“Oh. That again?”
She perceives at once her mistake. He cannot ever say to her, finally, once and for all, that he cannot bear for her to bear a child. He will never say that. But he cannot agree to a child, either. She is, she now sees, forcing him into a corner and has been doing so for some years. A corner out of which the exit will be violence, not physical, but violence all the same, to her and to himself.
Brooke rises and pours the last of the martini from the silver jug.
“Does it seem like the kind of world, to you,” he says, “to bring children into?”
To that, there is no answer. None. No, it does not seem like the kind of world, etcetera. But she wants children all
the same. Why? Something too primitive to be analyzed? Something which needs to proclaim itself, against all odds? Or only the selfishness of wanting someone born of your flesh, someone related to you?
“I shouldn’t have brought up the subject,” Morag says. “I guess you’re right.”
“Look, love, let’s just see how things are in a year or so, shall we?”
“Yes.”
She knows she will not mention the subject again.
Finally she shows
Spear of Innocence
to Brooke. Reluctantly. He stays up until nearly midnight, reading it.
“Well,” he says at last, carefully, “it seems to me that the novel suffers from having a protagonist who is nonverbal, that is, she talks a lot, but she can’t communicate very well.”
“I know that. I know. That was part of the problem.”
“I also wonder,” Brooke says, flicking pages, “if the main character–Lilac–expresses anything which we haven’t known before?”
No. She doesn’t. But
she
says it. That is what is different.
“I see what you mean,” Morag says. “I’ll think about it.”
The next day she parcels up the mass of paper and sends it, submits it, to a publisher. She does not tell Brooke.
Memorybank Movie: Prin
Christie’s telegram reads:
Prin very bad could you come yours Christie.
Morag has always known, of course, that this would happen one day, but the time seemed faroff. Now it is time present.
“Brooke–I don’t want to go. That’s the awful thing. But I must.”
“Hush, little one,” he says, holding her tightly. “You’ll soon be back.”
All the way on the train to Winnipeg, and then on the bus to Manawaka, Morag tries to focus on the novel, but it is finished and away from her, and there is no longer any reason for Lilac Stonehouse to talk inside Morag’s head. She does not want to think of Prin, but can think of nothing else.
Christie meets her at the bus station, and they walk back to the house on Hill Street, in the dusk, the streetlights not yet turned on. Early summer, and the air smells of dust and the sweetly overpowering perfume of the lilacs that grow in mauve and purple grapelike bunches on the bushes with their heart-shaped leaves, in the front yards even of the small poor houses this side of town.
“Christie–how is she?”
“Not long for this world, Morag,” Christie says abruptly, and the euphemism sounds odd, coming from him.
“Is she at home?” Morag is praying she is not.
“She’s been in the hospital this past month,” Christie says. “She’s been pretty low for some time now. Even before she went in.”
Christie, coping with her alone. Has Eva continued coming in on Saturdays? How would Morag know, who writes to Christie perhaps once in three months?
Had it been wrong to want to get away? No, not wrong to want to get away, to make her getaway. It was the other thing that was wrong, the turning away, turning her back on the both of them.
The
both of them. As soon as she got back to Manawaka, she even began thinking in the old phraseology. Extraneous
the
, yet somehow giving more existence, more recognition to them than correct speech could have. Escapist. Wordsmith, forging screens.
“You’re looking smart, Morag,” Christie says.
She is dressed in a fairly pricey cotton dress and light blue summer coat, her hair short and swept back and upwards. At this moment she hates it all, this external self who is at such variance with whatever or whoever remains inside the glossy painted shell. If anything remains. Her remains.
Christie is looking terrible. He is, she realizes, sixty-four. He has looked old for as long as she can remember. Now he looks as ancient as a fossil or the dried and shrunken skin of some desert lizard. His once-blue eyes seem to have retreated rheumily into their sockets, and the skin of his face is brown-brittle, clinging close to his bones as though no flesh came between, mummified as a pharaoh.
“Well, here we are,” Christie says.
The house stinks. No other word for it. It has not been cleaned in some time, obviously. The odours seem to be: human sweat, urine from unemptied chamber pots, clinging smell of boiled cabbage, breadmould, and dirt. How could it be otherwise? Christie has done what he could. The house seems smaller than she has remembered it.
“When can I see her, Christie?”
