by Gee, Maurice
She goes to her mother for Christmas and that’s a hard time. Mrs Brownlee – Ellie names her Brownlee with relief – feels that Ellie has spoiled her life. Ellie stays pacific, then is sharp. She thinks of how much money she has wasted on this trip, how many hours of mopping floors. Mopping floors – like waitressing – doesn’t mean ‘ending up’.
1971. She meets a woman with two children, the younger John’s age, and accepts an offer to move in with her and share the rent. Carol’s husband, a fisherman, is away at sea most of the time. Carol is plain in looks and behaviour and has a strange speech impediment: before starting she must work her jaw as though freeing toffee stuck in her molars. Yet when she speaks her voice is soft and clear, and somehow endearing. Her opinions are sensible. Ellie soon likes her as much as any woman she has known. She grows fond of Carol’s children, and likes Denis well enough when he comes home from sea. She enjoys the supply of fresh fish and starts John eating it quite early. What she would like for herself is a share of the love-making Carol and Denis enjoy on the other side of the uninsulated wall. Not their love-making – Denis doesn’t attract her in that way. She denies that she is looking for a man. She would just like to have one now and then.
Carol weans her daughter at ten months. Ellie follows reluctantly at twelve. She wants to go out and work, and knows she can trust Carol with John. With apologies, contrition, lots of extra cuddles for her boy, she takes a part-time job in the public library. Is anxious away from him but likes the work and enjoys meeting people. Money is still her greatest worry. She paints watercolours of local scenes to sell in gift shops. Fifeshire Rock. The Boulder Bank. Yachts sailing through The Cut. No one will buy and she doesn’t blame them. There is no pleasure in doing it. She cannot see the things she tries to paint or paint things she cannot see.
1972. Money. Money. The child allowance is $1.50 a week. Ellie asks for more hours at the library but is told she will have to work full time. She delivers advertising circulars in the afternoons, with John in a carrier on her back. Enjoys it over summer but has to give up when bad weather comes. She paints birds and flowers on plywood for a woman who makes mobiles; learns to paint on glass for another; weaves tiny pretty flowery raffia baskets, hating it. Joins a women’s liberation group, which Carol won’t go along to, frightened it will spoil her happiness with Denis.
1973. Ellie looks after Fan and Audrey’s house while they holiday in Sydney. It’s only for a week but she wants it to be forever – not for the money (they insist on paying her a hundred dollars) but for John. He runs on the lawn and she chases him with a hose, even though the water tanks are low and Audrey has asked her not to flush the loo except for big ones. Still without a licence, she takes him in the Mini to the beach and smears him all over with muddy sand and washes him clean. He has Mike’s colouring – lucky boy – but everything else, Ellie insists, comes from her. She carries him on her shoulders through Jim’s orchard and lets him pull fat apples two-handed from the trees. At night when he’s asleep she watches TV and listens to music, surrounded by Fan’s paintings advancing and retreating in the shadows. She can’t explore the studio – Fan has locked it and closed the curtains – but she looks at art books from Fan’s collection (thousands of dollars’ worth of books): Matisse, Cézanne, who puzzle her and begin, just begin, to stir in her blood, and everyone else. She’s alarmed at her ignorance. How is it she has never heard of half these people? Goya she has heard of, and seen. He strips off her skin again, and when it gets too painful she snaps the book shut and puts it away.
In 1974 Ellie turns thirty. Where have I got to? she thinks. John is part of the answer but cannot be all. Another question, mingling with the first, is how is she going to see he gets a proper chance? Doesn’t a boy need a man? And doesn’t she? She realises that she has never been in love – not in the way people are in books, enough to make them jump under trains. She’s been infatuated; she’s had crushes; but her better affairs have been for pleasure and affection. Mike had been like that. Love had been missing, and respect. She reads Jane Austen again (forgets the servants overlooked) and enjoys the progress, the orderly complications, of the love her young women feel. Perhaps, though, you need money and leisure for that sort of thing. Would it be worth sitting in parlours and sewing ribbons on bonnets for? Ellie doesn’t think so.
