Someone's Wife Read online

  They all lived in London. London London London.

  When my mother’s mother Violet is about 20 and living in her home in London there’s a war, World War One, and my grandfather’s an injured soldier from New Zealand and she’s his nurse. He’s a lot older than she is—nearly as old as her father—but they get married and have a baby, and that baby’s my mother. When my mother’s nine months old her father decides to take his little family back to New Zealand. At the same time, my mother’s grandfather tells Violet that he too is getting married. His new wife’s not much older than she is.

  Violet and Claus sail back to New Zealand. My mother says that she left London a bonny baby. By the time she arrives in New Zealand, she’s skin and bone. Skin. And. Bone.

  I like Mum telling me this story. No more mothers have died. The skin and bone baby is now my mother. And in England she has an uncle, her mother’s half-brother, Tony, who is younger than my mother. An uncle who is younger than she is! It doesn’t seem possible.

  There’s other brothers too, because it turns out Claus has been married twice before and has children. Mum says she remembers one day two boys, a few years older than she is, knocking on their door and asking if they can see their father. She says her mother turns them away. I can see why she did, says my mother, and I lie in bed, and I can’t. I can’t see why she did. I try to imagine someone else married to my father telling my brother to go away and I don’t want to.

  A few years after her mother has died, we’re on a family holiday in Auckland and my mother goes for afternoon tea in St Heliers with an old friend of her mother’s. She comes back shaken. She has been told that her mother’s mother did not die just after her baby was born. When Violet marries Claus, and her father tells her he is marrying again, he also tells her he is finally free to do so. The last 20 years his wife, Violet’s mother, has been incarcerated in an asylum. You cannot divorce someone who is insane. But at last she has died. He tells his daughter this as she is about to leave for New Zealand. Just before she will never see him again.

  My mother finds this intolerably sad. She says that her mother, a kind and generous-hearted woman, would have loved to have visited her mother. My skin creeps with fearful pity as I think of the asylums I’ve seen in movies. There are mad women in drab clothes, pleading, moaning, reaching through ground-level grilles. My great-grandmother is now Glenda Jackson.

  Later, when we have children of our own, my sisters and I discuss it. The sadness of it. We know how easily anyone can appear mad—can feel mad—after the birth of a baby. We think that what she probably had was post-natal depression. We are now old enough to imagine her as a person.

  Towards the end of her life, with dementia, my mother likes to talk about the past. I remind her of the sad story of her mother. She is quick to correct me. Her grandmother, she says, and she’s adamant, died just after giving birth to her mother.

  Futilely, I attempt to correct her.

  She asks who told me. I tell her she did.

  ‘Well,’ she says, ‘they didn’t tell me. They told you but not me? Typical,’ she says.

  5.

  THE

  STALKER

  In which my flatmate gets unwelcome attention

  It must have been our third year. Because we came out of our bedroom doors at the same time. The second year, we’d shared a room.

  We came into the hall.

  The phone was hanging on its cord.

  The little hall had green lino. The front door had that opaque glass.

  Sue says the front door was open. I don’t remember that. But the phone hanging on its cord …

  I don’t remember the door being open, because I remember hearing the click which must’ve been him closing it. That’s what woke me up.

  Or was the click the sound of him taking the phone off the hook?

  Why had he taken it off the hook?

  We’re trying to remember how it all started. He must have seen Sue in the library. Sue was so pretty. Beautiful, really. All these years later, half a century, living across the Tasman Sea, she still is. She remembers he sent her notes. Did he leave them by her books when we went out for a break to the caff? I sort of remember that he slid them under the front door. So he must’ve found out somehow where we lived.

  It’d be easy enough to follow us home.

  In one note he’d said that she was to wear her red cardigan the next day. To show she’d read his message. My red cardigan, I say, the one Michael sent me from Italy. We remember how the four of us in our flat were all the same size and we shared and swapped clothes. With her Mediterranean colouring Sue suited that dark red.

  She can’t remember if she wore it. Or not.

  At the beginning, says Sue, it was sort of flattering. A secret admirer.

  The Calcutta kidnapper, she says the next morning, when we still can’t leave the story alone. Oh God, she hasn’t thought of it for years. He put that in a note. Well, he signed the note with that.

  I don’t remember that. I wonder why I don’t remember. The alliterative nature of it. The implication that perhaps he was a foreign student. A Colombo Plan student. That was freakish, she says.

  He’d probably read The Collector, I say.

  The flowers, I say.

  Someone’s got a fan, the man delivering them from the florist said.

  They weren’t signed.

  Unless that was when he called himself the Calcutta kidnapper. Would he, though? When the florist could see it? Of course he wouldn’t. He wasn’t stupid.

  He didn’t pay for them, I say. Didn’t they come round the next day and try to make you pay for them?

  Sue doesn’t remember that.

  Didn’t we go round to the florist’s? I say. To see if they knew who’d sent them? And that’s when they said he hadn’t paid for them. And they tried to get Sue to.

  Did Gayle and Gail wake up? We don’t think so, though how could they not have? Perhaps they were both umm … out that night.

