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Chapter Ten
Timothy

Timothy-getting-out-through-a-hole-in-our-back-fence.

Afterwards Eliza tried hard to re-create the first chapter of Timothy, but only the drawing-room's stiff, robustious life, filled to overflowing with hard shiny pot-plants, the piano, Carly's snapshot album, the big dark picture of Bonny Prince Charlie and his two Scottish lairds, the brass irons in the fender, came out clear. Blurred, ill-focused little figures sat on the sham leather chairs, making faint remarks at one another. ‘Won't you have some more cushions, Mr Cardew?’ and ‘I'd sooner have men who work on the roads than men who work in offices.’ That was from Eliza, to please John, who struck in heavily. ‘Ah, she's right, she's right. If I had my time over again, I'd see them all damned before I'd lick the clerk's platter of leavings.’

When Augusta told Eliza that she was to waste her Sunday afternoon meeting Timothy Cardew, she was indignant.

‘Who and what is Timothy Cardew?’

‘One of your father's Bolshevist horrors, I expect.’ Augusta helped with the top back buttons of the Indian Squaw dress, its green flannel slashed into fringes at neck and hem. ‘They work together. Your father says he writes poetry. You know what he is for picking them up.’

‘But, Mother, Simone and I were going eeling in the Hutt this afternoon.’

Injudicious: Augusta and Simone didn't mix. ‘Stay home and do as your father asks you, for once,’ Augusta commanded; then, rather abstrusely. ‘Since he works in the office, he won't have vermin. It'll be in the mind, then.’ Eliza went into the drawing-room and strummed the keyboard of the piano—tra-la-la, Melodie d’ Amour—seeing Hutt River pools blackish-silver, old tarnished coins. Stumps under the surface, and prickles, and Simone sitting with her knees drawn up… the only person worth fighting with. ‘Curse poets. The good ones are all dead. This will be an ape.’

Timothy-getting-out-through-a-hole-in-our-back-fence. The hole was under the ngaio tree, much too squeezed to fit his shoulders, and he page 122 looked up and laughed, backing ungracefully into the empty section whence the Hannay cats came marching home, their fur a mass of bidi-bidi, and sat madly scratching their tummies on the settee. The snap came clear there. His eyes were bright green, much darker than Simone's, not vacant, not at all thwarted. He said, ‘I'm going to run now,’ and did—as abnormal as if he had sprouted wings and disappeared flashing over the house-tops, but a trick of which Timothy never broke himself. In argument, in sorrow, in passionate love-scenes (Timothy made passionate love-scenes, in dead earnest, but always with the proviso that some other time he was going to kiss some other girl), the thought slid into his mind: ‘Now I'm going to run. Oh, by Peter and Michael, now I'm going to run.’ If you were a good comrade, even if he felt sorry for you and wanted you to see the light, he grabbed your wrist, and before you knew it your feet were pounding turf or pavement, whichever came nearest. You sobbed and struggled, but Timothy never pulled up until your heart had long since escaped from your ribs, and the gorse-bushes, the tufty grass, the houses with red caps on crooked, were a jolted rhythm of sheer insanity. Then he dropped down, laughing, and pulled you down beside him, starting to kiss you with quick, hard kisses, themselves rather like pebbles or pieces of turf. Hedgehogs came tumbling out of the yellow grass, with their funny little cold noses and shrivelled paws, and Timothy watched, pointing them like a setter as the grass-heads swayed. When he had them, he made them uncurl, and tickled their underneaths. ‘Soft-belly, soft-belly.… These are our mascots, aren't they, Eliza? These are our special beasts.’

Timothy, when he had covered in a few strides the empty section, getting the ends of his grey trousers matted with bidi-bidi, stopped for a moment and looked down. Streets and houses made vague explanatory gestures between the bare golden drops and the bays, but the sea had no need to explain itself.

