Loving Ways Read online

  Loving Ways

  MAURICE GEE

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London, WC2R 0RL, England

  First published by Penguin Group (NZ), 1996

  Copyright © MAURICE GEE 1996

  The right of MAURICE GEE to be identified as the author of this work in terms of section 96 of the Copyright Act 1994 is hereby asserted.

  Digital conversion by Pindar NZ

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand.

  www.penguin.co.nz

  ISBN 9780143019183

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank Chris Pugsley for sketching in Alan Macpherson’s army career; also Rosie Little and Bruce Hamlin for elementary lessons in pottery and allowing me to use Estuary Arts, Parapara, as a model for Inlet Arts. Chris, Rosie and Bruce are not, of course, responsible for mistakes I may have made.

  Ben Alder Orchard usurps the place of Zagros Orchard on the Tasman Bluffs but no other likeness is intended.

  The characters in this novel are, as always, fictional.

  I am grateful to Creative New Zealand (the Arts Council of New Zealand, Toi Aotearoa) for financial help.

  Contents

  Siblings

  May

  David

  May

  Alan

  Alan again

  May

  Interlude

  Robert Macpherson

  A death

  David

  Alan

  May

  David

  Epilogue

  May and Alan at Wharariki beach

  For Margareta

  Siblings

  MAY

  May Macpherson made one of her escapes. Eight people, sightseers all, performed their ambling dance in the showroom, while Evan, driving the slab-roller like a car, kept his eye on the ninth, who might turn out to be a customer. Sometimes she could not bear this part of the business – the selling season, when on days Evan would call ‘boom days’ more than eight hundred people (nine hundred once) passed through the showroom. She found his pleasure in making a sale, that muted pleasure only she could identify, questionable, even unpleasant, and his explanations unnecessary – that he threw the pots while his partner May created the designs, except for the fish, the fish were his. He became ingratiating. She wished that he would not say created; and wished, especially, that he would not name her. It gave part of their privacy away.

  She should not feel like this for she was no shy flower, in spite of her name, but loud and hearty, effervescent and, she would admit, common too, and she loved to know there was money in the bank, money, like foundations, under her, and loved the things that money would buy – for she had discovered foreign flavours and tastes.

  She slipped by Evan with a brushing of her fingers on his forearm, against the grain of the black hairs there, whispered, ‘Ten minutes,’ went out past the big kiln and climbed the gravel path above the pond. It was just, she thought as she went up, that she had not expected love to come along at her age, and work, an occupation – she was occupied by both; and the surprise of it remained alive in her, and the delight. Her sensitivity began there. Evan could not be blamed. Pleasure and surprise were in him too and found an outlet different from her own. Selling was his reassurance that it would last – and naming her a reassurance too.

  ‘So pull yourself together, May,’ she told herself out loud. ‘And get back there and pull your weight as well.’ The customers liked to see her stroking away with her brushes and stains; it made them feel part of a process owning and using would complete. She climbed on all the same, wanting to have her sight drawn out to a far horizon which would empty trouble from her mind. Then, going down, it would fill again with the fresh pleasures of her day.

  Before her eye went out, though, it had to cross the settlement down there, and it was always a question whether the fibrolite shacks and the weedy gardens would depress her or bring a sense of community. Depression made her guilty, it seemed like a failure in sympathy, but the us-and-them cosiness and aggression of the other would seem bogus in the end, and depress her too. She had tried communities too often and had come to know that she was better off alone – or in a pair.

  The sea was white today, like zinc, and the sky so pale one had to concentrate to bring out the blue, but the town, hamlet, settlement – what name? rural slum? – declared itself, and she took pleasure in its unsealed roads and sandy paths. Lean-tos sheltered woodpiles left over from the winter. Upturned dinghies lay in back yards. Here and there flower gardens shone, borders stood out in yellow and red, and vegetable patches made geometrical shapes. Little bits of suburbia in the rural slum. Men were digging, and a painting man crouched on a roof; and two women were carrying an aluminium dinghy through the sand dunes to the beach. She could name them, both sexes. No strangers there. And fill you in on their histories. The women, for example, were lovers – which put it too simply if the word meant only sexual partners, as it seemed to do in people’s minds – and the man on the roof a retired accountant, with a partner too (a woman), kneeling on the lawn, digging out dandelions that trespassed there. Lesbians settled in Woods Inlet, half a dozen, but what was keeping the gay men away?

  She could see George Otway’s forearm shine and red creep on the silver, and see the yellow gloriole of Daphne’s lacquered hair, but was too far away for the implements they used. Knowledge though she had. Daphne’s eyes were murderous as she attacked the weeds. George had taken his paint pot up a ladder to be safe. It was possible that one day Daphne would kill him; but impossible that he would sell the house and take her back to Wellington, where she longed to be, and so, perhaps, prolong his life. ‘I love Woods Inlet, May, and I’m never leaving it. Why doesn’t she just pack up and go?’ ‘A wife’s place is beside her husband,’ Daphne said.

