.’

  We covered up and ran to Allenby Terrace, against the rain, and I ran home.

  And we were lucky. Harry would agree. All sorts of things go wrong in beds. There’s nothing much can go wrong in a shelter on a wet and windy frozen Sunday night. Standing upright. In puddles. On bricks.

  Our first time was memorable.

  That’s summer and winter. Leave autumn for the moment and come to spring. (The seasons are not significant.) In spring I took Harry to Auckland to meet my mother. I had visited Palmerston North and been approved (more than that, I had liked her mother and been liked) and now it was Harry’s turn. Her examinations were over; she had to sit a more demanding one.

  We travelled by air, a first for both of us, and I was able to show her Loomis as we came towards the airport at Whenuapai. The west coast beaches lay in their bites of land, the ranges, patted flat, spread a grey-green bush-stain down the valley. Paddocks, orchards, vineyards, made sharp and shallow angles and contrasts of green. The creek was a tree-line, bending lazily, and the town a little pasted-paper game. I found our house but was not quick enough to show Harry. She was straining to see her side of the harbour, the North Shore.

  We used the Loomis taxi. My nervousness had made Harry nervous. Stained and damp and malodorous we faced the straight cold lady in the door. I kissed her cheek and smelled her chilly dryness; and pulled myself together, for Harry’s sake and mine; and winked at Harry as her kiss was checked and she was made to shake hands. Though shake is wrong. Flat palm, no finger-curl, and quickly ended – that was my mother’s way of meeting. She made no alteration for her future daughter-in-law.

  Later, when Harry was out of her slacks and wearing a clean dress, and had brushed her hair and washed her face and put fresh lipstick on, and we were drinking tea in the living-room, my mother said, ‘I’m afraid I shan’t be able to come to the wedding.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Palmerston North is too far away.’

  ‘You could fly.’

  ‘I think not. I’m sure Harriet will understand.’

  And Harry, with a cool smile, Harry pulled together, like me, said, ‘It is a long way, Mrs Skeat. I do understand.’ But could not resist: ‘As long as Jacko gets there, that’s the main thing.’

  Friendship between them had never been likely. The joke, the name, ended any thought I had of it.

  ‘My husband and I chose “John” carefully,’ my mother said, ‘and I do think that in my house …’ She let it trail away. Genteel incompletion was one of her ways of showing dislike. Harry heard beyond the murmur and saw beyond the smile.

  If her cheeks went red there was a chance of cut and thrust. I would have preferred her hot to cold. But Harry is strong and she managed the harder way.

  ‘I’ve made a choice too. In certain circumstances Jacko is right. Although perhaps not drinking afternoon tea with Mrs Skeat.’ That’s most impressive for a girl of twenty. It pleases me still. Her tiny smile mirrored my mother’s and her teacup made only a single chink as she put it down.

  So it was cool exchanges and gloved antipathy. Harry punished me a little as we walked in Loomis in the late afternoon – called my creek a ditch and laughed at the war memorial gates – but she held my hand as I talked with Lila Petley and bounced the swing-bridge when we crossed that way. We went into a vineyard and bought a bottle of sherry, and met, blanket-clad, in the summer house that night. We drank and made love, drank and made love, marvellously; without Alphonse, without thought – unless it was the thought of my mother in the house. Harry, I suspect, would have liked her to have known what was going on.

  I have never been sure she didn’t know. In her own house she knew everything.

  My ‘accident’ in Allenby Terrace brought about another ‘cute meet’. By roundabout ways I discovered my work.

  This is the autumn of that annus mirabilis. I was shelving books when a voice said at my should
er, ‘I hope you’ve recovered from your fall.’

  I faced a clean white gentleman with a rosy face and hair as light and soft as a baby’s. The stirring in the air as I turned made it lift. He wore a perfect tie and a summer overcoat and shining shoes and only his smile was unorthodox.

  ‘I would have stopped to help you but I thought …’ And seeing my incomprehension: ‘In Allenby Terrace. Oh, about a month or two ago.’

  ‘Ah. Yes.’ It was the man with the curious smile. ‘Some girls in the flat came out and helped.’

  ‘So I noticed. Nice girls, were they?’

