What age am I waiting for to come to myself?
Xenophon’s Anabasis
So here is Kate reading in her room by the sea, about soldiers and their long journey home. It is years now since her father’s death, years too since her mother turned her face to the wall and let the cancer take over.
She had not been to see a doctor but simply ignored the symptoms, dismissing them, when Kate enquired, as a touch of flu, an upset tummy, nothing to worry about. She had said nothing to Izzie either, though they saw each other every week. When Kate visited Izzie to tell her of her sister’s death, she found her getting Ted dressed. He had begun to wander and it was only a matter of time before he would have to go into a home, but in the meantime, Izzie coped. He hunched on his chair carefully counting the spots on his pyjamas. Izzie’s hands shook so much that she had to lay aside the hairbrush. ‘But who will I tell all my secrets to now?’ she said to Kate. (‘Thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-five,’ said Ted.) She smoothed his skimpy hair with a wavery hand. ‘Who?’
Tollie may have said nothing of disease, but she had planned her funeral carefully nevertheless. Every time Kate visited her in the little house in Dunedin to which she had moved after Pat’s death, she brought down the sphinx box from the mantelpiece.
‘You see this?’ she said each time. ‘This has everything you’ll need. This is my will, this is my bank book, and all the bills will be here, paid up to date.’ She laid them out on the table as meticulously as if she were preparing for an operation. Objects in the house all bore a sticky label glued to the base: MAURA on the bottom of half the cups and saucers, KATE on the remainder. MAURA on the sewing machine, KATE on the Remington. She had planned the funeral tea.
‘Just a cup of tea,’ she said, ‘and some cakes from the Astoria Bakery. They’re not as good as homemade, of course, but they’ll do.’
She had even, it turned out, planned the service. When they opened the sphinx box after her death they found a video. TO BE USED AT MY FUNERAL. Bernard had been over to visit and while he was there, she had asked him to film her doing one of the readings: Praise him with the timbrel and dance! Praise him with psaltery and harp! Then she made a brief account of her life.
Well, I was born at Millerhill in Otago on the South Island of New Zealand. My father was a farmer and my mother taught piano in the district. They were both descended from Scottish early settlers.
She was wearing her dancing dress for the occasion, the toffee-coloured silk with the string of amber crystals and the matching earrings. She was very formal, sitting upright on the piano stool and facing the camera. A little nervous, but determined.
I spent a happy childhood playing with my sisters, Isobel and Anne, and my brother Thomas. When I was sixteen I discovered my vocation, which was nursing, and went to Oamaru Public, where I spent twenty happy years. I married Patrick Kennedy in 1945 and had two daughters, Kathleen and Maura, who have been a great joy to me. I just want to say that I love you all. So goodbye, until we meet again in heaven.
She turned to the piano, stretched her fingers as she always did before beginning to play. There was a cut in the film while the operator moved the camera to profile.
Now let us sing, said the determined little figure on the screen. She played a couple of chords. The tuning on the piano was uncertain, the tone jangly, but the introduction was recognisable enough.
Love divine, all loves excelling, sang their mother. And the congregation at Millerhill joined in while she played, vamping a little in the bass when the chords became too difficult. Joy of heaven to earth come down.
She had arranged it all. She had done it all herself.
The church itself at Millerhill outlasted her by only a couple of years. It was rarely used. The families who had once occupied its pews on Sunday mornings had vanished as the district shrank. Where once there had been thirty smallholdings, each sufficient to sustain a family in some comfort as the wool cheques rolled in and the English dutifully ate their butter and fat lambs, there were now only half-a-dozen big farms. Each enclosed its quota of old cottages falling to ruin, or renovated by city people wanting a weekend retreat. The farmers had become agribusinessmen; their wives commuted to the city, which was only twenty minutes away, now that the twists of the old roads had been made straight. The school closed first, then the hall was sold to a weekend potter. The church was demolished and its timber and furnishings went off to rehabbed kitchens in Maori Hill. The only sign of its former existence was the tribal cluster of Stuarts and McGregors and Todds rotting down companionably on the hillside looking out to the sea and the jagged silhouette of the Horse Range.
Kate’s mother is there, among her own people. Pat lies 200 kilo-metres to the north, buried beneath his white wooden regimental cross. Kate’s two daughters have grown up. They lead intricate lives of their own. They have walked round Annapurna, gone climbing in Peru, driven around Australia in a clapped-out Toyota, fallen in and out of love several times, been to university, worked as applepickers and waitresses and on offshore islands with seabirds and tuatara, and they have told Kate something about all this, but the rest belongs to their secret private lives and is none of her business. She and Steve are no longer married. After twenty-five years the marriage reached a standstill. That’s all. It stopped and they got off and walked in different directions. She became seduced by the thought of solitude.
And then suddenly the cabin was in front of me, the sunset making its windows reflect gold as if it had lit itself up for me: and I was home.
Gaining Ground by Joan Barfoot
She lived alone for a time, then she met another man. Rory is strong and kind and she loves him too and they live together in a house like the Little House, with its orchard full of apple trees. The bare branches burst into pink blossom every spring and are heavy with fruit every summer and hens peck about their trunks, finding bugs and worms and talking their contented talk. Kate picks the apples and stores them in a room on the southern side of the house where the air over the winter smells more and more sweetly of apples until it is almost fermentation and decay, and then, just in time, it’s spring and the whole business can begin again. The house is at the end of a twisting gravel road. The sea washes into the bay a hundred metres from their door and at night they sleep to its regular breathing.
