THE CLOCK

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 406, 3 April 1947, Page 22

THE CLOCK

f | Written tor "The Listener"

by

RUTH

FRANCE

grandmother and my Aunt Mary. I don’t know that they were’ very pleased about it, but there was nowhere else for me to go, and grandmother always. did what she considered her duty. Her duty in this case was to bring me up, but quite eatly on I decided I wasn't going to be brought up jn the same mould as Aunt Mary. Aunt Mary hadn’t had a chance. When she was young: they had lived way back in the hills of the peninsula, and she wasn’t clever, like my mother, to win scholarships and become a teacher. Not that it ever did my mother any good, Aunt Mary was fond of telling me. Look where she was, in her grave. You always felt that Aunt Mary thought a lot. She couldn’t say much, not with grandmother, but she didn’t need to. She could express herself quite well without. It was her only weapon, but even at that it didn’t do her much good. Not. against. grandmother. ‘ | ie those days I lived with my Grandmother was small and neat and straight. She was-meticulous in her dress, and the white lace ruffles at her neck and wrists were always snowy. She had a little gold watch that hung round her neck on a gold chain and tucked into a pocket on the inside of her black bodice. She always wore a jet brooch, ‘and her skin, though wrinkled, wag as soft and white as that of a baby. When we went out she wore little black toques, like Queen Mary’s, trimmed With jet and with feathers, and she used to send me back to polish the heels of my shoes, of which she was always critical. You'd never think, to look at her, that she’d raised a family on a small peninsula farm in the ’seventies, You’d never think she knew all there was to know about pioneering until you looked again, and saw how straight her back, was, and, though small, how firm her chin. She spent her time playing patience. On Sundays she walked a mile to church, and every morning and evening recited the rosary. This was for the repose of the soul of my Uncle John, who had been killed in the first great war. His

portrait, painted from a photograph, hung in the dining roomj°and because he had been looking at the photographer, his eyes followed you all round the room, and haunted you. This pleased grandmother in a morbid sort of way, but I found it horrible, But then I had never known my Uncle John. He had a long and sensitive face, like my mother. x * % ss NEITHER grandmother nor Aunt ' Mary were that type at all. They were both battlers, The pity of it is, when you have a battle somebody has to win, and in this case it had been grandmother. Aunt Mary was a bad loser. She had gone sour in the process. Sometimes when I realised how grandmother had dominated the lives of het children I grew afraid. It was only the thought of my youth, and her age, which comforted me. I wasn’t too close to her, and too bound, as Aunt Mary was, so that dislike, and even hatreds drowned all other feeling. Sometimes since then I’ve been shocked at the intensity with which I could dislike a person, but never has my life been so bound to the hated one that I could not admire and respect him for some of his qualities. I can still admire grandmother for living in the fowlhouses, though Aunt Mary added it to her list of grievances. This was before I went to. stay with them. The peninsula farm had been sold, and grandmother was building a house on the outskirts of the city. But being grandmother, she had to see every piece of timber and roofing that was used, and, as soon as the stove was installed and the water laid on Aunt Mary was hauled, willy-nilly, to the site, and grandmother’s large feather beds were squeezed into the swept-out fowlhouses, which were already on the property. "And it’s a great deal more comfortable we were than when I first came to New Zealand," said grandmother, (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) This odd return to pioneering might have had its drawbacks. One could have understood the builder growing annoyed at being badgered whichever way he turned. But strangely enough the builder too was from County Cork, and considered grandmother "a fine, upstanding lady, then." The house was finished to the complete satisfaction of everyone concerned-except perhaps Aunt Mary, whose opinions were never considered anyway. % Not that Aunt Mary didn’t have her opinions. And not that she didn’t voice them sometimes. Her mouth and chin were just as firm as grandmother’s, and strangely like them too. But grandmother’s matronly blandness was worlds apart from Aunt Mary’s pinched and bitter spinsterhood. And could you blame her bitterness when all the money she ever saw was the sixpence doled out to her every Sunday morning when we were setting out for Mass? Sixpence for Aunt Mary, and threepence for myself, and we owned them for half-an-hour or so till we dropped them in the collection. Yet I was happy enough, in a way. I was young enough to feel detached. My | mind was always on what was ahead, | and I was sure that all my life was going | to be wonderful. It was only in the evenings I felt the oppressiveness of the place. During the daytime it wasn’t so bad. : Aunt Mary’s pent-up feelings were relieved as she worked. And how she worked! She wreaked the disappointment | of her life on every pot she scoured, each | floor she scrubbed, on every poking of the fire. | In her hard clattering, no less than in her tight-lipped silence, was all the frustration of her loveless life, her lack of friends, of money, her hatred of the drab clothes grandmother bought for her. Even the wool Aunt Mary knitted was drab and colourléss. She worked at it fiercely in the evenings. But knitting needles, after all, don’t click very loudly. The evenings were far too quiet. Grandmother played patience on one side of the fire, Aunt Mary knitted on the other, and I did my homework. Once, I remember, a neighbour gave Aunt Mary some paper-backed novels, and grandmother burned them all-at least she thought she did. But I knew Aunt Mary still had some in her bedroom, where she read them avidly. Sometimes in the evening she read my schoolbooks, The Mill on the Floss, and Travels with a Donkey, and sometimes she would ask me to translate, which I did very clumsily, from Tartarin de Tarascon and Cyrano de Bergerac. I think she had a fellow-feeling for the unloved and unlovely Cyrano. * x % UT for the most part the evenings passed in silence. I couldn’t help wondering at what stage of their lives grandmother and Aunt Mary had ceased to talk to each other. They spoke, of course, when necessary, and ‘sometimes Aunt Mary’s bitterness would flare into loud anger, but in that house there were no. discussions, no conversations of any kind. No minds were ever drawn out, but fed only upon themselves, and upon their own bitterness. , Nor did I ever find out whether this was merely a slow growth over the years, or the result of some major frustration by grandmother. In the quietness of those evenings all sound was intensified. There was only

