by Gee, Maurice
‘Well, possibly …’
‘He said to sell it to the Yanks. It was my insurance, he said.’
‘Don’t let the Yanks get it.’
‘I won’t. But then, later on, he said, “Burn all that junk. I don’t want the thesis boys busy on me.” And he meant it. So I said I would. But I kept it. And what I need to know, is it mine?’
Well, I said, the copyright, copyright stayed with Rex. Ownership, that was difficult. What she should do was keep very quiet; or she could leave it all with me -
‘No.’
‘Put it in the Turnbull then. Tell them to bury it. I don’t think Rex would ever find out. The Hocken? The Auckland Institute?’
She shook her head at each suggestion. ‘I want to keep them with me. In a way I’m guardian. He never – he never looked after himself, Jack.’ She meant his reputation. And if she meant hers, who can blame her? Poets’ wives come badly out of things. I was pleased with her. The archivist in me was delighted. I did not care where his papers went as long as somebody kept them safe.
‘He’s capable of coming here and claiming it all. And burning it. It goes with this simple life nonsense he’s tied up with. She treats him like a labourer. Someone to dig drains and chop down trees. You’d think he wasn’t Rex Petley at all. One of our best poets. Some people say our very best.’ She wanted credit for him, she wanted her part known. That made the steeliness behind her front. I admired her more than I ever had.
‘Just put them somewhere safe and deny that they exist. People are going to thank you one day.’ I did not feel I was betraying Rex. I’ll lie and cheat for manuscripts and archives. Preservation is a ruling principle and it makes its own morality.
‘I kept a daybook too: where he went, who he talked to – visitors, dinner parties, that kind of thing. When he started poems and when he finished. I thought one day, for a biography …?’
‘Yes. Good. What about things he said?’
‘If they seemed’ – she turned her head, removed herself a little – ‘important. It’s odd, he didn’t say very much.’
She had survived the disappointment. I admired her even more; and wondered if her daybook recorded his meeting with Margot Stiles.
‘There’s an interesting thing he said about you.’
‘Me?’
‘He said – wait, I’ll get it.’ She went out; and closed the door in case I should see her hiding place. I looked at the paintings round the room – an Ellis motorway, some Hanly agitated molecules: she hadn’t managed to hang Rex but she had some good things on the walls.
‘Now –’ reappearing with a bundle of notebooks (hard-covered, octavo) held in a thick rubber band – ‘what year did your wife draw that little children’s book about a hedgehog?’
‘1970. It came out in October. For Christmas.’
She found the book, and the place – the ideal archivist. She read: ‘Rex brought home a children’s picture book [Henry Hedgehog’s Happy Holiday, by Beth Simmonds and Harriet Edwards, Sandpit Press, 1970] and said, “Who does that remind you of?” [the hedgehog]. I could not tell. “It’s Jack. Harry’s done Jack as a hedgehog. And look at the way she’s split him down the middle. Poor old Jack, he doesn’t know whether he’s supposed to laugh or cry. Or run away or go in boots and all. She knows a thing or two, that girl. I hope she never tries to draw me.” ’
‘Can I look?’
‘That’s all. I hope you don’t mind. But I tried to write down everything he said about books. Even … He really did admire it. We had it round the house for several years.’
‘Can I look at 1971?’
Steady voice, steady hands. I knew the dates – late February, early March. And I knew what I would find. ‘Rex was away all week, he won’t say where. “In the bush.” He says he writes best when he’s close to water and he wanted to see some rivers “down south” where it isn’t muddy it’s clear. There don’t seem to be any poems though.’
Fiona brought in tea. How neatly I drank – sip, sip – and nibbled my biscuit. I cupped my hand to catch the crumbs. Then I left Alice – Woolfish Alice – standing in the shade of her front hall and drove with Fiona to my hotel.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Nothing.’
‘She can be depressing. If I was either one of them I think I’d leave the other. I haven’t told you, Jack, I’m getting married.’
‘Good for you.’
‘He’s a psychologist. Tom Pringle. We see things so much the same way.’