Every morning she walks up the valley into the bush where birds are busy leading their extraordinary lives and the creek chatters along the way creeks usually do. She walks as far as the waterfall. The creek tumbles here over a lava face into a pool surrounded by gnarled fuchsia. They drop their tiny red earrings into the dark water. Kate puts her hand into the water and wishes those she loves a good day. It’s a bit like praying, the praying you do when God has disappeared for ever over the rainbow. It’s probably pointless, just a ritual. Sometimes it seems to work: her daughters are happy, and Caro and Maddie and Donna and the others. Other times, it fails. Babies die and are found like white china in their cots. People crack up, break down, they are knocked from the bikes or they change to an earlier flight, as Tony did one summer morning on his way to a conference in California, and fly at the hands of angry men into a shining tower.
The studies of circles and waves benefited from colossal investments of effort by man, and they form the very foundation of science. In comparison, ‘wiggles’ have been left almost totally untouched.
The Fractal Geometry of Nature by Benoit B. Mandelbrot
Last year Kate went back to Canada. She visited Toba and David, their children grown, their house calm and orderly. Toba took her to her studio. They walked together over snowy ground to a former soap factory where Toba flung open the doors. Inside, the walls had been whitewashed and paint spattered the concrete floor like fallen leaves.
An entire wall was covered in one vast canvas. ‘Mandelbrot’s Garden,’ she said. ‘We rented his house in Oxford last year when David went on sabbatical. It was ghastly: one of those dank, gloomy, academic houses. But the garden was something else.’
The canvas was made up of hundreds of tiny squares, each painted exquisitely in the colours of flowers.
‘I got into the habit of painting tiny things when the kids were small,’ she said. ‘Remember? I thought it was a handicap, that I’d never be able to paint anything big. Then one day, I realised that if I put all the little squares together they made a bigger square.’ Now the canvases are huge. They hang here in the soap factory and in galleries in Ottawa and New York.
Up close, the grid was obvious. A tightly measured pencilled scaffolding was still visible the width and length of the canvas on which squares of colour had been painted, end to end and side by side until the whole wall was concealed. From a distance, the scaf-folding disappeared and all that was visible was a garden. All that was clear was colour and the perfect form of a sufficient mass of apparently random elements.
Once upon a time, in a barnyard, there lived a little red hen.
The Little Red Hen (trad.)
So Kate sits reading Xenophon in the week that war begins. In time, this war will be declared over. It will be called a victory. Baghdad will be occupied. In time, Hussein’s two sons, Uday and Qusay, will be killed, along with a third man and Qusay’s teenage son. Their faces will be shaved and reconstructed and they will be laid out beneath a makeshift awning for the inspection of the world’s press: Qusay the strategist, the reliable son, and Uday the playboy, who was the favourite of their mother, Sajida. Their flesh will be reconstructed and Uday’s leg will be amputated and laid alongside his body, so that the pins that had been inserted after an earlier assassination attempt can be seen and the relic verified. In time, Saddam Hussein will be dragged from a hole in the ground. In time, the whole appalling fairy tale of this war will fade into another story.
But all this is yet to happen. Today, Kate is reading in her father’s book about Xenophon and his part in the attempted overthrow of the High King Artaxerxes. The name is familiar but she takes a moment to identify it.
Artaxerxes.
Son of that other Artaxerxes who makes a brief appearance in her mother’s book, the Bible. She looks it up, and there he is: Artaxerxes I. The good king who gave his cupbearer, Nehemiah, permission to return to Jerusalem to supervise the reconstruction of the city’s walls. He features as a model employer, providing his servant with letters of safe passage and timber for the walls from the royal forests.
He is a minor figure, soon forgotten in the businesslike report that is Nehemiah’s contribution to biblical history: a marginal character, like his son, Artaxerxes II, who merely supplied the focus for Cyrus’s insurrection and appears in person for only the split second it takes to dispatch his younger brother. They are both, Artaxerxes I and II, father and son, peripheral to the stories in which they appear, however powerful they may have been in their day, however they may have lived as men before whom other people prostrated themselves trembling. The narrators have stepped forward and elbowed them off the stage of history: one a Jewish cupbearer, the other a Greek mercenary. But Kate likes finding them there, nevertheless, Artaxerxes I and II with their freight of double Xs, one in her father’s book, the other in her mother’s. It feels like a link, a kind of union.
There is war and terror in both the books in which they have their cameo roles. There is also the recurring miracle of the birth of children, the gleam of a woman’s bracelet, the curiosity of seashells discovered on an inland wall, the sight of wild asses galloping through scented scrub. There is wonder in the arrival of all this in a small room at the end of a gravel road on an island neither writer even dreamed could exist.
Kate reads in her room by the sea. Episode five of McGibbon, the Marlborough Sounds mystery, lies disarticulate on her desk. Her last episode. She won’t write any more. She is going to write a novel instead. A novel about real life, as it is lived, and as it is read. She has decided to write about books and their beautiful, simple power.
Outside the window, kereru are stripping the fruit from a ngaio. The leaves on the apple trees in the orchard are starting to turn. When she reads now, she is looking from the corner of her eye for little references to old age and the progressive death of the body and how that might feel. While she reads everything co-exists: past and present and future, friends and family, the living and the dead, apple trees and wild asses, tyrant and infantryman, birth and the sea, doughnuts and newspapers and hens pecking about in a garden.
Book book, they say.
Book book.
