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The Godwits Fly

Chapter Twelve — Business Girls

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Chapter Twelve
Business Girls

Simone said, ‘You look the complete dairymaid,’ and it was true, because of Little Miss Blair's frocks, against which even Carly revolted, sobbing, ‘She makes me stick out all round, and I don't.’ ‘Look how those girls have stood by their poor old father,’ said Augusta subbornly. The Blair girls would never see forty again, but they were prominent in church circles, and their lonely respectability had won Augusta's heart. That was all very well: but as Carly pointed out, you could tell Little Miss Blair and tell her, while she knelt on the hearth-rug with a mouthful of pins, taking measurements and tacking up seams, and always she would assure you that she quite understood. Then, the moment you had gone, Miss Blair Proper would put on her spectacles, and say to her, younger sister, ‘Now, Clemency, no nonsense.’ God had given women certain geographical features, but St Paul had the last word, and the result was always the same old sackrace silhouette. Sandra said, ‘Well, Carly's blue makes her look as if she's going to have a baby any minute, and I don't see that that's so very respectable,’ and got her ears boxed.

Simone's dark red lipstick in its gold case was called Coralie. ‘She would,’ said Augusta. Only a little more beauty, a little fining of blunted hands and prettying up of full, scornful mouth, and Simone would have been the picture of a French marquise. But somehow it was right that her beauty should be broken, flawed opal like the rest of her. She worked in a frock-shop, drawing designs. Sometimes Augusta said, ‘I call her a very ordinary little thing, and she squints’; sometimes, ‘Well, if she doesn't get a man in that rig, she never will.’

Queer; getting a man was almost equally important to Augusta and to Simone, though at bottom neither of them cared a rap for men as such. In practice, Augusta hated matrimony, and Simone would much sooner have been an artist, if her fingers had been differently shapen, her ambition just a little more straitly winged. Or if she wanted a man at all, he was a dream, an elaborate mechanical toy, old school of faun, plus Oscar Wilde conversation, plus beautiful dancing pumps that circled for ever and ever, plus some form of heroism or distinction page 136 that wouldn't be too uncomfortable—a leper island doctor, for instance, would be right out of it—plus—oh, what the devil? Heaven and Hell, black night melting into a face. Most women never grow up, the others are born that way. No, it's ourselves we reach out for, Eliza thought, our own undiscovered selves.

Nevertheless for Augusta and Simone, when a man, almost any man, said ‘Will you marry me?’—even if he were so abject that you turned him down without a second thought—it meant you had not lived in vain. And always you allowed it to leak out that he had proposed to you.

This made Timothy's letters extremely awkward. He wrote three times in the week—oftener than Trevor Sinjohn cared to stroll down the road, and re-establish the fact that he was still Carly's boy—but although he said over and over again that he loved Eliza, sometimes in words which could very nearly be hung up to dry as a proposal, on the next page he thought nothing of mentioning that he had just fallen in love with somebody. Eliza knew them all—Damaris Gayte's profile, Lucy's soft, hurt face, this new creature with the blue eyes and the teeth. It wasn't that Timothy bragged—he understood that relations between men and women are far more often defeats than conquests—but it didn't occur to him that you were supposed to love one person at a time, and that done well.

Eliza herself wouldn't have cared, except for loneliness. She wondered if the Hannay generations had introduced somewhat a touch of the tarbrush, for her mind took to polygamy like a duck to water. So long as he loves me best, I don't see that the others need be embarrassing.… But Simone asked, ‘Has your Timothy proposed?’ and Augusta, who wouldn't directly ask, was worse. She would adore Timothy if he married Eliza; if he wouldn't she would hate him all the more for being charming. In family council, her tongue would flay little bits from Timothy… and from Eliza.

Timothy just doesn't know, she thought, he doesn't realize how naked we are until some man clothes us with his honourable intentions. Ugh.… Lovely to inherit things, of superb right: hateful to hang about, like a freckled charity child at a bun-fight. Simone, looking into the cloakroom mirror at whatever dance it was, touched with the slim pencil lashes already dark around her green eyes, and said, ‘Almost anyone would fall in love with me sooner than with you. Your Timothy comes from the country, doesn't he?”

Why should I be manœuvred into hating you because you're beautiful—when all the time, at the back of my mind, I don't? Separate and apart, your cold green eyes, lakes with the dusk thick around them. page 137 Because of that, I could forgive you anything. More than that, I could become disembodied, stand apart, only wish you to continue ever as you are, in this gentle evening light.