He laughed, and out of three old tiled houses beside the Botanical Gardens chose the centre one, against whose garret windows the sunset was heliographing in fierce flashes, long and short, short, two longs and a short. In this house he installed Eliza, and told her to cook a rabbit for supper. Then he suspected that she couldn't cook, and reminded himself that he liked live rabbits, and was now a vegetarian, A.D.G.B.S. So leaving the fleshpots, he led her to the bookshelf, and was upset to find that she hadn't read Maurice Hewlett's The Forest Lovers, or Stephen Phillips’ Marpessa. ‘But, my dear child—’ ‘Rostand's Chanticleer is beautiful too,’ she excused herself. He laughed, thinking her childish, and would have taken her upstairs to bed; but page 123 loving Eliza brought back other women to his mind—Damaris Gayte, whose forty-year-old wisdom and coiled black hair made him think of a steel river; Lucy, whom he had hurt so much that seeing her face made him actually cry, tears like red-hot needles pricking his eyeballs. If Lucy had had a baby, he would have married her—he thought he would marry any girl who was going to have a baby of his—but he was glad she hadn't. Living with a girl whose face made his eyes prickle would have been too much discomfort. He swerved back to Eliza, and thought that after all, though childish, she was interested in books as well as in being a girl, and he had never met one of the type before. He wouldn't ever take her up to bed in the red-tiled house, he would teach her Nietzsche when she was a little older, and keep her white, for an ideal.

A little wind came and caught him a soft, weightless blow under the chin, like a spaniel trying to attract notice with its begging paw. He forgot women, and with the spaniel at heel plunged down into the valley, which was now misted over, a large basin of curdled, crinkled milk, sapphire at the edges. From a road on which he met no one and smelt nothing but wild honeysuckle, he broke into Tinakori Road, which ran past the Gardens into the city; a road obviously of the horse-drawn age, though beetle trams crawled along its midriff. Its three-decker houses, crooked and out of drawing, leaned weighted with fantastic shadows, weighted with humanity. Against lighted windows Timothy saw hands and heads moving, sometimes ponderous, sometimes shrivelled like crazy leaves. A girl plunged into a pianoforte solo, spraying the notes laboriously behind her. Her lampshade was red. Timothy listened, then walked swiftly on, lifting the roofs off, smiling, loving the inextricable intimacies of a city at night, just as he loved the bidi-bidis on his only good pair of trousers. At the Dog's Hospital he had once helped the vet. to confine a Pomeranian, and was amazed at the tininess of the wet rat puppies, their blind heads breaking out of the silken bag. He wondered how the Pom was getting on; he would have liked to pat her head, saying gently, ‘Hullo, old girl… hullo, old girl,’ just as he had before the vet. poured chloroform above her aristocratic nostrils.

In a waiting-shed he saw a blurred and shapeless figure sitting, an old tramp. Timothy adopted what he hoped was the tramp slouch, and sat down. Easy to get into conversation by offering a fill of tobacco, and he loved the seared face and horny eyes lit up by the match, but he was disappointed when the tramp called him ‘Sir,’ instead of ‘Digger’ or ‘Mate.’ In his dreams, Timothy was the complete godwit, always boarding ships for London, working his passage among the page 124 roaring black-and-gold gizzards of furnaces, men jagged as tree-stumps in the dead landscape of Hell. When he landed, he wasted no time on white cliffs at Dover, but made straight for the city, touching with gentle hands and thought all the lives huddled up, lying about on park benches. It was as if he knew for certain that among all the oysters named Dud was the pearl named Of Great Price. But the others he loved also, because they were Duds, because they hadn't any pearls. Another warm throb of affection went through him, as he remembered Eliza had said she liked best men who worked on the roads, not in offices. She was right.…

He walked into a second-hand bookshop kept by a little twisty Jew, a devil of a Jew, with a drip under his nose. (Pearl of Great Price?) Here he bought her London's Martin Eden, and on the flyleaf scrawled, ‘In this see ourselves, but with the discipline of creation.’ He underlined ‘discipline of creation’, yet was less sure what it meant after he had dropped the package into a pillar-box than before. As he swung along, the idea came back to him: creation in the artistic sense, powerfully diverted from the body. It seemed tragic to him that at twenty he hadn't created anything worth while; though he liked ‘Song Soul’, his clay bust of a woman with head thrown back in an ecstasy of singing. Clay was his second string, and he handled it much better than verse. But it crumbled under his fingers, irritating and brittle, while the line lasted.

