What Happen Then, Mr Bones?, page 9
Frederick Montague retires. He takes many walks on the beach at Eastbourne with its consoling litter of mussel shells and driftwood, its fragrant outbreaks of wild sweet alice, and he owns his whole shining day and sidereal night as once people did before the invention of the watch and wage slavery. Actually he’s wrong about this — humans have always been trading parts of their days for goods, most of them all their days for insufficient — but anyway, these things, the beach, the flowers, the shells, the stars, the freedom, are enough for anyone, or should be. He dies of a heart attack in 1955, leaving the Family Bible to his daughter Ngaio who puts it away in a travelling trunk and forgets about it. She doesn’t read a word of it till her children are completely grown up.
2
The Lebanese peddlers pour out of the defiled alleys and into the light of day, their diamond rings flashing, their gold teeth glinting, their waxed moustaches gleaming, the dark thick hair on their chests reeking of sexual intent, their piled merchandise still secretive about its uses or worth. They flow into the hills where the fine houses wait oblivious, where the protruding backsides of housemaids scrubbing immaculate the employers’ front steps invite their pinching yellow digits, where the lady of the house paces in cream nervousness. Yes, she will take their thin copper pans and caustic soaps, their animal-urine perfumes and shellfish aphrodisiacs; she will take it all with a prim smile to propitiate the predatory coruscations of the peddlers’ teeth and rings, the impudent upturn of their stiff moustaches, the leering curl in the openings of their fastidious shirts.
The peddlers make a killing, then drain away to the docks. There, they wheel and deal, drink their liquor out of stunted metal cups and smoke the Chinamen’s pipes, gobble their smuggled fodder, and begin their recondite chants and arcane lamentations. After dark you can’t see their skin or knives in the sallow glare of the street lights. You are robbed and violated and dead by morning. The night-cart will collect you — no one will ever know.
Frederick Montague looks out of the carriage window and thinks, But I am not Lebanese. Though why he should bother thinking this he’s not sure. Our thoughts often turn to reassuring ourselves, even if we are not often reassured. We know the world comes to its own conclusions in spite of our private whispers. But it seems unlikely that when small-town eyes follow a fair-skinned, light-eyed man in a heavy serge suit that Lebo is the description that first springs to mind. Nevertheless, on the train with his suitcase of medicines it feels important for Frederick to deny any similarity, if only to imagine that promotion to life’s higher walks awaits him, that a sewerless ghetto of dark language and chanting and knives in one’s back does not. Of course it does not, since the spring tide of foreign rape is but the flood of hysterical imagination. Really it’s the home crowd everyone should be worrying about.
Frederick Montague continues to stare out of the running carriage window as the wet landscape bleeds past. He wishes it wouldn’t rain like this in summer — there’s nothing worse than a provincial town in a downpour, even a warm one. Of course he could stay home and work in the woollen mills, the soap factory or the meatworks, everyone else does. He could join the camaraderie of fleece, fat and bone … no, he’s better off out here, he’s free out here. When he arrives at a new town he can sit down like this in the station café with a thick white cup of viciously strong tea and his cigarettes, can have some time to himself, and not have to listen to his wife and her friends at their eternal card game. They call themselves high-spirited, but he knows where the spirit comes from.
His wife isn’t negligent of her duties. There’s always a stew on or a leg of mutton in the oven; the house is clean, the washing folded, home baking in the tins, preserved stonefruit on the shelves, a nearly-finished dress or shirt beside the sewing machine. Who could begrudge her the pleasure of her cards? Every life has to have a little pleasure and this is his — this table, this cup, the view of misted hills from the open window of a train station. This perfume of honeysuckle, this memory of Emily McNamara — no, not a memory, for there is nothing to remember: let it be a premonition then.
