Dear Oliver Page 7

  She often asks me, ‘Do you know people down here?’ I don’t say who I see or how I see them, on what terms. I think of her own mysterious sexual past, when she explored life to the depths. But when I sit close by her on her bed and say to her fondly, ‘You were always so full of get-up-and-go. Do you remember? Rushing here. Rushing there. Playing tennis. Cooking. Going out,’ she nods in a vague way, as if that were some other person, separated from her by a vast chasm of time.

  ‘Put the cup up there,’ she says to me in her old voice, not exactly of command, but do-what-I-say I-know-best.

  ‘Old bossy britches,’ I say to her fondly.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Old bossy britches,’ I repeat. ‘You.’

  Her face for a moment shines: she becomes beautiful to my eyes, and she smiles. She does what she has always done. She raises her fist up, clenches it and shakes it at me in a playful fashion. ‘I shake the fist,’ she says, the age-old words of a game that goes right back to childhood. (Was it cod-Māori or did it come from Nino Culotta’s They’re a Weird Mob?)

  We smile at one another.

  ‘It’s only a week, Mum, I’ll be back.’

  ‘I’ll miss you,’ she says in a small pettish voice, but she looks up at me with absolute love. ‘You have been good to me, Pete, coming in here to see me, it must be very boring.

  ‘It’s no trouble for me,’ I say. ‘Besides, I like doing it.’

  I do not say that I have begun to wonder if she will ever die, whether I will ever be free.

  I reach down and take her hand.

  I’m not amazed that these thoughts can co-exist — I felt a strange kind of transporting love for her, consciously remembering her even as I looked at her. We touched hands as I leaned forward to kiss her; she jumped slightly, as if I was going to kiss her on the lips (which of course I never did), and instead presented a rather boney cheek. I kissed her soft skin, the texture of which I remembered from my grandmother. We looked at one another like lovers parting — or people who love one another. I can say this without shame.

  ‘See you soon. Only a week. Bye.’

  She lifts a hand to wave.

  I do not look back.

  Notes

  1 Joan Didion, ‘On Self-Respect: Joan Didion’s 1961 essay from the pages of Vogue’, Vogue, 22 October 2014, www.vogue.com/article/joan-didion-self-respect-essay-1961 (accessed 21 July 2017).

  2 The direct descendants of John and Ann Northe, who arrived in New Zealand in 1847, numbered 516 in 1950, so this is a remarkable diminution.

  3 Oliver Sacks, On the Move: A Life (London: Picador, 2015), 360.

  4 Willa Cather, Not Under Forty (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988).

  5 Alan Downs, The Velvet Rage: Overcoming the Pain of Growing Up Gay in a Straight Man’s World (Philadelphia: Da Capo Press, 2012).

  6 Rachel Aviv, ‘The Philosopher of Feelings — Martha Nussbaum’s Moral Philosophies’, New Yorker, 25 July 2015, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/martha-nussbaums-moral-philosophies (accessed 21 July 2017).

  How to Read a Letter

  It seems obvious how to read a letter. You open it up, start at the beginning and read through to the end. But a letter is not just a collection of sentences, a bundle of facts. A letter, if seen in the right light, is a kind of biography.

  EVEN WHEN A LETTER APPEARS to be banal, language is such a slippery medium that the human spirit slithers in between the letters of a word and, elfin-like, introduces its presence. Besides, life is made up of endless small decisions. We edit our persona as much as we put up a front. Letters have the virtue of being imprints of an identity that occurs just on the particular day the letter is written. They can be candid, duplicitous, straightforward, or a mask through which a conflicted self speaks.

  ‘For all their apparent simplicity, [letters] are complex documents,’ the biographer Janet Malcolm has written.1 The significant thing with a letter is that it comes without the corollary of things we use in face-to-face conversations to verify, test, back up or question (eye movements, instinctive jerks, a feeling of unease). But even an everyday letter may be chucked in a bag or purse and re-read at a later, more leisurely moment when we can — so to speak — unpick it and look for the hidden meanings that survive as a kind of subtext. That is the true richness of a letter. It is not only what it is; it is also, if we know ‘how to read it’, a midden, a treasure chest, a mystery revealing the human heart sliced open in the rawness and indecision of a moment in time.

