Promise: Katherine Mansfield’s Final Adventure.
These pieces were scattered about on my blog and I felt they needed uniting with each other in order to make more sense and coherence of the ‘lastness’ that permeated all parts of this triad. In fact as I type I know there are many more fragments of Katherine Mansfield’s final adventure on the blog , but for this moment, it is these three pieces only.
My mother finds them miserable and I know I have consciously ‘borrowed’ the ending of Mansfield’s bleak tale, The Life of Ma Parker. I am sure that with such stories, including The Canary too, Mansfield was trying out her own death in language.
‘Turnips’ is perhaps very Tess of the D’Urbervilles too. But sadness can heal. And it just seemed such a strong image of Katherine Mansfield’s wandering in such a field.
Janet Lewison
Are you a reader? Do you read then…? Katherine’s words seemed exiled from her mouth. These attempts at friendship were almost quaint these days and yet for the moment she wanted this coffee and this table cloth with the bold tulip detail and yes, she wanted this woman to stay.
Two women with green baskets entered the cafe and sat over in the corner by the ancient dog.
The hands were busy at the sugar again and the old Katherine might have frowned at the distraction, but instead she smiled in her new faded way and held up her own spoon.
Try this – perhaps you might like…chestnut eyes for autumn and a sudden hand took her silver spoon and gently tapped her nose. One tap for yes, two for definitely, three for a whole day with me. Think carefully Ms Writer, you have just this minute to make up your mind.
Dark brown fire.
Katherine borrowed the spoon back and held the cupped end to her nose. She inhaled as gently as she dared. Warm metallic embers. Gardenia. The spoon moved once, twice and then, why not, once again. The magical promise of the three, the wisdom of the trinity. It was better than writing letters to those friends she would never meet again, better than watching the cat growing bored with her silent company. This was here, somehow a now had returned with the laces and the burnt chestnut eyes.
Wonderful! Your day can begin whenever you want it to. There will be no dawn or dusk until you decide. You are in perfect control of your, our destiny, Katherine.
If you say my name again I will cry.
But the woman didn’t hear this thought and she said Katherine again and it didn’t matter and it didn’t matter that it didn’t matter, because they had their day, all day.
Communion
There was a dark shape crouched on the ice. Katherine steadied her arm on her new friend and peered down at the small creature aware of her own need to sleep and the shape’s utter stillness and silence. Was this death as it should be? Nothing moved around them; no urgent footsteps, no voices from the village. Just this outline of a life. Katherine closed her eyes and thought about praying and then knew that she could not.
When she opened her eyes again, the girl had knelt down, swaddling the animal in her scarf, her hair still touching the older woman’s gloved hand. The creature faintly lifted a black face and took a look at them. One breath, one life. The girl lifted the creature into her coat and held on.
We need a box and straw and a fire. You have a fire too?
Mais oui. All day long the help would build her sick mistress a small fire, promising better wood, less smoke. They were nearly there and the girl waited for Katherine to open the gate, and then the door, gestures that made the latter feel suddenly bold and brave. The fire was red and the girl settled the creature on the slate, calling to the maid for a saucer of water and honey. Now some chopped meat quickly.
Drink you. Eat this.
The girl started to loosen Katherine’s boots and moved each toe slowly in the direction of the fire.Wisps of steam rose from brown stockings and for the first time in months, Katherine smiled.
Turnips
They said there were the bones of the ancient dead feeding the vegetables here. Katherine turned her neck towards the wind stiffly thrilled by the rain. One bite of a sweet turnip and you could be led some where, way back into the past, where faces were once slashed with blood red streaks and voices sounded like this huge crow stood watching her like a Victorian school master.
It seemed worth the risk.
Katherine shifted her boots and sniffed at the far away smell of stewed food, rehearsing a conversation she wanted to have with the stranger; perhaps she had forgotten how to speak to people. She hadn’t even a name to call her yet and perhaps this was a good thing. Perhaps it was. For this was now a time for forgetting. (Her doctor had told her with his head on one side). For setting loose those names that anchored her to this muddy-grey mortal life. (Could she trust a man with plump pink hands?)
When she was younger, much younger, she had once practiced talking into a mirror, changing her words, shaping her fringe and re-shaping her natural smile. There had been girls on the boat over who had assaulted everyone’s ears with their fast chatter and Katherine had watched them like this crow, appalled. Yet her voice had always been slow, finding words and applying just the right amount of pressure to make them her own.
She bent down slowly and pulled up a small turnip, sweating with this new effort. They could eat it together.
Parting
There was nowhere to go. The woman stood watching tired leaves, thinking about her death. Nowadays it felt just one breath away. They had warned her, he had warned her, everyone had spoken of the final hemorrhage; their safe clinical words separating themselves from this person she had now become. More leaves thrown up by the wind, a golden, bloodied carpet for a brief future and so many stories she would never write.
Never never never she whispered into a black woolly glove. Wet prayerless words. Now who had bought her such harsh luxury? She couldn’t find the name, even when she shook her head listening at the past, and her mouth burnt against the damp heat of the glove.
It was that coffee that had raised her up a little, had made her nod almost agreeably, but here she was alone again, shaking her head at the dissolving threads of memory. She pulled the hat lower over her cold ears. Muddy water skimmed over her boots, darkening them and a crow landed in front of her, its head on one side calling to a companion she had not seen. If she was superstitious she would call this an omen, but this woman was less than any simple sadness today, yet more too.
For she had enjoyed the coffee, that synchrony of spoons and the face across the table – more than anything; she corrected herself; more than anything she had felt for a very long time. And it was time that she missed.
She missed the carelessness of health. She had written several stories she had enjoyed, yet her characters never seemed to do very much either. They lived small, tiny existences somehow. Always stood on steps or at windows looking in. But where could she have sent them that she would have believed in? There was nowhere.