Towards Another Summer Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Part One - The Weekend

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Part Two - Another Summer

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright Page

  Books by Janet Frame:

  The Lagoon and other Stories (1951) short stories

  Owls Do Cry (1957) novel

  Faces in the Water (1961) novel

  The Edge of the Alphabet (1962) novel

  Scented Gardens for the Blind (1963) novel

  Snowman Snowman: Fables and Fantasies (1963) short stories The Reservoir: Stories and Sketches (1963) short stories

  The Adaptable Man (1965) novel

  A State of Siege (1966) novel

  The Reservoir and other stories (1966) short stories

  The Pocket Mirror (1967) poetry

  The Rainbirds (1968) novel (also published as Yellow Flowers in the Antipodean Room)

  Mona Minim and the Smell of the Sun (1969) children’s book Intensive Care (1970) novel

  Daughter Buffalo (1972) novel

  Living in the Maniototo (1979) novel

  To The Is-Land (1982) autobiography

  You Are Now Entering the Human Heart (1983) short stories

  An Angel at My Table (1984) autobiography

  The Envoy from Mirror City (1985) autobiography

  The Carpathians (1988) novel

  The Goose Bath (2006) poetry

  Towards Another Summer (2007) novel

  ‘. . . and from their haunted bay

  The godwits vanish towards another summer.

  Everywhere in light and calm the murmuring

  Shadow of departure; distance looks our way;

  And none knows where he will lie down at night.’

  —Charles Brasch, from ‘The Islands’

  Part One

  The Weekend

  1

  When she came to this country her body had stopped growing, her bones had accepted enough Antipodean deposit to last until her death, her hair that once flamed ginger in the southern sun was fading and dust-coloured in the new hemisphere, and she was thirty, unmarried except for a few adulterous months with an American writer (self-styled) who woke in the morning, said

  —I write best on an empty stomach, pulled a small piece of paper from his tweed coat hanging on the end of the double bed, and wrote one line. One line every day. She too was a writer, self-styled, and it was in between the second and third parts of her novel ‘in progress’ that the weekend intruded itself; it stuck in the gullet of her novel; nothing could move out or in, her book was in danger of becoming a ‘fosterchild of silence’.

  Therefore she applied literary surgery to free her characters for their impelled dance or flight; she wrote the story of the weekend.

  It snowed. For weeks the plants in the garden had a shocked grey look that made you think they’d had a stroke and would die - the same look was in the face of the old man who collapsed on the pavement outside Victoria Station, and the ambulance men wrapped him in a grey blanket, and the crowd said

  —Is he dead, Can you tell, when their face is grey like that . . .

  Soot left fingerprints everywhere; after the first night of glossy snowfilled sleep the city had its way with its own lust of smoke, torn paper and bus tickets. The twelve crocuses in the front garden of her flat softened in their tawny shell and pushed forth limp cream-coloured shoots. The tree by the wall in the corner that had shed its leaves before Christmas, continued mysteriously to release dry crackling skeletons that drifted against the back door and over the drains, covering the small coral reef of rust that spattered at the mouth of the downpipe. In the back yard there were three tubs of plants - two of evergreen trees, evergreen in name only, for their stout leathery leaves were shrouded in soot; and one geranium, its leaves withered, its stalks like tendrils of ageing hair growing from the soot and slush-covered earth. Were the geraniums dead? Every time she looked at them she asked were they dead, for in her own country she had never known geraniums not to be in blossom, they possessed too much fire to let themselves lie dormant, ‘banked’ during the long winter night with their own death-grey ashes.

  In my own country.

  She didn’t use that phrase as much now as when she had first arrived. Then it was At Home, Back Home, Where I come from . . . It’s funny over here, you . . . whereas we always . . . you do this, we do that . . . you . . . we . . . here . . . there . . .

  And then there was the matter of the Southern Cross, trying to fit shadowy stars into an already crowded northern sky, pushing out Aldebaran, the Bear, dizzy with trying to replace even the swimming city lights with lonely southern stars, but not being able to reach far enough across the earth to capture them; then giving up, forgetting We, there, us, back home, where I come from, in my country; reminded now by only one or two things - the weather in its climate; the drooping geranium - surely if the geranium died everything would die?

  Inside, the electric fires sucked in and blew out the same tired stuffy air; the pedal dustbin in the kitchen was filled with empty soup tins; the bathroom walls glittered with damp moss, the congealed moisture of last week’s wet washing.

  She sat typing her novel.

  End of Part Two.

  Part Three, page one, page two, page three, ‘they told me you had been to her, and mentioned me to him’ . . .

  Page four.

  Then one morning the Times for Mr Burton, the Director’s Journal for Mr Willow, a letter from Nigeria for Mr and Mrs Mill-Semple, a circular for Grace - Dailies Bureau - are your dailies clean, efficient, punctual? Also for Grace the carefully addressed postcard—Miss Grace Cleave: Do you know the temperature is point one-five degrees warmer in Relham than in London. Come and bask in it! Philip Thirkettle.

