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Chapter Nine
Reflections in the Water

A special Day's Bay voice, hard and authoritative like a chunk of brown wood, shouts from the lower deck, ‘Stand away from that rope. Stand clear, now, stand clear of that ro-o-ope. You up there, catch a-hold of that ro-o-ope.’ The coil whizzes, the eager little boy on the wharf catches it and drops its noose cleanly over the stanchion. For a moment his heart knocks against the frail cage of his ribs, with fear that he might have missed, that perhaps this time the rope won't stand the strain. Every fibre in the hemp creaks, then stiffens. The little boy suddenly sees his own face in the bearded sailor visage peering up at him, sees his own head under the peaked cap. He is the Cobar's captain. At first this intoxicates him and fetches a long whoop out of his chest. Then he remembers his new dignity, and saunters away down the wharf, looking askance at the loungers who thread the water with fine needles, the silvery bodies of minnows used for snapper-bait. The Dago, a glum youth with brows like iron bars, is the only one who has caught any snapper. As soon as he pulls them up, he beats their heads against the stanchion, and there they lie, their red mouths bloodied and helplessly wide open, their wet silver porridged with dust. The little boy, passing with whistling mouth, does not mind, but automatically he rejects the Dago from his crew.

Quivering like a wary animal, the Cobar swings inwards, and Augusta says, ‘Kitch, hold tight to the seat, darling. Eliza, mind you don't drop the cups out of that billy.’ They hit the wharf with a bump, the piles recoil, and the Cobar's siren screams, ‘We're here, we're here.’

Picnickers crowd the gangway, while the sailors sing-song, ‘Stand clear, now, stand clear. One at a time, please, lady.’ Tall, bare-headed boys, with their girls in organdie frocks and brimmy hats, middle-aged men in flannels, their stomach sagging pear-shaped, small girls who have knelt up on the hard seats so that their bare knees show a red crisscross like the pattern of waffle irons, crowd forward. The little girls are pleased at having crossed the harbour in the Cobar, known in Wellington as ‘The Holy Roller’. ‘Oo, didn't she roll, Em'ly?’ they pipe. ‘Oo, didn't you feel sick?’ Their mothers, like large, patient black page 114 beetles, but with red or parchment faces, scream, ‘Davie, you come here this minute, d'you hear me or not? Hold on to Mum, lovie, or you'll get trod on. Don't you push behind—what's all your hurry and shove for? Can't you see I got a kid in me arms? The very idea.… Bill, don't you dare forget that lunch basket and me good kitchen knives.’ They form into a solid wedge, one flesh, shuffling along the gangway an inch at a time, buttocks and things neatly curved into breasts and things; suddenly developing legs again as they jump down at the far end. On the wharf young people in frocks or flannels crispwhite as daisies wave their racquets and call impatiently, ‘Oh, hullo, Pete… Hullo, Glad…’

Between the Cobar and the wharf the water is marled, pale and transparent, full of thready green veins like those in jade. Eliza feels if she could once get the look and feel of those waves absolutely right, in a poem or a picture, everything would be well with her soul, and she wouldn't need, every fortnight or so, to grovel for It to come back again—the uncontrollable, incompassable power. But it's no good, her poems are rotten and she can't paint at all, not even so well as little Kattie Bryce, who takes lessons and paints horrible native birds and sprays of kowhai on black velvet cushion covers. She sighs, and is prodded in the ribs by her father. On the far side of the wharf a notice says, ‘Danger! Twelve Feet Deep’. Boys with dark gold bodies, wearing only V's, jump on the stanchions, steady themselves, then plunge down like gannets. In a minute their dark heads bob up, they shake water and laughter out of their eyes, ears and noses, swimming leisurely overarm to the wharf steps.

Eliza can't dive, but she belongs to the sea. Day's Bay sand is smooth and warm, honeycombed with tiny airholes in which hide the blue crabs. Sandra is the only one who claims to have been bitten. Somehow she attracts the hostilities of nature. She comes in, her blue eyes swimming. ‘Look, a bee stung me on the leg.’ ‘Wilson's foxie snapped at me, it nearly broke the skin.’ Carly is afraid of the water, and won't go in. She will sit on the beach with Trevor Sinjohn, the chunk of white clerical meat, who is now officially her boy, though he hasn't given her an engagement ring—too stingy. Carly is eighteen and a half, and wears home-made frocks of voile, down to her size 3 shoes. Her engagement with Trevor Sinjohn is called ‘an understanding’, on the grounds that they are too young to be formally engaged, and every week-end she helps old Mrs Sinjohn, the tiny, sad mouse who says, ‘Carly is such a sweet girl.’

