The Great Fire (35 page)

The gale had blown all week from the Pole, raising foam on the sea and grit in the city. On Friday it faltered. And the town, which had been obscured by dust and by the visible force with which dust was driven, reassembled itself into roofs of red iron and walls of buff weatherboard, and concrete buildings, called modern, from before the war. By Saturday morning, the south wind was felt only in salt gusts at the corners and crossroads of the town, where it was usual.

Helen, invited to Lowry Bay by the friend from her French class, crossed the town on an early tram to take the bus for the bays, which left from a shed near the station. Shops and offices were open until lunchtime, and the tram rocked behind a flock of Morris Minors and bicycles, striking, with ancient bell, its note of the past as it listed into the main street of the capital, where it passed the shops close to their tin awnings propped on dented poles; close enough to see stained linoleum in the tearoom and glazed buns beneath a celluloid dome, and to read the titles of books in South's windows.

It was radiant morning in the potholed streets. From intersections, you could see, beyond the quays, the blue harbour and far mountains, whose incommunicable grandeur might, for all the town seemed to care, have hung there on a calendar. Remoteness had generated a fear of occasion, and the populace clung to the safety of its small concerns, just as their forebears had clung to these islands, greeting them as rafts and spars in the wild ocean, rather than as destination. They had left their destination behind them, and could only re-create, here, its lesser emblems. Audacity had been exhausted in arriving at the uttermost point of earth. They wished above all to pretend that nothing had happened.

Aboard the bus, there was the Noah's ark of caps and cardigans, skirts and shirts. The mixture of sandy and saturnine, and a stalwart couple with Maori blood. And the fat child content, as yet, to be smothered in Mum's embrace, while the baby lay awhimper in Granny's arms. A man of thirty-odd had lost a hand in the war and held his newspaper with a device of metal and black leather. In the national hush, the rustle could be heard whenever, with a glint of steel, he turned a page.

Weatherboard straggled, fence rails suggested countryside. They were near the sea, and the bus trundled into gravelled depressions and swept, with its petrol breath, the encroaching scrub. Like pupils in a class, the passengers wished for unseemly diversion, if someone else would provide it.

So it seemed to her, parted from her best thoughts.

The hills, approaching, were bristled with thick gorse, with which the founders had reconjured Scotland: introduced for sentiment, it had come to dominate, ineradicable. Someone said as much, to the bus in general, for the gorse supplied a topic irreproachable as weather. And the public words stood in air, like skywriting, as if no one would exorcise them with reply.

Until a man with plentiful white hair half-turned his body in the metal seat and said, quite loudly, 'It was the longing.' A jacket of gingered tweed was buttoned to creaking point. 'They were longing for their home.'

All high-flown utterance was to be deplored, alarming as nakedness. As to the speaker, it was unclear whether he had distinguished or disgraced himself, nor did he appear to care — smiling with rather fleshy lips and with eyes of a clear blue unsuited to his age. Something carnal was not incompatible with sensibility.

He got off at a country crossroad. Helen, at her bleared window, watched him walk away on a dirt track, smiling abstractedly and slightly swinging a string bag of small packages wrapped in newsprint. Even so, there was the antipodean touch of desolation: the path indistinguishable from all others, the wayside leaves flannelled with dust, the net bag. The walking into oblivion.

At a tin shelter that served as terminus, Barbara was waiting. When she stepped out into sunlight, tall, smiling, and dressed in blue, people could not help admiring; and thought, She should be meeting a lover.

The two young women touched hands. They walked off on the earthy path, laughing not quite naturally, for they could hardly help being pleased by the momentary attention of descending passengers and by their own almost meritorious youth. In this place, too, the scrub closed in, but they were near a rise of handsome firs; and, nearer still, on their right, to the sandy shore.

'A man on the bus spoke about longing.'

'No, really? Out loud?'

'Well, audibly — obviously.' Helen added, 'Only a few words.' Meaning, This man was not a maniac.

'They must have had a fit.'

'They went rigid.' Recalling the man's pink sensual face, the white excessive hair and brows, the incommensurate eyes. Elsewhere, he might have been a danger to young girls. But here the Bush had swallowed him.

