The following, p.15
The Following, page 15
‘I’m not sure you’ll want to hear it. I’m not sure I want to say it. Mind you, the Weekly would love her. But I need to give my heart and soul. I can’t do her, I am sorry.’
She saw from his face some sort of agreement – sons’ mothers, too huge a subject to comprehend at an ordinary level of assessment. Margaret caught something else – Powys enjoying her pronouncements. It made her blush.
‘Let’s have a drink,’ he said.
‘Tea would be good, but –’
At that, he planted a glass, a bottle of Scotch and a jug of water in front of them. He poured after lifting an eyebrow. ‘This will warm you,’ he said, the flat being impossible to heat, cold air coming up through varnished floorboards and around the faded, worn heirloom rugs. They drank and Powys shivered at a premonition of some sort, of the kind anyway that spirits always roused – a promise of grandness in just being oneself.
He brought his books over. She touched the dry, ridged lettering of the jackets. She apologised for not having ever heard of the publisher – only recently of Powys himself, it was needless to add.
Then and there she began reading – a gaze of concentration, a passing frown, a sudden grin, a sigh of exasperation – while sitting under the ivory-yellow lampshade on the first day with Powys on the top floor of The Condamine, in the winter of that year of changes, with Powys’s heart pumping his lifeblood around a little faster. Since the Piccolino he could only think of her with agitation. He wanted to slow down his eyesight, gather his thoughts, possess the idea of her before touch demanded he might wreck it. He’d never seen anyone read as fast. The grandfather clock went like a tack hammer; the china dogs, grey, glossy and cold, tinkled with vibrations of passing traffic. Add to which a feeling Powys had – something like the ‘flu’, something like fear, something like childhood over-excitement that always ended badly. It might be humiliating to give it a name, considering, just for a start, the age gap between them. She wore a home-knitted grey sweater, full of lumps and knots, and a pair of what looked like a man’s suit trousers. As she read she ran a hand up into her hair and pulled a twist around to her mouth and nibbled its ends abstractedly. With her ankles tucked up on the couch various expressions passed across her face, reflecting thoughts not always to Powys’s liking.
She looked up from the page, catching him – mask-like in his intensity – and delivered an opinion. She could hardly have done more than scan the pages and come up with it. She told him that his novels were obviously works of art but might not be properly read ‘because the words get in the way of the story’ and, she thought, because of a class assumption that bothered her.
Powys leaned back, drew breath.
‘Is this the way you tackle everything – old ladies, flower paintings, businessman-novelists and their productions?’ he said.
‘Look,’ she said to him. ‘The way you write’s smart, clever. It’s bold and beautiful, but there’s something wrong.’
‘Wrong? That’s a tough judgement.’
‘Does it go anywhere?’
‘That might be the point,’ he said.
‘Not in a good story.’
He was often called nerveless – reflexively dead-faced.
‘Where’s this from, your sword of Damocles?’ He wanted to know.
‘I was eighteen,’ said Margaret, ‘when I was made children’s editor on the Auckland Star. I had to write answers to all the most brilliant kids’ efforts up and down the country – read them, think about them, steer them on, encourage them and tell them the truth without crushing them – and I had Thursday mornings to do the whole lot, which included opening the mail and sorting it, replying and writing my column.’ She clutched the two books of Powys’s to her chest, then put them on a side table. ‘I’ll buy my own copies, of course.’
‘Good luck finding them – I’ve had friends and booksellers too, face them to the wall from extreme irritation. Take them.’ He hated what he said next. Such peevish needfulness. ‘The English reviewers had me writing from “the peak”.’
‘Golly.’
‘Well, there was one who did.’
‘What do you get when you write, what does it give you?’
The way she put the question implied that he did not need to write, as she did, for a living, but might have, if she capitalised it, a purpose.
‘The war’ was his two-word answer. A mental hell was subdued. That’s what it was on the page. Maybe not much else except something from childhood, a love of words. There’d been no leave from hell, but he’d learned to make one through words. He’d survived when others had not. Words had guided him through. Words kept on with their aliveness to changes. When it was all out of his system he might never write again.
