A State of Siege E-Book

Janet Frame

• Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 344

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

In A State of Siege, Janet Frame brings her signature playfulness to paint a thrilling psychological portrait. After the death of her invalid mother, Malfred Signal, a retired New Zealand art teacher, leaves her birthplace in the south for a beach cottage on a sub-tropical island in the north. Freed from endless lessons on still life and the dominating presence of her family, she hopes at last to be alone with nature and the 'room two inches behind the eyes'. But the solitude she has sought mocks her with echoes of her past, when, one stormy night, an intruder pounds ceaselessly and inexplicably on her door. Propulsive yet poignant, A State of Siege is a mesmerizing exploration of the artistic process, of selfhood and loneliness, and of death and its counterpart: the need to survive, to live.

Leseprobe

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‘Intensely personal, her writing is always spiralling in on itself, towards the condition of myth, and yet it nails the moment, pins down experiences so fleeting that others would never grasp them. What eludes ordinary language, she can capture in the extraordinary argot of her imagination.’

— Hilary Mantel

‘She is a singular writer. No one is quite like her.’

— Eleanor Catton, author of The Luminaries

‘Frame achieved that supremely difficult task of finding a voice so natural it feels almost as if it were not written.’

— Jane Campion, Guardian

Praise for The Edge of the Alphabet

‘[Frame’s] writing is engaging and idiosyncratic – full of a character that proves that the best way to strike deep with the reader is not to do what everyone else is doing, but to grasp your distinctive vision of the world and hammer it hard…. [T]hat is the joy of books like this, out of print for sixty years, but now roaring into view, stronger and brighter than ever. It’s good to have it back.’

— John Self, The Times

‘Janet Frame’s prose is a highly volatile material. Words, sentences, paragraphs behave like mercury on the page, running this way and that, forming new shapes and smears from one silvery, trembling blob…. Frame’s fiction … made not of some stale conception of verisimilitude but of the shifting stuff of sentences, can take us to a borderless, boundless anywhere.’

— Kirsty Gunn, Times Literary Supplement4

‘The most Woolfian of Frame’s work: with intense, often dissociated separate monologues and repeated imagery of light, sounds and shapes evoking The Waves, and the long, turbulent journey by sea of Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out.’

— Catherine Taylor, Guardian

‘A revelatory portrait of the sometimes unbearable unease of being a human, wrapped up in a consummately playful metafiction.’

— Ellen Peirson-Hagger, New Statesman

‘Frame’s writing … frequently returns to the strange, self-doubling rituals of normalcy, required of us to find so-called connection…. Her sentences, always at the shore of some great nothingness, have the intricacies and echoes of a conch shell…. Frame points us away from the sturdy book in our hands, toward the flimsy, the abandoned, the scrapped and scraped, the reflective, the ribboned. Toward stories that are nothing but a title, and masterpieces that can fit in the interior pocket of a handbag. There, she says, look. You almost missed it. Look what she has made.’

— Audrey Wollen, New Yorker

‘Frame’s writing is often compared to Faulkner’s, and her family history reads like a Southern Gothic novel. Yet Frame can be an extraordinarily cheerful, funny writer. Language was a source of continual revelation… The Edge of the Alphabet is about trash, debris, dreams, the incommunicable and the excluded.… The proposition Frame seems to be making is that marginality means semantic exile too; vivid, broken images are her characters’ alternative vehicles for communication.’

— Lucie Elven, London Review of Books5

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Introduction

By Chris Kraus

A State of Siege is the first novel Janet Frame wrote when she returned to New Zealand late in 1963. She was about to turn forty and, for the past seven years, she’d been living abroad, mostly in London. Born in the South Island – a region that was already becoming depopulated when she was a girl – Frame famously spent most of her twenties as an inmate in some of the country’s most backward, remote psychiatric institutions. She’d grown up in a large and poor working-class family. Initially admitted for a half-hearted suicide attempt, she was misdiagnosed as schizophrenic. Frame narrowly missed undergoing a leucotomy that was called off when The Lagoon, her 1952 debut book of short stories, won an award. Nevertheless, she remained intermittently institutionalized for another two years after that.

