Pray, my Dear, quoth my mother, have you not forgot to wind up the clock? — Good G—! cried my father, making an exclamation, but taking care to moderate his voice at the same time, — Did ever woman, since the creation of the world, interrupt a man with such a silly question? Pray, what was your father saying? — Nothing.
Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
‘Do you think we should get married?’ said Steve one night, not long after the return from Queenstown. Life seemed serious suddenly. Finite. It seemed necessary to act. His skin felt smooth as sunwarmed stone. There was always a kind of whirring about him, a buzz of nervous energy. He felt alive, and right now Kate wanted very much to be alive. At the mention of marriage she felt a bubble form in her chest the way it always did when she was excited. She turned the word over in her mind. She tested the strangeness of it. Something that happened to other people, something that she had read about for years, could happen to her. She could be Princess Grace on the steps on the palace witnessing the Explosion of Joy over the Principality. She could experience the final page in all the sixpenny rentals: that blissful wedding that followed the kiss as naturally as night followed day. She had, of course, already experienced the part that lay beyond the wedding: the moment of ecstasy when there was no further need for words. The end of university loomed. What lay beyond — that awkward space between childhood and death — was a blank. Marriage filled the gap and solved the problem in just eight letters.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, yes.’
This was the year of the Songs of Innocence and Experience balanced on a shining thread above the hallucinatory abyss; the year when the angel fell headlong from heaven in the blind man’s vision, dark dark dark amid the blaze of noon. In that year, her third at university, Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones and Tristram Shandy packed down as a cheerful scrum, Hamlet tried to make up his mind as the bodies piled up centre stage, Lear carried Cordelia in his arms, howling, howling, Fanny came to Mansfield Park and Robinson Crusoe ventured offshore in a proto-colonial direction. Pope nipped and snapped in couplets like rows of sharpened teeth and Mr H leapt from the cupboard in pursuit of that dodgy virgin, Pamela. And the wanderer dreamed of home, and of kissing his wife under a single sheet.
She sat in tutorials trying on marriage. She wrote her name surreptitiously in the margins of notes on Tristram Shandy: Kate Dobbs. Mrs K. Dobbs. She suffered brief regret at the monosyllabic ordinariness of it, at the loss of the pleasingly alliterative Kate Kennedy, at the abandonment of Irishness for Uncle-Tom-Cobbley Englishness. But at least the name did not make her absurd. Imagine if Steve’s name had been Pate, for example. ‘Kate Pate’. Her mother had a cousin who had married a man called Arnold Smellie. It had made her bitter, her mother said. Ridicule was a high price to pay for love. Kate Dobbs. The name had a clunky sound, like solid timber, like sensible shoes. Kate Dobbs. Steve and Kate Dobbs.
Steve bought her an engagement ring. It was a diamond solitaire with a chip on each platinum shoulder. Kate had never worn a ring before, nor bracelets, nor necklaces, hating the sensation of metal against her skin. Rings particularly appalled her. They slid on readily enough, then they stuck. She became frantic at their immovability, soaping her knuckle wildly to help them slide off. It was akin to the claustrophobia aroused by a tight sweater caught over the head. But this ring was different.
She wore it for the first time on the night they went to see Long Day’s Journey into Night at the Regent. She sat in the dark while Katharine Hepburn, tremulous with morphine addiction, fluttered about the dark house like a pale moth, and the lumpish sons squabbled, and Ralph Richardson, shorn of any quizzicality, became another of those literary dark male brooders. As the family writhed toward catharsis, Kate looked down at her hand. In the dark the ring twinkled. She had read somewhere that that was a test for a true diamond: it should cut glass. She had tried it out that afternoon, scratching her initials, KSK — her soon-to-be-abandoned maidenly initials — on the window of her room at the flat. And it should gleam in the dark.
Her right hand was held in Steve’s hand. Her left hand had the ring like a little star.
She was engaged. The word sounded giddy: like a new haircut, or red shoes. It sounded silly and serious, all at once.
‘That was in the winter of senior year. Then in the spring something happened to me. Yes, I remember. I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time.’
Long Day’s Journey into Night by Eugene O’Neill
Mr and Mrs Patrick Kennedy of 55 Greta Street, Oamaru, announce with pleasure … The words in the two-minute silence were forced to their formulaic order. Their natural sequence had been appropriated by convention.
