Gracious Living (14 page)

Just before I finish, must tell you about your grandparents. I went to see them last weekend. Your grandmother surpassed herself with lunch – gefilte fish, fried eggplant in spicy tomatoes, fresh chocolate cake and cream for dessert (how you must miss all that), and then, if that were not enough, she entertained us with most of Debussy’s
Children’s Comer Suite
. In lieu of parents I asked your g.ps to come to college for family day on the 26th and they were thrilled. They miss you enormously and made me read all your letters. Has anyone ever told you what a good letter writer you are? In your next letter you must tell me what a library with a few million books is
really
like, and who is this Tina whom you mentioned in your grandparents’ letters but omitted from mine?

I await your news with bated breath. I miss you madly, we’d have such fun if you were here.
Me miserum
!

With love from,

Kate

Harry lasted three months. He was a chap with impeccable credentials: poet, radical, secretary of the communist party on
campus. People assumed Harry was from the working classes, although in those days universities had even fewer working-class students than today. Kate was surprised, therefore, to discover that his father was a dentist and his mother worked part-time for the National Trust, and they all lived – Mum, Dad, Harry and little Belinda – in a sturdy, mock Tudor home within walking distance of where Adrian and Elizabeth Dadswell would purchase their family-sized home and Kate herself would eventually live.

Back in 1964, Harry the radical was before his time; four years later, when everyone on campus was a radical with working-class roots, Harry, having had a head start, became a leader of the student unrest that filled the universities. But that was later; in 1964 when Kate knew him, Harry was a minor fashion with a large library. The books were excellent, as were the discussions, but the sex was not. Of course Kate was very ignorant and when Harry told her she had a tight vagina and should try and relax, she accepted that the problems they had with penetration were entirely her own. However, when she teamed up with Russell, Kate discovered otherwise. After Russell there was Ian, after Ian came Peter and then Geoffrey. By the end of second year she was experienced but not particularly impressed. Then Pauline came along, and after Pauline, Angie. This was better, she thought, although there was something about relationships that was so tiring, so very unfulfilling.

Have you found this too?

She asked in a letter to Vivienne early in her third year.

It’s not that I don’t want happiness because I do, but when happiness and relationships are put together it leaves one exhausted – just like you felt with Tina. They all accuse me of not working hard enough at T
HE
R
ELATIONSHIP
, but if you ask me I do my bit, I just think they all change their mind over what they want. Anyway, they can’t be all that dissatisfied, they never want to break up, and when finally they do leave there seems to be no end of people to take their place. To be honest I like homosexual
men best. Have you met any over there? Campus is simply full of them. They make great company and what with their beats and baths I think they have the whole relationship thing licked. And so efficiently too!

Vivienne was not impressed. Kate had misunderstood the problems with Tina, she wrote, and as for ther stereotypes of homosexual men, they were deplorable. Kate replied that Vivienne took life too seriously: where, she asked, was Vivienne’s sense of humour?

As for Kate’s humour, it had flourished. That and conversation.

‘It was always a joy to hear her talk,’ Monica Vanderlou, Kate’s lover of 1967–68, told Elizabeth years later. ‘Of course it still is; but back in those days, she stood out even more than now. She had read the right books – Nietzsche, Hegel, Marx – and she could talk about them better than any of us.’

And analysis? Elizabeth had asked.

None, Monica confessed, but this had not been apparent until much later. ‘Words flowed like molten gold,’ Monica explained, ‘so smooth, so seductive, so weighty. She sounded so good, the absence of depth escaped us.’

She could talk and she had style. Everyone who met Kate at university could not escape her style. She should have been plain – floury skin, eyes too deep, flared nostrils, square face, hair drained of colour – she should have been but was not. The head sat well atop the compact, well-proportioned body; the hair was cropped closely at the neck but fell in soft curls over the forehead hiding the widow’s peak. The deep eyes were widened by expert manoeuvring of shadow and pencil and her clothes were magnificent: silk shirts buttoned to the neck at once soft and austere, loosely flowing trousers in elegant beiges and faint greens, tailored jackets fully-lined, and loafers in various colours of supple leather. She never had any money, people simply bought her things, people just gave and gave.

