Vincent O’Sullivan

Grove

Grove’s face wasn’t injured, as far as you could tell, but it curved in on one side, so that his left temple and jaw were at least an inch further out than his left cheek. Whether he talked or smiled, his lips on that side stayed straight and together, and the right side of his face moved by itself. And there were two deep lines that ran from beside his nostrils almost to the end of his chin. He wasn’t scarred or hideous or funny. You didn’t want to laugh at his face and you didn’t want to say you felt sorry for him. But I can’t remember being in any company with him when people didn’t tend to look at him rather than at anyone else. They wouldn’t let on, but they were absorbed by his dent.

‘You can’t take your eyes off it can you?’ Mary said. She was McCaffrey’s daughter, and used to come round to the flat on Wednesday nights, on her way home from CYM or whatever she called it. She’d come in on Sundays after church to get my lunch, and of course I’d have to go to her place whenever I took her out. Her father insisted on the old niceties, sitting there with his scotch in his hand in front of one of his own latest TVs. He’d led his wife a dance with his drinking but he never offered me one because of his daughter.

‘Well you can’t either,’ I told her. Grove had been in the flat two months, and Mary was still as fascinated by his face as when she’d first seen it. We’d asked him to share that weekly dinner on Sundays, but he ate with us only twice. Then he told us a lie and said there was a small group he blew with at one o’clock. I found out later that the group met at three, yet he left shortly after mid-day, and must have bought a hamburger in town. When I told Mary this she told her mother and her mother said that it showed how delicate he was. I didn’t think the word gelled with the bent face and the long awkward silences and I said, ‘I think he’s scared of women, that’s the real reason.’

‘No fear he isn’t,’ she said.

We seemed to talk about him a lot, about what we didn’t know more than what we did. ‘He likes music, all right?’ Mary said, ticking off the little finger of one hand with the forefinger of the other.

‘Right,’ I said.

‘He’s polite, and he’s clean.’

‘Right again.’

‘He’s always punctual.’

‘And that’s about it.’

‘It can’t be,’ Mary said.

‘What else is there?’

‘What else should there be?’

I said, ‘If there’s nothing else why do we think there is?’

Mary laughed and said, ‘As long as he keeps playing wherever he is for the next hour, anyway.’ We’d been lying on my bed talking about him and I began unbuttoning her blouse. We always seemed to have our eye on the clock.

‘Just a minute,’ she said. She took a chain with a medal on it from round her neck. She leaned across me with it closed in her fist, and put it beside the alarm clock on the chair by my bed.

‘Think it’s not so bad if you take that armour off?’ I asked her.

‘Never you mind why I do it,’ she told me. Sometimes I thought of old McCaffrey when she looked sly like that, her lips slightly apart, her hair brushing my face as she came back from depositing her medal; thought how he’d need more than his bottle of scotch a day if he knew how his little lady ended her Wednesdays.

One day I said to him, ‘Why do people always call you Grove?’

‘They always have,’ he said.

I was rinsing a shirt in the bath while he stood before the mirror, shaving the straight side of his face. ‘I didn’t mean that,’ I explained to him. ‘I mean why don’t you get called Graham like your parents called you?’

‘They’ve always called me Grove too,’ he said. ‘It’s no problem.’

It was like that when you spoke to him. He gave you the feeling that it wouldn’t matter what you asked him, or that it made any difference to him whether you liked his answer or thought it was nonsense.

‘It’s like he can’t imagine needing to stress anything that’s the truth,’ Mary said. This was another time, when she asked him one Saturday afternoon if he ever danced himself at the places he played at, and he said No, that if he liked a girl it was better to talk to her than dance, and that if a girl didn’t like him it wasn’t fair to bale her up, she might say yes she’d dance with him because she felt sorry for him, or because he was in the band and some girls liked the band to make a fuss of them. ‘So there’s no point is there?’ he’d said.

When Mary said the bit about truth I said, ‘That’s all very well but he lies about Sunday afternoons doesn’t he?’

‘That kind of excuse’s got nothing to do with it,’ she insisted. ‘It’s not the same thing at all.’