‘No more changes?’ she said.
Then she was gone, the books under her arm, down the stairs and around the corner. After finishing his drink Powys drained hers, which she’d hardly touched. Whenever he drank Ardberg now it would bring on the feel of her wool sweater itching the back of his hand when he passed her the glass. The sting of her opinions. The lightness, the clarity of her gaze although ever so mistrustful. And that last comment she made, with a touch of flirtation: ‘No more changes?’
He laughed – well, something was happening, gingered into existence by Elisabeth Morrison’s matchmaking. He lit a cigarette and stared out the window at the pimps, prostitutes and promenaders in their undersea world of the Cross. There were certainly enough young men at large in the world to catch any young woman up if she wanted to be, without an old man thinking he might be the one.
OVER THE NEXT FEW DAYS Margaret Poole asked around on the QT because she could not own to how she, Margaret Poole, had fallen into the circle of a decidedly non-socialist Powys Wignall. What was he like? It seemed that everyone knew him.
‘Powys,’ said her bohemian friends, ‘is frosty and up himself.’ He was said to have had an affair with Rhona Blumers, wife of the Polish count. The affair was presumed to be over, although when Rhona looked at Margaret she seemed to say, Who do you think you know that I don’t, sweetie?
It could have been Margaret’s imagination except Rhona told a story around the urn. ‘In the middle of the night I heard him crossing the floor. Tappa-tap, tappa-tap. He pulled back the bedclothes, what could I say? “Oh, go on then, have a go.” ’
It was fairly ugly. It didn’t sound like an affair. But that was Rhona, it seemed. Yet could it be Powys? Would he betray a man friend, at the very least? – the Polish count, chess opponent, aficionado of the Piccolino, translator of the Russian moderns – and be so functional as it sounded?
Men did (betray). Women did (betray). He must have been (at the very least) being a man, functional.
He might not be very nice. But he was not the only one around with a cane, she was interested to learn. There was the short story writer from Melbourne who’d had polio as a child, a hard case known to Rhona, and Margaret supposed he might be admitted (or allowed) as a violator of her kindness, for Vincent Crashaw used polio as a rationale of deserving. Women disliked him. He was a married man and went everywhere with his wife, subjecting her to devotion.
Margaret and Rhona were members of the Socialist Writers’ International Friendship Committee. Powys was hardly of that ilk. He was known, but held in contemptuous awe – nobody knew what to make of him, was the summing up, a Wignall by definition being of the ruling class. True writers were progressive, party matched on the left, otherwise if they had style but no radical credentials were admitted to be somebodies, but only in a dispicable sort of way. In summary they were reactionaries without relation to time or place, so much so they might as well be shot, and were, in other countries, on occasion.
Yet just when the Friendships thought they had Powys as the example of a type, he’d written a letter to the Sydney Morning Herald confounding their views. It was on nuclear disarmament, how the West wasn’t playing the game, unfair to the world at large, and they remembered he had a friend in Pommyland, (Lord) Adam Sylvester, who spoke up for causes on platforms with the Red Dean of Canterbury. So they reserved final judgement for a while yet.
And just when Margaret was about to give up on Powys, because of the night with the cane, the thought of it so sickeningly detailed, Rhona told her something that proved it was the comrade from Melbourne, and in the telling made it pitiful – a man allowed his own estimate of himself.
At monthly Friendship meetings Margaret took the minutes in Pitman’s shorthand. When Rhona, the Countess Blumers, held the floor, a breathy silence fell among the men, their jaws and brains slack, her clotted red lipstick and tight sweaters making their own ineradicable points in their hot imaginations, certainly, but the way she spoke was electrifying. It was so honest and clear, and her phrasemaking had a touch of oratory. She was a playwright, and a good one, with a heart of fire. People came to her plays, such as Powys, who would never go near the Workers’ Theatre otherwise. Margaret liked her, but wasn’t like her. If there was a man in the room who didn’t want Rhona, Margaret would like to know who. She deferred to those ratbags. They voted her onto their delegations to Moscow and Peking. At supper those same men, with claret-blackened teeth and close, attentive hands, lectured Margaret on her sexual rights, how she should exercise them on their behalf, apparently.