Helplessness they all called it, when in fact it was her inability to ask, her utter passivity. Kate, it seemed, was still waiting. From early childhood she’d found decisions to be fraught with danger.
Her initial solution had been to retreat into conformity: abide by the rules and there would be fewer decisions and fewer requests to make. As a child, she had observed how to behave, how to be witty, stimulating, the mannerisms to use; she had learned her part. And she waited, waited to be loved.

When Kate met Vivienne and the Rostens she learned to be less strict with herself. But decisions, so carefully avoided for years, never came easily; and even when childhood was no more than a rubbery recollection her attempts at responsibility were feeble indeed. Fortunately there was no need for it, her friends at the university seemed perfectly willing to look after her.

In 1964 she had arrived at university on a full scholarship and no money. Within a fortnight someone had pointed her in the direction of a part-time waitressing job; another month and someone else had organised a circle of friends; by May, Harry had offered himself as boyfriend, and by the end of term she had established herself as the most competent student in all her courses. Only the latter had occurred as a result of her own efforts. Things have a way of working themselves out, she wrote to Vivienne, and even though fearful of the rejection that lurked behind every decision, Kate managed well, so well, that in time she, like her companions, was no longer aware that it was they who carried her through.

And carry her they did – happily – and in return they believed they were in the presence of a great mind. People were fascinated by her: the family neglect, the boarding school, her books, the eager sentences thirsting for an audience. It was of little concern that she hobbled through life because someone would always offer her a hand, a bed, a meal, a job. People did not comprehend her passivity and neither did they understand her defeat by the material world. Indeed, that the material world was beyond her grasp seemed an endearing quality, one that reinforced the image of the absent-minded intellectual. They flocked to her circle to feel the weight of her words, and what Kate drew from them was shockingly basic – care, comfort, someone to make decisions, make meals, buy aspirins, someone to talk with the person behind the shop counter, the waiter in the restaurant.

I am awash with people,

Kate wrote to Vivienne in the winter of third year

people morning, noon and night. This one bringing me books, that one filling my fridge, dinner here, a concert there, numerous discussions – some crucial, others trivial – and through it all my gas was nearly disconnected because I forgot to pay the bill, and my telephone
was
cut off, but fortunately one of the hordes came to my rescue – knew someone at the phone company – and I was back on line within twenty-four hours. So much to do and so many people, and while it makes the days pass more easily my work has suffered. I confess that on more than one occasion I have reduced an essential text to a close reading of its introduction; unfortunately, this will not guarantee me a place in the honours stream. So I worry a little but not too much because everything works out in the end, and you can get through a lot of books with an exclusive concentration on the introduction. But you wouldn’t approve of this so I’ll move on to the mice.

I know as a country girl I should not be bothered by mice but I am, and there’s one in the kitchen, and I think it’s brought its family, and I am not happy. Monica (remember Monica Vanderlou? she’s my philosophy tutor, I’ve mentioned her before) said she’d set traps and check them for me the following morning. It seemed a perfect arrangement until I discovered that Monica is not enamoured of mice either, particularly dead ones. With great ingenuity – Monica’s not mine – the problem was solved, and I’ll tell you all about it should you ever be invaded by mice. You lie a supermarket bag (or any large stiff paper bag) on its side and put the trap inside. The mouse sniffs out the chocolate – I’ve heard that modern mice prefer Cadbury to Kraft – walks into the bag has a nibble and meets its end. In the morning with eyes averted you pick up the bag and give it a little shake. If the trap goes off then you know you’ve been
unsuccessful and you can safely look in the bag. If the trap does not snap then you know you’ve caught one and it’s dead in the bag and you quickly throw bag and contents into the rubbish. Last Friday, we set up three traps in three bags and Monica offered to stay the night because I was nervous. We were unsuccessful but Monica is coming over on Wednesday night to try again.

