The Back of His Head (3 page)

The old fellow looked at me hard when he said this. He knows you're as mad as he is, he said. Madder. He knows you've got his DNA.

And I wondered, how much of the story, the full story, did he know?

Now, at last, the September meeting of the Raymond Lawrence Memorial Trust, properly notified and quorate: Hon. Chairman Mr P. Orr, Hon. Secretary Ms M. Swindells, Hon. Treasurer Mr J. Yuile,
Order please
—

‘Oh, shit, is there a meeting now?' Marjorie has just noticed the papers set out before each chair at the dining table. ‘You just said it was an emergency.'

‘
That's
the emergency, having a meeting!' Semple. ‘Once a month, Marge, thought you'd remember once a month!'

For twenty seconds, the usual rattle of ill-tempered gunfire.
Order, order
—

We get through the prefatory nonsense—
is it your wish—those for—AYE
(Semple always very loud at this point, sometimes sustaining the note like a choirboy)
those against, CARRIED
.

There are no matters arising but under chairman's business I am able to report the ongoing sale of unauthorised Raymond Thomas Lawrence memorabilia online—cheap
bric-a-brac
, more a hangover from the time of the award of the Prize than a real and ongoing threat, but crass and irritating all the same: for example, a line in garden gnomes made to look like the Master—the Master sitting fishing, the Master as Rodin's Thinker, even (most lamentable of all) the Master as the Manneken-Pis. Appalling, upsetting, infuriating: but, according to our legal advisors, untouchable, since we'd lose more if we sued, apparently, than we might gain. And, as I said, this particular phenomenon does seem rather to be fading out.

‘You've told us all this before,' Semple is slumped forward, his arms along the tabletop.

‘True,' Marjorie works a moist refreshing tissue at a reddening septum. ‘Next business please.'

‘We haven't
got
to the business proper yet,' I tell her. ‘I'm still doing chairman's business.'

‘All right, do that,' she tells me. ‘Come on, chop-chop.'

‘Roof repairs,' I tell them.

‘Isn't that Item 2 Upkeep?'

I remind Julian I'm still reporting from the last meeting. ‘Eric the handyman's had a look at the roof,' I tell them, ‘and he gives it a year.'

Pause.

‘And then, what?' Marjorie demands. ‘It all falls in on us?'

‘And then it needs repairing,' Julian says.

‘And then it needs
replacing
,' I tell them.

‘Oh, shit. Let's forget about that, then, what's next?'

We move on to the agenda proper.

Proposed from the chair: That in light of today's theft, Item 3 Security be moved to Item 1: CARRIED nem. con
.

Once it gets there, though, the perennial impasse returns.

‘I can't believe we're discussing a fucking paua shell
ashtray
,' Semple groans. ‘Who cares if some prick's nicked a paua shell?'

‘It's not just a paua shell,' I remind him.

‘We've discussed this before, aren't we rather thrashing it to death?' Marjorie asks. ‘Next business
please
.'

But the next business is Financial, and there, the same issue threatens to come up again, melting—
order, order
—into Item 3 (as it is now), Upkeep.

Whichever item we deal with, of course, it's about the same thing, even I have to recognise that: the need to find money against the perennially rising cost of running the Residence and the fundamental, ineluctable fact that, even without our having spent a dollar of it, the Trust's endowment capital has become relatively smaller and smaller as each year has gone past. And against all this, the need to keep alive the authenticity, the integrity of the venture. Its
purity
, even: even its
spiritual
aspect.

Whenever we discuss these things, as I've said, Julian and I are always for the latter, and Semple and Marjorie are always (in effect) against: meaning that they want to start selling some of Raymond's
objets
to pay for upkeep, while Julian and I don't want to sell anything at all. They want to
represent
Raymond's life with bits and pieces from second-hand shops, imitation antiques or even rough approximations, used books by the carton-load from the back room of the university's bookshop, knives, forks and spoons from Bargain City out by the airport, and so forth. Julian and I have always held the line against these proposed atrocities, and for
authenticity
.

