by Gee, Maurice
‘Whatever you say.’
‘I love you, Ellie.’
‘I love you too. Go to sleep. Wake me when you’re ready again.’
‘Ellie.’
‘What?’
‘I’m ready now.’
She felt him. ‘Yes, you are. I must have been wrong about concussion.’
‘Me on top.’
Ellie wondered if her eyes were huge.
The next night they went to the opening of Fan Anerdi’s exhibition at the David Shea Gallery. Ellie took John along, hoping Audrey would be there. She was the nearest thing he had to an aunt.
They arrived early and circled the big room and the annexe, looking at the paintings. Neil brought Ellie a glass of wine.
‘They’re good,’ he said. ‘You can feel the tension.’
Ellie did not know what he meant. Between the colours? Between the shapes? She did not feel it. Fan’s paintings disappointed her. She seemed to have made a half-hearted return to – was it cubism? Early Cézanne? She could not understand why hills and bush should be shaped like this. Brown, green, this way, then some other way. Solid blocks, oddly angled, running at the edges. She knew enough not to ask what Fan meant by it all, but felt she was entitled to see. She missed the colours Fan had worked with – colours that took your breath away. Missed yellow hills and brilliant trees and their recognisable interdependence.
‘It’s great how painters get better the older they are,’ Neil said.
‘Yes,’ Ellie replied, wondering what she would say to Fan.
A small commotion sounded at the door. Fan came in, encircled by David Shea’s arm. She looked trim, upright, and neatly, acceptably old. Her clothes had the brightness her paintings lacked. Ellie waited until others, many others, had talked to her, although they exchanged a tip-fingered wave.
‘Where’s Audrey?’ John whispered.
‘It looks like she didn’t come.’
‘Ellie dear, I’m glad you could make it,’ Fan said. They embraced. ‘And John.’
‘You remember Neil?’
‘He’s the novelist. Hello. And hello again, young John. I hope you think my paintings are fun.’
‘What are they?’ John said.
‘You look at them, you’ll see,’ Neil said.
John ignored him. ‘We thought Audrey was coming.’
‘So you brought yourself along for her not me?’
John became confused. ‘Both of you,’ he said.
‘Ellie, come here. Come in David’s office. I want to talk.’
Ellie followed, holding Fan’s dry fingers in her hand.
‘Is it something about Audrey?’ she said as Fan closed the door.
‘Yes. She’s sick. She’s ill. I shouldn’t be here.’
‘What is it?’
‘Her diabetes. You knew she had that?’
‘No. No.’
‘Didn’t you notice she never ate all those cakes she baked? She’s losing her eyesight, Ellie. And she’s –’ Fan made a grimace of pain; held out her hand, palm down, and wobbled it – ‘like that. I’ve had her in hospital. She should have died several times.’
‘Who’s looking after her?’
‘I am, who do you think? Oh, you mean tonight? I’ve got a nurse. She’s not much good but she can cope one time. I’m flying home in the morning. I wouldn’t be at this stupid opening except I’ve got a contract fat David won’t let me out of. But it’s my last. They’re no good, Ellie. You can see that.’
‘Well …’
‘I can’t paint any more. How can I when Audrey’s going blind?’
Ellie put her arms around her, wanting her to cry. Her own cheeks were damp. The door opened behind her.
‘Get out, David. Buzz,’ Fan said. She stepped away from Ellie and dried her eyes. ‘Now he’ll spread it that we’re lesbians. Well, who cares?’
‘I wish I could help you. Help you both,’ Ellie said.
‘Can you come over?’
‘Fan, I …’
‘Yes, all right, I know, you’ve got your man.’
‘And John. And my job. But I’ll come. I’ll come soon. A weekend, would that help?’
‘Visitors only get in my way. Don’t worry, Ellie. She’s been fussing over me for forty years, now I can do her. Just send your love.’
‘I do. I do.’
‘Good. Now let’s go back. He’ll be lucky if he sells any of these.’
‘Neil likes them.’
‘Jolly good. I hope you’re happy with him.’
‘Yes, I am,’ Ellie said, knowing suddenly, sickeningly, that she was not. It was like standing on a step that wasn’t there.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing.’