After being released, Frame accepted the hospitality of one of New Zealand’s great modernist writers, Frank Sargeson, and moved into a hut behind his tiny shack on what was, at the time, the semi-rural North Shore of Auckland. There, in less than a year, she wrote her first novel Owls Do Cry, a poetic account that drew on her imaginatively rich but materially poor South Island childhood. Mentor to an entire generation of New Zealand writers, Sargeson narrowly escaped a career as a lawyer after being arrested on a homosexuality charge of ‘indecent assault’ in his youth. Sargeson found Frame’s work a shade too poetic – ‘The day is early with birds beginning and the wren in a cloud piping like the child in the poem,’ the opening section of Owls begins – and they debated aesthetics. Sargeson told Frame that 10novels require ‘a certain amount of dead wood’, but she disagreed. As she’d say many years later in a rare radio interview, ‘poems are the highest form of literature. A work of writing must be wholly alive and essential.’

When a 1956 Literary Fund grant gave her a chance to travel, Frame jumped at the opportunity to leave. She spent several months in Spain and Andorra before going to London where she would write, publish and live for the next seven years. Nevertheless, Frame never felt completely at home there. England was a country of cold, damp and snow – a place where ‘the plants in the garden had a shocked grey look that made you think they’d had a stroke and would die’ and ‘soot left fingerprints everywhere’, as Grace Cleave, the writer-protagonist of her 1963 novel Towards Another Summer would later observe. Frame wrote the book – a deadpan account of social unease brought on by an invitation to spend a weekend with a professional acquaintance, his wife and two kids – to take a break from her 1965 novel The Adaptable Man, but decided it was too personal to publish. Summer wouldn’t appear until three years after her death in 2007.

‘Am I homesick?’ Grace Cleave asks herself late at night, ‘I haven’t thought of my land for so long, my land and my people, that’s how it is spoken, like a prayer...’ Nevertheless, when the journalist profiling Grace asks if she ever wants to go back, she replies: ‘I was a certified lunatic in New Zealand. Go back? I was advised to sell hats for my own salvation... I’ve been so long away. This is my home now. There’s gentleness here.’

Despite her ambivalence about the UK, Frame’s years in London were extremely prolific. In addition to Summer, she produced another four novels and two collections of stories. And it was soon after arriving in 11London that Frame began to make sense of her decade of hospitalizations and the more than two hundred electroshock treatments she’d received. Seeking help for her general unhappiness, Frame admitted herself to the Maudsley Hospital and was told by clinicians that she’d received a false diagnosis, she was not schizophrenic at all. This reprieve prompted a crisis: if she was not schizophrenic, who was she and what had become of those years?

The analyst she saw after leaving the clinic encouraged her to write about these lost, institutionalized years. The result was her 1961 novel Faces in the Water, a clinically detailed account of her hospitalizations and the small, bitter politics that emerge and flourish among patients and staff. Like in Airless Spaces, the feminist theorist Shulamith Firestone’s report on her own forced psychiatric hospitalizations, Frame avoids self-analysis and instead reveals the cruelties that the institution breeds. It is a microcosm of the larger world. Faces shows readers the ways that people’s spirits are broken by neglect and assault, by atrocities large and small. It would be Frame’s most accessible and popular book until the 1980s, when she published the autobiographical trilogy that Jane Campion later adapted into the award-winning film An Angel at My Table.

In Towards Another Summer, Grace Cleave dreams that she’s a migratory bird ‘suffering from the need to return... Here I live in a perpetual other season unable to read the sky...’ and in 1964, Frame decided to move back to New Zealand because, as she’d later say, ‘it’s where I belong.’

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12The small island of Karemoana, where Frame’s protagonist Malfred Signal decides to retire, is a fictitious place, but it geographically resembles Waiheke Island, a short ferry ride from Auckland in the Hauraki Gulf. Waiheke is now one of the country’s most favoured billionaire boltholes, ‘the Hamptons of New Zealand’, but at the time Frame wrote A State of Siege, the island was a sleepy summer holiday place with three hundred residents year-round.

Malfred arrives at the island from Matuatangi, a small South Island town. The Signals are a big local family and a bronze statue of her long-dead, mountaineering businessman father perpetually watches over them all. Malfred is fifty-three years old and she’s spent her whole adult life teaching art in a high school for girls. The curriculum favours life-drawing: the faithful depiction of banal household objects like fire shovels, milk jugs and cups through perspective and shade. The only unmarried daughter in a family of three children, Malfred numbly accepted her fate of staying at home and taking care of her mother through a long lingering illness. When her mother dies, she is suddenly free and decides to retire and shockingly leave the provincial, highly anglicized South Island town where she’s lived all her life to pursue painting full-time. She buys the Karemoana cottage unseen, unafraid of the fact that the previous owner, an elderly woman, had died there alone.

