THE RETURN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 315, 6 July 1945, Page 23

THE RETURN

A SHORT STORY Written for ‘The Listener"

by

ISOBEL

ANDREWS

shimmered and glowed with the effulgence of his return, Bob went down the narrow known path, opened the remembered gate, stepped on to the recovered street. The new green was thrusting through the grey of the sycamores which still lined the footpaths. The houses, regimented into a universal neatness and urbanity, hid behind drawn blinds the best bedrooms and the sitting-rooms from the depredations of the early sun. The tentacles of his mind had for the last four years gone over the scene in endless repetition, lingering over this roof, touching that stone, gathering in these gardens. Limned against alien skies they had taken on a radiance and a beatitude which now brought their reattainment somewhere short of the dream, slanting reality just a fraction out of line, as in that French film where to get a certain effect in a certain sequence, the camera had been tilted slightly askew. He crossed the railway line at the same illegal point where he had always crossed, but did so now with an exaggeration of care that brought an apologetic and shamefaced movement to his lips. The shining converging rails carried his eyes to where paddocks mottled with sheep, ranged with pines, flowed towards the foothills, gently ascending until, backed by the mountains, they finally disappeared in a dark blue haze. A streak of ice-white cloud cut across the summits and hid the forest trees. A gust of feeling heavy with an unnamed unnameable emotion assailed him as he went down the hill and wandered into the town. Here familiarity wrapped round him like a mist. Town meant one wide meandering street which held the older wooden shop fronts with their verandahs, their plain windows, their wooden doorsteps moulded and scarred by time and the passage of many feet, standing in their shabby indomitable tow, pressed down every now and then by an incursion of modernity and change in the shape of the ferro-concrete insurance building, the bank with its four stories of austere brick, the new church, pseudo-Gothic, which had replaced ten years ago the old oblong wooden building with the little porch in the front and the one cracked bell, A clatter across the way showed Joe Dyer unfastening the old iron shutters in front of his shop ("Phineas Dyer and Son. Estd. 1885. Watchmakers and Manfg. Jewellers.") Seeing Joe, Bob lurked under the verandah of Tom Gallagher’s barber shop, not wanting to talk to Joe just then because of Ron, who had got his at E] Alamein. Ron, diffident EAVING the house which still

a! in ill-fitting battledress, came back to the main street for a moment. Came back between his eyes and the shaving cream, the razors and the gent.’s Superior Hair Oil in Gallagher’s shop window. Because of Ron and not wanting to talk to Joe he walked delicately down the street, taking care that his boots did not ring too loudly in the still empty morning. Passing the Bank he looked up at the second floor window, knowing that the table and chair which he had left four years ago would still be waiting ‘for him behind the frosted glass. But the way he felt just then he didn’t think he would go back there. The way he felt he wanted to go ‘to a place like Tauranga and grow lemons and oranges and lie in the sun. 6 a * UST before the Church the ruin of the Stanton shop paused him. The folks had written saying that there had been a fire and that the old couple had sort of folded up after it, going off to Hastings to their married daughter and leaving the shop as the fire had left it, gutted, unsightly, deserted. He peered. through the boards which had been nailed across the windowless frontage, and gazed into the darkened, smokesmeared interior. Silence lapped him like a dark tide. All feeling had for so long been bound up in the desire to come back and to find nothing changed. Death, explosion, fatigue, noise, strange places, and strange people had engendered in him a passion for immutability. His mother’s greying hair, his father’s stooped figure, the transformation of his sister from a girl of 17 into a preoccupied pregnant young married woman had all, now that the first flush of return had faded, brought a faint resentment, a feeling of having been cheated. Now, in front of the Stanton shop, he felt that he wanted nothing so much as he wanted to see the place as it had been when as a boy he would go every Saturday to spend his allowance, or as a young man to buy fishing tackle, a new tie, or just to have a chat with the old man who had lived in the district all his life and knew all the stories about it. He wanted to be exasperated again at the festoon of dungarees, gingham overalls, children’s clothes, and long pink underpants which hung over the counter

