The Great Fire (36 page)

At the shore, the gale was returning in grainy gusts that hurt the eyes and throat and set hair flying at one moment forward and then streaming behind. Speech also being swept away, they could not use expendable words about the strong sea and the rough passage of the Picton ferry; each thinking, rather, of what had been read and said, and recalling the rhymes of impassioned love. When, in a lull of the wind, they lingered under trees, Barbara asked, 'But have you known — abroad, that is — a man who might really talk that way? —
"toi seule existes"
all that.'

'Yes.' And then: 'Yes, yes, yes.'

'I thought it might be only in books.' Barbara put both her hands to her hair. 'Oh, I would like to find out.'

The sea had risen so high on the horizon that those watching it might imagine themselves prostrate on the shore. In an intolerable instant of life, Helen wondered in what fine street on the other, centuried side of earth, the passersby glanced at him, who was more present to her than this sand and harbour, and more to her than all the beautiful splayed islands of the great south land.

They walked on to the end of the cove, staying aloof from the smaller house there.

'That place belongs to us, but it's rented. I don't want them to think, you know, that we're hanging around.' Barbara said, 'My grandfather built it for his children, so he'd always have them within cooee. A good idea, or maybe not. But the eldest son was killed at the first war, and Grandpa died early, and the house has drifted.'

'It looks closed up.'

The house needed painting, there was a break in the verandah railing, and a front plot of garden was untended. You could feel the splinters in the wooden steps.

'Still, someone might be there.' Barbara turned away, scrunching over a glittering rubbish of weed, shell, and tiny carapace, and chips of coloured glass. Walking back, she said, 'We let it for the spring and summer to those Fairfax boys. They come out from the town from time to time.'

Two British brothers were at Wellington awaiting the return of their father from the Antarctic. Explorer-father had set out months previously, from the South Island leading an expedition, and would resurface at summer's end. The sons, meantime, were to experience the Antipodes. The elder was of an age, barely, to have served in the war; the younger might have been twenty. Here they would linger, figures in some legend, until the ice, melting, released their father. That was their nearly primaeval condition. The elder was writing a dissertation, of which no one had discovered the theme. It was not known how the younger passed his time. Rarely apart, they made a fine pair on the uneven pavements of the capital: well formed and well turned out, light-eyed and fair. Barbara's mother had declared, Two princelings. The ladies of the town openly doted; their menfolk, resentful, were cowed by a quiet show of self-possession, which they mocked in surly asides; and by the reality of the icebound father, whose polar tradition had been sanctified, at Lyttleton in 1910 by the fateful departure, to his death, of Captain Scott.

Helen might have liked to know what books the explorer-father had taken with him to the ice floes, and by what light they were read; to smell the reek of whale oil, and to learn whether, in winter, the sun rose at all. She had seen the two brothers one evening at the Majestic, where dances were held in a big blank room, darkly red, that also served as a cinema. The young men had been pointed out to her, and she had tried to understand whether, in their own land, they would have appeared as princelings or merely as a pair of pale-headed and impassive youths. With these matters in mind and her elbow on the viscous tablecloth, she'd watched them refuse dry sandwiches and swallow thin coffee in heavy cups; and rise civilly, to dance well, with each of the women in their small party. Meanwhile, her own coffee was cooling. And when her partner for the evening asked her to dance the hokey-cokey he placed her white saucer over the cup, to keep it warm.

Barbara said, 'It's obvious. They made a vow, coming here, not to saddle themselves with local girls, not to risk life sentences to colonial connections.' She picked up a pebble, as if to throw, and instead examined its markings. 'What I mind is their imagining we don't see it.' She laughed then, rolling the stone in her hand. 'If one of them did ask me out, I'd probably go. Wouldn't you?'

'I might.' From curiosity, or boredom.

'How funny you are. So indifferent. Anyway, when they came to see the house, my mother had them to tea. It was only polite, but did look pointed. Janet wouldn't show herself, Flora and I sat and smiled. Afterwards, the sides of our faces ached from the smiling. And Mummy actually wore a hat, the big white hat she got at Kirk's. In her own house, as if it were Windsor Castle.'

