Living As a Moon (20 page)

‘A year’s work on the societal effects of public transport, and now you want to jettison all that and switch to Myanmar. There is a procedure involved in changing a PhD topic, you realise.’ I retained a smile, I’m sure, a soft voice and reassuring tilt of the head. ‘Quite a serious decision at this stage, quite a business administratively.’

‘I’ve seen Prof Scadding and Dr Blundeleir,’ said Ms Flowerday doggedly. Her eyes never dropped from mine. ‘They say that in the long run it’s what best for me, something I can feel a real commitment to. They said to talk to you about it and then come back.’

‘They mean well, I’m sure.’ Almost certainly Ms Flowerday knew my opinion of Scadding and Blunderer, and their similar regard for me, but nothing was said of that. ‘I agree that you must do what challenges you academically.’

Ms Flowerday had a blue plastic watch strap and small zips at the leg ends of her jeans. Her eyebrows were plucked into high, thin arches. She still believed that success and fulfilment in life came from following a dream. ‘Let’s look at the sequence to make the switch as advantageously as possible,’ I said. Nothing was to be gained by showing chagrin, or revealing to her that Professor Scadding was an opinionated, self-serving careerist, and Blunderer more so, and corrupted by wealth. I imagined Ms Flowerday on her research trips to Myanmar: her perspiring moon face and fixed hazel gaze, her digital camera clasped for protection like a cross, and her heavy sneakers, each with a spray of excessive shoelace, taking a good grip of terra firma. ‘I wish you well, Adrienne,’ I said. ‘I’ve enjoyed seeing your work develop over the year.’

‘I’m expecting Dr Blundeleir will be my supervisor if I change direction,’ she said.

Blunderer’s wife is very beautiful, outgoing and intelligent: quite wasted on such a man it seemed to me then. She wears clothes of exquisite material and cut, and moves as gracefully in them as if clad in a sari. I met her only at occasional university functions, as Blunderer never invited me to their home, as he did other colleagues. All because he discovered I was responsible for the corruption of his name that even other staff used on occasion, and because I banged on the office wall a couple of times after the constant noise from his room distracted me from my work. I rather hoped Blunderer would be adolescent enough to bang back, but he forbore. He came to my door and with restrained civility asked me not to knock on the wall again. ‘If there is an issue, Donal,’ he said, ‘have the maturity to come and discuss it with me.’

‘It’s just the bloody din,’ I said.

‘What din?’

‘The noise from your office,’ I said. ‘Continual banging and so on. It becomes distracting.’

‘What banging? These partitions are very thin. You know that. I don’t dance; I don’t sing; I don’t have a radio on. Goodness knows what it is you’re on about. I have a chair on wheels that allows me to move from the computer table to my desk, that’s all. What is it with you.’ Blunderer filled all of my doorway, and the whiteness of his teeth contrasted with the dark expanse of his eyes. He increased the volume and reasonable tone of his voice a little, conscious that it could be heard down the corridor. ‘All I ask in institutional life,’ he said, ‘is professional respect and toleration among colleagues. Not too much to ask, even of you?’ and after a supercilious glance at mismatched oddments in my cubicle, he padded, bear like, the few paces back to his own room.

A few days later I had an email from Dr Walley in Chicago, concerning my application for the fellowship there. He said he knew Robin Blundeleir was teaching with me now, and that a brief testimonial from him would enhance my application considerably. Although Blunderer had never taught at Chicago, Walley said previous colleagues there held him in high regard, both for his scholarship and personal judgement. What ironies our own life provides for us. The deciding factor in making the application had been my desire to avoid Blunderer’s presence, and yet I needed his support to achieve that end. Pride prevented me making any such request. I confess to pinning a dead mouse to his door. I’d found it behind the assignment drop box in the department office. It was flattened on one side, and seemed to have dried out quite without decomposition.