‘Good for you.’
‘He thinks both my parents are mad.’
A new, open Rex. I knew that he would tell me about Harry.
‘How do you mean, interesting?’ Rex is quick.
‘I got the chance to check some dates. How often did you and Harry go away together?’
The sea turning over in long rows; thin water streaming up the sand. Far ahead figures moved in the sea-haze at the southern end of the beach.
‘Only once. I met her twice but the first time it was an accident. She was in Taumarunui. She was going down the Wanganui River the next day. I was just – wandering around. I had to get away from Alice now and then.’
‘And Harry had to get away from me.’
‘Yeah, she did.’
‘Did she tell you why?’
‘We had some drinks. We talked a bit about it.’
‘And went to bed?’
‘No, mate, nothing like that. I guess we both just knew if we needed help there was someone we could ask.’
‘And Harry asked? In nineteen seventy one?’
‘Yeah, I guess. We said goodnight. She went down the river and I went – don’t remember. I was getting out of Auckland quite a bit around that time. I nearly called on you once but you’d shifted house.’
‘That was before Taumarunui.’
‘Probably. Anyway Jack, no bed. Though I won’t say it didn’t cross my mind. I guess I like Harry as much as anyone I know.’
‘She always told me she didn’t like you.’
‘She didn’t. She doesn’t. Except now and then. Now and then I guess I was OK.’
‘So what about that note you sent about her book? Did you write that to let her know you were available? You went to bed the next time. I’m not a bloody fool.’
‘Take it easy, Jack. I thought I saw something – so I wrote.’
‘Saw what?’
‘In the hedgehog. I thought she must be pretty desperate.’
There were moments, walking on the beach, when I wanted to kill him.
‘Take it easy.’
I swung back and forth like a pendulum: hatred, love. You can love your friend who has made love to your wife. You can even love your friend who has understood her.
I asked him what had happened ‘down south’.
‘She sent me a card at work. It just said where she’d be, and when.’
‘And where was that?’
‘Takaka. We went across to Totaranui and stayed in the farmhouse. We went for walks up and down the coast.’
I would have liked to do that.
‘What else?’
‘Jack, these things, I don’t know, they just kind of happen. It was a case of knowing each other for so long. No one betrayed anyone else.’
He did not say that it had happened six years ago. He understood that it was now for me. I turned to the sea. Tears ran on my face at Harry’s need to get away, and to have me with her in Rex, whom she didn’t like. I understood how passionate she must have been with him.
‘If you ever write a poem about this I’ll fucking kill you.’
‘Sure, Jack. I won’t write a poem.’
Even so, I did not see it as adultery. I saw it as Harry’s deep need. I saw it as love in which, somehow, I was object. And it must have been like that, a little, for Rex: I was probably not central but off to one side. (I wonder where Alice was standing.) I’m not concerned with the sex part. There must have been an interesting chemistry between them. I�
�m not going to think about that. I thought about it for a while, then I turned it off. It’s a part of Harry’s private life. The loved person must be free to have a private life.
As for Rex and me, that chemistry – but I’ll leave it. We walked down the beach to our car and driving back to Waimauku he asked me to come in and say hallo to Margot. She should be home by now. A man of simple states, Rex, this new/old creature, Rex. Our Harry conversation was all done; and he had a need of his own, which was to lay at rest the small last part of Sidgy’s death I carried round with me.
I sat on a pile of bricks by her shack while he went into the vine rows to find her. Silence, except for the wind and the cicadas. Silence in me, a cold fog. Then, advancing through it, almost sub-aural, a chatter not of voices, of events – the rattle, the collisions, the agitation, of Harry’s life and mine, our lives together. It grew into a roar. It rattled away down a chute and fell from hearing, and I was empty and must start again. All we had was our naked selves, facing each other and, perhaps, prepared to reach out and touch each other. I won’t say that I understood it; but I came into a state – perhaps from the sky, the moving grass, the dusty road turning across the hill – into a position from which, sometime soon, understanding might be reached for and be found. I would survive. I knew that I had an ‘I’ to survive. I would increase. And Harry was Harry, it would happen to her too. I’m not talking about happiness, it’s salvation; but happiness does come into it.