Frederick Montague stubs out his cigarette and gets to his feet, picks up the battered suitcase, trudges out to the road, looks up and down it. Which way the fancy houses, or will he do richer trade on the credulity of the poor? Toss a coin of the realm: heads it’s the careful rich who won’t believe in the efficacy of his bottles of coloured syrup but might pay to be rid of him, tails it’s the gullible peasants who are certain that his potions will cure their headaches, heartaches and genital sloth if only they had the pennies to buy them.
That then is the working week. Frederick Montague hopes to have saved, stolen or won enough money for a car one day; in the meantime he likes the trains. There’s comfort in their steady, regular gait — a man can relax and read his newspaper or go to sleep. When he arrives home on Saturday he is not tired like he used to be when he didn’t travel and sold his wares in town. Now he only has to be a family man for a day and a half. If the weather is fine there’s free entertainment on the Day’s Bay beach, picnics and tea-dances in the park.
Emily McNamara is wearing a red bathing dress and red lipstick and carrying a bright red parasol and is coming along the beach towards him on her long legs that cast bewitching shadows in the hot sand, and already Frederick is trembling, this man who has never trembled over anything. She is coming towards him to turn his premonitions into fact, his desperate hope into less desperate reality — if the reality of grasping with both hands what you think you always wanted ever turns out to be less desperate. She is advancing towards him so that he can run his fingers through her raven hair, can run his hands up her long white thighs, can hold her pale face between his palms and tilt those green eyes into the penetrating sun. Thus she will be illuminated for him. He will know everything she thinks.
But of course she is not going to allow him do any such thing. She is coming along to say, ‘Can you watch my Martha in the sea? I’m going to buy some ice creams,’ and now she is picking her way over the sand strewn with picnics and people and towels, and he is left with that feeling again, that there is nothing. Still, at least she talks to him. If he hinted at his feelings and she rebuffed him, this easy familiarity they share might die. What easy familiarity? he asks himself cruelly. She walks towards you and you tremble; she utters one sentence and you don’t, can’t answer; she leaves you in charge of her daughter and you’ll probably let her drown. And what’s this? It’s Emily McNamara’s husband with his camera — he’s looking up grinning, gabbling, ‘I just caught the two of you looking happy.’
‘Don’t we often look happy?’ Frederick growls, and Emily’s husband appears disconcerted.
‘Why no,’ he replies, reddening. ‘She always looks so severe and you look …’ But then he breaks off as if it’s bad manners to tell another man how he looks. ‘I’ll give the photo to you when I’ve developed it,’ Emily’s husband says apologetically.
‘Don’t bother,’ Frederick throws over his shoulder as he stalks away. ‘Give it to my wife or daughter.’
Later in the afternoon, Frederick Montague crosses from the beach to the park. The band has arrived and the men in their heavy suits are unpacking their instruments. The women, Emily McNamara among them, are setting out the food and teacups on the trestle tables. There she is, standing by the trestle that contains the large teapots and the plates of sandwiches. Time lurches and stops. He takes her picture with his naked eye; with his naked eye he has photographed the plenum. Another woman comes over to Emily. He can see them laughing; the plenum is emptied out. Why does he so resent her laughter? He feels excluded by it, as if she is happy without him, whereas for him no happiness is possible outside the reach of her voice or gaze.
Frederick Montague watches and wonders if Emily will talk to him. No she will not, first because she will be busy with the dancing, then because fate will deny it as it denies the pleadings of all impotent supplicants. The tea cools, the sandwiches curl, the streaming emptiness gushes in. He attaches himself to a group of men who are standing under a tree discussing cricket, and watches Emily out of the corner of his eye. He can’t bring himself to prepare for the pain he will feel when she leaves his presence for another week.
Emily McNamara is scissoring across the grass towards him, her bewitching long legs now modestly covered in a pretty white dress, her face hidden by the brim of a large straw hat, and yes he is starting to shake — the only sure sign that you really love someone. Is she going to ask him to dance? Is he going to feel his hand in the small of her back, his body pressing along the full length of hers, his knee pushing her legs apart for a brief cataclysm before the imperatives of the dance demand their closure? Is she going to open her white swan neck to him so he can kiss-bite it purple? No, that is not what she has come for at all. Her eyes are shallow, full of important business.
