Owls Do Cry (16 page)

He didn’t ask me for supper. Nobody did. I could have wept, and I knew it was all the fault of my funny clothes and not being able to afford dancing lessons. And I had to go to supper with the rest of the girls that were left over, and we sat together at a long table while the others with partners sat at tables for two, and talked and laughed in an intimate way, while we girls sat angry and silent or else looking haughty, pretending it did not matter – but it did matter.

But to return to the present time. I am really excited about Saturday. I love to think that I have some kind of social standing, enough for the Bessicks to want to meet Tim and me. I have finished
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
and have begun
Wuthering Heights
, by Emily Brontë. I read it years ago when I was a schoolgirl and in search of some kind of romance. My reading of it now will be more mature and balanced.

Peter is full of the quaintest remarks. He said this morning —Mummy, what kind of a world is the world in the washing machine? And last night he asked about the moon. There’s something in it, he said. Like hills, and something that moves. He is in primer three at school, and anxious for the holidays to finish. I see myself as the mother of a Rhodes Scholar.

But it is night and I am very tired. The children seem to have been squabbling all day over toy ducks and guns and motor-cars until I am weary of the sound of their voices. And Sharon has diarrhoea, so I have to wash a
million nappies. I thank heaven for a washing machine. Poor Sharon. I laugh now to think of Mark, and how I was scared of him at first, he was so tiny and slippery, and how carefully I washed his ears and mouth and nose with cotton wool and his body with olive oil, and crept in the room at night to see if he had stopped breathing or had smothered by putting his face in the pillow, the way you see it reported in the newspapers. Dear Mark. How terrible if any of them had been born blind or deformed or idiots that waved their heads around, like caterpillars, and never learned to speak.

Now I will finish this record for the night. I have told you I am tired.

I have just remembered that Herbert Bessick spent some time in France, and he speaks French well, they say. We learned French at school, a little, from a French tutor. How wonderful if I could speak French with him at the party.

Correction; it is not a party, just a quiet social evening.

January 24th

I had a strange dream last night, I dreamt I was sitting in the middle of the arena at a circus, nursing a little black panther that kept scratching at me and saying in a child’s voice with a foreign accent —I’ll scratch your eyes out. I’ll scratch your eyes out.

The spotlights of the circus played over me, and though I knew I was expected to perform in some way, I found that I could not remember my act. The audience in the big top cheered and stamped and whistled, waiting for me to begin. Suddenly I threw the panther away from me across the ring
and began to cry, and I thought, This is only a dream, there is nothing to cry about, it is just a dream. Then the light in the circus faded and I found myself in Paris, walking by the Seine river. It was midnight. I heard a clock striking twelve, and I kept on walking looking down at my shadow cast in the water to make sure it was walking with me. Suddenly I felt tired and knew I must sleep, so I took off my black fur coat – thinking, how strange, I did not notice I wore a black fur coat – and spread it on the ground and fell asleep on it. When I awoke my fur coat had vanished, my shadow had vanished, I was standing staring in the river that swirled in a whirlpool of darkness.

Now isn’t that a weird dream? I asked Tim if he dreamt a dream last night, and he said no, except at one time he half dreamt he was climbing a mountain to find an orchid, but found only a handful of snow. Dreams are curious things. They say that dreams mean more than people think.

By the way, when I first began this diary I said I would give a record of my inner life. I begin to wonder if I have said anything about my inner life. What if I have
no inner life?
I am morbid today. I had a letter from my mother in Waimaru. She says the same thing over and over in her letters; that everything is well, that everybody is happy; and she says it like a chant of denial, so that you can’t help knowing that nothing is well, and nobody is happy. Sometimes I wonder if we should go south to live. I don’t know. I really don’t know.

Today and tomorrow and then the day of my little social gathering. I am beginning to wonder if I should make a coffee sponge after all, for we shall be having coffee to
drink, and it may seem like too much of the same thing. I shall forget about it, let the idea stay in my unconscious mind, and decide tomorrow whether it shall be chocolate or coffee. If it were chocolate I could use real chocolate, plain or dark, melted, or cocoa. Tim has said something about drinks, a liqueur, benedictine, or tia maria, but I am not sure how to time drinks and I don’t want to disgrace myself by showing ignorance.

