All Visitors Ashore Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Also by C. K. Stead and published by Harvill

  All Visitors Ashore

  Copyright

  Dedication

  One: The Dreamtime

  Two: Speech Balloons

  Three: An Ordinary Saturday in Summer

  Four: Marking Time

  Five: Sorry, Wrong Dream

  Six: The Comic Strip

  Seven: Exit and Enter

  Eight: And all are False . . .

  Nine: A Good Run

  “Combines a gritty naturalism with a poet’s vision and an almost Proustian preoccupation with memory . . . fiction that is beautifully written”

  JOHN MELLOR, London Magazine

  “Auckland as never before in poetry or prose”

  SUSAN GRAHAM, Herald

  “Stead makes it look so easy you don’t realise till afterwards that very few people can put together such luminous sentences”

  IAN SHARP, Sunday Star

  “It seems ironical that for sheer immediacy, for the annihilation of distance between writer and reader, we should have to turn to a novel located on the Auckland waterfront . . . for that intimacy and precision which most novelists seek and seldom find . . . An intricately clever and engaging novel”

  NORMAN SHRAPNEL, Guardian

  About the Author

  C. K. STEAD was Professor of English at the University of Auckland until 1986. He is known to students of literature as the author of The New Poetic, a study of Yeats, Eliot and the Georgian poets. He is the only New Zealand writer to have won the New Zealand Book Award for both poetry and fiction, which latter he has won twice for All Visitors Ashore and The Singing Whakapapa. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and in 1984 he was awarded the C.B.E. for services to New Zealand literature. He lives in Auckland.

  Also by C. K. Stead and published by Harvill

  THE DEATH OF THE BODY

  SISTER HOLLYWOOD

  THE END OF THE CENTURY AT THE END OF THE WORLD

  TALKING ABOUT O’DWYER

  THE SECRET HISTORY OF MODERNISM

  Also by C. K. Stead

  Fiction

  SMITH’S DREAM

  FIVE FOR THE SYMBOL

  THE SINGING WHAKAPAPA

  VILLA VITTORIA

  THE BLIND BLONDE WITH CANDLES IN HER HAIR

  Poetry

  WHETHER THE WILL IS FREE

  CROSSING THE BAR

  QUESADA

  WALKING WESTWARD

  GEOGRAPHIES

  PARIS

  POEMS OF A DECADE

  BETWEEN

  VOICES

  STRAW INTO GOLD: POEMS NEW AND SELECTED

  THE REAL THING

  Criticism

  THE NEW POETIC

  IN THE GLASS CASE: ESSAYS ON NEW ZEALAND LITERATURE

  POUND, YEATS AND THE MODERNIST MOVEMENT

  ANSWERING TO THE LANGUAGE

  THE WRITER AT WORK

  Edited

  OXFORD NEW ZEALAND SHORT STORIES (SECOND SERIES)

  MEASURE FOR MEASURE, A CASEBOOK

  THE PENGUIN LETTERS & JOURNALS OF KATHERINE MANSFIELD

  THE COLLECTED STORIES OF MAURICE DUGGAN

  THE FABER BOOK OF CONTEMPORARY SOUTH PACIFIC STORIES

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Epub ISBN: 9781407093284

  Version 1.0

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published by The Harvill Press in 1984

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3

  Copyright © C. K. Stead 1984

  C. K. Stead has asserted his right under the Copyright,

  Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  This paperback edition published in 2001 by

  The Harvill Press

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  ISBN 9781860469367

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  Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press