Not happy with Neil but wanting to be, waiting to be. Audrey was proof that it would not happen. She and Fan looked at happiness differently.
‘Do you mind if we go soon? I promised John we’d eat in a restaurant and it’s getting late.’
They went back into the gallery.
‘She loves John, you know. She’d love to see him one more time,’ Fan said.
‘I’ll bring him over in the school holidays.’
They ate in a McDonalds, which delighted John. Neil, his eyes darting, was pleased too. ‘It’s like passing into the future.’ He bit his hamburger, sending a squirt of sauce out one side. ‘These things are good.’
Ellie felt as if there was no ground underneath her. ‘You can have mine.’
‘I will, Mum,’ John said.
They shared it; shared her chips. She should have been pleased with their grinning squabble, but wanted to warn Neil: Keep away. He’s my son, not yours.
Where am I going? she thought. She had not known that Audrey was her touchstone for love.
She telephoned Fan the next night.
‘How is she?’
‘It doesn’t change. It won’t change now except for the worse.’
‘Can I talk to her?’
‘No. She’s sleeping. Write a letter. Wait on.’
Ellie heard voices – Fan’s scolding, Audrey’s a whisper.
‘Ellie, is that you?’
‘How are you, Audrey? Should you be out of bed?’
‘It’s a dull place to be. And I have to be sure that the rest of the house is still here. It’s got a way of vanishing when you’re locked up.’
‘You’re not locked up,’ Fan’s voice said.
‘Is John there? Can I talk to him?’
Ellie fetched him from the TV room. He said hello, then listened. ‘Are you sick?’ he said, and listened again. ‘Yes, goodbye.’ He gave Ellie the phone.
‘Audrey?’
‘I’m putting her back to bed. Write a letter,’ Fan said. She hung up.
‘She says she’s not sick, she’s just off colour,’ John said. He went back to his TV programme.
‘Is that the old one with the hump?’ Neil said. ‘What’s that called, lordosis? Or maybe that’s the inward one? I should know these things.’
She wondered if he expected her to look it up. Audrey in the painting above the fireplace, a creature of planes and angles and of red and blue, transported her away from Neil and his words – his word concerns, his practice and practicalness, his information hunt, his sniffing nose for this thing and that, his flicking eye, his sharpness and consequent dreaminess – into a place of simple things: this colour, this shape, this woman Audrey.
She left him reading, and washed the dishes. She felt calm and still, unconcerned about what happened to her next.
The High Commissioner invited a selection of Wellington writers and their husbands and wives to a Saturday lunch to meet the visiting novelist Miriam Freeman. Lounge suit, the invitation said, annoying Neil. He did not own a suit of any sort and had to hire one. Ellie wore the dress she thought of as her best. The style and colours were out of fashion (which Neil, surprisingly, knew) but she felt comfortable in it. One of the best things about the feminist revolution was that you could wear what you liked.
&nbs
p; Neil looked distinguished in his suit. He would be a handsome old man if he survived middle age. Triumphs were more likely to spoil him than disappointments. His face had the potential for fatness, which satisfactions would bring out. Today he was looking bony and intelligent. His Adam’s apple bounced, a movement Ellie found sexy. Hair covered the damage to his head but the bruising on his ear had turned the top half yellow. The bottom was pink, with a thin lobe jutting like a supplicating hand.
‘What are you looking at?’
‘You, Neil. You look good.’
‘So do you. If you’d asked me I’d have bought you a new dress.’
‘Too late now.’
They sat in their car along the road from the High Commissioner’s house. Neil did not want to be the first to arrive.
‘I suppose I should have read this woman. Tell me something about her, quick. Is she a Jew with a name like that?’
‘She’s a working-class girl from Birmingham. Well, not a girl. She’s in her forties. Five or six novels so far. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize.’
‘I know all that. What are they about? What are their names?’
‘I hope you’re not going to pretend to have read them.’
‘I will if I have to. People are always doing it to me. Come on, tell.’
‘Girls kicking against the class system. And marrying bastards.’
‘Give me something to say.’