As much as a man she wants a satisfying job, something to fill the empty parts of herself. She is fretful by mid-year. She turns about, looking for somewhere to go. Then Denis is drowned in a winter storm. Pieces of his boat wash up on a West Coast beach but his body is never found. Carol weeps week after week. Ellie has never seen this sort of grief. Did her mother feel it for her father? She finds herself recreating him: riding on the footplate, coming home from work, leaning over her cot. She holds his forehead in her palms. It’s sad and supportable and sometimes makes her smile. Carol’s grief is insupportable. Ellie is afraid she will die. She gives up her library job and looks after her. Late in the year she sends her to stay with her married sister in Murchison.
Ellie is alone. And she has no money. (Fan gives her a painting but she’d sooner have cash.) She takes in boarders, two young men who work in the bank; but it doesn’t last. One of them thinks she must be easy. He turns nasty when she tells him no. The other has an allergy to cats (Ellie has adopted a stray tom) and thinks it might extend to John. He draws away as though he’ll get a rash. She sends them packing and takes in two girls, who ask to have their boyfriends stay all night. Two couples in one room: Ellie says no. They get nasty like the man from the bank. She turns them out and telephones Carol: Please, is there any chance of her coming back? Carol says she has been going to write. She is teaming up with a sharemilker whose wife has left him. She had never thought she could be happy again, but he’s such a good man and so good with the children. Ellie understands: you’ve got to keep going. She puts the phone down and weeps.
1975. Her luck changes. Fan and Audrey are going to Europe for three months. They ask her to mind the house from April to June. (They want to be back before the Mediterranean tourist season starts.) Ellie settles in, then gets her driver’s licence. House and car and money (just enough). She wants to sing like Mary Poppins. She wants to throw John in the air and catch him coming down – but he’s too big. ‘School in three months and holidays till then.’
The dry summer has left the tanks even lower, washing-up water must be saved for the plants, so she doesn’t chase him with the hose. She takes him to beaches and playgrounds, helps him climb trees, feed the goat and feed the fowls, chase J.P. Morgan (or one of his descendants) away from the jars of honey water. She teaches him to swim so that he will never drown. His piping, inquiring four-year-old voice makes her delirious with love. She hugs him so hard it frightens him, and frightens her. She’s hungry, she’s desperate for another kind of love.
There’s a Swedish boy picking the last Grannies in Jim’s orchard. She invites him in to watch TV. They drink a bottle of Fan’s Australian wine. ‘Ellie,’ he says, ‘as well as myself I have brought these.’ Contraceptives. She feels that making love in the house will betray Audrey (not Fan) and change her luck, so they spread an eiderdown on the lawn, in the warm night. She leaves the door open to hear John if he should wake. It’s inhibiting, and Lars is too quick, but is eager to try again. She’s half satisfied. Won’t let him come into the house and stay all night; sends him away frowning the next time he calls. He looks like Werner, her boy on Skye, but he isn’t half as nice. And this is not the way to find love. She won’t be the sort of woman men visit with condoms ready to put on. She has the eiderdown drycleaned.
1976–79. John is happy at the school in Tasman Street and later on at Nelson Central. Ellie works full time in the library. She wants to buy a house but the bank won’t give her a mortgage. She’d throw a stone through its plate-glass window if Trafalgar Street wasn’t so well lit. She rents, and rents again, but cannot save. Drives a Datsun Bluebird that is always breaking down. Has a man friend. Has an
other. (No names.) They don’t stay all night. She is determined that John will not find an uncle in the house on Sunday mornings; and to keep her resolution keeps her single bed.