  May turned her shoulder to them and let her gaze go out to sea, thirty kilometres, to the punctuation, stops and dashes, of Farewell Spit. Some days you could not see it, others it drew a pencil line, but today was an intermediate day and it made itself mysterious. She had never taken the drive up the beach to the lighthouse and never meant to, although Evan had been twice and had come back fresh and shining-eyed, talking of the seabirds and the quicksand and dunes like in the desert with wind curling sand off their tops. Another sensitivity in her: she meant to keep the spit unspoiled – no, delicate, a place she could make into a shape with her stains. When she wanted empty sea and
coast and untamed birds to screech at her, she would go, out of season, to Wharariki beach and walk to the south end, opening the archway rocks and, like Evan, find her way home with shining eyes. The archways too had found a place in her designs. When you looked in at those sea-carved doors your eye passed over to no real world. How hungry you might then become, driving home, how full of longing for pleasures that were familiar.

  A breeze was blowing round her and she enjoyed her sense of parting it, of blood reddening her cheeks, and enjoyed the contents of her head – homely, domestic, practical; but not limited, her thoughts, to kitchen, workshop, glazepot, kiln or Evan – capable of wide concerns, and flights, and fears. Her eyes went to the road where it dropped out of the cutting. She was fearful of trouble from there, all the way from Nelson and Ruby Bay, along that thread no act of will, only act of weather, could break; through the apple lands and hops and tobacco, over the hill set with marble teeth, up through the farms to Takaka and along the coast. The road delivered father, brother, daughter. Or, more easily, the telephone might bring them. If she listened she might hear it. A black car, a grey car, came out of the cutting. Her father drove a black car – though Heather drove him now, at ninety-one – and David a grey one; but neither was a modest man; their cars were more powerful than these.

  They crossed the causeway at a steady pace, disappeared into the bush and passed with a pleasant thrumming the sign reading Inlet Arts; faded into silence along the Collingwood road. She raised her arms and let the breeze blow into her shirt and cool her armpits. She was tough with them both now, father and brother, and would not let them bully and demand – although anticipation could make her sweat. It was only when she faced them that she became sure; faced them here, on her own ground, behind her moat of trees. Then how definite she would become, and happy with it. Evan was at her side, ready to lend a hand, but even without him she would stand secure. I really have grown up, she thought, I’m free. It’s only from Heather that trouble can reach me now – Heather, coming up behind.

  She lowered her arms, then hugged herself, not out of fear but a quick desire for love from her daughter – not a desire that lasted, for there was no hope, and part of her new happiness came from no longer wishing. It was like turning a coin; it could be done by a simple flick of the mind. She saw gleams of red and white through the trees – car roofs in the sun, in the parking yard by the showroom – and heard doors slamming as people left – without buying probably; and felt a spit of anger that they’d not made Evan happy, and not read the message she had painted on the pots. Lousy skinflints in their fancy cars; they don’t deserve to know, she thought. Deep pockets and short arms, Evan would say. They had honking voices, phoney English. She would bar such people if she could – set up a voice test at the gate and try them for an honest kiwi twang.

  May laughed, and thought of Evan’s voice with its lovely, ugly glottal stop. It had got in the way of a sale or two. She had seen fastidious withdrawal, mental shrinking, and had wanted those people off the property fast. Evan must not be hurt. He was so homely and so chaste.

  See how he had built things here, unadorned: the house and the pottery. See how he had moulded the pond into the fall of the hill. She could almost believe its surface had been made by the smoothing of his palm; and the rushes there, the swans and their reflection, the amiable ducks, might be things he had created with a thought. I could make it as a pendant or a brooch, with silver and lapis lazuli, May decided; but it would be too far out of nature, too adorned, like this tank she stood beside, that had been white when he had left it but now was painted with fantails and bellbirds and flax and ferns and, low down, creeping things, centipedes and wetas and skinks. That was her contribution, and quite unnecessary although nice. And it was fun. ‘Do I frighten you?’ the weta said in a speech balloon. ‘Your time’s up,’ a fantail grinned at a fly. If Evan lacked anything it was a sense of fun.

  She drew two or three deep breaths and went down the path and down the steps and past the kiln and found him wrapping a vase, one of their most expensive, and saying to the customer, ‘My partner, May, does the fruit designs. She’s got a marvellous sense of colour.’

  ‘You can almost taste the juice in that peach,’ the woman replied.

  ‘It’s a nectarine,’ May said, but smiled at her. ‘They’re more mysterious, I think. More female too.’ She touched Evan’s arm, smoothing it, and went to her bench, where she was decorating tiles, and put her head down and worked for half an hour, while three more cars drove up and nine people passed through and Evan made another sale. Then, for a moment, the showroom was empty.

  ‘All right?’ he said.

  ‘Yes. There’s a new pair of ducks.’

  ‘I saw them this morning.’