It’s interesting the way a new personality in an established group is sometimes assimilated with very little effect on the whole, and at other times becomes a catalyst for a substantial realignment. Blunderer was deferential to nobody, but shared Alan Scadding’s enthusiasm for change. Refreshment was the word of the moment. The academic programme needed refreshment, as did teaching practices, student assessment procedures and allocation of staff responsibilities. Blunderer’s considerable weight and overseas reputation was thrown behind the acting HOD and refreshment swept all before it, like a Coca-Cola ad. I was becoming seen as a reactionary, a man out of touch with the prevailing culture.

Everything changed, however, between Blunderer and me, after I saved his life. The ambulance people made that grand assertion. It was a Thursday evening, a little after nine, and as I locked my room I saw light shining through the glass panel above Blunderer’s door. I’d heard nothing through the wall over the last half-hour or so, and Blunderer wasn’t one for working late. The corridor lights were out and I saw from a rim of yellow that his door was slightly ajar. Normally I would have walked on, but mewling sounds came from within, and when I knocked on the door it opened enough for me to see Blunderer sitting on the floor of his office with his back supported by the computer desk, and the contents of his case scattered before him. He had two expressions on a single face: one piteous, the other beyond his control.

Blunderer had suffered a terrible stroke. Odd that it had occurred with far less noise than his everyday and irritating movements. Such a heavy man that I had difficulty even pulling him far enough from the table so that he could lie face up on the carpet. ‘You’ll be okay,’ I said. How fatuous are our comments in such circumstances. There was an umbrella in a plastic pouch hanging behind the door. I put it under Blunderer’s head, which made his breathing less forced. ‘Just take it easy. You’ll be fine,’ I said as I punched the emergency numbers.

It didn’t seem right to be so obviously looking down on Blunderer, so I sat on the carpet beside him, tried not to let my face register alarm at the disarray of his: one side given way as if the strings of puppetry had collapsed. Blunderer made no attempt to talk, no movement except that the fingers of his good hand moved on the carpet as if to test its quality. ‘They’ll be here in a jiffy,’ I said. ‘No need to worry.’ Blunderer was dying perhaps, and I was telling him it was of no concern.

They weren’t there in a jiffy, of course, and there was great need to worry, but eventually I heard the siren and went to the main entrance to let the medics in. I do think that I showed a flash of foresight by taking care that Blunderer’s door didn’t snib shut behind me.

I helped the two ambulance officers carry Blunderer on the stretcher down the stairs, and then through the quad to the vehicle. He was very heavy, seeming even more so because inert. His hands were carefully crossed on the blue rug, and on the left wrist was his quite beautiful gold watch that caught for a moment the flashing lights. A tortoiseshell cat came bounding out of the dark, leapt briefly into the ambulance as we loaded Blunderer, and then fled again. The most unusual happening of the night, but apart from a snort of surprise from one of the medics, we paid no heed to it.

As Blunderer and I disliked each other, I thought it hypocritical to travel in the ambulance with him, despite an invitation. Also it could be seen as deliberate emphasis on the service I’d done him. When the ambulance had gone I went back to Blunderer’s office, gathered up his papers, a packet of green tissues, two whiteboard pens, a muesli bar and a pair of manicure scissors. I took the case home with me, admired the rich suppleness of the leather and the gleaming brass of the catches. There was an embossed green and gold emblem in one corner that I took to be the trademark of his family firm.

I visited Blunderer in hospital two days later, and already there were signs of improvement, although he couldn’t speak. Some people make excellent recoveries, the doctor said: so much depends on where the damage is and how much the brain can reroute. Blunderer filled up the hospital bed, and already had impressive beginnings of a dark beard to match the thatch that showed at the base of his throat. His wife was there. She was embarrassingly effusive in her thanks: tears in her eyes, and the light touch of her fingers on my arm. ‘You saved Robin’s life,’ she said. ‘The doctors said time was so very important.’ Poor Blunderer, so superior only a few days before, and then felled, considered under obligation to an enemy. ‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘I’m thankful I happened to be there.’

‘Yes, you saved his life,’ she said tremulously.

‘I’ve brought his case from his room,’ I said. It’s difficult to dislike a person who is so much in your debt. Difficult to refuse a heroic role offered by a woman as beautiful as Blunderer’s wife.