  Now journeys were not simple matters for Grace; nothing is simple if your mind is a fetch-and-carry wanderer from sliced perilous outer world to secret safe inner world; if when night comes your thought creeps out like a furred animal concealed in the dark, to find, seize, and kill its food and drag it back to the secret house in the secret world, only to discover that the secret world has disappeared or has so enlarged that it’s a public nightmare; if then strange beasts walk upside down like flies on the ceiling; crimson wings flap, the curtains fly; a sad man wearing a blue waistcoat with green buttons sits in the centre of the room, crying because he has swallowed the mirror and it hurts and he burps in flashes of glass and light; if crakes move and cry; the world is flipped, unrolled down the vast marble stair; a stained threadbare carpet; the hollow silver dancing shoes, hunting-horns . . .

  It’s no use saying Freud, Freud. People do, you know. Like squeezing a stale sponge.

  Nothing was simple, known, safe, believed, identified. Boundaries were not possible, where nothing finished, shapes encircled, and there was no beginning. A storm raged, and Grace Cleave was standing in the midst of it, one hand pressing her skirt against her knees, the other pressing her dust-coloured fading hair fast against her skull. In these circumstances it needed courage to go among people, even for five
or ten minutes. A weekend in Relham with Philip Thirkettle, his wife Anne, her father Reuben, and perhaps - Grace did not know - one or two children - seemed a promise of nightmare. No escape. Two or three days. The problems of what time to get up, go to bed, what to say, where to go, and when, had reached, for Grace, the limits of insolubility: you see, during the night Grace Cleave had changed to a migratory bird.

  Oh she could laugh at the fact now, although at first she had been frightened. In the afternoon the announcer reading the weather report before the one o’clock news had said,

  —A thaw warning. A slow thaw is spreading, with rain, from the west.

  Grace went to the window of the sitting room and looked out and felt in her bones the slow thaw moving from the west, and felt her blood stop, swirl to left, to right, in order to rehearse its warm spring flowing; a porous grey raincloud moved in her head and stayed, soaking her once clear cold precise thoughts, exuding them as ragged links of silver, raindrops of vague mist.

  She looked beyond the lights of the car saleroom - European Cars, and the tall flats with their floating staircases, underfloor heating, nine hundred and ninety-nine years’ lease, into the dark sky where a small ray of sunlight pushed its way through the dense hedge of cloud and stood, green-sleeved, yellow-capped, in a suddenly-summer lane, shining. Her skin grew warm, she released the skirt held stonily-fast against her knees, moved from the window and flopped, anyhow, legs spread, in the deep easy chair which the agent, checking the inventory of the furniture, had described as part of a ‘three-piece suite, cushioned, with floral covers’. And that night Grace didn’t continue with page four of the third part of her novel. She went to bed early, carrying a sleeping tablet in a little aluminium foil dish which had held a Lyons’ Individual Apple Pie. She took the pill, slept, and woke at midnight, and lay thinking of temperature, light, migratory birds, Coriolis force; and the slow thaw spreading, with rain, from the west; and the misty cloud gathering in her head, and her freely flowing blood released from its glacial well; and her heart beat faster as she felt on the skin of her arms and legs, her breasts and belly, and even on top of her head the tiny prickling beginning of the growth of feathers. She jerked her arm from the bedclothes and plunged the white knob which switched on the bedlamp; she threw back the blankets and examined her skin. No feathers. Only a sensation of down and quill and these, with other manifestations of the other world, could be kept secret; no one else need learn of it. In a way, it was a relief to discover her true identity. For so long she had felt not-human, yet had been unable to move towards an alternative species; now the solution had been found for her; she was a migratory bird; warbler, wagtail, yellowhammer? cuckoo-shrike, bobolink, skua? albatross, orange bishop, godwit?

  She slept, and woke again when the early morning traffic had begun to flow and the first underground trains shuddered through the earth, they seemed quite near, she wondered if the line were directly beneath her flat, she always meant to ask about it but kept forgetting to locate the regular five-minute shudder. Ah, then she remembered. She knew she had been concentrating on traffic in order to forget her most urgent topic of thought; she had changed to a migratory bird.

  How do you feel? she asked herself, no longer afraid, almost enjoying the humour of the situation.

  —OK, she replied. Not much different, only relieved that at last I know; but it’s going to be lonelier than ever now, there’s the thought that once I’ve established myself as a bird there’ll be no stopping me, I might change to another species, I might move on and on - where? I don’t know, but farther and farther away from the human world.

  She buried her face in her pillow; she tried to find reasons among the coloured lights flashing from the back of her eyes, among the red and yellow stripes, the brown trees, the sun moving in the west corner on the end of a crimson string. Why a migratory bird? No doubt because I’ve journeyed from the other side of the world. Perhaps I’m homesick for my own country and have not realised it. Am I homesick? I haven’t thought of my land for so long; my land and my people, that’s how it is spoken, like a prayer, the kind which murmurs I possess rather than I want, an arrangement of congratulation between myself and God; I’ve tried to forget my land and my people; when the magazines arrive I thrust them unopened at the back of the wardrobe; but I read the letters - Do you remember Willy Flute, you know Willy Flute who used to hang round Mary Macintosh, well he’s dead. Willy Flute? With the sunlit eyes? Mary Macintosh? The stuck-up tart in the Post Office at the Motor Licence Counter? No, I don’t remember them, I am rocked to sleep, numbed, at least I’m not going to write poems and stories which begin In My Country, and are filled with nostalgia for ‘branches stirring’ ‘across the moon’ - where? At Oamaru, Timaru, Waianakarua? No, that way of thinking and dreaming is not for me.