  He might’ve even given us a ride home one day. We often hitched. We used to say, Drop us at The Square, and we’d walk to our flat. But sometimes boys who gave us a lift offered to take us all the way home. If it was cold or wet, we’d say yes.

  So what happened after he broke in? Did we ring the police?

  How crazy, we say. We didn’t even think of ringing them.

  I rang Richard, says Sue. She wasn’t going out with him anymore but he was the sort of person who relished things like this, and his motorbike thundered up the street within minutes. He stayed the night.

  It was our French lecturer who told us to ring the police.

  How did he know about it? Why had we told him? But then we remember that for a while he gave us lifts. That his wife was doing teacher training and she was on section at the school near our flat and he was dropping her off, and because he was going past our flat he offered to give us a lift to university each morning.

  What happened to him? Sue asks, and neither of us knows. Another university, we think. He might’ve gone back to England. Or was it Wales.

  He was very friendly, our French lecturer. Nice. He lent me Lucky Jim when I got almost-but-not-quite-pneumonia. A ragged throat that didn’t go away. I’d been to four balls in two weeks. Too many late nights, the doctor said to me. I loved that book. I could see why he did, too. He was funny. I remember dancing with him at one of those parties we used to have with our lecturers, and we were talking in French and we were in hysterics and he said no wonder I’d failed French I. His wife was sitting with one of the other lecturers’ wives and she was crying loudly and she suddenly called out, I’ve only got boys. And I wanted a daughter.

  Do you remember that English lecturer? I ask Sue. The pretentious one? Who wore a cloak? Well, one of those who wore a cloak. At that party, he said we should all go to the cemetery and have a happening. Even then, I say, I thought that having a happening was meant to be spontaneous. You had to already be in the cemetery for it to happen. She doesn�
�t remember him. But English wasn’t her major.

  When we told our French lecturer about the break-in, he said we had to ring the police. In fact, he’d take us to the station on the way to Massey. He said, That’s not just being a nuisance, that’s breaking the law.

  Sue thinks she never wore that red cardigan again after that. I think I probably didn’t either, in case it gave off an unsavoury message.

  How did the police find him? The stalker?

  Without knowing his name? How did they find him? The only thing we knew was that he was a student too. How did they get his name? Did they ring the florist?

  But the florist didn’t have his name—that’s why they tried to get us to pay. It was our French lecturer who took us to the florist. Just around the corner in Featherston Street.

  I remember in the night. Coming down the stairs for breakfast I say, The number plate! We got his number plate! He was driving away and we opened the door—if it wasn’t already open—and I got the number plate. Always the Miss Marple.

  So we gave it to the police.

  Why would he have taken the phone off the hook? Sue thinks it might’ve been that he was going to go home and ring us, and if it was off the hook he’d know we hadn’t woken up.

  It could’ve just been to freak us out.

  Now they’d have just put the number plate in their computer and up it would’ve come. Anyway, they got it. And the university must’ve told them where he’d be that afternoon. They didn’t come and take fingerprints or anything. They just went to his lecture. The class was in a lab, and the cops called him out.

  He was a vet student.

  I’ll bet they loved it, I said. The cops. Going up to the university to arrest a student.

  It was nearly the olden days, we say.

  They called the guy who owned the car out of the lab. But that guy said it wasn’t him. He said it was his car, but his flatmate had had it. His flatmate had borrowed it the night before. But his flatmate hadn’t come to the lab today. The student who wasn’t the stalker gave the police the address of his flat.

  What was he called? What was the guy’s name? We have no idea. Something unmemorable. And nothing to do with Calcutta.

  The police found him at his flat. He was packing. It was holidays the next week and he was going home early. He lived in Hawke’s Bay. We think.

  Sue remembers she was given the choice of pressing charges or an apology. The apology was to be made in a public place and she wasn’t to be alone with him. I came too, I remember. That’s right. Neither of us remembers where, but it might have been the caff. What did he look like?

  Unmemorable. Sue says he was sort of regular and had brown hair with a bit of a kink to it. Wasn’t just his hair that had a bit of a kink.

  He’d said sorry. In an offhand way. He’d said it was actually really easy to break in to our flat with those sorts of locks.

  Didn’t he say he’d broken in another time? And we hadn’t heard him?

  Oh God, says Sue, I don’t remember that.

  Our back door that time. Into the laundry. And the bathroom.

  That phone. Dangling.

  Wonder what on earth happened to him. Was it just a once-off, someone who was socially inept? If we’d remembered his name, we could’ve looked him up on Facebook.

  Is he practising somewhere? A vet? We could’ve looked him up on LinkedIn. At last! A use for LinkedIn!

  Lucky he’s not a doctor, says Sue’s husband.

  6.

  TEACHERS’

  COLLEGE

  In which they try to teach me how to be a teacher

  By the time I’m 22 I am, in theory, a trained teacher. Teachers’ college: after years of being Miss Todd at university, I’m back to being Linda. I’m back to having my name ticked off on a roll. We start the year in the beautiful old buildings in the middle of Christchurch. I love them; they’re successfully posing as dreaming spires. Then, partway through the year, they move us to brutal new buildings at Ilam, no longer walking distance from my flat in Ferry Road.

