Going West Read online

  His mother would have said to that, Get out into the garden and do some digging. He hears her voice, sees the imperative in her eye, and when he has noted it he’ll get out, he’ll take his spade and turn the good earth over and break it with a hoe and plant some broccoli and radishes. Jack will do as he is told. And he’ll enjoy it.

  His mother is merely his agent now.

  ‘Jack,’ Harry calls from her window, ‘will you run Jo to her car? She got a puncture and she came by taxi.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘On Lake Road.’

  ‘Is it fixed?’

  Jo’s head appears, squeezing Harry’s out. ‘I dropped my keys off at a garage and they’re doing it. But I’ll get another taxi, it’s all right.’

  ‘No you won’t,’ Harry says.

  ‘Give me a minute to finish this row.’

  He trickles radish seeds into the furrow and palms earth on top and pats it down. ‘You come too,’ he says to Harry in the kitchen. ‘We’ll get a Chinese take-away.’ Domestic easiness between them makes Jo uncomfortable, and sometimes seems to hurt her for she’ll scrape her ribs or hips with her fingernails and blink her eyes as though at a muscular contraction. Jack enjoys his advantage. He grins at her. ‘My turn to cook. We were only having ham.’

  Harry has gone pink: a girl invited out. She asks Jo (and explains): ‘Why do take-aways always sound romantic?’

  ‘And improper,’ Jack adds. He has Jo defeated, and aware of him, and feels no desire for her at all. ‘OK, let’s go.’

  With Jo in the back seat, tightly strapped (Jack insists although she’s mutinous), they drive to Castor Bay and over the hill to Milford.

  ‘Remember the salt-water baths?’ Harry says.

  ‘And the Pirate Shippe?’ They’ve asked each other these questions before, recently, but this is for Jo – to somehow include her, on Harry’s part, and push her further out, on Jack’s. ‘We used to go to dances there. Round the top of the harbour in Rex Petley’s old man’s truck. A dozen or so of us on the tray, singing nice clean early fifties songs.’ He smiles at Jo. ‘We had to go down on the beach for a woo.’

  ‘That was before my time,’ Harry says.

  ‘Woo. What amazing language.’

  ‘Wasn’t it pashing?’

  He’s pleased with her. ‘She knows,’ he tells Jo.

  ‘It’s the garage by the lights,’ Jo says. ‘Harry, I just remembered, hophomyrtus bullata, there’s a little gully full of it just off the road to Whatipu. I’ll get a branch for Tuesday.’

  ‘Yes, you told me,’ Harry says.

  ‘Will you have obcordata done by then?’

  ‘Well, not the berries,’ Harry laughs.

  ‘I know that.’ Jo is cross. She has put herself at a disadvantage, playing his game; and Jack is anxious to be out of it.

  ‘This one?’ – pulling off the road and stopping at the back of petrol bowsers. ‘I’ll fill up while you get your keys.’ He puts in twenty dollars worth of unleaded, which gives him a little glow of virtue (sometimes it seems wimpish and he has to restore his manliness with a show of efficiency at the self-service pump).

  Jo comes back with her mended tyre held like a wreath. ‘They put the spare on. Now I’ll have to change this one back.’

  ‘I’ll help. We’ll do it straight away.’ He wants to show how good he is at practical things.

  ‘I’d sooner do it at home, thank you.’ She drops the tyre in his boot and wipes her hands on her handkerchief. She is busy saying Jack is nothing again. He smiles at her and opens the back door.

  ‘In you go. I’ll let you off the seat-belt.’

  They drive along Lake Road and find her little tin-can Deux Chevaux. She fits herself in and putt-putts away. ‘Poor Jo,’ Harry says. The plain car suits her. ‘I wish there was something we could do.’

  ‘Well, there isn’t.’ Jack makes a U-turn and drives back the other way. Jo gone is Jo switched off for him. ‘Time for the lake?’

  He thinks, driving down to the shore, that he could put his foot down and they’d dive into the water and sink hundreds of feet in the cold crater, the maar – and lie there drowned, side by side. It’s a fantasy born of contentment. He is happy with Harry, he’s touching her, and he wants more closeness.