‘Oh, Neil. Say you like the way they slap their husbands down. Literally, I mean. One of them kicks him in the crotch. Then they take off.’
‘In every novel?’
‘Two of them. They’re fun. Tell her you laugh. Keep your legs crossed.’
Two novelists and an arts administrator went in. Neil parked the car closer and they walked up the path. A woman, perhaps a secretary, welcomed them. Neil mistook her for the High Commissioner’s wife.
‘It’s good of you to ask us,’ he said.
‘Come into the drawing room,’ she said.
The High Commissioner apologised for his wife being home in England. He introduced them to Miriam Freeman, a tall woman with angular shoulders and a concave chest – a starved sort of figure, Ellie thought – but a broad-nosed merry face, and eyes the colour of Angela Prime’s but more lively. Got you, Ellie imagined Miriam Freeman saying. She wore a plain badly hanging dress with a biro fastened in the neck.
‘We both write novels,’ Neil said.
‘What, you too?’ Miriam Freeman said to Ellie.
‘No, I meant you and me,’ Neil said. ‘Ha. Ellie doesn’t write, she paints.’
‘Oh, what sort of things?’ Miriam Freeman asked.
‘No, I don’t, it’s just an ambition,’ Ellie said. She could not believe Neil had used her like this.
‘Well, there’s nothing wrong with ambition, Mrs Higgs,’ the High Commissioner said. He was a nice man, silver and pink and alert and kind. His smoothness probably came from his training.
‘Not Mrs Higgs. I’ve kept my own name,’ Ellie said.
‘Ah, I’m sorry.’
‘Ellie Crowther. And I don’t say Ms.’
Miriam Freeman looked at Ellie’s hands. Not a ring in sight. Her own were the same. She grinned.
‘I love the way social life has got so difficult.’
Ellie sat across from her and one along at lunch. She looked out through floor-to-ceiling windows at a swimming pool hooded for winter, and lawns and gardens nicely trimmed, with a grass tennis court at one side. There was bush beyond, on the lower slopes of Johnston’s Hill. She wondered how much it cost to buy and maintain houses like this all over the world, and lay on lunches – delicious entrée, salmon, lovely wine, and no doubt even better things to come. How did Miriam Freeman like being waited on after her childhood in a suburb of Birmingham, two-up and two-down? That quick violet eye took in everything; but a sense of humour was necessary too. A sense of outrage would get in the way. Ellie remembered how funny her novels were. Neil should read them and lighten up – lighten up his own. He was being very still, very precise, and had nothing to say, three places along from Miriam Freeman.
‘I hope you’re getting some idea of our literature,’ said Dennis Hood, the poet, sitting on her left. He had not worn a suit but a silver-grey jacket of the sort Indian politicians wore, fastened at the neck. It seemed to constrict his voice, which was BBC, more English to Ellie’s ear than Miriam’s regional.
‘I’m not trying,’ she said. ‘I’m here for a holiday. But don’t tell my publisher that.’
‘Ha ha. You don’t know us, though, until you’ve read our books.’
‘Do you think so? I’ve met some interesting people so far. I had a good talk with a man reading a horse-racing guide on the plane coming down.’
‘The names of race horses are poetry,’ Dennis Hood said, baring his teeth in a lipless smile. He recited several in his lovely voice.
‘I doubt if there’s a winner amongst them,’ Miriam said. ‘What I’d like to meet is some sheep shearers. People like that.’
‘Oh, they have exhibitions,’ the woman from her publisher said. ‘I’ll arrange it.’
‘No, I mean real ones. In the country.’
‘Fleecos and rousies, that’s what you want,’ Ellie said.
‘Now what are they?’
Ellie explained. ‘I do research for Neil but he hasn’t needed sheep shearing yet.’
‘What else do you know?’ Dennis Hood intoned.
‘Apple picking. Waitressing. Living in a commune. I did fish packing for a while in Nelson.’
‘A novelist needs to know one person in every trade and profession,’ said Philip Dyer, a novelist.
‘Have you really lived in a commune?’ Miriam said.
‘Yes. A sort of hippy one.’
‘Free love and all that?’ Philip Dyer said.