“In the morning.”
Morag goes up to her old room. Cannot sleep. The tiny room is huge with ghosts. Ghosts of people and of tales. Morag, a child, a girl, a young woman. Christie ranting the old ironic battle cry. Clowny Macpherson. Piper Gunn who led his people to bravery. Gunner Gunn, who once, unbelievably, had life as Colin Gunn, her father. Rider Tonnerre, the talesman, the talisman. They are all here tonight. Who has been real and who imagined? All have been both, it seems.
Prin. Prin, long ago combing and plaiting Morag’s hair. Prin, sitting at the back of the church, going in just before
service began, not to be noticed, once she’d grown so gross.
“Christie–they can’t do anything for her, there?” Morag asks next morning.
“No. Not a christly thing.”
“Would she rather be home then? Now that I’m here.”
“She’d rather it,” Christie says in a low voice. “She couldn’t say so. But I know. It’s not right for you, though, Morag. It’s not a pretty sight.”
“Oh Christie–I’ve enough to answer for. Let’s just let her come home, then.”
The doctor, however, is adamant.
“I can’t prevent you from discharging her against my advice, Mrs. Skelton,” he says. “But she’d never stand the move.”
“She’s going to die anyway.”
The doctor frowns massively. It is not Dr. Cates. It is a younger man, a stranger, a newcomer. Probably been here for ten years. Newcomer. Good Lord.
“We needn’t hasten it,” he says ethically.
Why not? Why not? But faced with this medical sanctity, Morag finds she cannot argue. And Christie’s fighting days are over.
Morag goes alone to see Prin. A public ward, naturally, but the white cubicle-curtains are drawn around Prin’s bed. At the first sight of Prin, Morag feels only relief that the doctor has had his way. Impossible, impossible to have Prin home. And then the reverse reaction. Who wouldn’t prefer to die at home?
Prin lies in the hospital bed which is really too narrow. The white bedclothing rises over her, over her flaccid hugeness, her quietness. Her body is mercifully hidden by the pre-shroud around her. Her hair is thinner even than
Christie’s now, wisps and straggling feathers of the almost-bald headskin, reminiscent (unbearably) of the dead half-bald baby birds fallen from nests in the spring of the year. Prin’s face is as blank as a sheet of white paper upon which nothing will ever now be written. Her eyes are open and unseeing.
“Prin–”
Morag touches the untouchable face, the hands. No response.
“I don’t think Mrs. Logan knows you, dear,” the entering nurse busily says.
Morag says nothing. She sits for a while, her hand upon Prin’s white unmoving lard-carved hand. Then she goes away.
In her sleep, as the saying goes, Prin dies two days later. She has been in her sleep for years now, but whether there were dreams or nightmares in there, no one can know. Now at least there will be darkness. She has died a month before her fifty-ninth birthday.
Morag and Christie hold their wake in the kitchen at home, by the thin light of the one exposed bulb, the bottle of scotch on the table between them.
“She was not what you’d call an old woman, Morag.”
“I know that, Christie.”
“The strange christly thing about it,” Christie says, “is that she always seemed old, from the moment I first laid eyes upon her, and yet she always seemed young. I don’t mean
happy
young, you see.”
“I know. Yes.”
“I mean, more, young like a young child who’s yet to learn much speech. I think they had told her–her father, and maybe them teachers in the few years of schooling she’d had–they’d made her believe she was kind of simple in the head. Maybe she was. I never figured it out, quite.”
“Maybe she was simple in another way,” Morag says. “Another meaning of the word.”
Even eight or nine years ago, when she saw him last, Christie would have grasped this simple thought, this thought about simplicity. Not now. He looks at her from shrouded eyes, knowing he has not understood her meaning.
“I wouldn’t know about that,” he says, pouring more scotch for them both, “but I seen the way she was. It’s a bloody christly terrible life sometimes.”
Morag prays that he will not now go into the old act. He does not. He sits silent and shrunken, diminished. And then she wishes for the lost wildness, which would not, she sees now, embarrass her any longer.
“I was a hard man for her to live with,” Christie says. “I had a darkness in me. She could never see rhyme nor reason for it, as why should she?”
“Her life would’ve been a lot worse without you, Christie.”
“That,” Christie says, “we don’t know.”
“
I
know.”