By now there was no one to see how pleasant these two looked in their coloured clothes, or how, in passing there, they enhanced the scene. They felt it themselves: the waste.

The Baillie house was backed by trees and faced a short pale beach. At the far end of the cove there was one other house, smaller but similar; and that, too, was painted 'cream.' Both built by the Baillie grandfather, architect also of a family house in the town and whiskered subject of an incompetent portrait in a civic hall in Tinakori Road. The profession lingered in Barbara's father, who was a building contractor — an easy-natured, ruddy-faced chap, who drank a bit, made good money, and was proud of, if baffled by, his three slim, articulate daughters. Bruce Baillie would have been, elsewhere, a plain good sort; but the great south wound was on him, as it was on many men of the hemisphere: the sense that something more was required of, and by, them. His eyes, when he laughed, remained dark and glassy like those of a Teddy bear.

Barbara's mother, born in Timaru, was distantly if emphatically connected to a signatory of the Treaty of Waitangi. Pale and heavy-lidded, with a grooved almond of mouth, she sloped into sad shoulders and attenuated limbs, and wore discreet clothes that appeared faded even when new. Some youthful glow had been consumed in the obsessive gentility that, without blazing, shrivels all. Though dissimilar, husband and wife were never quite distinct: the shared error of their marriage had grown to be a bond.

Too cautious to detest, Mrs Baillie did, with some regularity, not quite like. Mrs Baillie did not quite like Barbara's connection with the Driscoll girl — who had lived overseas but not in quite the right places; and was said, by her assertive mother, to be enamoured of a grown man met in India or Japan. To be in love was itself not quite desirable, was not at all the same as announcing the engagement and having one's photograph — demure, pensive, and misted by tulle — in
The Dominion
. In Featherston Street, behind the Government Life Insurance Building, there was a nice shop displaying fruit plates in Crown Worcester, and a tea service with roses; and table mats, backed with cork, reproducing English county scenes by Rowland Hilder. Standing one day with Helen before this shrine, Mrs Baillie had said, 'I do feel that Barbara should begin to gather a few things together.' And the girl's silence had displeased. Sharpening her argument, the mother had remarked that French was all very well, but would do nothing for Barbara in the life to come — an observation that referred neither to love nor to religion, but to domesticity.

By now, the two girls had crossed the wooden verandah at the bay and were entering a grotto of limp cretonne, rugs of grey peonies, and rose-painted tin trays. Fronds of real Dorothy Perkins, intruding through north windows, partook of indoor dust. A reproduction of
The Laughing Cavalier
called for alignment. For entertainment, an old wireless teetered on cabriole legs, and folders of sallow songs were stacked on an upright piano. Books, in their single mesh-fronted case, came from the lachrymose or costumed past:
Anthony Adverse, Lorna Doone, The Prisoner of Zenda.
Outdoor smells of shrubbery and shore were no match for humid linen in warped cupboards, pipe tobacco, camphor, mildewed bread, and a slight leak of gas.

Only the presence of the three pretty sisters, all together, might have let in light.

In the kitchen, Barbara put milk in an enamel saucepan and spooned coffee from a canister. They took turns to watch and stir. Drops from the spoon fell on linoleum. A window above the sink overlooked a fenced clearing between house and woods, where late planting was even now coming through. The yard ended in tangled shrubberies, and in the twin peaks of a compost heap and kitchen midden.

When the milk puckered, Barbara took a sieve, poured the mixture into mugs, and turned out the grounds in the sink. Helen had the better mug — uncracked, and marked
CORONATION
DAY
, August 9, 1902 — showing the royal pair in red and yellow: Queen Alexandra in pearl collar and satin bodice; King Edward incorrigible in ermine.

There they stood: sipping, munching. As far as the world was concerned, they might stand thus forever, in this or similar kitchens. Of that menace, both were mortally aware.