The white hat from Kirkaldie's, flat and circular: a saucer placed to impede further cooling.

'They haven't asked us back. They've been lent a flat in town and are mostly there.'

'Whose flat?'

'I don't know. I daresay, someone with daughters. It's in Buckle Street, near the museum.' Barbara disclosed the stone in her palm, then dropped it. 'Out of exclusivity, they've become mysterious and desirable. As women are supposed to be.'

If Barbara were to wed a Fairfax, she would supply the spontaneity and candour. Realising this, why would some Fairfax not go on his knees to her? Such was the thought of both young women; so clear to them, it went unspoken.

Reaching home, returning to the sink, they spread mustard and hacked at corned beef. Barbara had brought, from town, a dod of cabinet pudding, and they ate in the living room on a seat by the leaded windows. They did not go back to their books: that aspect of their day had run its course.

Barbara carried the dishes back to the kitchen and splashed water in the slate sink, into the Coronation mug:
ENTHRONED
IN
THE
HEARTS
OF
THEIR
PEOPLE
.
It was
said that Queen Alexandra always wore that collar, of pearl or diamonds, because she had once tried to cut her throat. Probably untrue, the legend gave the private measure of such a marriage.

She looked from the window at the tumbled yard, which had been this way, with seasonal variations, ever since she could remember. She would have liked to rush, like the girl in a poem they had read that morning who ran to meet her lover in the street, under the rain.

She could not remember whether, for his part, the lover ran to her also; or just stood waiting.

When it was time to take Helen to the bus, Barbara closed the house against the wind. Along the shore, the sea rose, and combed, and fell heavily; and rose again, thundering, and again fell. The gale was bedevilling the furze, and the small house of the princelings was preparing to yield more of its matchstick decoration. Solitary, irrelevant, it did suggest the last obscure retreat of some monarch no longer enthroned: one could envisage the historic photograph. Unlikely places of the kind lay in wait for the deposed.

Barbara was recalling, not happily, how her father's brother, staying there with his family on a visit from Auckland, had broken the verandah rail during a balancing act. The girl liked her Uncle Doug, who was funny and kind. There had been other damage, including a broken toaster, and the holiday had ended badly. When they had all gone, her mother had sat in a chair and said, 'That's Auckland for you.'

The bus was there, taking on passengers. Helen found a seat to the rear. She and Barbara mouthed farewells through the glass, and raised their hands in a show of good cheer. When Helen looked round from the bend of the road, Barbara was still there, not watching the bus, but lowering her head submissively against the gale and holding down her clothes.

From the day's sensations, Helen could retrieve the solitude that never now completely left her. And was able to think of how they had read about the past, which was full of desires and dreams and delusions, so that the planet seemed entirely charged with human wishes, existing for the most part silently and in vain. She thought about her brother, to whom Thaddeus Hill had read her letters, and who would die without her. And of Miss Fry, whose talent had been spent in repairs. And of the mother who had been instrumental.

There was the climate of resignation, which had opened to admit her and closed behind her, and from which she must get up and go. Mrs Fry had said, You must save yourself. She would write and tell him, I am coming.

She remembered the drive out in the bright morning, and how the white-haired man had spoken up for longing, and had gone away smiling for himself alone. It wasn't enough.

Among the passengers, she recognised the elder of the Fairfax brothers, alone and reading. The back of his head, and of his neck in particular, did not seem invulnerable. He might have been misjudged. He would sometimes raise his eyes to the window, to be reminded of his surroundings or his existence. By the roadside, lone figures walked bravely against the wind; and, within the bus, the same baffled acceptance of obscurity.

She would write and say, I am coming.

In the tea shop alongside South's, Helen sits alone with Sidney Fairfax. The hour, near closing-time, is not propitious for lingering, and the shop itself — its very walls, counter, and coat-stand — grows restive. The bookseller next door has already locked up and left. Due to the licensing laws, there is, in the town, no bar where they can sit and talk.

The spring continues blustery, reluctant. Far to the south, the polar ice is, to the souls grappled there, adamantine.

