Owen Marshall Selected Stories Read online

  Mr Van Gogh wasn’t all that odd-looking. Sure, he had old-fashioned clothes — galoshes in winter and his gabardine coat with concealed buttonholes, and in summer his policemen and firemen braces over grey workshirts. But he was clean, and clean-shaven. His hair was long, though, and grey like his shirts. He combed it back from his face with his fingers, so that it settled in tresses, giving him the look of a careworn lion.

  Because my father was a parson it was thought he should be responsible for Mr Van Gogh and other weird people. Mr Souness said that it was just as well that my father had something to occupy his time for the other six days of the week. Ministers get some odd people to deal with, I’d say. Reggie Kane was a peeping tom who had fits whether he saw anything or not, and Miss O’Conner was convinced that someone was trying to burn down her house at night, and she used to work in the vegetable garden in her nightdress. Our family knew Mr Van Gogh wasn’t like the others, though most people treated him the same. My father said that Mr Van Gogh’s only problem was that he’d made a commitment to something which other people couldn’t understand. My father had a good deal of fellow-feeling for Mr Van Gogh in some ways. Mr Van Gogh would’ve been all right if his obsession had been with politics or horse-racing. He wouldn’t have been a crackpot then.

  Two or three times Mr Van Gogh came to our house to use the phone. He’d stand quietly at the door, and make his apologies for bothering us. He was ordering more yellow glass from Austria perhaps, or checking on his pension. Mr Van Gogh’s humility was complete on anything but art. He was submissive even to the least deserving. On art, though, he would have argued with Lucifer, for it was his necessity and power. It was what he was. His head would rise with his voice. He would rake back his grey hair, and for a moment the backward pressure would rejuvenate his face before the lines could appear again, the plumes of hair begin a faint cascade upon his forehead. He could be derisive and curt, fervent and eloquent, but people didn’t understand. A naked intensity of belief is an obscene exposure in ordinary conversation. It was better not to start him off, my mother said.

  When the council decided to make the bridge a two-lane one, Mr Van Gogh’s house had to come down. The engineers said that the approaches to the new bridge would have to be at least twice the width of the bridge itself, and Mr Van Gogh’s house was right next to the old bridge. Even the house next to Mr Van Gogh’s would probably have to go, the consultant thought. Mr Van Gogh took it badly. He stuck up the backs of the letters the council wrote, and sent them back. He wouldn’t let anyone inside to value the house. He wouldn’t talk about compensation. The council asked my father to get Mr Van Gogh to see reason. My father said he was willing to try and explain the business, but he didn’t know if he could justify it. The council didn’t seem to recognise the distinction.

  As far as I know, Mr Van Gogh never let anyone into his house. Even my father had to stand on the doorstep, and Mr Van Gogh stood just inside the door, and there was a blanket hanging across the hall behind him to block off the sight of anything to a visitor at the door. My mother said she could imagine the squalor of it behind the blanket. An old man living alone like that, she said.

  My father did his best. So did the council and the Ministry of Works, I suppose. They selected two other houses to show Mr Van Gogh, and a retirement villa in the grounds of the combined churches’ eventide home, but he wouldn’t go to see them. He became furtive and worried. He’d hardly leave his house lest the people come and demolish it while he was away. The council gave Mr Van Gogh until the end of March to move out of his home. Progress couldn’t be obstructed indefinitely, they said. Mr Souness looked forward to some final confrontation. ‘The old bugger is holding up the democratic wishes of the town,’ he said. He thought everyone had been far too soft on Mr Van Gogh.

  In the end it worked out pretty well for the council people. Mrs Witham rang our house at teatime to say she’d seen Mr Van Gogh crawling from the wash-house into his front door, and that he must be drunk. My father and I went down to the bridge, and found Mr Van Gogh lying on his back in the hallway, puffing and blowing as he tried to breathe. ‘It’s all right now,’ said my father to Mr Van Gogh. What a place he was in, though. For through that worn, chapped doorway, and past the blanket, was the art and homage of Mr Van Gogh. Except for the floor, all the surfaces of the passage and lounge were the glass inlays of a Van Gogh vision. Some glass was set in like nuggets, winking as jewelled eyes from a pit. Other pieces were lenses set behind or before similarly delicate sections of different colours to give complexity of toning. The glass interior of Mr Van Gogh’s home was an interplay of light and colour that flamed in green, and yellow, and prussian blue, in the evening sun across the riverbank. Some of the great paintings were there: Red Vineyard, Little Pear Tree, View of Arles with Irises, each reproduced in tireless, faithful hues one way or another.