  For a horrible moment I thought he was a pansy. (I use the term for historical accuracy.) But a woman approached, a clean little lady to go with the man, and they stood together, so beautifully normal (although antiseptic) that I relaxed, I put myself perhaps too much at ease. And soon the man, Euan Brightmore, wanted me.

  ‘It would only be for three months. And I could pay, oh, what you’re getting here. I’m sure as experience it would stand you in good stead.’ He picked a book from my hand. ‘These are a product. In your profession I’d look for the source.’

  ‘Well -’

  ‘Chaos and order, my boy. A system is a kind of philosopher’s stone.’

  ‘Don’t confuse him, Euan,’ his wife said.

  But I was not confused. My base metal was changed by Euan Brightmore. Not by his talk of systems, there were plenty of those in librarianship. By ‘source’. By ‘chaos and order’. Some of the processes would be moral.

  And I was excited by opportunity.

  I left my job and worked for Euan Brightmore and turned myself into an archivist. He was, as he said with a smile, not unknown. He is just about unknown today. What little fame he has rests on the papers I put in order in those months – they turned out to be six -1 worked for him. He could, of course, have done it himself but was ‘too lazy’. I defend him from the charge. He worked eight hours a day on his huge and still unpublished autobiography. It has since been added to the Brightmore papers in the Turnbull and is a prime source of information about literary life in ‘the Dominion’ between the wars. I am there, towards the end, in the dull post-World War Two part: ‘my intelligent and industrious archival clerk’. There’s no mention of First Fruits, I kept it secret. There’s mention, there’s praise, there’s alarming praise, of forgotten poets (and ‘poetesses’) of the teens and twenties and thirties of this century; there are panegyrics on Homeward-looking novelists; and diatribes on Mason, Glover, Fairburn etc. Anyone now judged good is damned. Indeed there’s a law that operates – cultural, aesthetic, historical – and it gives the Brightmore papers their value and fascination. A new age and outlook grates along the edge of the old. The wincing and the screeching and the anger and the pain – the shrinking, the sadness, the turning away, and the forgiveness now and then – all are there, in letters – how they wrote letters, how he wrote (and made copies) – and in his journal, in his notes, in his Articles of Faith: a Life in Literature, in his novels (published and unpublished), in his verse.

  What a kind little man he was outside the giant anger and the pain. Euan had intended to be ‘great’ – they believed in ‘great’ – and was on his way until a ‘clique’, a ‘coterie’, sometimes even a ‘congeries’, of ‘avant-gardiste poseurs’ betrayed him. He could not see it was the times, the age, it was New Zealand. Poor dislocated fellow, he stayed on his wrong angle for the rest of his life – in, of course, plentiful company.

  I kept very quiet and worked on the papers. I saw how valuable they were. I found my trade. Preservation became an absolute and put me in a moral workday universe.

  Notebook: 8

  We walked down Alma Street with Lila Petley and she gave us tea and pikelets in her kitchen. Les was not at home but Lila opened his workshop door and showed us a bench of freshly painted ambulances and fire engines and trucks. They were unfussy, functional; white and red and yellow and blue; and they made me wonder if Les had returned to some primary state and left his anger behind. But when I asked Lila how he was she shrugged and said, ‘He doesn’t change. Maybe he’s not so rowdy I suppose. He’s gone to the footy with the boys. He needs one on each side to keep him out of fights.’

  She had pikelets made in minutes – a whisk, a sizzle, butter, jam – and they were delicious. I asked her what she thought of the hospital poems and a look showed on her face as though she had opened the oven and found something perfectly risen inside. It quickly passed. She said, almost wearily, ‘Good. They’re very good. Do you think so?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘We don’t worry about Rex any more. Les wonders how he’s going to make a living, that’s all.’

  ‘Poets go hungry. It’s part of the job. Maybe there’ll be some sugarworks poems.’

  ‘Oh, there are. Tweet went over to see him last week. We go there. He doesn’t seem to like coming to Loomis any more.’

  ‘He doesn’t want to disturb it, that’s the thing. In his head.’

  ‘Don’t romanticize him, Jack.’

  She saw him, I think, as shifted into a world with different laws from her own; where he would suffer pain, and do his work, and earn rewards she would never know about. She was convinced of him, convinced of ‘poet’, and was prepared for sufferings consistent with that. Lila, not I, romanticized him. Her weariness, her switching off, were a way of acceptance.

