by Gee, Maurice
‘She’s looking at my drawings.’
Ellie ran across the lawn into the kitchen. Paula squawked like a chicken and jumped away. She ran along the hallway, threw open the front door, ran outside.
‘No, leave her,’ Derek cried, holding Ellie’s arm.
‘I’m going to talk to her. Shit, Derek, I’ve had you in my house for three days. I’ve got a right.’
She went on to the front veranda and saw Paula running towards the patch of swamp. Saw her trip and sprawl, then sit, headless, knees wrapped in her arms.
‘Stay here, Derek. I’ll bring her back.’
She went through the swinging gate and walked down the paddock.
‘Paula,’ she said softly.
The girl made a reflexive shrinking. She gave a sharp moan and closed her arms more tightly.
Ellie sat down.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, thinking, There’s no place for this child. I can’t even put my arms around her. ‘I didn’t mean you to see my drawings. But I’m a painter. That’s what I do.’ It sounded so selfish, so unconnected, that she gave a shiver like the girl. ‘Paula, I don’t know what you should do. But come back to the house now. Derek will look after you. And you can stay as long as you like. I’d like to talk with you about all sorts of things.’
She put her hand on Paula’s arm. The girl uttered a thin scream as though she had been scalded; and Ellie, her face suddenly streaming with tears, said, ‘I’m sorry. I’ll go.’
She walked, labouring, up the slope, passed Derek without looking. She went through the house and through the fruit trees, sat in the long grass by the back fence. Soon she heard the car drive away and could not help thinking, Yes, that’s right – although she instantly rebelled and, confused, shifted again: that thin thread of Paula’s life, should anyone dare snap it unless they had some substantial garment to weave her into? And I don’t, Ellie told herself, I just have me. And my work, she added fiercely. And John as well. And it’s enough. But what could I have done for her?
She dried her face. The tears had surprised her – and now, considering them, she moved almost to the point of consternation. What did they mean about herself? That she, her work, John, were not enough? I need to be painting a picture, that’s all. It will come. I know it will.
Failing with Paula did not count because there had been no other possible end.
She sat at the breakfast table trying to listen to ‘Morning Report’. Those voices, serious, informative, sometimes joky, were her usual company at breakfast. She wanted them to tell her where Derek was. Had there been a car crash, a drowning, a shooting? Did they have guns at Gethsemane? Had there been a burning at the stake, a crucifixion? It had seemed possible as she lay awake at 2 a.m.
She looked in his room again. His duffel bag was on the chair, so he meant to come back. There was little trace of Paula in the other bedroom: a dented pillow and a wrinkled mat, that was all.
Ellie sat on the living-room sofa, looking at the drawings in her pad. Robert Early was ordinary. She had given him a maw like Jonah’s whale but in the morning light it was a mouth, large, cartoonish: a mouth. How had she done this? How had she come to try for what wasn’t there? There’s too much me in it, she thought, and not enough Fan. And what had possessed her to leave the pad lying on the table for Paula to find? She took it out to her studio, put it inside and locked the door.
The car came as she took the covered walkway back to the house, and she hurried down the side path and waited at the gate. Derek was alone. She hugged him. ‘You’re all right?’
‘Me? Sure. Just tired, that’s all.’
‘Did you take her back?’
‘Yeah, she’s back.’
She made him coffee and sat him at the table.
‘We stopped at one of the lookouts on Takaka hill. I wanted to give her a chance to talk, but she wouldn’t talk.’
‘Not about me? My drawings, I mean.’
‘Not anything.’ He pushed away his coffee mug and laid his head on his arms. ‘I’m tired, Ellie.’
‘What happened?’
‘We sat in the lookout, then I had to go for a pee. Then she went too and I thought that was good. Normal, I mean.’ He sat up. ‘We stayed in the car while it got dark. You can see Rabbit Island and most of the Waimea plains, and Nelson on the other side – you’ve seen that view. Then the lights started showing: there’s more than you think. Nelson was like a ship, and there were little towns, and strings of lights, and car lights moving along roads, and the more there was the more she had to go to Gethsemane. So after a while I took her.’
