My parrot memory, my self-consciousness, I’m thinking about nothing, about mathematics and the nth power, the ability to count one two three four five until, at n, the tongue swells in the mouth the syllables explode, one can only stammer n n n, the archway, any archway, you did not bring me to Winchley to pronounce eternity, spare me, you say, the pretension, do you know, you will say, you’re wearing the weekend quite well, it becomes you, but your pretension is showing.
Grace thought, You care about buildings, don’t you, Philip? The vegetation and geomorphology of the city: natural growths, outcrops of human flesh and spirit, corns, cancers, stone prayers, domes like institutional chamber-pots
or solitary breasts or cupped hands retaining the vision; these buildings are sighs, statements, denials . . . the sky like a grey handkerchief over the dead stone faces . . . I have a passion for the sunlight of memory. I’m a migratory bird, Philip. As a bird with a pathway in space I too have a special feeling for buildings, and a terror of them. Do not laugh at me. You have a lonely human courage, you know that man as well as buildings must learn to stand upright . . . do you know how brave human beings are to be walking on the earth, to be standing buffeted by weather and time and space; always the object of attack, still surviving; how can man dare to plant himself so, and then to know the magnificence of spirit which urges him to build a structure which is more than four walls and a roof . . . how can man dare? It is a marvel that he does not build his little hut, go in, shut and bolt the door, and spend his life there with his head bowed in humility. There is talk of voyaging in space, of the courage it needs - see the handsome cheerful intelligent men who have been chosen to circle the earth. It takes tremendous courage to make any encounter with inner or outer space, to walk upright, to move unsupported, seized by weather attended by time the cosmetic artist in reverse - snipping hair, writing wrinkles, padding the belly with pillows of fat . . . where does man find the courage?
In my condition as a migratory bird flying towards another summer, I find all buildings are obstacles. I must change my course when I approach them. They play tricks with sun and shadow. When I fly against them I fall stunned, my mind is confused. I have no fists now, only wings to strike at the buildings which stand in my path.
I’m a migratory bird, Philip. Shall I speak it aloud? Shall I tell Anne, Sarah, Noel?
—What are you thinking?
Philip waited for her to speak. He and Anne had expected that Grace Cleave would have ideas to express.
Grace looked silently, mournfully at him and turned to stare once again at the Winchley Viaduct, the local landmark. How
complicated, interfering and insistent a local landmark may be! In the cunning everlasting ritual of identification one cannot say, pointing to oneself, boring one’s guest,
—This is me, or I, I am myself. Here I am, see, I, me, myself . . . But one can say, Our town has a special landmark. Like to see it? I’ll show it to you. A long interesting drive, afternoon tea somewhere, ah there’s the castle, statue, scene of the crime, This is it, see it, There it is, see, there.
—You like the Viaduct then? You find it interesting?
—Yes. I see what you mean, that it is best in this light. Grace sneezed and blew her nose.
—The north’s a grim place she said finally.
They went down the street to the bus terminus where Anne and the children were waiting. Noel was asleep. Anne’s face was rosy with cold. They talked of getting a taxi back to Holly Road but they decided against it and Grace remembered, ashamed, that Philip had brought her from the station at Relham in a taxi. A Winchley bus surged out of the muffling mist and frost. They climbed on, but this time Philip managed without asking Grace to carry Noel, although she bustled here and there offering to hold this and that—Shall I? Can I? No thanks, all the same, no it’s all right thank you.
Sometimes Grace thought that
No thank you
was the most chilling phrase in the language.
When they reached Holly Road they almost ran to get to the house. In a burst of boyish gaiety Philip said,—I’ll go ahead to light the fire and I’ll have glasses of hot rum poured out, waiting.
He went ahead towards the house.
Cheered, they followed quickly and excitedly; it was all right after all, soon they would be home and warm. Philip had painted such a cosy picture of their homecoming that Grace, looking for the glasses of piping hot rum and the blazing fire,
felt disappointed and depressed when she realised that Philip had been joking.
—Well what do you think of Winchley? Anne said as they entered the cold kitchen.
They drank coffee and smoked. The fire was out.
