Towards Another Summer by Janet Frame Read Free Book Online Page B

of New Zealand scenes were hung on the wall, and over the fireplace a large map of New Zealand - blue seas, green plains, white-capped mountains. Grace reached up and ran her finger around the coastline tracing the once-familiar towns between Oamaru and Dunedin and farther south, pausing at each one to try to capture a memory of it. Maheno: there was
a picnic spot near the river - The Willows - where girls from School used to go for their Saturday bike-rides, and the boys and girls for their Bible-Class picnics; where lovers used to bathe naked in the earth-tasting beerbrown swimming hole. Maheno, where the Limited Expresses from North and South used to pass, near Waianakarua, a plantation of gum trees crackling smooth grey flames of leaf, shaking blue dusty smoke as the wind touched them; the rust-coloured engine-sheds; cabbage trees, tussock, swamps, sheep - with her finger on the map Grace catalogued the physical details of the land. She was in the train travelling from Oamaru to Dunedin - why did it seem such a tiny train yet why did the black canopy shrouding the platform between carriages seem of such shiveringly-fearful importance? The usual slow train that stopped at every station to unload and load or merely to loiter and which travelled seventy-eight miles in seven or eight hours did not possess these luxurious black canopies which enabled you to pass, hidden, from carriage to carriage. If you wanted to move along the slow train you had to risk the rush of air on the unsheltered platform, you were jolted, blown on, rained on, and never had there been such a noise in your ears, so much soot in your eyes.
    ‘Tall where trains draw up to rest . . .’
    Grace looked about her at the sweaty redfaced passengers whose possession of the train, beginning for most of them when they had left the Cook Strait Ferry at Lyttelton, seemed to provide them with so much influence and power; they stared with disdain at the scattered few boarding at Oamaru, the Refreshment Stop; cream buns and fizz. Then Grace looked out at the sea, the cliffs, the hooded wayside stations Waitati, Puketeraki, Mihiwaka . . .
    She drew her finger quickly from the map. No, she would not travel in the Limited from Oamaru to Dunedin.
    She stayed in the room. The colours of the map were such delicate pastel shades, as if agriculture were a cosmetic. There
was no sign of Empire blood; only a peaceful burnt umber, leaf-green, gold, and the collections of punctuation marks or blots and stains which implied people - living, dying, buried; and then up and down the map all the silver threads that were rivers, real rivers, not English puddles or Spanish valleys where the water had disappeared for so long that people picnicked on the river-bed. Grace could not forget the snowcapped peaks and snowfilled torrents; during her stay in Great Britain she had not been to sit humbly, politely, by a narrow stream beside a hill and afterwards write home about her visit to a river near a mountain. Only Keats could write ‘I stood tiptoe upon a little hill’, without offending his sensitive countrymen!
    The room was cold. Grace lit the gas fire and warmed her hands. She looked out of the window at the darkening Winchley landscape. She touched the clean-shaven dormant potatoes. She pulled her nightdress from her bag and put it under her pillow. Then no longer able to delay the act of sitting to a meal with Philip and Anne, she went slowly downstairs into the kitchen, taking her place as if she had lived with the family all her life; waiting with her mouth slightly open, like a child, like a helpless ‘younker’, for the dispensed meat pie and peaches.
    Philip asked her again if she had a pleasant journey from London. She replied, Yes thank you.
    Philip seemed to listen for sounds from upstairs.
    —Silence, he said.—This is the best part of the day, when the children are asleep.
    —I suppose it is, Grace said.
    When people spoke to her she was in the habit of punctuating