  Mr Van Gogh lay like clay in the passage, almost at the lounge door. I thought that I was looking at a dying man. I blamed all that glass dust that he’d been taking in for years, but my father said it was something more sudden. He pulled down the blanket from the hall, and put it over Mr Van Gogh to keep him warm, then went down the path to ring the ambulance. The blanket hid Mr Van Gogh’s workshirt and firemen’s braces, but he didn’t look much warmer. His face was the colour of a plucked chicken with just a few small veins high on his cheeks. Very small, twisted veins, that looked as if they didn’t lead anywhere. I stood there beside him, and looked at his work on the walls. The yellow sun seemed to shine particularly on the long wall of the lounge where Mr Van Gogh had his own tribute to the man we knew him as. In green glass cubes was built up the lettering of one of the master’s beliefs — ‘Just as we take the train to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star’ — and above that Mr Van Gogh’s train to Tarascon and a star rose up the entire wall. The cab was blue, and sparks of pure vermilion flew away. It all bore no more relation to the dross of glasses and ashtrays that Mr Van Gogh brought round on Sundays, than the husk of the chrysalis to the risen butterfly.

  My father came back and waited with me in the summer evening. ‘It has taken years to do, years to do,’ he said. ‘So many pieces of glass.’ The fire and life upon the walls and ceiling defied Mr Van Gogh’s drained face. He’d spent all those years doing it, and it didn’t help him. It rose like a phoenix in its own flame, and he wasn’t part of it anymore, but lay on his back and tried to breathe. All the colour, and purpose, and vision of Mr Van Gogh had gone out of himself and was there on the walls about us.

  Both the St John’s men were fat. I thought at the time how unusual it was. You don’t get many fat St John’s men. They put an oxygen mask on Mr Van Gogh, and we all lifted him on to the stretcher. Even they stood for a few seconds, amazed by the stained glass. ‘Christ Almighty,’ said one of them. They took Mr Van Gogh away on a trolley stretcher very close to the ground.

  ‘What do you think?’ asked my father.

  ‘He won’t necessarily die,’ said the St John’s man. He sounded defensive. ‘He’s breathing okay now.’

  Mr Van Gogh went into intensive care. The hospital said that he was holding his own, but Mr Souness said he wouldn’t come out. He said that it was his ticker, that his ticker was about to give up on him. Anyway there was nothing to stop the council and the Ministry of Works from going ahead. People came from all over the town to see Mr Van Gogh’s house before they pulled it down. There was talk of keeping one or two of the pictures, and the mayor had his photograph in the paper, standing beside the train to Tarascon and a star. But the novelty soon passed, and the glass was all stuck directly to the walls with tile glue. The town clerk said there were no funds available to preserve any of it, and it was only glass anyway, he said. Someone left the door unlocked, and Rainbow Johnston and his friends got in and smashed a lot of the pictures. Mr Van Gogh’s nephew came from Feilding, and took away the power tools.

  My father and I went down to the river to see the house demolished. With Mr Van Gogh
’s neighbours, Mr Souness and the linesmen who had disconnected the power, we waited for it to come down. There were quite a few children too. The contractor had loosened it structurally, and then the dozer was put through it. The dozer driver’s mate wore a football jersey and sandshoes. He kept us back on the road. Mr Van Gogh’s place collapsed stubbornly, and without any dramatic noise, as if it were made of fabric rather than timber. The old walls stretched and tore.

  Only once did my father and I get a glimpse of Mr Van Gogh’s work beneath the weathered hide of the house. Part of the passage rose sheer from the wreckage for a moment, like a face card from a worn deck. All the glass in all its patterns spangled and glistened in yellow, red and green. Just that one projection, that’s all, like the vivid, hot intestines of the old house, and then the stringy walls encompassed the panel again, and stretched and tore. The house collapsed like an old elephant in the drought, surrounded by so many enemies.

  ‘Down she comes,’ cried the driver’s mate, and the driver raised his thumb and winked. There was a lot of dust, and people backed away. Mr Souness kept laughing, and rubbed his knuckles into his left eye because of the dust.