Convention also dictated an engagement party at the flat in Clyde Street, with the Doors on the stereo, several crates of beer and punch made from ginger ale and half a dozen bottles of Pimms. The guests brought presents: a wooden salad bowl, a coffee pot, a set of whisky glasses, an electric clock. Caro organised a kitchen evening and there were more presents: another coffee pot, kitchen scissors, and a Mood Barometer with hands labelled Him and Her that could be turned to points ranging from Lovey-dovey! to Watch Out! Maddie gave her a nightie in a brilliant orange psychedelic print.
‘Thought you’d like it for the honeymoon,’ she said as she poured Cold Duck into a tea cup.
For the honeymoon retained a certain aura.
Caro slept regularly with a med student: a tall med student who she said made her feel at last delicate and tiny, like a porcelain shepherdess. Maddie had had a succession of disastrous relationships. She said musicians were hopeless, being romantic and neurotic, but she continued to bring them home where they retreated to her room for some brief, generally unsatisfactory sex, followed by intense and equally unsatisfactory conversation. Despite evidence to the contrary, however, the myth of pre-marital chastity was politely maintained.
… announce with pleasure the engagement of their older daughter, Kathleen …
In fact, when Kate announced her engagement to her mother, the response had been more muted.
‘What about your job?’ she had said.
‘What job?’ said Kate. ‘I don’t have a job.’
‘Teaching,’ said her mother.
‘I can still teach,’ said Kate.
‘Not when you’ve got children,’ said her mother. ‘I thought teaching was to be your calling?’
‘We’re not going to have children straight away,’ said Kate. ‘And teaching’s not my calling. I just took the studentship for the money. I don’t know yet what job I want.’
‘You should do law,’ said her mother.
‘Law’s boring,’ said Kate.
‘It looks interesting on Perry Mason,’ said her mother.
‘It’s not like on Perry Mason,’ said Kate. ‘Not really. Not in New Zealand. It’s divorces and real estate and stuff like that.’ Caro was doing law. The books on her desk were enormous, dense with detail: Adams on Criminal Law. Cheshire and Fifoot. Caro sat at the kitchen table with her law student friends discussing snails in ginger beer, the indefeasibility of title, contract and negligence. It should have been interesting: The Carbolic Smokeball Case! Donoghue v. Stevenson! Frazer v. Walker! But in reality, the discussion revolved around tiny points of debate. There was no grand sweep, not around the kitchen table at any rate, no sparkling dialogue, no revelatory climax, just dry resolution and precedent.
Her mother Tip-exed a mistake, dabbing at the manuscript with the little brush. The maternal side was nearly ready for the printer.
‘You could do good if you were a lawyer,’ she said. ‘If you didn’t have the distraction of a family to take care of, you could help other people. You could become an MP! We need women MPs.’
‘I do not want to be an MP,’ said Kate. ‘Now, where’s the Windolene?’
The windows in Maura’s bedroom where Steve was to sleep were grimy. Kate had already visited Steve’s home in Invercargill and the windows there were polished, the furniture gleamed: the Queen Anne bedroom suites made by Steve’s dad, the dining table under its baize cloth, the eighteenth-century longcase clock in the hall — all bore the satisfied glow of furniture properly waxed and cared for. The roses in the garden were pruned, the edges trimmed. For days before Steve’s first visit Kate vacuumed the floors and tried to apply some polish to furniture scuffed beyond redemption.
‘Who is this boy?’ said her mother. ‘He must be quite something.’
She seemed amused. Her father too. Kate thought she saw them wink at each other, for the first time that she could ever remember in collusion. They thought her cleaning was funny. They had never had guests to stay, not even family. They had never had anyone over for a meal. They had never gone out to a restaurant with red plastic covers on the menus. They had no idea how other people lived. Kate scrubbed the bath viciously with half an inch of Ajax.
‘He is something,’ she said.
‘I’d better make a cake then,’ said her mother.
The visit did not go well, despite the clean windows. Steve seemed curt, her father was uncomfortable, struggling to sit at the table, his stiff hands fumbling to hold knife and fork properly. Her mother flustered, endlessly asking this strange young man if he’d had enough to eat, endlessly apologising.
‘Here you are, Steven. Have another helping.’ (‘He’s very thin, isn’t he?’ she had whispered to Kate out in the kitchen as she tipped the carrots into one of the serving bowls making its inaugural appearance from the china cabinet in the front room. ‘He looks like he’s outgrown his strength.’ ‘He’s just fine,’ said Kate.)
‘You’ll have to eat up,’ said her mother. ‘When you’re swotting so hard. My brother Tom …’
‘Mum!’ said Kate, but it was too late. Her mother was launched into Tom and the TB and Waipiata.
