Owls Do Cry (15 page)

January 15th

For the first time in many years, eight years ago to be exact, since it is eight years ago that I married, I have decided to
keep a diary. I intend to put in it all my feelings and every happening of importance. Indeed I think I shall be very frank, like the Frenchman, Rousseau, and put in everything. Or nearly everything. I intend to give, perhaps, if I have time, a brief account of my life in my eight years of marriage. Perhaps I shall refer to my childhood and the members of my family, my brother Toby who is a licenced second-hand dealer in Waimaru, my sister Daphne who is in a mental hospital, my other sister Francie who was burned when I was quite small. And my mother and father. Naturally I shall talk of Timothy and the children. I am determined to keep this diary regularly, and if it happens that I miss a few days it will not mean that I have forgotten to record incidents and emotions, only that I have not found time; after all, I am a housewife.

Now where shall I begin? I do not know. I shall put this away until after the children have gone to bed.

Night

Timothy (I shall call him Timothy because it sounds more bookish and sophisticated) is amused that I should have begun a diary, and he threatens to read it, yet dear Timothy, he is so honest that I could leave it lying anywhere in the house and he would never open it. No, I believe I shall write of my husband as Tim – the other sounds too much like a stranger. He has given me a steam iron. He brought it home tonight as a surprise. I shall give my old one to Daphne so that when she recovers she will have some kind of material basis for her new life.

Now to really begin my diary.

In August or October we shall be going south to Waimaru, to live. I am excited and afraid to visit the scene of my birth and childhood. It is like returning to the place of crime, but it will be spring and all the blossoms and daffodils will have budded. I long to see them. I remember a poem we had at school, about daffodils fluttering

beside the lake, beneath the trees.

I should like to put in a simile, the way it is done by writers, to describe the loveliness of the blossoms in my old home. I can think of nothing to say except they are choking white.

Even now I have not really begun my diary. I like my name, Teresa, and if people at home when I visit there prefer to call me Chicks, I shall refuse to answer. They used to call me Chicks because, they said, I was like a little dark chicken running about, trying to catch up with people, and almost pecking for grains of wheat upon the ground, with my head down and the hair falling over my face. My other sisters had interesting names. There was Francie, that was Frances, and though she wore slacks and my father seemed angry with her, I thought she was some relation to Saint Francis who, I believed, kept animals in his pocket and took them out and licked them, the way Francie licked a blackball or acid drop, for pure love. And there is Daphne who, I thought, smelt like a flower bush, half-way between lilac and catmint. And Toby, my brother, who had no particular smell that I remember. He wore braces. Children nowadays wear belts, men too. I should laugh and laugh if I saw Tim hitching up his pants with a pair of braces. He wears action-waist. I gave him a pair for Christmas and he gave me a set of nylon underwear,
the sort that breathes, blue, with wide lace at the edges. I love Christmas with the children waking earlier than light and climbing into bed between Tim and me, showing us their presents and snuggling down for a new sleep. What hot little bodies they have, and bright eyes and fresh voices, why, they shine with newness. And Who puts the sun out? Peter asks me, as if I should know. The dark is a frightening answer.

January 16th

The washing machine has leaked over the floor. And the baby Sharon is sick with her teeth. She cried all night and her little right cheek is flushed like a cherry. Why cannot children be born with teeth?

January 20th

It is almost the end of the first month of a new year. I feel I have done nothing, though what I should be doing I do not know, it is just the feeling of getting nowhere and of time passing. I shall be twenty-eight this year, nearly thirty, then forty, and then come the fifties and sixties, why in no time I shall be an old woman collecting an old age pension. I am afraid to think of it. Why, it will happen in almost no time. My own mother is old and ill, they say she will die soon with her heart. I shall get old like her and have high blood pressure and varicose veins and dropsy and have to squeeze the salt out of every pound of butter and remember not to put salt in the vegetables or on lettuce or any food because it is forbidden. Or perhaps I shall get diabetes like my grandmother, and not eat sugar, and have my legs taken off, to be kept behind the door in the dark.