Blunderer’s recovery was quite rapid, and surprisingly complete. He was back at work within eight months. His general health and his fierce determination were given credit by the doctors, as well as the location of the failure within the brain. The interesting thing is that he recovered a better person, and I don’t know the clinical explanation for that. At a stroke, you might say, his vanity and self-obsession were wiped away: replaced by consideration and humour.

Blunderer and I often now walk at lunchtime through the trees and over the lawns to the staff club, where we have a pasta salad, and Blunderer will buy a bottle of Central Otago pinot noir. He’s lost a good deal of weight as well as much prejudice and pretentiousness. We talk about our work, our lives, our colleagues, the tedious and incremental creep of administrative trivia upon our time. Blunderer is not anchored by the need of a salary, and is considering resigning to travel, research and write full time.

Blunderer has told me that he has recommended me to succeed the retiring editor of
Geography Today
, a prestigious academic journal published in New York. Scadding’s promotion to associate professor closely followed his success in having an extended article published in its pages two years ago. Blunderer and I were in a window alcove of the staff club, having hot chocolate after a tedious departmental meeting. Outside were four cherry trees, and with each gust of wind the pink-tinged blossom whirled in panic before the buildings and the sky, like a shoal of coral fish before a predator.

‘I wouldn’t have a dog’s show,’ I told Blunderer. ‘I haven’t published enough. I haven’t been invited to enough conferences, given sufficient papers. My area of specialisation isn’t fashionable at the moment.’

‘I think you’re ideal,’ said Blunderer. ‘I’m on the board there. Between you and me, I provide a substantial cash donation each year, which allows them to continue the full-colour format that’s so important to them.’

‘It would be blatant cronyism,’ I told him. I imagined the stimulating intellectual challenge arising from editorial control of such a highly respected, well-funded publication.

‘You could do it from here — right here.’

‘Wouldn’t it be morally dubious?’

‘Not at all,’ said Blunderer as the wind ruffled the cherry trees and petals whirled into the sky. ‘It’s patronage, not corruption. Much of the world’s best art and scholarship has been achieved because individuals with power and resources made personal choices when giving support.’ Odd how the new Blunderer, the post-stroke Blunderer, is far more succinct and persuasive in argument. ‘Leave it to me,’ said Blunderer.

I have a standing invitation to attend Blunderer’s notable Sunday brunches: his wife rings most Saturdays to encourage my attendance. It’s not the same without me, she says.

I’m there today. On Blunderer’s patio, fringed with lavenders in giant, free-standing pots with a fiery glaze, I mingle with bankers, local politicians, an antique dealer minus a thumb on her left hand, and American expatriates. There is wine, a smiling Asian girl circulates with canapés, and the bright sun creates flashes like flying fish from the ripples on the swimming pool.

Blunderer’s wonderfully attractive wife has just introduced me to a futures dealer as the man who saved her husband’s life, and now draws me aside to talk privately. She says that her sister, recently widowed, is coming out from her estate in South Carolina to stay with them. ‘Camille is the beauty of the family,’ she says warmly, ‘and so looking forward to meeting you. We’ve told her everything, of course.’ There is not a cloud in the sky above Blunderer’s patio. His guests are intelligent and candid, his wife a treasure for the eye and mind, his sister-in-law mine for the taking, his generosity sincere, and even his academic discussion has a new bloom since his recovery. From a distance I hear him praising me to the futures dealer, saying how much I have changed, apparently not recognising the transformation in himself. Dear Blunderer.

It was late summer when I went to Mrs Cullum’s in response to her advertisement, and the sun was still able to reflect wanly on the windows of the small villa. I didn’t realise then that in winter it would disappear almost entirely, and the valley become an enclave of permafrost within the city. No husband was in residence, or ever mentioned by my landlady. Mrs Cullum was sole head of house and firm overseer of me and Mr Ancaster. In Britain we would have been called lodgers; here we were boarders.

