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The Godwits Fly

Chapter Twenty — Thorny Mauds

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Chapter Twenty
Thorny Mauds

When Kay, undressing, stretched up her arms, her skin was clear honey-brown, and the white silk she wore crisped softly against it, like foam on sand. She despised girls who didn't wear white underneath. She was coolness on the eyes, because she always looked so fresh. Her hair was a shiny black shingle that might have been varnished on her round head, her brown eyes soft enough to be Maori eyes, but livelier—old sherry, not treacle. The American sailor boy said of her, in his long drawl, ‘Say, you're just like them little leaves when they come out—not the green ones, the little pink ones.’ People were always falling in love with Kay, desperately and inconclusively. She called them Jimmie and Johnno and Hugo-Love, and gave them toehold on her sunny raft.

‘Did I hurt you much? I didn't mean to barge into you like that. I'm always barging.’ Then Kay's open sunny face changed; Eliza felt herself draw up, tight and hard, inside her green gown. ‘She knows,’ reported the hard, tight self, ‘I can't wear this dress any more. I must be getting conspicuous.’

Rightly, then, her self should have taken her by the shoulders, swung her round and marched her off. But instead of this, Kay and herself were walking along together, talking; and Kay said, ‘You're going to have a baby, aren't you? I'm a nurse.… Oh, that's nothing.’ And she told several stories about girls who had illegitimate babies. Their babies were always the prettiest and smartest. ‘Because they're the little wild roses,’ said Kay. They bought some Thorny Mauds from a fruit barrow, tiny green-cased mandarins, thirty for sixpence, full of sweetness inside their vivid shells. They went to the Haymarkets, where every nationality sold every product. Chinese held by the legs squawking poultry, and sold viridian blocks of ice-cream. Kay crunched three between her strong white teeth. ‘Nothing makes me sick. But maybe you'd better not.’ They bought sixpenny bunches of native roses, hot pink, and tucked them in their gowns. One shop had in its windows a wonderful raffle trousseau, value 400 guineas, a dozen of everything, all in crêpe de Chine and lace. They took raffle tickets. page 203 ‘But look at me,’ protested Eliza, half-laughing, half-crying. ‘That won't last for keeps,’ said Kay, ‘you can't tell me, I'm a trained nurse.’

They were in the Peking Café, and blue paper birds, like creatures on the painted lanterns sent long ago by Grandmother-in-China, soared out on threshing streamers, softly hitting outstretched palms. Then the smell of coffee made a broad brown river, all down a street where little shops ground it piercingly new in their mills. As they walked side by side, Eliza talked in a high self-pitying voice about Ena and the roaches and making the slovenly warm beds, which made her feel sick. Kay said, ‘But don't you pay?’

‘Of course I do, thirty shillings a week. But I said I'd help, or she said it, and then this happened.’

‘Then why don't you clear out? Sydney's a big enough place, goodness knows.’ Kay stopped, and said accusingly, ‘You're afraid of them.’ Her eyes were two little brown gardens. Eliza cried, ‘Stop, Kay—you don't understand. It's not ordinary being afraid—it wouldn't be much use if I were, everything's happened, and I can't get worse hurt than I am. But everything seems unreal, don't you see? My hands and feet don't feel as if they belong to me, they're so funny and far away. If I put out the light at night, it's like a thick blanket crushing down on me, I can feel it lying over me. I can't be bothered fighting them when I feel like that.’

Kay said, ‘You ought to move away from there.’ There was a hole in the flimsy golden sunshine, through it she could melt away as easily as she had come; she stood on the Sydney pavement, brown and lithe, and behind her shoulders the Gardens sloped down, two rows of dirty plaster casts, cut grass, then the sea.

Eliza said, ‘All right, Kay. I'll move. I'll start looking for a new place to-morrow.’ As soon as she had said it, she was real again, and knew that she could actually move. Life was a queer music, shot through with many colours. Kay said, ‘Let's walk down Greek Street. I think it's rather romantic, all those funny dago shops.’ Eliza's problem being cleared up, Kay herself became faintly sad, after the fashion of one young girl with another, when their story is not stale between them. She talked in her clear, full voice of a married man she had loved once. And he had gone away, leaving a great bunch of red canna lilies outside her door, and she was always thinking he might come back again. But meanwhile there were Jimmie and Johnno and Hugo-Love, and they all proposed.