I don’t know if I have told you that Terry and Josie cannot come on Saturday because of their children’s chicken-pox. We shall have to entertain the Bessicks alone. What a frightening prospect. I am relying on Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony to break the ice.

January 25th

I am afraid for tomorrow night.

Sunday

Well, it is over now and I can look at it calmly and with indifference. Shall I describe last night? Well, before they came I had the children put to bed and the baby given her bottle, and the sitting room arranged cosily and, I hope, tastefully, with the chairs and couches (our furniture is Swedish make) placed at what Tim and I consider the correct angle so as to make conversation easier and more intimate. I dusted the radiogram and blew the fluff from the long-playing needle, and left the Fifth Symphony lying upon the cabinet. I could not help leaving a few of our more intellectual books lying around, carelessly, as if we used them every day, some of them half-open, or open at pages
of difficult words; also a collection of Van Gogh prints, and an isolated Picasso, which I propped up on the top shelf of the bookcase. It was one of Picasso’s that I cannot make head or tail of, yet it gives a certain impression and surely no visitor, I thought, would be boorish enough to ask me to explain the meaning of it.

Tim had decided that we wouldn’t have any drinks, only coffee, and that the cake had better be chocolate, with walnuts, for variety. I prepared to make a number of narrow slices of toast with a sardine, or a slice of tomato, lying upon each. Above all I wanted our evening to be a
natural
one, with none of the artificialities one finds – everyone at ease and happy.

They came at eight o’clock. I was aflutter when I heard their car – one of the latest, with engine in the back. I dashed to the bathroom for a final powdering and a new touch of lipstick and whipped open the cupboard door to make sure the plates and coffee cups were ready, and as a last minute thought, I put the Picasso, face downward, upon the card table. I was afraid suddenly that Dr Herbert would say, outright —What is your interpretation of this picture, Mrs Harlow? (later, I thought, when we become friends, we shall of course be Tim and Teresa and Herbert and Alison). Then I answered the knock at the door, quite coolly, though my voice shook, and I was forced to clear my throat.

They are such nice people. We were Tim and Teresa and Herbert and Alison right from the very first, though I do not remember actually addressing the doctor by his christian name in case it sounded familiar, though he has travelled overseas and does not worry about such things.
He called me Teresa. His voice is very soft, almost like fur, and he is dark, slightly bald, with brown eyes, almost black at times; and his wife is the opposite, very thin, with fair hair and large grey eyes, nondescript except for their size. She has a protruding upper lip, something to do with her teeth, which gives her a horsey expression. Admittedly she is good-looking in other ways, her eyes for example, but I can see what Josie means when she describes her as a shrew. The expression is latent. She kept referring to her husband as
Doctor
. I could see she is conceited about being a doctor’s wife. Yet I enjoyed the evening. We played the Fifth Symphony, and Herbert said, instantly —Fate knocks on the door.

And he (Herbert I mean, not Fate) gave me quite a special sort of smile. Herbert (forgive me if it sounds familiar) tapped with his hand upon the side of the chair and nodded his head to the music, with an understanding look in his eye, while his wife sat with a slight smile on her face and her eyes in a kind of dream which I must confess made them rather ethereal. I had prepared to nod my head and tap too, to show my familiarity with the piece, but I had to devise some other means of keeping time. I swayed backward and forward with, I hope, an intelligent expression on my face. Tim said afterwards that I looked like a charmed snake. Dear Tim, what a tease he is!

After the music Dr Bessick (I have decided that the name Herbert sounds too familiar) exclaimed that the Fifth Symphony was one of his first loves, and repeated the words —Fate knocks at the door, again glancing at me with a special look in his eye.

