Janet Frame

They Never Looked Back

When Tom and Deanna had been living together for three years, people said of them as they say of those with problems solved, illness cured, ‘They’ve never looked back.’

They said the same a few years later when Tom and Deanna, believing neither in marriage nor in work for gain, were married in a friend’s herb garden, and went up north to work on a small farm they’d once seen and remembered. They found the farm had been demolished, the land cut up in ten-acre sections, but there was another where they did find work, Tom as rouseabout, Deanna as cook, and where their eighty-year-old farm cottage was the joy and envy of their city friends who dropped in exclaiming with delight at the coal range complete with flue and damper and polished brass clothes rack, the water pumped from an unpolluted deep well, the old wash-house with its copper and copper fire and the antique washboard on which Deanna used to rub the nappies and towels. She even draped the sheets over the mānuka bushes. The word ‘pioneer’, having been in their childhood a dirty word, had become clean and fashionable once again. Tom and Deanna used it often to describe their way of life.

They were happy up north. They made their own clothes and furnishings, grew and ate their own vegetables and fruit. It was only when Deanna was expecting their second baby that they thought it would be better to move to the city to be near the National Women’s Hospital. Back in Auckland once more, in Ponsonby (room, kitchen, share bath), Tom found a job making sandwiches and filling rolls in a downtown coffee bar. With his hands busy, he thought, his mind would be freed to work on the television play he almost had in mind. Unfortunately as the soft filling seeped into the sandwiches, so the work seeped into the part of Tom’s mind which should have been impermeable, and the nascent television play was suffocated, while others, conceived, lost the health of a whole dream and fell apart.

Life was tough that year. The rent was more than they could afford. Although Imogen was born whole and perfect, little Cordelia developed a stomach upset which, the doctor hinted, might be caused by a congenital malformation of the intestine. This was too terrible to think about. Tom and Deanna blamed the city life, the rat race, the everlasting fumes. They heard of a bach for sale, cheap, by the sea, and a lawn-mowing round, also cheap, in the neighbourhood, and drawing all their savings from the bank where they had pretended to themselves they had nothing, as they didn’t believe in bank accounts, they went up north again, by the sea, to a three-roomed fibrolite bach that had kick holes in the walls and paspalum tide-marks along the side where the garden had been, and pieces of rusty iron, and old motor tyres lying in the clusters of purple-headed silky grass that grew in deeper depth and greener green over the burying places of the old dunny. Scraggy mynahs, curious, perched on the dunny and cried Whaa Whaa Whaa; and huge blackbacked gulls tramped about like workmen on the roof.

‘Just the place for us,’ Tom said.

Deanna agreed.

They never looked back.

Most of their new neighbours were retired, spending the days that at last belonged exclusively to them, trying to improve the appearance and comfort of their house and land, adding a terrace here, a flamingo there, a rose-arch, an orchid house, a new fence, new furniture, new rooms. Carriers and concrete contractors with their revolving grey-bellied mixers were forever arriving, unloading, turning awkwardly half on the road, half on the footpath; sometimes a small heap of concrete blocks would appear overnight as if a new kind of mammoth had passed by; or a bulldozer would be discovered in a den in a clump of mānuka, or parked in a driveway lying in wait for the performance of a new trick of landscaping. How busy the people were, who had said goodbye to work!

‘It’s not our way of life,’ Tom and Deanna said. ‘But they ARE human.’ And when one of the neighbours brought them hot lentil soup the week of their arrival they said, how kind, how human.

‘This is the place to be. I can feel it,’ Tom said.

‘I can feel it too.’

‘And we’ve never lived by the sea before. We can get to know it.’ They could see it from their living room, and on stormy nights they could hear the waves seeming to lap against the walls of the house.

‘I can take the children on the beach. I can tell them about the sea,’ Deanna said.

What fulfilment and riches their new life promised! Even the depressing thought and the frustrating actuality of the lawn-mowing round were vanquished by the old optimistic knowledge that nothing from without could destroy the inner resources.