  To whom it may concern

  ONE

  * * *

  The Dreamtime

  Let’s begin with the tea towel – it’s hanging over a string and damp so the string curves downward under the sink bench and Melior Farbro, the old master, who is not so old, a little over fifty like the century itself and in good shape despite his limp and his endless complaints about corns, piles, tinea, peptic ulcers, migraine, bends down to dry his fingers on its brown checks. He has been making a salad and now he limps with it to the counter that separates his kitchen from his studio and puts it down in front of Curl Skidmore who is thirty years younger and hungry and likes salad and fresh fruit but doesn’t think of them as food. Farbro squeezes a lemon over the salad and tosses it so oil and lemon mix through and Skidmore is watching Farbro’s fingers which are long and broaden at the nails, spatulate, while all the time Farbro is talking and the sun is shining in and shining down on the garden beds out there where the lettuce and tomatoes and green peppers that are in the salad grew alongside the lettuces tomatoes and green peppers that are still growing. The sun is shining on red peppers drying on the peeling window sills and on sunflower heads bristling with black seeds you pluck out and chew for the oil and what it does for your corns, piles, tinea, peptic ulcers, migraine while Farbro is putting out cold smoked fish with the salad and telling Skidmore there’s nothing a young man needs a woman for, nothing his pals can’t provide and make it better, let’s not go into details, and Skidmore is regretting that it’s brown bread, healthy and rough and good for the bowels but with salad and fish he would have liked unhealthy white floury light warm doughy bread fresh from the bakery on the corner you can smell even down at the beach when the wind blows the right way on a yeasty night and he has her against the retaining wall her skirt in his teeth to keep it from falling down over the business and her bush in his palm. Nothing, Farbro is saying, not noticing that the young Skidmore who has gone back a moment to the beach and the night and the easing of thighs this way and that against the slope of the retaining wall is shifting from buttock to buttock on the stool on the studio side of the counter and hand in pocket is making an adjustment. Farbro has put a plate in front of him, is putting cold potato salad beside green salad and he’s saying he has some cold sausage – salami – if the fish isn’t enough and then he’s back to the subject of what boys can do for one another, thinking of himself as a young man and of little K
enny, tough little bugger, knowing everything right from the start and taking it all in his stride without ever a qualm or a tremor or a worry, and is that maybe what’s holding up this lanky Skidmore whose hands move so daintily over his food (but nothing dainty about the quantities he’s putting away) and he’s saying yes, some salami would be nice. In Farbro’s day it was ‘the fear of God’ they used to say they would ‘put into you’ to keep (he used to think) the pleasures of the prick out. So slicing the salami with little yelps of pain pretending it’s a piece of himself he reaches over to push the pieces on to the plate of young Skidmore who is losing his sense of that yeasty beach scene and is now looking up and around. He takes in again the easel and the work bench and drawing board, the stretched canvases and sketches and watercolours, the pinned-over walls and the long shelf of art books and folios of prints, and the long strips of heavy paper, on which Farbro says his new work will be done, hanging over the arms of the canvas chair. Through the door and another door both open Skidmore catches sight of the green over-arched enclosure of the back garden filled with bird-sound and the faint clatter of the typewriter of Cecelia Skyways unseen in the garden hut writing her Memoirs of a Railway Siding. And Farbro taking a moment to look at this young visitor while the visitor is looking around him is thinking This lad has an eerie charm and he talks well and probably has talent but there are so many with talent and what becomes of them?

  And now the tea towel with the brown checks is again heavy on the string, the string curving further towards the floor, the dishes washed and dried and put away, and Melior Farbro is seated in the canvas chair having thrown the long strips of heavy paper like a suit of clothes on a hanger across his day bed and moved the easel into a corner and guided Curl Skidmore to a comfortable chair. He has rolled himself a cigarette and passed the makings to Curl who is expertly following suit, keeping the paper moving at the tips of his ginger fingers, pinching the strands from either end after the last deft roll-and-lick-and-roll. The light passes from one to the other and there is the silence of the satisfied in-breath while they hold it there, letting the smoke hang a while in the lungs, pleasantly agitating, and with no sense in either of vast dark consequences to come, this being 1951 and it being the mark of manhood and the seal of friendship to exchange the poison weed and set it smoking down there inside you. Cecelia Skyways’ railway words clattering on a distant surge of her typewriter flow a moment into the silence of the indrawn breath conjuring sidings, steam and the clank of joining wagons, and then Skidmore and Farbro breathe out and the pallid smoke, deprived of its best tars, flows forward in two greeting dissolving streams. Farbro is looking at the back of his hand held up against the light from the windows, turning his spatulate fingers this way and that, and already Curl knows from this sign that the old man is considering.

  ‘You have intelligence,’ Farbro says, ‘and a good appetite, so there’s nothing you can’t do if you go about it in the right way.’ There is a heavy stress on that phrase the right way and Curl Skidmore knows, half-knows, has picked up but won’t let himself quite recognize it, won’t do more than glance at it obliquely, that the right way for the old master doesn’t mean Patagonia (he thinks of her as Pat) against the sea wall on a yeasty night. It might include a bit of that but only and always recognizing that cruising the loos and the docks for gentlemen partners is living dangerously but not half so dangerously as cruising where Farbro guesses Curl may be situated now on the borders of the vast bog of domesticity, the average, the norm, mothers and fathers and kiddies and debts, no canvas or heavy paper or (as it would be in Skidmore’s case) galley proofs draped over the camp bed, no clatter of the railway siding words of Cecelia Skyways flying up among the passion fruit and pawpaws, no art, because there is no art of the average, no art of the mean, of the mean in heart (Farbro is in full flow) and there is besides (he avers) the fact that all art is androgynous and you have the hands, my boy, you have the hands. Curl’s eye is fixed on a cobweb in a cobwebby corner but he has shot down his flying hands, brought them home to base where they lie awkwardly on his lap playing dead with a bad grace. It is with a desperate honesty, feeling he’s climbing a high stone wall, heaving himself over it, that he brings out the fact (his eye still on that broken web stirring in a breeze from the open windows) that he has a girl, that she has moved in with him in his glassed-in verandah down on the beach, that her name is Patagonia (he calls her Pat), that she would like to meet Farbro because she is a painter, a student of art.

  Silence, while the old man considers the back of his hand, his spatulate fingers turned this way and that, and then a formal invitation like a card on a tray. Next time Curl comes he must bring her.

