Blog 7 - Saturday the 6th of January - Nanny Comes to Visit

The white walls of my room extend into an infinite greyness that hovers outside; sulking. The country has been misty and flooding ever since I came to Mum’s retreat.

It is now 8 in the morning and there is no sign of her.

She appears.

“Not a minute to waste,” she says breathlessly. “This is not the start we wanted.” She starts to pull up the blinds.

I ask her, “Why don’t you just listen to your body and wake when it wants you to?”

“It puts you on the back foot all day, you will never catch up. Enough of all that, I am not going to gossip anymore.”

I go to help her in the kitchen so she can catch up and she is looking for the spatula to scrape out the porridge pot.“I need smooth waters around me,” she says. “You must only have one of something or you don’t know you’ve lost it.”

We find the spatula in the second-to-top, not the top drawer; where I have mistakenly put it.We read the paper and the Ukrainians are locating the Russians by tracking calls made on their cell phones. Mum says,“Goodness, in my day there were censored letters.”

We decide to do some French homework by continuing reading Only the Soft Moments Last. Elise (whose husband has left her) is left with Edouard the dog after her son has gone to university. Edouard rolls over onto his back offering his pink tummy and wagging his tail. Suddenly Elise cannot bear the emptiness of the room—gets up and leaves Edouard alone with his hopes of affection.

A sadness washes over me, as when Moo Hefner left me—all those soft moments that make a life were washed away like sandcastles on the beach. But my children remind me that the sandcastles were actually extremely gritty, and I accept that romanticising the past is a weakness of the lovelorn.

Mum is just like Elise, which is why I think she likes the book so much. I never understood how French she is and what cultural mongrels we are. Mum has never encouraged our Frenchness—maybe because the children at Kelburn Normal School laughed at her when she spoke in a strange tongue—but she says no, thats not why, and doesn’t elaborate. I just don’t think Mum wastes her time thinking about things that she can’t change or control.

She thinks about Rarotonga, her mother, our dad, all those fortunates whom she adopts as her own, the biographies of worthy people, the role of history and geography in making us who we are today, archiving her own family history, watering her African violets and drying her sheets in the open air. She has always been 100% committed to being a good mother and wife following a French model. This means the first thought of the morning is “What shall I feed my family today?” to arduously cutting out interesting articles from the paper so that her children remain conversant in the affairs of the day. I meanwhile am apt to wring my hands and sob at Gus not fixing my window—which has absolutely no practical value at all. I confess to mum that I privately procrastinate at every opportunity ;on the loo, in the shower, in the car, in bed , on a chair.

Mum observes gravely,

“Child, only you know that and you must honour yourself.”

Nanny, my friend with ginger hair which has been cut by Anthony for 50 years, arrives at the visiting hour of 3. Like all those born under the sign of the lion, she is pretending to be a cat because privately she believes she is a lion.

She has a massive bouquet of flowers in her arms.

Mum is delighted and says, “This is exactly how a bouquet should be.”

Nanny roars, then remembering, miaows—while still managing to remain the protagonist of any particular play she is in.

“I brought these in water in the back of my car.

I picked them myself.

I can put them in a vase.

I’m happy to.

I’ve brought secateurs.”

Then she remembers me.

“How is the darling? Writing—oh how wonderful…”

“I’m not a total invalid,” I churlishly reply, getting a bit fed up with her and Mum’s hearty comradery.

We sit around drinking coffee on our little armchairs and Mum suddenly reaches over and heartily swipes a little spider that arrived on the flowers.“You’ve killed it!” I wail, but then I see it continue its laborious climb up the arm of my wincy pyjamas.Mum is taken aback.

Nanny asks, “How are you two getting on?”

“We’ve arrived at a modus vivendi, managing our togetherness relatively amicably. Well, that is until she accused me of killing a spider.”

Nanny laments, “I created the problem. I’m so sorry.”

Nanny says a weta crawled up her granddaughter Willa’s back and she very calmly said, “Willa, a weta is an Ancient Being, and it has has chosen your back to crawl up.”

I tell her that Charley is dating a female electrician. Nanny—who is an authority on everything to do with education, Māori and construction—says women make great electricians as they are perfectionists who can squeeze into small spaces.

The conversation drifts from Nancy saying how she is afraid her kids have shown the deformities inflicted by a life of privilege, to my contributing that my bum is saggy—but Mum says it’s my posture.

Nanny leaves, saying, “Diane, I must say, looking after our patient makes you look marvellous.”I stare out the window. The magnolia flowers have turned from cream to dirty brown, like the snow in a car park.

I go to my room to talk to Leo, my old boyfriend from Melbourne. Leo is a psychiatrist who, like a child, plays with adults relentlessly and triumphantly. He makes an artform of making you feel worse about yourself and says I must walk as I have fine bones that will crumble easily.

“What’s with being the invalid?” he asks.

“I’m tired. Nancy came to visit.”

“Is she still doing Māori?”

“Well, her answering machine says kia ora. She has a new boyfriend called John.”

“Is he Māori?”

“Nope.”

“I feel she’s betrayed the cause.”

Mum and I eat simply delicious ham, sautéed potatoes and salad for dinner. We watch the 256th Pope buried by his successor and two more episodes of The Queen’s Gambit, where Beth navigates life much as she does chess. Mum says,“Seldom do we look at ourselves. We are always looking and reacting to the other’s game.”

Beth finally has sex with Benny, the reigning US champion, and as she lies in bed dreamily looking into his eyes, says, “So that’s what it’s all about.”

Benny answers,“Play the Sicilian movement against Borgov.”