  Black swans glide and wind-surfers skid and houses glitter richly in the trees.

  ‘That one,’ Harry says.

  ‘Not unless Bellringer and Edwards write a best-seller.’

  ‘How do people get money? I mean real money.’

  ‘I don’t know. You married the wrong man, love.’

  ‘The woman is just as likely to make it today.’

  ‘You’d sooner be painting morphotis bullata.’

  ‘Hophomyrtus. Yes, I would. All this is unreal.’

  ‘The swans are real. The explosion was real. This lake could go up again one day.’

  ‘The whole of Auckland. We should have stayed in Wellington.’

  ‘For the hundred year earthquake,’ he says.

  Harry shivers.

  ‘Cold?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Under threat?’

  She shivers again. This time it’s theatrical. ‘From all sorts of things.’

  Jack laughs. ‘Jo and all those Latin names? Come on, Chinee take-away.’

  ‘Let’s have fish and chips.’

  ‘That’s not like you.’

  ‘Then we can take them up the top of North Head.’

  ‘You really do want to get blown up.’

  ‘I wouldn’t care tonight. The world can end tonight and I won’t care.’

  He thinks about that as he waits in the fried-oil smell of the shop. Harry is a mystery. Is he ever going to know her? She becomes familiar, then recedes, and turns half round and there’s a new aspect he hasn’t seen. How does she do that? She has turned so many times nothing should be unfamiliar now. How does she remake, how does she new-feature, the part that’s turned away from him before she, twisting unexpectedly, lets him see? He carries the hot packet out to the car. It seethes with heat and flavour and he hands the dangerous thing to her and feels he has paired like with like – and this is revolutionary, for Harry, it’s her trademark, is cool. That is why it had been proper to think of deep down with her in the lake. Heat is improper. Is Auckland going to make Harry combust?

  I love my wife, he thinks, as he drives to North Head, but the emotion is not grounded in any certainty of who she is.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Don’t get grease on your dress.’

  She has opened a hole in the end of the packet. A little gust of heat and steam escapes. Harry puts her finger in, withdraws it with a yelp; keeps on trying, worms a pale chip out.

  ‘Give me one.’

  ‘You’ll crash the car. I hate pale chips.’ But she smiles at him and huffs, ‘Delicious,’ round the hot chip in her mouth.

  Jack drives up the steep road to the top of the hill and parks in the yard by the gun emplacement. It’s years since they’ve eaten fish and chips in a car. The smell is appetizing and disgusting. They lick and grab and gulp shamelessly. The windscreen steams up and she rubs it with her hand.

  ‘The sea’s gone hollow.’

  ‘Let’s get out.’

  They walk across the asphalt and sit on a grassy bank.

  ‘I wish we had a nice cold bottle of wine.’

  ‘Or some beer.’

  He shakes crumbs of batter into a corner and offers them. Harry compacts them in two fingers and a thumb, and hunts the last few pieces with her tongue. Astonishing. She looks as if she’s washing her face with the greasy paper – his neat and cool and artistic wife, with her cropped hair and buttoned wrists and her middle-aged skirt. She licks the salt.

  ‘I love salt,’ she apologizes. She has a taste for all things savoury, and, too, things creamy and sweet; but love, that’s overstatement: what she loves is the occasion. He’s happy with it himself but a little uneasy. Harry can be dangerous when shifting,
momentum can suddenly die and she’ll swing back, remove herself entirely from his knowledge. He points at the sky, the clouds, Rangitoto darkening, to prevent it. He mentions the warm wind and touches her cheek for its temperature and finds it cool. Delight, mental and sensuous, makes him swallow and turn away.

  Harry giggles. ‘Not here.’

  Jack is afraid. She’s very seldom naked, they’re seldom as naked as this. He wonders how much of it is Auckland. Auckland is spread out, unashamed. They sit side by side on one of its volcanoes and ‘extinct’ is not a word he wants to use. The sea, the sky, the ranges, are passive, but they make an eloquent shout. Is Auckland going to change Jack and Harry just when their lives have settled down?

  Jack does not want to be disturbed. He has things neatly in their place. But some have never been fixed, although for many years they have been still; and they want to move – they’re moving now.

