The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt (15 page)

T
he weather is turning; you can feel it in the mornings most, see the difference in the light, smell the cooler weather. It’s still beautiful to swim; there’s not yet the bite of winter, the cold touching your skin, getting under it. Even so, this morning the other bathers at the beach are fewer in number. As I hold the towel around me after my swim, absorbing the salty wet, I watch an old woman hobble to the water’s edge, leaning on a stick. She pushes the stick down into the wet sand just up from the water, and gently sashays into the ocean. She bobs, her head in a rubber bathing cap studded with floppy rubber flowers; bobs on the waves, not swimming, just being there. She bobs back and forth on the water, bisected in my sightline by the upright of her walking stick in the sand. I turn away from her, stuff my towel into my bag, pull my cotton shirt over me, slip my feet into sandals and head up the sand, off the beach, to home.

Mo is coming again tomorrow. Not with Jonno and Caro. She just wants to
kaw-reh-raw
, she says. I beg your pardon, I say. Talk, she says,
kōrero
. She is using strange words, today,
words I haven’t heard her use before, as if she has just had a language lesson and wants to show off. They are like ripe fruit, round and heavy off her tongue.
Kia ora. K rero. Kai.
They are not familiar to me, these words; I have to ask her their meaning. She touches the bone pendant at her throat when she tells me. Hello or thank you or agreement. Talk. Food.

Kia ora
, I tell her.

She brings only her audio recorder, as she did for our early sessions together. She sets it up on the kitchen table, fussing with the business of it, placing the machine and the microphone, adjusting their positions, carefully uncoiling leads, making connections. I busy myself with the coffeepot, my back turned to her as I face the stove. We both work in silence, saving our words for the machine.

I hear her exhale – a deep whoosh of breath – and mutter
fuck
under her breath.

‘I’ve forgotten the power lead. Shit. I’m sorry. Look – I don’t like to rely on battery to run it.
Shit
. Do you mind – shall we just forget it for today? I can’t believe this.’ She is flustered, not herself.

‘No matter. I don’t mind.’

‘Thanks. I’m so sorry, I don’t like to mess you around. I guess I’ll pack up.’

‘And we shall have coffee, at least.’

She starts unplugging and recoiling leads, packing the gear back into the plastic box she brought it in. I finish making the coffee, and turn to serve it. As I hand hers to her she – both hands busy – gestures with her eyes, her
head, to the table, where I place both cups. She lifts the last lead, finishes coiling it, and bends over to put it in the gear bag on the floor by her feet. She straightens up, holding the lead, and staggers a little, then steadies herself by placing her hand on the table.

‘Are you all right?’ I reach out my hand towards her, but don’t quite touch her. ‘You look pale. Are you not well?’

‘Sort of. I’m pregnant.’

‘Oh.’ I understand now the cause of her pallor, the bathroom hijinks. Not a user after all. ‘Well, congratulations.’

Still standing, she puffs out breath –
pfou
– and her shoulders relax. ‘Thanks.’

‘But you should sit. You look dreadful. I’m sorry – tired, I should say.’

‘I’m okay. It comes and goes. It’s getting better.’ She sits, the audio lead still coiled in her hands, resting in her lap. ‘I’m past that first trimester thing.’

‘Are you – I’m sorry, I don’t mean to pry, but I’m a little surprised. Was it planned?’

‘God, no! I mean, that sounds dreadful, or irresponsible. It was…’ There’s the puff of breath again,
pfou
, and she lifts both hands, palms upward, in a gesture of resignation, or acceptance. ‘It was completely unplanned. The product of a reckless New Year’s Eve fling, and – ah – contraceptive failure, if you must know.’ She looks at me over her glasses, with something approaching a sly smile. ‘Classic, really. An ecky at New Year’s and I’m anyone’s. I should know better, at my age.’

‘Anarchy? At New Year’s?’

‘An ecky. Sorry, I thought you’d…’ She shakes her head. ‘Never mind. Ecky. Ecstasy. Kind of a love drug. A party drug. I hardly ever – ah well, that’ll teach me, eh.’

She bends down – is it to avoid eye contact? I can’t tell – and places the lead in her hands into the plastic box at her feet. She wraps both hands around the coffee cup and sips from it, holding the cup close to her mouth even when she has finished drinking. Her face is hard to read.

‘What will you do?’

‘Do you mean am I keeping it? Having it?’

‘Yes, I suppose that’s what I mean. Are you?’