“Do you, then?” A momentary blue light in his eyes. “Well, you’re young. You know a whole lot you won’t know later on.”
Morag laughs. How weird to laugh, here and now. But it seems right. They are both getting fairly drunk.
“Christie–remember those stories you used to tell me when I was a kid?”
Silence.
“I remember the telling of them to you,” Christie says at last, very quietly, “but I don’t recall no more what it exactly was I was telling, then.”
Morag wants now to tell him, to tell him all the tales. But cannot. She can do nothing at all, except to reach her
hand across the table and touch Christie’s leathered lizard-skin hand.
Prin’s funeral is a church funeral. Prin went to church for all those years, and liked the hymns, so it is only right and proper. Christie and Morag are agreed upon this. Morag tells the minister that they will not be requiring any short inspirational talk–just the service for the dead, and one hymn.
“Who will attend, and sing?” the young minister enquires pathetically.
“Could you not get the choir?”
“It’s not usually done, Mrs. Skelton, unless–”
He breaks off, unhappily. Unless the deceased is a well-known citizen.
“If you could just get the organist, then,” Morag says, angrily.
“Yes, I can do that all right. It’s my wife.”
Oh lucky wife.
In fact, there are eleven people there. Eva Winkler’s mother, and Eva, with her husband and three adopted kids, Eva looking older and thinner. And several elderly ladies, whom Morag does not recognize. Professional funeral attenders, perhaps, but at this moment Morag is grateful.
“Hi, Morag.” Eva, just before they enter the church.
How to say anything at all to Eva, who speaks softly and apologetically as always?
“Eva–thanks. For all you did for Prin.”
“It wasn’t that much,” Eva says. “She was always good to Vern and me.”
Sure. Prin gave them the occasional jelly doughnut. She gave Morag her only home.
“Where’s Vern these days, Eva?”
“Oh, he’s away out at the Coast now. He’s doing real well. We had a card, year ago last Christmas. He’s changed his name.”
“What?”
Vernon Winkler, smallboned, as a sparrow, in those days, being beaten by his father Gus, bear-man, pig-man, himself probably beaten by some longpast father in Europe.
“He calls himself Thor Thorlakson,” Eva says, smiling. “Sounds nice, don’t it?”
Eva, having dragged around a small brother for what must have seemed centuries to her, is now able to rejoice that Vern has made it. Vern is another one who has decisively left–more so, perhaps, than Morag, even. A card, a year ago last Christmas.
“Yeh. Very nice.”
They part. Eva and Morag, drifting apart into the church.
Service for the Burial of the Dead. The old words.
We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.
Hear my prayer, O Lord, and give ear unto my cry; hold not thy peace at my tears.
For I am a stranger with thee, and a sojourner, as all my fathers were.
A sojourner, as all my fathers were. Then the hymn. The hymn Prin used to like the best. They stood, all eleven, in the almost-empty church.
Jerusalem the golden
With milk and honey blest–
The singing is embarrassed, sparse. The organ pumps out the tune, to cover the paucity of voices. Christie stands, but silently. Morag sings, feeling crazily that it is all she can do for Prin now.
They stand, those halls of Sion,
All jubilant with song,
And bright with many an angel,
And all the martyr throng;
The Prince is ever in them,
The daylight is serene,
The pastures of the blesséd
Are decked in glorious sheen.
Those halls of Sion. The Prince is ever in them. What had Morag expected, those years ago, marrying Brooke? Those selfsame halls?
And now here, in this place, the woman who brought Morag up is lying dead, and Morag’s mind, her attention, has left Prin.
Help me, God; I’m frightened of myself.
The service over, the coffin is carried into the waiting hearse. Niall Cameron stands beside the newish vehicle, not the same as the one down in the valley, a long time ago.
Niall is a great deal older. The lines on his face have extended like shorthand scribblings, perhaps to be deciphered only by someone who knows that particular shorthand. His hands shake on the hearse doors. His eyes are not evasive, only absent. She wants to ask him if he remembers that day, and the fire. But cannot. She has the feeling that it would be too much, that he could not bear it. Niall Cameron, who undertakes the strange responsibility for the town’s dead, seems to bear now the mark of his calling upon him. His calling calls.
He has lived among the dead a long time. Will this make it easier for him, or the reverse, to die among the living?