Are the crippled children, then, the sick thoughts of God?

He was right under the oblong shadow of the match-factory, a thin lemon rind of moon hanging on its shoulder. It chilled his blood a little. The wailing of a Chinese fiddle squalled down the streets, which farther along offered up stench, as if a main had broken. But it was only the smell of life, where garbage-cans, tomcats, listless Hindoos sleeping in ragged rooms, are all details. A girl of perhaps ten, thinlegged, hopped by like a sparrow, keeping pace with a great hulk whose shoulders were so hunched that she was midway between giantess and dwarf. Her menacing voice said, ‘And I says to him, that's no bloody good to me, see? And either you'll do as I says, or I'll bust your bloody face open.’ The little girl giggled, a shrill fountain of laughter in the dusk. There was a white women's street in the Asiatic quarter. Fat voices spewed out of doorways.

‘ ’Ow about a—, boy?’

He couldn't go in, he was too much afraid, not only of disease and of the prickly heat called shame, but afraid that they might laugh at him, the great horse-laugh of the body for the other body that had page 125 tangled itself up with a mind. Yet he was good to look at, proud. One day in London or Liverpool, he'd try it. Right down into the gullet of darkness, like the King's diver in the poem:

And the youth from the waves shall return never more.

Two cadgers whined for the price of a meal. Timothy felt his panache come back. They were old and seedy, Cockneys with broken teeth. He linked arms with them. ‘Come along to the pie-cart, boys.’

Timothy as John's domestic pet lasted about a week. Then Eliza had a note from him, a funny little note, hurt and incoherent. He was going away from Wellington, without another visit to Laloma; ‘Your father says—of course, he's perfectly right.’

They were all at table, John buried behind his newspaper.

‘You couldn't have said things to make Timothy feel like that. You couldn't have.’ (One keeps saying, ‘You couldn't,’ meaning, ‘You did—you have.’)

‘Can't have him turning your head, my girl.’

‘You brought him here, you forced me to meet him. You've insulted a guest, you've more than insulted me. I'll never forgive you.’

Augusta said, ‘Your father's pleasure is hurting his own flesh and blood.’ Timothy had impressed her.

John began to shout. Unconvincing; he was just jealous of any man who touched any of these women he didn't want. By and by, he'd be equally jealous of Kitch. Eliza went out, down past the cellar, where once Kitch had got stuck in the awful Spider Place; down the steps, away along the bush road. Something rather comic in sizzling off like a charred moth, but heading for black dark instead of the lamp. Phosphorus slid between the old graves, there was a mist with a hurt childish face, a crying face. In the one lonely farmhouse, spellbound within its circle of macrocarpas, lived an old couple, both blind. All they wanted was somebody, once a month, to read aloud their letters from their son, who had gone to Canada.

Not to be able to see. Not to be able to touch.

The dreadful lesson of humility; take what you are given, it isn't permissible to ask for more. Of course you can get—manœuvre, cheat, play your hand—but that's a different matter. The salt is gone.

It was a long time since she had loved anyone, except Simone: not since Mr Duncan, and that was before the war. Trevor Sinjohn didn't count.…

Phantoms, or our own face on the gloom,
For love of love, or for heart's loneliness.¹

page 126

Timothy, what was Timothy? Less bright green eyes, less the delicate stalk and catkin of the sea-grass pencilling his face with its line of shadow, less a voice musing in the shelter of the great green waves past the Red Rocks, than the infinite endurance of a moment: while he was there, time and the world stretched out and out, you could hardly hear the little foam that burst around their edges. Standing with her hands pressed against her throat, she accepted fact. ‘I love Timothy. I must love him, because my throat is hurting me.’

