The Back of His Head Read online

  ‘You’ve told us all this before,’ Semple is slumped forward, his arms along the tabletop.

  ‘True,’ Marjorie works a moist refreshing tissue at a reddening septum. ‘Next business please.’

  ‘We haven’t got to the business proper yet,’ I tell her. ‘I’m still doing chairman’s business.’

  ‘All right, do that,’ she tells me. ‘Come on, chop-chop.’

  ‘Roof repairs,’ I tell them.

  ‘Isn’t that Item 2 Upkeep?’

  I remind Julian I’m still reporting from the last meeting. ‘Eric the handyman’s had a look at the roof,’ I tell them, ‘and he gives it a year.’

  Pause.

  ‘And then, what?’ Marjorie demands. ‘It all falls in on us?’

  ‘And then it needs repairing,’ Julian says.

  ‘And then it needs replacing,’ I tell them.

  ‘Oh, shit. Let’s forget about that, then, what’s next?’

  We move on to the agenda proper.

  Proposed from the chair: That in light of today’s theft, Item 3 Security be moved to Item 1: CARRIED nem. con.

  Once it gets there, though, the perennial impasse returns.

  ‘I can’t believe we’re discussing a fucking paua shell ashtray,’ Semple groans. ‘Who cares if some prick’s nicked a paua shell?’

  ‘It’s not just a paua shell,’ I remind him.

  ‘We’ve discussed this before, aren’t we rather thrashing it to death?’ Marjorie asks. ‘Next business please.’

  But the next business is Financial, and there, the same issue threatens to come up again, melting—order, order—into Item 3 (as it is now), Upkeep.

  Whichever item we deal with, of course, it’s about the same thing, even I have to recognise that: the need to find money against the perennially rising cost of running the Residence and the fundamental, ineluctable fact that, even without our having spent a dollar of it, the Trust’s endowment capital has become relatively smaller and smaller as each year has gone past. And against all this, the need to keep alive the authenticity, the integrity of the venture. Its purity, even: even its spiritual aspect.

  Whenever we discuss these things, as I’ve said, Julian and I are always for the latter, and Semple and Marjorie are always (in effect) against: meaning that they want to start selling some of Raymond’s objets to pay for upkeep, while Julian and I don’t want to sell anything at all. They want to represent Raymond’s life with bits and pieces from second-hand shops, imitation antiques or even rough approximations, used books by the carton-load from the back room of the university’s bookshop, knives, forks and spoons from Bargain City out by the airport, and so forth. Julian and I have always held the line against these proposed atrocities, and for authenticity.

  And here, at this evening’s meeting, the perennial impasse, presenting itself yet again. Semple starts the show:

  ‘Every single problem on this’—he taps his agenda—‘would be solved if we cashed the place up.’

  ‘There’s no motion on the table.’

  ‘If we cashed up, it wouldn’t matter what they nicked, they’d be nicking crap anyway, we’d just replace the crap with more crap. If they gouge it we’d, you know, use wood-filler? If they keep on gouging it we’d replace the whole item from a junkshop. It’d all be crap.’

  ‘I have only one thing to say about this.’ A pause, as I look around the table. ‘Mabel Carpenter.’

  ‘Oh, fucking Mabel Carpenter. Not her again. Christ, she was dreary.’

  ‘Yes.’ Julian. ‘Some of her stuff’s unreadable.’

  ‘All of it’s unreadable.’

  ‘She was a great writer, though,’ Marjorie says.

  ‘Oh—no doubt about that, she was a great writer all right.’

  ‘No doubt about that at all.’

  ‘Her Memorial Residence is a disaster,’ I remind them. ‘We all know that.’

  And it’s true, both that the Residence of the late Mabel Carpenter—she whose fiction brought Dargaville to the world—is a joke, and that we all know is so. When it was first opened we had a look at the place, Julian and I, driving north after a conference in Auckland at which the pair of us represented the Master late in his life, when he was too ill to travel. Naturally, given his condition then, we had thoughts of what might soon—and now, alas, has—come to pass: I mean how a writer’s home might most properly be turned into a memorial residence once he has (as Raymond used to put it) passed on to the great whisky decanter in the sky.