‘Was Robert Early there?’
‘No one was. It was all dark. They go to bed at ten o’clock. So we parked and waited all night. She slept a bit. So did I. Dawn was like – it was sort of bloodshot, but then it went soft. Nice colours. Like it was saying, Yes, all right.’
‘So she went in?’
Derek nodded.
‘Did you?’
‘She didn’t want me. I was –’ he grinned without humour – ‘like you. You and me are outside the gates. Some men were going to milking by then and women were going to the kitchen. Someone ran upstairs for Robert and he came out. No one said anything, just watched her walking past. She went into the hall and Robert turned and followed her. The others got busy with what they were doing, and that’s all. I drove away.’
Ellie made toast. She boiled two eggs and watched him eat.
‘So,’ she said after a while.
‘Yeah, so. I’m sorry I took your car for so long. I wouldn’t blame you if you’d called the cops.’ He stood up. ‘Can I have a sleep for a couple of hours?’
‘You can sleep all day.’
‘No.’ He was going into Nelson and catching the Picton bus and getting on the ferry to Wellington. ‘Surprise for Mum.’
Ellie did not argue. While he slept, she telephoned Nelson and booked him a seat. After lunch she drove him in.
‘Have you got enough money?’
‘Sure. I didn’t spend any. I’ll pay you back, Ellie.’
‘Please don’t. It’s a Christmas present. What will you do in Wellington?’
‘I’ve got some friends at the City Mission. I can probably help with something there. She seems a long way away, doesn’t she?’ He meant Paula.
‘Yes, she does.’
‘It’s a funny thing.’
When the bus had gone Ellie visited a friend. Had a look at the exhibitions in the Suter Gallery, did some Christmas shopping, mostly food (John had asked for money as his present), then drove home. She changed the linen on both beds, and thought calmly as she smoothed them down about what she might paint next. Nothing before Christmas, I’ll take a break. Then she might do someone in a blue dress – but who and where she did not know. She would do a baptism too. But wait and see. Nothing was banging for admission.
She was pleased that Derek and her mother would be together at Christmas time.
She had John for only two days. Although she could have arranged an apple-thinning job for him, he stayed in Christchurch counting bats or wetas in Peel Forest, and staying close to some girl, Ellie suspected. He arrived on Christmas Eve, driving a Volkswagen, a beetle car, which belonged to Kerri – ‘That’s with an “i”. It’s nice having a girlfriend who’s got wheels.’ She was coming by bus on Boxing Day and they were taking off to walk the Abel Tasman track, then going on to do the Heaphy as well.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ Ellie said; heard the complaint, almost whining, in her voice; turned away, said forcefully, ‘You should have said. I needn’t have got in so much food.’ Hated that too – so impersonal, such a lie. She turned back and took his head like a ball in her hands, laid her cheek on his, and felt the pleasure of loving him, in spite of disappointments and that cold little judgement: He’s ordinary. She felt again his gift for happiness, and that was not ordinary but exceptional in a way, although it depended – didn’t it? – on not thinking too hard or far. Mike’s legacy?
>
She fed him ham, with new potatoes and peas from her garden, and home-made pavlova and home-grown strawberries, and they drank wine from the vineyard down the road; then John switched to beer and Ellie to malt whisky – an early present to herself – and they both got more than a little, midway drunk.
‘Who was he anyway? Mr Mike Rowe?’ John said.
That was sobering. Ellie said, ‘Are you sure you really want to know?’
‘A ratbag, eh?’
‘No, no. I loved him. He was funny and clever and …’
‘Yeah, “and”?’
‘Loved a good time. He was good-looking. He played the guitar and made up songs.’ She could not think of anything more to say about Mike; was inclined to go back and qualify ‘loved him’ with ‘almost’. Qualify ‘clever’ too. ‘You know his name. You can track him down.’
‘No way. I’ve got no hang-ups, Mum. I don’t believe in all this bullshit about knowing who I am. I know all right. And where I come from. That’s from you. Let’s drink to us.’
She did not tell him Mike had called earlier in the year or that he did not know he had a son. There were questions she wanted John to ask, now that they were talking about his father. He did not ask them but got more drunk than she liked to see and went to bed.