‘Well, yes. I didn’t really think about not keeping it. Once I was pregnant, I realised I wanted it. You know, I’m forty. Now or never.’ She shrugs her shoulders.

‘But it’s hard, you know. You should think carefully, if it’s not too late to do something about it. A child; it slows a woman down. Anchors her. Perhaps artists shouldn’t have children.’ I lift my chin as I say it, as if to challenge her to disagree.

‘But – do you really think that’s true? Plenty of men who are filmmakers have children. I dunno. Francis Ford Coppola. It hasn’t stopped him. Why should it be any different for a woman?’

‘Well, put simply, because it
is
different. Any male artist who has a child also has a wife, or a woman playing that role. If you had a
wife
to look after it,
then
it wouldn’t be different. You know that, if you think past the rhetoric. It is simply different. The biology of it. The sense of connection. I have – seen it happen. It can suck the creativity from a woman, if she’s not careful. Suck her
time and her energy, so that she has nothing left for art, for music.’ I sip my coffee before uttering my final curse, only half-believing it. ‘Your art will suffer if you do this.’

‘I’ve heard the arguments before. I just – I’ve always been able to do whatever I’ve decided to do. I don’t think having a child will fundamentally change that. There has to be a way to do it.’

I sigh, shake my head. ‘Is there a father to have some say in the process?’

‘Of course. I just – we’re not – he’s not in a position to be part of a couple.’

‘Ah, so he’s married.’

‘No, no, not that. He’s – he’s not father material. It was just a thing, a fling, sex, not a relationship. He’s a nice guy. Young. Too young.’ She smiles, shrugs.

‘He knows?’

‘About this?’ She touches her belly. ‘Nah. I haven’t told him. I don’t think – I don’t think I’m going to tell him. He’ll notice soon enough. But I’m going to do it. On my own.’

I clap my hands, raise them together, clasped in a salute. ‘Excellent! That’s precisely the way. If you’re set on doing this mad thing, do it by yourself. Make your own decisions. Don’t rely on anyone staying in your life, being there to take things over. Pay someone to look after it for you. Pay a nanny, that’s my advice. Then when they leave, you can find someone else to pay. It’s the best way. People don’t stay.’ I look past her, out the window. Then I shrug, drain my coffee, stand up, pull myself up straight. ‘When will I see you next?’

She gathers the last of her things, swipes them into her bag. ‘Can we go again tomorrow? Caro and Jonno are keen. Would that be all right?’

‘I have no other commitments. Tomorrow is fine. Let’s start earlier. Eight o’clock. I like the mornings. It may not suit you and the others, of course. I know the young tend to rise later. And perhaps mornings are difficult for you, with this…’

I gesture with my hand towards her belly.

‘No no, it’s fine. This isn’t going to change the film. Tomorrow. Eight o’clock. Thanks for today. I’m sorry about the lead. And everything.’

I see her to the door, wave her away as usual. Her confiding in me – my response to her – has not changed her view of me. I have responded to her news in the odd, embittered fashion of an old, childless woman. I have played my childless part.

A
nd so she comes back, and she keeps asking me questions, endless bloody questions. Why did I agree to this? I cannot bear to think back on my life, now. Sometimes I make things up, when I don’t want to answer her. Spin stories. And yet, somehow, she manages to hit to the heart of the matter, seeing things through the cool glass eye of her camera.

‘What I’d really like to know is what’s kept you coming back here, of all places. I mean, just before the war; why here, after you left Dunedin? After the war you left again; then, all those years later, you came back. You settled here – left and settled – time and again. What is it about this place; what’s sent you away, but always brought you back?’

The grey-green eyes of the filmmaker look at me from behind the solar flare of the lights; I can’t see them but I know they’re there. Oh Mo, what can I tell you about the losses that have shaped the paths of my life, the forces that have pulled me from here so many times, and yet drawn me back? Is now the time to tell? Am I old enough not to care?

I sip my wine. A drop of condensation falls into my lap, spreads wetly; I feel it, cool against my leg.

‘There is an extent to which it is just easier to return to one’s homeland. If I can call on a musical analogy, maybe it’s like the motif of an orchestral piece – you come back to it; it flows through the music, anchors it, no matter how far the music wanders from it. It comes back to that motif. It centres around it. Its heart is there. I guess this place is somehow at my centre. It’s where I refer to – it’s my reference point. My life has been lived relative to this place. And so, while I’ve flung myself far away from it many times, I return to it as if I’m on elastic. God, I’m mixing my metaphors, aren’t I?’ I sip again. I’ve responded to her questions – done my duty – but really, I’ve told her nothing.