  Not like that! the pair of us chortled happily as we drove away from Mabel’s Residence afterwards. It was her house all right, I mean it was one that she had lived in: but for years after her death it had been rented by civilians (as Raymond used to call the inartistic), and there was not a thing she’d actually owned in it once her memorial trust decided it was time to commemorate her, nor anything very much to guide them in their sad little reconstruction.

  A desk very similar to one Mabel might have written on is a line I remember—with laughter—on a notice tacked to the wall above a very ordinary table that had been sanded down to nothing, no past in it, no life. A bed typical of beds of the period was another. The pièce de résistance—the nearest they could manage to the real thing, the nearest to achieving, for the literary tourist, the true and authentic moment—was a clothes-wringer in the outside laundry, certified to be authentic on a nearby placard, though described as a mangle all the same. Mabel’s mangle, we came to call it, and we were quite clear that, when the time came, the Raymond Lawrence Memorial Residence would do better, far better, than that.

  Naturally, I remind the meeting of all this. We mustn’t get caught in Mabel’s Mangle is my concluding line—rather a good one, I can’t help thinking.

  There is a pause, and then Marjorie continues as if I haven’t even spoken!

  ‘It’d have to be good-looking crap,’ she’s telling Semple. ‘It’d have to look almost the same as the stuff we’re talking about selling.’

  ‘It’s not stuff and we’re not talking about selling it,’ I remind her. ‘There’s no motion on the table.’

  ‘You mean if there was, you’d discuss it—?’

  ‘If it had a seconder.’ I look across at Julian. ‘Then I’d have no choice.’

  ‘All right.’ Semple. ‘I move we sell the Steinway.’

  ‘Oh, not the baby grand,’ Marjorie says.

  ‘I think’—this is me, feeling my way towards a deferral—‘I think it’d be better if we addressed the principle first rather than the particulars.’

  ‘My motion’s on the table, fuck it—’

  ‘No, it’s not, there’s no seconder.’

  Semple looks at Marjorie. ‘Come on, Marge,’ he says.

  ‘Ask somebody else. I don’t want to sell the baby Steinway. And don’t call me Marge.’

  ‘It’s worth more than all the rest. It’s worth more than the entire house and garden. It’s worth hundreds of thousands. It’s a fucking Steinway, for God’s sake, with art casing, I don’t know how it got here in the first place—’

  The Steinway is in the corner of the Blue Room, covered in framed photographs and with a large table lamp on it. It’s one of several items in the Residence obviously with some monetary value, though (it has to be said) not necessarily as much as Semple and Marjorie would like to think. Though they don’t realise it, I’ve had it valued, and found it would bring in about fifty thousand local dollars according to when and where it was sold and by whom. Overseas, of course, it would be a different matter, sold overseas it would fetch rather more. But then one would have to get the piano overseas in order to sell it, which would cost all we might realistically sell it for once it was there. Checkmate: and, in some ways, the history of our little country in a single proposition.

  Marjorie, meanwhile, is casting around for alternatives. ‘That thing.’ She’s pointing at the carved buffet behind me. ‘Let’s sell that.’

  ‘The Henri II buffet?’ Julian asks. ‘You’d have
a job replacing that, you’d have a job getting something cheap that looked like that.’

  ‘You’d have a job getting it out of the house.’

  ‘It’d have to be authenticated first,’ I remind them.

  ‘What about the berber rug, then?’

  ‘No,’ I tell them. ‘The berber rug is off-limits.’

  Mr Semple’s motion that the Trust sell the Steinway baby grand piano lapsed for want of a seconder.

  Ms Swindells’ motion that the Trust sell the carved buffet lapsed for want of a seconder.

  Ms Swindells observes that the answer is to increase visitor numbers. Mr Semple expresses reservations.

  ‘You must be fucking dreaming,’ he says. ‘How are we going to get more of the bastards in?’

  ‘How many did we used to get?’ Marjorie asks me. ‘You know, in the good old days?’

  ‘Two or three hundred a month. More. Admittedly a while ago—’

  ‘Admittedly ten years ago,’ Semple says. ‘When he was still famous. Christ, when he was still alive—’

  ‘Yes, but—’ Julian. ‘We—’

  ‘They used to come here to get a sight of him drooling in his fucking bath chair. Ray. That’s the only reason they came, that’s why we got so many people through, the old boy was still around to gob in front of them.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Yes, but even so, show me the literary residence in the country that ever got—’

  ‘How many literary homes are there—?’

