by Gee, Maurice
But the big event of these years is Fan Anerdi’s retrospective. Ellie lets all her paintings go, including the one she has given John and the two hanging in Hollis’s house, and helps the young man who writes the biographical piece and the catalogue raisonné. (He’s the grinning fellow who poked his head in her kitchen window.) She insists that Audrey be given her proper place. ‘A long supportive friendship’ is how the young man puts it. He wants to add ‘equivocal’ but Ellie says no, she’ll withdraw her paintings if he does. She allows ‘fulfilling’, and still feels Audrey has not been granted her due. The exhibition goes to the four main centres and several provincial ones, including Nelson, and the house seems bare. Ellie sees her own paintings for the minor works they are but refuses to think of herself as small. There are times when she feels as large as anyone who has ever painted, and she looks inside her head at that line-up of Earlyites on the shingle bank – black trousers, white shirts, faces immobile – and feels her kinship with Goya, who lined up a firing squad of soldiers and prisoners for execution in that way. She runs through her own retrospective, right back to that painting in tar on the carriage roof, and feels a kind of terror: What if I’d never met Fan?
John and Kerri don’t marry but live together. They have two children, then begin to like each other less. Kerri leaves him and is married inside three months and gone to live in Australia. Ellie is surprised at the tepidness of her grandmotherly love. It’s John she loves. Her grandchildren will probably be as happy in Melbourne as in Christchurch and will like whatever his name is just as much as John – but her own child, will he recover? She watches him for signs of grief getting out of hand, but he settles quickly into a loose light contentment with himself, with the new woman he finds, and the one after her. There’s a serious diminishment, Ellie feels – but then, did he ever have much weight?
In her worst moments, moving beyond intellectual judgements on her son, she seems to hear him rattling like a handful of dried peas in a can or – how much worse it seems – in a cardboard packet. She had hoped he would love his work as much as she loves hers, and believes that it interests him deeply at times – so how can he use his special knowledge in making little lightweight runs against her happiness? He seems to think she’s out of touch and ill informed and somehow escaping from reality in her painting. So he must show her: Does she know that there’s a blowfly with taste buds in its feet and when you see it walking on a turd what it’s really doing is testing for a feed? How wonderful; clever fly, Ellie says. So he tells her about the Gordian worm that lives in wetas, eating them away but leaving their vital parts untouched. They drive them like a driver drives a bus, John says, and dry them out so that they seek water, where they drown; but water is where the worm’s got to be, the smart little bugger, for the next stage of its evolution. Ellie can look at that clear-eyed; look at people too, who behave just as badly to each other, with the addition of cruelty and pleasure. Would John like some examples? He waves his hand dismissively. She makes him impatient with this sort of flying off from the subject every time. He makes her sad. He should have had a man in his life, even Mike.
Hollis’s father lives in a nursing home in Wellington. He doesn’t know Ellie and doesn’t know Hollis most of the time but is clear about the voyage he never made around the world, solo in his yacht Surprise, the ports he stopped in and the storms he weathered. He’s a happy old man, living a rich delusional life. ‘It was midnight and a car stopped at my gate. Keith Holyoake. “Harold,” he says, “I don’t know what to do. You’ve got to advise me. Should I commit our troops?” I told him no but he wouldn’t listen. Couldn’t afford to offend the Yanks. Trade, you see.’ At other times it’s Norm who knocks at midnight, or it’s Rob. ‘I told him it was suicide to call an election but of course he did. Too much gin. That was Rob.’ He holds Ellie back as she leaves: ‘You can see the moon in the daytime, can’t you?’ he says. Ellie says yes. ‘I told him you could but he called me a liar. He pulled me out and strapped me. You can, can’t you?’ ‘Yes, you can. It’s out there now.’ ‘I told him that but he wouldn’t look. He strapped me in front of the class.’ Tears run down the old man’s cheeks. Hollis wipes him dry.