The camera continues to roll, the light to shine, the condensation to form on the side of my wine glass and trickle down onto the coaster at the glass’s base. I breathe in, breathe out, consciously, calming. I hear the house shift and creak as it heats in the warmth of the sun.

Perhaps I will get away with it, this time.

I see her to the door, nearly-empty glass in my hand. Closing the door behind her, I walk through to my bedroom, draining the last of the wine as I walk. I place the empty glass on the dressing table. Condensation wicks around under the base of the glass. A ring will form, will mark the wood. Well. So it shall.

I open the door to my wardrobe, and part the clothes that hang lowest, the long dresses, skirts, silky trousers,
their wire and wooden hangers screeching on the rail as I push them aside. I kneel down – slowly, as I must, with age. At the bottom of the wardrobe, long left untouched, is my box of scrapbooks, of cuttings and clippings and keepings. I lean forward to lift it out. As I bring it close to my chest, I smell old books, papers, and dust. There is a faint, soft smell, too, like face powder, or flowers in another room. I stand – slowly, again – turn, and place the box on my bed. This is the story, in this box, the public story that Mo – or anyone – might find if she looks hard enough, through newspaper microfiche and musty library archives. Does it answer the questions she’s asked me, though?

Behind where the box was, in the shadows at the back of the wardrobe, I see the dark curves of my old typewriter and, underneath it, another box, smaller than the one on the bed. I push the metal hooks of the hangers, and my clothes fall softly, densely back into place, curtaining the typewriter and the box. I close the wardrobe door on them, for the moment.

U
ncle Valentine met me as we disembarked in Fremantle. The voyage had put in at Melbourne and Adelaide en route from Dunedin, but we had not had the opportunity to go ashore at any of these ports. I was tired of the roll of the ocean, ready for land.

Although we’d exchanged many letters and telegrams, I had not seen my uncle for a decade, since he’d delivered me to the port in Singapore. I watched him part the Fremantle crowd with his portly walk – he was, having kept his head above water during those financially depressed years, well-off and well-fed. He took me by the shoulders, locked his eyes with mine, then grasped me to him in a bearhug, patting his hands on my back until he released me from the embrace.

‘My girl, so good to see you. You are all grown up.’

‘As are you, Uncle.’ My arms had not reached around him when we’d embraced.

‘Wicked girl.’ He linked his arm through mine, and started walking me back through the thronging crowd on the wharf in the direction from which he’d appeared. ‘Come on, I have a car, let’s get you home and wrapped
around a drink. I’ve directed the shipping office to deliver your trunks, we need do nothing else about them. You’re home now. Uncle Val will look after you, my love.’

Uncle Valentine drove like a demon, both hands clutched tight around the steering wheel. We opened the windows of the heavy black car and the warm wind blew through our hair (or mine, anyway – Uncle’s had thinned to nothing, a shiny globe exposed when he removed his hat and placed it on the back seat of the car). We drove along the coast from Fremantle, north along the railway line. I stuck my head out of the open window, like a dog in a farm truck. The wind blew my hair across my face. I could smell the ocean, even as I only glimpsed it behind the sand dunes and buildings that now spread up the coast. I felt light for the first time in an age, for the first time since Trix had gone. I pressed a hand to my belly, my Grace, whispered,
We’re home.

Uncle Valentine –
Call me Val, darling, no need for the uncle,
he said as he handed me a glass of whisky no more than a moment after we walked through his front door – still lived in his big, comfortable house in the street that ran down straight as a die to the sea. We stood facing each other, glasses in hand, in his dark, curtained, familiar front room.

‘To your return, my dear.’

‘To being back.’

We clinked our glasses together.

‘And to your dear Beatrix.’

He put his big arms around me, then released me, and
tossed the contents of his glass down his throat. I sipped mine – I had not had a taste for alcohol since Grace had been with me – and raised the glass towards him.

‘To Trix.’

‘Sit my dear, sit! You must be fagged. Sit and tell me something lovely about your journey. Or was it all tedious?’

He waved his hand at the soft chairs and lounges arranged in the room. I sank into cushions, grateful that they didn’t sway and rock with the sea under them. Uncle Valentine pushed a velvet-covered ottoman towards me with his foot.

‘Feet up old thing. Another drink?’

