by Gee, Maurice
Jack picks up the cosy Tweet has dropped beside his chair. If he puts it on his head and sticks his ears through the holes will that amuse Lila, will that help her to forget? But he sees from Tweet’s sharp elbows and narrow back that she wants him out of the way so he goes into the kitchen and fits it on the pot, then walks out to wait by the car. He leans on the mudguard and looks at the Waitakeres. There’s a road in the bush there, in the shade. He and Rex dropped down it on the Beezer, leaning until their elbows almost touched the ground. He refuses to let Rex be snuffed out. There’s too much of his own life in the gravitational dance.
‘How is she?’ he asks when Tweet comes out.
‘She’s all right. How did it happen? What did you say?’
Jack admits his miscalculation. He says that he is sorry and he won’t come again. He can understand Lila, he says; but how sad it is she can’t enjoy Rex in her old age.
Tweet grows angrier at this. ‘You keep out of it. And keep that Dobbie man away from us.’
‘Yes, I’ll try. There’ll be others, though. He’s going to get more and more important.’
‘How? Why?’
‘As a poet.’
‘God, there’s another world, can’t you see?’ She starts for the gate, but turns back. ‘You book people can have him. Just leave Mum alone. Melva too. And all of us.’ She goes on to the path and locks herself behind the pickets. ‘I’m sorry to be rude. But I can keep her going if people from outside will just-’ Makes a pushing movement with her hands.
‘Yes, all right.’ He tells Tweet to look after herself.
But there’s a dislocation, a mystery. Too much is made of Rex’s death; even when Joy is in the sum. Are they saying Joy became too much for him? Forty years must have smoothed it down: a pebble in a creek, time works that way …
Are they saying Rex meant to drown out there? He broke a basic rule of water survival: cling to your dinghy – every Auckland boatie knows that one. And he left his life jacket on the bonnet of his car … but his work, his life, his poetry, were built on confidence … The coroner was satisfied, although he gave a warning …
Jack drives to Green Bay. He can’t stop arguing. What do Tweet and Lila know? What must he find out? He wants to step away from mysteries and confusion and spend his time where everything is plain.
Jack needs to be with the two young men.
Notebook: 9
After Thorne’s Bay I did not see him again for more than a year. I heard about his marriage to Alice Pittaway with something between alarm and amusement, believing that the shaggy Loomis boy and the daughter of that patrician house would reach accord only in a transitory passion – consume each other for a time but in the end violently repel. She might insist that he cut his toenails but would not change his way of looking at the world. Loomis not Epsom would come out on top.
I bored Harry with my analysis. She had no interest in Rex, and Alice was simply a name. Perhaps, she said, they were in love. That would overcome my silly dichotomies. It might do that, I agreed, with anyone but Rex, but he was – her scepticism made me overstate it – a wolf in the dogpack, running singly though he ran with them, and sooner or later he had to go off on his own. I knew his nature, I had watched him from the start. That wasn’t true, Harry declared, I had simply grown up with him. ‘Best friends’ wasn’t watching, it was a kind of blindness.
Now, of course, I have to agree. My watching of Rex was retrospective. It only began when I knew he was a poet.
Harry and I rented a villa in Ngaio. We tried to buy a house in Worser Bay, where the wind and spray – but I’ve said all that. We walked from Ngaio in good weather, across the gorge and up to the railway line on the other side, and down looping Upper Wadestown Road, under the black pines of Tinakori Hill. Twenty minutes from a waterfall creek and cliffs of rock, from tawa and fern and supple-jack, to the main street of the capital city – even Harry began to see that Wellington had its attractions. Then we bought a house in Kelburn, on the wrong side of the hill, and Harry, pregnant, walked to work with me through the gardens but travelled home at night by cable car. She had a job in the Health Department and I in the Turnbull Library, in the old brick house in Bowen Street. I was in charge of manuscripts, high under the roof, in a room where the maid must have slept, if Alexander Turnbull had a maid. Rex and Alice called on me there when they got off the Christchurch ferry after the Writers’ Conference, 1957.