obscuring the boxes at the back and framing Mr. and Mrs. Stanton as bunting on holidays frames the windows and the balconies of a town. He wanted old man Stanton to scratch his head with a battered pencil and looking out from under craggy eyebrows peering over lopsided spectacles say, "Drorin’ pins? I did have some somewhere, Bob boy, but bothered if I know where I put them." And~ Mrs. Stanton, dry. and birdlike, coming in with "Course you had some, Dad. You remember, you put them up on the shelf with the Beechams and the toothpaste." He wanted nothing so much as he wanted that, but all he had was silence and the stale smell of the charred wood. * * * HE sound of hooves and the rattle of unoiled wheels and the way he still felt, not wanting to meet anyone just then, made him gaze fixedly at the Stanton shop, but subterfuge was annihilated by the roar of Timi Tawhero’s command to his horse. In response to Stentor, hooves and wheels faltered, stopped, and he had to turn round. "Hey you, Bob, back again, eh? Good to see you. Good to see you." Mr. and Mrs. Tawhero were sitting in the same old cart, with the same clutch of children crowding at the. back, Mrs. Tawhero, who never spoke, smiled and nodded as Timi lumbered to the ground. ‘Timi, expansive, his enormity made more ‘enormous by his thick flying overcoat, his dark face made darker by his natty gent.’s stetson, green with a silly little feather stuck in the band; Timi, thrusting out a map-like hand, pumphandling vigorously. — *‘ "Hey, Bob. Glad to see you." Effort, bringing right words, the right gesture, the right inflexion, made him respond to the handshake, nod to Mrs. Tawhero, smile at Timi. Effort became feeling and he was suddenly glad to see them, "Hullo Tim. How are you, Mrs. Tawhero? You're all looking great." "So," said Timi. "Back again, hey?" "Back again, Tim. Damn glad to be back, too. How’s the family?" "Fine. Fine. But you're’ too thin, boy. Too thin. Have to fatten up, eh? Have to fatten you up now you're, home." (continued on next page) |

| The Return

(continued from previous page) "Sure, Tim, sure." Mrs, Tawhero sat in her navy costume and red hat, her hair straggling on to her coat collar. She was smiling, smiling, nodding and smiling. The children looked at him out’of great round black eyes. The horse flicked his head, itched his feet up and down. The blackened shop behind him served as a background to it all. Timi, after his first indulgence of words, paused, searched, drew something that wanted to be said. "See Pete over there?" "Never set eyes on him, Tim. Heard enough about him though. Felt quite /proud I could say we grew up together. He’s done pretty well, hasn’t he?" Timi, hands now in trouser pockets, flyaway coat spraying out behind, natty green stetson pushed to the back of his head, cracked his dark face with a grin. "Pretty well," he admitted, with a poor display of disinterest. "Pretty well. In Italy now. Captain Tawhero. Sounds good, eh?" and Timi’s pride in Pete brushing aside pakeha subterfuge of mock modesty, broke through. Timi rocked back and forward on his large feet, smiling hugely at the thought of Pete, Captain Tawhero, somewhere in Italy. They both stood, seeing Pete Tawhero in a Grecian pass, blowing oncoming Jerries to hell with a tommy-gun while the rest of the company took the wounded on down towards the sea. Pete Tawhero of Thermopylae and the old pa. Captain Tawhero of Tahunui and the olive groves, the vineyards, and the old cart with its smiling Mrs. Tawhero and the cluster of great-eyed children. The stale smell from the ruined shop choked the back of Bob’s throat, but Timi didn’t notice. "You an’ Pete had a few good times together," he announced. "We sure did, Timi,"we sure did." "Remember the night you went eeling and you fell in? An’ the time you pinched the apples from old Grant’s shed? And old Grant was going to have you up before the Court? I tanned Pete’s hide for that-but the apples were damn good! An’ the time you put the fire-crackers under Mrs. Thompson’s chair?" "Sure, Tim, sure I remember." And all at once there was nothing more for either of them to say. "Better get goin’ and Timi struggled back, took the reins from Mrs. Tawhero’s flaccid fingers. "Great seeing you, Bob. See you again soon. If you’re out our way, come and see us." ' "I will, Pete, sure I will." Timi’s roar started the horse and the wheels again. Bob waved to Timi, to smiling Mrs. Tawhero, to the clutch of children in the back. % * % PEOPLE were starting to drift into town. He didn’t want to talk any more, so he turned off the main street and went down towards the river. The houses on this side of the town were older, smaller, not so well kept as the houses in the street where his home was. Some of them here were no more than the original two-roomed cottages that had been built when pakeha ways first invaded the district. Others,

