“That remains to be seen, doesn’t it? The novel is a complex structure.”
“Don’t I know it,” Morag says glumly.
“Here–no long face, please. Come on, smile, love.”
Morag smiles.
“That’s better,” Brooke says. “How about a movie tonight?”
“Lovely. I’d love to. I’ll flash up the dishes and be ready in ten minutes.”
In fact, she would like to go back to Chapter Three. Lilac, going to work in the seedy nightclub, Crowe’s Cave, for the first time, hasn’t been presented properly. Lilac should be more hesitant–a combination of hesitancy and brashness. How to get that across?
Unfair to Brooke. Who is, after all, supporting her while she bashes away at the typewriter. And who loves her. And whom she loves.
Morag thinks of her smile. The eager agreement to go out. How many times has she lied to him before, or is this the first time? No, it is not the first time. She never thought of it that way before. It never seemed like lying. Now it does.
Brooke is depressed tonight, as he frequently is. The movie does not interest him, and they leave in the middle. At home, he pours them both a gin and tonic.
“Brooke–what is it?”
“Oh, I don’t know. The First Year class this year is singularly lacking in wits. It’s discouraging, I suppose. I sometimes think this is a hell of a way to spend one’s life. And if you
do
make contact, ever, more often than not you never know it.”
“That’s not quite so,” Morag points out. “Your Third Year class is full of good kids, and you know perfectly well you make contact with them.”
“Yes, I guess so. I sometimes wonder.”
“Brooke, there’s absolutely no doubt about it.”
“You may be somewhat prejudiced, my love.”
“Of course I’m prejudiced, damn it. But I’m not blind. I can see how they feel about you.”
How is it that she once imagined him to be totally certain of himself? No one is, of course. But with Brooke, you have to get within very close range before you can see it. His vulnerabilities are not on display. He learned his lesson almost too well as a child.
“What would you have preferred to do, then, Brooke, if not this?”
Brooke smiles ironically.
“I don’t know–run a tea plantation, perhaps. Somewhere in Assam, somewhere very remote, away from the varied awfulness of this world.”
“I know. I think I can understand that.”
“There is, however, no place, really, to go or to get away.”
“Brooke, why don’t you get a job teaching in India?”
He shakes his head.
“No, little one. I couldn’t go back. It’s all changed too much. I wouldn’t know it. I wouldn’t feel at home there any longer.”
Trapped in a garden of the mind, a place which no longer has a being in external reality. Is everyone? Not Morag. She wouldn’t go back to Manawaka for all the tea in China or Assam. And yet the town inhabits her, as once she inhabited it.
“Brooke–that’s terribly sad. I’m sorry. I wish there were something I could do.”
“It’s the human condition,” Brooke says abruptly. “There’s nothing anyone can do about it.”
“I can’t accept that, Brooke. I just cannot accept it.”
“Well, all right. There
is
something you can do, then. Keep on being happy and cheerful–it’s a kind of leaven. It’s what I need from you.”
I will never let him see the Black Celt in me.
Morag, shortly before marriage. It seemed an easy thing to undertake, then.
“Brooke, I will. Be–the way you said. I will.”
Will
is a strange word. Will she, then, by an act of will? And if this act of willing, however willingly undertaken, is false to her, can it be true to Brooke?
That night Brooke has the same (same? who can tell?) nightmare, the one which recurs every six months or so, and speaks the same name.
Minoo.
She cannot bear the weird monotone of his voice. She shakes his shoulder.
“Brooke–wake up.”
“Oh God. Not again? What a bore for you.”
“I don’t mind. Who
was
she, Brooke?”
He rubs his eyes and sits up in bed.
“Did I say–yes, I suppose I must’ve. Well, I may as well tell you, not that it’s all that important. She was a Hindu woman–really, at this point, I have no memory of whether she was young or old. She seemed old but she may only have been a girl. I was about five or six. She was my
ayah
.”
“Your what?”
“
Ayah.
She looked after me. She was very–oh, I don’t know–very affectionate and tender, I guess, and there was not much of that kind of feeling around our house. My mother spent nearly all her time lying in a hammock, suffering from migraine. Minoo used to play with me, and build little stone forts for me, and–”
“Go on.”