‘I still have my mind,’ Tom said. ‘And I’m my own boss. After all, Jim Baxter once worked as a postman.’

‘Yes, I believe he did.’

‘Look at the work he managed to do! Traipsing up and down half the day, dogs at his ankles. And look at the poems he wrote. If Jim Baxter could do it, I can.’

They were talking together, as they often did of an evening, when the children were in bed and the future invited itself to share the hearth that was symbolic only, as the bach had been a summer place, without fires. Tom’s remark about Jim Baxter had the effect of silencing them. Tom felt ashamed of his boldness. But did he not have talent? Did not Deanna, and many of their friends, have faith in his talent? He’d read almost every worthwhile modern book, poetry and prose and many of the classics, and he could talk literature with anyone, he could quote, name names, criticise intelligently. Surely, now they were here by the sea, he had his chance!

‘Yes, if Jim Baxter could do it, I can.’

Deanna frowned.

‘It’s good we have a hero, don’t you think, in our own country? That our generation are proud to claim possession of a person rather than a thing? Everybody owns Jim Baxter. Everybody has a story about him — you know — he said this to me, to me alone, he said that, he read this poem, that poem, I was the first person to hear it. If you were in his company you had to breathe and he had to breathe and he breathed poetry.’

‘They say.’ Tom felt a little as if he were being robbed. After all, they were talking about HIM, THEM, their future.

‘It is good,’ Deanna said, ‘that we have someone to admire. I think my mother was taken over by Hollywood. I know that my grandmother had Aunt Daisy for a heroine. “Christmas cake (Doctor’s wife).” And Mabel Howard with her bloomers (XXOS).’

‘And what about you?’ Tom asked.

‘Oh, I have you.’

So it was all right then.

How happy they were in the bach. Once more they grew and ate their own vegetables and fruit, and Deanna knitted for the children and sewed dresses on an antique sewing machine, and the children learned to love the sea, and Deanna told them of its treasures, and the fish. And insect-time came, and the mānuka scrub was thick with praying mantises and crickets and grasshoppers and cicadas; and stick insects walked up and down the fibrolite walls of the bach, and the wētā came inside after the subtropical downpours — the world was full of life, and noise, with the busily retired people hammering and sawing and clipping back the alarming growth of their gardens; and the newly married couples in their newly built homes on their newly bought sections, they too hammering and sawing and mowing; and the summer sun like a golden fog stifling the breath; and the seasons passing; and winter, with a velvet light filling the royal purple sky.

One day a neighbour phoned.

‘We’ve caught so many fish. Would you like some?’

How kind, how human, Deanna thought.

They’d had fish before from the same neighbour. Snapper or trevally so neatly prepared, wrapped in waxed paper, on a pretty blue plate which Deanna immediately washed and returned, Oh you must have it back at once, it’s so pretty.

‘I’ll leave them in the box at the gate,’ the neighbour said.

Later when Deanna went to the gate she found in the milk box two gaping-eyed dead fish, curled to fit into the box; like corpses. She shuddered. Then plucking up courage she took them against her breast, cradling them, as this was the only way of carrying them, and when she reached the kitchen she dropped them on the sink bench, shuddered again, and set to work to clean them. In no time, she told herself, she’d have fish fillets ready for cooking.

She’d forgotten, however, that fish had blood. She’d had a vague idea that ‘cold-blooded’ meant having no blood. ‘Only whales and porpoises, the warm-blooded mammals, suckle their young.’ The sentence came, half remembered, to her, out of a natural history book she had bought for the children: Fish and the Sea: Man and his first home.

