Towards Another Summer by Janet Frame Page A

Ulysses at College. Roll-call - Childs, Cleave, Coster, Crawley - the only names, apart from the usual brilliant, beautiful or eccentric characters, that she could remember from the alphabetical roll-call. She had not even a clear image of the Childs, Coster, Crawley which surrounded her - Childs played hockey, was a ‘sporting type’; Coster was a swot, clever at making puppets; Crawley . . . Grace could remember nothing of her personally, only that she
came from Timaru, the rival of Grace’s hometown - Oamaru, and she remained in Grace’s mind more a symbol of Timaru than a human being, so much that if Grace thought of Crawley (Joyce? Noeline? Bertha?) she thought at once of Caroline Bay, its rivalry with Oamaru’s Friendly Bay, and the humiliation suffered by Oamaru when each year in the Tourist Guides Caroline Bay was praised, Friendly Bay ignored. Why, Grace used to think, sitting moodily in a geomorphology lecture, Friendly Bay has everything, Caroline Bay has nothing, nothing, nothing. Yet through her two years at College, and long afterwards, Childs, Coster, and the Crawley from Timaru, acted as escorts to Grace’s name.
    But Ulysses . Oh. Grace remembered Ulysses , but again it was not the book which claimed her memory. It was the realisation that the strangeness and insecurity of the late war years, spent at school and college, were epitomised most vividly and terribly, for Grace, in the paper on which books of those years were printed: pale yellow speckled paper where the printed word seemed just another blemish that could be attributed, in the preface, to War-Time Economy. Grace remembered that opening such books filled her with terror and foreboding; it seemed as if an end had come to everything, that nothing mattered any more; books had seemed, in some way, the last hope, and now that language had become as an excusable stain upon a piece of coarse kitchen towelling, there was no hope left.
    At that moment Grace thought, What if Philip’s eyes with their dark flecks are reminding me of the print upon yellow sheets of war-time economy paper?
    —Oh, she said suddenly and foolishly,—Oh it’s quiet here, there’s no traffic!
    Philip and Anne stopped their reading to look tolerantly at her.
    —Yes, you’ll find it a change, Anne said, returning to Ulysses .
    —Winchley’s quiet, Philip agreed, opening The Spectator .
    —I notice, he said, that the critics are ceasing to be indulgent towards every Russian writer who is published here. Some are
even turning against Doctor Zhivago . I didn’t care terribly for it myself.
    —Oh I liked it, Anne said.—It made me weep. Of course, I was pregnant at the time.
    —If you read it when you were pregnant and wept over it then perhaps the critics- Grace began.
    Philip finished her sentence, laughing.
    —Perhaps the critics were pregnant?
    —Did you read it, Grace?
    —Yes, no, I mean yes. I don’t read many novels.
    —Professional jealousy?
    —Perhaps; yes.
    —I hope your coming for the weekend is not interrupting anything you’re working on.
    —Oh no, Oh no.
    Grace continued her study of the books near her, choosing one from time to time, reading a little, then replacing it. She felt tired. She wanted to go home to London, to the flat, to sit at her typewriter; she wanted to sleep; to turn her face away from the street-lights and close her eyes.
    —Philip has plenty of New Zealand books.
    —Yes.
    She opened the Book of New Zealand Verse which in New Zealand she had always kept by her bed but which she had been unable to read during her stay in Great Britain. She touched the familiar red cover, noting with pleasure the clear bold printing, the beautiful m’s and n’s like archways, the lintel t’s, the delicately-throated r’s . . . She glanced through the long introductory essay, a self-conscious loving dedication to ‘these islands’, and then began to read some of the poems.
    ‘I am the nor’west air nosing among the pines’
I am . .