‘I was up at Waipiata once,’ said Steve. ‘At a health camp when I was seven.’
Her mother was triumphant.
‘You see?’ she said as they dished up the pudding in the kitchen into a crystal bowl she had received at her own wedding twenty-five years before, with the silver spoons released at last from white tissue paper. ‘A shadow on the lung!’ She tipped some cream into a bowl rimmed with stylised orange trees. ‘That boy will have to watch it if there’s TB in the family.’ She loaded his plate with pineapple upside-down pudding and a small hillock of cream. Steve tried hard, but Kate could see him struggling.
‘Something wrong?’ said her mother, seeing his spoon falter.
‘No,’ said Steve. ‘It’s delicious. It’s just that I’ve had plenty, thank you.’
Her mother looked disappointed. ‘I know it’s not very nice,’ she said. ‘I should have added more sugar.’
‘It’s great,’ said Steve, but her mother was not to be comforted.
‘Is it?’ she said doubtfully. ‘Are you sure you won’t have some more then?’
‘Mum!’ said Kate. ‘He’s not hungry! He’s had enough!’
‘If you say so, dear,’ said her mother, and she took up the cream bowl as if it were heavy burden. ‘I’ll get it better next time.’
‘They’re not always like this,’ said Kate, when they were able to escape at last and walk together on a blessedly empty beach.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Steve. ‘My parents are exactly the same.’ (They weren’t. They played violin and piano duets in the living room after dinner. They called lunch ‘luncheon’. They drove a Riley. They had a Labrador called Rusty. His mother was secretary of the National Party. His father had a cabinetry factory employing fifteen men. He was a city councillor. They didn’t bother much with church, but if they did go, they were Anglicans.) The beach stretched away undisturbed into heat haze; the sea rolled in; there were tiny beetles of iridescent green scaling the marram grass in the hollows of the sandhills.
… to Steven, oldest son of Mr and Mrs Clarence Dobbs of ‘Sevenoaks’, Invercargill …
Convention required dress fittings in a workshop whispery with tulle and satin: frills or simple sheath? White or cream? Train or no train? Fingertip veil or full-length? There were invitations to send. One bridesmaid or two? Trumpet Voluntary or Mendelssohn? The reception to plan for. The Gold Room at the Central Hotel or the Homestead Wedding and Reception Centre? Beef or chicken? Trifle or pavlova? The photographer. The flowers …
The honeymoon was the one thing that required little thought. Steve had a scholarship. They were going to England.
It was not quite so far off as could have been wished: but it was probably far enough, her radius of movement and repute having been so small. To persons of limited spheres, miles are as geographical degrees, parishes as counties, counties as provinces and kingdoms.
Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
The wedding was recorded on Super 8 by Kate’s cousin Bernard, who had given up on his chemistry degree after only a term and moved into television. (‘What’s that lad up to? He’s throwing away his Opportunity!’)
Bernard filmed the entire event from odd angles: from between the straw wedding hats of Caro and Maddie, from ground level among a shrubbery of legs and shoes, and, to finish, the wedding party walking down the church path and coming to a halt on the steps so that they were perfectly framed by a sign painted on a shop wall across the road advertising Lane’s Emulsion: ‘Good Health in a Bottle!’
Their families came to see them off. Steve’s parents kissed them both and wished them good luck. Maura gave her a brief hug. ‘You’re so lucky!’ she said. She still had two years to go at university, and it was torture. French and German and a teaching studentship. She had come second, however, in Miss University, in a purple halter-neck dress she had made herself, and she was working part time in a clothing shop near the Octagon. The management was hopeless, she said. Absolutely no sense of design. They still hung the clothes on those plastic dummies with the pointed feet and the vacant smiles. But she was going to turn it around. She had done one all-white display with a Vespa Supersprint in the window and a model with the visor down sitting astride it in a kind of Courreges print and white boots. The boss had not been too sure but they’d done ten times their normal business that week and she was going to be allowed to try another.
‘Tell me what they’re wearing in London,’ she said. ‘And if you can find me some really good boots, I’m a size six. Remember?’ She wrote it down in Kate’s address book, along with her body measurements, just in case.
Her father hugged her awkwardly. His arms were crooked permanently now at the elbow.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘enjoy yourself over there.’
‘I will,’ she said.
Three years suddenly seemed like a long time.
‘You could come and visit,’ she said. ‘You could come and stay in our flat.’