‘What did you say?’ he asks her. He has seen her mouth moving but not a single word seems to have escaped.
Emily McNamara rolls her eyes. ‘I said, did you hear my husband got that job down south?’
‘Down south,’ he repeats stupidly. Stupid repetition is another sign of true love, though not infallible, since it’s also the sign of true stupidity.
‘We’re moving,’ she says, ‘Leaving,’ she adds with emphasis, as if the man in front of her is incapable of deducing it.
Frederick Montague blinks rapidly and feels his throat go dry, feels his life go dry. In a desiccated trance he is shaking her hand and wishing her well. Yes of course they’ll see each other again before she goes. Such noble protestations — of course they don’t. They never do again.
If a man could wear a garlic necklace, if he could go about with a crucifix, if he could hold it out and hiss whenever he saw one of those devils, one of those cunts and pricks on legs, one of those needing, unreachable, unreaching, repudiating two-faces called persons, if a man could do that, he might die happy. Well, at least he would be happy to die. It’s only the philosopher-hermit who can really enjoy the unpeopled world. The rest turn bitter and, outside the gaze of others, cease to exist even for themselves. But from that afternoon when he last sees Emily McNamara, Frederick Montague metaphorically holds the crucifix aloft while hissing sibilantly. The miasma of his garlic necklace is thick enough to choke him. It all works perfectly: henceforth he fails to forge any new intimate relationships, and old ones break down. In 1955, when he is laid in his September grave, there is no one but family to mourn him.
At the beginning of the war to end all wars, oh the arrogance, Frederick Montague is thirty-four, one of the two hundred and seventy-five thousand men of military age in the country, but not one of the one hundred and three thousand who will eventually serve overseas, and definitely not one of the sixty thousand shortlisted to be injured, nor one of the nearly seventeen thousand earmarked to be dead. At the end of the war he thinks the worst is over. It never is — these are innocent times.
First there is the influenza pandemic, the first death occurring on Armistice Day. Within a fortnight, twenty-eight have passed away, many of them adults in their prime with swags of dependent children. It’s put about that the pandemic eventually carries off as many victims as the hostilities. Maybe, maybe not: there is always someone in a Boy Scout uniform telling you what the world is like, always some wing-nut with his socks pulled up and his hair pulled down shouting about reality. Usually because he wants to instigate Special Measures.
After the last clod of earth has been shovelled over the last dead body, there is the postwar depression and a housing shortage to confront. By 1920, when his daughter Ngaio is born, Frederick Montague is already feeling rather tired and there are still twenty years of parenting ahead of him. At least there is only to be one child — how onerous can that be? Parents of singletons don’t know they’re alive.
The single child isn’t proof of the efficacy of Frederick and his wife’s contraception, however, since they don’t use any. They have been trying for Ngaio for fifteen years, on and off, and after her birth sex falls off almost immediately — a common enough occurrence, now that we can say so, but one that Mr and Mrs Frederick Montague can’t patch up again, being, although they share a bed and a life, increasingly estranged. They are estranged by temperament rather than events. Indeed, events are what hold them together. External events are all they have to talk about.
For example, there’s the inauguration of the electric power supply on Christmas Eve of 1924. In 1926 there’s the establishment of General Motors, which sends its first car, a Chevrolet sedan, rolling off the conveyor belt within eight months of the signing of the documents. Before the end of the decade twelve thousand Chevrolets, Buicks, Pontiacs and Oldsmobiles have been sent out into the streets. In 1935 they can talk about the testing of the first polio vaccine. Seventeen thousand human guinea pigs are vaccinated with a very dilute virus: twelve contract polio and six die, the vaccines are deemed unsafe and inoculation stopped. Well, if they didn’t have all this fascinating trivia to divert them, the true and essential silence between them might shatter into annihilating rage.