Being in love was a sort of tapu state, full of constraints and superstitions, not quite real. It had to be kept away from the world. When she had finished walking to the bush in the daytimes, she continued in dream; especially towards the pool. There was a dark trail, forgotten all about, and a stream came with edgings of fine malachite ferns, and beds of tall nettles stung the hands in white blisters. Purple berries lay fallen, rich as damsons, but not so big, and good only for the fantails and that black and white gust of feathers—ah, so tiny—called Love's Messenger in the Maori. But the real place was the pool itself, nearly six feet deep, and with a huge round boulder in the middle, where she could sit. The stream came down in a waterfall, and broom tilted over it, petal on petal of eager gold, rafts on the water; but with summer came the musketry of bursting pods.

Eliza wouldn't take Simone to the pool. She told her about Timothy, but lamely: ‘Grey tweed sports coat, green eyes, little freckles, tall, cleft in the chin, fair.’ Simone said cleft in the chin meant a flirt. She was hard then, nearly seventeen, hard and rather fierce. She rode well, but swished Grey Jeremy so irritatingly that once he threw her and broke her arm. She had numerous love-affairs, so openly that Augusta, who did not forbid her the house because then Eliza would be always about with her outside, used her most scriptural language about her. But what Augusta didn't know was that Simone's idea of a love affair was dancing all night with the same hypnotized youth, then laughing him out of countenance if he tried to kiss her. She wore little shoes shot with opalescence, always a size too small. To go to dances, she had to stay with a maiden aunt up on the Wellington hills, and the boy who saw her home had no catch, for all her brightgreen eyes and his bright-green hopes. Her feet hurt her too much. She was always dying to meet somebody who would remove her shoes and her intelligence, but never did. Her fastidiousness was quick as a cat's.

With Eliza she let go. They had quarrelled and blundered their way into friendship, she met sentimentality half-way, as Eliza met her hardness. In the manuka she burned with a restless, silvery fire, and every line of her was cup and curve, like those nymphs she had tried to page 127 draw. Simone was her own one and only successful nymph. They made a special god for wet black nights, Little God Pot, the brother of Pan. Simone said she was going to marry, and marry well. Mostly Eliza argued against matrimony, and to fame via London and unlimited poems: for even if Timothy came back, she did not believe that he would marry her.

Simone said, ‘I could take almost any man in the world away from you’; the cold voice in Eliza's brain cried, ‘Yes.’ The Hannays didn't seem precisely lucky in love; they were too soft and too hard, too intelligent, and such bloody fools, besides being matter out of place. Aloud, she said, ‘Your youths always seem a pretty scratch lot to me. And if you want to know, Walter Lestrange is extremely affectionate when your back's turned. He even tries to flirt with Sandra. He'll get himself a scratched face yet.’ Simone didn't want Walter, but she'd mind—hurt in her pride, seeing in Sandra a new competitor. She would hate Sandra, prize Walter a little bit more, and have something to take her mind off Timothy. Cover and double cover.… Becoming a woman, that's it; partly the noble art of defence, partly passivity.

Sometimes for days at a time she hardly knew Timothy existed. Then a sudden pain shot through to the surface, she wanted to strike out blindly at anyone, heard her voice saying hard, unreal things, or talking aloud as she walked alone. It would be good to break, to stop talking.

She had sunstroke, after letting an artist, the queerest little brown patch of a woman, sketch her on a grilling beach. It was no compliment to her shape, Mrs Macey only wanted a flesh-coloured blob in the foreground. What she really enjoyed painting was spiders, and she kept them in bottles at her studio. But the Academy refused to hang her insects, and in desperation she had turned to painting blue flapjacks of sea, yellow flapjacks of sand, titled, ‘The Bay’; like all the other accredited New Zealand artists. When she had earned enough by the sale of ‘The Bay’, she was going after a wolf spider. Eliza liked her, though Mrs Macey always made her imagine many legs on the back of her neck.

Relief to sink down, to be quite ill and lie flat in the little green room, never moving a hand, like somebody who will not stir again. Relief, cool darkness and no voices.

At the end of Eliza's sunstroke, John came into her room with an enormous letter in a blue envelope.

‘That's from young Cardew,’ he said, and tramped out again.