  ‘And George is painting his roof. I don’t think Daphne knows how to climb a ladder.’

  As usual he took her seriously. ‘She can wait for him to come down though.’

  ‘I think she’s happy killing weeds for a while.’

  ‘It’s no joke, May.’ He went to the storeroom and brought back a new nectarine vase. ‘Sixteen stitches in your shoulder is no joke.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Or dioxan mixed up in your porridge.’

  ‘Being dragged to a place you hate is no joke either.’

  ‘She can leave. She’ll get her half. There’s no shortage of money.’

  ‘But she can’t arrive back in Khandallah with no husband. She can’t do it, Evan.’

  ‘She’ll kill him.’

  ‘Or cripple him. And then take him back. An invalid husband is okay. But I don’t think she’s that smart any more.’

  A car chewed its way up the drive, doors slammed shut, expensive voices approached the showroom.

  ‘BMW,’ Evan said. ‘Here goes.’

  ‘Sell them a fish.’

  ‘A family of fishes for this lot.’

  She smiled at him, pleased with his lightness. He had been like that on the night they’d met in the Collingwood pub. She went there when her loneliness stopped aching and really bit – she had felt it sometimes like a weasel’s mouth stitched in her side and knew the short journey for those teeth to reach her heart. Then she would die. Dead of loneliness. Would people understand, in a woman who repeatedly declared that she was happy with her own company thank you? Evan had put an end to that. She had ridden her bike along the Collingwood road from her little shack or shed or hovel by the inlet, come into the warm public bar, drunk three beers, and was easy enough to talk to the barman – who said, ‘A tank, you want? See that joker over there, he’ll build you one. Hey, Evan.’ Evan walked across. ‘Ma’am?’

  And with that greeting they began to move in harmony, lightly either one, but with a growing wonder and excitement in her – not, I like him, but, here’s someone who likes me.

  The shack was gone now. It had been chopped up for firewood. The tank he had installed on the hill was out of use, supplanted by the big one with flax and bellbirds on it. A sign by the road said Inlet Arts and a metalled drive led up to the parking yard and down again in a loop, and house and pottery and showroom sat unadorned on a plateau fringed with bush, and nectarine vases and fish plates and floral tiles stood on islands or hung on the walls, where her paintings hung too, bright and bold (selling perhaps four a year); and there was a new kiln, controlled by a computer; and there were advertisements in glossy magazines. The top end of the market: eight years ago the phrase would have been double Dutch to her. And happiness double Dutch too. Now – she watched Evan make a sale – the mortgage was paid off, there was money in the bank; the roof didn’t leak, she drove a car instead of pedalling a bike; she had a job, work that she was good at; and she had no stitch in her side. She had Evan. There was love.

  And there was privacy. The customers left – but here were two more cars, arriving as though pulled by a cable dropping the BMW to the gate. And here was Sally pushing her bike.

  ‘The help’s arrived.’

  ‘Go easy o
n her, May. She’s not a bad person.’

  ‘Oh, I like her.’ I just don’t like her here, she almost added – which Evan knew well enough. He seemed to think that employing someone to help with the sales increased their financial stability. Sally was one of the Inlet lesbians. He had expected May would be kind to her for that.

  ‘I’ve finished these. I want to go across and see the Otways. Just in time, Sally, I’m just off.’

  ‘Take the car,’ Evan said.

  ‘No, I’ll walk.’

  ‘Not on the road. Not in this traffic.’

  She smiled at his care for her, and was irritated by it.

  ‘You can use my bike,’ Sally said.

  ‘I’ll take the dinghy.’

  ‘Tell Junior …’ Evan said.

  ‘Yes, I will.’

  ‘And be careful with Daphne.’

  ‘Don’t turn your back on her,’ Sally said – which May thought ungenerous in someone who herself had not been judged. All the same she hesitated crossing the yard – perhaps she should have taken Sally’s bike to make the girl feel more accepted in her job. She almost laughed. Life was too complicated for her. Guilt. Susceptibilities. Desire. She could not have what she would most like – Evan and May left alone in all the world.

  Another car passed her, gritting up, and full of carsick children from the look of them. They would yahoo on the paths and scrape their initials on the tank and throw clods of clay at the ducks. She half-turned to go back, then went on. Evan would not allow it. Evan could be stern. He would lose any number of sales to protect what he and she had made.

  She went out the entrance, waited while a too-fast car and a bus went by, crossed the road and walked fifty metres on the edge of the seal, then climbed down the bank where the causeway began. A path, invisible to strangers, led through tufted rushes and islands of low scrub to her dinghy tied to a waratah hammered in the mud. It was aluminium, riveted, two metres long – a tin-can boat that skated on the surface like a toy. Inlet people could use it if they wanted. Twice now the oars had been stolen, and once the dinghy had been unroped and left to drift out on the tide. There was also the matter of the turd on the seat. Someone was jealous that May and Evan had done so well.