A History of Silence (30 page)

At the zoo in Newtown she might notice those animals that appear to read our very thoughts and share our instincts. The white feathered cockatoo, for example, with its shifting pink eye. There are other animals that appear homesick or depressed. The baboon reaches up to an overhanging branch and with baffling grace moves off to a remembered corner of the forest. The lions are besieged with homesickness. They are a reminder of everything that is wrongly aligned or out of place.

From the front porch at 88 Eden Street the long view is broken up by stubbly hills and valleys. The fast-moving clouds suggest change afoot, perhaps some rearrangement of the dust at the door where her mother will show up.

She is somebody's daughter. It is hard to say whose. She was Maud's, but now there is another woman who acts like her mother: dresses her, feeds her, but then stares at her as if she ought to be someone else, and is disappointed to discover that she is not that person after all. So she must find a way of living with her failure to be what Mrs Fairley wishes her to be, as well as the failure of what she was in the Nash household.

Did Maud ever visit her daughter? Maud told the court she hadn't set eyes on Betty since handing her on to the Fairleys, four years earlier.

In a letter to O.T. Maud mentions handling the adoption ‘through friends'. She doesn't say the friends are adopting my mother. Her vagueness may be deliberate, to prevent Nash discovering Betty's whereabouts. But then why would he care? Wouldn't he be relieved to be rid of the child whom he regarded as a curse on his life, proof of Maud's lying, and of a past of which he was never quite sure?

If the Fairleys were friends, did they cease to be the moment they adopted my mother? If such a friendship survived I imagine Mum would have remembered the bitter-sweet occasions of her mother visiting.

As long as there is memory a life is never fully discarded. It lingers on—a scratch on the ceiling, a corner of the wallpaper pulled away, a whisper, a laugh, a touch, the first lick of something delicious, a ride in a car. And other puzzling moments that make no sense on their own. Mr Nash, who used to cuddle her and at other times call her names, and spit in her food, and shout at her mother, shout at them both as they walked up the street, which made people stop and stare, while others walked on as if they had not heard a thing. And the silences that seem to mean something but she cannot say what it is. The silence building in the car, as they drove at the edge of the strait. Her mother, in the front. Mr Nash looking further up the road. They were on their way to somewhere, but that place has slipped her memory. Why does the mind produce such moments? Where is Mr Nash? Will he find her in his motor car? Perhaps she paints pictures—to reinstate the world she has lost. She puts in a boat, installs her mother as a pilot. The boat is at sea. She paints herself on the beach. Her mother cannot see her, and it seems impossible that the boat will ever turn to the shore where she stands waving. Has her mother lost her? Or is she busy, detained,
preoccupied
with the two boys. These are words she will learn to spell at Island Bay School. She is coming into the complexities of language that will help her establish the arrangement of the world and make sense of it. She is read to. She reads. She wonders where her mother is. What is taking her so long? She learns her mother is in England, which she discovers is on the other side of the world. She picks up a coin. On one side is the King of England. On the other, a tui. She clutches both in the palm of her hand. (As late as 1960, my mother referred to England, where she had never been, as ‘home'.)

She may find kinship in the emasculated hills—what once covered them has also gone. The old trees have been replaced. The wind rises to hysteria. People continue to smile. They are encouraged to.

She is awake. Daylight is breaking. It is time to get up, to wash, to eat breakfast, to brush her teeth, to go to school. There are things to attend to, teachers to listen to. Arcane bits of information to store away. Trees weep—a little-known fact. And farmers with an unsentimental eye slit the throats of fly-blown sheep. Beech, she will learn, are happiest in the company of other beech.

Solace.

Despondent over the departure of a good friend, Pliny the Younger writes to his correspondent who has offered sympathy, ‘Either say something that I have never read of before, or else hold thy peace.'

Cures for melancholia once included conserves of roses, violets, orange pills, condite. ‘Odoraments' such as rose-water, balm, vinegar, ‘do much to recreate the brains and spirits.'

As an adult Mum swore by her daily tablespoon of cod-liver oil. She also loved to read about other lives, biographies.

Hawthorne introduced the W to his name to separate him from a Puritan forebear, Hathorne, who had been a judge at the Salem witch trials. A slight alteration of name might have succeeded in distancing him, but a writer's works have a way of tracking back to his wellsprings.

Seneca spoke of Simon changing his name to Simonides and setting fire to the house of his birth so nobody should point to it.