  Rex Petley shifts about. Harry shifts.

  Jack Skeat cannot keep himself in place.

  Notebook: 2

  When we started out as poets Rex refused to theorize, while I never got beyond the ‘need to discover truth’, which was ‘the moral role of poetry’. I had no aesthetic and nor had Rex. He would not even talk about practice. I remember him saying that he liked nouns – and his are solid, undressed, plain (leaden at times). I believed in solidity too but I fell prey to adjectives (they still won’t let me go) and I thought myself mature and stern when I cut them down to one. But stone was stone for Rex and clay was clay, and that’s the way it remained all his writing life. To me he seemed to have no flair. ‘Load every rift,’ I said. But his poems made a census of the streets he found himself in: official, neat, local, contemporary.

  Mine, by contrast …

  ‘Good stuff, Jack. I like the way you colour it all up. And then, bang, the big generalization. Good stuff.’

  I waited for him to go on, but Rex had lied as far as he was able.

  ‘Hey, they’ll have to shift that ‘ess’ to the back of your name.’

  The joke failed to match the event. He held my lovely first work in his hands. Now what he must say was a serious ‘John Skeat’.

  ‘You beat me, you bugger. You’re the one who’s laid the bloody egg.’

  That was better. That diverted me. Until I thought about it later on it was enough. Then I understood that he’d said nothing. All he had done was understand me. Rex had changed the points and sent me off on another line.

  My book, of eighteen pages, was published by Serpent, Wellington. It was called First Fruits and came out in 1949, with crooked print and a stapled cover and an apple, ill-drawn, on the front. For a couple of months I played the part of teenage poet. Rex Petley nodded and kept quiet. In our fifty years of friendship he was unkind to me in many ways, but he usually left my verse alone – a strawberry mark, a crossed eye, a stammer, not to be used.

  Merv Soper too, the Serpent, was kind. He was in Auckland on a visit, staying in Epsom with Leon Pittaway, a history lecturer at the university, and a poet himself; a pianist, a socialist, a tennis player, a wartime army officer, an astronomer, a family man and a great lover – Leon Pittaway, self-styled Renaissance man. I trembled in his presence, I stammered when I spoke, and I hung at his shoulder, looking up (he was six foot four), on that first meeting, waiting for his sign that he had read First Fruits and thought it good. ‘Well pleased’ was what I wanted, with a laying of his hand on my shoulder and a smiling down, benign, resigned. But he gave me nothing. He took me for another of his daughters’ hangers-on, and sideways, long-armed, pushed his glass at me to fill in the kitchen ‘Lager, boy,’ – and took it, when I brought it back, without even the glance you’d give a waiter; kept on talking to his honours students ranged in front, a bed of annuals gazing up at him, open-faced. (One of them is a cabinet minister now but in 1950 they were five foot nothing, it seemed to me, and none had poems to his credit, or any future.)

  1 slunk off, slunk about, looking for Rex, looking for Merv Soper. Closed groups and squared-off backs were everywhere, and conversations I had no confidence to enter. Parties of that sort – I went to quite a few about that time – where the talk was of things that I should know but hadn’t got around to finding out about yet, and the talkers more clever than I could be, and so many of them glamorous, men and women both, in the sense of interfering with one’s perceptions and one’s judgement, and so magnifying themselves – those parties made me ache with longing, and shrink with insufficiency too.

  I found Merv Soper sitting on the back steps. He was like me, he was worse than me. Parties terrified the Serpent. He was the most timid and rabbity person I have known. Merv had to be alone to find his opinions, in company they fled away and left him capable of only nervous ha-has and oh dears and golly gosh. In letters he could write, This seems sub-standard to me, and, I’d advise you to throw this back, but say a line at him and it was all gee-whizz, ha-ha, amazing! Merv was a civil servant, a ministry clerk; a man with a passion for good verse (his judgement went astray now and then) and a determination to publish it. He bought an old handset machine and set it up in the toolshed of his house in Grant Road, hard up against Tinakori Hill. He was no fine printer. Merv inked too light or dark and his lines ran crooked. But there, single-handed in his tilting shed, he published Serpent, his magazine, from 1947 to 1955, and kept a generation of young poets from despair. Now and then he’d do a little book like First Fruits. Rita Bullen published with him. So did Laurie Sefton. And John Dobbie took up six pages of Serpent with a Dylanish piece about his green youth in Helensville.