“Well,” Brooke says, reaching out for a cigarette and lighting it slowly, “actually, when I couldn’t get to sleep she would get into bed beside me, and hold me in her arms and
stroke me. I mean, all over. I used to have an orgasm or whatever is the equivalent in a child, and then I’d go to sleep. It was quite a common practise there, as I later learned. Not, however, among Europeans.”
“It may be somewhat different from Dr. Spock’s recommendations,” Morag says, “but I can’t see anything so heinous about it.”
“No,” Brooke says. “There wasn’t. But one evening my father came into the bedroom.”
“Oh. I see.”
“That was, as a matter of fact, the reason why, next day, he beat me and tied me to the steamer trunk outside the gate, with the sign
I Am Bad
on me.”
“Brooke, that was terrible.”
“Not really,” Brooke says. “It’s a nuisance that it comes back to me, that’s all. But it certainly strengthened my resolve. I hated him forever after, and I suppose as a child I must’ve wondered if he was right about it, but at least it taught me at an early age that life is tough and one has to be pretty tough, as well, to stand up to it. I learned to run my life my way, to keep a firm control over things so that the external forces would batter at the gates as little as possible.”
“And yet, earlier tonight, when you were depressed, you said it was the human condition and nothing could be done about it.”
“Oh, that. Well, yes, I guess that’s more or less fate, that kind of depression. But one can make oneself less vulnerable to the external blows, at least.”
“Too much so, perhaps. Brooke–listen. We hardly know a thing about one another. I mean, not really. Even after nearly five years. It’s necessary that we find out. I don’t think either of us has ever admitted how we really feel about a lot of
things. I’m not the way you think I am. And you’re not the way I thought you were, either. I just didn’t know. I like you better like this. Maybe I wouldn’t have, four years ago, but I do now. We’ve got to find out a lot more.”
“We may do,” Brooke says, putting out his cigarette and patting her gently on the rump, “but I also have an eight-thirty class in the morning. Let’s get some sleep.”
This cannot be said to be an unreasonable viewpoint in any sense. If you have to get up at seven you don’t lie awake all night yakking about your childhood and so on.
How much of Lilac’s childhood remained with
her
?
All.
It always does.
Morag usually stops writing about four, so she will have time to get outside the novel before Brooke arrives home. She does not always manage. Sometimes she forgets that time, outside, is passing.
This afternoon she has forgotten, because Lilac has aborted herself in a way that Morag recalls from long ago. And yet it is not Eva for whom Morag experiences pain now–it is Lilac only, at this moment. Morag finishes the episode, moves away from the typewriter, walks around the apartment, smoking, trying to shed the tension instantly, which is impossible. It is five minutes to six.
The key in the door, and Brooke comes in.
“Hello, love.”
“The dinner isn’t ready,” Morag blurts. “It isn’t even begun.”
He stares at her.
“For God’s sake, Morag, are you ill? What’s the matter, love? You’re shaking.”
A moment ago she felt aggressively defensive. Now she is ashamed to say.
“It’s–no, I’m all right. It’s just that I’ve reached a kind of crucial point. I mean, with the novel.”
Brooke laughs, relieved.
“Is
that
it? Heavens, I thought you’d been suddenly stricken with something serious.”
I have. I have.
But she does not say this. Odd–if you had a friend who had just aborted herself, causing chaos all round and not only to herself, no one would be surprised if you felt upset, anxious, shaken. It is no different with fiction–more so, maybe, because Morag has felt Lilac’s feelings. The blood is no less real for being invisible to the external eye. She wants to explain, but feels too tired.
“Well, never mind,” Brooke is saying. “It doesn’t happen often. We’ll go out to eat. You run along now and make yourself look presentable.”
She wants only to go to sleep for about fourteen unbroken hours. But goes and puts on a decent dress and does her hair. It is, after all, kind of him. It really is. He might have been angry and has not been.
She takes three aspirins and tries to make herself look especially nice.
SEVEN
W
ork over for the day, Morag walked. The road past the house was dirt only, supposed to be maintained by the municipality, but no voters worth mentioning lived along here, so the ruts were deep and old. Small red-branched dogwood bushes were now in white cluster-flower. The purple and white wild phlox were so rich and heavy with their July perfume that they seemed almost out of keeping here, amongst the plain coarse grass and the dust.