A dog ran round the corner of the shack and skidded to a halt; a nondescript dog of the sort you see on TV, working sheep. It looked at me and looked away at someone out of sight. Perhaps it guarded me, or kept me company, I could not tell; but its eyes and attentive nose and sharpened ears underlined me in my new position. I said, ‘Gidday.’
Margot, when she came, underlined me too, with a close and wary look. ‘Jack? No, don’t get up.’ She was stained jungle-green from tomato leaves, and smelled of them.
‘Hallo, Margot.’
We shook hands.
Rex had known her the way you turn a page and know the first word. I could not make the connection. The whole long emptiness between – Margot now, Margot then; you take the easy step across; don’t look down or you’ll see the chasm falling away, and all that inner surface … False analogy. There’s no similarity in the relations. Margot doesn’t wear trickiness, she exposes it. I simply have to leave her life to her, and stand them side by side, the child and the woman, and treat them somehow as contemporaries.
The woman, I saw at once, was pregnant: no soft swelling, a hard lump. It was localized and muscular – the child held tight. I told her how much I admired their piece of land. It wasn’t often you saw land used so intensively. Were they trying to live off it or did they go outside to work?
‘I do,’ Margot said.
‘She’s got some private patients,’ Rex said.
‘How long will you be able …’
Right through, she answered. Exercise was good for pregnant women, and good for the baby too.
‘And how long before you’ll be making wine?’ I nodded at the vine rows on the hill.
‘Years. We’ve got to learn how.’
‘I got old Ivan Franich up to help me with the planting. God knows what we’ll do when we get some grapes,’ Rex said.
‘We’ll manage.’
‘I’m sure you will.’
We finished topics quickly. I liked Margot at once but saw that she didn’t much like me. Was it me now or me then she had trouble with?
‘Would you like a cup of tea, Jack?’ That, and a biscuit, she owed me. I wanted more. Hadn’t I come to tell her that Sidgy might stay dead? I had walked through her gate and patted her dog and smiled at her. In a way I sanctioned her baby and I didn’t want now just to nod and go away.
She had been a fat child. Now she was square and muscular. She had been freckled and sandy. She was freckled and sandy still. No mystery, no darkness, little curve (even with a baby on the way); no moist corners or fronded declivities. Her hips and pelvis made a footing for the foetal sac that rode inside. I nearly wrote ‘precious load’ for ‘foetal sac’ but there seemed to be none of that, just an immense practicality. A powerful in-turning. Nothing delicate or ‘sensitive’.
Her face? Ordinary. Nondescript. Open, not mean; private, not loud. She would smile but it did not light her up, it simply made her available for a moment or two. She did nothing with her hair but keep it short. She did not hide her ears – lop ears are they called? – that jutted like serving spoons from the side of her head. Her hair had mostly hidden them when she was a child.
I did not need to mention Sidgy. They simply had to see me to know that he wasn’t coming back from my direction. I don’t think he bothered them much. He was a scar they carried on some part covered by clothes. Birthmark might be more accurate, in the sense that Sidgy was present in their beginning; but scar is deeper and more apt. They did not feel it any longer but probably noticed it now and then. Margot perhaps noticed more, being pregnant. She had needed to see me. After the cup of tea she needed me gone.
‘And you still live in Wellington, Jack?’
‘Yes. In Kelburn.’
‘And you’re married? With children?’
I told her. I said Harry’s name and it sounded in me like a gong. Then it sounded like a simple, clear, direct call home. Harry reduced Margot to her proper size. Margot and Rex. I did not want, or need, to be part of them. For the first time in my life I didn’t need Rex. It was stunning, liberating. It was like a load of shingle sliding off a truck and leaving the tray empty, polished clean, and sinking easily to its proper place.