While Philip played with the children Anne prepared the tea. Although Grace longed to be alone in her room she stayed in the kitchen, spellbound by its returning warmth and comfort; listening to Philip and Anne, watching them, considering them, more relieved by their happiness than jealous of it, feeling herself in a gratifying way included in it. She smoked cigarettes from the two packets she had bought in the village and put on the mantelpiece for anyone’s use, as her rehearsal of ‘I’ve bought some cigarettes, Help yourself, smoke mine for a change’ had been futile, she had been too shy to speak; therefore she endured Philip’s surprised amused glance as (so he thought, unaware of her secret gift) she chainsmoked, without by your leave, from the family Nelsons.
—I never smoke, really, Grace said.—But I’ve decided to smoke this weekend.
She almost added, for Philip’s benefit,—I bought these cigarettes this morning. Help yourself.
She wished she could summon courage to leave the kitchen, but her desire to stay was too strong; it seemed to her that she was at home, experiencing a peace that her own home had never provided. As she watched Anne going about her task of preparing tea (she had refused the help mechanically offered by Grace), Grace had a strange feeling that Anne was her mother, about to ‘dish up’ for the family, and that she was a child sitting at the big wooden table on the long kauri form which her father and his brothers and sisters had used, when they were children, as a canoe, turning it upside down and paddling it through makebelieve swift waters. Grace had never liked sitting on the form. As it was against the wall you had to creep under the table to reach it, and once there, with brother or sister beside you,
you had no means of escape. If Grace tried to escape by walking along the form the flypapers hanging from the ceiling tangled in her frizzy hair and she heard the desperate buzz of trapped flies, quite unlike the usual dispersed sound a fly made in its free movement around the kitchen. It was the same frantic buzzing of a fly trapped in a spiderweb - Grace
knew
, for she and her sisters, from time to time, would say suddenly,—Let’s catch flies and feed them to spiders. They would catch the fly in an old bottle or jam-jar, carry it to the spiderweb, and let it free to fly into the web - z-z-z-z-z its wings beat, the frail web shook violently, twanged like a silk bridge with an army crossing it; then a dark hairy face with lamplit eyes looked out from the hiding-place in the corner, and ascertaining that everything was ready, arranged according to providence, and goose-stepping on the silver silk tight-rope, the spider approached the fly, wrapped him neatly in a cobweb blanket until his wings no longer struggled, then drew him along the shaking web to his lair, to add him to the collection of flies’ feet and strips of wing littered in his secret room.
As Grace sat in the Thirkettles’ kitchen she heard again the desperate buzzing of flies trapped in her hair. She shook her head. It was always a time of panic when things were trapped in her hair. No one knew, no one knew how terrible it was to have such hair, so much of it, so curly and frizzy that it hurt to be combed, and people in the street stopped to stare at it,—Look at that girl with the hair!
Grace shook her head suddenly. Her ears buzzed with trapped blowflies, the frightening dark-blue kind, the same colour as the end slab in a small box of paints which someone gave as a Christmas or birthday present. Inside the lid were milky blue-white compartments, but the share of each colour was so small, such a thin strip on a shallow bed, that the blowfly colour was painted entirely away in one picture’s thunder-filled sky.
Looking at Anne, Grace almost leaned forward to say,
—Bed ’n’ syp, Mum, bed ’n’ syp!
—Can’t you see your mother’s occupied?
Occupied. Her father always chose a long word, if he could find one. Of the books on the bookshelf - the set of Oscar Wilde bought at a sale-room, school text-books, old reading books of American Civil War stories, Dr Chase’s
Book of Hints and Recipes
(in which the family births, marriages and deaths were recorded), a novel with a grey and white striped cover and a crippled back, called
To Pay the Price
, and God’s Book, a Christadelphian manual with big print and misty lurid pictures of angels, Armageddon, and again, the mechanically impossible Resurrection Day - the red-bound dictionary was most used, especially by Grace’s father who attempted all the word-puzzles he could find. Grace used to try to help him. She remembered once spending the whole evening in search of a word of six letters, and the more elusive the word seemed, the more determined her father became to discover it; everyone had gone to bed when he was still searching for the word. Grace went to bed when she couldn’t keep awake any longer. The next day or the day after her father said suddenly,—It’s
rattan
, it’s
rattan
. For all his triumph he might have won the Melbourne Cup!
