Between My Father and the King (31 page)

Then footsteps and Mr Winton sobbing, Bernadine, Bernadine.

He stayed now and no one asked him to go. He stood by his wife, claiming her, while her body was prepared and when they came to remove it wherever they remove the dead to, he went with them and they did not argue or try to persuade him not to. The three tired doctors washed their hands; what else could they do ? The nurse brewed tea and gave a cup to those who were still awake and who knew, and the neat silence stayed all night, and voices were low, telling about it and about other times when it happened, and when we woke in the morning, confusedly remembering, we found that the visitor who had desperately claimed Bernadine had gone, had taken her, and her bed was empty.

When I'm writing I feel I must start with the idea that I love the people I'm writing about. I love them, I have deep compassion for them, it is not my place to try to change them. Unfortunately I have a problem: as I grow older I find it harder to love ‘people', to look generously and compassionately at them. I disapprove, I pity them, I wonder what they ‘see' in their lives, I suppose their way of life to be ‘poor' while mine is ‘rich'; and at times, far from loving them, I hate them, not strongly enough to make the hate an effective other side of the coin of love, just a pity-hate which would rather that people were out of my sight.

Therefore, I said, before I write another novel or story I must try to find the way back to loving. When people in fiction weep, I weep, when they are in distress, I too am in distress. If my neighbour trips I think it serves him right, or, perhaps not as harshly as this, I merely give the matter no deep thought or feeling. One who dies in the mountains or bush or in the surf was
‘asking for it' by behaving foolishly.

What a strange year it has been for me! I have tried so hard to find my way back to the loving which I find necessary for writing. I bought myself a white kitten for seventy-five cents, reduced from a dollar. It became my companion. I cared for it and respected it and now it has grown into a pleasant companion to whom my only responsibility is to leave it comfortable and cared for when I go to town for a few days. Sometimes it lies down as if dead and I see it dead, and I think calmly, perhaps then I will get another, perhaps not, I'll see.

The man from whom I bought this house went blind. I never met him. Sometimes I think of him with fleeting sentiment, How sad, he was going blind, he had to sell the house. And then I can't help feeling the tiny spark of love (this, you understand has nothing to do with personal sexual affairs which are private), the Shelleyan love, the ‘love one another or die' kind of love and I am back in the country where writing begins; grateful, full of wonder; I might even cry real tears as I think, This is the only true place. You may be sure that the servant words whose survival depends on such places, agree with me as they try to amuse and calm me, but never, never try to stop the springs of love, and the tears. And I look about my house then for the evidence of the man who was going blind, and his family. They had seven beds, or ‘sleeps seven' as the advertisements would say. They read the
Reader's Digest
, the
Woman's Weekly
(English),
Woman's Day
, and the
Boating World
. On wet days they played cards. They surfed and swam. They spent the time like any other summer holiday family with a bach near the beach. Why did they come here? What was his work? Why was he going blind?

A neighbour talks to me, ‘He was having trouble with his eyes. Poor man. We saw them one weekend, the whole family, son and daughters and grandchildren, help to lay the concrete drive to the garage with their own hands. With their own hands.'

No one before or since has spoken to me of them. All I know is what I surmise, and that they laid the concrete drive with their own hands in one weekend. This was told to me in a tone of awe and admiration. I think I made the expected response, ‘Did they really?' As if they had sailed round the world or gone to the moon.

My faint curiosity and pity do not develop into love. Instead, I feel the stupidity of a life that is remembered only by the family teamwork of laying concrete one weekend. My arrogance (a forbidden characteristic of a writer) refuses to let me enter the mind of the man himself and his family. I say, ‘O I would die of boredom.' What did they think about, what did they dream about, if one of the memorable episodes of their life was the laying of concrete from the driveway to the garage door? Then I remember they would have made a noise, a Sunday noise most likely, and I am angry, for the country of writing is noiseless. How well I know the scraping and rattling of the do-it-yourself concrete mixers. It used to be said of encyclopedias, Every home should have one. Here, it can be said of concrete mixers, or motor mowers or circular saws or electric drills.

What is there in the habits of people around to make me love them as I know I must?

Therefore I leave my thoughts of the man who was going blind, and his family, and the linoleum he laid in the house, the plants they put in the garden (I thank them for the five feijoa bushes). I leave them because my arrogance is stronger than my compassion, and the solitude and quiet necessary for writing about the people who surround me are threatened by those same people. At the same time that I dislike them for their threats, I cannot love them enough to want to investigate their human essence: the ambrosial stink. I keep forgetting the need to accept as final the place of the ‘pitching of the mansion'.

Life interferes with art; life is the irritation. Always. And yet
there are some who plead, innocently, for further life-involvement of the artist!

A family has camped for the holidays two sections away from me. I hear them in the evening standing on their sundeck as they look out at the sea and the volcanic island and call to one another, with their high-pitched city voices like excited released birds, Oh look, Arthur. Oh just look, Dorothy. The moon is full. The crickets chirp and warble. The air is mild, faintly perfumed by the opening flowers of the orange trees and the escaping gases from the holiday-filled septic tanks and holes-in-the-ground. As I hear the names, Arthur, Dorothy, a nerve within me is touched, the path of which leads to a story hide-out, a possie. The obvious, honest names delight me, ask to be reckoned with, ask for commitment, offer themselves as prey to the predator in me. There is no shyness in them, no reliance on a capital letter and full stop or capital letter and dash that are part of fearful and mysterious stories which begin, say, ‘I was living in Z—, on the banks of the S—, when I first met M—.'