I hardly saw Grove except at weekends and breakfast. Mostly in the mornings he’d be finishing in the kitchen when I came in. If we were there at the same time he’d chat about the band, or occasionally about work, where he’d just been put on some union committee, I think he said. On Saturdays he would do his washing and read. He had no preferences when it came to reading. He’d pick up any kind of book and seem to enjoy it. Mary brought him a couple of novels once that he said he liked, but he said the same about some Plymouth Brethren thing a fellow at the milk factory had given him, and about a book he’d found in the bus shelter. It was a study of Mexico and must have been left there by a student.

‘But you can’t like everything you read,’ I said to him. I’d looked at the Mexican book, and it wasn’t accounts of battles and peaces that didn’t last but about growth rates and projected development and there were pages of graphs and figures.

‘I don’t read so very much,’ he said.

‘But what you do read.’

‘There’s reasons for books,’ he said, ‘even not very good ones.’

‘What’s that got to do with it?’

‘I mean the reasons are always interesting,’ he said. ‘The reasons why they write them.’

He had his hollow side towards me and I thought for a minute is he having me on? But Grove didn’t ever joke, so there was no point thinking he didn’t mean what he said. A couple of times he had seen me with electrical books, and he stood perhaps two or three minutes looking at the one diagram, although he didn’t ask what it meant. One time the diagram was of a radar system that theoretically dispensed with antennae. The other was in a fifty-year-old book that I’d picked up for curiosity, and it explained positive and negative charges in a way a child could understand. He looked at both of them carefully then put the books down and began on something else.

I’m certain McCaffrey thought his daughter could do better for herself than take up with me. He was hardly in a position to say it, seeing the maintenance work depended mostly on my efforts, so he just said to Mary had she ever thought of a trip overseas? He’d give her half the fare if she saved the other half. And he never mentioned her to me at work. He was out half the day, at golf if the weather was all right or along at the Commercial, in the private bar where he had his own private tankard on a peg near the Johnny Walker ad. A couple of afternoons he might sit in his swivel-chair going through orders and catalogues that sooner or later he’d pass on to me.

I was glad often that it was his daughter I was having a go at. It kind of evened things, although that had nothing to do with my liking her, I mean, that was an extra. I’d seen her in the workshop several times and was thinking how to speak to her before I even knew who she was. She was about an inch taller than I was, and if she wore her hair up she could look unapproachable. Then once I was meeting her after work we’d go for a drink before walking over the bridge. I’d leave her at the corner of the park beside the river and keep on, up past the ugly grey church and the statue with its arms raised as though it were in a lineout. The old man wouldn’t let her out more than two nights a week, and as often as not if we went to the movies her younger sister would come too.

‘You’re nearly twenty,’ I said. ‘Tell him to get lost.’

‘That wouldn’t help,’ Mary said. She looked at me as she did when she wanted to tease me and said, ‘It’d scare you like hell wouldn’t it if I left home to live with you?’

‘That wouldn’t be fair on Grove,’ I said, to make a joke of it. ‘Ladies’ things in the bathroom and all.’ And then I said, ‘You know, I wouldn’t mind going down to the Arcadia one night.’

‘To listen to him?’

‘And watch him,’ I said. ‘I can’t imagine what he’d be like when he’s playing and in public and that — can you?’

‘Wait until he asks us,’ Mary said.

‘God,’ I said. ‘Imagine old Grove with strobes on!’ Suddenly I could see him there after all, with his bell-bottoms and the medallion he carried in his pocket until he was in the hall and the light sliding up and down his trombone and his head like a dented kettle.

‘Don’t be at him all the time,’ she said.

‘Rather stay home for a treat then?’ I asked her.

‘That’d be nicer.’

When we did get home that Saturday, after an afternoon up at the Park, Grove was sitting on the sofa with a woman who must have been pushing thirty-five. He stood up and said very formally, ‘This is my friend Ruth.’

‘Hello.’ She smiled and I could tell her teeth weren’t her own. Her breasts were huge inside a pink blouse and silly pale blonde curls were licked down over her forehead. Her skirt was short although Mary said that length had been out for months now.

‘Hello,’ Mary said. Grove asked her would she like to sit next to Ruth?

‘No, you stay there Grove,’ she told him. She sat in the armchair near the window. She looked very good like that, the pale curtain just stirring behind her dark hair.

Grove was dressed up in his suit and glitter shirt and string tie. I thought how ridiculous he looked next to that tart, his jaw longer than ever in the way the late light glanced over it. I could tell he was pleased that we’d come in time to meet her. ‘Ruth works in the T.A.B.,’ Grove said. ‘Her husband grows strawberries along the Cambridge Road.’