Away from her family and personal history, Malfred believes that by moving to Karemoana she’ll be finally free to explore and express her own vision, the intense private world that Frame-writing-as-Malfred describes as ‘the room two inches behind the eyes’. There are no guarantees that she’ll succeed, but ‘for the first time in her life she was free to explore that room’. For Malfred, 13as for some of the greatest New Zealand modernist painters like Rita Angus, Toss Woollaston and Colin McCahon – all of whom were South Islanders and Frame’s older peers – that room was a roomful of landscapes. ‘The land’, Malfred thinks, ‘is all I need.... We are so few in this country. It is the land that is our neighbour, the rivers, the sea, the bush that we have loved as ourselves.’

A State of Siege takes place in an exaggeratedly binary world of the over-civilized north versus a wild, primitive south; the world of the suburban tract home and the gasoline lawnmower versus the promiscuous growth of wild vegetation and a life of the mind. But within the folds of this binary world, Frame creates a vivid and nuanced depiction of the struggle to escape the expectations of others, and the move towards artistic creation that drives Malfred’s inner life. Can one ever escape one’s own past? Arriving up north from the south, Malfred is dazzled by a ‘South Pacific Paradise. An island where storms were stormier, rain was rainier, sun was sunnier; where figs, bananas, passionfruit, pawpaws, feijoas, custard apples, guavas, grew and ripened.’ Frame must have been similarly struck by this powerful burst of vegetation and light arriving home after so many years in the UK.

But Malfred’s slow journey north is haunted by resentment and fear as she remembers and dreams of her mother’s long illness: ‘How I hated Mother!’ the compliant, cardigan-wearing spinster shockingly recalls.

‘The blue tubes of lanolin in rows and rows on the shelf in the bathroom ... the special equipment for the sick, as if the journey to death were a journey into space... She was enclosed, not in a space capsule in preparation for a voyage that would give her a wonderful view of the stars, of eternity, but in one of those medical 14capsules the skin of which is dissolved, digested, by those who swallow them.’

But Malfred’s arrival in her new island paradise quickly turns sinister. Her new house isn’t empty: with no one to claim them, the dead woman’s belongings have been left behind. The driver who delivers her things casually mentions the island’s dry summers and uncertain water supply. There’s a ‘bad element’ among the population, he warns her – she’d better be careful and lock all her doors.

Until this point, a reader could almost believe Frame was writing a conventional thriller. But on Malfred’s fifth day on Karemoana, things turn very strange. The previous evening she’d taken a walk over the hill to a part of the island ringed by a mangrove swamp. Here, the boarded-up baches and cabins turned suddenly shabby. Two families of Māori and Pakeha children ran and played near the swamp and Malfred was certain the enclave’s derelict nature was due to the mangrove itself. Until now she’d forgotten about poverty and she was convinced that ‘the mangroves ... had the power to lure poverty, as a kind of human complement to their own vegetable squalor. On Karemoana it would be at this meeting place of sea and swamp ... that the ragged would always play; and they would be outcasts in such a bounteous land of light and colour.... Already, out of the new world, there was one plant that haunted her, that she knew she must paint: the mangrove in its sordid, calm sinister bed of grey mud...’

She wakes up the next morning, inspired and ready to paint. She sets up her paper and easel and paint tubes just as she’d done all her life in Matuatangi. She looks out the window preparing to copy but instead she’s gripped by a new and powerful urge. Without knowing why, she 15takes out some leftover tubes of her invalid mother’s lanolin and mixes the waxy cream in with her tempera paints. ‘The sickly smell of the lanolin made her shut her eyes with remembered horror,’ and ‘she painted the sea at that moment as she felt and saw it.’ She works in a lucid trance and completes the painting that day. Titled My Last Days in Matuatangi, the foamy mixture of tempera and lanolin completely conceals the drowning body that has just been sucked underneath the waves. ‘There are no people in my painting,’ Malfred tells herself, ‘No people.’ It’s as if Malfred, or Frame, has folded the New Zealand modernist trope of the light and the landscape and of man alone into a delirious mix with the anxious reflections of a celibate woman in late middle-age. And then, that same night when Malfred is safely in bed, the storm comes and the knocking begins.