And here, at this evening's meeting, the perennial impasse, presenting itself yet again. Semple starts the show:

‘Every single problem on this'—he taps his agenda—‘would be solved if we cashed the place up.'

‘There's no motion on the table.'

‘If we cashed up, it wouldn't matter what they nicked, they'd be nicking crap anyway, we'd just replace the crap with more crap. If they gouge it we'd, you know, use wood-filler? If they keep on gouging it we'd replace the whole item from a junkshop. It'd all be crap.'

‘I have only one thing to say about this.' A pause, as I look around the table. ‘Mabel Carpenter.'

‘Oh,
fucking
Mabel Carpenter. Not her again.
Christ
, she was dreary.'

‘Yes.' Julian. ‘Some of her stuff's unreadable.'

‘
All
of it's unreadable.'

‘She was a great writer, though,' Marjorie says.

‘Oh—no doubt about that, she was a great writer all right.'

‘No doubt about that at all.'

‘Her Memorial Residence is a
disaster
,' I remind them. ‘We all know that.'

And it's true, both that the Residence of the late Mabel Carpenter—she whose fiction brought Dargaville to the world—is a joke, and that we all
know
is so. When it was first opened we had a look at the place, Julian and I, driving north after a conference in Auckland at which the pair of us represented the Master late in his life, when he was too ill to travel. Naturally, given his condition then, we had thoughts of what might soon—and now, alas, has—come to pass: I mean how a writer's home might most properly be turned into a memorial residence once he has (as Raymond used to put it)
passed on to the great whisky decanter in the sky
.

Not like that! the pair of us chortled happily as we drove away from Mabel's Residence afterwards. It was her house all right, I mean it was one that she had lived in: but for years after her death it had been rented by civilians (as Raymond used to call the inartistic), and there was not a thing she'd actually owned in it once her memorial trust decided it was time to commemorate her, nor anything very much to guide them in their sad little reconstruction.

A desk very similar to one Mabel might have written on
is a line I remember—with laughter—on a notice tacked to the wall above a very ordinary table that had been sanded down to nothing, no past in it, no life.
A bed typical of beds of the period
was another. The
pièce de résistance
—the nearest they could manage to the real thing, the nearest to achieving, for the literary tourist, the true and authentic moment—was a clothes-wringer in the outside laundry, certified to be authentic on a nearby placard, though described as a mangle all the same.
Mabel's mangle
, we came to call it, and we were quite clear that, when the time came, the Raymond Lawrence Memorial Residence would do better, far better, than that.

Naturally, I remind the meeting of all this.
We mustn't get caught in Mabel's Mangle
is my concluding line—rather a good one, I can't help thinking.

There is a pause, and then Marjorie continues as if I haven't even spoken!

‘It'd have to be good-looking crap,' she's telling Semple. ‘It'd have to look almost the same as the stuff we're talking about selling.'

‘It's not stuff and we're not talking about selling it,' I remind her. ‘There's no motion on the table.'

‘You mean if there was, you'd discuss it—?'

‘If it had a seconder.' I look across at Julian. ‘Then I'd have no choice.'

‘All right.' Semple. ‘I move we sell the Steinway.'

‘Oh, not the baby grand,' Marjorie says.

‘I think'—this is me, feeling my way towards a deferral—‘I think it'd be better if we addressed the principle first rather than the particulars.'

‘My motion's on the
table
, fuck it—'

‘No, it's not, there's no seconder.'

Semple looks at Marjorie. ‘Come on, Marge,' he says.

‘Ask somebody else. I don't want to sell the baby Steinway. And don't call me Marge.'