Several months later Harold Prime dies. The family scatters his ashes on the beach at Breaker Bay. A southerly drives huge seas on to the rocks, and spray streams inland. Ellie watches from the roadside as Hollis and his older son walk down the beach. Angela and Barry follow with their pregnant daughter and her child. Hollis hangs his walking stick on his arm and offers the carton like chocolates. Ellie approaches. She wants to be part of it but wants to watch. Angela takes a handful of ashes fastidiously. Throws it underhand into the wind. Grit stings their faces and grey ash streams through the group. ‘I’ve got dust in my eyes,’ Angela cries. ‘That’s not dust, lovey, that’s your daddy,’ Barry says. Hollis says, ‘Throw it with the wind.’ They release handfuls of smoke, which blows across the road into the hills. Ellie will paint this: black rocks, broken sea, people triangular in streaming coats, ashes smoking away. She wonders why Hollis is using a walking stick.
His vineyard is healthy: Tidal Flat (a name Ellie approves of – she designs a label to go with it). He still sells some of his grapes to established producers but has built a cellar and hired a wine-maker, sharing him with another small estate, and this year (’97) will release riesling and sauvignon blanc. Ellie tastes them: fresh and clean. But why is Hollis so tired just as he is set to succeed?
‘I’ve been waiting for it,’ he says.
Post-polio syndrome. She has never heard of it. He explains: after the illness some of the nerve cells partly recover. New fibres and filaments transmit the messages. So the victim carries on with his life (in Hollis’s case limping from his slightly shortened leg). Then as you start ageing the new pathways wear out, become overgrown – ‘choose your metaphor’, Hollis says – and your trouble starts all over again: a sort of flaccid weakness, then sudden deadly fatigues. Mysterious pains, and pain referred in the butt and thigh. Loss of mobility and loss of balance. ‘Bitching and bad temper,’ Hollis says. ‘I’m sorry, love.’ Ellie almost cries, But it’s not fair. ‘What can we do?’ she says instead. ‘Live with it. Keep going. Pull my horizons in.’ He looks from the patio across his vines. They’re netted to protect the grapes from birds – ghost rows. ‘If I can’t do much work here, at least I can manage it.’ He tries to grin. ‘I’ll still be boss.’ ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘of course you will. But treatment, I mean.’ He tells her painkillers, and massage and mudpools up at the hospital in Rotorua. ‘Will you tell me when I need to come and live here?’ Ellie says. She believes that he won’t ask, so holds herself ready to recognise the time.
Which is midwinter, when he is forced to change his stick for crutches – not the sort fitting in the armpit but shortened ones halfway up the arm. He goes along with a clacking sound, as though renewed, although it’s more her moving in that causes his cheerfulness. Ellie is surprised not to grieve for the place where she has passed seventeen years of her life. She pictures a kind of knitting of her flesh into house and land, expects a tearing, imagines the sound of it, the pain; but there’s none of that and she can’t help being disappointed in herself. She’s converted, she thinks sourly, into a bride: her house and kitchen, her husband, her man. Then she starts enjoying herself. She walks the boundaries with Hollis, at his pace. She climbs a stile and slaps along barefooted in the rushes, seeing mud crabs scuttling for their holes. She sees how the vineyard resembles a bird, one wing high (the riesling), one low (the sauvignon blanc). Looks at the neighbouring paddocks Hollis is hoping to buy for pinot noir. Red, she thinks, and tastes the colour. Perhaps she will start painting in crimson and maroon. She walks up and down the rows, counting them and thinking that the regularity is rather nice.
Straight lines bring control, but remember that the shape is a bird.
Tidal Flat
Ellie watched from the sunroom as Hollis walked up the new path to the riesling. He had
mowed it the day before, trying out the modified controls on the tractor. Instead of going straight up, he’d cut an easy dog-leg so he would manage on his crutches. She watched his progress anxiously. He pushed himself too hard and seemed to have a dark enjoyment of his pain. He reminded her more and more of the boy she had first seen forty years before, sitting in the rain by the tennis court. He had been a singularity – but no, she protested, he’s not any more, not sucking everything into himself.