The rest of the book recounts a long dark night of the soul, and for Malfred it doesn’t end well.

Frame often mentioned Virginia Woolf as a model and heroine, and in A State of Siege, she’s deliberately playing with time – the book is a model of how time might expand and compress. The novel also shows Frame, through the cipher of Malfred’s artistic crisis, confronting both her and the culture’s screen-memories of New Zealand identity alongside her fresh new perceptions of the ‘subtropical flowers, bright red and yellow; big flowers, striped, brilliant, like sun umbrellas.’

Across her large body of work, Frame insisted upon making a world that allowed imagination to live alongside fact. A State of Siege (SOS!) is an existentialist spinster-thriller – a book about creation and death.16

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Contents

Title PageDedicationIntroductionI.The KnockingI.II.III.IV.V.VI.VII.VIII.IX.X.XI.XII.II.DarknessXIII.XIV.XV.XVI.XVII.XVIII.XIX.III.The StoneXX.XXI.XXII.XXIII.XXIV.XXV.XVI.XVII.Fitzcarraldo Editions ClassicsAbout the AuthorCopyright20

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I.

The Knocking

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I.

A South Pacific paradise. An island where storms were stormier, rain was rainier, sun was sunnier; where figs, bananas, passionfruit, pawpaws, feijoas, custard apples, guavas, grew and ripened; where the cold pale narcissi opened their buds at the official beginning of winter, and violets bloomed all year; where the only enemies of man, apart from man, were wasps as big as flying tigers, a few mosquitoes breeding a giant island strain, too many colonies of ants; and perhaps, though one does not explain why, the sullen grey mangroves standing in their beds of mud in the tidal inlets facing the mainland.

People from all over the country retired to Karemoana. Others owned or rented baches there, crowding in summer onto the old ferry boats with their holiday gear — including children, goggles, frogmen flippers, fishing rods and reels, bathing suits, grey bach blankets, tinned food, sun umbrellas. The island became a world of guitars, beer, love (free and imprisoned), rejoicing, loneliness, louts and sun. The shopkeepers in the small towns and along the unmade roads forgot their fears of bankruptcy and put out hopefully on the counters, already laden with old stock, a few more weevil-infested packets of walnuts and peanuts, and sea-rusted tins of tomato soup. Then, after summer, when the tourists and holidaymakers had gone, the three hundred permanent residents would reclaim their almost-deserted island, and with the space, sun, rain, silence to grow and ripen as freely as the fruit and vegetables around them, they would nurse their individuality, encouraging the growth of the kind of eccentricity that flourishes best on small islands kept fluid in image by the everpresent sight and sound of the sea.

In relation to the rest of the country, Karemoana and 26the mainland lying in its latitude were ‘up north’ in a foreign climate with foreign inhabitants whose speech and way of life were American, Australian, Polynesian, certainly far from New Zealand. ‘Up north’ was a place blessed with sunlight, warm winds, subtropical ease; its people were prosperous, confident, free; they thought themselves superior, and perhaps they were, cherishing their geographical ‘king of the castle’ delusion while the oppressed south, the true ‘down under’, struggled for political air and attention. The north lured. The population of the south drifted north as to a new frontier, leaving saddened Borough and City Councils, Tourist Boards, and, in some places, ghost towns. There seemed to be no way of bringing home the deserters, nor of encouraging the new settlers to stay after they had been seduced by the tales of returning holidaymakers and by the ecstatic cries of their frost, snow, mist-ridden neighbours:

‘It’s subtropical! The north is subtropical! They grow oranges.’

Members of Parliament preferred not to speak of this climatic rift because it was something they could neither control nor promise to change. Everyone knew that orange trees grew up north. The southern retaliation that up north the climate was too dry for the best peaches and apricots that furred the trees and the purses of Central Otago, seemed never quite to have the conviction of northern boasts. Orange trees; orange blossoms; the fruit hanging golden, ripening in winter; the soft dark figs bursting at the close of a hot summer; tree tomatoes; Chinese gooseberries. And sun. Months of sun.