  ‘All the time Mr Van Gogh spent,’ I said to my father. ‘All that colour, all that glass.’

  ‘There’ll always be a Mr Van Gogh somewhere,’ my father said.

  The Charcoal Burners’ Dream

  At reception I felt I belonged still to the outside world. I could breathe the exhaust fumes from the passing traffic in the street outside, and there was an undeniably healthy man in a post office smock sorting letters with one of the reception nurses. As I was taken down the corridor, however, and up the stairs, the smell closed in; a uniquely institutional fragrance of antiseptics, medication, polishes — and resignation.

  I was taken to the far end of Men’s Surgical Two, almost to the balcony room, and I put my case on the bed and stood awkwardly before the veterans of the ward. There was a sparrow in the balcony room, and Nurse McKerrow wanted it let out. Colin and Jimmy chased it as best they could from one side of the room to the other, but only one window would open, and the sparrow slammed instead into the closed panes, becoming more dazed and bloody. Chris was in the next bed to mine. ‘Oh, for Christ sake,’ he said and he cast his yellow hair from his face impatiently. ‘Can you move about much?’ he asked me. ‘Throw a towel over it then, please, and let it out.’ I went into the balcony room, and the next time the sparrow struck the glass I dropped the towel over it, and then released it through the open window. The bird half fell, half fluttered the three storeys into the hospital garden below. A trim pebble garden like a cemetery, with waxy camellias in a row.

  Colin and Jimmy reluctantly came back to their beds, and I got out my pyjamas and dressing-gown to change. Nurse McKerrow said I could pull the curtain screen, but I knew the impression that would create. I had to prove my anatomy, as well as my pyjamas, to be suitably nondescript. Chris watched me, propped up on his pillows. His almost yellow hair hung limply, like a transplanted tussock. When I was in my pyjamas, Chris considered I had formally joined them, and I was introduced to those close to my bed, Jimmy, Colin, Richard and Chris himself. Throughout the afternoon those less immediate in the ward were mentioned as they brought themselves to notice by refusing to eat, having a good-looking visitor, or being on the surgery list for the next day. Each was identified by his complaint as a suffix title. Arthur Prentice spine fusion, old Mr Webster prostate. Chris himself was bowel. He said the word bowel in the tone of voice a man might use for an ex-wife. A tone of intimacy and betrayal all at once.

  Colin talked most to me that first day, superficial things, of course, about the hospital routine and the All Black tour, the headlines in the paper and the difficulty of making small businesses pay. That was Colin’s line, small businesses. The sort of things you would expect two strangers in bed to discuss. I was to find, however, that there wasn’t any more to Colin than the first superficial contact. When I left hospital he still talked about the All Blacks and small businesses with the same conformity. Colin was the tribal New Zealander, for whom the greatest horror is to be different from what he imagines the majority to be.

  Chris didn’t talk much the first day, but I was aware of an aura of goodwill. In the morning, after Mr Millar had gone, and the others were having breakfast, Chris noticed me lying quietly. He told me what a good bone surgeon Mr Millar was, and how well known he was for it. I wasn’t allowed to eat anything before the operation. I had trouble in my knee: bone disease in the knee cap, and cartilages to come out as well. Chris watched as Nurse McKerrow shaved and bathed my knee before the operation. When it was so smooth and pink that it shone, she gave me a jab of something. I remember Chris saying, ‘Pentathol. My favourite magic carpet. As good as a night with Nurse McKerrow — almost.’ Colin and Jimmy laughed, and Nurse McKerrow smiled with her eyes.

  ‘Send in the trolley,’ I said extravagantly. ‘I’m ready for the trolley’, and I wondered why the others laughed so hard.

  The pain kept me from sleeping much the first two or three nights after the operation, despite the stuff they gave me. At night the ward was not completely dark, because of the light spilling from the sister’s office. It dwindled down the ward, and didn’t reach into the balcony room. But from where I was, looking back along the rows of beds towards the light, I could see pretty well once I got used to it. Old Mr Webster coughed a lot without waking up, and the radiators stood along the wall, on the lino, like piano accordions. I had plenty of time for thinking on those long nights. Lying there, looking along the beds towards the office, and with enough pain to banish any inner deceit, I had enough time for thinking all right. Chris talked to me sometimes to take my mind off the pain. I was too selfish to realise then that he was awake for the same reason. That’s when he first told me about the Liberal Mythology. Never let yourself get sucked in by the Liberal Mythology, he said. He saw it in the way I talked about my best friend who came to see me shortly after the operation. I told Chris how close we were, and how I’d known him over thirty years. ‘The Liberal Mythology,’ said Chris.