She took her pad and started sketching him on the path, not solid but shot through with light, a tripod shape; then ran heavy strokes through it and dropped it on the floor – too sentimental. She tried again. A pair of moons in the daytime sky: Hollis and Ellie – but that was childish, it was rubbish. She scored it through, took another page: vine-fields tilted left and right, triangular planes. A path ran between them, finding its curve by gravity. Figures, not moons, hung in the sky, a boy and girl, while trees, forced into a slant, stood on one side and a sheet of rain on the other. Now she could put Hollis in, walking with his crutches on the path, and Ellie Crowther matching his step, the older figures slanting like the trees towards the right – which must be the future while left had to be memory? Surely, then, they should be two-faced?
Ellie tore the sketch out and crumpled it up. This was not her way. It was not her manner. She laid her pencil on the table and went down the brick steps to the yard to find an object warmed by the sun, that she might turn back to front without the fear of finding something there. It had been a trick at first, then became a habit. She called it a refreshment break or a comfort stop; but if she had used it when the shadow man appeared, would she have gone on with him?
She went out through the gate and walked along the front of the vine-rows. A rose bush flowered at the head of each one, not as an early warning of disease but because Hollis liked their colour. The grapes, sauvignon blanc on this lower level, were looking healthy, squeezing each other for room within each bunch and starting to blush on their rounded cheeks. Over in the shed Chris Latta, who did the heavy work Hollis couldn’t manage, was hauling out nets. The riesling would be covered first. Starlings and blackbirds had already appeared and would be feasting before long.
Ellie walked between the rows to the edge of the water. She took off her sandals and waded in the rushes, disturbing tiny fish that vanished with a flick. Then she sat in her dinghy – her Christmas present from Hollis – waiting for the creeping tide to free it from the mud. She wanted to feel that moment of release, like being lifted minutely into the air. The house above the vines seemed to float on green waves. The door of her sunroom – she wondered why she could not call it studio – stood open. Ellie felt no temptation to go there. What would she paint? Hollis and Ellie, boy and girl, beside a tennis court in the rain? A woman sitting in a beached dinghy? Hills? Look at the Richmond Range. Look at the Barnicoat. Mount Starveall, Mount Malita. Why did she no longer need to paint them?
Ellie said, ‘I’m not going to start worrying yet.’
There was no special virtue in hills (she had learned that when she had flattened them) and perhaps her preoccupation came from growing up with a range on either side. She should have felt shut in, but that had never been the case for they seemed to lean outwards instead of over her, say ‘out’ not ‘in’ – and that was why they took on extra meaning perhaps. Ellie laughed. There was so much to say ‘perhaps’ about. Perhaps the inlet tides, which she had painted for a season, were the tides of her life going in and out – men coming and going, Mike, Neil, Hollis, and that great inflowing tide of her years with Fan. Perhaps, perhaps. She had made good paintings, that was the certainty she had.
Ellie knew her place, compared with Fan, and with all those others who had worked and signed their names. She was confident in her social life, quick and sometimes loud with her opinions, and seeing her, hearing her, people gave the smile that said, ‘Who does she think she is?’ They supposed she saw herself in the foreground, one of the row of heads along the front, while Ellie knew she made a matchstick figure at the back – out at the far edge of the plain. They did not know how happy she was there. She’d found herself, had done her likeness, earned her place. Good paintings; yes, they’re good, she thought.
She had tried painting John when he came at Christmas time, but could only get him when she sat him in the dinghy and pushed him through the rushes away from shore. A sketch had turned out to be enough; it was now, in a way, historical – John without oars – because later, as they sat on the landing, with tepid water lapping about their feet, he told her that he had located Mike Rowe and called on him.
He smiled at Ellie and seemed for the first time in years his proper age.
‘How was he?’ Ellie said carefully.
‘Good.’
‘Was he surprised?’
‘He was blown away.’
‘Pleased?’
‘He seemed to be, when he got used to it. He wasn’t very pleased with you.’
‘Is that an understatement?’
John laughed. ‘He reckons you’re a phenomena.’
‘Phenomenon.’
‘Yeah, but I’m telling you what he said. I liked him, Mum.’
‘Are you going to see him again?’
‘Yep, you bet. We’re having a beer when I get back to Christchurch. He lives – do you want to know?’
‘Yes.’