  At teachers’ college there’s a subtle undertone, one that wasn’t present at university. There’s a we’ll-put-you-back-in-your-place-ness, guaranteed to remind us that in this world no one is anything, really. And, possibly, designed to make us reassert ourselves the next year, to leap onto the Us side of Us and Them when we go into schools as teachers.

  We’re to teach kids the next year, there’s a vague idea of what, but no one quite says how. That’s because no one knows: it’s not teachers’ college that teaches anyone how to teach, it’s an incalculable combination of things many of us have already experienced. It’s being interested in others. It’s actually finding kids fascinating, and entertaining, and believing they want to know new things. It’s having a reasonable force of personality, being the sort of person who is occasionally capable at 2.30 p.m. on Friday of bringing calm to a room full of 14-year-olds who’ve lunched on donuts and red cordial. Being the sort of person who works out, finally, that even though shouting is intuitive, lowering your voice to almost a whisper is more likely to quieten them. It’s an odd combination of believing in authority and being an anarchist. It’s having in one’s past a teacher who, for any number of reasons, has left their mark. It’s loving one’s subject: not hard if your subject is English, when years and years after first reading it, when you suffer a gut-wrenching loss, King Lear’s saddest five words—Never, never, never, never, never—come back to you and make you weep in the night. It’s knowing that nothing explains life quite as well as good literature. It’s some or all of these things; sometimes it’s something else entirely. And one person’s wonderful teacher is another child’s nightmare.

  Ideally you should have taught for a while before going to teachers’ college, then you’d be more likely to know what you don’t know. Teachers’ college barely shows you how to keep a roll-book. How to record marks. They probably assume that most girls and some boys who liked school know how to do this already, having spent the years from age six to 10 playing Schools with other girls who like school. It tends to be people who liked school, who don’t feel quite ready to join the real world, who become teachers.

  Because they also can’t quite work out what makes a teacher a good one, teachers’ college provides a weekly lecture on a subject called Pedagogy. Whatever the hell that is. To me it seems like a subject designed to fill the gap created by people determined to name the unnameable. Define the indefinable. The lecturers in this subject can’t believe their luck: they have escaped dealing with 30 x 5 teenagers of wildly differing abilities and experience, to stand in front of reasonably compliant 21-year-olds, talk nonsense for an hour or so, and get paid more for it than they would school teaching. There are lots of other words like pedagogy thrown in and they just have to learn to use them with insouciance. Four foolscap pages of notes later, I for one am none the wiser. Except I have a primal understanding that although older people have been teaching younger people for centuries, no one else is any the wiser either.

  In my flat in Ferry Road I have a cat. A stray. She’s black with white paws and I call her Feet. She is so intelligent. I’ll be walking home along Ferry Road, and from about a hundred metres from the flat she’ll run along the other side of the street, hiding behind the cars, then race across the road just as I get to our house. Once, when Robert was coming for the weekend, then phones to say he isn’t, and I’m crying on the sofa, she comes up beside me and puts her paw on my shoulder. Tentatively. Quietly. Lovingly. You don’t forget things like this.

  Teachers’ college does try to teach you how to do useful things, like changing the reel on the projector. I stand at the back, the enthusiasts are at the front, and as I’m five foot two, this guarantees that even if I could understand, I won’t because all I can see are other people’s backs. I never master the sprockets. The order is beyond me; it’s a hundred times harder than threading a sewing machine and it’s taken me years to do that. As all other left-handers will know
, anything to do with threading a machine designed for right-handers is cruelly counter-intuitive. Somehow I pass my AV Certificate but I’ve learnt one crucial thing: at the beginning of each year for each class, find the boy (usually a boy) who loves threading film. If he’s away sick, you can’t watch a film. Later, when films and sprockets are replaced by video tapes and another sort of difficult winding, find another boy, and it may well be the same one, who knows how to do that.

  One good thing about the digital age: girls and boys are now equal in their understanding of how to do things.

  Our social studies lecturer is an organised, somewhat vulnerable man who is in love with charts. He’s an escapee from the chalk face. He speaks of charts in the way a born-again Christian speaks of his faith. He shows us that if you choose a student a week to make a chart showing what’s happened in the world that week, by the end of the year you will have a wonderful record of the Events that were Current. He has examples from his own classroom teaching to inspire us. What he doesn’t mention is that most of us will start doing this, and somewhere round late March, one after another, the two students whose turn it is the next two weeks will come down with the flu. The next week, a third who has been hiding dyslexia for years will also fail to produce. You will abruptly stop. After school one day in early May, you will replace the charts that taunt you on the wall with theme-based collages that you’ve encouraged your class to make that Monday morning you remembered to bring those magazines from home. They cut up Newsweek, Thursday and Broadsheet magazines to illustrate amorphous themes like Family and Shelter that link vaguely to what you’re currently studying in social studies. You ask them to clean up the mess, but too late, they’re on the way out, and you have to do it yourself, rushing round picking up all the tiny bits of paper just as your 7th Form wander disdainfully in. That’s the wall done. For the rest of the year.