  Curl Skidmore walks dejected at the water’s edge, barefoot on the wet sand that the small waves slide over. He doesn’t know why he is dejected. It is summer, the sun is shining, the Gulf is blue and calm, there is a sense of space, the sea spreading away to and around the islands of the Gulf and one big ship going out past Rangitoto through the immense wide gateway to the world. He walks, hands behind his back, his stomach comfortably full of Farbro’s lunch, his head comfortably light with Farbro’s wine, the sun feeling its way through his shirt to his shoulders, the sliding water cooling his feet with a hissing sound over the coarse-grained yellow-orange sand, full of some vague yearning that might be for anything – God, Fame, Nirvana, Great Love, Extinction – and only (Skidmore thinks in the wisdom of his twenty-one years) a fool would tell you that one of these words with a capital letter fitted the feeling better than another, or that it ought to be just one of them, but the world is full of fools and nothing is more entrapping, more enticing, than a word with a capital letter and there is a triple-fool in Skidmore (he knows this too) who can dispense with God and Nirvana but would like Fame, Great Love and Extinction all together and in equal measure. The beach is deserted, the mothers are shopping the fathers are at work the children haven’t been let out of school and there is only Skidmore and a capering dot that grows as the distance between them diminishes and becomes a dog, a brown-black dog, a bedraggled mongrel spaniel which chases sticks for Skidmore out into the calm water and returns, shaking itself on the sand, and grips the stick more tightly and growls and twists when Skidmore tries to take it and in a moment releases it and as it flies from his hand turning and seeming to float against the blue sky before falling to the gently rising water, runs yapping and bounding and swimming to retrieve it. So it is out of a flurry of sand and dog and stick and water that Curl looks up to see a couple walking hand in hand at the water’s edge and as they near him and hesitate and turn away and turn back he registers that it is Felice, the wife of Nathan Stockman the violinist, and that the little hand of Felice (who is a soprano) is resting in the large red hand of their cook. Not that they have a cook as people have cooks in novels or in history or in England, but the beautiful house of Nathan and Felice Stockman designed by Nathan’s architect brother among the pohutukawa trees and looking over rock and water at the end of the beach has been turned into a restaurant where, it is advertised, you can eat and look out to sea and listen to ‘Nathan and his Gipsy Violin’; and since every restaurant of quality needs not so much a cook as a chef it is in fact (correcting the fact) in the hand of their chef that the tiny hand of a potential Mimi called Felice is at present unfrozen and indeed entirely unthawed. And Skidmore thinks it’s odd they should turn away like that and he feels (wrestling with one end of the stick while the spaniel whose name is Rosh growls and hangs on grimly to the other) something like disappointment thinking of Felice’s high pure notes floating out through the branches of the moon-filled pohutukawas and of Felice’s big swelling soprano bosom and of her white neck and her round red mouth moulding the notes. Not that he thinks of her very precisely (throwing the stick so it turns end over end against the sky while the spaniel skitters to the water) because she is at least twenty-five and perhaps more and there is something (he suspects so) motherly about the way she pats his shoulder and his botto
m and pinches his cheek when they meet. They are walking away now, she and the cook, no longer hand in hand. Perhaps he’s her brother, Curl thinks, making a dash at the spaniel as it comes out of the sea.

  Melior Farbro rests on his hoe between the bean rows his mind running between the skinny Skidmore who ate so much and talked more and the memory of Kenny as a young man eating very little and talking less but always observing – the two of them so different Farbro wonders why they should go together in his mind. He twists the hoe so the brown volcanic soil that would blow away in summer dust if it were not enriched with compost parts and crumbles around the bean stalks and begins yet again to compose a letter to Kenny he won’t write warning him that the Government means business this time, he’s sure of it, and that Kenny should stay out of it, not take part in executive decisions because the police will be looking for anyone well up in the union they can bring any sort of charge against and that if Kenny goes cruising just once while the heat is on . . .

  But of course he won’t write it because Kenny would think it was the old jealousy rising again trying to keep him off the streets, trying to make him all Farbro’s own – and would that, Farbro asks himself, be entirely untrue? Leaning on his hoe again he listens to the bird notes which he can’t identify but which have the feel of the warmth of the day about them, and then he notices that there is no sound from the hut, Cecelia has finished her stint for the day, her typewriter is silent. And as he looks towards the hut the door opens and a Botticelli face enhaloed by ginger-gold curls through which the sunlight for a moment astonishingly strikes looks out, sees itself looked at from the bean rows and with a gasping-in of breath withdraws again. Silence but for the bird calls until slowly the door moves, inches open again and slowly the bright head puts itself forth and a voice as sweet and clear and remote from this world as the heavenly head it issues from says, ‘It’s you Melior’ (Who else? he thinks, smiling however), adding that she thinks she will make a cup of tea and would he like one? He nods, yes he would like one, and she gathers herself at the still only half-open doorway and then in a flash she is down the two steps into open ground that might be raked with machine-gun fire and crisscrossed with mine-fields, across it and up the three steps into Farbro’s house, banging the door behind her.