Helen and Sidney have come away from a film called
The Blue Lagoon,
about a boy and girl shipwrecked on a tropical island, who grow up in a state of nature. At the outset, these two are helped along by a third castaway, a kindly elder who, having taught them the rudiments of survival and served his cinematic turn, conveniently dies. Boy and girl, attaining adolescence, become lovers in all innocence, and produce a child. At the end, they are rescued and borne away to the clamorous, censorious, contentious world.

Sidney Fairfax says that there have been books and other films on the theme; that it is the old story — Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve, the Expulsion. The old mentor was God the Father, revealing the world and leaving them to it. Sidney is aware that Helen considers him overready with the obvious, and that the formula is his nutshell of safety and authority. He himself is inclined to agree, having always found his thoughts more original than his utterance.

'An open-and-shut case,' he says, smiling. Tolerant of a commonplace world that refuses to give up on sentiment. Sidney is becoming, literally, a philosopher: that will be his profession. While waiting at Wellington for his snowbound father, he will complete a doctoral thesis: here is another man carrying pages around the world. He, the older of two reticent brothers, is agreeable. The younger, Gerald, is terse, reclusive, sometimes surly. That, at least, is the judgement of the capital.

Of the movie, Helen says, 'The first part was a bit like my brother and me with our teacher.' She has not previously mentioned the absent brother, but the background is known in the omniscient town. In the picture-house, she has blinked away tears.

She says, 'I suppose that there will be no more desert islands. Only castaways.'

He has met her just twice before, but believes that he sees deterioration: among them all, they will wear her down. (It wasn't in his nature to say 'break her'.) He knows, who doesn't, that she has been separated from an older man: that is no concern of his. He has heard the mother say, 'We nipped that in the bud.' Mrs Capulet.

Helen says, 'They'll poison us here if we don't go.'

'I feel they already did that.' They have shared one of the glazed buns. 'There must be somewhere we can talk for half an hour. If we were to loll in the lounge of the Hotel St. George, would you be fatally compromised in local society?'

'It will be noted. But they do know me there, at the desk.' Not that blame would attach to the gallant Fairfax; only to the forward girl.

They get up and Sidney says, 'What a fine green coat.' He himself is coatless, but wears a long striped scarf furled like an undergraduate's. Ruddy-cheeked, blue-eyed, longish-haired, shortish-limbed, and compact in body, he looks the student. But Sidney, who is twenty-four, has been a soldier in the Ardennes.

Under frugal street-lighting, they walk the chilly block to the hotel, where Helen is soberly greeted at the desk: 'Miss Driscoll.' It is agreed that they may sit awhile in the lounge, where all is brown, and where commercial travellers from Invercargill and Wanganui very quietly pass through, and toll calls are announced over a loudspeaker.

Sidney remarks, 'They might have been less repressive. It's not as if we were asking for a room.'

Helen laughs out loud, they both do, at the very idea, and they sit down companionably. Sidney says, 'I was never so consistently aware of my position on the face of the earth, were you? Sea-girt, southerly, sundered. And my father so much more so, near the Pole.'

Helen thinks 'face of the earth' a fine phrase. Then, 'Yes, the islands seem adrift on the atlas. There is our helplessness, even to register. I suppose it could be seen as floating free.'

'My father isn't helpless. He has chosen. His entombment down there haunts one, but it's voluntary.'

Helen says that Sidney and his brother have also chosen to pass, here, these months of waiting.

Sidney Fairfax says, 'Not quite.'

She asks how his brother spends his days.

Sidney doesn't look at his watch, but says, 'At this moment he is waiting for me. At other times, he also is writing.' Sidney now genuinely turns to Helen for the first time, seeing her not exactly as herself, or as a woman, but as the responsive being with whom he can share, in this brown place, a fragment of self: appreciating her. 'My brother Gerald,' he says, 'is writing the story of his life. As he is a literate man, it has been proposed that this may help him recover from a breakdown of two years past, which is a factor in our presence at Wellington. His collapse had some origins in early bullying endured at school, but came on during his months of national service, in which he was utterly at odds with his surroundings and assigned to specific hardship tasks intended to make a man of him. When he foundered, in an episode that it would be hard for me to speak of, a medical discharge was procured for him, partly through my father's influence. For, yes, there is influence, and thank God for it.