Her father liked to regard himself as the literate member of the family. He was the Railway Union Secretary, and beneath business notes he signed his name, with a flourish, followed by
Union Sec
.
—Bed ’n’ syp, Mum, Bed ’n’ syp! Her mother was reciting poetry, her own verse,
‘He was a poet, he loved the wild thunder
as it crashed in the universe; now he sleeps under,
under the grass he loved; stilled now his hand.
Only a poet’s heart could understand.’
The poet, of course, was Grace’s mother, who, whether through the family poverty or her own conviction of the working of a poet’s mind, insisted that the best poems were always written on the backs of envelopes, on scraps of letters. She had evidence to prove it. She spoke of So-and-So who wrote his masterpiece on a bill that he couldn’t pay; to Grace’s mother this seemed the most
powerful and effective revenge against poverty.
—Oh, please Mum, bed ’n’ syp!
Suddenly Grace’s father began to shout.
—Haven’t I told you before . . . everything I say goes in one ear and out the other . . .
Startled, Grace turned to look at Philip, who, if Anne were playing the part of Mother, should have changed to Father. He hadn’t changed at all, he was Philip wearing his weekend clothes, the relaxed professional man playing with his children; with just a small spot of tired darkness like a tiny black hailstone or punctuation mark set deep in his gold-flecked eyes.
I wonder, Grace thought. I’m glad I’m not like those dressmaker’s dummies whose heads are built in the shape of a cage, or my thoughts would fly out through the bars. But I must know, I
must know
the reason for the strangeness of this weekend.
Philip is interested in architecture. Their love has an architectural quality but I feel that it is not yet complete; the foundations are strong, there are walls and roof enough to give shelter from the storm; Philip is a serious builder who has taken great care to set up a firm scaffold. A scaffold? A magazine? A School? There’s a shape hanging from the scaffold, a small boy in a blue woollen cap like a USA baseball cap; he is stiff and dead; it is Noel. How like Philip he is, the clean intellectual shining beneath the beggar-boy snot!
But it is not Philip’s and Anne’s house of love that I am seeing, it is a real house, the one from Edendale, being rebuilt in Glenham, and we are living temporarily in the huts and it is snowing. There aren’t enough hankies to go round, the air is clouded with Friar’s Balsam, the Dunedin aunt with the goitre is saying,—She’s delirious, she’s delirious, and I’m crying because my legs ache and ache. Growing pains. Is growing so terrible? And what was that my mother said about the little boy at Outram who ‘grew too fast’, that he ‘outgrew his
strength’? Didn’t he become ill and die? Is that a punishment for growing? And why do they all tease me with my mop of hair, saying that I’m like Topsy, and asking about where I was born, and I reply, knowing that they expect it,
‘I’m the girl that never was born,
p’ras I grew up among the corn.
Golly, ain’t I wicked!’
—Do you like cheese on toast?
Whenever Anne made such an enquiry Grace replied by gurgling enthusiastically,—Oh anything, anything, I eat anything.
Now, after having answered thus at the beginning of each weekend meal Grace, trying not to be so impolite and ambiguous, said—Yes, I do like cheese on toast.
She wanted to say,—My brother doesn’t eat egg, he’s never been able to eat egg, and I never knew.
She looked at Philip, remembering that at one spare moment in the weekend when Philip had been out of the room, Anne had said, in a confiding voice,—Philip loves
Spaghetti Bolognaise
; he’d be happy if I served
Spaghetti Bolognaise
at every meal!
Now, Grace looked wonderingly at Philip, marvelling at the quality in human beings which endows a simple commonplace like or dislike with such mystery and magic. He likes
Spaghetti Bolognaise
, she said to herself, treasuring her knowledge.
—I’ve enjoyed your cooking so much.
Grace felt proud to have said that. She admired Anne’s conjuring ability, for although meal seemed to follow meal, and there were continual preparations, with Anne moving back and forth from sink to stove to sink to table, all was accomplished in such secrecy that if you had stopped Anne at any moment you would not have surprised her with a clod of dough in her hands or a half-peeled potato. The deliberate or unintentional way
in which she concealed the preparing and cooking of the meal reminded Grace of the creation of a work of art; yet the final delivery of the food was not made in self-conscious triumph. An artist could learn from her, Grace thought. She knows how to make, to give, without the qualifying—
It’s mine
.