Other formats

    TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

To Have and To Hold

To Have and To Hold

He drove the axe savagely into the rotten wood. It split lengthwise and fell apart, baring the wet sawdust tunnels of woodgrubs. He put the inch-long grubs on top of the chopping stump, their white wrinkled bodies curling blindly in the foreign sunlight; then spattered them one by one with the back of the axe. God made you; God will look after you, he thought; but remembered the story of Buddha cleaning the tiger’s wound and making another wound in his own body for the worms that lacked a lodging. The dank wood smell rose in his nostrils. The wind blew gently over banks of convolvuli where hairy bees scrambled and sucked. It stroked his chest under the flannel shirt. The leaden irritability which had lain on his mind since waking began to fade and vanish like fog from the morning town that lay below the bush. He straightened himself and walked down the gravel path to the back door of the house. The kitchen was empty; a brown vase of newly picked irises stood on the bench. In the bathroom he could hear his wifepage 288 humming as she cleaned the enamel bath; and through the door he could see her bent back. She was wearing her pale green oldest dress. He stood in the narrow passage and watched her. ‘That dress suits you very well. It goes with your hair.’

Her voice echoed from the shining bath. ‘Oh you always say that. I don’t think you notice what I’m wearing. Do you know what day it is?’

‘Of course I do.’

Her half-girlish body leaned forward as she polished, round trim buttocks, strong waist and small breasts. A huge longing gripped him to reach out and cup his hands on each breast. An image from Boccaccio rose to his mind, of Scythian mares. No, no, he told himself; for he knew that she hated to be touched except at the expected moment. And with that strangling of desire, a hot band tightened on his forehead.

‘Of course, it’s our anniversary.’

Awkwardly he touched her bare arm. Her face came up from the bath, wearing the slightly anxious expression and the small wrinkle on the forehead which he knew and dreaded.

‘Did you see the irises I picked?’ Her face grew calmer, the moment of contact over. ‘Come and look at them. They’re the best in the garden.’ In red heel-less cloth shoes her feet moved gracefully over the flax matting. She stood beside the irises, by the open window, cool and totally inaccessible. ‘What do you think of the way I’ve arranged them?’

‘They’re very nice.’ A vacant coldness settled on his mind; under it anger moved obscurely, that she could walk lightly in the sun, unmoved by the violence of his own pain and desire. She would respond to a flower, a painting; but not to him, not to a man. She should have been born an iris.

‘Just nice? I don’t think you’ve really noticed them at all.’ ‘They’re lovely. You’ve arranged them perfectly.’

At all costs they mustn’t be at loggerheads today. He smiled unconvinc- ingly, with what she called his rabbit’s smile, a baring of the teeth while the eyes did not change. A whimper drifted through from the front room, where the child lay kicking in its bassinette. She turned quickly, the irises forgotten. ‘Oh, would you be a dear and get Beth up. Give her a teaspoon of orange

juice after her milk. I really must finish the bathroom.’

The child lay plump and small in the bassinette, her iris-blue eyes open. He changed the soiled napkins, lifted her out, and sat on the edge of an armchair to give her the bottle. This was the one certain pleasure of the day. She played with the teat sleepily, sucking and refusing to suck, and kept her large eyes fixed upon his face. He tucked the woolly blanket round her head. In a tuneless voice he chanted nonsense songs, and rocked her to and fro.

Give her time, give her time, he thought; it was worth any amount of tension if the child was all right. Give himself time too. He remembered their plans before marriage: a house beside the beach, time to make bags out of thepage 289 broad kelp to hold mussels in, skip stones over the water, talk and make love. It had seemed to him then that the commerce of the bed would grow more real, a green and gold heraldic tree with leaves to hide their separate fears and follies, and roots that would last a lifetime.

The child sighed and belched. He wiped the trickle of milk from her chin. Those plans had been no more lasting than the shifting leaf-patterns thrown by the street-lamp on the wall of the room where they lay together, alive in the unrespectable night. The axe had fallen: for a life a death. Their wedding had been a confused shambles, where relatives talked in whispers with gravestone faces. From their few sexual encounters during her pregnancy he had come away bitterly ashamed, with the sense of having forced his attentions on a tired and ailing woman. So sex gave place to a brittle tenderness unreal as a pagoda above the lake of coiled obsession. The birth itself wakened him to enormous care for her safety and that of the child. Her face, blue from anaesthesia, looked at him, however, from the closed world of maternity. Her tiredness and irritability while nursing the child increased his conviction that his sexual need was a parcel delivered at the wrong door; but the conviction did not remove the need. If anything, it grew stronger.

Nine months after the birth his careful efforts to please alternated with fits of savage depression, when he chopped wood out of earshot of the house or flew into pointless rages. About this time he began to visit the pub on his way home from work. Drink relieved the tension for him. In the pub he could express obliquely his anger at her tormenting presence, joining in the small-talk that reduced every wife to a comic antagonist and moral censor. In the dark fug and babble, under the hanging bar-signs, he resumed the single man’s rebellion against the hand of the castrator. Now he saw her not, as once, a fellow-conspirator, but one of the enemy. Yet he hated himself for neglecting her. She was the Sleeping Beauty inaccessible within her wood of briars. He came home guilty to her angry silences and her back turned to him in the double bed. There was relief in his mind each morning as the train pulled out of the station, and he could watch the harbour waves rise and fall beyond the circle of his own dilemma. He would relive erotic episodes in his single life; and then turn back in shame to the image of her calm face bent to the feeding child.

Last night, moved perhaps by the thought of their anniversary, she had gone to bed early and waited for him. But the habit of suppression, developed over months, did not break readily. Without emotion he had seen her black hair spread on the pillow. And after the solitary spasm he had lain awake, his inward hunger unsatisfied, thinking – Our marriage is dying. Will we always lie like this, rock beside rock, and communicate only through our angers?