‘It's worth more than all the rest. It's worth more than the entire house and garden. It's worth hundreds of thousands. It's a fucking
Steinway
, for God's sake, with art casing, I don't know how it got here in the first place—'

The Steinway is in the corner of the Blue Room, covered in framed photographs and with a large table lamp on it. It's one of several items in the Residence obviously with some monetary value, though (it has to be said) not necessarily as much as Semple and Marjorie would like to think. Though they don't realise it, I've had it valued, and found it would bring in about fifty thousand local dollars according to when and where it was sold and by whom. Overseas, of course, it would be a different matter, sold overseas it would fetch rather more. But then one would have to
get
the piano overseas in order to sell it, which would cost all we might realistically sell it for once it was there. Checkmate: and, in some ways, the history of our little country in a single proposition.

Marjorie, meanwhile, is casting around for alternatives. ‘That thing.' She's pointing at the carved buffet behind me. ‘Let's sell that.'

‘The Henri II buffet?' Julian asks. ‘You'd have a job replacing that, you'd have a job getting something cheap that looked like that.'

‘You'd have a job getting it out of the house.'

‘It'd have to be authenticated first,' I remind them.

‘What about the berber rug, then?'

‘No,' I tell them. ‘The berber rug is off-limits.'

Mr Semple's motion that the Trust sell the Steinway baby grand piano lapsed for want of a seconder
.

Ms Swindells' motion that the Trust sell the carved buffet lapsed for want of a seconder
.

Ms Swindells observes that the answer is to increase visitor numbers. Mr Semple expresses reservations
.

‘You must be fucking dreaming,' he says. ‘How are we going to get more of the bastards in?'

‘How many did we used to get?' Marjorie asks me. ‘You know, in the good old days?'

‘Two or three hundred a month. More. Admittedly a while ago—'

‘Admittedly ten years ago,' Semple says. ‘When he was still famous. Christ, when he was still
alive
—'

‘Yes, but—' Julian. ‘We—'

‘They used to come here to get a sight of him drooling in his fucking bath chair. Ray. That's the only reason they came, that's why we got so many people through, the old boy was still around to gob in front of them.'

‘But—'

‘Yes, but even so, show me the literary residence in the country that ever got—'

‘How many literary homes
are
there—?'

‘Show me the literary residence
anywhere
—'

‘Yes, but—'

‘—that has consistently made a profit—I mean a meaningful profit, not just pocket money.'

I sit back.

Marjorie squirms her mouth. ‘Yes,' she creaks at me. ‘That's all very well, Peter, but you're telling us yourself, dear.
You've
brought it up,
you're
telling
us
we've got a crisis. Item 2, Financial crisis.'

‘A problem. A challenge.'

‘Yes, but'—Julian at last—‘it's not just visitors, they don't bring in that much, for God's sake, they never have, we didn't ask for anything at all for a long time and what do we ask for now? A voluntary contribution that hardly anyone actually makes.'

A pause.

‘True,' says Marjorie. ‘We'll have to start charging them to get in—'

‘Then nobody'll come,' says Semple. ‘End of story.'

‘But we'd have to charge a hundred dollars a visit to get anywhere near what we need.' Julian turns to me. ‘What needs doing?'

I look at my list. ‘We pay quarterly rating, the phone, electricity—'

‘Well,
fuck
the phone for a start.' Semple rocks from cheek to tender cheek. ‘Who needs a fucking
phone
when there's no one here most of the time?'

‘Robert, darls, don't tilt back like that.' Marjorie. ‘These chairs just won't take it anymore.' Then (to me): ‘Maybe
they
need replacing, too—the chairs?'

Proposed Mr Semple, that the telephone be disconnected forthwith, seconded by Mr Yuile: carried nem con., Mr Orr to action
.

What else?

‘The guttering needs replacing—'

‘It needs
placing
, there isn't any at all round the side—'

I stick to my script. ‘The garden. We're down to one gardening lady now. Val—'

‘How many did we used to have—gardening ladies—?'

‘Back then? Seven. But we didn't pay them. Deciding to pay them was a mad idea. We were paying four at one stage—when those Austrians came and made that documentary we had four gardening ladies on the payroll—'

‘Yes, but doesn't it look spiffing, in the doco, I mean—the house and the garden—doesn't it look
spiffing
—? Summertime, and all that—?'