Red-winged blackbird. You would not guess their concealed splendour, seeing them on a branch with their wings folded. Only when they took off, the outfanning of those scarlet feathers hidden among the black.
A groundhog fatly scuttled from the path. Morag liked them–they seemed portly and innocuous, vine-gobblers, meaning well. But Royland said the groundhogs’ holes made the cattle trip and break legs. Idiotic groundhogs, uncarnivorous, scuttlebustling about on their own tiny business, not one of your great antagonistic creatures, no dinosaurs or jaguars they, yet busting the legbone of some dumbly innocent cow all the same.
Morag always carried a stick when she walked these roads. So as to fend off the following: mad dogs frothing with hydrophobia; killer foxes; coyotes or some few ancient wolves which might have survived here since pioneer times, unknown to anyone, but possibly lurking in the underbrush, panting to pounce; and poisonous snakes, of which the snake book said this area had none.
Morag returned to the house. The swallows were positively dangerous, as always at this time of year, dive-bombing anyone who came within eyeshot of the nest, which was above the kitchen window–a goblet-shaped structure of mud and straw, with its patio on either side. The fledglings were nearly ready to fly, and took up all the space in the nest, so the parent swallows slept on the mud-and-straw patio these nights. Admirable parents. Intelligent. Joyous.
“It’s okay,” she told them now, as they flew to within an inch of her head. “I’m no threat to your young.”
Imagine dying from a fractured skull delivered by a hysterical parent swallow. A novel death. In a novel, who’d believe it?
Novel.
Odd word. Swallows never actually hit, though. They possessed fine radar.
The kitchen door was open. Morag had closed it when she went out.
“Hi,” Pique said.
“Pique!”
Morag hugged the girl, and Pique did not seem to mind. Seemed even glad to be here. Looking just the same–tall, slender, almost skinny, long straight black hair loose around her shoulders, dressed in blue jeans and what appeared to be a man’s shirt of ancient vintage with sleeves cut off short and unhemmed, wide leather belt with old brass buckle which she hadn’t had before but which had an oddly familiar look.
“How
are
you, honey?” Morag asked, holding the girl at arms length as though searching for signs of malnutrition, ill-treatment by world, or sadness of any variety. Shadows under Pique’s eyes. Sleepless nights? Worry? Over what?
“You look a bit tired,” Morag said.
Pique laughed.
“I’m okay, Ma. I hitched from Toronto, and didn’t have such good luck. I
am
a bit tired. That’s why I was kind of delayed, the luck. I’m starving. Got any peanut butter? I’ve just arrived this second. Has Gord phoned? I sure as hell hope not. What hassles. He won’t go away. I don’t want to damage the guy, but what can I do? Where’s your bread–in the fridge? Yeh. You shouldn’t eat white bread, Ma, it’s very bad for you. How are
you
?”
“Fine. Fine.” Morag lit a cigarette, hands unsteady. “It’s good to see you. Are you okay, really?”
Pique grinned, dark brown slightly slanted eyes filled with faint golden lights, sparks.
“Relax, Ma. Shall I make us some coffee? Where’s the percolator? You shouldn’t drink that instant slop. It’s plastic. Sure, I’m all right. Really. Can’t you see? I had a pretty good time. Some times weren’t so good. They hate kids hitching, some places. They’d really like you to be dead. Really
dead
, for real. It’s the anger that scares me.”
“Yeh. Me, too.”
“Because they don’t know it’s there inside them,” Pique said. “They think they’re sweet reasonableness, and it’s
you
that’s in the wrong, just by being, and not being like them, or looking like them, or wanting their kind of life. It’s the anger you can feel, even if they don’t lay a hand on you. It’s, like–well, visible. You can see and taste and smell it. You know?”
“I can guess. I’ve seen it, under other circumstances, when I was a kid.”
“I wondered about that,” Pique said, in between mouthfuls of sandwich, “when I went to Manawaka. I guess it’s changed a lot, on the surface. Underneath–well, I dunno.”
“Did you see–”
“I don’t think I can talk about it, just yet,” Pique said carefully. “I’ll tell you about it later on, maybe, sometime. I don’t think Christie’s old house is there any more. Lotta new little tacky houses on Hill Street.”
