Going West

by Gee, Maurice

  So we sat in the garden holding hands – metaphorically most of the time – and talked about David and Jillian (hundreds of hours we spent on them now that there was little we could do) and my work and her work, and we read each other newspaper paragraphs and witty or ungrammatical sentences from books. We bought good wine, and Harry developed a taste for gin, but we never drank too much – just enough to make us relaxed. What did Walter Skeat say? ‘Do nothing with immoderation.’ I could not reach disbelief in that, but discovered freedom within those bounds. For her part, Harry believed in keeping a clear head and a steady hand.

  We did a lot of walking in those days, in sneakers and sun hats and dark glasses, with little Swedish day-packs on our backs – a light parka, insect repellent, an apple, a sandwich, water, a packet of barley sugars, a packet of bandaids; and, for me, a plastic rubbish sack to pick up rubbish other people dropped. (I did not always bother.) We went to Red Rocks and Cape Turakirae to see the seals. We went to the Orongorongo Valley and climbed Mt. Matthews (the biggest of the elephants). No point in listing our walks and climbs and scrambles, our scrapes and falls; but in Nelson, on Mt. Duppa, we climbed through moss and fern, and limestone boulders in a net of roots, and I seemed to see the world Harry had drawn on the bedroom wall. She always knew a little more than I, a little sooner. Between Johnston’s Hill and Mt. Kaukau, with the city and the harbour at our feet – a postcard, too lovely to approach – we came on two men fighting in a hollow. They were middle-aged, red, exhausted, stripped to the waist, and they whacked and missed each other with huge boxing gloves on their white arms. I wanted to watch, and stop them perhaps when they’d had enough, but Harry tugged me on. ‘Can’t you see it’s private?’ Later, as we ate lunch, they walked by, carrying their gloves, one behind the other, with something settled between them, it was plain. I recognized one of them, he was a third party politician.

  Harry knew about privacy. We kept our own, each from the other, and I look on it now as natural. And even more: desirable. Confession, bleeding, shrieking, ‘letting it all hang out’ – is that the phrase? – I see as absurd, unnatural, promiscuous, among those not intimate, and between those intimate, as Harry and I were (are), likely to damage or destroy. There are all sorts of places to go, hand in hand, all sorts of pleasures to share, with the body or in the mind, and these acts of touching are like the pebble kicked along the path, that changes the centre of gravity of the universe. We love each other sufficiently when that has been understood.

  But I should speak only for Harry and me. I club a broken tea-tree jack (as Les Petley had clubbed the broken-backed dog) and Harry takes me inside and makes me wash my face and sits me down with a cup of tea. I tell her when she wakes from anaesthetic that the lump in her breast is benign. I hold the basin while she is sick. And we walk downtown and climb home through Allenby Terrace after a movie that makes us laugh. I, she, we, in a thousand ways. Married people know all about it. There’s a lazy gravity at work between these two that don’t escape but never touch.

  Arrangement and description has been my work. A&D; a moral principle. At the pick-up, disorder; everything is, by nature it can seem, and deliberately it also seems, discomposed. But inherent in it there’s due order and we have systems to find it out. At the end, accessibility. The thing is preserved and available. Not always, but now and then, I feel that I have used my life well.

  I would love to have been a literary detective: found the Boswell papers; the truth about Sir Thomas Malory; the true account of Christopher Marlowe’s death. I visited the Public Records Office in London; and there I turned side on, I was thinned out by attraction and repulsion. Half of me wanted to rush in and the other half to rush away. I was overcome by delight and fear. So much treasure. So much life and death. I was afraid that I would find the attempt absurd. I stayed only a short time and I’m not sure what I took away.

  Back in Wellington I was top man. I climbed the pyramid at last and enjoyed the view from my narrow seat. But sometimes it was like the wheel the Persian satrap sat Polycrates of Samos on to die. (That doesn’t work exactly; and didn’t work for Rex when he used the spike in a poem, standing for conscience. The mechanics, the anatomy, are wrong.) I learned bureaucracies and budgets and staff – how I learned staff – and how to overcome and enjoy difficulty, and how to stand aside and let the thing roll past that won’t be stopped. But all the time I remained the reader who turns to the back of the book and judges it by its bibliography. And in Coblenz when the archivist put a letter from Heinrich Himmler in my hands I felt something dark uncoil in me; I had to find a washroom and soap myself up to the elbows. I retained that susceptibility.