Arthur, Dorothy. I learn they plan to hold a barbecue that evening. They will gather cockles from the beach at low tide, eat them in the open, and drink their beer with friends from town who arrive later in the evening. They too stand on the sundeck, look out at the sea and the volcanic island and call one another shamelessly, loudly, by their names, Albert, Annie, Shona, Shirley, Ted, Bob . . .

All the names, queuing with remembered names of other people, names of imagined people, those listed in the Births, Deaths columns of the newspapers.

I turn away the clamouring names. I seal the nerve-path. What boring lives, I think. What ugly useless boring empty soulless lives. Loud voices, loud radios, ugly baches, uglier pretentious homes so-called ‘permanent' with their ranchsliders, exposed beams, rumpus rooms garage under — the words of the real estate
agents come to mind. Ranch house, long, low and lovely.

I leave Arthur and Dorothy and their guests. I have no love left for the human race. The crickets continue to sing. I do not love the crickets.

I do not love the crickets.

I see this written as part of a first course in a foreign language, a tourist phrasebook, and everyone knows that such books are filled with complaints.

The perfectly shaped dead volcano on R— Island stands against the horizon. I remember poems by D— G— who lives in W— and C— B— who lives in D—; our best poets have something to say about R— Island.

The mystery of the initials is replaced by absurdity. A story flows on a deep deep stream of feeling, bearing all with it, names, initials, people, their absurdities, faces, trivialities no longer trivial. D— G— W— D—. How absurd to write thus in shallow waters on the Wh— Peninsula!

Is there nothing in the lives of the people around me that will cause me to exclaim, How terrible, how wonderful, that will haunt me day and night? How can I ever love if a tragedy arouses only a fleeting, How sad? The people, I think, are all tragedies and their tragedy is that they do not realise it and my tragedy is that I have the arrogance to suppose that I do and that I am right, which also gives me, I suppose, a rebirth into adolescence and adolescent impatience which, in me, does not have the virtue of being transformed into fertile hate, known as hate only because its conversion to love cannot be contemplated without terror at the prospect of the surrender which is part of love.

The solution is to separate art from life, and, entering art, supposing it were the gateway of a kingdom, even the eye of a needle, to discard the ‘I' and carry it as common clothing for all. I do not love the cricket. I am interested in the stick insect though I do not love it. That is
outside
the kingdom. Within, as a stick
insect, I am almost impossibly frail as I lie close to an almost identical blade of grass. I am alive, I have legs and a breathing body, and eyes on stalks, exposed, vulnerable. The blade of grass moves only when the wind moves, and is not — to my body, my eyes, my colour — endowed with life, nor my kin, yet I imitate it, I lie next to it, the image of it is my protection and salvation. With the blade of grass near me I may trust myself now and again to move, to feed. I like to come out at noon. What does noon mean but the sun on the grass and on the walls of the buildings and my tiny insect prey perhaps dizzy and drugged with sunlight.

You see? I, within the body of the stick insect, care for it, love it because it is myself and excess anthropomorphism means only that I am in the wrong kingdom, with the wrong ‘I'.

Next, shall I be Dorothy, shall I be Arthur? I can no longer shudder with horror at the boredom of the life, for I am Dorothy, I am Arthur, and how can I live if I admit boredom with my own life and self? I naturally love myself. A mishap observed by the life-I becomes a tragedy to the art-I. We gathered cockles for the barbecue, we spent ages digging in the muddy sand, we were slightly drunk, excited with the sea air, and though we are Arthur and Dorothy there is also Shirley, Shona, Doreen — perhaps I thought I was putting my life-savings into it, both I and Dorothy, the way we prepared for it — after all, it was only a barbecue, such as you see in American pictures and on TV with all the couples laughing and drinking and being witty.

How could I help it if, to begin with, half the cockles were filled with black sand instead of fish? What did it mean? From the start, everything was against us.

The night of the barbecue I looked up at the house where Dorothy and Arthur had called out from the sundeck in their high city voices.

‘I bet half their cockles are filled with sand,' I said to myself.

I never found out if they were — one doesn't have to find out these things. I was too busy thinking about Thyra and Cedric who live next door in the big house with the plaster penguin at the gate. Let me tell you. It is very sad . . .

‘
Between My Father and the King
' Previously unpublished. This story has its origins in the £25 rehabilitation loan that Janet Frame's father received from the government after he returned from the First World War. The factual basis of the story is given no more than a paragraph in chapter 2 of
To the Is-Land
(
An Autobiography
Volume 1, 1982).

‘
The Plum Tree and the Hammock
' Previously unpublished.

‘
Gavin Highly
' Posthumously published in
The New Yorker
(5 April 2010).

‘
The Birds of the Air
' Published in
Harper's Bazaar
(June 1969). Written Dunedin 1965–66. Chapter 13 of
To the Is-Land
is also called ‘The Birds of the Air' and describes the visit of Frame's maternal grandmother.

‘
In Alco Hall
' Published in
Harper's Bazaar
(November 1966). Written Dunedin, 1965–66.

‘
University Entrance
' Published
New Zealand Listener
(23 March 1946). Written August 1945. Frame notes in her autobiography that she earned 2 guineas for this, her first published adult story, which was about needing 2 guineas for a school exam fee: ‘confirming for me once again the closeness, the harmony, and not the separation of literature (well, a simple story!) and life' (To
the Is-Land
, chapter 28).

‘
Dot
' Posthumously published in
A Public Space
7 (2008). Frame reminisces about ‘Dot's Little Folk' — the real-life inspiration for this story — in
To the Is-Land
(chapter 17). The second half of ‘Dot' is easily identifiable as fiction, so this story can act as a useful indicator of the dangers of assuming any of Frame's fiction has a one-to-one correspondence with her life experiences.