“I couldn’t bear to see it. Although it could hardly look worse than it did then.”
“Prosperous town, I’d say.”
“Yes. I suppose so. Did you go down in the valley?”
“I’ll tell you
later
, I said.”
“Sorry.”
“That’s okay. Got any oranges or bananas?”
“On the sideboard. Where’d you get the jazzy belt?”
“From my dad. He gave it to me. He had to shorten it a lot. It was his.”
“Of course. I knew I’d seen it before.”
“I saw him in Toronto, Ma.”
“I know. He phoned me.”
“He
did
? Why?”
“I don’t know,” Morag said, feeling slightly annoyed. “To say he’d seen you, and what did I mean, letting you go off like that. He has his reasons for saying that, though.”
“That’s funny,” Pique said. “He didn’t take that line with me. He said he knew why I had to go out west and that. He did, too.”
“Yeh. Well, maybe he only said that to me because he thought it was what I’d expect to hear. I think he really phoned
to tell me he’d seen you and you were okay. He always thought I was kind of–”
“What?”
“Bourgeois. Square.”
“
Square.
I love your idiom, Ma. It’s like an old dance tune from the forties.”
“Brat. You wait. Yours will be passé, too.”
“Well,
were
you, like,
square
?”
“It all depends where you stand,” Morag said. “To him, I suppose I was, at least in some ways. He thought I wanted things that he didn’t care about. I did, too, but then, later, I didn’t.”
“What things?”
“Oh–respectability, wall-to-wall carpets and that.”
“Did you really? Poor Ma.”
“Indeed. But it wasn’t all that bad. It wasn’t like that at all, really. I can’t explain.”
“My dad gave me some songs,” Pique said. “That was the best thing he gave me.”
“He told me. That’s good. That’s fine.”
Hypocritical Morag. Jealous of the fact that he had that to give. Like A-Okay’s poems. Could you hand over a stack of books to someone? Only to someone who wanted to read, presumably. Maybe Pique would read Morag’s out of curiosity when Morag was pushing up daisies. But
songs
. And he had been singing them so long ago, long before everyone in sight began going around singing their own songs. Lucky bugger. God knows he’d had a rocky road, withal, though.
“I never thought he’d actually teach them to me,” Pique said. “He’d sung them that one time before, you remember? No, twice–didn’t he, when I was a little kid, somewhere, as well?”
“Yes. Yes, he did. Some of them.”
“Gord couldn’t see how important it was to me. He thought it would be just the same if you listened to a record and picked up anybody else’s song that way. I couldn’t explain. It was kind of strange to see him again, my dad. Did you love him?”
Morag sat with her hands around the coffee mug. Thinking. How to reply and get across that much complexity in a single well-chosen phrase? Impossible.
“I guess you could say love. I find words more difficult to define than I used to. I guess I felt–feel–that he was related to me in some way. I’d known him an awfully long time, you know. I mean, at the time when you were born, I’d known him an awfully long time
then
, even. I’m not sure
know
is the right word, there.”
“Who cares about the right word?” Pique cried. Then, suddenly, the hurt cry which must have been there for years, “Why did you
have
me?”
“I wanted you,” Morag said, stunned.
“For your own satisfaction, yes. You never thought of him, or of me.”
And to that accusation there was no answer. None. Because it was partly true. To have someone of her own blood. But only partly. She had not conned a kid out of him, after all. Or not quite, anyway. How did he look at it? She didn’t know. But he’d given the songs to Pique.
Silence. The afternoon sun pouring through the window as though the daylight would be forever. The young swallows fidgeting and flittering in the nest, wanting to fly.
“Pique–”
Pique, sitting at the end of the long table, put out her hand and touched Morag’s hand.
“Yeh. I know. Never mind. It’s okay. You know something, Ma?”
“What?”
Pique was about to cry, but refused to do so, was forced to reject tears as an indignity against what she was about to say.
“His voice isn’t very good any more,” Pique said steadily. “The jobs are getting harder to find. Lots of competition around now, and he’s only got one thing to cash in on now, in lots of places.”
“Which is?” But she knew.