I heard her voice come winding up the stairs – dove notes increasing almost to a honk. Beautiful Alice, English Alice, Alice with her V. Woolf liquid eyes and V. Woolf hair. She cultivated the resemblance and when it was mentioned said with a laugh, oh but she was manquée, she was afraid, in everything else – which no one believed for a moment of course. I was bedazzled, and failed to get Rex properly in view. When I managed it I was impressed and disappointed – impressed more at first but disappointed later on. Corduroy jacket and white silk scarf and suede leather shoes. And a beard. I had not thought he would let Alice dress him up. Or that he could be so poet-like and spectacular. His beard had streaks of ginger. Les Petley’s red was coming out. It was close-trimmed, jaw-hugging (Alice would not tolerate shagginess) and – it’s odd – it made me see Lila, thrown into relief somehow, in the bones of his upper face.
‘Auckland comes to town,’ I said. ‘You’re not going out in the street dressed like that?’
‘Same old Jack,’ Rex said. He was pleased with me; but Alice, in that moment, knew that I would never do as Rex’s best friend. She had someone else lined up for that anyway – and in he came, following his little pouter chest: John Dobbie, the Elf. He had a flamboyance I would never have – and (she recognized it, I am sure) an inveterate subservience. John wanted to be second, wanted Rex to be first. It satisfied him deeply, allowed him an importance that would not be out of control. He too had a wife, Evelyn known as Eve; with marble throat and limbs and a farm-girl face – Olympian and Waikato. She was thoroughly ill-matched with the Elf. Several times she held his hand but that made him look like a schoolboy with his mother.
‘I read your piece in Serpent,’ I said to John, ‘it was very good’ – although I meant ‘quite’. (The thing I respect most about him is that he grew up in Helensville and so has some knowledge of mangroves and mud.)
‘We’ve been reading poetry on the ferry,’ Alice said. ‘In the dawn, coming over the strait.’
‘Up on deck,’ Eve said. She was always uncertain and usually came in late.
‘New stuff?’ I asked Rex, but he said, ‘John’s. Out loud,’ and I recognized him again and knew that Alice had not changed anything between us. Two words, dead-pan: the whole of our past was back in place. Beard and costume were a game he played. Was marriage a game that he played too? He could afford to let Alice dress him up. Under the beard, under the scarf, Rex from Loomis went about his work in his old way.
I showed them politicians’ letters (how casual we were in 1957). ‘I want to spoil the bastard’s view,’ McKenzie wrote, approving an unnecessary road between Buller’s house and the lake. Rex loved it, but Alice was perturbed. For all her displays of unconventionality, she believed (continues to believe) in face value and official truth.
I gave Rex my key and sent him and Alice to Kelburn by taxi. (The Dobbies had friends of their own.) Harry pulled faces when I met her for lunch; behaved almost as though – had put her in danger. She grew private in her pregnancies, self-communicating in some way, and her brightness when she had to mix with others had a clockwork precision that made me listen for the breaking of a spring. I was ready to step forward and catch her when she fell. But this was Rex, not just anyone, I argued as we ate our filled rolls in the cemetery. Rex and his new wife. ‘You’ll like Alice,’ – on speculation. ‘I wouldn’t mind betting she’s pregnant too.’ (She had thrown up on the ferry, halfway through John Dobbie’s poem.) But other women’s pregnancies were an affront to Harry and she forbade me to mention hers; although anyone with half an eye … She said she would
cook tea and do her best but I mustn’t expect any poetry talk from her. She did not like Rex’s poetry. Some of it was cruel, she said, and not for any good reason. And it always turned to violence and the dark. No woman who was having a baby wanted that – which he had better learn if his wife really was pregnant. But it wasn’t just optimism Harry needed. She liked things hard and clean and definite. Although she could admire the particularity of Rex’s verse she didn’t like the way the edge was blunted – so she said, I don’t see it – as though it hit against something hard that knocked all the point and sharpness off.
‘Go on,’ I said. She had never talked in that way before.
‘Everything gets cloudy. There’s too much blood.’
‘But he’s absolutely clear, and anyway blood’s a part of it,’ needing her to see the Rex I saw.
But all she would say was, ‘He’s yours, not mine, so don’t ask me to like him. I’ll cook tea, that’s all.’