And all these blessings without the mainland curse of too many people, their motorcars, motor mowers and transistors, were enjoyed on the islands in the gulf – on Huia, Little Colville, Coromandel, and on Karemoana 27where Malfred Signal of Matuatangi, South Island, came to retire, not too old at fifty-three to enjoy the comforts of the longed-for separate life in an environment that gave the novel illusion of a world abroad, overseas, in a golden vale of orange trees: a South Pacific paradise.

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II.

Malfred buried her mother (recently dead, worn out in soul and skin and with the same spotted brown patches on both) and saw her father, thirty years dead, set up in bronze on a lonely headland overlooking Matuatangi, before she made the move north. Her going was a pilgrimage against her nature and her family, especially against her family. The fact that it was a pilgrimage gave her the strength to carry out her plans: at fifty-three, or indeed at any age, there are so few opportunities to be a pilgrim.

‘But Malfred,’ everyone said, ‘your father almost built Matuatangi with his own hands, time, patience and money. And you are your father’s daughter.’

People had a habit of casting this unanimous verdict without being aware of the sentence it imposed. Malfred, with her sister Lucy (married to a local businessman who one day, in his turn, would have his statue set on a lonely headland, if there were any headlands left that were lonely), and her brother Graham (member of a law firm in Christchurch), each had a strong sense of family responsibility. It had seemed that a sense of loyalty alone would persuade at least one member of the family to stay in Matuatangi. Lucy had settled there, happily. But everyone knew, and remarked, that it was Malfred who was her father’s daughter; and here was Malfred, born and bred in the town (what blackmail, what self-satisfaction in those words born and bred), leaving Matuatangi to live in the foreign North Island! Malfred, who had taught art for so many years at the local High School, who had retired early to care for her sick mother, who yet had found time to help in Corso appeals, to organize WEA lectures in the library hall, to paint and exhibit in the Art Society’s rooms, those well-loved, local landscapes and 29seascapes that were prized for their water-colour likeness to the original scenes. Why was Malfred Signal deserting Matuatangi? Who did she think she was – Grandma Moses?

There was a farewell evening organized by the Old Girls’ Association with a present bought from contributions made by the Old Girls, the Art Society, the WEA; and Malfred prepared to go north with the good, though wondering, wishes of the people of Matuatangi cast for her in the shape of a pair of silver candlesticks, and with her family’s good wishes not as solidly expressed in the shape of good advice, instructions to write, reminders of her age, and of the fact that she was her father’s daughter.

‘In Matuatangi,’ Malfred told them, ‘I can scarcely forget it.’

Drinking fountains, seats, gates, foundation stones, trees, all had been named after Francis Henry Signal. He was on the Mayoral Roll in the Town Hall, in the records of past Library Committees (Athenaeum and Mechanics Institute) and the Boys’ High Honours Board. He had been a legend that Malfred had found hard to reconcile with the slight, shy, brown-eyed man that she knew. He’d climbed mountains, too, named peaks in the Southern Alps, had been mentioned in the country’s history; yet Malfred remembered most clearly his gentleness, his long silences, his body that did not seem to have the right shape, for he walked as if one of his legs were shorter than the other, and his head dropped to one side. Malfred had been amused at the Apollo-like image cast of him in the bronze statue: his chin was firm, his head erect, his stance determined, almost regal. The sculptor had shaped him as the conventional Hero, and had got away with it, Malfred supposed, because her father, in life and in death, had 30been treated as time treats so many heroes: his exploits had been given physical expression.

Malfred knew that the family and the townspeople (who are always more shrewd than is to be admitted) were correct in naming her her father’s daughter. She was her father’s only child. Where Graham climbed mountains, Lucy knew the names of the native trees, but neither had made mountains or trees as separate dreams inside their mind, as Malfred had done. Malfred knew of the ‘room two inches behind the eyes’; it was filled almost to overflowing; yet for forty years she had kept it locked. She had not planned that her exploration of it would be a dramatic occasion for herself or others. She kept remembering that when she was a child she had kept a fierce-looking beetle in a matchbox, not daring to look at it, and then when one day she found the courage to open the box, she found only a shrivelled, dry shell. But the shell had once been such a beautiful amber colour that having the beetle dead and gone did not seem important, for it had left behind the memory of its colour, of the shell that shone — yellow streaks on dark polished gold and amber. It had seemed incredible to Malfred that the thing, for so long unlooked at, had once been a creature, a pet with a name of its own. Howard. Yes, that was his name: Howard.