Enough of this morbid writing. It just happens that I seem to be doing the same thing over and over every day – get up, get dressed, get the breakfast, dress the children, Peter and Mark, or pester them till they dress themselves, send them out to play, give baby her bottle and put her down to sleep, have a peaceful cup of tea – that means a cup of tea in peace – with Tim before he goes off to work, wash the dishes, vacuum the carpets, turn on the washing machine, wash, rinse, spin-dry, hang out the washing, sit down to morning tea with the paper to read and the scandal.

And so on and on. In the afternoon I have time to read. I am reading
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
by Anne Brontë. It is the story of a woman and her drunkard husband, her suffering and terror in a world of squalor – that is what it says on the cover. I find the book absorbing, indeed I dare not put it down. What will Huntingdon do next, I ask myself, quivering, like his wife Helen, for fear and suspense. What a brute of a man to so treat a woman’s love. The scene where Huntingdon has a rendezvous in the shrubbery with his current mistress, and his wife, taking a solitary walk in the same area at nightfall, is mistaken by Huntingdon for the woman he has promised to meet, and therefore greeted passionately and fondled, until he discovers his error and exclaims in disgust and fear,

—My wife! Helen!

that scene abhors and disgusts me. I have read it carefully three times.

Sometimes in the afternoon I have visitors like the Baldwins, Benny and Ted, or the Smarts, Terry and Josie. Very often Benny and Josie call and we sit and talk babies
and husbands and housework over a cup of tea and biscuits. I feel so ashamed that I never have tins full of my own cooking when visitors call – I have to undo the cellophane off packets of biscuits, chocolate and wafers, and pasties; and though Benny and Josie are too polite to make remarks, I feel their criticism, for they always have meringues or peanut brownies or those pinky marshmallow cakes, when I visit them. Benny’s father is a judge in the Supreme Court and her husband is high-up in the Civil Service. The Smarts have a new house over in one of the bays – a coming area, they say. They know the Bessicks, Dr Herbert and his wife Alison, and have promised us an introduction. Dr Bessick is a brilliant gynaecologist, just returned from studying overseas – his wife had an article in the social news about their life on the continent and the States. She is a bit of a shrew, they say, but dresses perfectly and is, they say, an entertaining hostess. Both the Baldwins and the Smarts, by the way, are in the local drama club. We have playreadings on Tuesdays.

Now how else shall I describe my day? In the evening after tea there is always the children’s bath and story, for Tim and I believe in the idea of putting children to bed after a story. Tim bought a book on child psychology, and we have studied it. Some of the ideas do not seem to work with Mark, he is so individual and temperamental. Tim reads the story while I fix the baby’s bottle. Children’s books are different now from when I was a child. I have enjoyed reading
Jemima Puddleduck
, by Beatrix Potter, I had never read it before, how the foxy gentleman kept his newspaper in his tail coat pocket and had a shed full of feathers for
Jemima Puddleduck to lay her eggs in. What a cunning swindler was the foxy gentleman, and how gullible poor Jemima Puddleduck. It was almost like real life with its intrigue and near-murder.

By the way, Tim has bought me an electric cake mixer so that I can make a chocolate and walnut sponge for the weekend when we meet the Bessicks. It’ll be strange to meet a doctor socially, especially a gynaecologist, though I shall be too seasoned to blush if I remember what he must know about the insides of women. Ten years ago I should have fled. Just imagine.

It is late now and I am tired. Tim has just gone down to the gate with the milk bottles. Oh, the weather is so hot and humid, I don’t know how I can bear it sometimes. And the mosquitoes, there seems to be a plague of them this year – they say there have never been so many. I shall go to bed soon. Benny says she uses Wisteria Night Cream, that it is better than Gloria Haven. I have tried Gloria Haven before and I, too, feel there is something lacking in it. Today I bought a pot of Wisteria at the chemist’s, extravagance no doubt, but Tim does not mind, indeed he encourages me, and likes to see me taking an interest in my make-up. What a perfect husband. Where in all the world would I find a man more thoughtful or loving? And to think that years ago he was one of those dirty little boys who used to hang around my sister Francie at Waimaru, and I used to poke my tongue out at him. His father was a council man, and though Tim began his first year medical, he did not finish it, it was not suited to his talents. He is now high-up in selling, not a mere commercial traveller, but a high pressure executive with
responsibility. His friend Howard Weston (the Westons have a sheep station in the country back of Waimaru) has fixed the sale of our new house at Waimaru. When I saw the pictures and plans of it, I thought it seemed strange that it should be built over the old rubbish dump where we used to play as children and where Francie was burned. The idea frightened me. Living where we used to sit amongst the toi-toi, tickling it down our backs and putting it in our hair for feathers; where we explored and found what we called treasure, old tyres and boots that we said were walked in at night by dead men and giants; and bits of motor cars, and books, and all the rubbish under the sun. And from morning to night, how long seemed the time, with the day taking chicken steps in the sky. Yes, when I live in our house there I shall feel afraid and strange; yet I feel it is the right place to live; the place with its promise of happiness and treasure in our future life and then its despair over Francie, I had a blue ribbon in my hair that day, and it kept coming undone and there was no one to tie it for me; it is like a kind of gap in my life.