  ‘Show me the literary residence anywhere—’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘—that has consistently made a profit—I mean a meaningful profit, not just pocket money.’

  I sit back.

  Marjorie squirms her mouth. ‘Yes,’ she creaks at me. ‘That’s all very well, Peter, but you’re telling us yourself, dear. You’ve brought it up, you’re telling us we’ve got a crisis. Item 2, Financial crisis.’

  ‘A problem. A challenge.’

  ‘Yes, but’—Julian at last—‘it’s not just visitors, they don’t bring in that much, for God’s sake, they never have, we didn’t ask for anything at all for a long time and what do we ask for now? A voluntary contribution that hardly anyone actually makes.’

  A pause.

  ‘True,’ says Marjorie. ‘We’ll have to start charging them to get in—’

  ‘Then nobody’ll come,’ says Semple. ‘End of story.’

  ‘But we’d have to charge a hundred dollars a visit to get anywhere near what we need.’ Julian turns to me. ‘What needs doing?’

  I look at my list. ‘We pay quarterly rating, the phone, electricity—’

  ‘Well, fuck the phone for a start.’ Semple rocks from cheek to tender cheek. ‘Who needs a fucking phone when there’s no one here most of the time?’

  ‘Robert, darls, don’t tilt back like that.’ Marjorie. ‘These chairs just won’t take it anymore.’ Then (to me): ‘Maybe they need replacing, too—the chairs?’

  Proposed Mr Semple, that the telephone be disconnected forthwith, seconded by Mr Yuile: carried nem con., Mr Orr to action.

  What else?

  ‘The guttering needs replacing—’

  ‘It needs placing, there isn’t any at all round the side—’

  I stick to my script. ‘The garden. We’re down to one gardening lady now. Val—’

  ‘How many did we used to have—gardening ladies—?’

  ‘Back then? Seven. But we didn’t pay them. Deciding to pay them was a mad idea. We were paying four at one stage—when those Austrians came and made that documentary we had four gardening ladies on the payroll—’

  ‘Yes, but doesn’t it look spiffing, in the doco, I mean—the house and the garden—doesn’t it look spiffing—? Summertime, and all that—?’

  And now we sit for a moment, each of us, and think just how spiffing the Raymond Lawrence Memorial Residence really did look in the high summer of 2001–2, when an Austrian crew of astonishing seriousness came over and filmed Raymond pottering about among the lacecaps and the agapanthus. He refused to wear his partial upper denture for the actual interview and consequently looks like Klaus Kinski in Nosferatu, with just the two eyeteeth poking down on either side of his mouth. A section of this documentary opens the standard tour of the Raymond Lawrence Residence, which begins downstairs in the garden room with a closed-circuit showing after the signing of the Visitor Book, and then proceeds upstairs via the elevator: when the elevator is working, that is.

  ‘Oh, and the elevator,’ I remind them. ‘Still not working.’

  ‘It needs replacing,’ Julian says. ‘To tell the truth—doesn’t it? Isn’t that what’s wrong? The whole bloody shooting-box? It’s Apollo 11 technology, it’s another age, it doesn’t work anymore—’

  A pause. They look at each other, Marjorie at Semple, Semple at Julian, Julian at Marjorie.

  Suddenly Semple slams forward in his seat.

  ‘Fuck it,’ he says. ‘Let’s just close the place down.’

  He holds the pose, looking around at us one by one, then pushes back truculently and waits with his arms folded. Julian looks at me, and I look at Marjorie. This time Marjorie looks at Semple.

  ‘We can’t close it down,’ Marjorie says. ‘Can we—?’

  ‘Got a better suggestion—?’

  ‘Well, we just can’t—’

  ‘For Christ’s sake!’ Semple slumps forward, his palms on the tabletop again. ‘It’s like what Jules just said, it’s another age—it’s not now we need to think of, it’s ten years’ time—twenty.’ He looks around. ‘Kids don’t read books anymore, they don’t read anything—what’s Raymond fucking Lawrence mean to them? The youngest people that come through the Residence are fifty-something. Readers are dying and illiterate cretins are being born—’

  An awful silence in the room.

  ‘I mean, let’s stop kidding ourselves.’ He looks around, but not at any one of us in particular. ‘Let’s stop trying so hard. It’s the old, old story and it’s caught up with us at last, so let’s just face it.’