She joins a group trying to stop Council from planting a pine forest on a public reserve. Looks up the river valley from the library steps, sees the hills golden in the afternoon sun and cannot understand how people can uncolour them, geometrise them with foreign trees. It’s just for money, the filthy stuff. Ellie becomes secretary. She writes to the Mail; she heckles at Council meetings. The mayor threatens to have her put out but she’s unafraid. Marches up and thrusts her manifesto in his hands. She distributes leaflets written by herself, one in every letterbox in town, but it’s all for nothing. Teams of forestry workers plant the hills, put ink dots all over the golden slopes. One Sunday morning Ellie can stand it no longer. She sends John to a friend’s house and walks along a face above the river, pulling out seedlings as she goes. The spread-out town unnerves her. There might be a hundred pairs of binoculars trained on her. She cannot afford to pay a fine so she comes down, digs out her watercolours, tries to paint the hills the way they were, keeping the lines as simple as in her painting on the carriage roof. It doesn’t work. Watery, slack, insipid. She’s upset. How can what her hands do be so weak when she feels so strongly?
1980 is a year for joining. NFAC. The Values Party. She hates Muldoon. Hates him. Believes he’d get rid of parliament and run the country as a fascist state if he could. She knows people who have emigrated because of Muldoon. Tries cartooning in broadsheets – Piggy as pig, as crocodile, as Uncle Sam’s rat on a leash – but fails again. There’s too much anger and too little wit. She gives it up. Tries to calm down, knowing the damage she does to herself. ‘Fan,’ she says, ‘next summer will you teach me to paint?’ ‘We’ll see. You’ll probably go shooting off in some other direction before then,’ Fan replies.
The prophecy comes true. In mid-winter Ellie meets Neil Higgs. Another group she’s attached to – as library representative – is Coffee and Books. She goes along to listen to him talk about his novels. After ten minutes she thinks, What a delicious man. In looks he’s not bad, he’s average – large ears, long nose, mouth that twists left when he smiles and pouts when he’s serious. He has a way of crinkling his eyes that’s perhaps over-sweet. All the same, he’s masculine – good shoulders, wide throat, square hands. His mind is a nice mix – sensitive and tough. He can laugh at himself. Tells a story about going to the landfill with a trailer load of rubbish and trying time after time to back it to the tip-face. He slews left, he slews right – until a little old lady jumps out of the cab of a truck and parks it for him with a single twist of the steering wheel. All the ladies laugh. Ellie laughs, wondering if it’s true. She wishes she had read one of Neil Higgs’s novels. So far he has written three. How old is he? She works it out from a dust jacket. Forty-two.
Ellie interviews him for the library newsletter. She tells him that she paints and mentions that she knows Fan Anerdi. His eyes light up: he’d love to meet her. Ellie telephones Fan, who shrugs along the wire – ‘Why not?’ They drive in Ellie’s unwashed Bluebird to Ruby Bay. Fan is polite (while Audrey only wants to hear about John). Neil Higgs walks along Fan’s paintings. He murmurs, he exclaims, and Ellie cannot tell whether it’s from pleasure or greed. How are his eyes? They shine. Is it calculation? Fan doesn’t invite him into her studio. Audrey makes tea while Neil mentions painters he knows. ‘Oh yes,’ Fan says. She does not say whether she knows them or not. ‘I suppose none of these are for sale?’ Neil asks. ‘No. Talk to Ellie about her one. She might sell it.’ It’s more than a rebuke for turning up with a man Fan dislikes; it seems like a severing of friendship. Ellie drives Neil back to Nelson. She has time to show him her Anerdi painting – which is not for sale – before taking him to catch his plane. They shake hands, he crinkles his eyes and flies away. Why does Fan dislike him? It’s far too quick, must be shallow. Fan is jealous perhaps.