  I felt sorry for her. I praised him extravagantly, careless of Harry, who had found the hospital poems cold and cruel. Lila smiled a moment, then yawned.

  ‘Dulcie’s got a baby, did you know? And Melva is expecting again.’

  A rattle of wheels on the doorstep and Melva backed in, with her pushchair laid on an angle and her child off balance, grabbing the air. I had never seen a woman so huge in front, I could not see how she kept herself from toppling forward. She cried my name and hugged me and I felt lumpy parts of baby inside and made up my mind I would never put Harry in that condition. Lila took the child from the pushchair and hugged it as hard as Melva was hugging me.

  ‘He’s dirty, Mum, watch out,’ Melva said.

  We smelled him. I gave a sickly grin at Harry, who gave a false one back. No babies! This was the one – called Tod from the time he had toddled, nicknames in that family had a way of holding on and I never learned his real name – this was the one Rex had not been able to hold. I did not blame him. There was something too raw and greedy there. A baby could throw fine balance out with its gross life and importunities. Meaning might not survive a baby. I understood how fragile ‘Petleys’ might be.

  We said no to more pikelets after the dirty nap, and said goodbye and Harry bounced the bridge; and the next morning, after our summer-house night, we went, alive and yawning, hand in hand, by bus and ferry and foot, to Devonport to make a careless visit on Rex. Harry did not mind if she met him or not. She was happy just to be on the ferry, slanting across-tide to the Shore. I had promised her we’d go to Takapuna if there was time.

  Lila had said he might not be home. He spent a lot of his spare time fishing from the wharves and from the rocks between the beaches. You could still catch snapper in those days. He had sent a twenty-pounder, scaled and gutted, home with Tweet, together with a note on the best way to cook it. (Lila sniffed.) He had a net too that he set across the mouth of a creek and once he had dropped in with a box of flounder that kept the family eating for a week.

  We walked from the ferry to Albert Road, where he had a room in the basement of a house. ‘If he’s not home we’ll climb up there,’ pointing at the grassy sides of Mt. Victoria. It was almost sheer, with terraces that seemed designed as handholds; and it made me think of Harry, breasts and hips, and making love. Her mood was different, she had arrived at childhood places and did not need me. I’ve had to learn this – there are many times when Harry does not need me. She wanted to get down to the beaches and tuck up her skirt and walk in those little Sunday waves that pass for broken sea on the east coast. Cheltenham and Narrow Neck
were just around the corner. When I touched her in the way that had become our sign she said sharply, ‘Don’t do that.’ (There has been, in our marriage, a fair amount of ‘don’t do that’, and much repositioning, not all of it from me.)

  I was, then, more pleased than she to find Rex at home. He had the use of half the lawn at the back of the house and he lay there on a towel, with his head in the shade of a lemon tree, reading a book. (For those who want such things, it was The True Confession of George Barker. Someone else can work out if it influenced him.)

  ‘Mum said you might show up.’

  He got to his feet. There was a reluctance in him that put me off balance. ‘Show up’ seemed less than welcoming too. He touched me on the shoulder – and I realize now, from the well-known ‘touch no one’ in his poem of that time, ‘Me. Here. Now.’, that he was giving a great deal.

  ‘Gidday,’ he said to Harry, and I introduced them.

  ‘Did your mother phone?’

  ‘Yeah. Tod swallowed a threepence. They had to take him to the hospital.’

  ‘Is he all right?’

  ‘I guess so. She would’ve rung again.’ He had a bottle of beer newly opened and he went to his room for two more glasses. I never saw the inside of that room but John Dobbie has a description from a woman who claimed to have visited him there. It was, she said, ‘clean, bare, sterile, a table and a chair and a bed’. He had the use of a bathroom upstairs. ‘A hot plate,’ she said, ‘and a plunger in a pot.’ She hints (she’s unnamed) that she stayed all night. More people claim to have known Rex than he ever had the time to know.

  His hair was ragged, longer than was thought masculine, and he had a two-day stubble on his chin. What else did I notice? His toenails were uncut. They bent like yellow caps over the ends of his toes. He was muscular and carried no fat. ‘He could be quite good looking if he tried,’ Harry told me later.