At home in the evenings, Carly sews for her glory box, though by day she works in an office. Doilies, table-centres, nightgown-tops with page 115 patterns of lilac and violets, camisoles, are born and folded away like papery flowers. She does her brown hair in two puffs, drawn over her forehead. She has lovely eyes, grey to witch-hazel, but in spite of these and her tiny hands and feet, she thinks herself plain. ‘If only I hadn't such a big mouth,’ she mourns.

Trevor squires her off the boat, with the slim indifference which is his weapon and Carly's wound. He can always hurt her now, merely by not being there, by not smiling out of his bright, rather haggard eyes. Especially Trevor can hurt Carly on the bloody fields of her only public life, the church dances and socials, where the Maxina, the Valeta, and the waltz alternate with musical games, in which everybody prances round the hall, singing:

‘A-hunting we will go,
A-hunting we will go,
We'll catch a little fox
And put him in a box,
And a-hunting we will go.’

Open mouths baying.… All he has to do is not to ask her, ‘May I have the pleasure?’ He needn't even dance with another girl, he can drift outside, to smoke and talk with the big boys crowding the stairway. Other boys leave her alone, because tacitly she is Trevor's. Carly is the little fox. She sits in her primrose crêpe-de-Chine, feels its petals wilt softly and damply against her breasts, her thighs, all the soft, vulnerable parts of her that she would so gladly do without. She feels her mouth stretching wider and wider across her face, as if it must crack, like a clown's. Sometimes old Tim O'Keefe, smelling slightly of alcohol, his boiled shirtfront creaking, one stud undone, steps up to her like a gander. He dances well, but with a sort of rhythmic hop. One-two-three, one-two-three, One… two… three.… Carly, floating in his arms, smiles her darkened smile at the dancers, at the stairs, at the two old spinsters, Miss Blair and Little Miss Blair. The fat one has the reproachful, aqueous eyes of a frog. They look out of the trap at Carly, who is soft enough also to be trapped, whose wounded love is bleeding on the air, bleeding in the cloakroom that smells of Three Flowers powder and lavatory, bleeding through the thick blue smoke puffed by the louts. ‘What a sweet girl Carly Hannay is, and so obliging.’ Anything they can do to make Carly like themselves, shining church brasses, breaking off the tall stems of lilies to fit the altar vases, that surely they will do. The dead are anxious for company, so also are the living dead. Carly doesn't know page 116 this, but Eliza does, and would at times as soon take a sock at a ghost as not. Eliza is not a sweet girl.

But Carly at Day's Bay is another person, she has the field clear and sunlit. Trevor is there, swinging a billy packed with sandwiches, looking down at her with his bright haggard eyes, half schoolboy, half faun. He has brought a camera, and presently they will be snapped together among the sandhills, Carly so absurd in her long voile and perching hat that a decade later people would shriek with laughter at her: so soft, so radiant in happiness that the same hard decade might crawl on its marrowbones after her, asking, ‘Carly, dear, how did you do it? However did you manage to love like that?’ Trevor gives her his arm as they cross the road. Her day is made, her little face, looking back, is an enchanted face. Augusta suddenly loses her grip of vertical worry-wrinkles and set lips. ‘Come along, John, let's get the hot water for tea, then we can settle.’ John shambles in her wake, like a very thin, very patchy brown bear.

The macrocarpas have dipped the tips of their plumes in white dust, but their higher fronds are velvety, turning where the light catches them to the golden-green of old plush whose pile is worn. Behind lies a small brown artificial lake, with swans sailing, their breasts only slightly soiled from the mud of their nests, their black bills snapping for bits of bread. Once there was a Day's Bay Wonderland Exhibition, and the derelict water-chute still stands, from which flat-bottomed pontoons used to bounce out on the lake. Farther along is a closed stucco shell, adorned with a laughing, moth-eaten tiger and labelled, ‘The Whispering Gallery’. In the pines rises a double-storied bandstand, its stairway blocked up because it is rotting and dangerous. Eliza can think of nothing but the Whispering Gallery as she helps Sandra to fill the billies with boiling water, 3d. a can, and trudges up behind the pond to the bush.