And actually, any talk about polio is just this side of dangerous. Both parents feel guilty about their daughter, as if they had failed to protect her from something within their control. That isn’t true, of course, but perhaps they hadn’t instigated the right treatment. Everyone still talks about Elizabeth Kenny and her rehabilitative system involving applications of moist heat, passive exercise and constant physical therapy, not to mention strenuous applications of will-power. But anyway, Mr and Mrs Montague could ask themselves, although they don’t, who would have been providing such treatment gratis here? This silly argument has quite forgotten the depression — both depressions, in fact: the one after the war to end all wars and the one before the war to make the world safe for ever. In some people’s lives they run together like the giant mouths of two cold-boiling rivers.
Frederick Montague is forty-four when he comes home one evening and finds Emily McNamara at his wife’s card table, long blanched legs extended onto the floral carpet as she sprawls in a chair, cigarette hanging from dark red lips, eyes squinting at her cards through the upcurling smoke. Sometimes we are bewitched by innocence and the comfort of apples, but it doesn’t usually happen twice: we quickly switch to the seductive and suggestive and the reek of smoke. Or we hope to switch, since there is nothing as exciting as falling in love with a complete stranger when we are forty-four years old and it’s our last chance.
‘Frederick, this is Emily McNamara. She’s moved here from Auckland. Her husband’s on transfer.’
Emily stands up and offers her long-fingered pale hand. It is limp and cool in Frederick’s grasp. He notices the greenstone colour of her slanted eyes, a lidded mysterious aspect to them that makes him want to tilt her face up to some source of illumination. He will always retain this desire and never satisfy it. Of course he has not fallen in love with her already — he is not actually daft. But there is a kind of dangerous preparedness inside him of which he is oblivious. Frederick goes out to the scullery and splashes his face with cold water. This is an effective prophylactic for a short period only. When the full force of the emotion hits him, cold water will turn hissingly to steam as on a sun-scorched pavement.
People always seem to be making promises to us. It takes a long time to recognise that their mere existence, their mere presence in our desires, is not actually a promise. But Frederick is convinced that Emily is looking for a way to fulfil the sense of promise that she arouses in him. This is a terribly humiliating aspect of love — let’s turn our eyes away to developments in the town. While Frederick Montague wastes aeons of time daydreaming, more practical men have turned to works of beautification. They have been busily levelling the sandhills in readiness for a promenade. Were anyone to run out and shout in protest that sandhills are an essential component of the infrastructure and ecological life of a beach, he would immediately be labelled the village idiot.
3
Pater is astonished young Frederick doesn’t want to be apprenticed to him. When the bed is made and all he has to do is lie in it! How glad he himself would have been to step into the shoes of the self-made man instead of being the man who had to do the making. Instead of being the fetch-and-carry boy at the meatworks, or the stripling hawking meat-scraps and rabbits door to door, or the forelock-tugger starting at the very bottom of the chain of hired help at the retail butcher’s shop, sweeping up the red sawdust and taking the piss-smelling old lady the fat and gristle for her mangy cat — so she says. He bets she’s the cat herself. Working hard, rising up, joining the company of aproned butchers in denouncing meat-hawking as unhygienic, finally establishing his own butcher’s shop, and always trying to stay ahead of the ever-expanding works, its retail business, its endless off-cuts for the poor.
Now here’s his son going to turn his back on it — but to go where, do what? Yes, it’s a land of opportunity, a land of milk and honey, as long as you own the cows and the hives. Young Frederick says he doesn’t like the smell of the shop, the reek of death, the blood in the sawdust, but Pater roars back, ‘You haven’t got any choice. Down here we’re the abattoirs of the Empire.’
Frederick walks away. There’s always choice if you take it; at least there’s the choice of being contrary. Christ, maybe that’s the only choice we have, because what is there for him here in this raw town with its salt-laden gales from the south and its grit-laden gales from the north, and both of them laced with the putrefying stench of animal corpses, not to mention other rank odours to which we have become so accustomed we have neglected to mention them.