In her reading Mum might have found solace in fables. Aesop, for example, telling off the fox and his companions who are complaining for want of tails—‘you complain for want of toys, but I am quite blind, be quiet; I say to thee, be thou satisfied.'

And, ‘It is recounted of the hares, that, with a general consent they were to drown themselves out of feelings of misery, but when they saw a company of frogs more fearful than they were, they began to take courage and comfort again.'

She loved the sea, found comfort in its moods and inconstancy, in its capacity to reflect and to absorb. As a young woman, she swam between the rafts moored out from Petone Beach. Her swimming course followed the Esplanade and a number of streets running up the valley, named after the ships—
Aurora
,
Cuba
,
Tory
,
Oriental
—that delivered the first white settlers to this same beach. She swam over ghosted moorings. Back and forth, said my father. He maintained she was a good swimmer. Years later, when I was a toddler, she would bring me to this same beach to splash in the shallows, even when the tide was red from the discharge at Ngauranga and the meatworks at the old p
end of the beach. But I never saw her swim.

Krapp's tragedy is that he is stuck with his life. Confined to his tapes, endless replays and outbursts of rage. Maud's strategy was to forget, and to help the process she sought a physical solution. In 1919, some months after she gave up my mother, Maud approached a lawyer to begin separation proceedings. Nash talked her out of it, and persuaded her to spend some time ‘with her people' back home.

Maud left in 1920 and returned to England. Two years later she sails back to New Zealand as if arriving for the first time. It is a retracing of an older journey, in the same way as my sister Lorraine would set out from the house after a fit of epilepsy, or, like the basilica on Barbadoes Street, a dismantling followed by a reassembling, so that with the crossing of oceans and the passing of time everything might be stitched back together as good as new. And on her return, Maud will learn to abide within herself.

But not quite yet. There is the tail-end of her marriage to Harry Nash to work through.

They had written to one another over the two years Maud was away. Harry Nash sent a letter off with each boat. Maud's letters arrived regularly. ‘Some of Maud's mail was nice enough,' Harry Nash noted, but, ‘some of it could be nasty.' In the one letter that survives, Maud calls Nash a liar and accuses him of backtracking on his promise to provide her and the children with a living income while in England. After Nash shows no willingness to pay for her return fare Maud marches off to the New Zealand High Commission in London to demand that the government take an interest in her domestic affairs. More unpleasantly, she threatens to tell Nash's business colleagues in England of his ‘appalling treatment' of her.

In England she lives in the house in Taunton where years later I would visit Mavis. Meat and fruit, she complains, are unaffordable, yet she takes herself off to the London theatre and treats herself to extravagant new clothes.

For her passage back to New Zealand she borrows from her brother, Bert. After their departure is delayed a fortnight following a collision in the Channel, Maud and the boys are handsomely compensated with an upgrade to a first-class passage. Six weeks later she passes through the familiar weather-beaten heads of Wellington Harbour.

Things don't get off to the best of starts when Nash is late getting down to the wharf to meet Maud and the two boys off the SS
Paparoa
. Harry's first conciliatory act was to take Maud and the boys to Kirkaldie & Stains department store for morning tea. In Nash's account, within a short time Maud is nagging him.

The next day they make plans to go to the races. They squabble over some slight thing. Within three days of cohabitation Nash has moved out. There has been another incident.

In Maud's absence Nash has employed a housekeeper, a Miss Andrews. I wonder if Maud sniffed the possibility of a dalliance between the housekeeper and Nash. If true, this has a certain poetic justice. If it isn't true then there is no acceptable explanation for what follows.

Mr Nash: ‘Mrs Nash and myself had agreed to go to the races with a party. Miss Andrews came down to help and Mrs Nash chased her upstairs, and had Miss Andrews pinned on the bed…'

Miss Andrews: ‘Mrs Nash chased me up the stairs and into my bedroom and she tried to throttle me from behind and as I could not free myself I screamed for Mr Nash, and when he freed me I left the house without packing.'

And Nash files for a decree of separation.

The judge directs the all-male jury to find one party guilty of cruelty to the other. If it finds both Nash and Maud to be equally guilty of cruelty then he will not grant a decree of separation.

The jury returns in Nash's favour.

Maud appeals on the grounds that the judge unfairly directed the jury, but also to clear her name of all the damaging things Nash said of her in court.