When they have passed the mamuk’¹ tree-fern which grows right in the middle of the path, they know that the Day's Bay fetish has been properly observed. The fern is like a Siamese King's green umbrella or a curly throne. Sandra says, ‘Wouldn't it be lovely to sit plump in the middle?’ They pass the enormous rabbit hole, large as a cave, and catch up with their parents. John says, ‘You can't get the tea-things down there, it's as damp as muck,’ and Augusta retorts, ‘Oh, don't be such a boob,’ and sets foot on the scramble-trail into the gully, where there are many ferns and skeleton leaves, a brown stream, and nothing to sit on but overcoats. If other picnickers are in the gully, the Hannays scowl and move on. But most people prefer to lie on the beach, page 117 turning on their gramophones and slowly cooking themselves the colour of raw steak.

Trevor and Carly lay the cloth. There are egg sandwiches, ham is too dear. Everyone hopes the sausage-rolls will go round twice; they should, for this is Eliza's sixteenth birthday. Carly, Sandra and Kitch all have winter birthdays, but Eliza's is a January day, and always Augusta pronounces, ‘We'd better go to old Day's Bay, it's so sheltered there.’

After lunch Trevor rinses the cups in the stream, despite John's protest, ‘Dogs may have been drinking there.’ Augusta says, ‘You children go and get your dip, then we can go for a walk. No, Carly, I'm quite all right. Well, go with the others, even if you won't go in. You're a silly about the water. Trevor, you're in charge.’ John lights his pipe and takes out The Martyrdom of Man. He would like to splash in the sea, to shake the drops off shoulders and hair, a happy wet dog, but he doesn't quite dare. He is afraid and envious of the young. So he growls a little in his throat, and is left in the glade with Augusta and Kitch, the lissom sunlight slipping down through the boughs on each, and on the queer, lonely kingdom of sticks and stones, new ferns and last year's broken bottles.

The men's dressing-shed is much bigger than the women's, and of stone, not tin. Under the women's roof, the room divides into wetfloored sandy cubicles, in most of which there are cobwebs. Carly whispers ‘Don't stare,’ to Sandra, because a woman in the cubicle opposite has her clothes off, and shows not only rolls and roils of apologetic pink flesh, but patches of dark, frizzy hair. The Hannays undress discreetly, keeping on their vests until the last possible moment. Eliza thinks how queer it is that suddenly the smoothness of skin should be interrupted by funny little curly beards, and how awful she felt when she first noticed that Carly had broken out in this way. But everybody's doing it, even Simone, who uses a razor on her underarms because the smell of depilatories in the bathroom makes her father so furious that he threatens to thrash her.

Her feet are bare, the sandgrains have an odd, brusque feel. A girl races in from the sea and splashes under a streaming tap, until her eyes, hair and mouth are one gasp of water. Then she slings her bathing suit into a cubicle and stands naked. She looks as if a sea-tree had just prodded her. Carly whispers, ‘Roll your stockings in your bloomers and hide them under the seat. A girl last week lost simply everything, and had to go home in her togs.’

The sand is mounded with bodies, flabby white, brown, crayfish. They stare a little, mostly quite peaceful, like seals. Dear little sun- page 118 babies stagger about with buckets and spades, sitting down suddenly and coming up with sand pasted over their blue rompers. Carly sits down in water just waist-deep, and won't go any farther. Her legs wash in and out with the tide. Trevor, without a glance, flashes past and sheathes himself in waves, swimming overarm to the raft. Eliza can't do that, but she lies flat, turning over like a porpoise, thinking, ‘Oh, I'm so happy. Take me away with you.’ The marled waves laugh and run faster. Sandra puffs laboriously on red water-wings, her eyes screwed shut, her arms like two broomsticks. A foxie runs in and dog-paddles madly after a stick, then runs out again, feeling very efficient, all his black beauty-spots showing through his short coat. Eliza thinks suddenly, ‘There might be a shark’; the wharf steps are thick with old, cutty barnacles. She starts to shiver, and runs out, passing Carly, who is still sliding her legs in and out with the drift of the waves.

The others are tired and want to sleep in the bush. A party quite near has a gramophone, American honey-funny dropping through the tree-ferns.

‘Carl me back, parl o’ mine, let me dream once again,
Carl me back to your heart, parl o’ mine…’

Carly clicks the camera shutter. Trevor flings back his faun head, posing; he takes a goodish snap.

‘Come along, Eliza, you and I will go for a walk together.’

