Frame - Living In the Maniototo

Theres a sentence which used to fascinate me when I overheard it in bus queues, shops, in the street: Ive buried two husbands, you know.

Have I, also, indeed?

It is possible, the children grown and scattered in the corners of the world like godwits that have cast away their migratory habits for a more settled pecking-place. And the husbands? I remember them: Lewis Barwell, dead at forty-two; the children, Noel and Edith. Lance Halleton, the French teacher at the local girls school who, though never having been to France, was kept alive by the daily consumption and distribution of the French language. Lance Halleton, dead at fifty.

And I, now able to walk into waiting rooms, stand in bus queues and at railway stations and say freely, Do you know, I have buried two husbands?, and waiting for the Go on, you dont say or fancy that, become silent again, having used the compelling shorthand to retrieve and hold the possibles and probables of existence. Lewis Barwell, drain-layer. Lance Halleton, French teacher and, later, debt collector. And I, Mavis Furness, Mavis Barwell, Mavis Halleton, perhaps, in a world once peopled with Madges and Mavises and Peggys, the penultimate Mavis, yet remaining, as all good stories satisfy us by saying to this very day, just Alice Thumb, or Ariella, Lokinia, or Mauis sister, or mere Naomi, Susan, Ngaere, Belinda. Or Violet Pansy Proudlock, ventriloquist.

Alice Thumb.

Instant traveller, like the dead, among the dead and the living; an eavesdropper, a nothingness, a shadow, a replica of the imagined, twice removed from the real.

Alice Thumb.

Violet Pansy Proudlock?

Good morning. I am here to entertain you. I will make you laugh and cry. I am Violet Pansy Proudlock, an expert in near, near-distant, and distant ventriloquism, for which I use my talking stick and my pocket head with all available fitments, top lip movement for smiling, head nodding, swivel eyes, eyelids for blinking, moving ears, squirting of water from the eyes for crying, and sensation wig for standing on end.

You might think it strange that I choose to be a ventriloquist, to be in a narrow path on the margin of creation and recreation when I could go to the centre, but I choose to be here, as an entertainer. My repertoire is restricted to old well-worn jokes and as many new ones as I can think of, but my real artistry is in daring to enter the speech of another even if it may be only the speech of a talking stick or a pocket head. My own ambition being more extensive I hope to progress from stick to pocket head to person, real person, not stick person or pocket person. I have a task to perform. Knowing the treasures of communication which lie, reinforced by myth, I search out these treasures and use them. I have turned to ventriloquism. I am also Alice Thumb. I have turned to eavesdropping and gossip. Some do not turn and miss the advantages of being like Lots wife. Then, forbidden to turn, many do, many turn, and all the tears of a lifetime congeal, redirecting the winds and the sun, responsive slightly to the washing of the sea, the body sparkling and strong and at rest in its own power and beauty with its composition of laughter and tears, once thought to be a useless erosion of the standing-place, the spirit.

I will describe salt forms, and comfort Lots wife and Lot by reminding them that whether the turning is backward or forward, or toward or away from, or in or out, possession of a fixed salt being is no disaster; it is the essence of having turned or attended.

Riddle:

I make many riddles.

The sun has burned me. I bleed.

I break and mend. I knit.

I am a garment, a prison. I protect flower and seed.

I shrink and stretch, yet I always fit.

Im a prison you must stay in.

What am I?

I am your skin.

Violet Pansy Proudlock, Alice Thumb. A scattering of Mavises and Susans.

As I said, I have buried two husbands.

A few years ago when I was visiting the United States and about to spend a grim, uncomfortable summer among the cockroaches of downtown Baltimore where I had a basement room level with the sewers and the gas-pipes and all the understreet fixtures of a big city, my Californian friend, a poet with a horse-riding daughter and a husband who worked in Futureland, Ltd, wrote to say,

You must meet our neighbours, Irving and Trinity Garrett. Theyve read your two books and would like to meet you, and theyve offered you their house for six weeks while they go to Italy. Do accept.

Irving was a town planner, my friend, Grace Loudermilk, wrote. And Trinity was in textiles. Both were retired.

The Loudermilks enclosed the fare.

And that is how, in early summer three years ago, I came to be sitting in the Garretts house high in the Berkeley Hills, drinking sherry and eating small bobbles of food known as cocktail food where the hands are allowed to masquerade as claws and beaks in grasping and pecking at the offered morsels. Out of the corner of my eye I could see a wooden mask of Shakespeare fixed on the wall by the patio door (which, assuming my acceptance of their house, they had already instructed me in opening, closing, and locking). The mask was toothless, eyeless, with long nose, burn marks on the forehead and two nailed holes in the skull, one on each side.