  Harry might say, ‘Oh God, the whole family wiped out, because some drunken hoon had to drive his car.’ Or: ‘All of them drowned. Two little girls and the mother. She was pregnant too! And the poor father, trying to swim for help. Imagine what he feels like, Jack.’ I could imagine. But I was interested more in deliberate acts. ‘They tied him up and put him in the boot of the car and drove two hundred miles and threw him in the Huka Falls. The police think he was still alive.’ I wanted the reports of it. I wanted the bloodied singlet and the ropes. For my archives. Beautiful things alone are not enough.

  Archives bring a kind of control.

  We saw Rex again on television, 1981. He was marching against the Springbok tour but it seemed to me that Margot was the one who was there and she had brought Rex along. She flashed her eyes at the camera and held her placard high while he had his attention somewhere else.

  ‘I can’t do that shouting by numbers. Margot can’t either. That was the only time we went.’

  ‘So, did you write a poem about it?’

  ‘I don’t write much poetry any more.’

  ‘Dried up, eh?’

  He looked evasive. ‘We wrote a couple of letters to the paper.’ (John Dobbie quotes from one, proving Rex had a social conscience. He fails to mention Margot signed it too. Perhaps she wrote it and he signed.)

  I did not speak to Margot on that visit, but saw her working in the depths of a shed: bare legs, tartan shirt, that was all. I could not see her face but I think she smiled. She raised her finger in a small salute.

  ‘Swim, Sal,’ Rex called, and their child ran out. She was brown and shaggy-haired, and over-muscular for a seven-year-old.

  ‘This is Jack. A mate of mine.’

  The child unwound her towel from his arm and ran ahead of us up the hill. She flashed in the vine rows, climbed the fence, disappeared into scrub overlapping the ridge.

  ‘We bought a bit more land,’ Rex explained. ‘There’s a creek down the other side.’

  ‘Good swimming holes?’

  ‘Not as deep as Loomis, it’s more stony. The water’s better though, you can see the bottom.’

  The scrub turned into bush halfway down. There were ferns and nikau palms and supple-jack: jungly bush, as much in its own climate as the vineyard over the hill. But the creek was wide and open to the air; it did not seem to me a creek at all. I save that word for gorge water, slow and deep and green. This, I told Rex, was a stream.

  ‘Yeah, maybe.’ We sat on rocks in the sun and watched the naked child swinging on a knotted rope and dropping into the water.

  ‘Want to go in?’

  ‘Next time. I’ll bring some togs.’ I took off my shoes and let the water run over my feet. Rex delved under the bank and came up with two cans of beer.

  ‘Emergency supplies.’

  ‘I thought you’d be drinking wine.’

  ‘Margot hasn’t got it quite right yet. We sell most of our grapes to Ivan Franich.’

  He had moved from the active to the passive. He seemed not to go out to things, in his mind, but let them come to him, the way the creek or stream came, round its bend, over his square feet on the shingle; and let things go in that way. It was the same with past and future. He did not want to visit. As usual I wanted to go back; wanted the extra dimension. Rex had always been a door for me. I tried him
with the Fun Doctor: our standard two room, Miss Warburton in the corner, all her sharp authority gone, and the old man – bow tie, crinkled Auden face – juggling dusters (little puffs of chalk dust from his hands) and balancing stacks of chairs on his forehead. And I tried him with junket, grated nutmeg sprinkled on top. ‘A schoolteacher told me kids don’t know what junket is any more.’ Rex looked down the creek and yawned.

  ‘Old Norman Tate. Remember the time the chairs came down and took the skin off his nose?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He picked up a pebble and lobbed it into the water. He lived in a capsule labelled ‘here and now’, and time slid by and the world slid by while he enjoyed the golden weather inside. Yet he had mentioned Loomis Creek without being prompted. Perhaps there were some pictures on the walls. And I had entry. I could visit this new creek (this ‘now’ creek) and watch the child swinging on her rope. I could come as long as I stayed simple.