Mrs Cullum was a woman who drew attention to herself by an excess of manufactured fragrance and bold mismatched clothes. When she passed, even outside amid the Wellington wind, there was an additional gust of perfume, and the house reeked like a leopard’s den. She retained something of a figure, but I don’t think she wore a bra, and was thus slung low, almost to the waist. Her legs were her best feature: long and still well contoured, although marbled with bluish veins, and she liked to sit with her legs crossed and the free foot oscillating. She was fifty, Mr Ancaster told me, which I thought then very old.

My guess was that Mr Ancaster was a little younger: certainly he was a little shorter. But he too took a pride in his appearance, although he was a boarder with only a bedroom for privacy, no evidence of family, and a small, ruptured car that refused to start in winter. The last was no great hindrance to him, for he was employed at the botanical gardens, within walking distance. I never saw him in work clothes, and his small hands were scrupulously clean: just a faint yellowing on the smoking fingers of his right hand. Mrs Cullum once told me he worked mainly in the hothouses. He wore gaberdine trousers with pronounced cuffs and a knife-edge crease, a green Harris tweed sports coat, and ox-blood brogues that shone like chestnuts after their evening buff on newspaper spread on the tiles before the unused fireplace.

Dressed in such retro fashion he could have stepped from the pages of a 1950s menswear catalogue. To be fair, I think he had two pairs of gaberdines, because after prolonged observation I detected a slight distinction in their light colouring. I’m sure he had no other good jacket, or shoes. When it rained, he wore to work a clear plastic, calf-length coat that made him appear like a man in a bottle.

Mr Ancaster had a thin, Hitlerish moustache, and often brought home most splendid blooms, which Mrs Cullum would display in a square vase covered with miniature, multi-coloured ceramic tiles. She would make reference to them at mealtimes, saying such things as, ‘I never seen such colour in local flowers, Mr Ancaster,’ or, ‘What heavy fragrance the hothouse brings out, doesn’t it,’ although her own perfumes always overcame it.

Mr Ancaster would give a small cough as a response to the compliments. This cough was his replacement for the phatic communication of others. It was a reduced, double cough generated in the upper throat, and nothing to do with being a smoker. He coughed as acknowledgement when addressed, as a response signalling concurrence in conversation, and as a prelude to speech. Yes, and his hair is another thing I remember well. He had a head of ash grey hair, short and upright, so that when close you could see the pale scalp beneath.

I realise now that Mrs Cullum’s meals were peculiar indeed, but what is customary soon becomes accepted, and the three of us might sit down without comment in the Aro Valley to a dinner of beetroot sandwiches and chips, the bread beneath the heaped potatoes bright with the suffusion of the beetroot’s blood. Maybe boiled sausages in chicken and onion packet soup, Yorkshire pudding with hundreds and thousands perhaps, or chickpeas and pears. I had not one day of illness in the two years I spent there, though I did have a scare concerning a communicable disease and a fat girl doing economics.

Mrs Cullum told me on different occasions that she had been a teacher of modern dance, a franchise holder for a portfolio of toiletries sold door to door, the charge hand at Lefroy’s Baby Woollens, and an usher at the Regent Theatre in Cairney Street.

It’s easy now to be selective in retrospect so as to make her appear almost a Dickensian figure, and myself an amused observer, but she was the confident presence in her own home, and Mr Ancaster and I obedient minions.

Gin was the spirit of choice in the Aro Valley. When I returned from lectures to the late afternoon darkness of Mrs Cullum’s kitchen, there was often a bottle of Gordon’s Special London Dry Gin on the table between her and Mr Ancaster. It occurs to me that I’ve never lived with any group of people who weren’t drinkers. Mr Ancaster took his gin neat, and our landlady favoured a modest addition of tonic water. My arrival was usually the signal for the tête-à-tête to break up. ‘Such a day — these few minutes are all I’ve had. Absolutely flat out,’ Mrs Cullum might say, or, ‘No rest for the wicked, I’ve got things to do,’ and she would take the bottle and bustle away. Mr Ancaster would cough, but stay at the table because the kitchen was the warmest room in the house. He would toy with a dark, bakelite ashtray, and smoke self-rolled cigarettes with intense concentration, turning them often in his fingers for inspection, as if their appearance there was a perennial surprise to him.