The vision rose, complete and unlikely. Her family, transported across the world to an English bedroom with counterpanes and casement windows and church bells chiming down a leafy lane. Now that she was abandoning them so definitively, she had a sudden urge to hang on to them all. She wanted to take them with her. But her father was saying, ‘Now why would I be wanting to do that?’ And when she said well, he could look up his relations, he could go back to visit Dundee, he laughed and said he could remember as much as he wanted of Dundee and he hadn’t kept in touch with the relations and where would they get the money for a trip like that anyway?
‘No,’ he said. ‘You just go and have a good time.’
Anything could happen in three years.
‘If you’re ever in Hodges Figgis or Blackwell’s or Foyles or one of those second-hand places,’ he said, ‘and you see anything interesting, just pick it up for me.You know what I like: travel, history, Pacific exploration, that kind of thing. I’ll send you the money. All right?’
‘All right,’ she said.
She held his hand. His bad hand.
‘That’s the girl,’ he said.
Her mother had stayed up the night before, baking biscuits for them to eat on the way.
‘But the tin’s enormous!’ said Kate. And it was: the largest cake-tin available, with a picture of the daffodils by the Avon on the lid, squeezed into a pink plastic string-bag. It was filled to bursting with ginger crunch, afghans, coconut squares and peanut biscuits, with layers of greaseproof paper in between. ‘I don’t know if we’ll be able to take it on board.’ They had already checked their luggage in.
‘Nonsense,’ said her mother. ‘Of course you will. A great big plane like that.’
‘They have weight limits,’ said Steve. The woman at the desk was very particular. ‘And there might be Customs as well. They have rules about what can be taken in and out of a country.’
‘But they won’t be bothered about a few biscuits, surely,’ said Kate’s mother. Nobody knows. Nobody has ever flown before. ‘I’ll go and have a word with her.’
‘Don’t do that,’ said Kate. ‘They’re busy. They won’t want to be bothered about biscuits.’
‘But we need to know,’ said her mother. ‘We need to know for sure.’
‘They’ll have plenty of biscuits anyway on the plane,’ said Steve. ‘They do full meals.’
Her mother looks defeated at that. She stands holding the string bag as the crowd mills about.
‘Packet biscuits,’ she says. ‘I thought you might like something from home.’
‘We would,’ says Kate. ‘We’d love it.’
Her mother smiles at that. ‘I’ll come up to the desk with you, and ask them,’ she says, and she follows them when they move toward the escalator, holding the string bag with the daffodil tin.
‘I don’t like these escalators,’ she says, but Steve is already rising away from her, and so is Kate, so she steps onto the tread. Kate hears the intake of her breath behind her, and a kind of frantic scrabbling. She turns. Her mother is hanging on to the moving handrail and fighting to keep her balance as the stairs move upward. The string bag has caught on the edge of one of the steps and tipped her back, she’s falling, she’s grabbing for support but the steps are moving too fast and the tin has fallen open. Ginger crunch, peanut brownies, afghans are tumbling out onto the metal treads and rising in little crumbling heaps toward Kate who is trying to walk back down to help but she is holding her coat in one hand and her bag in the other and she can’t get back.
‘Kate!’ calls her mother. Kate!’
Kate gets to the top then runs back down the stairs and by the time she is back her mother is being lifted to her feet by a stranger, she is dusting herself down. She is fixing her hair and gathering what is left of the biscuits into the tin.
‘Well, that’s taken care of that,’ she says. ‘They’re ruined. You can’t take them now.’
‘Of course we can,’ says Kate. ‘Look, there’s heaps that are all right. See: these ones are fine.’
She wants them now, more than anything. The afghans, the ginger crunch, the peanut brownies.
‘No, they’re not,’ says her mother. ‘You can’t eat them after they’ve been on the floor.’
But Kate is on her hands and knees, picking up whatever is unbroken, stuffing them back into the tin and her mother is saying, ‘You’ll have to pack them properly or they won’t fit,’ so they pack the tin again carefully, while Steve stands by keeping an eye on the time and as the final boarding call is made she hugs her mother and her mother hugs her fiercely, closely, and Kate loves her so much she can hardly speak to say goodbye.
Then somehow she and Steve are on the plane and home is vanishing to a rim of cloud on the horizon. They fly out over the ocean and on across the astonishing crimson continent that is Australia with its hour after hour of deserts squiggled with dry valleys and serpentine creekbeds. She nibbles an afghan and feels the threads stretch that hold her to home. They stretch and stretch until they are so fine as to be almost invisible.