He said something in French then, which, although I thought rapidly to connect with any sentences of French words I knew, I could not understand, and answered —Yes, yes, rather foolishly, but with French gestures, for compensation. I did hope then to make a remark in French to show him that I knew a little of the language, but alas all I could think of was —
Le chat court vite. Le rat court vite aussi
.

Oh, we had the usual annoying things happen in the evening. The sardines came out squashed, and I burned a couple of slices of toast. They complimented me on the coffee. They said —Do you grind your own coffee?

I was about to say, of course not, when I realized that it is apparently the thing to grind your own coffee, so I said —I have been thinking of doing so.

Oh, you find the bought coffee ghastly too, questioned Mrs Bessick.

I told her I found the bought coffee hopeless, but managed to process it in some way.

Oh, we talked then about capital punishment and the Far East, and the psychology of the child, and Alison told me of her child, Magdalen, very highly strung and delicate and brilliant —Poor little Magdalen, I said. She will suffer.

And Alison said —It’s terrible. We don’t know what kind of world our children will grow up into. If only something could be done about the state of the world.

We were both silent then, and depressed. I agreed —If only something could be done about the state of the world.

The Bessicks have promised to come again, or ring us quite soon. I believe now, fingers crossed, that we are established in the right society.

Thursday, February the something

Everything is flat. The Bessicks have not rung, and thinking it over, I believe they never will. The weather continues hot and at night the air breathes mosquitoes. I cannot remember a summer for so long without rain. The ground is like a baked brick, cracked and hard, and the children dance over the cracks and call them earthquakes. Of late in the afternoon I have been taking a rug on the lawn and lying down in my sunsuit, lazily drowsing or looking up at the sky where you can see the waves of heat moving and shimmering. I remember when we were children we used to lie for hours looking up at the sky in autumn when the thistledown sailed above the cloud, sailed or scurried on an urgent voyaging. Where? And then a cloud would cross the sun and we would shiver for the blocked warmth, and it would seem as if there had never been any sun, as if we had lived always in cold; until the cloud passed and we shivered for the warmth of new sun upon our backs, between the shoulderblades where cold and hot strike. It’s funny, the sky up in the north here is different from the sky in the south, and the light too. Down in the south you feel all the time a kind of formidable background, like a block of grey shadow, of a continent of ice, Antarctica in the wings. The dark there is more frightening and less friendly, you are trapped in it as in a tomb, and the stone of ice will not roll away. Up here at night there is a kind of upper daylight, high in the sky, as if the dark were clinging closer to the earth under the whip and strike of sun. But, why, how strangely I express myself. I was thinking of the letter Daphne wrote to me, about dark and light and a continent of ice. I must send her a tin of biscuits.

By the way I had a letter from my mother to say that Toby is coming north for a night and expects to stay with me. I don’t want him to come. He lazes around and expects to have everything done for him, and he won’t eat this and he won’t eat that, like a spoilt child, the way he acts at home. And I’m afraid he would disgrace me and take a fit when I had visitors. I shall live in terror that some of my friends will call and see Toby hanging around with his dirty fingernails and greasy hair. Perhaps I should be sorry for him. But his life is so apart from mine, him poking about in these rubbish dumps for scrap iron and bottles and things to sell, almost as if he were still a child. He goes back and back to the rubbish dumps as a child goes to a wound, tearing the plaster off so that it never heals but festers always. I do not know why I thought of that. I just thought of it.

February 11th. Monday

The Bessicks have still not rung, as they promised. Rain today and I could have put my tongue out and drunk it straight from the sky. It was the kind of rain that smokes with warmth. If I were in the south now there would be signs of autumn, leaves turning, and the chill in the late afternoon, and the beginning of mushrooms in the sheltered and more dewy places. Here there seems nothing but warmth and everlasting summer. I had another letter from Daphne, a very strange letter. I don’t know if they will ever cure her, even with these modern treatments like electric shock and insulin shock and that new kind of brain operation you read about in the papers, the kind where they change the personality. How terrible to be deprived of one’s personality.

February 18th. Monday