There were rare times when I was invited to have a gin, and although it’s not a favourite of mine, I never refused, and the three of us would sit on the wooden chairs that had faded, flat cushions attached to their backs with tapes. These were the times I think when Mrs Cullum and Mr Ancaster had been drinking at the table long enough to feel expansive. Mrs Cullum would tell us of the significant events in the world — the neighbour’s cat spraying on her washing, her certainty that someone glimpsed on the television was a former dancing colleague, the tragedy that a barely opened jar of strawberry jam had grown a mould thick as frog porridge. Mrs Cullum’s perfumes were powerful enough to cover the faint fumes of gin, but the taint of various liquors clung often enough to my fellow boarder, and through the thin wall that separated our bedrooms I heard often the clink of bottle to glass, and Mr Ancaster’s preparatory cough.

I saw her only twice after I left, years later when I was back from Europe and had a non-tenured position at the university. On the first occasion she was looking down at me through a bus window as I waited outside at a city stop. I had forgotten that her face was rather like that of a pike, her lips far forward and very bright with lipstick. I waved to her, and she glanced further back in the bus to see whose attention I wished to attract.

The second time was in a florist’s shop where I was buying roses for Vicky to celebrate our daughter’s first birthday. Mrs Cullum was a customer also, but didn’t recognise me. I introduced myself, and she seemed pleased to remember my time as her boarder. ‘Of course, you were an agreeable boy,’ she said, ‘despite the untidiness, but my God, one of the biggest eaters I ever had.’ I would have eaten more had it been available. She was wearing high-heeled shoes to flatter her legs, had a yellow scarf over her shoulders, and fly-away hair dyed fire engine red. Mutton dressed up as lamb, my mother would have said. Some deep lines on her face gave her a set expression of mild affront, and her heavy scent overwhelmed all others in the florist’s. I should have realised that, since she was buying flowers, Mr Ancaster was no longer in her house, but he was the only topic I could think of with which to continue the conversation.

‘Absolutely no idea. None whatsoever,’ she answered my query. ‘I believe there was some incident with a member of the public in one of the hothouses. I gave him his marching orders.’ Her pronounced lips tightened in indignation at the thought of Mr Ancaster’s disgrace. ‘I’ve boarders of an excellent calibre now,’ she said. ‘Of course property values in the valley have soared, absolutely soared.’ And she began to tell me of the prices obtained by various neighbours, and of the lives of those neighbours, although I had no recollection of them, or their increasingly valuable homes. Only after I left the shop did I realise that not once during the conversation had Mrs Cullum asked any question at all about me. At least in the small space I had in her memory, I would remain an agreeable boy, rather than a drunk.

I never saw Mrs Cullum again, but drink united me with Mr Ancaster, in a sense. Drink is a convivial thing, according to conventional wisdom. Let’s have a drink together and unwind, people say. But only the first few drinks are interested in community, and then the possessive demon takes control. In the end booze isolates you from people, even those you love, those to whom you have a duty, those who love you. It’s a narrowing focus until there’s just alcohol and you — then finally booze is you in some hapless symbiosis. The smell of it even, becomes intolerably provocative, as the scent of a woman to her besotted lover. The physicality of it, even: how the liquid weight of it surges from the bottle, the fluidity of it against the tongue and mouth, its mobile resistance to compression. The varied sounds and colours of it, even. The absolute necessity of it that no logic, or advice, can stand against.

So it was the aftermath of addiction in which I met Mr Ancaster again. In the Mather rehab centre, which was a long way from both the Aro Valley and the university. It was the practice at the centre for inmates to help in some way with the running of the place; voluntarily, of course, though not to do so marked you out as someone not in accord with the ethos of situ, as Dr Bigg liked to express it. The ethos of the place was never formally set out, but obviously included a collegial and cheerful willingness to reduce the overheads.

