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The Godwits Fly

Chapter Twenty-Four — Various Goods

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Chapter Twenty-Four
Various Goods

Then, after all her lamentations, Mrs Sidebottom decided she would have a little fresh sole, or perhaps a couple; nothing else but one of those custards, and grate plenty of nutmeg over it, please; oh, and when you've done that, and counted out the linen, you might just run down the street and get the soles, Eliza, and order those cakes for to-morrow, and remember to tell him, this time the cream must not be on the turn. Last time, I was so ashamed when I saw the look on poor Mrs Raymond's face. And you'll be sure the soles are nice and fresh?

She lingered anxiously over the little fresh soles. Her digestion had failed her, and as she lay in bed, mounded with pillows, she spent a good deal of time thinking what she could and could not eat. Alchemist seldom searched for the Philosopher's Stone more vigorously than Mrs Sidebottom for the substances which would not upset her stomach, or give her heartburn afterwards. Rock-oysters with squeezed lemon, plain custards, drinks like barley water (which would be like a platonic marriage, Eliza thought), white meats, little fresh soles passed in procession before her faded blue eyes. She met them on bloody fields and, when routed, turned to her temporary maid with a quiet triumph.

‘There, what did I tell you, Eliza? It's made me sick again.

‘And Eliza,’ added Mrs Sidebottom, a little fretfully, ‘when you're changing the linen, do look and see if it has a pattern on it or not. I suppose you don't know that last week you put my husband to bed in my best damask tablecloths?’

‘I'd rather like her,’ thought Eliza, ‘if I knew her in any other capacity but that of stomach and stomach-pump. Little fresh soles. Oh, blast her. What a hill.’

The wind flapped like a great slipshod kite clear over her head, the coloured town streamed out, triumphantly claret-roofed and brownhilled. She bought the little fresh soles, told Huggins about the cream, smiled at a Hindoo boy in a fruiterer's because he was letting a dusty row of sparrows peck at his green peas, as if he were God Almighty page 228 and didn't care what helped itself, and was up the precipice again before she realized that she should have asked the little fresh fishmonger to skin and fillet the little fresh soles. She looked at their hides with distaste. Half an hour later, she was still tearing at them in the kitchen sink, while Mrs Sidebottom wailed, ‘Eliza, haven't you got those soles on yet? Eliza, what are you doing?’ Mr Sidebottom came in and said gravely, ‘If you stood on the tails and pulled, the skin might come off. Like getting a very fat man out of his pants.’ He took the knite and showed her how to fillet soles. His hair, pale frizzy yellow, stood straight up on end, his blue eyes were always twinkling.

Anyhow, thought Eliza, trudging down the hill again to catch the tram for her lodgings (she was the Sidebottoms’ girl, clean, £1 a week and sleep out), I've earned enough to pay for my bridesmaid frock.

Mrs Sidebottom's stomach alone couldn't have done it. She wrote stories and articles, free-lanced, interviewed the slightly dim Hollywood stars that shot smoking through on their way back from making the First Great Australian Film, once even sold an advertising slogan. She had written her first book—poems—but, of course, that didn't pay. Quite the contrary, as the publishers reminded her, hopelessly, about once every three months.

Mrs Minnet. her landlady, had again taken off the electric light bulb and substituted a defective one. It wasn't that Mrs Minnet was either poor or needy, or didn't get her rent from Eliza, but she suspected her lodger of using the light, writing and reading till all hours, and the thought was a little iron claw in her heart. She sat up at nights, long, pale and strange in her nightgown, with the convex enlarged family photographs all around her, listening for the click of Eliza's lightswitch; failing to hear it, and thinking, with passionate resentment. She's still burning that light.’ If Mrs Minnet were a millionaire, still the thought of light flooding her barren rooms after ten o'clock would have agonized her. But she didn't like to give Eliza notice, because the last young woman had had men in her bedroom, and the couple before that—such honest-looking people!—were unemployed, and left her with three months owing. Eliza called, ‘Mrs Minnet—oh, Mrs Minnet. The light bulb's gone, I'm afraid I'll have to have another, please.’