‘Not so much. Not even communal living, not much. Just – being free.’
‘And have you shorn sheep?’ Miriam said.
‘No, I was a fleeco. We had one gun shearer –’
‘Will you write these words down for me? Is fleeco hard?’
‘You drop down dead at the end of the day. Except you have to spend time picking wool out of your nipples.’
‘No?’
‘Oh yes. It’s so fine it gets in the pores and it itches like mad.’
‘Details like that are great,’ Philip Dyer cried. ‘I’m always asking my doctor stuff. And the guy who services my car.’
‘So then you shower …?’
‘One place we went there were only taps. Another one we took bits of soap down to the river. The best days are the days it rains. You can’t shear wet sheep.’
‘So what do you do?’
‘Play cards. Talk. Sleep. Drive into town to the pub.’
‘And you’re all sort of living in the bunkhouse together? Guys and girls?’ Philip Dyer asked. He sucked saliva back in his mouth.
‘Different rooms,’ Ellie said.
‘So no romances?’ Miriam said.
‘No. You get good mates, that’s all. What we did, Phyllis and me, we made the mistake of apple-pieing the guys’ beds. Tying knots in their blankets and so on. We were pretty stupid.’
‘What did they do?’
‘Held us down and rubbed dags in our hair.’
Neil coughed. ‘My mother used to have a phrase: That’s not a table topic.’ He tried to sound humorous but got out his words as though setting type.
Miriam winked at Ellie. ‘I think I can guess dags.’
Alison Farquhar (another novelist) asked about the Booker Prize, about agents and publishers, film rights, TV rights, and Miriam answered brightly, woodenly – polished wood. Ellie looked at Neil. He was talking – woodenly too – to the High Commissioner’s secretary on his right. His eyes turned to Ellie, stayed long enough to chill her, flicked away. She understood how deeply she had transgressed. Had met it before, this residual propriety, and deference (he hated it but could not shake it off) to people b
ehaving in formal and fixed ways. Well stuff him, it’s his problem, she thought. I’ll say what I like. Later he would mock them: the High Commissioner, Dennis Hood, Miriam Freeman too, and praise Ellie for her outspokenness. For the moment, though, his icy look. Poor Neil.
Lamb was the main course, for Miriam. Dessert: pavlova (out of season), for her as well. They moved back to the drawing room for coffee. Ellie was cornered by Philip Dyer, who had reviewed The Dark Before the Light favourably and could not understand why Neil was annoyed. Ellie did not tell him – that praise from a lightweight was demeaning.
‘It’s hard to know how Neil works, that’s why he’s so fascinating,’ she said, trying to put wet-mouthed Philip off. He fancied her. Would use his novelist’s licence soon to talk about sex.
‘Excuse me,’ she said, and asked the secretary for the toilet. The word came out clearly and Neil, over the room, looked at her and looked away. So bodily functions were not allowed in the High Commissioner’s residence?
She stopped in the corridor and looked at a painting that caught her eye – a bright room, a balcony, a woman in a red dress. ‘Fan,’ she said, delighted. Her neat black signature was down on the right. The woman was Audrey. Ellie felt as though her mind was washed, as though Fan was saying, None of that matters in there.
Miriam Freeman walked down the corridor.
‘I hate these things. I bloody hate them,’ she said.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘No, not you. The thing I’ll remember about this lunch is nipples and dags.’
Ellie laughed.
‘Can I beat you in here?’ Miriam said, opening the bathroom door. She hoisted her skirt and sat down. ‘“She peed like a draught mare.” A man wrote that, I’ll bet.’
‘He must have listened,’ Ellie said, remembering Boggsie.
‘He was probably married. Don’t you love marriage?’
‘I’ve never tried it.’ Ellie looked at her face in the mirror – her light bit of lipstick holding on, her eye shadow, rarely used, improving her eyes. Neil was a lucky man, she thought, smiling at herself.
‘Joke?’
‘Oh, nothing. Sometimes I just like my face.’
Miriam flushed the toilet. Ellie took her place.
‘I’ve read your novels. Do you want to hear things like that?’
‘As long as you don’t try and talk about them.’