the click of Aunt Mary’s needles, grandmother’s faint movements as she shuffled her ecards, and the ponderous ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece. That clock, together with the mantel edging of painted green velvet, had come all the way from Ireland, and was one of grandmother’s most treasured possessions. It seemed as though it knew of its own importance. The heavy ticking, and the calm assurance of the swinging pendulum, seen through the glass door, gave to the clock, in its ornate and fretted wooden case, a brassy independence, It seemed to have a life and motivation self-controlled and exerted. In some strange way, I felt, that clock intensified the charged and brittle atmosphere. (continued on next page)

| SHORT STORY

(continued from previous page) Did Aunt Mary feel it too, I won- | dered, or were the baleful looks she | cast on it just part of her general hatred of her world, and the deadly routine which the clock imposed on her? Aunt Mary’s day was ordered to the minute, | by the clock, and grandmother. ’ * * * T nine o’clock each night Aunt Mary folded her knitting, impaled the ball of wool upon the needles, and heated milk for supper. Grandmother gathered her cards together with neat, firm hands. How many games she played in her life I can’t imagine. She never cheated, and very rarely did a game defeat her. There seemed no limit to the time she could spend, turning the cards again and again, till they all found their appointed places. It was grandmother who taught me to play Old Maid, and Strip-Jack-Naked. And every evening, before she went to bed, grandmother wound the clock. Aunt Mary put out the milk-billy, shut the cat in the wash-house, and locked the doors and windows. Yes, every window was closed, and locked at the top of the sash. But grandmother wound the clock slowly and steadily and put the key back on top of it. And when Aunt Mary had gone into her room and shut the door with a bang and locked it, and I was in my tiny room off the diningroom, where they had pushed the diningroom couch for me to sleep on-after gtandmother’s first idea of my sleeping with Aunt Mary had been so obviously disliked by us both-after we were settled, and not before, grandmother retired to her room. Here, where any life the room might have had was drowned by the bedstead with the brass knobs, and every conceivable piece of furniture used in a bedroom, from a wash-stand with a battery of china (large, heavy, and slippery) to a lowering wardrobehere grandmother spent her nights, and every morning and evening recited her lengthy devotions. It never occurred t»> me to wonder until I was older how exactly grandmother regarded God. For surely grandmother required no fortification of spirit. Rather one could imagine her communing on more or less equal terms with the Deity. Bargaining would be too harsh a word, yet on the other hand, there was nothing of supplication in grandmother. a * * * INE wonders how she came to death, whether, at the last minute, if she was conscious, her spirit quailed. We never knew. For one morning she was late in rising, and Aunt Mary went to call her. She lay as though she were asleep with no sign of disturbance, and none of faltering. Aunt Mary and I were shocked. Yes, shocked is the word. It was as though the unbelievable had happened, in fact as though God himself had disintegrated. Surely people like grandmother never came to the cold husk. Surely they couldn’t disappear like that, in a twinkling. "May her soul rest in peace." There was the awful finality. May her soul rest in peace. May her soul rest in peace. words went echoing through my ‘mind, just as the priest had spoken them at the graveside. They went on and on, and even when I stopped thinking them they went on and on. But for some time I didn’t find it strange-until I began to wonder where the words were coming from.