  I’m prompted to these thoughts by the single letter that survives from my parents’ wartime correspondence. It’s an aerogramme sent by my mother, Bess, to my father, Gordon, in the chaotic days following the end of the Second World War. They had married in December 1939, just after war was declared, their marriage hastened by the sense of impending global change. None of the other letters from my mother survived apart from this one, because my father’s truck, carrying his belongings, was destroyed by a bomb in northern Italy. Bess, living in civilian Auckland, did not save a single wartime letter from Gordon. Make of that what you will.

  By early 1942 the war was going badly for the Allies. Singapore had fallen to the Japanese, and on 19 February the Japanese bombed Darwin, killing 235 people. Suddenly Australia and New Zealand were vulnerable to invasion. My father, a thirty-four-year-old bank clerk, was called up. He went overseas in late 1942. By the time this letter was sent, the newly married couple had been apart for three long years. My mother was twenty-nine, my father was thirty-seven.

  The aerogramme shows my mother making tentative approaches to the man with whom she was going to have to live for the rest of her life. But she had been separated from him for longer than she had lived with him. How could she tell him what had happened to her in his absence?

  This aerogramme certainly looks its age. It feels grubby — after all, it has gone off to a Europe reduced to rubble and ash, been flown back to New Zealand in a military aircraft (probably stuffed in a canvas sack), then laid relatively untouched in a handkerchief drawer. It has been readdressed crudely by someone in a hurry. The crayon scrawl seems to breathe impatience. Part of the letter is typed, using a ribbon almost devoid of ink. (Wartime shortages.) The rest is handwritten in ink that has faded with time. But for all this, the letter is curiously resilient. Paper worms are only now starting to eat it. So in one way this piece of writing is both archeology (bringing something dead back to life) and, more profoundly, an act of emotional rescue. Something my mother wrote in a state of agonised indecision has lasted more than seventy years, delivering itself into my hands as something to parse, ponder and reflect on.

  In 1945 an aerogramme was a relatively recent invention. A lightweight self-sealing single sheet of paper, usually coloured blue to signify air transport, it was a breakthrough in communication. (Previously the quality of a letter was denoted by the heaviness of the paper stock. Heavy equalled good.) The essence of an aerogramme was lightness and speed; it was also cheap to send. The needs of war had accelerated acceptance of the aerogramme, and by 1941 it was widely used in the British Army in the Middle East. But there were further reasons for its quick acceptance. It created a private form of correspondence, and the very fact it did not allow much space in which to exchange information meant it was ideal for a certain kind of letter writing. Aerogrammes were not for love letters or an endless flow of thought. They demanded containment, economy of expression, almost a mundane form of discourse.

  This letter from Bess to her husband displays these attributes. It is prosaic in its use of language and tone; there is no sense of Bess gushing out pent-up feelings. Yet looking beneath the surface reveals another whole world. At a glance I can see their future lies exposed. They were a man and a woman at a particularly vulnerable moment. In fact, the very first sentence is a harbinger of the rest of their lives together: of missed connections, misreadings, secret feelings and things unsaid.

  ‘My Dear Gordy, Well I have missed writing to you fo
r a couple of weeks now for that letter of yours of the 28th June mislead me [sic]. I thought from [the letter sent on 28 June] that you must have been on your way but on Sat I received one dated 30 June and you just seemed to be still at Trieste. Suppose you too were mislead by wild rumours.’