‘That’s when I’m there, that is,’ Ruth said. She smiled knowingly at Mary and Grove smiled quietly on the other side, pleased to see the two women taking to each other.

‘She doesn’t get on with her husband,’ Grove explained.

‘The other way round, more likely,’ Ruth said. Her tongue came out and ran along her lips, making the pale lipstick like a wet lolly. I thought for God’s sake Grove haven’t you any idea at all? Mary said she would make a cup of tea and Ruth said yes, that’d be lovely, she was dry as a sandpit at the moment. I followed Mary about thirty seconds later. I went up close to her but she put her finger on my lips and said in a loud voice that was meant to sound ordinary, ‘You can rinse the teapot if you want to help.’ I tipped the old leaves out beneath a scraggy hydrangea and stood in the back porch. Mary kept making signs to me from where she leaned against the bench. She said later that she thought I’d break out laughing or say something Grove would hear and be hurt by.

From the kitchen I could see through the door crack into the sitting-room. Ruth had opened a metal powder compact and was rapt in the little mirror. Grove touched very lightly the hair that curled above her pink collar. It was a shy sort of touch, as though he were brushing the skin of a baby. He didn’t speak and she smiled at him before she clicked the compact shut. Mary had told me once that compacts like that look like the things priests take with them to accidents.

Mary became impatient with my prying at them. ‘You can take the tea things in,’ she told me. ‘Then you can put some biscuits on a plate for us.’ As I took a cup and saucer in each hand she added in a whisper, ‘Don’t stay in there longer than you have to. We’ll go round home for tea.’

We sat in the room with them for ten minutes. It was long enough for me to have a quick second cup, and for Ruth to tell us what must have been half her life story. The climax was that old pig who was the father of her two children, who was becoming more objectionable all the time. ‘You wouldn’t believe what he says in front of those kids.’ She clicked her tongue, to give us some idea of how vile he was.

‘How old are they?’ Mary asked.

‘Peter’s eight and Bronwyn’s six,’ Ruth said. And then, carefully, ‘We’ve been married just over nine years.’

‘That’s where the children are now,’ Grove told us. ‘Their father’s looking after them.’

‘Not for much longer, he isn’t. Not if I can help it.’

I poured more tea rather than say anything. It amazed me that Grove just didn’t see what was obvious as the day. I mean, she only had to hitch at her bra strap through her blouse, or uncross her legs so that she could ease down the heel of one shoe with the toe of the other, for you to tell what a bag she was. You didn’t need to get as far as her teeth or her gritty hair or the ladder that began in a small hole behind the crossed knee and disappeared somewhere in the lump of her thigh.

Grove actually spoke to her as he’d once spoken to Mary’s mother, when she had called in to say Mary had ’flu coming on and would I like a lift round to see her? She had tried not to stare at Grove and I think he knew this, yet he asked her to sit down, and in a few minutes he had old lady McCaffrey telling him about the time she’d lived in Eltham, years before Grove’s family had settled there. Her eyebrows were cocked as much as saying you wouldn’t think me that old, would you?

Even now Grove looked solemn. He sat with an elbow on the arm of the settee, his fist knuckled into the hollow side of his head. I made the usual allowances for women not being as affected by looks as men are, but he still struck me as pretty near impossible. I said this to Mary later in the evening and she said, ‘You’re getting obsessed with him. You should look for a new flat if he’s getting on your nerves.’

‘He’s all right to flat with,’ I said.

‘Then the rest is his business isn’t it?’ She had to agree though that Ruth was a bit rough round the edges. When I’d almost finished my second cup that afternoon and Mary was waiting for me, standing in the doorway with her suede jacket already pulled up at the collar, Ruth had said, ‘You’d think he’d make more effort with the children though, wouldn’t you?’

‘Won’t he let you have them?’ Mary asked.

‘Oh, I haven’t left him. I mean when you’ve got a young family well you’ve got a young family, haven’t you? But I feel like a few nights off sometimes,’ she said. Her appeal was very simply to reason.

‘He doesn’t even cook for them properly when she’s not there,’ Grove added. He was looking at her although he spoke to us.