“You know, he’s still kind of an oddity,” Pique said, in that same unnervingly calm distant voice. “That’s a bad scene, for him. And he’s not so young any more.”
“Nor am I,” Morag said. “Nor can I go on forever, either. Sometimes I’d like to see him.”
“Why don’t you, then? He’s there.”
“I don’t know if he would like to see me. Probably not.”
Pique’s voice was not calm and distant any longer.
“You make me sick. You make me bloody sick. You’re so goddamn proud and so scared of being rejected. You’re so stupid in that way, you really are.”
“It’s not that simple,” Morag said.
But maybe it was. No, it wasn’t. Indecision all around. If she went unannounced to see him, he would laugh bitterly in her face. Or would he? She felt extremely tired.
“How would some dinner grab you?”
“Okay,” Pique said, without enthusiasm. “Shall I cook, or will you?”
“Me, I guess. You can tomorrow.”
Unfortunately, at that moment the door was decisively knocked upon. Morag prayed. Let it be Royland. Or A-Okay and Maudie. But of course, no.
Gord. Who else? His straw hair tangled, his boy’s face still not quite set into the firmer outlines it would have in a few
years, but showing strength of the bones under the skin. A determined tenacious face, but the blue eyes were bewildered.
“Now, listen, Pique,” he began. “Just listen for one minute, will you?”
“I asked you not to come here,” Pique said, voice low and helpless. Then, flaring up, “I’m going
out
. And don’t follow me, either,
see
?”
Like a kid. But only because she didn’t know what to do.
“If you’re going out,” Morag said, “why don’t you take a pan and pick some of the wild strawberries up the meadow?”
“Oh, for God’s
sake
!” Pique ran, and the screendoor slammed.
Tactful Morag. It had seemed practical, that’s all.
“Want some coffee?” she asked Gord, hoping he would say
No
and leave immediately.
He nodded and sat down.
“Why does she
do
it, Morag?” he asked, begging for revelations. “I mean, what’ve I ever done to make her be like that? She was okay for a while, there, on the way out west, once I caught up with her. Which wasn’t easy, believe me. Finding her. Then she just sort of went away. What’s she want me to
do
?”
She wants you to get lost, you poor mug. No, that’s too flippant.
“Look, Gord,” Morag said, “she cares about you. That is, she cares about you as a person. But I just think she feels she has to be on her own awhile, and find out what she’s meant to do. You will just have to let go of her.”
Would it be kinder simply to tell him that Pique couldn’t get on with him any more, through no fault of his or hers, that she was on some kind of search on her own behalf, that she couldn’t care about him as once she had and couldn’t pretend to feel what she didn’t feel? No, not kinder, probably.
Am I only interpreting her through my own experience? Maybe she doesn’t feel that at all. Why all that talk, suddenly, about her dad?
“Yeh, I guess I know.” He glared for an instant at Morag.
All Morag’s fault, he probably thought. Brought up the girl strangely. What could you expect? Bad scene. Morag could feel Gord’s hostility like lye thrown in her face.
“Couldn’t you suggest anything?” Gord then said, pleadingly. “I feel it must be my fault, but I don’t know how.”
Morag perceived that what she had taken to be hostility had been in fact self-reproach on his part.
“I don’t know what to say,” she said. “I don’t think there’s anything.”
Gord rose.
“Yeh. Well. I thought probably not. Thanks anyway, for the coffee. I’ll be going now. Tell Pique if she wants to see me, phone. My aunt’ll take the message if I’m not there.”
No doubt, at least for the time in which it took him to find another woman, he would rise up at 4:00
A.M.
if necessary, summoned from his aunt’s farm, and come rocketing out.
Through the swamp and fog (or flame and fire, or ice and snow; can’t remember) I gotta go where you are.
“Chloe.” Done by Spike Jones, a sendup, clanging with tubas and cowbells, aeons ago. Morag was becoming an antique. Also, mind-wanderer.
Mooner
, Prin had said.
“I’ll tell her. Gord, I’m sorry.”
She was, too. Also for Pique. The infinite capacity of humans to wound one another without meaning or wanting to.
An hour later, when it was nearly dark, Pique returned, carrying an old coffee tin full of aromatic wild strawberries.