It was the clock. For the first time Aunt Mary and I were alone. Aunt Susan with her patient face had gone back home, and Uncle James had seemed to wipe the dust of the house from off his feet at the door as gladly as he had always done. Aunt Mary and I were sitting at the fire with only the cat and clock for company. You're tired, I told myself. You only imagine that the clock sounds louder. You only imagine those words because you're over-wrought, and everything’s so quiet. Otherwise you wouldn't imagine there’s still a tension in the room. There can’t be. There’s nothing to make it. But the clock went on with its ponderous intonation. May her soul rest in peace. May her soul rest in peace. And drowned the comfortable rumbling of the cat and the click of Aunt Mary’s needles. I knew I was overtired. But when Aunt Mary said abruptly, "Get off to bed now," put away her knitting and began to settle the house down, I wondered if she had felt anything too. She locked the house carefully, then came to the fireside. Her hand went up to reach the key of the clock, and hesitated. But finally she took the key down, wound the clock, and returned the key to its place. "Get off to bed Maureen," she said sharply. : * * * ‘THE next day I went back to school. Aunt Mary seemed her usual self grim and taciturn, but for pudding that evening there was queen pudding with meringue on top, sweet and slightly sticky and delicious. Grandmother would never have countenanced such flumdummery. But we ate the lot. After dinner I had homework to do, and with that life seemed a little more normal. I did not notice the clock, until, as time went on, I saw that Aunt Mary was restless. She sighed a lot, and every now and again cast on the clock such a look of hatred that I wondered. But then she had always looked at the clock like that. You never knew whether she was annoyed with the clock or with something quite different. But that night when we went to bed she did not wind it. I’m quite sure, and I’m quite sure she didn’t forget, either. Because when she had done all her other jobs she came back and looked at the clock very hard for a minute and then went off to her bedrooth and shut the door without a word. The next morning the clock had stopped. Aunt Mary said nothing, but I noticed that the clock from her bedroom was now in the kitchen. The dining room was still, as though it were dead. When I came home from school Aunt Mary was out. This was remarkable. And I couldn’t find the key anywhere. There wasn’t a recognised place for the key, since there was seldom no one at home, and I poked all round the place until I gave it up as a bad job and sat down on the doorstep to wait for her. It wasn’t long before she came hurrying in, obviously flustered at being late, and rather self-conscious about her parcel, which she took to her bedroom without offering to show me. But I didn’t need to be told what it was. Any woman could see it was a new hat. It was during this evening that I began to feel quite lost and hopeless. For grandmother to die was bad enough. But for Aunt Mary to stop the clock and then go off and buy a new hat was too much. I should have welcomed such spirit, and yet, instead, I felt young and (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) insecure and very unhappy. As though the whole world was unstable. And it wasn’t as though, with the stopping of grandmother’s clock she had got rid of grandmother. There was no real loss of grandmother in that room and never would be. Nor loss of tension either, as long as Aunt Mary lived there, in the same room as grandmother’s ghost and her belongings. The silence, if anything, was even more maddening, more intensely frustrating than the clock could ever be. I was so miserable myself that at first I didn’t notice Aunt Mary. When I did I wondered why she didn’t look happier about her new hat and her new found freedom. With evening the first fine flush had died away. There was time to sit and think. And to feel the silence. All the same I was rather surprised when half way through the evening, without waiting for bedtime, Aunt Mary rose, reached for the key, wound the clock, and swung the pendulum to start the ticking. * * * [tT wasn’t long after this that my father "came back for me, as somehow, deep down, I had always known he would. The last time we heard from»Aunt Mary she was cooking for the men in a timber mill, and enjoying it. But I neyer saw the new hat.