I shook my head, holding my glass of barely touched whisky up towards him. He poured himself another glass at the sideboard, then sank into the cushions opposite me, and we fell back into relaxed conversation, melted the years away. I’d always been comfortable with Uncle Valentine. Being with him did feel like being home. I felt justified in my compulsion to return to this place of my youth – not quite home, and yet more home than any other I could claim.

He waved his whisky glass in the direction of the gramophone dominating the room.

‘Got all your recordings, my girl. Very proud, you know. Tell everyone I’m solely responsible for your musical education. And your various talents.’ He winked at me, swirled the whisky in his glass and downed it in a big swallow. ‘But you stopped playing, eh? Done with it?’

‘For the moment,’ I told him. I took a tiny sip of whisky, smiled at my uncle, looked around the room for a topic of
conversation, anything to change focus. There was a small brass vessel on the mantelpiece, an odd little pot, almost like a teapot. I stood, walked to the mantel, lifted the pot. The lid was on a hinge. Within it was another, smaller container, a shallow bowl that fitted within the outer vessel neatly, snugly. A faint smell, smoky, sweet, arose from the open pot. When I closed the lid, there was a pleasing
ting
, a clear, bell-like note.

‘Ah, memories of days in Malacca, the eastern sojourn, misspent youth, eh?’ He wiggled his eyebrows, as he used to when I was a child. I laughed, shook my head. ‘It’s for smoking opium, darling. Lovely filigree work on the lid and the base. They’re collectors’ pieces now. Got it on my last trip up there. When your father…’ He paused, waved his hand in the air. ‘When I went to sort out his things, tidy up the loose ends. Sad business.’ He smacked his lips together, sighed, drained his already empty whisky glass.

‘But life, my dear Helena, is for the living. Here, more whisky!’ He poured from the decanter into his glass, and my own. I stood, and we faced one another, clinked our glasses. ‘To those gone, much loved, and to those of us who remain!’ His voice was loud in the room. My right hand clinked my whisky glass, raised the glass to my lips to drink. My left hand slid to rest on my belly, rubbing lightly, slowly, hardly at all.

Uncle Valentine installed me in a comfortable bedroom facing north onto the wide verandah that shaded the room from the sun, and insisted I make myself thoroughly at home. My trunks arrived and were carried up to my room
late in the afternoon of the day I arrived. I went upstairs to unpack, shaking each garment as I took it from the sea trunk before folding it into drawers dry and scented with sprigs of lavender tied with kitchen string.

The next day I woke early, in the relative cool of morning, Grace churning within my just-bulging belly. I left quietly through the back door, leaving the house before it had started its day. The back door led to a path through the garden, past the old outhouses at the back and down, through a low gate in the back fence, to the laneway that ran parallel with the street, down to the ocean. The unpaved laneway had dirty sand in wheel ruts on either side of a central mound, topped at that time of the year by browned grass, the odd green weed. Weeds fringed the laneway on either side, frilled up against the back fences of the houses. Bougainvillea hung over back fences, thunderboxes backed onto them and through them. Back gates were sized to high-step through, cut so that they began a foot above ground level and reached only chest high at most.

On that first day, and on most days that followed, I would wake early and walk the laneways and streets that ran to the ocean. In the cool dark, the nightcart men clattered; later in the day children played; but I had the laneways to myself in that in-between time, my pathway to the beach, to swim each morning as Grace swam inside me. Then I’d return to the front of the house as the streets were commencing their days, people starting to appear from front doors, milkos to deliver, motor cars and bicycles to veer from their parking places. The streets were for the daytime. The laneways were mine, in that liminal time.

Grace grew and took me over, as the months passed. Uncle Valentine and I failed to talk about this, even as it became obvious, even as my belly grew to match and then exceed the size of his. Finally he acknowledged my by then obvious state by leaving a slip of paper folded on my breakfast plate one morning, his neat writing spelling the name and address of his physician;
Pop along and see Davidson,
he told me,
he’ll look after you, and look after the little one when it comes.

He gave me one other gift, that day. He took both my hands in his plump hands, and pressed them together around something cold, hard. I parted my hands; they cupped a plain gold ring, barely remembered.

‘Your mother’s, my love. And our mother’s, before that. I was saving this for when you married, but I think that you have need of it now. Wear it proudly. Stare them in the eye, my darling girl.’ He kissed me on the forehead, and sat down to read his newspaper. I slipped the ring onto my finger, perfectly in place.