On Christmas morning he slept late. She bullied him out at ten o’clock, drove him to Ruby Bay and made him swim – threw him into the sea, was how she put it to herself – and was tempted to tell him that she had swum here naked with Mike twenty years before. Something sounded in time with the memory: not so much a sigh of completion as the muffled clicking of a wheel as it set itself for its next revolution. She would like to think about it, this single momentous click, but had no time, let it slip away, as John started turning driftwood, looking for the things that lived underneath, which he knew and identified and explained. Ellie loved his interest and eagerness. It was in these tiny creatures that his chance lay to make himself grow. Again she heard the slow wheel click.
‘Who’s Kerri?’
‘Just a girl. Go easy on her, Mum.’
‘Of course. Why wouldn’t I?’
‘She’s a bit nervous about meeting you. Famous artist and all that.’
‘Me? I’m not. I’m anonymous.’
‘She doesn’t know much about painting, so – you know …’
Oh yes, I know, Ellie thought. Pretend it’s not important, just something I do to fill up the time. ‘Does she count sand hoppers too?’
‘She’s doing law. Her old man’s a lawyer. She’s pretty bright, Mum. OK?’
Yes, OK. She would go easy. This girl was probably number one in a long line. Ellie had better learn how.
Back home they gave each other presents. His to her: Picasso in a series called Artists by Themselves. She was pleased. He had tried. Hers to him: a cheque that must be twice as large as he had expected, he went so pink; some record tokens; half a dozen T-shirts (he lived in T-shirts); last of all (she went into the spare room and carried it out), a painting by Fan Anerdi, done in her colourist, post-impressionist phase.
‘That’s for me?’
‘Do you like it?’
‘I don’t know. I’m not much on painting, Mum, but it’ll remind me of old Fan.’
‘I’ll keep it here for you.’
‘Sure. Sure. It might get beer spilled on it in a student flat.’
‘When you do take it, John, you’ve got to look after it. And you’re not to sell it. Not ever.’
‘Is it worth something?’
‘Probably about twelve thousand dollars.’
‘Shit,’ he said.
He met the bus in Nelson in the afternoon, and drove home with Kerri, a tall girl with a nervous habit of bobbing her head – why do I always want to weigh people’s heads? Ellie thought – but a pleasant imperfect face: nose with a bend in it that made her look as if she needed protection, thick black eyebrows, long slightly flattened lipsticked mouth. ‘Hello,’ she said breathlessly.
Ellie felt an instant sympathy. It forced her to look at John in a new light. She would not have thought he had enough maleness in him yet to damage a girl. ‘Come inside. Do you need the bathroom?’ (Perhaps her bobbing was caused by that.) ‘John can bring your pack.’
‘Oh, no –’
‘Oh, yes. It’s good for him.’ She wanted to say, Take care, don’t trust him, and pull John aside and say, Don’t you dare hurt her. He carried her pack into his bedroom.
But out of the toilet, relieved and freshened up, Kerri surprised her. She bobbed and was breathless only for a short while, then began to use a willed directness.
‘We’ll have to go early because we want to get a good way up the track. It’s going to be full of Germans and Swedes.’
‘Yes, John told me.’
‘We’d be grateful if you could drive us to Marahau. It’s better if I leave my car parked here.’
‘I’ll look after it.’
‘And Mrs Crowther. Ellie. We don’t have much time, so could I see your studio before it gets dark?’
Ellie wondered if learning how to take command was part of legal training. Kerri no longer seemed like a girl who would let her boyfriend borrow her car while she rode in the bus.
Ellie drove them to Marahau next morning, setting off as the sun came up, and was home again by seven o’clock. Took advantage of the coolness to work outside: topped up the tui jars with honey water, nailed new pickets on the front fence, a job she had hoped John would help her with; then sat drinking iced tea in her canvas chair in the shade, smiling at Kerri’s yelps of sexual pleasure sounding through the wall last night, and the pair of them muffling each other’s laughter with their hands. They thought, of course, that she wouldn’t approve, but she approved. Have fun, she thought. But please be kind to each other too.