Malfred knew that she was on no human terms with the ‘room two inches behind the eyes’, that what lay there, treasure or no treasure, did not belong to her, had not been captured by her and given a name. Perhaps it would never be captured and named. Yet she felt that for the first time in her life she was free to explore that room, and the fact that she was seizing the opportunity to explore branded her more surely than any other action had done as her father’s daughter. What her father wanted to do, he had done, in time; he had been patient, persevering; his 31‘one day when I get the chance’ had remained a genuine excuse, not the way of life it becomes for so many people, through their own deficiencies or through the sly workings of fate.

Malfred had been interested most of her life in painting. She was not sure that on Karemoana she would be inspired to paint; she wanted, first of all, to observe, to clean a dusty way of looking. From her collection of water colours she chose to take north with her, first, a painting of the mouth of the Waitaki in early winter; next, an old mill scene depicting the old mill at Matuatangi; then, a painting of the lonely headland where her father’s statue had been set up. Other paintings she chose were a country scene on a day of a nor’wester, the old Main Street of Matuatangi with its wool and hide stores, early newspaper offices, rabbit-skin factory, new foundry. It was when she was trying to limit her choice of paintings that she realized (though she had known it for years, passively) how sentimental, colourless, were the images she had made of the scenes that were dearest to her; the true images were in her mind; she could stare at the mouth of the Waitaki in early winter without having to burden herself with a pile of dusty canvases that would remind her less of the scenes depicted than of the years spent ‘teaching’ art, pouncing on the faulty ‘shadowers’, trying to instil the ‘sense of proportion’ that in her probationary years meant persuading schoolgirls to ‘match’ the sides of shovels and vases, to make distant mountains distant, near faces near; but which meant to her now an attempt to rearrange her own ‘view’, set against the measuring standards not of the eye but of the ‘room two inches behind the eyes’.

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III.

‘It’s not as if you’re young, Mally. Do you really think you can tear yourself away to go to this island? You’ve lived in Matuatangi for so long!’

‘What would mother think? Did you ever tell her of your plans?’

‘Karemoana has only rain water, no sewers.’

‘Up north! Are you sure you’ll like it up north?’

‘It’s a long way to come south for visits. Do you know what the journey’s like?’

‘And it’s a long way for us to come north to see you.’

‘The north is vulgar. It takes the biggest bite of everything.’

‘The south nibbles discreetly. And thirty chews to a swallow!’

‘You can hear the north eating. Its table manners are bad.’

‘The south is old-fashioned enough to still use a tablecloth, to put pepper and salt on the breakfast table.’

‘It’s hot up north, Mally. The kind of heat that you wouldn’t like, at your age. Humidity.’

‘There’s no snow.’

‘No rivers to speak of.’

‘And you’d never guess what, in all good faith, they give the name mountain to!’

‘You’ll be a stranger in a foreign land. At your age it’s harder to become acclimatized.’

‘And what of this bach you’ve bought? What is it, beside our old family home that you’re selling, where the three of us grew up and Dad and Mother died?’

‘What about your friends, your painting, the Old Girls’ Association, the Art Society?’

‘I’ll allow all your arguments,’ Malfred said good-33humouredly. ‘I’ve an answer to everyone. Not what about the weather, the distance, the isolation, the family, the town, friends, societies, my age. Just – What about me?’

They were disconcerted. They had supposed, they said, they had supposed. When they looked again at their sister, at her coarse grey hair wound in plaits, her oval face with its high cheekbones already patched with the pigmentation of age and rising blood pressure, her grey eyes, her full yet primly posed lips, and her body in its autumn-tinted cardigan and skirt, they saw for an instant not the incipient signs usual in a woman past fifty, not the hints of the walking last will and testament, with legacies neatly disposed, but a flame that there was no accounting for, burning steadily at its own pace because it had been lit from within. They did not try to identify or discuss it. Instead, Lucy, so dreamy, untidy and rich, said, ‘Mally, do come to see the central heating in our new greenhouse, and all the beautiful plants Roland has bought.’ While Graham said, ‘When you’re passing through Christchurch, Mally, what about spending a couple of days with Fernie and me?’