  Wild rumours, as it turned out, were a worrying possibility for Bess. Both she and Gordon were trying to communicate in a zone where information was still strictly monitored and rumour was as much a part of reality as fact. Behind their communication problems lay the movement of troops returning home just at a time when Europe was full of stateless beings, people without shelter. This aerogramme survived simply because it did not arrive while he was at the European theatre, as it was then called. It was forwarded back to Tekapō, a military camp in the South Island, then sent back to my mother who, for reasons unknown, saved it.

  The aerogramme was addressed with the specificity necessary for identifying an individual during a conflict in which approximately 690 million humans fought. It began with my father’s ID number (472930), then ran on to his personal identity: Gunner Gordon L Wells RHQ 61 Field Regt 2nd NZEF Middle East Force. For three long years — in Egypt, Palestine, Libya, Tunisia, and then Italy and Austria — this had been who he was, all he was. His military role had subsumed his identity entirely.

  The aerogramme is dated 30 July 1945. Everyone knows what 1945 signifies. At one minute past midnight on 8 May 1945, war in Europe was declared over. Dad was in Venice that night, and I have a worthless Italian bank note with his ebullient words written on it: ‘The Night of peace’. It is signed all over by New Zealand comrades. (There is also a phrase he has gone to a lot of trouble to rub off. What did it say?) With the war over, Gordon could look homewards. But first he was to go with his regiment to Trieste to hold insurgent communists at bay — it was the start of a new war, the Cold War — and also to enjoy three months’ rest and recreation.

  The official artillery history notes the soldiers’ ‘enjoyment of their Adriatic paradise’. It talks of Trieste in terms of ‘an enchantment’. It was the height of a European summer, and the weary men who had spent eighteen months in Italy ‘serving their guns in anger and anxiety’, fighting through snow and blizzards, could now relax, swim, flirt and dance.2 There is some evidence Gordon had an affair in Trieste. (The sexual double standard almost expects this and evaluates this entirely differently, as we shall see.) The soldiers dressed up in the ‘smart clothes worn to Groppi’s cabaret or garden restaurant in Cairo or similar places’, and had the time of their lives, celebrating their survival. ‘There were anguished looks and tearstained [female] faces at the roadsides as the gunners said goodbye to Trieste and the Triestini,’ the historian notes.3

  It seems typical of the way Bess’s letter was all about missed connections that Gordon had already left Trieste the day before she even started writing it. He was part of a convoy making its slow way down the leg of the Italian peninsula. (He was actually in Bologna on the day she dated it.) The ability of a couple to correspond, to keep in touch, to keep up to date, was as severely tested during this time as it was during the war. But it needs to be noted that, even then, Dad had sent Mum two letters in quick succession, while she had ‘missed’ sending him a letter for a relatively long fortnight. She then delayed a further week before adding a postscript. It is possible she was agonising over what she could say — and not say.

  When I first read this letter without any knowledge of the background, I was disappointed that it appeared so prosaic. It struck me as hardly the letter of a woman who had been married comparatively briefly, then been separated for three years from a husband she loved. It was business-like, distracted, even if couched in conventional phrases of affection. It was only later I grasped that the entire letter was a masquerade. Like many letters, what was not being said was more important than the few sentences that seemed to provide meaning.

  What was not being said was that she had fallen in love with someone else.

  The letter talks about ordinary concerns, darting here and there, following her thoughts. But at times it also, and unavoidably, displays her unspoken anxieties about what is going to happen when her husband returns. As with all things repressed, these anxieties have a way of emerging in a different form.

  This is most clearly expressed at the beginning of the letter when Bess raises a subject of great importance to them both. ‘I think you only get 28 days free travel and it can be taken any time within a year.’ She is referring to a train trip they have planned to take around the scenic South Island. They will spend time together, reacquainting themselves one with the other. Unofficially, this has the status of a second honeymoon. (In fact, the government thanked returned servicemen by offering a free rail double pass, second class, to them and their wives. It had to be taken within a period of thirty-six days.) But if Bess is nervously anticipating it in words, she demurs in thought: ‘However, the longer it is before you actually get under way the more chance we have of getting our holiday in the summer — that is if you are not too long of course.’ So she plays off her secret wish that he may be delayed coming home — the reckoning — with the lustre of a promise that they will spend time together on a summer holiday. She then immediately goes into negative territory: if they were going then it would be ‘pretty cold and miserable in the South Island just now — they have had a terrific lot of snow — 8 inches in Christchurch — all transport held up etc etc.’ That is, conditions of the human heart are freezing and hostile to the prospect of intimate time together.

