“To feel the flame at your throat as you used to imagine you felt the spot of yellow when Bogey held a buttercup under your chin.”
She saw Karori — saw Wellington — almost as though she looked at them through a flowering bush. And at 75 Tinakori Road, the parlour, the dining-room, were seen through this flowering bush too. She wrote to Chaddie (Marie):
“Cinerarias … blue ones — and the faint, faint pink kind. Mother loved them and we used to grow masses in a raised flower bed. I love the shape of the petals. It is so delicate. We used to have blue ones in pots in a rather white and gold drawing room that had green wooden sunblinds. Faint light, big cushions, tables with ‘photographs of the children’ in silver frames, some little yellow and black cups and saucers that belonged to Napoleon in a high cupboard and some one playing Chopin — beyond words playing Chopin.”
and
“It’s strange we should all of us Beauchamps have this passion for flowers…. I have a large bunch of good old-fashioned marigolds on my table, buds, leaves, and all. They take me back to the black vase of ours at 75, one that you (Marie) used to like to put mignonette in. It was a charming vase and well in the van of fashion, wasn’t it? Do you remember the brown china (bear) on the top of the black what-not? I can see it!”
It was not the flowers in themselves that Katherine was then remembering — but flowers as the setting and the passion of the family at No. 75 — flowers as the key to the life of the family there. At the memory of the flowers,”all the life of that house flickers up, trembles, glows again, is rich again.” Those were words written by Katherine to John Galsworthy in praise of his picture of the Soames’s house in Bayswater Road, to which she responded as one who had also known and savoured the rich reality of Victorian middle-class life. She, too, could go back into a kindred past,
“back to the dining-room at 75, to the proud and rather angry-looking seltzogene on the sideboard, with the little bucket under the spout. Do you remember that hiss it gave and sometimes a kind of groan? And the smell inside the sideboard of Worcester sauce and corks from old claret bottles?”
In this family, and the life they lived so closely together — with “things” so important to them, there was a kind of unity, partly because of the harmony between the father and mother — because she satisfied his needs so well and asked for nothing further — partly because (as in all New Zealand homes) the children were trained by the parents, not by a nurse. They were brought up in “the English tradition,” the mid-Victorian tradition, really; yet the contact between children and parents was much closer than in most English homes because in New Zealand the scarcity of maids for the household, and nurses for the children, demands a still closer contact. So there was a sense of living their lives together, of overlapping almost, of the whole family revolving about in one main current. It was in this way that Kezia — that Laura — remembered No. 75:
“The father in his dressing-room — a familiar talk. His using her (the mother’s) hair brushes — his passion for things that wear well. The children sitting around the table — a light outside; the silver. Her pity as she sees them all gathered together — her longing for them always to be there.”
and
“Aunt Beryl, Aunt Harriet and Mother sat at the round table with big shallow teacups in front of them. In the dusky light, with their white puffed-up muslin blouses with wing sleeves, they were three birds at the edge of a lily pond. Beyond them the shadowy room melted into the shadowy air; the cut glass door-knob glittered — a song, a white butterfly with wings out spread — clung to the ebony piano.”
It was this very sense of the tide sweeping in, sweeping out, bearing them all together in its swing to and from the beach and out to the sea again — the sense that their rhythm was from their unity — that they all seemed caught together in the ebb and flow of their lives — it was this sense which made Kass (“the odd one”) feel her separateness. The very things which bound the others together, seemed to help to cast her out. She was “different.” They had simply “the family feeling”; she was inoculated with something foreign:
“… I remember one birthday when you (Jeanne) bit me! It was the same one when I got a doll’s pram and in a rage let it go hurling by itself down the grassy slope outside the conservatory. Father was awfully angry and said no one was to speak to me. Also the white azalea, bush was out. And Aunt Belle had brought from Sydney a new receipt for icing. It was tried on my cake, and it wasn’t a great success because it was much too brittle. I can see and feel its smoothness now.”
Her life was becoming a medley of living in the family’s way, and living in strange, fierce, inexplicable ways of her own.
2
The Wellington Girls’ College was a ten- or fifteen-minute walk down from Tinakori Road toward the Quay. It was a huge grey frame building, built about a year before Kathleen was born — the second girls’ school to be established in Wellington. The first (built on Fitzherbert Terrace nearly ten years previous) was the more “exclusive” Terrace School to which the girls were sent three years later.
When Kathleen Beauchamp registered for the Second Form on May 25th, 1898, at nine years and seven months, the Wellington Girls’ College was still a private school. The Prep. School was at the front of the building, on the top floor, at the left of the high wooden tower. Seven girls sat in that small square room on the hard wooden benches of the Second Form. A large fireplace at the south end warmed them when the winds whipped across Lambton Harbour and whirled about the barn-like, unprotected school. Kathleen, from where she sat, could watch the waves lifting — lifting as far as she could see; and the white line of foam running up to the scalloped bays. She loved a choppy sea; it was her favourite sea — brilliant blue with an edge of white. But she hated the Southerly Buster in winter, when newspapers flew like kites down Thorndon Esplanade. The phutukawas (which in Auckland flaunted crimson plumage so proudly) were bowed abjectly on the Esplanade, too twisted and bent to bloom. In spring she could watch the leaves shaking in the tree tops about St. Paul’s. There was “a kind of whiteness in the sky over the sea,” then. She loved such days.
Marie, with her sandy hair dragged back by a comb she abominated, was in the same form. She and Kass were dressed alike. Vera was threatened with a disease which kept her away from school for the second and third terms. The five other girls were Alice, dark with Irish eyes (her father was Governor of the Fiji Islands); Esma Dean, her cousin, a fair, self-centred girl who lived with her; Zoe (Kass liked Zoe for some reason), slight and sweet, with wavy brown hair and a fringe; Irene, swarthy, straight-haired, appearing even darker in her short purple frock as she stood before the others reciting The Revenge in a deep voice with a great deal of gusto; and Marion Ruddick, Kathleen’s special friend. How excited she had been on the day she exclaimed to Marion:”I’m so glad you’re just the kind of a girl you are!” and Marion had said the same to her.
Mr. and Mrs. Beauchamp had returned from their last trip to Canada on the same ship with the Ruddicks; Mr. Ruddick was in the Government service in Wellington. When the mother introduced Marion to the children, they greeted her politely in the way they had been taught; but Kass stared solemnly at the new girl. She was so prettily dressed. Little girls of New Zealand wore clumsilycut, home-made frocks which made them appear even fatter than they were from the good butter and jams and cream buns of their six-times-tea.
Marion was a slim Canadian child in a well-cut sailor suit and pretty shoes. She had a style, a way of wearing her clothes, unknown among Wellington children. Her hair was in a fringe and loose dark curls. She had the glamour of a girl who had come across the South Sea from a country which had snow at Christmas.