It seemed that the blood escaped almost before she touched the fish. Swiftly she sawed off the head as she could not bear the gaping eyes, and now finding she had nowhere to grasp the fish she pegged them with a clothes peg to the rim of the plastic basin, and trying to remember and copy the calm action of her father who always cleaned fish so neatly and swiftly, she began to slit the belly, first of one, then of the other, and the red and blue and black curds of guts spilled out into the basin and with them (giggles, they used to call the guts) came the fish smell that bore no relation to the white-salt deodorising sea. The smell filled the small kitchen, the big brown blowflies that haunted the septic tank outside began to drone at the back door, knocking on the thin hardboard panels, their bodies sounding heavy, insistent. Deanna felt sick. A feeling of panic came over her. Her hands were bloodied, the guts stuck to her skin, the scales too, like those flat white seeds of the plant honesty that she and her friends used in ‘dried arrangements’; and the more she tried to get rid of the scales and the smell the more the presence of the fish invaded her and the room. A blowfly, surging in through a gap in one of the louvre windows, knocked against her check. She gave a small scream. Cordelia, playing in the sitting room, cried out, Mummy, Mummy. She had been nervous lately. Her stomach. They would have to take her to the specialist in Auckland. Perhaps they’d have to move back to Auckland. What if there was really something wrong, a congenital malformation? There couldn’t be, and yet if there was, they’d have to face it. People faced things like that every day. Yet it seemed not to have any relation to their life, the stone-ground flour and the ‘oven-baked’ bread, the natural wool cardigans, the television plays that Tom would be writing soon, the sea and its wonders so close to them. Deanna thought, had she and Tom tried too hard just to LIVE? Should they have let their life flow over them, like the tide? The way they lived was the only way they felt they could be happy, yet why did they feel, at the same time, as if they were being watched over, judged, that they had to be strictly against or for? Their world was full of domestic enemies (I’m against white flour, she had found herself saying one day, with rage in her voice). Yet one had to declare oneself, to take a stand. Yet a stand meant boundaries, and they were against boundaries.

Cordelia’s crying became louder.

‘It’s all right,’ Deanna called. ‘Mummy’s here.’

Having finally managed to sculp a reasonable likeness to fish fillets from the almost intractable bulk of blood and slime, Deanna gathered the remains in a bucket and quickly went outside and emptied them on the compost heap. I’ll bury them later, she thought.

Cordelia was still crying.

Deanna hastily washed her hands and went to the living room. Imogen was awake now, and also crying. She lifted Imogen from her crib. She had a sick feeling of failure and shallowness that she could not explain and longed to be rid of. She gave the now hysterical Cordelia a sharp slap, and at once felt remorse, and tears came to her eyes. She felt that she hated herself and the children and Tom with his lawn-mowing round and the television plays he dreamed of writing because the NZBC were ‘crying out for television plays’; and the way their life seemed to belong to other people rather than to themselves — yet how could that be? It’s that stupid fish, Deanna thought. Why didn’t the neighbours prepare it? They’ve always cleaned it before now. The milk box will smell, too. They just dumped the fish there as if they were getting rid of bodies.

By evening all was well again. Deanna had bathed herself and the children, and had changed to a special screenprinted dress that she knew Tom admired. The evening was calm, the tide was in, right up over the mudflats and the sand, and the sea was scarcely moving, with only a lapping of waves at the rim of the shore and elsewhere still, in a grey-green film over itself. There was a faint sweet smell of salt and mānuka flowers and honeysuckle from the last bach but one, near the water.

Tom, tired and hungry, noticed Deanna’s dress.

‘You’re wearing your screen-printed.’

‘Yes,’ Deanna said, as if she herself were surprised to be wearing it. ‘I’ve almost made the tea.’

She went to the kitchen where two pieces of fish were set on a large plate above a saucepan of already boiling water. Hastily she turned the pages of Aunt Daisy’s Cookery Book, stopping at the page headed, ‘Invalid Cookery’. ‘Steamed Fish. Scale, clean and bone. Set between two buttered plates …’

The instructions were soothing. Carefully Deanna buttered another plate and set it above the first, then she went to the living room to talk to Tom about his work and his day and her day and their proposed new life in Auckland. For Cordelia’s sake. In no time they’d be back up north again. By the sea. Or on a farm. They were young, they had inner resources. They talked until midnight while their future, always the invited but invisible guest, sat with them, and such was their excitement at the prospect of it that they would never have noticed if, wanting to satisfy its hunger, it helped itself to the remains of the fish fillets lying on the plate in the kitchen.