What nonsense I talk.

Now I must stop writing in this diary for tonight. Tim is in the bath. He always runs it far too hot so that the place is all steam and his body like a cooked crayfish; and he even
reads
in the bath. Dear Tim! To think I have been married eight years. Now I must go to bed, and before I sleep, finish one more chapter of
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
.

January 21st

I am excited over meeting the Bessicks. And afraid. It will be my first
real
experience of hostessing to people who
really matter. I have asked them to come in the evening for I think it would be more convenient and less nerve-racking with the children asleep, though I had wanted to show off Sharon’s curly hair and dimples and that charming smile of hers, and the pink nylon frock, embroidered in Switzerland. Never mind. To fill in a little of the evening, if conversation lags, we have arranged to play Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony on the radiogram. I am quite safe with that for I have read about it and what it is meant to represent and know the different movements, and therefore should be able to make some intelligent remark about it. I believe the Bessicks are musical, and I feel quite safe with the Fifth Symphony. I can mention about fate knocking on the door and that kind of thing. I shall do out the sitting room in the afternoon so as to have it ready, and make the sponge in the morning. I have decided on coffee sponge instead of chocolate as coffee is more intellectual. I shall wear a simple tasteful frock of taffeta, with my new gipsy earrings, and my hair done as usual with the parting slightly higher. It ought to settle if I wash it the night before, Friday night, or perhaps two nights before, Thursday, and then it will be manageable.

You must forgive me for writing all this, but it absorbs me, you know. They say Herbert Bessick is unique.

January 22nd

Hot weather still. The children are running around bare. I had a letter from Daphne today, the first for a long time. What a strange world she must be living in! Her letter does not make sense, it is a wonder the doctor let it be posted – all about Christmas and a piece of moon and a mouse nibbling
at a shroud of sun, it frightens me, I can never see her getting better and living a normal life like myself. Poor Daphne. And she sends back the letter I wrote her, and has written the words Help help help at the end of my letter. As if I had to be rescued from a terrible doom, as if fate (I think of the Fifth Symphony) knocked at my door. Poor Daphne. Naturally she means herself when she cries help help help.

January 23rd

Only three more days. I am as excited as a young girl going to her first party. I remember my first party, a sixth form one, at school, when the high school boys were invited and I had nothing decent to wear, while the other girls were dressed in the loveliest frocks, evening gowns or ones ballerina length, with satin slippers, and holding evening bags covered with sparkly beads. The party was held in the gymnasium, I remember, and I sat all night, ashamed of my plain print dress, and being afraid to talk to anyone. And when the dances were announced my heart beat so fast I was afraid it would choke me, like in a novel, and I would fall swooning to the ground. But who could ever swoon in a print frock and wearing walking shoes, lace-ups? I waited for someone to ask me to dance. The boy Tod came up and asked me if I was engaged for the next dance, a foxtrot, and I said in a rush —No, I’ll dance with you, and I grabbed him and pushed him onto the floor, and we danced; but I could not keep in time, and trod on his toes, and said Sorry, sorry, all the time, though I learned afterwards that a woman never says sorry – it is always the man’s fault. I did not know what to talk about while we danced, I was too busy trying to keep
in step and show my partner what a good dancer I was, in the hope that he would ask me for supper. He was captain of the cricket eleven.