A Jest of God - Margaret Laurence [2]
“Yes. All right.”
She is a generous person. I know that, and shouldn’t have to keep reminding myself. But it’s embarrassing. I never know what to say. Once she gave me a necklace of hers. It was horrible, made out of polished peach stones. I’d only admired it out of politeness. And then I had to wear it.
Late afternoon, and the children are drawing pictures. Free choice – they can draw anything they like. A number of them cannot think what to draw. I have to make suggestions – their own houses, what they did last weekend.
“Did any of you go out for a walk, beyond town? Did anyone find any pussywillows?”
My own voice sounds false to my ears, a Peter-Rabbitish voice, and I find I am standing beside my desk, holding a new piece of orange chalk so tightly that it snaps in my fingers. But the children do not seem to have noticed. A small chorus of response goes up – from the girls, of course.
“Me! I did, Miss Cameron.”
“My brother and me, we found about a million pussywillows.”
Interesting creatures, very young girls, often so anxious to please that they will tell lies without really knowing they’re doing it. I don’t suppose more than a few of them were actually out in the country at all. They only think I’d like to hear it. And yet I feel at ease with them in a way I don’t with the boys, who have begun to mock automatically even at this age.
Except James Doherty. He is too preoccupied with his own concerns to bother with anything else. He goes his own way as though he endures the outside world but does not really believe in it. His schoolwork is, generally speaking, poor. Yet he knows a staggering amount about how cars work, and electricity, and jet planes. The car part of it I can understand. He’s picked it up from his father at the Manawaka Garage. But where has he got the rest from? They aren’t a reading family. He’s had no encouragement at home. Those parents of his have likely never opened a book. It seems cruel that he should have had to make his appearance there, with them. Grace Doherty is all but moronic. She doesn’t know what kind of child James is. All she cares about is that he should get a good report card, not because this would show he was learning something, but only so he wouldn’t do worse than her sister-in-law’s boy.
“Let’s see what you’ve done, James. May I?”
He hands over the page. Tentatively, because he cares about it. No houses or feeble pussywillows for him. The spaceship is marvellously complex, with many detailed parts – knobs, props, instrument panels, oxygen tanks, hydroponic containers for growing vegetables in mid-space, weird protuberances which have some absolute necessity, stark fins, pear-shaped windows, and small bulbous men muffled in space suits, ascending to the ship on swaying ropes, thickly pencilled, like angels climbing Jacob’s ladder.
“That’s good, James. What’s this bit here?”
And he explains, the words torrenting out to make the thing known.
I tell him – splendid. He takes the page back in silence, pleased. But when I move on to the next child, I find myself forced to say splendid once more, this time over Francine MacVey’s drawing, a lady of appalling unoriginality. The stilted glamour and the pursed lips and curling eyelashes have been copied straight from some ten-cent colouring book of Snow White or a movie doll-queen. How unfair this is to James, to demean praise in this manner. But if I don’t – what might happen, if ever he or any of them discovered how I value him? They would torment me, certainly, but this is nothing to the way they would torment him. The old words for it, the child’s phrase – it’s so cheap, so cold and full of loathing. It frightens me so that I can’t even form the words to myself. But James would be cruel, too, if he knew. He’d find some means of being scathing. He’d have to, out of some need to protect himself against me. That’s what stings the most.
After school I sit at my desk, waiting for Calla to appear. But when the knock sounds and the door opens, it is Willard Siddley. He’s always very nice to