  I’m a migratory bird. Stork, swallow, nightingale, cuckoo, shearwater. Sooty shearwater - you remember they live in burrows, you catch them down south, and they cover your mouth and face with dark brown grease, it’s like eating earth made into flesh and fat, and afterwards you’re so heavy you seem to sink into a fat-swilled grave, deep, warm as a muttonbird burrow - there, I’ve said it. Mutton-bird. No. Sooty shearwater. And there’s the Maori name titi, old Jimmy Wanaka knew it, he was my father’s oldest friend, the first Maori engine-driver in the country - you remember the weekends they fished together for salmon, the time they left their fish in the engine shed ‘out the Waitaki’ while they went for a meal, and the fish was stolen, and mother composed the inevitable ditty, - there followed a mumbled last line which no one could understand, the kind of tone used for putting across vulgarity, except that my mother could never be ‘vulgar’ . . .

  ‘One day when Jim and I went up

  to the house for a bite and sup,

  someone stole into the shed

  where we were to lay our bed;

  someone stole our salmon, someone stole our salmon,

  I know ’twas only gammon -’

  Oh no, I must not remember, Grace thought. I’m a migratory bird. I live in London. The Southern Cross cuts through my heart instead of through the sky, and I can’t see it or walk beneath it, and I don’t care, I don’t care. I no longer milk cows or sit all day watching a flock of sheep, or walk beneath the bark-stripped gum trees by creeks and waterfalls bedded with golden pebbles; what sparkling air; I’ve never seen so many leaves, spring, summer, autumn and winter, I’m buried in leaves, see my hand reaching up from their softness, Help.

  Here - the trembling ever unbroken shell of traffic. Blossoming cars at the wayside. The trap of comparisons as futile as racing to put potatoes in a basket.

  Smiling, Grace Cleave got up, washed, dressed, made her bed, and no longer afraid of being a migratory bird she went to the window and looked out again at the slow thaw arriving, with rain, from the west. Then she unbolted the back and front doors, slid the chains from their grooves (burglars! a robbery every night!), unsnipped the Yale snib, released the Chubb lock, and opening the front door she went upstairs to collect the mail.

  —Miss Grace Cleave. Do you know the temperature is point one-five degrees warmer in Relham than in London. Come and bask in it. Philip.

  2

  Grace Cleave, as I’ve told you, was a writer, although landlords with financial fears preferred her to introduce herself as a ‘journalist’ or a ‘private student’ or ‘someone engaged in professional work’. It was those who described themselves as writers, she learned, who appeared in Court on the charge of not having paid their rent, fares, bills for meals eaten recklessly in cafes. In a mocking voice the prosecuting counsel would remark,

  —He describes himself as a writer, Sir.

  —A writer? Dear me, I thought writers were highly paid these days. Television, films etc. Why not pull yourself together young man and try to get into television, write something the public want, don’t get mixed up with these fringe people crusading for peace and poetry, put yourself in a well-paid job, and then I won’t have you befor
e me month after month for defrauding estate agents, restaurants, British Railways . . . these offences can lead to something worse . . . your father was a civil servant, too . . .

  A writer collected complications, like the sooty dust that made an indelible stain on your clothes when you walked through a paddock of paspalum - that was in Auckland. Province full of ticking insects, loud-throated birds, warbling, chirruping, striking bells, the air like polished silver . . .

  Being a writer, and returning home tired after every venture, you are so surprised to find on yourself a slowly spreading stain of publisher, critic, agent. You turn in panic to the household hints in Pears Cyclopaedia; running your finger down the list of stains - acid, blacklead, blood, candlegrease, green ink, marking ink, Indian ink, nailpolish, nicotine rust scorch sealingwax soot tar whitewash wine, and the remedies - water, turpentine, methylated spirits, carbon tetrachloride, photographic hypo, vinegar. You wonder which stain and which remedy would apply to publisher, agent, critic. Nailpolish? Blood? Wine? Candlegrease? Photographic hypo? Then you realise there’s nothing, you can neither identify the stain nor remove it. Feeling resigned, depressed, you set out on your new venture, returning once more through the paddock of paspalum; and the stain spreads.

  At the close of her latest venture when she was walking slowly back home, Grace collected an interview with someone from a magazine. Bother. Acetic acid? Photographic hypo? It was no use, there was only the time-proved long-drawn-out remedy that her mother used to adopt, inspiring fury and impatience by her faith in it.

  —The air will take it out. Exposure to the air is the best remedy.