Polly sat battering the lid of a tobacco tin against the bricks in the backyard. She sang to herself as she played, a little shrill war-chant. Her streaky yellow hair flew back from her Mongolian face. Ena page 204 came in when Eliza had nearly finished packing. The clean white things she had bought for her baby spread over her hands. Ena's sallow little face, with the heavy goitre underneath, fell into its lines of sullenness. She said, ‘Well, you didn't seem to make yourself at home, Mrs White.’

‘Your father was horrible to me. And you knew.’

‘I think Dad was quite right,’ said Ena. But it didn't matter what she said, there was a taxi outside, and Eliza could say, ‘We're all square about money, aren't we?’ Only, far beyond them, far out of their individual reach, the fight went on, the fight of the dying slum plants for their sunlight, the antagonism of the dying slum plants for anything that got in their way. In the long run, it had to be Ena who won: not because she was worth more, but because her hair was lustreless under the wet red streak of her tam-o’-shanter, and because she held on to a towel when her babies came. But for the moment Ena's victory hung suspended. Eliza went out from the little house, and saw in the strips of brick and mud big sunflowers, heavy-headed like the little boy from next door. They nodded their thick brown and clarified gold in gardens Eliza would never see again. As the taxi jerked, she thought of one line Rainer Maria Rilke had written, and it said everything for them, though they would neither hear nor care:

Children and cherry trees are always ailing.1

She went first to a high, cold, central hostelry, many stories high, and lined with blue-and-white tiles. It had lovely bright bath-taps, nickel bright as silver. Months since she had swum in a really clean, really hot bath. She liked fingering the clean taps. Mostly she lived on Thorny Maud mandarins, but the sickness had gone away from her now, and she could go down into the underground cafés for a sixpenny hot meal each day. One place, run by two old Scotchwomen, was small and friendly. Eliza told them that her husband was away living in Melbourne, and they laughed, the kind, matey laugh of respectable women joking another into their circle. ‘You'll have something to take home to him, won't you, dear?’ After that, while she was hunting for lodgings, she nearly always had dinner at the Edinburgh.

She no longer hated Sydney: only sometimes the noise, sometimes the growing heat. But she had to be desperately careful about the next lodgings, because some of the little houses were vacuums, ready to suck in and swallow anyone strange, either for the money or for the sake of someone to talk to. The women were liked caged animals: no, worse, liked domesticated animals, all stare, and readiness either to scratch, or to be friendly once their curiosity was appeased. They page 205 saw she was going to have a baby, and they told her, leaning on their brooms, how their own were born and died. She walked along their streets, where the old flaky stucco was the same colour as the sunshine, and an Old Men's Home had the extraordinarily peaceful name, ‘Sunset.’ But she supposed, watching the old boys potter about in their garden of blind roses, that this too was Have, like most official things. At last she found a room in Stanmore, where the woman was taken up in her own daughter, seventeen and too pretty, and where nothing intruded but the blare of a radio through the wall. Kay came and celebrated, on new-ground coffee, strawberries and asparagus; they lay in their white knickers on the bed, trying to keep cool, and Kay told about her patients who had proposed, and the one who threw the flatiron instead. But for most of the time, Kay would be out of town. She was qualified to take private cases, and went anywhere.

Under the huge Moreton Bay fig trees in Centennial Park, grass tangled in green undersea forests, stealthily cool. Boys and girls riding on ponies made upright shadows across the asphalt that divided the two seas of grass, the last edging out towards a pond. Wild duck with pointed wings rose into the air, and flapped crying into the sky's greater mere. The liquid grass made its touch against hands and face, like old jade. The boys and girls were beautiful, with their brisk whipped faces and good hands carelessly on their bridle-reins. They did not ride fast, any more than a bird sings fast, but they urged their mounts into the cool of the morning, leaning forward slightly against the wind. Eliza sat watching them, or sometimes read Nietzsche and Melville, and odd scrappy books of poems picked up at the great Library where they would give you books as if you were a Prince, almost without asking who you were or whether you would really return them. While the grass touched her, her body seemed to live a rested life of its own, not disconnected from earth's vitality. But while her mind touched Nietzsche's book, a stinging clear exaltation ran into her, and she knew what it was Timothy had found lacking in her. Flavourless and cold, the minds that had never been touched by this writer who bore a sword and a burning brand. Then Melville's strange book, Mardi, ran by in a cool stream. A little unknown poet, Rachael Anne Taylor, said:

Sleep, sweet, sleep—
The gods of beauty seek in the spring
From out of the world's white flowering
Some delicate thing to keep.2

page 206

She looked out with cool eyes across the ponds, and an old solemn couple, wandering by like two grotesque black ants, came and talked to her about the life beyond. ‘Sister,’ they called her. They were spiritualists who had lost an only daughter, and were perfectly convinced that by rapping and the pale light of séances, this missing ant would make herself manifest to them. They shook hands warmly with Eliza when they left. ‘Dear Sister,’ they said, ‘Dear Sister.’ And a leaf's weight shore through its stalk, like the thin neck of a young girl, and dropped into her lap. She walked past the lotus pool to Palm Drive, where at night the cars’ lights were golden frightening dragons. Confusedly she thought, ‘I'll not forget any of it.’ The heaviness of her body was momentarily a sweet heaviness, and this grassy place its consummation.

Eliza was a sick restlessness, awake in the night, thinking, ‘Cars, cars, cars. Radios. Why don't they turn off their radio. Bloody devils, I'd like them to be dead, I'd like to kill them. Why can't they turn off their cars and their radios?’

White face, black hair in small ringlets. Like the dream, but too white. Yet not cold to touch.

‘Make me go to sleep, please. Make me go to sleep.’

You shall be betrayed again and again, on a lonely field, and your seed shall perish, or be taken from you. And always you are host to your own enemy—fear, pain, love, mortality.

It is easy to love the little dead. They make no heaviness, they are not a load to carry about. Yes, but the face which has never lived, only been seen for a moment, makes its own demand of a love that can never be wholly selfish. It is so lonely, so lonely.

The jacarandas are a far, pale mist, evening's colour drenching the leafless limbs of trees. Little buds nuzzle on the grey bark of those trees not yet in bloom, others still hold the lingering greenish colour of the sap. The coral trees prick up their scarlet ears. Lie so, relaxed and light, not in the labour-room but in a big old room upstairs, the first quiet room in the world. No more pain, but morphine. Go to sleep. That woman wrote:

Sleep, sweet, sleep—
The gods of beauty seek in the spring
From out of the world's white flowering
Some delicate thing to keep.

But the wrong one slept. Timothy would have been sorry, he wanted a baby, he would always have wanted my baby. He would have picked page 207 up my baby and carried him under the green rafters, running with long strides.

The morning after her baby was born dead, Eliza, still heavily drugged, recognized in her mind an old companion. She felt neither happy nor unhappy, merely still, as the nurse moved about the room. When she was alone, words ran in her mind, measured themselves, a steady chain of which no link was weak enough to break. Long ago, she had called the power ‘it.’ It was years since her poems had fallen into a foolish little rubble of shards and ashes, schoolgirl sentimentality. This was different. It was the old power back; but with a stronger face, an estranged face, it sat down in the house of her mind.

On the afternoon of the seventh day Ena Burns came. She entered in a little rush, her sallow cheeks reddening like the old tam-o’-shanter.

‘Oh, Mrs White, I've been that upset about you.’

‘She'll go away soon,’ thought Eliza, lying flat and quiet, answering back when Ena wanted to be answered back. At last Ena did rise to go. She got as far as the door, came back, shook hands again, then hung about, uncertain. At last, her eyes over-bright, she spoke out.

‘You'll give me something to remember you by, Mrs White?’

‘Whatever you like.’

‘His little clo'es. Since you wouldn't be needing them, I thought perhaps you'd give me his little clo'es. Even if it was only the shawl.…’

‘Yes, yes. Of course you can have them.’ Make your voice flat and quiet, quiet as your body.