I was mailman during part of my stay at the Mather. Letters and parcels were left at reception, and some vetting was done by Trevor Staples the counsellor. A few people were not permitted to have parcels given to them, and had to open them in Trevor’s presence. I would take the mail and go through the rooms and distribute it upon the beds. The bedspreads were of cotton, and all ivory, or pale green, except Greta Wallop’s patchwork cover, which she brought from home because it had been made by her handicapped son. Some beds received mail regularly, and some never. Some received a variety of envelopes with the address handwritten, and some just the occasional stale, official window envelope. Mail distribution was a manifest sign of life outside the place — of the steadfastness of support, or indifference.

After some weeks there was a reallocation of jobs. I lost the position of mailman, and agreed to help in the laundry. There were murmurings about bribery and corruption in connection with the changes, but there always are in such places. I didn’t mind the laundry. It was warm in winter, machines did most of the labour, and my stint was just three hours twice a week. It was there, in the vaporous atmosphere and revolving noises of the laundry rooms, that one of those things you usually hope to avoid in rehab happened — I met someone who knew me. I was taking a second load of sheets to the drying room when I noticed a slim man sitting on an upturned blue, plastic bucket just outside the door, and smoking, with great concentration on the act. His grey hair was as stiff as a scrubbing brush, and he wore gaberdine trousers.

‘Mr Ancaster?’ I said. Sooner or later we were bound to meet. ‘Gareth Siddup,’ I said. ‘I boarded with you at Mrs Cullum’s for a couple of years when I was at varsity.’ Mr Ancaster gave his signature cough.

‘Yes, yes, that’s right,’ he replied reflectively, as if confirmation, even authentication, was expected of him. He’d got thinner, as alcoholics often do, and his skin had darkened with the nicotine and the drink. He had accordion creases below his eyes, and the apathetic passivity that those unfamiliar with the disease mistake for serenity. ‘I’m supposed to be knocking off,’ he said. ‘They’re down on it here, aren’t they.’ He meant the cigarettes. It went without saying that drink was out.

Mr Ancaster hadn’t long been admitted, and had aged a great deal. Originally all we’d had in common was Aro Valley and Mrs Cullum, but at Mather we had the additional connection of being alcoholics. We began to talk sometimes, especially on those visiting afternoons when I knew Vivienne wouldn’t be coming; Mr Ancaster never had any callers. We complained of our fellow patients and the staff who tended us, but also we talked of our boarding days. Neither of us wished to say much about the subsequent and sometimes despairing lives that had followed. There was a north-facing window at the end of the second-floor corridor in Kotuku Block, and a form there on which we’d sit together when there was winter sun. Mr Ancaster would have a crafty fag, and drop the butts into the green agapanthus below.

‘We were at it, of course, Sheila Cullum and me,’ he told me as the sun came and went in a cloudy sky. There was a quiet pride in his voice, as if he needed that opportunity to inform someone that although he was an ageing and nondescript alcoholic who had shamed himself in a municipal hothouse, yet he’d once been his landlady’s lover: he’d been the object of affection. I was surprised, because he’d always seemed so much an auxiliary in the house, and I’d never witnessed any affection from Mrs Cullum towards him, apart from her admiration of the flowers he provided from his workplace. ‘It wasn’t open slather,’ Mr Ancaster admitted. ‘Sheila was very careful about it all. She knew your lecture times to a tee, and we never went to each other’s rooms in the night. But if my luck was in then before lunch sometimes. She didn’t like to do it on a full stomach. Of course I wasn’t on the sauce the same then.’

He’d taken care of his appearance then too, whereas in the Mather Centre his trousers were pouched at the knees, grimy at the pockets, and instead of polished brogues he had schoolboy shoes with thick, rubber soles. A scurf of dried skin particles would gather on the folds of his dark socks.

During another talk he told me that he’d paid the rates for Mrs Cullum, always supplied the gin, and helped her out with legal fees when her neighbour took her to court over spraying the boundary hedge with weedkiller. ‘I could’ve done with the money for the car too,’ he said. If he was telling the truth then I’d quite misread the household when I lived there, but that’s so often the case. You think you know how the circumstances were in a certain time and place, and then someone recounts experience from a different angle and all the pieces change.