Once she left Simone standing alone on the crowded pavement. I'll never go back, said the cold voice, I'm better off without her. She rode up and down in the diminutive cable-tram, plunging through tunnels and past bright toy gardens. The driver was a one-legged man, his face calm as Pluto's. All day tunnel and sky slid over him. In the evening the tunnels went topaz, the open spaces cool black, scented by flowers. Lights gave themselves to the air, like sparkling lovely women with wreaths pinned in their breasts. He had nothing to do but push a lever up and down, smiling vaguely at the passengers. This left him with a face emptily serene, like a god's.

Bright toy gardens, the wild unbounded sun of a marigold, concentric rings of orange light, cool dark inside the tunnels. (You could make me happy for ever, and yet it is more important, somehow, that I should belong to you than that you should belong to me. Possession is nine points of the law, but whose law? Not any law I wouldn't take up and smash against these sliding tunnel walls.) It is not fitting that Simone and I should quarrel over a lust for possessions. My hands are full of grey tunnel and blue sky, like big, strange birds, tumbled out out of an airy nest, screeching and gawky. How do you like my eaglets, Simone?

The patch of grass outside the Ladies’ Rest Room was black-dotted with people, boys and girls eating their papered lunches, tired women suckling babies whose heads looked too big. One man, a shy fellow with a shiny black coat, had the pigeons so tame that they perched on his head and shoulders, big murmuring puffs of opal. He was bald except for a dark little ring of hair, and scurf lay on his coat-collar. He laughed shyly, inviting people to admire his gleaming pigeons and ignore his shabby self.

The tea-room Simone liked was full of dud antiques, Ali Baba jars smeared sticky crimson, two shell-parrots tittering, engrossed in a pygmy idyll. Women's voices loomed immense over their cage.

‘Oh, look, Betty, do look. He's kissing her, the dear little fellow. We must get a pair, aren't they too sweet? Do you think the pale-blue are prettier than the green?’

A last shot, the old picture-show everyone called the Fleahouse. Simone was sitting near the front, her short-sighted eyes peering up at some film negroes. One negro's white lips were pasted right across his face. He rolled up his eyes and capered. Simone had to wear glasses at the pictures, and sit almost against the tired mechanical pinging of the page 138 unseen theatre pianist, who dreamed from one pre-war melody to another. She seemed immensely pathetic. The grey and blue birds flew out from Eliza's hands into the stagnant air.

‘It's an unbearable picture. Let's go.’

‘Oh, it's you.’

At the top of the Gardens, the quiet manuka place where sunlight stroked the seamed old face of the world, she was so much more Simone: a girl in a green and golden shellcase, deciding that women are inevitably licked, that somehow, magically, she wouldn't be. She would win—but she hadn't the faintest idea what she wanted to win.

‘What's the good of love without marriage?’

‘What's the good of marriage without love?’

‘You're a fool. You'll only get cheap.’

‘A thing given can't be cheap. In the meantime, you might as well be nice.’

‘You ask for it, you're a soft. One can't help teasing you.’

Picnicking children, carrying their lunches in paper bags, clattered by on the paths. They were not to go too far, not down through the trees to the swings, because there they might meet a man. They were ordinary children, with sunburnt tow hair and little socks slipping in wrinkles about their ankles. But they looked beautiful and strange, like wild ponies. Their shrill conversation drifted up from their own world.

‘You're always tryin’ to be the Boss.’

‘Shut up. Look in the bushes—there. I seen a fantail.’

Their faces, upturned, saw also the grown-ups, the two fantastically dressed creatures with silk stockings and hats, lying side by side in the brown grass. The grown-ups smiled at them, but the children's leader marched on, bouncing her black hat-elastic under her chin. There was no admission into their intimate and delicate companionship.

When Eliza was seventeen, enterprise and scraps of rhyme got her a job, a spidery, likeable job at thirty shillings a week, scribbling notes for a little paper on Woman (of whom she knew nothing she would have told). The job gave her new standing. Augusta, always scrupulously fair where money was concerned, wouldn't take a penny for the first year. Ninepence a day for lunch at Gamble and Creed's, the rest for tram-fares, books and clothes. No more Little Miss Blair. Readymades glossy-new from the shops, and little hats that turned perkily up or solemnly down, the only known styles of the day.

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Augusta was pleased, yet with the pleasure mingled a strange disappointment. Thirty shillings a week-good. But somehow, out of the clouds, there should have been another way—a brilliant scholarship, a clear-cut genius for something more profitable than eternally scribbling poems and crying over them.