She did not have to do that. He had left a note on the kitchen table that said Leon Pittaway was in town and was giving them dinner at his hotel, and later on there was a party at Rita Bullen’s – ‘You and your wife are invited’ – and Leon had his car and was driving them to Auckland in the morning. All they needed was a bed for the night. ‘Goody,’ Harry said, and flopped down on the sofa with a grin.
I felt I had been pushed into the margins again; but that was more than made up for by being at the centre of Harry’s life. She had me put my hand on the baby to feel it move, which was my first acquaintance with David: a flick like a cockabully’s tail. It churned me up so much with elation and fright that I could not eat the extra piece of steak – Rex’s piece – Harry gave me for tea.
‘We don’t have to go to this party.’
But she would like to sit and watch, she said – as long as she could come home as soon as she’d had enough. Rita’s house was only a quarter of a mile away. We walked from our gully to Central Terrace, and insulted Barton Rymer with a bottle of cheap sherry at the door. ‘No need, no call for that.’ He put it behind him, out of sight. Barton was the husband Rita had at the time; a lawyer, and ‘well-to-do’ she had said while considering him. She liked especially his family house and harbour view; and found him ‘nobody’s fool’ and ‘more fun than you’d think’. And how could she resist being Rita Rymer? His flattened melancholy lower lip suggested to me that he had been broken in too fast to Rita’s ways. Barton played the flute beautifully, but the flute, Rita said, was for later in the evening. Right now he must see that everybody had enough to drink.
Rex and Alice and Leon arrived late, which made Rita snappish. Merv Soper sat quiet, drinking more whisky than he was used to and saying ha-ha and golly now and then (on the last night of his life). Harry liked him best of anyone there, she said next day, but I don’t honestly think she noticed him. And I did little more than nod across the room. I’m sorry to say I talked with John Dobbie and admired his conversational trick of self-reference and his way of mounting on his toes when being clever. We were both waiting for Rex. As soon as I realized it I pulled out of the game, dismayed at myself. I did not need to be subservient, I did not think second was an important place to be or that reflected light made one shine with interesting colours. I could stand aside from Rex and have his friendship. John Dobbie was not able to do that.
I sat with Harry and told her who was who as they came in: Laurie Sefton, Rita’s protégé, whose first poems had just appeared in Serpent; the Training College poets and the coffee shop hobohe-mians (Rita hadn’t invited the second group); Len Mooney, the short short-story writer, wearing his Marxist armour and looking for a fight; tall private-schooled Ray Candy, the abstract painter, who gave him one out in the garden (and married Mooney’s girlfriend before long, that is what it was really about); a woman I thought was Ngaio Marsh, but who turned out to be the next door neighbour; some students selling copies of their poetry magazine.
James K. Baxter didn’t come.
It wasn’t a brilliant party. It needed Rex Petley and Leon Pittaway. John Dobbie remembers it as brilliant, although he can’t prove it other than to say that when Rex stumbled on the steps coming in and bloodied his nose and bled into his hands while Alice ran off to find a towel, Rita said snidely (how did John miss the snide?): ‘The great poet bleeds into the chalice of his palms,’ and I said, ‘Does anybody happen to have a wafer?’ What was I doing with that remark? I can’t recall. I like to think I was getting at John Dobbie for his elaborate concern and fussy importance.
Why doesn’t he ask how it came about that sure-footed Rex should stumble on those easy steps?
Alice and Rita laid him on the king-sized bed in the master bedroom (laid meant just to lay down in those days) and he came out after a while with a plaster Aliced on his nose. ‘Golly,’ Merv Soper said. ‘My boy’ – Leon Pittaway.
‘Lovely timing. Get him a drink, Barton,’ Rita said.
1 don’t remember Rex in any detail at the party, perhaps for the reason that it wasn’t him. He was an artefact, he was Alice’s. I remember shifting between dismay and complacency. Complacent in my knowledge that he would be moving on, that he wasn’t living this, he was doing it. Dismay was real all the same. His way of conversing with Leon upset me. It was nudge, wisecrack, smartarse, all the time. Perhaps this is what the Elf calls brilliance. I understood, after a while, that it was Rex’s way of keeping his distance and letting Leon have no foothold in his life.