Such things do not last. He has troubled me again. He has been a load I bear; that I bear gladly now and then. But the moment when I stood free of him and emptied out, is – what? Valid state, absolute condition. That is me. As long as I remember it …
‘Harry? Is that short for Harriet?’
‘Yes.’
She sent a look at Rex and I wondered if he had told her. Probably had. They were not people who would hide earlier lives.
‘I’ll be home tomorrow. That will be good. I don’t really like Auckland much.’
‘I don’t either,’ Margot said. ‘But I love it here.’ That, with her marvellous directness, was for Rex. I saw why he loved her but I did not envy him. I wanted to get home to Harry.
‘Does he still call you Wells?’
‘Not now.’
‘They use “Porridge” in schools, you know. “For Wells”.’
‘Yes, I’ve heard. I’m going back to work, Rex. I’ve got another three rows to do. Goodbye, Jack. Thanks for being kind to me when I was a child.’
‘Rex was the kind one.’
‘Yes. Come and see us when you’re up again.’ That was the only time she wasn’t honest. She went back to her work nipping laterals and I haven’t met her since, although I’ve spoken with her on the phone.
‘Does Alice know she’s pregnant?’
‘No. Margot goes up the hill when she comes out.’
‘She won’t be coming out again, after your letter.’
‘I guess not.’
‘And you really live like this, separately?’
‘It’s the way she wants it. My place is over by the other entrance. Sometimes we don’t meet for a couple of days.’
‘Are you getting married?’
‘We’re kind of married already. Come and have a look at the place.’
Margot’s dog came with us. He had been trained to keep to the paths – though now and then he peed where he shouldn’t have – and he trotted ahead, keeping his nose to the breeze and possibly smelling Margot, working far away among the tomatoes. She had taken off her shirt and I saw the curved sweat-shine of her back – a curve in Margot after all.
We went up through the clipped vines on their wires and when I complained about the clay he told me grapes grew well in that sort of soil. The place had a micro-climate, it had a lid on it and a
wall around. In a way, he said, it was displaced – half a beat outside time, a millimetre off the grid of the paddocks round about. I saw a little clinker-built dinghy standing on its stern against the back wall of his shack.
‘You still do some fishing?’
‘When I can. Margot doesn’t like the sea. She doesn’t trust it.’
‘Where do you go?’
‘Out on the Kaipara.’ A sports car – Jaguar, or some conspicuous thing – stopped by his stall at the gate and he watched it with narrowed eyes until it drove away. He did not seem to care about selling. ‘It’s a bit too closed in though. I go across the other side. Off the Whangaparaoa.’ He grinned. ‘She likes the fish.’
‘I thought they were all gone.’
‘I know where they’re hiding. You’ve got to work at it. I’ve been sitting out in the Hauraki Gulf for a long time now.’ He was happy, he was pleased with himself, and his boasting was a part of it. The sea was not the reason, Margot was, Margot and this piece of land with a lid on it. He had found a place to stand better than ‘Petley’ – which, now, perhaps he could leave.
‘Can you keep on writing?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Alice thinks you won’t.’
‘Alice is a bit out of touch.’
‘Does the family come? The boys?’
‘They’ve got other things to do.’
‘What about Lila and Melva and the others?’
‘They’re still there in Loomis. I go and visit them. Margot’s not too good with families. Come up here, Jack. When you stand on top of the hill you can see right across to the dunes at the back of the beach. When the wind’s right the spray comes up and makes it like a fire. You think it’s all burning, twenty or thirty miles of it, on the other side.’
Don’t ask questions, he meant to say.
So there’s Rex, on his bit of land, with his ‘wife’. Alice was to say ‘he never married’, but she was wrong. He did not marry her because she had no territory. Margot had a territory. He lived with Margot and their child between Muriwai and Waimauku, and learned to make wine that could just about be drunk. He sold produce at the gate and sent a few trays and sacks to market now and then. Margot kept a patient or two. There was never much money. He managed to keep his old car on the road and drove off to the Kaipara or the gulf with the dinghy on the roof-rack and the motor in the boot and came home with snapper and kahawai and kingfish.