On her last day in Matuatangi Malfred went with Lucy to visit the family grave in the cemetery. Lucy cleaned the winged angel with a small bottle of detergent she had bought for the purpose, while her small snowy-haired son, Oliver, made daisy chains, with Mally’s help, though Malfred was disappointed that he did not see ‘something special’ in the daisy chains. If she’d had children of her own, she thought...

She replaced the cleaned glass bell over the pale stiff artificial flowers, forked the chickweed (how lank and tall it grew, twice the size of chickweed on ordinary soil!) and the sow thistle from the borders, then, with their sense of 34duty and their conscience put to sleep in the warm spring air they unravelled Oliver from his daisies and went back to the car. Lucy then drove to the cape for Malfred to have a last glimpse for many months, perhaps years, of their father’s statue.

‘Though why we should bother to drive up here, I don’t know,’ Lucy said. ‘Unless it’s for the view. It’s too bad that just when they decide to put Dad up here everyone discovers there’s a View. The place has been overgrown with weeds for years.’

‘Nobody came here in the old days,’ Malfred said. ‘Lovers, maybe. And old men taking a stroll from the Old Man’s Home. Don’t you think Dad would die of horror if he woke to find himself here, now, with this restaurant beside him?’

‘It makes me wonder if you’re quite sure your island up north, Karemoana, will be the unspoilt paradise you believe it to be.’

‘I don’t expect a paradise.’

Why could no one seem to understand? A sense of peace came to Malfred as she realized the lack of bitterness in her question. Indeed, she suspected that she was asking it only out of deference to herself when young, when understanding had seemed as scarce as ownership of a royal kingdom. She felt, too, that the attempts of Lucy and Graham and others to persuade her to stay in the South Island were not based on genuine concern, as if she had been young and in need of care and advice. The objections to her going north were routine objections. Lucy and Roland would miss her, and she would miss them, and little Oliver. She would miss Graham and Fernie, too, and their aloof, grown-up family. And then there would be no more Monday evenings at the Art Society, Ladies a Plate — all plates because there were all 35ladies! Your mountains, my lake, her beach in summer. The Old Girls’ Association. Yes, Miss Cartright; no, Miss Cartright; more tea, Miss Jefferson? But you don’t take sugar, Miss Humphrey!

Then home, and mother. The blue tubes of lanolin in rows and rows on the shelf in the bathroom. Also in the bathroom, the special equipment for the sick, as if the journey to death were a journey into space, with invalids and astronauts practised travellers in their lonely new environment. Who knows, Malfred thought, that mother at her death did not catch a glimpse of eternity and cry out from the small shrivelled capsule that was her final home, ‘What a beautiful view!’ And how jealous her mother had been of the equipment — the bed cradle, the commode, the bed pan; the liniments, pills, injections! Day after day she used to lie in the bed in the front room, calm, but in pain, engaged in a form of stocktaking that would not have pleased the earnest vicar whose mind, naturally or through training, turned to the counting of blessings only; old Mrs Mary Signal lay counting her medicines, like a grocer stocktaking his wares.

All her life Malfred had felt as if she had been bound in someone else’s dream, as she had read that some Eastern children had their limbs bound to set them in the shape desired by their parents and by tradition. In her dream she had painted lakes, boats, mountains, children, cats, dogs; and there had been no consciousness that her arms were asleep, nor any feeling of need to wake them from their approved dreaming. When her mother died, the realization and shock of her freedom gave Malfred a desire to destroy, to strike out, in the spasm resulting from her suddenly cured paralysis. Then she was calm and watchful.

She remembered that she went to the room that had been her father’s study, and there she forgot to be calm. 36She burst into tears that tasted of salt and chalk, the chalk that she had swallowed and sniffed and sprayed out in a poisonous spray of wandering lines during all the years she had ‘taught’ art.

Mother’s illness has been a strain, she told herself. I never knew that anyone could settle so happily into dying. Why should she have found it such an enjoyable experience?

At the time of her mother’s death, Graham and Fernie had come to stay. There were other relatives, too, from Nelson and Wellington: her mother’s youngest brother and his wife and their grown-up son. All tiptoed to the sickroom and peered in possessively at old Mrs Signal. Malfred noticed that only she had referred to it as the ‘sickroom’, as if her continued association with the dying had shown death in its truly old-fashioned light.