‘He lives in a caravan in a back yard. I think he’s got something going with the woman in the house.’
‘That’d be Mike. Did he have any message for me?’
‘Just “Gidday”. He said to tell you he’s a painter too.’ John laughed again. Mike had plainly delighted him. ‘He drives one of those machines that paints white lines on the road.’
John took his Fan Anerdi painting when he left. He said, through the window, before he drove away, ‘It’s good seeing you and Hollis. You go together, eh.’
Like you and Mike, Ellie thought. She felt no jealousy, but little pleasure either – for that, it seemed, would be possessive, and she did not want John, the child, but wanted to watch him grown up, and applaud, tentatively, hopefully. Thank you, Mike.
That same day she and Hollis had rowed across the inlet to visit a potter friend on the other side. Coming back, she told him about John and Mike, and he laughed and said, ‘I thought he seemed a bit more together.’ He had talked about his worries for his sons, both of them getting nowhere in their jobs, and one drinking too much and betting too much. Angela, too, worried him, useless (her word) in her big house while Barry, out in the world, tracked about obsessively, hunting for deals.
Ellie rowed to the top of the inlet, then swept down to the vineyard on the falling tide.
‘Maybe we should do some travelling, while there’s time,’ Hollis said. ‘Burgundy, eh? Tuscany?’
‘I want to stay here.’
He grinned. ‘Me too. I just thought I’d better make the offer. OK?’
‘Yes, OK.’
‘I reckon this place will keep us busy till we die. Look up there’ – the vines as green as saplings, the sweep of the plain (invisible but never out of reckoning), then the mountains with clouds like scoops of ice cream on the tops, and the sky – ‘all of that,’ he said, ‘and you squeeze a dozen barrels out of it, and it’s enough.’
He was losing money and would go on losing it for a good while yet, but refused to worry, dreamed only in seasons, vintages, and looked ahead to his own pinot noir – the glass uplifted like the Holy Grail. It did not stop him being practical. She had never known anyone so hour by hour and job by job.
He’s first rate and imperfect, she thought – we both are. But, perhaps (again) only because we’re together and have been apart. Words confused her; definitions were instantaneous but then lost shape as memory and desire, past and future, fitted them into the lives she and Hollis had lived and wished to live, where their usefulness was lost. Together? Apart? How inadequate when what she had meant was as large as their forty years of kn
owing each other yet as particular as the dipping of the oar blades in the water. ‘Together’ had a meaning altered each day from its meaning on the day before – but one of the things she must do was resist hearing the argument between increase in Hollis and herself and decrease in time. Daily changes were the things to note – dry air, white paddocks, ripening grapes. She must not think too far ahead to next year’s calendar on the wall.
It had been her resolution, which she had kept and broken since that time. There were daily changes in him – more pain, stronger pills and, since Christmas, a trip to Rotorua, with another planned. She had learned to massage his legs. And now there were the modified controls and the crooked path.
Ellie got out of the dinghy. She walked along the shore to the Tidal Flat boundary and followed the fenceline up to where the riesling grew. Now she was level with the roof of the house. Where was Hollis? She went past the rows, looking down each one. He hated her worrying over him and watching him. What reason could she give for being here? That she had nothing to paint, so had come outside to pluck some leaves, let in the sun? ‘Hollis?’ Over beyond the house, beyond the sheds, she heard the sound of a motor – not the tractor but a throatier sound. It came from the entrance to the vineyard, by the gum trees, and was suddenly switched off. She walked down the slope, following the new path. A breeze hissed in the grass on either side. Stubble collapsed under her feet. She saw where Hollis had trodden and his crutches scraped the earth.
Ellie walked through her sunroom, through the lounge and out the front door. She went along the driveway to the sheds and saw that the vehicle that had made that throaty roar was a Volkswagen like the one Kerri had owned. It was pulled up in the yard beside piled-high nets on the trailer – an ancient car, rust eaten, painted green. The driver’s door, newer than the rest, was bright orange and had ‘Coco Cleaners’ stencilled on it. The boot lid was tied down with an old brassiere. It made Ellie think of Mike, in spite of the name on the door.