She pushed them off. ‘Garn, you jokers – I have a boyfriend.’
‘So?’
It wasn’t Powys Wignall either. Though whether it was a boyfriend as such any more she doubted.
Alan Ward was a journalist, lean as a thread, hungry for fame, and that was the main thing between them – his work. They’d also crossed the Tasman together, having that to look back on as an example of alarming heroism, as far as their families in Kiwi were concerned. She would travel farther soon (always soon) to catch up to Alan when he was properly settled. That was the resolve. It had been agreed between them – they would sort themselves out in the fourth estate then shack up, making a go of it as a working pair, as lovers, as a couple, but would neither marry nor have children to bring into this weary world.
Now Alan was settled with a job on the Manchester Guardian and the time was right to say the word, but his weekly, then fortnightly, then monthly aerograms avoided the question, and Margaret’s pride prevented her from bringing up the subject of avowed intents (not exactly promises) anymore.
Margaret allowed herself, a little perversely lonely, certainly more than a little wistfully lost, to be befriended by Powys Wignall, cousin of the snake man of the NSW Far West and son of the dowager Lady Florence Wignall.
Margaret’s flat was up three flights of stairs and into a tiny kitchen like an upright coffin, with a bed that folded down from the wall. She’d never taken a bloke up there for a look except Alan and now Powys Wignall, showing how the other half lived when they lived just on words. A typewriter, a vase of flowers – daily refreshed – and a shared dunny and bathroom on the landing were all she’d ever wanted once she came over to this side, as she expressed it, arriving from Auckland to make a journalist’s life for herself in Sydney. She supposed Powys saw the photo of Alan pinned to the wall. They had never really lived together properly, but she liked implying they had. You needed credentials to be anyone on the platforms of the day, a louche attitude around morals, implied or put into play. Alan in the photo was leaning over the fence at the Gap, his felt hat tipped back from his narrow, white forehead. They’d never gone anywhere together unless for a story, she realised when he’d gone. No grace, nothing ever done just for her. Never a wayside wildflower picked and handed to her with a grin.
Margaret had grown up in ferny railway towns, up and down the North Island. She had piled in with her brothers and been farmed out, when older, to an aunt in the Hauraki Gulf islands, just as her mother had been in the previous generation. There Margaret discovered independence and the books and the pen that led her to composition. She was that prodigy of the Auckland Star who, Powys learned, had a boiler-stoker’s ticket, could drive a truck and change a wheel, liked to rock and roll, and, on the slightest pretext of naked emotional appeal in a written work, was given to tears.
‘God, that’s awful,’ she said the next time he showed her something. She wiped her eyes of tears. ‘He’ll never stop loving her, ever.’
This was a reference to Verlee Albury, the name Powys kept for his ex-wife, Beverley, his capacity for invention stopped short with only the ‘Be’ removed from the name ‘Verlee’ on the fictional page’s phonetics. Margaret had reached a point in Powys’s writing where few readers had, apparently, where she saw things Powys’s way and could not stop reading.
Margaret elevated novels to a social purpose and only regretted that Powys’s writing lacked one. Writing, Powys called what he did, as if a tool of betterment had no connection to anything but the hand that trailed the ink across the page.
ON THE PARQUET FLOOR POWYS walked, tap, tappa-tap. He stood at the front steps of The Condamine, leaning on his shooting stick. Margaret heaved bags into the boot of the car. This will show me, she thought around why she’d accepted an invitation to take to the road with him, what the consequences might be. Powys was anti-worker-movement of the sort who believed ‘The worker movement goes too far’, whereas Margaret was born into ‘The worker movement never goes far enough’. Her father, in his youth, had not been a Wobbly but had close Wobbly friends and returned to New Zealand to escape prosecution in Australia during World War I. Now here she was, allowing herself to be bought, as her brothers might say, by a bloated plutocrat.