She had finished lunch, and was thinking about going back to her sketches of Robert Early in the river to see if she could find out what was wrong, when she heard the quiet popping of gravel in the drive, then, in a moment, a car door slam. ‘Bugger,’ she said. People sometimes came like this in holiday time, thinking that her studio was a showroom or that she kept Fan Anerdi’s paintings on view. She had tried not answering the door but several had simply walked around to the back, and one young man, sent by David Shea, had poked his head in the kitchen window and grinned at her.
Ellie sat quietly at the table. ‘No, I’m sorry,’ she would say, and close the door. (Directness was something she could give Kerri lessons in.) Footsteps sounded on the veranda. The loose board creaked. Knuckles on the door, neither commanding nor tentative. Ellie sighed. She stepped softly on the lino and peered up the hall. A man showed darkly, framed from the waist up in the glass panel, reminding her, almost like a blow, of her shadow man. She shook herself, shook him out. She had finished with him, he was gone.
She padded down the hall in her bare feet, and knew who he was before she opened the door; was instructed by head shape and blurred features and, equally, simultaneously, by an undeniable sense that the time was right. She felt a deep accommodating pleasure.
‘Hollis,’ she said.
‘Hello. I was passing, so I thought …’
‘Come in. Come in.’
So familiar and I hardly know him, she thought.
‘I’ve just finished lunch. Would you like some?’
‘Ah, I’ve eaten. I bought a pie.’
A pie, a pie. It delighted her; took her back to his leather jacket and brylcreemed widow’s peak and pink car.
‘But I wouldn’t mind a cup of tea. I’m –’ he followed her into the kitchen – ‘I’m sort of drifting round Nelson a couple of days. I’ve got a rental.’
‘You’re lucky this time of year.’
‘Yeah, well.’ He looked shame faced. ‘Through the firm.’
‘Ah, the firm’ – thinking with no hostility, no feeling at all, that if it could set up abortions it could certainly do rental cars.
She made an effort, climbed out o
f the past; and was easy, welcoming, full of pleasure, sitting him down, putting on the kettle. He got up straight away and wandered into the living area, looking at the paintings.
‘You don’t mind me treating your house like a gallery?’
‘Everyone does. Why are you looking round Nelson?’
‘Well –’ He turned from Fan Anerdi, came back to his chair. ‘Can I opt for a beer instead of tea?’
They sat outside, shaded by the grapevine on the trellis.
‘I’m mainly looking at bits of land. Not with an agent – now’s not a good time. Just blocks of ten hectares, twenty hectares. I don’t even know if they’re for sale.’
‘For your firm?’
‘No, for me.’
‘To do what with?’
‘I’m shifting out of Endacott Prime. I’m –’ he shrugged – ‘changing tracks.’
He wanted to grow wine – plant some grapes, sell the crop for a couple of years, see what came after that, see if he could learn. It sounded banal to Ellie, a trendy occupation, a rich man’s dream: sitting in his wicker chair overlooking his estate, sipping a glass of his own red as the sun went down – then it was transformed by a kind of poor man’s hunger in his face. That bit of land was a dry place he must occupy and make his own.
‘Shouldn’t you be looking in Marlborough or Martinborough? Nelson’s second rate. For wine, I mean.’
‘No, I don’t think so.’ He named some wines that she agreed were not second rate (a small dishonesty: she did not know), then talked about climate and soil, a lawyerly summary that she wished would end. Hot days, cold nights? Gravel and clay? Ellie wanted why and when.
‘Have you seen anything you like?’
‘I’ve been driving past the wineries so far. Not going in. But I’d like to be away from other places. Down by the sea.’
‘Would you like me to chauffeur you? It’s my neck of the woods.’
‘I’d love company.’
She took him along back roads leading down to inlets. He looked and was quiet, disheartened, she thought, by finding cows and apples everywhere, and on a piece of land lying perfectly for the sun, olive trees newly planted, less than waist high. But he marked the map he had fetched from his car and wrote in a notebook while Ellie drove slowly so as not to jolt his arm.