  These poets, in their memoirs, dismiss Merv. He was useful for their juvenilia. They soon moved on to Landfall, and Pegasus and the Caxton Press. John Dobbie makes the point that Rex never published in Serpent – and he draws, in an aside, a picture, meant to be funny, of Merv busy in his toolshed like the greaser in the engine room of a coastal tanker. The point he is making is that Rex was a poet for the world.

  Merv Soper died in hospital in 1955. He had been at a party in Kelburn. (I saw him unhappy and alone but I had Harry Edwards by that time and all I did was cadge his tobacco and papers to show her how neatly I could roll a cigarette.) Wellington is a crazy town of a hundred thousand steps, they tumble down the hills from street to street – and perhaps Merv tangled his feet on the flight beside the bridge in Upland Road. Or perhaps the wind was trying to be friendly and thumped him too hard on the back. Someone found him curled around the trunk of a tree, where he had crawled. He died on a trolley, in Emergency; and nobody carried Serpent on. If you wanted your manuscript you had to go to Grant Road and hunt in the shed. Rita Bullen left a single red rose on the machine – at least that’s the story she put about. When I mentioned Merv to her several years ago she told it again, but insisted that Merv had lived in Hataitai, under the hills. He was, she said, the oddest little man, the way he popped out now and then and stood around blushing and then scuttled home to his burrow. But of course he had some value, in his way. One red rose …

  ‘God, he was a bore. Even hearing his name makes me want to yawn.’ John Dobbie.

  No John, Leon Pittaway was the bore, Merv was just harder work than you or I could manage. There’ll be nothing more written about him, although one or two libraries hold files of Serpent and will keep them till the paper falls apart. So let me put down that I sat with Merv on the steps at Leon’s party and rolled a cigarette with his fine-cut Greys and he told me that my book was in quite a few shops on sale or return, but New Zealand poetry didn’t sell and – mustn’t expect … In that moment I knew I was not a poet. It came like a vision: my proper size. Was it Merv diffident, provincial, amateur – turning as I turned and holding a mirror up to me? I said to myself, I can’t write. The knowledge was not fixed from outside but was a new part opened and at once occupied.

  I handed back his pouch and rolled the tobacco in my palm, enjoying its smell, and I remember saying, ‘It’s all right, Merv.’ I felt a weight lift from me and my bod
y levitate and I wanted to cry out with relief at being free. I need never suffer again the disappointment of not finding the words that would take me to the place where I wanted to be. Falling short had already set a frown on my face and would have sent me through life with a blurred eye and a limp tongue. Now I was freed from the pointless struggle. My lightness floated me across the lawns. I smelled the mown grass, I saw the kissing couple, I slid with the cool fish among the lily stems – and I did not have to write a poem. It was like being told that the lump is benign.

  Merv’s spectacles gleamed in the light. ‘Leon wants me to publish some poems by his wife.’

  ‘Are they any good?’

  ‘It’s hard to say. I’ll need to take them home with me. Ha-ha.’

  ‘Has Rex Petley sent you anything?’

  ‘Rex Petley?’

  ‘That’s him there.’ Walking up from the back of the section with the youngest Pittaway, Alice, his future wife.

  ‘Does he write? He looks more like an All Black breakaway.’

  ‘Breakaway, that’s right. But he plays for Loomis Senior B.’

  ‘Golly.’

  ‘He doesn’t let anyone read his poetry.’

  Merv nodded in approval. That sort of poet made his life easier. ‘Is he any good, do you think?’ If he was, Merv needed to know.

  ‘Rex is good at most things,’ I said.

  *

  He was even good at being honourable. In the truck going home I said, ‘How did you get on with Alice?’

  ‘I like her. She’s bloody intelligent.’

  ‘Meaning she said no.’

  ‘It ain’t your business, Skeatsie. How about you and El Snako? He going to do another book?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I’m not giving him one. I’ve stopped writing poetry, for your information.’