‘Hey Leon, here’s one. Arbuthnot and Bottomely are drinking at the club and Arbuthnot says to Bottomely, “I say old man, have you heard about Ponsonby-Ponsonby? He’s living with an elephant at the zoo.” “I say! A male elephant?” “Good heavens no, a female one. There’s nothing queer about Ponsonby-Ponsonby”.’ Leon cackled gleefully.
‘I don’t like Rex much this way,’ Rita said.
‘Nor do 1.’
‘I liked him better in his coat.’
‘Yes.’ (But please, everybody, forget the coat. The coat is in London, on the other side of the world.) ‘I don’t think Alice will keep him dressed up for long.’
‘She’d better not. I didn’t get him started for nothing.’
I grinned at Rita. It’s impossible not to like her. ‘The sugarworks poems are pretty good.’
‘Not bad. I wish I knew what he’s hiding from.’
‘Nothing, Rita. Not in his poems. Right now he’s hiding from his father-in-law.’
She disagreed on both counts. ‘I’m the one who’s hiding. The lecherous old toad.’
‘The Pittaways are a special case.’
‘Not in my house. His poetry is awful muck, you know.’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘I hope Rex realizes it.’
That was something I would have to find out. The damage would be real if he had come to think that poetry was made in the Pittaway verse factory. (Have I said that Alice wrote too, and that Merv Soper had turned down both her and her mother?)
But all this gossip counts for nothing. Remembering becomes an act of cleverness. I want to stop and let important things uncover themselves. Other important things I mean to keep to myself: Harry, and walking home with her in the night.
The fight in the back garden – it was hiss and grapple and rolling on the ground. The sensible Ngaio Marsh neighbour turned the hose on them. Out in front, as we left, Barton Rymer was playing his flute under a doctored cherry tree. He sat on one end of a wooden bench and Merv Soper sat on the other. I thought if one of them stood up the other would tip off.
If he had given all his time to it Barton could have played professionally. The flute, with its succession of monotones, its portion of breath mixed in each note, its furry shaking free into a penetrating clarity, has always been, for me, the instrument that best expresses body/mind, and pre-vocal wonder, and transcendence. It speaks, inevitably, of death. We stopped and listened as Barton, improvizing, told us that nothing mattered here, that doors were opening and arrival was at hand. I was, I suppos
e, made susceptible by drink. I wanted to ‘cease upon the midnight’, and Harry to cease with me, and urgencies to stop. I felt that we might float away, over the sparkling city at our feet, over the cold harbour and the starlit hills, and simplify to a molecule and have no need of bodies or of knowledge any more and become our own single point.
Harry tugged me out of the gate. ‘I don’t like that man. I can’t stand his mouth.’
‘He’s marvellous on the flute.’
‘All that phoney sadness. Anyone can do it.’
I did not try to say what I had felt. Harry and I slipped into accord and walking home in the wind soon became the best part of our night. I don’t forget Barton’s music though, and regret never hearing it again; although I heard him play several times before Rita ran away to live with Laurie Sefton.
‘I feel sorry for Rex,’ Harry said in bed.
‘Why?’
‘He seems younger now than when I met him.’
‘He’s playing games. Alice is a game.’
‘Yes. Someone should tell her. She’s mad about him, Jack. Did you see the way she comes up and sort of sinks against him? She’d get inside him if she could.’
‘She’s tough all the same.’
‘She’ll need to be. I wish she didn’t look so much like – who did all those pictures?’
‘Burne-Jones?’
‘I suppose that must be what Rex likes.’
They came in not long after us but we kept our door closed and breathed softly; and giggled and clutched each other as they made love – grunts from Rex, flat and focused and definite, and little whoops and female barks from Alice.
‘Phew,’ Harry said.
‘Bloody Rex. He’s got to be the best at everything.’
‘No he’s not. No he’s not.’
‘Noise?’ I whispered.
‘We can be quiet. They can’t.’
There was, in that, transcendence and repose. (And no little Skeat creature perched himself on my shoulder.)