  Storing beer under the bank was as far ahead as Rex wanted to go. I could not see that sitting by the hole enjoying the sun, watching Sal fall and splash and swim to the tree roots and climb up and capture the rope again, was any better – healthier – than nosing obsessively down Loomis Creek and sliding in the mud chute with Fiona. I could not see that there was any fight left in Rex. And it was not until we went back to the house – they had a house and lived together now – and I saw his old Holden with the dinghy roped on top, and knew he had an escape from his thirty acres, that I felt my depression lift.

  We had no conversation to record. And you can only say so much about an hour spent sitting by a creek. We went there. We did that. Then we walked back. The child vanished into the shed. I heard Margot hammering at something inside.

  Rex and I shook hands. ‘See you, Jack. Come out again.’ That was all. A happy man.

  Why was I uneasy as I drove away?

  John Dobbie has trouble with those years. He likens Rex to a fish in a tank. It’s effective as a simile if you don’t know what I know, that Rex loved Margot and Sal and was happy there. Poetry stopped, spirit died in him, John says; and although he’s right in the first part, as far as publication is concerned, he has no evidence for the second. He has, he says (but does not write), Alice’s word for it that something shrivelled up in Rex when ‘that unlit woman’ came into his life. But Alice is constructing a story. She thinks there was a Rex within Rex, driving, navigating, and that she was the route he took. The Elf goes along with this and when he has done it will be official. It does little good my saying no. I’ve no more evidence than John -less, for he has Alice while I don’t have Margot. I do have – we both have – the weight of those eleven years he spent out there. Some thousands of days go into the balance and the Elf will not be able to ignore them. But he’ll find a way around the mountain. Alice is waiting on the other side.

  I know what I know. But I have a question. Why did he go out in his boat when he shouldn’t have? Why did he drown?

  I’ll have to visit Margot, there is no other way. But first I must finish this. I’ll set myself square: stand Wellington and Harry and Jack Skeat in their place. Since he first came to Loomis school I’ve never ceased feeling Rex’s gravitational pull but other things have worked on me too. Rex was not the whole of it.

  A southerly and then a northerly. There was no rest. We called our bedroom Scott’s tent. The wind whooped and moaned. It rattled tiles and bent the window glass. The rain sometimes came up from below. Great solid lumps of air, ninety miles an hour, banged at us day and night. The house inched round, we were sure of it. Window latches burst. Curtains fled across the room.

  When I made our early morning cup of tea Harry called me Captain Oates. Another gust struck. ‘Jesus!’ I said. An earthquake now?

  There were sunny days and still days but they are not a memory. I simply know that they occurred. How could our garden have grown without sunny days? But I remember the pine tree crushing the letterbox. And the bank lunging halfway across the street, as yellow and quick as a tiger. The picture window bulges and I put myself in front of Harry to save her. We criss-cross it with sticky tape. She is not against precautions now.

  Downtown, the Quay bends left and right. Plaques set in the footpath show where the shoreline used to be. I am thrilled by that -by huge buildings standing where once there had been sea. Against my will I’m impressed by the beehive stepping into the sky. Politics can thrill me until I remember that those ordinary folk don’t decide – they adjust, adjust, react, react, and the machine clanks and grinds and moves itself on another day in a direction that’s changed only by a degree or two left or right. But the illusion is sometimes there, the thrill is felt, that one lives in an important place. (And lately there has been a turn – adjustment to the instinct of greed – that alters the way we go a little more than usual.)

  I did my job; reported to National or Labour, in that over-designed unhappy building. Outlasted them: the frightened minister, the thick-headed minister on the political make. (Had a good one too, once. He reached out for the brand new book I carried and sniffed it and held it for a moment against his cheek.)