  ‘What?’

  ‘All this about searching out kindred souls. It’s all part of the Liberal Mythology. You have as your friends who you can get as your friends, just as you have as your wife who you can get for your wife. Don’t kid yourself any other way. It doesn’t make them any less precious, but it’s the truth of it. Take Jimmy there: he’d like to be friends with you, and marry Nurse McKerrow. Right?’ We looked across at Jimmy. He lay asleep, with one arm over his face. ‘How much choice has Jimmy really got?’ said Chris. I couldn’t think of any form of rebuttal, except saying that I wasn’t the same as Jimmy.

  ‘Only a matter of degree, for you and me,’ said Chris.

  During the day Chris helped me with my exercises. At first he’d just tell me how far I was getting my heel off the bed, as I lay on my back and tried to lift the leg. Later he’d rest his hand gently on the top of my foot to give me more weight to lift as the knee became stronger. ‘You’ve got it beaten, Hugh, that’s sure enough,’ he’d say.

  Anything that jarred my leg was the worst: knocking it with the crutch, or catching the toe on a rug, would bring an instant sweat. Hopping was out; progress was a matter of deliberate smoothness. On the fourth day I slipped while in the toilet and got wedged in the corner amid my crutches. My bad leg pressed against the lavatory bowl. I should have called out in a calm voice of suppressed pain to tell the nurse what had happened. It never occurred to me to do any such thing. I lay there, giving a very quavering and sustained squeal, like that of a girl. The sustained squeal was best, because any deep breath was enough to alter the unbearable pressure on my leg. The ward enjoyed it when I was carried back ignominiously from the toilets.

  I began to get better rapidly, though. After a fortnight or so, Chris and I were able to go up to the geriatric wing and watch television at night. We weren’t allowed to use the lift, so it meant a stiff climb and a rather f
urtive hobble along the dim corridors. The television was left on in the geriatric dayroom, right through until closedown. Sometimes Jimmy would come with us, occasionally a patient from some other ward, but usually just Chris and me. And the locals, of course. There were several geriatrics whose beds were regularly pushed into the dayroom at night, not because they liked television, but because they disturbed the others if left in the ward. Mind you, they may have enjoyed television. Chris said it’s easy to be dogmatic when speaking for those who can’t speak for themselves.

  Puck and the Wrestler were our most consistent viewing companions. The Wrestler’s skin was too large for him, and flowed around the few fixed features of his face. Only on the top of his head was it tight. His eyes were circular, and ringed with creases like those of a parrot. The Wrestler had regressed to some time of persistent physical endeavour, and reiterated it all in a monologue of quiet despair. ‘That’s a good hold, Bob. Ah yes. Ah yes. Ah Bob, Bob, that’s a good hold. I’ll pin your shoulders yet. But that’s a good hold, Bob. Ah yes.’ The Wrestler never moved, and his voice was drab in tone, but behind it somewhere was an epic of pain and fortitude, and underlying submission as if he fought with life itself. Puck provided less of a window. Most of the time he sat as primly as Whistler’s mother, his hands demurely on the folded sheets. But from time to time he would give his own cry. It was the sound a contented chicken makes in the yard when the afternoon sun is hot, the dust dry and a breeze in the pines by the woolshed. Poo-ooook. You know the sound. A sound of drawling enquiry in a rising inflexion. Puck caught it perfectly. He did it most when everything was quiet: late at night when there was something subdued on the television or, even better, when it had finished. Then, as Chris and I prepared to leave, we would hear him. ‘Poo-oo-ook. Poo-oo-ook’, gathering the sunshine, the dry, grey dust, and the pine trees about himself. We called him Puck because of Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill. It was the most successful joke I ever made with Chris, mentioning Puck of Pook’s Hill. His soft, even laugh went on and on, until he started swearing at me because I’d made his bowels hurt.