built round about the 1880’s were bigger, sporting verandahs and peaked roofs and 20-foot studs, but they all needed coats of paint and a general brushing-up. Their gardens were heavy with sprawling bushes and old trees. Then there was the Winstone place, biggest of the lot, its two-storied extravagance topped off by gables and an attic. He half expected to see the Winstone kid-Sally--sitting swinging her skinny legs over the verandah, a half-eaten apple in a slim grubby hand, her impudent mouth ready to jeer. But she wasn’t there. He followed the road to the river, striking off down the path, seeking the place he knew under the bridge overlooking the whirlpool which had held such terror and such fascination for him when he was a boy. But the ledge where he used to sit was gone, a rubble of earth and split pebbles showing where a miniature landslide had taken place, On the opposite bank, men and machines were shifting the shingle, biting deep, scooping, dipping and shovelling. Leave it alone, he wanted to call, leave it alone. He went along the river bed to where the old willows, planted by the Maoris in the days of the fighting, dipped leaves into the stream, dug twisted roots down through earth to water. The river running before his eyes, now in a deep channel, now thinly over gravel, struck a pleasant nostalgic note. A battle had been fought here, years ago, between the white men and the brown, but nothing of their strife remained. There were only the trees and the river. Now that the coming home was ac« complished and the being here an actuality, he became aware ofthe lassitude, of an emptied-out feeling as though all reserves and ambitions had been focussed on this one ‘point, which now achieved, had something less to offer than had been anticipated. ; we * we E found himself automatically weighing and moulding a handful of the soft brown river earth. He let it dribble through his fingers and he watched it as it fell. Before his. eyes it merged with the sands of a desert, with the dust ef Crete, with the bones of his ancestors. The bones of his, old man’s old man who had been one of von Tempski’s guerillas; the bones of Timi Tawhero’s old man who had fought the pakeha under Rewi and had joined in that last audacious desperate retreat. You go away and you come back, Battle, murder, and sudden death-but you are more or less the same as when you went away and change is in the earth of home and in the people you left behind you. His feverish distaste for change in the others had been a pleading for them to wait, not to go too far ahead until he could come and catch up with them, And the impossible fulfilment of his desire lay in the sight of his sister who had become a woman, and in the face of his mother who was now old. Joe Dyer knew a changed world because Ron had gone out of it. Death doesn’t change you-living does that, and the last few years for him had been neither death nor life, but a _ static enduring period in between. Death halted your image in the minds of the people that knew you like an eternal "As you were." Like those statue games you used to play when the music went on and on and then suddenly stopped and you stayed, as you were, motionless, poised. Ron would never appear (continued on next page)

ca (continued from previous page) anything but young, diffident, clad in illfitting battledress, though Joe would go on, taking the shutters down in the morning, putting them up at night, getting older and more grey and worn as the years went on. Pete Tawhero, gallant in Greece, Captain Tawhero of Italy, was the same Pete who had gone eeling on moonlit nights, who had pinched Old Grant’s apples, who had set the firecrackers off under the teacher’s chair. It was Timi and Mrs. Tawhero and the old cart with the cluster of children in the back who had gone on towards the fulfilment which for Pete and for himself had been diverted by their becoming, for the time being, soldiers. Change doesn’t lie so much in four years of war as it does in the hometown, where it walks down the main street, lies in your hands as you sit under a willow, Bg * % E rose to his feet, climbed, got back to the road again. The Winstone kid-Sally-was coming towards him. She looked, waved, and laughed. Her hair was bound little-girl fashion with a ribbon round her head. She wore slacks so he couldn’t tell whether her legs were still skinny. or not, but her jersey didn’t fall straight to her waistline as it used to do, and her mouth wasn’t impudent now so much as provocative. "Hullo, Bob Martin,’ she called. She came up to him and smiled. The Winstone kid. He drew a deep breath. "You’ve changed," he said. ‘"You’ve grown up." "Oh well," she said carelessly, booming her voice the way the man does in the film, "Oh well, you know... Time Marches on!"