‘Cook?’ she said. ‘Cook? That’s not half of it.’ She leaned towards Grove, her hand resting on his knee. Her cigarette was burned down almost level with her stained fingers. ‘You mightn’t believe this,’ she said. ‘The kids’ own father. But the other morning I went in about breakfast time. I’d been at my girlfriend’s for the night, and I can’t ring him to let him know because he’s too stubborn to have the phone reconnected. So I walked in just as they were all sitting at the table, no cloth or anything, just their plates of Kornies, and he said right across the kids as if they weren’t even there, “Been out rooting again have you?” Can you imagine that in front of kids? “Been out rooting?”’

I looked to see how Mary took it. I was always careful what I said in front of her and I felt embarrassed, but she simply said, ‘I suppose he was worried about where you were.’

Except for a few pale spots where a camellia tree stood, it was dark at the side of the house when we came back from Mary’s. We’d told her parents we were going on to a dance. It was only nine o’clock. I held Mary’s hand until I’d crossed the kitchen and felt above the fridge for the light cord.

‘We’ve got four hours,’ I said.

‘At least four.’ Mary kicked her shoes off and moved her feet backwards and forwards over the lino the way a bull paws. We’d been impatient to get away and back to the flat, only it was the one Saturday in a dozen when her father had come in early. He’d had more than his share, Mary’s mother said, which meant he kept pouring himself a third of a glass of scotch and sloshed water on it while he’d kept up this spiel about the shop and the retailers and the rest of it. He had taken me into the lounge, to talk in his uneven slurred voice about the business in Frankton he was going to take over. ‘He’s had the place for two years and hasn’t made a cracker out of it. He thinks there’s no money in TVs! I thought haven’t you heard of colour mate, but if he wants his funeral in black and white we won’t be the ones to stop him, eh?’

Mary came and put her bare feet on my shoes and her arms round my neck and said ‘Get along then.’ Her weight pressed where the laces of one shoe went crooked into my foot and I wanted to tell her to get to hell off, it was hurting me. I was half way across the sitting room, my hands holding the tops of her legs under her dress to balance her, when she brought her arm around and spread the palm of her hand flat across my mouth. I licked her palm but she said ‘Shhh!’ against my ear and nodded her head at the sofa. Ruth’s purse and her scuffed white shoes were lying on it.

‘What’re they there for?’ I said.

‘They can’t have gone out. They must be in Grove’s room.’

I let her down from my shoes and swore. ‘And what are we supposed to do?’

‘Just keep quiet,’ Mary said. She took my hand now, and led me on tip-toe to the open door of my room. Grove’s door was closed. It seemed ridiculous to think of him tucked away in there with a woman.

Inside my bedroom I said, ‘Well there’s no need for us to go sneaking about. They must have heard us come in.’

‘Be nice to them,’ Mary said. She wouldn’t let me put the light on, then told me not to let my shoes drop to the floor. To make sure, she knelt down and took them off for me. I’d already unzipped her dress and I unhooked her as she squatted in front of me. With only the street light from up the road her breasts were like two pale bowls.

‘Hurry up,’ I said. I wanted her to think I was on edge to get to bed but I disliked her in front of me like that. Her shoulders looked rounded like an old lady’s and she had forgotten for once about the chain and medal around her neck. Later on when I lit a cigarette her fingers were moving round her throat and touching it, although she said nothing.

She took my shoes and put them at the end of the bed. We made sure the bed didn’t creak in one corner as it usually did by putting a pillow between the wirewove and the wooden beam you get in those old-fashioned beds. Mary already had my cigarettes in her hand when I went to lean across her, in case I tipped something off the dresser. I lay propped against the top of the bed, with one arm under her head. Suddenly she raised her head and pressed my hand. There was an odd sound from the other side of the wall. I wasn’t sure at first if it was an animal or what it was.

‘What is it?’ I whispered to her. We lay without moving and I could hear the blood threading through my ears.

‘Grove’s singing to her,’ she said.

The sound was more distinct. He must have been moving within four or five notes, yet it wasn’t a song, or like anything I’d heard him trying around the flat. Only those few notes, a kind of deep soft swell, but so little difference between crest and fall that it was there, but hardly there. It was a sound that wrapped round and touched softly and was never meant to be overheard.