‘It was all right this morning,’ sullenly lied Mrs Minnet.

‘It's fused now, and the room's like Tut's tomb, and I've got to have light for my work. Sorry.’

‘There's a candle in the stick,’ said Mrs Minnet.

‘No. A light bulb. I must have it, please.’

Hating all women, Mrs Minnet took the good electric light bulb out of the drawer where she had hidden it, and took it to Eliza's door. ‘I page 229 can't get off to sleep when you put coals on the fire to all hours,’ she said gloomily. She was a queer old figure, lean, horse-faced, capped both by night and by day, encased for ever in a flannel dressing-gown. People, like paintings, got fly-specked with time and weather.

Eliza took the bulb. ‘Would you like an egg?’ she asked. ‘I forget how long I've had these, but if I don't use them soon they'll grow wings on me.’

Mrs Minnet accepted the egg. Getting it for nothing made a tiny glow of pleasure in her, but simultaneously she was angry. The waste … the wicked, wanton waste.…

Eliza grinned as her landlady went out. These small, wrathful encounters were in their way the spice of life.

Well for you if you can remain angry. Beyond anger there is another country.

Her bridesmaid frock of green panne velvet, with a great silver fleur-de-lis and flares of silver tissue, hung against the wall like the stiff ghost of a woman at a dance. Even in electric light the too-large room, islanded with old furniture, was uncanny. Frocks that year came four inches below the knee. Everybody wore flared skirts for evening, except the very thin, who swayed out at both sides in shepherdess panniers. Simone had a silver-panniered wedding gown, silver and rose. She had designed it herself, of course; a goose-girl princess frock.

Simone with the haunting green eyes, to whom the experiences and feelings of the body seemed to matter so little, the body itself so much. When she bought a trousseau hat, she didn't buy it for her face and hair alone. Before a full-length mirror, trembling with those delicate becoming lights they always string up in milliners’, Simone's ankles, her stomach and hips, her slender shrugging shoulders, all had their word, arguing whether or not the new hat would do. The shopassistants, to whom she was adorable, but from whom she never bought because of caprice, dark young Jewesses with down clinging on their upper lips, protested, ‘Becoming, most becoming, Madam.’ But if Simone's waistline said, ‘No, we don't quite like ourselves,’ the Jewesses might as well save their time. Older women tried to be shamfrank, managing. ‘No, that one doesn't suit you—not your type a bit. But this one does. If you go through every shop in town, you won't find anything better.’ They made their sham-frank faces downright and convincing, and it fell flatter than pancakes. On the other hand, they always parted with Simone perfectly good friends, whereas Eliza, who would be capable of buying an abominable hat in a moment of weak- page 230 minded sympathy, would be just as capable of flinging into a temper about all hats, all wearied shop-assistants.

All that beauty, eccentric like a dragonfly's: and now things are changing. Simone is getting married. Perhaps she'll have a baby, an enormously large family. Perhaps be frightened, perhaps horribly, aggressively confident, as some young women are when they're married. But I don't think so. Eliza tried to imagine Simone, but could only see her in a sweeping green hat with real ospreys. Then they had both ridden up in the little cable car, and sat in the Gardens among the thin ragged manuka, and talked until with a swish the dropcurtain of stars was right at their feet.

But she is marrying Toby, big and fair and curiously solid—character, I mean—who has a trick of getting his own way. He keeps a great deal in reserve. He is very obstinate and proud, and for two pins would keep all that shut up inside him to the day of his death. He likes to pretend that he is still a schoolboy, and plays absurd pranks. He has rather a good profile. Simone takes snapshots of it and shows them around.

She very nearly didn't marry Toby, didn't marry anyone. Till the last moment she was looking for her lost daemon, looking in dancehalls and books and black willow-crotches, looking beside the Hutt river, looking in her nymph drawings. Then, one evening, there was a haystack, and faint, mild, dreamy rain. Like Davies’ ‘A rainbow and a cuckoo, Lord.’ Toby said, ‘You're throwing away something very beautiful, Simone,’ and Simone, my friend, turned and said, ‘I'll marry you whenever you like.’ Just that. Queer Toby, too. Queerest of all if Toby turned out to be the daemon. Inside marriage she'll have a new face, a stranger face. What could I have done, Simone? I had nothing at all but the grey ti-tree and the huge silvery globules of rain falling, hitting our faces. I never once saw her from her own side, I turned her into a fantasy.… So now my frock is green and silver, and I'll drink a little too much and break the awful solemnity by saying something ridiculous to make them laugh. Toby is taking her away into marriage, and then for a while into England. She's going to be a godwit.