Ellie sets her course away from Fan towards Neil Higgs. She buys his latest novel and is cross when two days later an inscribed copy arrives in the post. The hero is a wimp, which is disappointing. He’s meant to be deep and sensitive but is shifty and hysterical. The women – there are several – are simply decorative. Ellie knows that Neil Higgs can do better than this – and she’s right. In October he invites her to the launching of The Dark Before the Light. She leaves John with friends and crosses on the ferry to Wellington. Is this her crossing? Ellie is nervous. She sits on the open deck, reading the advance copy of his novel Neil has sent, and is caught up in it. The old clergyman is brave and unlikable, his wife patient and loving and strong, his children – so many of them! She loses count. Searches for a word she might offer the author. Olympian? After the launching there’s a party at his house. Ellie stays all night. They make love in a huge bed made for love. Talk. Make love. Talk again. He’s separated from his wife. He has a son John’s age and a daughter two years younger. They live in Auckland with Betty – a name Neil utters with dislike. He’s a socialist. It’s in his blood, no matter all the stupid things they do. His hand would shrivel and turn to dust if he tried to vote National. ‘Me too,’ Ellie says, concealing that she’s in the Values Party. ‘Why don’t you shift to Wellington?’ Neil says. ‘Do you mean it?’ ‘It’s a big house. I’d like your little boy, I promise I would.’ ‘He’s quite big now.’ ‘I like you,’ he says. ‘You make me laugh. You’re beautiful.’
Glenmore Street
Ellie could walk to Lambton Quay in ten minutes. Her favourite way was through the gardens and the cemetery: fountains and roses and cricket players, then names and dates and family tragedies. Children died and wives died young – and, to be fair, husbands too. Diphtheria, Ellie wondered, scarlet fever, whooping cough? Childbirth for the women, and perhaps anaemia; and, for the men – she did not know. TB? Drink? Disappointment? Drowning? The 1800s had been dangerous times. Her greatest danger was that she might walk up Lambton Quay behind Muldoon and find him just a little man in a baggy suit. Perhaps someone like him had stepped out when Childe Roland reached the Dark Tower and blew his horn. The ruined landscape Roland had ridden through was a psychic portrait of New Zealand.
Ellie liked that idea – she thought it was clever – and tried it out on Neil, but he didn’t read Victorian poetry, he said. Or novels either: they were spoiled by what they were not able to say. If Dickens had been allowed to write about sex …
She found out almost straight away that Neil had an ordinary mind. In some ways it was a relief. On the other hand, it made him mysterious. Where did his books come from? There were so many smarter people than Neil around. Some of them even tried to write, but they could not. It made Ellie suspect something deep and broad in him, but parallel, out of the usual way of intelligence. I’m in love with someone I don’t know, she thought; and set herself to find out who he was, with anticipation, with enjoyment, and a small amount of anxiety that she had perhaps committed herself on insufficient grounds.
She liked the house in Glenmore Street, although it needed doing up. She liked Neil’s behaviour with John most of the time. He had a way of withdrawing with a sigh when the child became boisterous. Ellie supposed he was missing his own son, Kevin. She did not expect John to replace Kevin or even make up for him but she wanted Neil to behave, in all the ways open to him, as her son’s father. Some things might be impossible, but she could not see that Neil should find it necessary to step back when John became a rowdy small boy. ‘Maybe we could tone him down a bit,’ Neil said. Ellie had heard ‘tone down’ before. She did not like it. But then she saw that noise was painful to Neil, disturbing an equilibrium. She made allowances, diverted John. She let him watch more TV – down at the other end of the house – than she thought was good for him. They all had to make small shifts, give something away.
She enrolled John at Thorndon School, next door to Wellington Girls’ College where she had gone. A circle seemed to close – she hoped she had finished
with perimeters and could occupy the centre. She strode across the playground with her son, feeling confident, feeling big. Being looked at twice was new to Ellie but people had started doing it, men especially. She was thirty-six, lean bodied, big breasted, dark blonde, strong in her features: she was handsome. She should perhaps take more care with her clothes, but that was a small thing. Her colour sense never let her down.
She filled in a form in the principal’s office and stopped when she came to Father’s name. ‘I live with my partner,’ she said, overloud. Partner was a new word and she had not got it right; but she gave a smile that might be seen as bold. ‘Not applicable, I’ll put that.’
‘Perhaps we could have your partner’s name? In case of emergencies,’ the principal said.