At first I wanted to laugh — Grove with his thirty-five-year-old mother of two curled in his arm as Mary was in mine, Ruth’s dyed hair brushing his dented side as though the hollow was there deliberately for her to nuzzle into. And to think he’d thrown away his evening with the band, and very likely his job as well, to catch what was probably the easiest lay around even for a man ten years older than he was. I tried to think of them only a foot or two from where we were, but it was too much, Grove and his naked woman! For a second I thought what if she sings back? She didn’t though, and I’d left it too long to laugh. I could tell Mary was serious by the way her fingers lay against my cheek when she meant to be keeping them over my mouth. Sometimes it was like a hive of bees behind the wall, on one note. Then he would run notes together, quickly, for maybe thirty seconds, before the humming sound again, and I thought we can’t listen to this any more, it’s like being a peeping Tom. Then Mary surprised me for the second time that night, and more than the first. She had gripped my arm tightly then thrown the blankets back and her tongue was working over my chest and down to my stomach. It seemed that Grove was holding that sound of bees in a box at my head, until I didn’t notice exactly when the sound stopped, only that it was silent again when Mary came back to lay her head on my arm.

‘He’s stopped singing anyway, thank Christ,’ I said.

‘I know,’ Mary said, ‘they’ve just left.’

McCaffrey sent me to Wellington for a month when a branch manager had peritonitis. This was the Thursday after Grove first brought his lady home, and a fortnight, exactly, before he died in a car crash on the way back from playing at Ōhaupō. The band had left the hall at two o’clock and Grove had sat next to the driver. Mary said Ruth must have had a crisis of conscience, because she was usually with Grove, but that night she was home again next to her strawberry-grower, ready to give the children the breakfast they deserved.

Mary put through a toll call the next morning. At first I took it for granted that he must have died of head injuries. It seemed the obvious way for him to die, as only his head ever occurred to you when you thought of him. But then later that week I heard how his chest had been broken up, that he had died in the narrow speeding confines of the ambulance, minutes away from the hospital. At first he was conscious and when the St John’s man asked him did he want anyone he said, ‘No, it’ll be all right thank you.’ I could see him very easily like that, not letting on much as the ambulance sped back between the hedges and through the country, the red light flashing and even the lean of trees and sheds and the front porches of houses lit for a second as though a fire was moving past them. And Grove there silent and polite and his head caught too in the red flare and then in the darkness and the siren growing thin as a thread as Hamilton came up from the right, but too late.

I wrote a letter to Grove’s sister in Eltham and to his brother in Gisborne. Only the sister replied. She said she hadn’t seen much of Grove over recent years, and if there was anything in the way of records or books I’d like for mementoes, to take them by all means before his gear was packed off to her place. I passed that message on to Mary, but as far as I know she did nothing about it. Then no more than three weeks after, she wrote to say that seeing her father was leaving me in charge of the Wellington shop, perhaps we would be wiser to let things cool for a while? She’d see me at Christmas when we’d both know how she felt. Of course by then she was in England as she must have known all the time.

When I did drive through Hamilton soon after New Year I wanted to talk about Grove. (He had been cremated so there wasn’t even a bit of ground I could look at.) But Mary wasn’t there and no one else I knew had known him. So I went to the T.A.B. beside the Riverina and asked for Ruth. A neat man spoke to me through the grill.

‘She left a couple of months ago,’ he informed me.

‘You don’t know where she’s gone?’

The man looked at me more attentively and said, ‘She wasn’t here that long you know.’

‘I wanted to see her for family reasons,’ I told him. ‘Could you tell me where her husband lives then?’

He called a woman from another window and spoke to her. Then she came to the grill where I was waiting and said, ‘She didn’t have one.’

‘I thought he grew strawberries or something. A kind of gardener.’

‘She lived in a flat off Hood Street somewhere,’ the woman said. ‘You’re welcome to any gardeners you find up that way.’ The neat man smiled over her shoulder and held up his palms as he must have seen in movies. ‘If we could help,’ he said.

I thought if I could track down his band that might throw up something, at least someone who could say a few sentences about him, but only the bass player was with them from Grove’s time, and he was away on holiday. I spoke about Ruth again, on the off chance. The pianist I spoke to tried to think of her, but then he said, ‘That’s not enough to go on, is it, thirty odd, randy, falling apart a bit? There’s quite a few like her round.’

I’d tried to do something for Grove and I left it at that. The notes of his Ruth song have almost come back to me once or twice, although it’s a good thing they haven’t. All that does come back is a blonde with plastic teeth who thought she had to lie to him. And a siren that grows thin as the city lights lift above the swamp.