In the living room, light entered through diamond panes. They would read their French lesson. Each had a book in hand and was turning pages. Barbara Baillie, extending her legs on a sofa and imagining herself some third party, wondered whether she or Helen might be considered the more attractive. Decency did not permit an immediate decision in her own favour. Helen's case was curious: so small as to be insignificant, yet sweetly made, and with strokes of undeniable interest — and having, as to wrists and ankles, what the French called
les attaches fines.
Some broad clumsy man might take her smallness under protection, for men were, and wished to be, disarmed by mere evidence.

It could not be said that Helen's reputed condition of love conferred luminosity. Such passionate absorption inspired pity, or some fearfulness. It was only when seeming to forget her far predicament that she appeared original, vivid, and destined indeed for other lands and lovely times. Meantime, the months were passing, and the southern spring.

They began to read aloud what Barbara called 'the famous passage;' because their teacher thus referred to it: 'The celebrated passage of the thrush.' They opened their books laughing, but were soon decently engrossed.

Hier au soir; je me promenais seul; le ciel ressemblait à un ciel

d'automne; un vent froid soufflait par intervalles.

Yearnings that were in themselves a consummation.

Transporté subitement dans le passé -

Declaiming such phrases in so remote a place, these women became not provincials but exiles.

They continued to read, by turns, for that magic — which, on Barbara Baillie, worked less consistently. She was aware of the discrepancy, but did not repress — even while raising her voice to crystal words — some thoughts about love, clothes, and a possible trip to the Bay of Islands when summer came round. For her, for her contemporaries, love was above all to be a release of tenderness — of which they had far more than almost any man could stand. Of transgression, such a girl had no conception; and Wellington was no place to throw over the traces.

For three years now, her father had annually promised to set his work aside and take the family to Britain: three months on the sea for the round trip, and three months to make sense of the blinking place. He did not expect to enjoy himself, but knew what was due to his position and, more obscurely, to existence itself: they'd have achieved that much, at any rate, and could queen it when they came back.

Again and again, disinclination prevailed. And when, in the third year, he renewed excuses, Barbara had asked — not, in that moment, a daughter, but speaking levelly, as one person to another — 'Won't we go then, ever?' he'd shifted, shuffled, and mumbled, 'Course we'll go. Yair.' Had stood looking at nearby air, and from time to time taking a palm-full of dried fruit — raisins and scraps of apricot — from a bowl on the sideboard. The girl was sorry for him, knew he would be concerned for expense and ill at ease abroad; even that he dreaded the entire enterprise. But she'd said, 'I'd like to have the chance,' without comprehending all that this implied. Still examining vacancy, the father had replied, 'Ar well. Next year she'll be right.' Could not stave off a pang as he focussed on his girl at last and met her pleading, penetrating eyes.

He thought, The trip, that's one thing. But in the end she'll have to knuckle under. His wife herself, however she queened it, had knuckled under along with the rest, raising the kids and pitching into the ironing and baking and mending, the lot. For her, too, he feared the great round trip, among glacial persons with whom Waitangi and Timaru and the whole bloody Canterbury Bight might cut no ice. He said to himself, Poor old lass, fading a bit, and never any capacity for a laugh; but still with some fancies tucked away, mulled over in silence with moist eyes.

With women, disappointment could take the place of experience.

With this never out of mind, his daughter lolled among dank cushions at the world's end; swung a foot, twirled a lock of hair. On a low table, the mugs looked derelict, their stains and leavings. Putting Chateaubriand aside, Barbara observed, 'No man here would stand for it' — meaning, Such ponderings, such poetry.

'They couldn't bear it.' That vulnerability should make a man strong. That there could be thought without helplessness; without that very helplessness in which their women were marooned, as if, by existing at all, one had become a victim.

She would have said, I've known a full-grown man. But dreaded these death sentences that came to her as if from the perspective of future years: the antipodean consolation of having once touched infinity. As if, in age, she looked back to evenings when she had bowled along in a chariot, singing about the Foggy Dew.

So they read from an anthology of wartime verse on wartime paper, lines from unhappy France that passed like spasms over the inert and wilted room. This in turn was put aside, and Barbara swung down her legs, of which she was proud, and proposed that they walk on the beach. The morning had passed, as mornings did pass there, with this and that. Later, there would be sandwiches and ginger beer.