Feet tramping by in the darkness. This is a flat, stiff little terrace, bristling with all the sins of ugliness. And they never kill Abel except legally, by the neck until he is dead. And somehow I like it. I have a mania for the flat, stiff places, the spawning-ground of life and its unwanted children. If ever the Star of Bethlehem shall arise, its unearthly clear jewel will mellow over such a place.

The passer-by whistles La Paloma. Dearer to me than my heart, page 231 you unknown, who pass and do not stop. I am tired, more than bodily tired. Where am I going? Into dreams, travel, fag-ends of love thrown down in gutters by those who did not want them, poetry, journalism, drink, drugs, the steep blue country of melancholy, where I have been before? Or down the road to the fishmonger's to buy Mrs Sidebottom's little fresh soles? It doesn't matter much.

She picked up the library volume of Rainer Maria Rilke's translated poems, flipped over the pages: there was the one she liked, beginning:

That was the wonderful deep mine of souls

and,

Already she was no more that fair woman
Who often sounded in the poet's poems,
No longer the broad couch's scented island,
Nor yonder man's possession any more.
She was already loosened like long hair,
And given far and wide like falling rain,
And dealt out, like a stock of various goods.
She was already rooted.…1

That's it, she thought, various goods. I am a stock now of various goods, some evil and some not, some merely sentimental. But more or less for everybody. I'll cling again to things and to people, quite insanely, hurt myself desperately for love of them, because that is my nature. But when I'm detached and cut down, when they turn and laugh in my face, I suppose I'll go on, vaguely interested in all of them. The little brawling workman, coming home in the tram with his belt of leather strapped about his middle, the belt he uses for thrashing his wife when he is drunk, escaped being Timothy Cardew by a series of miracles. And that both were flesh, not brick or stone, is really very strange.

Out of the crowd, the faces blind and striving,
Bent on their gains and bitter in their loss,
Or arrowed through with rain, or fragmentary
With wasted answers from a wasted Cross,
O piercing look, all-seeing, compassionate!
Find me and search… I move in darkness wholly…2

But it must be the look reflected a little on all the faces, she thought. Oh, let it be strong on one face somewhere! Let it be strong and clear, because I have done so many foolish things, and it is not right to punish a person always with his follies.

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She lifted the window. The thin distributed music of the rain broke itself into many slivers. Its voice was one and yet partial. The threads of light slipped down and down. She unlatched the door, and stepped quietly out, hoping Mrs Minnet would not hear her. A little way she walked in the rain, with slant beams of gold melting into the blackness of pavement under the street-lights. When she came to the bandstand at Oriental Bay, where great round lights glowed softly like melons, houseless men were sitting dejected, huddled there. The black sea rose and fell before them, and settled gulls no less ephemeral than the glimpses of lamplight-shattered foam. Light in little pieces, like a kiss from a laughing splendid woman unseen, came and dwelt on the faces of the men. They were old enough to be Eliza's father; few of them had shaved, their clothes were hopelessly battered, and their odd disjointed thoughts about their homes and life's work were the hermitages in which they dwelt. Yes, they looked holy and wise as ancient hermits, watching out to sea. Their faces had been battered into the sorrow and protest which are the next things to a petition for love. Presently one of them got up and slouched away home. Eliza walked on the opposite side of the road, for she did not want him to stop her or speak to her. But she heard his footsteps keeping pace with her own, quiet and dogged in the wet streets. When she had come to the doors of her lodging and stopped, his footsteps still went on. To capture them or set them back was more than a King's golden impatient armies might dare. They would go on for ever, and she stand on the pavement, smiling and listening.