  Harry perfected her art. Jo Bellringer was our guest for months on end, and while she loved Harry and hid her love I played my harmless game of lusting after her. Still it does not make me ashamed. Their books sold steadily and Harry was able to put money away. I published too – an article on archives here and there – and a book. Did I say at the start ‘author of one bad book’? I have a good one too, that I was not going to mention. It’s my Bibliography of New Zealand Bibliographies. A first class work that sits uneasily in the National Bibliography alongside First Fruits. I made some modest royalties.

  In the mid eighties when everybody wanted to get rich we began to want it too. We did our sums on bits of paper, grew fat in our minds with figures like 30 per cent, 35, 40; and thought we might get close to half a million before long. So we switched our money from no-risk to risk, which was ‘as safe as houses’ in those days. What did we go into? RADA, Equiticorp, RJI, Lupercal. And we bought prosperity bonds, but not guaranteed, no, no, shares. In November 1987 – well, some of our investments didn’t do as badly as the rest. But still, we were ‘wiped out’, that’s the term, which I like because it takes on all sorts of meanings.

  We grieved for our lost money; and were angry at other times and flung about looking for someone to blame; attack; destroy. Afterwards we looked at ourselves with a kind of shame. It hurts a little still, our loss I mean; but the knowledge hurts more that we could be greedy, that we had meant to stuff ourselves.

  ‘Poor Jillian, poor David,’ we managed to say. They would not have much more than the house when we were dead.

  ‘What about our trip?’

  ‘We can still go. I’ve got my leave and the tickets are paid for. We’ll have to do it more on the cheap.’

  So we went to Europe as we’d planned, for six months, and stayed in pensions and cheap hotels and youth hostels and bed-and-breakfast places, and ate off stalls and travelled on local buses and walked across cities instead of taking taxis. Got off the plane in Athens, zigzagged up to Norway, and had a month in England and Scotland at the end. We boast that we would not travel in any other way. How heavy our packs grew at times.

  In Auckland, as we set out, I telephoned Rex, but Margot told me he had gone out fishing in his boat.

  ‘Give him my, give him our love.’

  ‘Yes, I will.’

  Rex went out of mind then until Jill posted clippings from the Herald – his swamped boat was found – and the Star – his body found. The letter was waiting when we returned to Athens from the Peloponnese.

  ‘That’s the day – that was the day we left.’ We clutched each other, fingers hooked. Had my face gone as white as hers?

  We flew across Australia as Rex drowned. It seemed to me that I withdrew my love.

  ‘I thought of him …’ In the Peloponnese, at Nestor’s palace. It had been the only time: the runnel and the basin in the clay, where the kin
g had poured his libation – Rex would like that.

  Then I thought, Clay is archive, poor old Nestor’s only art; and I forgot. But it had been genuine, I had signed our friendship, running back. It saved me in Athens when I held his death in my hands.

  I could not grieve. I was simply relieved to pass a test. For the rest of our trip I thought of him in faked ways: Joannina (Byron was here); the Stockholm archipelago (reeling in a fish); Battersea Bridge. It wasn’t until our plane banked to line up the runway at Mangere and I saw the gulf islands sliding away that I understood Rex was drowned.

  ‘You got my letter, Margot?’

  ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘I couldn’t take it in. Not properly. But I wanted to say how sorry I was.’

  ‘Thank you, Jack. Sal and I appreciated it.’ She did not apologize for not writing back. Lila had written back. I read her half dozen lines in Zurich.

  ‘My daughter wrote and told us and sent clippings. I still can’t… I telephoned just before we got on the plane. It happened on that same afternoon.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So you couldn’t give him – our – love.’

  A silent wire.

  ‘I’m sorry, Margot, I’m not blaming you. Where was – did many people go?’

  ‘Quite a few.’

  ‘The family?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And – Alice and her children?’

  ‘Yes. Them.’

  ‘I’m glad.’

  Silence again. She was not.

  ‘Did any writers …?’

  ‘Rita Bullen came. She read some poems.’

  ‘Hers?’

  ‘No, his.’

  ‘That’s good.’ I wanted to know which ones. (I know now, I telephoned Rita. And John Dobbie named them in his book. John was there.)

  ‘I would have liked … I couldn’t come back.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’ Tenderness in her voice, it almost seemed.