  A slight pause: Marjorie looks at Julian, then at Semple. ‘I’m afraid I’m not quite sure what exactly you’re talking about, Robert, dear,’ she creaks at him. She looks at me. ‘Any idea?’

  ‘He means we’re past our use-by date.’ Julian. ‘That’s what you mean, isn’t it—?’

  ‘We’re irrelevant.’ Semple’s voice is so quiet it’s disconcerting: I don’t think I can handle him sincere. ‘We’ve got the population of, I dunno, Boston?—a city, I mean, we’re the size of a city—’

  ‘We’re a city-state—’

  ‘No we’re not a city-state, we’re not even good enough for that—Athens was a city-state, Singapore’s a city-state, we’re not anything. For Christ’s sake, listen to me, I’m trying to say something important—’

  ‘Listen to you!—we’ve been doing nothing but listen to you all evening, for God’s sake—’

  ‘Order—order—’

  ‘Oh, order yourself, Peter—’

  ‘We’re so fucking small, we’re smeared across the country like Vegemite, we just haven’t got the resources, we never have, and we tell ourselves it’s not like that anymore, we tell ourselves Ray took us out into the world and we’ve come of age—it’s not true, it’s all bullshit, it’s just pretending. This place is just pretending—’ He taps the tabletop with a fingernail. ‘If it wasn’t, we wouldn’t be talking about closing it down—’

  ‘You’re the one talking about closing it down—’

  ‘We wouldn’t have to grovel for support all the time, we wouldn’t be talking about money all the time, we’d be lying around talking about art, we’d be endowed by some big corporation, we could have guttering with goldleaf on it and a helicopter pad out the back—we could even have writers in residence, the way we’re actually supposed to but we don’t, because—guess what, we’ve got no money to pay them—’

  ‘Robert!’ This is Marjorie: she’s sitting back in
her chair with her eyes fixed on him and a tiny smile. ‘You’re being sincere!—I quite like you like this, I can almost see what all those teenage trollops see in you—’

  Suddenly, Julian leans into the discussion. He shifts about and begins to speak to the surface of the dining table.

  ‘With great reluctance—’

  ‘Here we go,’ Semple sits up.

  ‘Shut up, Robert.’ Marjorie is looking straight at Julian.

  ‘—I’m moving towards your position, Marjorie.’

  ‘It was my position first—’

  ‘Shut up, Robert—’

  Julian flicks a look at me. ‘Sorry, Peter,’ he says. ‘I’ve given it a lot of thought. We know some of the furniture’s worth thousands, and the books.’ He sits back and folds his arms. ‘I move that the Trust affirm the principle of selling property items to fund upkeep.’

  A stunned pause. I stare at him. I couldn’t be more shocked, I really couldn’t.

  ‘Seconded.’ Semple. ‘Well done, Jules.’ He slaps his palms together a couple of times.

  ‘Come on, Peter, you have to hold a vote now—’

  ‘Wait on.’ My mind is racing. ‘I don’t think it’s proper to the item.’

  ‘Bullshit. You’re making that up.’

  ‘What item are we discussing, anyway?’

  ‘Ah—one. Security. I don’t think it relates to security.’

  ‘No, we’re on Item 2, aren’t we? Upkeep?’

  ‘That’s no longer Item 2, it’s Item 3, I think.’

  ‘Then we’re on Item 2, money—?’

  ‘We’re still on Item 1, security.’

  ‘He’s stalling.’

  ‘I’d like us to discuss this,’ Julian says solemnly. He’s not looking at me. ‘It’s where we’ve been heading for years—well, at least five years. We should face up to it and sort it out.’ Now he looks at me. ‘I’m not particularly in favour of it, Peter, don’t worry, I just think we ought to thrash it out.’

  A pause. We all sit there, breathing hard at one other. I stare at him. How could he? How could he do this to me? Julian, of all people?

  In due course, it comes to its end, this latest meeting of the Raymond Lawrence Memorial Trust, with its customary sense of dissipation, its bickering and repetition, its sheer inartistic ennui. Each meeting wears me out, each meeting leaves me with the sense of having been the only adult in the room. I watch the others descend the concrete steps and depart through the trees to their cars. They feel so far from me, so little a part of Raymond and what it was that he stood for: yet again I wonder just what was he playing at when he appointed them? And now they want to sell him up, to wrap up everything he was and everything he believed in and give it away.