‘Mother likes flowers in the sickroom,’ she had said. She was aware, now, that she had spoken in a gloating manner.

Graham, as the man of the family, had seen to the practical arrangements that are part of dying and being disposed of, particularly of being disposed of. They dismissed Malfred as ‘overwrought’ when she said, half joking (to her surprise, too, for she had not thought she would joke in this way), ‘Wouldn’t it be easier to bury her in the garden?’

She had realized her mistake at once in saying that. She had long grown used to the fact that when a woman without family ties of husband and children makes any reference to or joke about the mysteries of the closed human family, whether about birth, marriage, death or disposal, she is immediately subdued by the argument that only those who have experienced such total mysteries have the right to comment on them.

Bury mother in the garden indeed!37

‘Now if I said that about any of mine,’ Fernie began, then she stopped. Malfred was looking at her with a glance that said clearly, ‘Mother was not mine.’

Well they could have her, Malfred thought, aware of rising hysteria. They could have her. She didn’t want her any more, she didn’t want her supermarket of medicines. But it hadn’t always been that way. Her mother had been gentle, she had seen things clearly, until her last illness.

Perhaps, Malfred thought, I did look upon her as my possession. Though I’ve been saying all my life that I can do without anyone, I must have someone. I’ve always needed someone, even if it’s only for the snobbish reason of keeping up with the Joneses. My he, she or it can’t be forever away on holiday or in the country or the city or at sea or unborn or lost or dead. How I hated mother! She was enclosed, not in a space capsule in preparation for a voyage that would give her a wonderful view of the stars, of eternity, but in one of those medical capsules the skin of which is dissolved, digested, by those who swallow them. I’ve seen hot water poured on those capsules; they are dark blue; they twist, they melt.

Mother walked with me one day in spring when the cherry blossom was out in the Avenue, and she turned to me and said, ‘Matuatangi with its cherry blossom is the prettiest town in the South Island. Pretty, but full of gossips.’

The night her mother died Malfred dreamed that she walked in a room carpeted with tubes of lanolin with their caps dislodged so that the stuff squirmed in a greasy mess over her best shoes; then the blue tubes of lanolin changed to tubes of oil paint. Malfred wound her hair in its grey plait and straightened her cardigan. She smiled in her sleep. ‘I’m painting mother,’ she said. But in the morning when she woke she did not remember her dream 38and so could not use it, as people like to use dreams, as an omen of her future. Instead, she woke with a nasty taste in her mouth, and a bad breath that could not be masked, and in her eyes and on her cheeks were muddy tears left by the tide of death that had come in, taken what it wanted, then gone out leaving all grief stranded with not even a solitary, pink sea anemone flowering in the rock pool.

39

IV.

She knew, but had not realized, the peace that came from staying year after year in the same place. She did not want to see herself as a timid woman, past middle age, alone, setting out on a tiring, perhaps a frightening journey to a new home in a part of the country that was strange to her. She could not get out of her head the idea of orange trees. Other people seemed impressed by them, too.

‘Up north?’ they would say. ‘Orange trees grow up north. Oranges, figs and lemons. But oranges.’

Yet when the Limited for the north drew in at Matuatangi station and the passengers, steamed warm, prosperous, assured, crowded onto the platform, staring with their condescending North Island eyes at the obvious attempt that had been made to jazz up the refreshment room, to ‘centralize’ sales by offering magazines side by side with buns, and not only buns — hamburgers, a crescent of burnt onion stuck to a slice of freckled Belgium — then Malfred knew she was afraid, or perhaps more excited than afraid, though the excitement was anchored at intervals (like a magic carpet pelted and weighed down with heavy stones) by the practical worries: would her luggage get there safely, her books, her painting materials, the few personal treasures she had chosen to take with her? Why were her suitcases so heavy when they had not seemed so at home? Would the crossing be rough? Would she have access to the ventilator in the cabin? And the day in Wellington, how would she spend it? Trying to escape from relatives, walking up and down Willis Street in the everlasting misty rain? Looking in Whitcombes, going to the Houses of Parliament, visiting an art gallery to see the fruits that she and her contemporaries had tried to ripen but had succeeded more often in withering? 40