In quest of her father’s lost past Margaret had done the rounds of archives, seeking surviving Wobblies for a piece, if she wrote it, that would test the Weekly’s resolve. It would have to be a woman Wobbly to get in, and she found one – and a tragic association with a dreadful, brutal hanging. The woman’s correspondence with a co-conspirator was said to have been burned by a politician, her protector, who married her off to a friend. The politician rose to the heights of power. In the end he died in her arms.
Powys’s leg killed him pumping the brakes and stepping on the gas. Margaret took over the wheel. The Weekly and its stablemate, the Telegraph, wanted stories from the bush and had put her on expenses. It was, she told herself, her motivation that gave the drive its meaning and her the upper hand. Being bought be blowed.
Except, as they set off, Powys said, ‘Hey ho for Meadow Flats,’ announcing his sister had papers for him to sign – his sister the maker of demands, it was best to get them out of the way – after which they’d start for the Darling proper, Margaret’s planned destination before Elisabeth and Kyle’s. They were due at Inverarity on Sunday, in five days’ time. It would mean more hours and longer distances with a diversion.
Except it wasn’t a diversion. It was the heart, what was left of it.
Because Meadow Flats, she learned, was where ‘Cornfounded Blight’ was written. In New Zealand, ‘Cornfounded’ was famous but regarded as stupid, the more so for being Australian. It made no sense. The words made no sense. Powys sang them as they drove, croakingly out of tune. They fitted the landscape, the scratchy, lumpy, bumpy rhythm. Margaret gave them that.
It was early winter – dry, cool, hazy – the blighted land out of tune with itself. The song – or was it a poem, or a ditty, or doggerel – was about creeks drier than a lizard’s guts and rivers draining off to saltpans. There was an underhand effect, and slowly but surely it made the ugliness of the drive feel beautiful.
A charred, charcoaled hand was dominant in the selection of hues. The road ran through low hills and small farms with tin sheds and thirsty paddocks. It was the reverse of New Zealand’s green plenty, and yet Margaret had been there before in the emotions of survival, she felt. It was a feeling that Australia had called to her before she ever came over – not as a place, but as an awareness – a feeling of being hooked to a love that rejected hope, that stuck to the bare bones of existence. That had those comical marsupials wearing waistcoats and spats too, and people like Powys Wignall in it, part of it, owners of it, belonging to it, but who never really properly fitted in, and they knew it in a way that made them affectionately shy and gruff. It was a country, a continent, irreducibly political.
The drive took six hours counting stops for thermos tea and slices of Big Sister fruitcake wrapped in sandwich paper. Margaret packed a picnic as a matter of course. She gained the impression that Powys’s vaunted Beverley never had, had never bothered knitting a sweater, tidying the covers of a bed, mending a husband’s shirts, never made ready for a long day’s drive by lining a wicker basket with a red-chequered cloth.
They came to ‘the town of Meadow Flats’ – Whistling Corner. In a cobwebby window was a placard in Rosemary MacKinlay’s handwriting telling would-be visitors they could come once a year to the Meadow Flats homestead garden, on a date to be advised, subject to a gold coin donation, weather conditions and factors beyond anyone’s control permitting.
On display were Bounder Morrison’s pipe, waistcoat, homburg hat, ink bottle, copies of his books and faded photographs with the Duke of York in 1928. The woman with sandy whiskers showing them around said that when Bounder sold Meadow Flats he never came back to thank them for all the stories they gave him. It made Powys glad to be an unread writer.
Late afternoon, navigating a public stock route past a travelling stock reserve, Powys suggested they pull over by the side of the road. It gave on to a view, a chain-of-ponds river and some rocky, tree-studded hills, as painted, said Powys, by Elioth Gruner in a famous fit of oils.
In the argument running along between them as they drove, Powys wanted to say that art had a high purpose, not a social purpose as Margaret said (with a serious frown), of looking and by that means wrenching points of view around so that subordinate to art social purpose might be discovered, or allowable, but was not the main game by any means.
Margaret’s day had narrowed down to what she’d been missing since Alan Ward left for the UK – the twist of warm feelings. Real conversation. She was making a friend of Powys. How they rattled on!