Poetry and boys and Simone Purcell—that little harlot. Augusta used scriptural words quite clearly and frankly in her household, without going to the ends of their implications. Simone was a little harlot because she used lipstick, had once written a letter saying ‘Lovers, but not too many babies’; because the whole purpose of her defiant gold and green was to be admired by many and married by one, probably a catch; because she was better-looking than Augusta's own children—except Sandra, perhaps—and Augusta wouldn't trust her an inch.

Eliza sat on a stool in a little dungeon, razoring from foreign exchanges anything that might be taken as a hot tip for women (generally assumed to be darker than Erebus in matters of cleaning their pores, curing their children of spots, keeping their man). She read the sex blackmail of a thousand advertisements—even your best friends won't tell you. Why is Jim interested in other women? I wouldn't care to dance with him again, pink toothbrush, one in every five has it. Samples will be posted in plain wrapper. I was a wallflower, too. Do you know that serious diseases can result from this simple neglect? Communicate Dr Smith, Box 19937. Men—do you want women to look at you in the street? In ten days I increased my chest measurement.…

Leeches for suckers. Americans and the imitators of the Americans, shouting, fawning, cajoling, lying, demanding money with threats; selling by print everything from toothpaste to abortion: fastening always on the lonely people, the little duds, the shy ones, who believed what they were told, and were afraid in their tragic hearts of being left out. And if you could invent an advertising slogan for the further intimidation of these people, it was worth real money. Spectacled Yanks would buy it, and offer better wages than you could get in newspaper offices. You could sit working in offices whose internal walls were all glass, so that the Boss could tell at a glance who was loafing on the job. There would be printed cards about the sacredness of your work. You could put money by.…

And die at forty, with your belly ripped open to get the cancer out. Not much.

Timothy wrote, ‘I wish to God I could make my living as a writer,’ and even Simone respected Eliza's job. Eliza loved it. People all page 140 around her, mostly Queer Mossies, rustled and slithered in and out of rabbit-hutches, stealing one another's electric light bulbs, and complaining bitterly about the sub-editors. Life in the office was dingy but warm, little embers pressed down in the bowl of a meerschaum pipe.

She picked up its thread again in Gamble and Creed's, where everyone ate hurriedly in a good smell of coffee and a bad one of stinking rubber-lined mackintoshes. ‘Brahn sandwidges, Miss. Here, Miss, there's no mustard in these sandwiches. Get a move on, Miss, I've got to be getting out.’

Choleric little faces, they had; queer, bonded race, so helpless and yet so powerful. Women, a minority, sat alone, reading books propped up against the drip-nosed nickel teapots. It was interesting to watch them come in. They always looked about for a table where there was nobody, crossed the whole length of the room to find one—as if a ghost occupied the seat opposite. They were all business girls. Many kept sentimental trysts with themselves, pinning bunches of daphne or heavy-fragrant brown boronia on their costumes. The men fraternized, talking shop. Flying particles of it came over—stock exchange, politics, smut, all on a harder, crisper plane than feminine talk, though you could spot a goodly percentage of bores. It wasn't that the men weren't ignorant, but they had the courage of their gutturals. It was evident at once that they had a life apart from the women. The women—they had the toy boxes called their homes, the rag dolls called their babies; or the business ones had a room (‘the flat’), with a pink lampshade and an imitation bit of Lalique. The value of men to women was plain in everything they did; even among these close-faced women, who watched unobstrusively as a cat watches. The value of women to men was debatable. If women weren't there, Eliza had a feeling the men would continue to talk shop for about ten years before they noticed anything. Then, presumably, they would want some fresh tea… or to reproduce their kind. Unless they had killed one another off in their wars.

And for both, when they were old, there was the last sexless companionship, a possibility of being people instead of men and women. But for most, since they had got so thoroughly into the man-andwoman habit, existed only patience, a withdrawing into the frail, battered shell of the body. Little black people living in old, ramshackle huts, by the green edges of an imperious sea. One has a lump of ambergris on his mantelshelf, one has only a Maori weatherglass, the bubble of air cut out in its leathery case from the strands of bull kelp. A little beauty, a little wisdom.

Eliza wanted none of it. Only the rafters of pinewoods over her page 141 head, and Timothy, his sandshoes slipping on the warm russet needles, his eyes full of little prickles of light. She would have liked to make a song at the top of the pine-slopes; but if she died going up, and was marked with a cairn of stones, soon scattered, it didn't matter.

Her immediate masters at the office, Mr Dill and Mr Lennox, said, ‘Don't dream, Ginger.’ They weren't Queer Mossies. Mr Dill was little and quizzical, Mr Lennox large, mild and plaintive, and they both stared down on her like dogs humouring a kitten.

Timothy wrote from Raupo. He was coming down, he said, Eliza could expect him any day.