‘Was it good for you?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ he had lied. Later in the night he had tried to rouse her; but she was fast asleep.

page 290

She came into the room humming, a duster in her hand. ‘My goodness, you’ll never feed her at that rate. Here, give her to me.’ She picked the child up, patted its back, and expertly slid the teat into its mouth. ‘You could go to town for me and do some messages. We need green vegetables; a cabbage would do, or some brussels sprouts. You’ll find the money in my purse.’

At the sharpness of her tone the coil of resentment tightened in his chest. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back for lunch.’ But the calm, bird-thronged bush towered over him on the path to the road. Lord, I must grow! he thought. Calm like the trees. She has her own worries, poor thing; and I only add to them by wanting something she can’t give.

He caught a tram to town. The Saturday streets were full of brash wide- suited boys and high-heeling sweatered girls. The tram moved slowly up Lambton Quay. Fat pigeons hopped outside the Farmers Co-op. In the doorway of the National Hotel a young truck-driver stretched himself and looked at the drumming town and pavement-walking floosies with the eye of a bull in clover. A florist’s shop crowded with satin blooms glittered primly at the next corner. He jumped down from the moving tram.

‘I want a rose,’ he said. ‘A red rose. Not in full bloom.’

The plump, grey widow behind the counter drew a sprig out of a vase. A bud just opening, dark red in its heavy sheath. ‘Will this one do?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’ll be one and ninepence, please.’ She wrapped the single stalk in waterproof paper, folded and pinned it. She smiled as she handed it to him. ‘For a girl-friend?’

‘Yes.’ He rested the rose gingerly on his sleeve. A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose. It could hardly be mistaken for a tired husbandly gesture.

At the greengrocer’s he bought a pound of brussels sprouts. The door of the National lay between him and the tram stop. Time for two beers. Not today. Then he remembered the night before, lying coldly awake at her side and the rose seemed a symbol of frustration only. Why should a man live like a dog in a kennel? He walked heavily into the public bar. The barman in shirtsleeves, round as a blood pudding, confessor of the poor, leaned over.

‘Hullo, Jack. You’re a stranger.’

‘Uh-huh. I’ve had a lot of work to do.’ ‘Flowers for the girl-friend?’

‘No, for the missus. Wedding anniversary.’

‘You want to sweeten her eh? We’ve all got to do that sometimes. What’re you having today?’

‘One long beer.’

The barman had grief on his mind. His fringe of grey hair hung like grass on an uncut grave. He drove a cork into a barrel, handling the spigot like a mother, and resting between blows. ‘It gets harder all the way,’ he said. ‘Look at me. My old man owned a pub bigger than this one.’

page 291

‘It’s a good job.’

‘Good for a man who doesn’t drink. The three permanent professions – doctor, barman and undertaker. I worked with an undertaker once. I could lay out a dead man in twenty minutes. The boss was buried in a coffin he made himself. Heart rimu. He liked his brandy too much.’

‘Have one with me.’

‘I’ll do that.’ He filled the empty beer-glass and a pony for himself. ‘Here’s keeking up your kilt. I can’t start on the spirits this time of day. Jack O’Brien was asking for you. He came in about five yesterday.’

‘I didn’t know he was in town. Maybe I’ll see him.’ ‘He said he’d be in today again.’

‘I won’t see him today. I’ll be home this afternoon.’

‘Good on you. Always remember your wife’s your only sweetheart. Have another before you go.’

‘All right.’

When he came out of the pub the noon sun hung brassily above the town, pure and ancient fire in the cindertrack of the sky. It shone equally on chirruping shopgirls eating their lunches below the cenotaph and the blind man at the corner who knocked with his stick on the pavement for the earth to open her door and take him in. And on a half-drunk young man with a silly rose in his hand. Praised be the Lord for our Brother the Sun; for he is very bright and shining. O Lord, he is Thy similitude.

It would be just on lunchtime now. Only half an hour late. He crossed the road and climbed into a wealthy black taxi. The driver sat with his glasses on, reading a racing guide. He looked up, sorry to be disturbed, a stringy-necked worried man who did not love himself.

‘Where to, mate?’

He gave the address and leaned back in his seat. The rose slept on his knee beside the bag of brussels sprouts. His hopes flourished. They would go to the park in the afternoon. To the pictures in the evening. A French picture about love in wartime. Tonight they would lie down in harmony. Their love would be like rain falling in the bush gullies, knocking the heavy chestnuts from their branch, peeling black leaves from the young earth. She walked swaying before his mind’s eye. Wild mare of Scythia, fertilised by the wind.

But stumbling in through the bush track he felt the leaden doubt rise again. No magic tree had grown up to cover them with its healing branches. She would remain herself: sharp, sensitive, locked in her own sufficient world where an iris was lovelier than a phallus. And he: tongue-tied, inept, a stumbler all the way. She would not welcome him; least of all, with beer on his breath.

The table was laid in the living-room: a clean cloth, brightly coloured earthenware, a bowl of fruit, flowers, chicken and salad. Her surprise gesture, her wedding feast. The irises stood now on the mantelpiece, and she belowpage 292 them, waiting. She wore a blue print frock, and round her neck a circlet of white beads. When she saw him the familiar contraction darkened her forehead.

‘Why are you so late? I’ve been waiting half an hour.’ ‘It took a while to get the shopping done.’

‘There was nothing to do. Have you been drinking? You have, haven’t you?’

‘I just had a couple.’

‘Oh I hate you! You spoil everything, everything.’

Rigid with anger she ran from the room. Slowly he unpinned the rose. He was about to put it in the vase with the irises, but saw that it would spoil their arrangement. He laid it on the shelf beside the bookcase.

1956 (135)