After a freezing, mouseless night all was redeemed at the market. I went with Angie who is simply marvellous with food – what you need, how much, the cheapest stalls. When she heard how cold I had been she bought me a quilt, terribly expensive, but there was no stopping her. We decided to rest before tackling the trek home – with so many parcels I was hoping she’d suggest a taxi, but she didn’t.

I really do like the market, should come more often, so many people, so much noise, you’re part of it all and yet totally anonymous. Something very pleasing about that. And I like the grimy hands of the men on the stalls, and their red swollen faces and their spruiking which at ten promises you a good price, at eleven the best price and, just before twelve, they’re offering you the world. And the women, such hardy souls, packing and stacking and taking your money, and when you ask for the produce to be taken from the front of the display and not the back, they smile a collusive smile: after all we all know about the fools who are lured by the display and fed from the bottom of the pile.

Even the winos have a certain style at the market. I saw one fellow leaning against some wrought iron fencing in a rare patch of winter sun. He was enormous with clothes, but his bristly face under a hat with ear flaps was small, so too the hands in tattered gloves. Lightly leaning against the railing, one foot hooked around the other ankle. And perched on the fence was a small Coca-Cola bottle one third filled with cloudy brownish cheap plonk. ‘There’s a wino with dignity,’ I said to Angie who,
although a teetotaller knew exactly what I meant. As for me, I smiled at the man, he tipped his hat and drank to me.

And there was a bottlo who looked as if someone had coated his face with soft toffee streaked with dark brown sugar and twisted and pinched it and left it to set. There were whiskers in the creases and a hump on his back and as he passed I handed him a bottle that had been lying on the bench where we were sitting. I asked about business, he said it was good. I was surprised, I thought winter would be a bad time for bottle collections; he said it was, but, nonetheless, he was having a good day. I moved up and offered him space on our bench, but he was working, he said, and had to move on. I think Angie was pleased although she denied it. Anyway she was saved from an argument by the sight of a group of people, an expanding group, gathered about fifty yards from where we sat. Intermittently, when the spruikers paused in their pre-midday promises of the world, I heard music coming from the crowd, and on one occasion I saw the people applauding. ‘There’s something happening over there,’ I said to Angie, who agreed to guard the parcels while I went to investigate. Well! I’ve never seen anything like it. There was a child, a girl of about eight, in the centre of the group, and she was singing and dancing to taped music. A man stood near the tape recorder, the girl’s father I assumed, and he guarded the machine and encouraged his daughter and collected money from the onlookers. He was a short stocky man, perhaps forty, an unattractive man in brown trousers (I’ve always regarded brown trousers as somehow sinister, it’s the same with grey shoes), a tie, and despite the cold, a short-sleeved white shirt, fine and transparent to display his back and chest where a herd of tattoos jostled for space. There should be a law against this, I thought, as he put the child through her paces. And she danced and sang, a tiny child, with an audience in her grasp. But it was no child’s performance, no Swallows’ Junior here, this child was equipped with hip gyrations and pelvic thrusts that could have been lifted from a girlie show. It was revolting and the audience loved it, they clapped along and cheered and gave their money and asked
for more. There were many admiring comments about the child’s appearance, her pink, frilly dress, the long white socks, the patent leather shoes, and yet they seemed unaware of the incongruity between the child’s appearance and her performance. As for the tattooed father, they congratulated him on his talented little girl: how proud he must be they said.

I returned to Angie fuming. I looked around for the police, the man had to be stopped. But Angie said he probably wasn’t breaking any law. And she was probably right, besides, the police are such pigs, they wouldn’t care, and the child is probably corrupted already. What a bloody awful world.

So why don’t you come home and improve it for me, come back and put some sense and kindness into my life? But for now I must away. I’ve spent a morning on this letter and I’m expecting Angie any minute; she’s taking me to a shop where you can buy quality winter coats cheaply. And later there’s a whole crowd coming over here.