  Then she goes into another apology — she wasn’t keeping up with his world, she was thinking of other things, subconsciously trying to block out the inevitable: her husband would return. ‘Sorry I didn’t post those things to Beth and Muriel [Gordon’s favourite niece and only sister] before but when they arrived it was the time of the Italian and German capitulation.’ These were gifts and trinkets Gordon sent to the women in his family, including his wife, as tokens of affection and love. I recall elaborate and very pretty mosaic brooches and rings and bracelets sent from Italy. ‘Gloves to your Mother, and the bracelet and badges to Muriel and Beth.’

  The tone is light, at times slightly flirtatious, but there is also a sense that she is thinking aloud in an attempt to quiet some inner uncertainty. Never once does she talk of her feelings, or of how she has missed him, or even how much she is looking forward to seeing him again. She does not say she loves him, except in a formulaic way as a sign-off at the very end of the letter where to leave it off would itself raise awkward questions. The plans for their railway trip instead represent anticipation, and she crowds out any exploration of her feelings with plans, gossip — her friend Nora and her mother ‘are still disagreeing — it’s a pity she doesn’t get her own house back. Mother even quibbles about the supper Nora’s visitors eat’ — at the same time managing to say nothing directly about her own life.

  Yet in one key passage she seems to reveal an inner self. She is talking here of a pair of Italian leather gloves Gordon has sent her. The gloves represent a billet doux; they signify I am thinking of you, I am imagining your warm hands inserted inside the living texture of animal skin. On the most basic level they signify her presence in his thoughts. But her response shows that he is not in her thoughts at all. Or rather, that she has put off placing him centrally in her mind. She hadn’t got around to sending the gloves and trinkets on to his relatives. ‘I thought I’d keep them for you to deliver yourself, but when I received your letters enquiring about them I sent them along,’ she writes dutifully.

  But this is followed by what amounts to an unconscious disavowal. ‘I haven’t worn any of mine yet for I use hand knitted woolen [sic] gloves all the winter and never wear a hat in the summer so hardly ever use them, but they’ll be very handy when I leave work and play ladies again.’ Wartime conditions had freed her from the clothing constraints of a middle-class woman: wearing gloves and a hat in public, stockings rather than bare legs. But it goes beyond this
: she chooses not to put her hands into his gloves, preferring her own self-constructed gloves — by inference, being her own woman, making her own choices.

  And the explanation swiftly follows. She has had the best period of her life, without a male — father or husband — directing her on how to live and, to a degree, what to think. She has become a working woman. But like so many women who were, to a greater or lesser extent, liberated by the Second World War, she now faces a looming crisis. She will have to return to domesticity — ‘playing ladies’, as she says dismissively, a childhood game of tea parties and idle chatter.

  She is very clear about what she feels. ‘I hate that thought for I’d be so bored just mooching around the Point. I’ve got used to a busy life now and I’d miss all the company.’ She does not specify what company, implying in a vague way it is her working environment that she will miss. The gender of her co-workers is carefully left undisclosed, just as she is not explicit about the fact she enjoys being her own agent, meeting whoever she likes, whenever she likes and on whatever terms.

  Then she abruptly changes tack and goes on the offensive: ‘What is the point of double spacing your typed letters? Maybe I spoil you, for I try to get as much as possible on the one sheet. It must be my very Scotch instinct don’t you think? (You see I haven’t changed). Groans from you I guess.’

  This is the closest she comes to badinage. She can twist him around her little finger is the inference.