Augusta and Eliza take the up-path, past tree-boles and hollow stumps to rocks set in the rapids beneath a waterfall. There is kidney fern, sprayed dark pads, and Augusta steals a root, but they come up against high barbed wire, keeping them from sight of the fall, the white bridal veil misty over some unseen slide of rocks. Because it is shut off, it becomes fairylike.

‘Ach—everywhere in this country, barbed wire. You never hear a New Zealander laugh, you never hear a New Zealander cheer, except over their filthy racing and their filthy football. Give me my dear old kookaburras.’

A few yards down the trail, she is wishing the barbed-wire fence back again, slabs of it. Two lovers are lying in the fern, the man covering all of the girl except fragments of crumpled white dress, filaments of bright hair caught in the moss over which the fantails make their delicate starred footprints. Over the lovers a wild myrtle peppers the air with little red berries, and under their pressed hands the earth is golden-brown. Eliza almost treads on them but they take no notice.

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‘And only man is vile,’ says Augusta, hurrying down the path. But Eliza hadn't seen anything vile, only a man lying over a girl and a green-and-bronze mist of leaves above their heads. A bellbird strikes, like a peculiarly sweet-toned little clock, and they are out in open, sunlit road, the only big residential one in Day's Bay. Its old houses comfort Augusta with their lazy serenity. A hedge is very bright blue, and she stops, saying suspiciously, ‘Plumbago.… I didn't know they could grow plumbago in this country.’

Then there are great masses of hydrangeas, rose, cobalt and snowy, inside colours of a glacier; disorderly with the rich and perfect disorder of the cultivated thing that knows how to let itself go. Old houses. Augusta stops.

‘This is where I'd like to live, you know.’

‘There'd be bellbirds in the early mornings.’

‘Somewhere like this, or in England, in my old white house like a Greek cross. I always had two blue vases, one very tall, one squat, for the primroses and little things.’

In a bank of clover, leaves splashed with the ruby pips that sometimes mean a four-leaf, Eliza hunts till she finds several, and gives them to her mother.

‘Perhaps they'll bring you the trip to England. This is the loveliest birthday I ever had.’

‘Is it really?’ The guard was down between them. Then Augusta said, ‘Man, woman and child; man, woman and child.’ She said it standing in the silent street, with the four-leaved clovers pinned to her fuzzy astrakhan stole, and the old houses dazed with peace and the coming of sunset, behind their hedges of bright plumbago and the tumult of hydrangeas. Nothing was sharp on the air at all, except the faraway grey ecstasy of the hills, that climbed above the bush and beyond their limitations; (great roaring billows splashed their far side, on a beach where Maoris speared fish by torchlight); and the smell of macrocarpa, and in a tennis court the hard, clean ping of the balls, as young men and girls cut clean across the nets. Every now and again, their voices came like a shower of fountain-drops, and were gone. This youth and lithe sharpness of movement were all around her, and her own life and that of her forbears passed out of her in words as dark as blood, and stained the dust round her feet.

‘Man, woman and child; man, woman and child.’ They smiled at one another, and went back to the others. John had been left with his book, and the children had gone to play rounders on the flat in front of the Whispering Gallery. Trevor had the bat, and Carly threw underarms up to him, sloppy shots; he couldn't miss making the full circuit every page 120 time, though Sandra and Kitch fielded well, Sandra a golden-haired giraffe, Kitch a stolid little brown idol. Trevor ran hard and cleanly, but as he came into the base he smiled and said, ‘Kid's patball.’ He was attractive, in his pasty way, but by no means Carly's Johannesburg gentleman.

When the Cobar slid out, everybody sang, boys and girls lying in one another's arms, and the middle-aged, and the squawking brats who, having sunburned their noses, were now trying to drown themselves from the lower decks, in waters that flamed and faded, waters grey like the wings of a moth, but with a so much colder sheen. They touched Rona Bay in the dark, bumping a wharf lit with lanterns: and the passengers they took on, and the gruff unseens shouting good-bye, were people they had known never and yet always, people coming from a secret town on their tide. Eliza thought one day she would write its saga, write how the shags bob their black necks and come up again, glossy and insolent, and over the horizon lies a milky smoke, a diamond sparkle of towers. She made the first line.

Out of the Tower of Babel I save the one word ‘Greeting’.

The boatload sang:

‘Nights are growing very lonely, days are very long,
I'm a-growing weary only list'ning for your song,’

and that Maori thing, that took the voices into its refrain so softly. ‘Hine, e Hine.’ ‘Maiden, O maiden.…’

Wipe that out, she thought, wipe that song off the face of the waters, if you can.