The Limits Of Tolerance

 (c) Devika Brendon 2016 

It is the season when the skies and the seas conspire to encourage us to tell sagas: as it is too stormy for us to venture out, like those old Icelandic sailors, we mend our nets and build the fires, and take the time to piece together the events that the hardships of life have scattered. 

Two years ago, Marina had gone to stay with an old school friend, in the Northernmost island of New Zealand. The Perseids were streaming in the skies above, and as the house was really a summer home there were sun lounger chairs on the deck, and, at 3am a year before, she and Marigold had sat outside  and seen the lights going out in the houses around the small bay. It was a cold, poetic, Tolkienesque winter. 

The small plane from Auckland had been tossed about in some sharp bouts of wind, on the flight up. The pilot said cheerfully, 'That was a close call! A bit touch and go!', as the passengers filed past him, slightly askew, into the cold air. It felt like the edge of the known world. Innocent, pure, and still being formed. 

This year, something was misaligned. Thinking back, on the bus trip afterwards, Marina thought it was set up by the unavoidably repetitive cycle of events. School and work routines imposed a mechanistic structure on her friend's life. Her smile was slightly forced. And it was clear there was unspoken dissonance fraying the weave of their long acquaintance. 

A year before, there had been a children's birthday party, hosted by a local personage, who lived in a spacious home with extensive views of a rain-swept valley. The children romped and roared, and the adult guests congregated around the custom built bar. 

The host asked Marina what she would like to drink. She asked what was available to choose from. The list was long, and various. He wanted to show off his knowledge of wines. She requested an apple juice. He asked if she wanted ice. Of course she did. And did she want it in small pieces or large chunks? Straight from the ice cube tray, she said, thanks. She moved away. 

Later in the afternoon, she heard him recounting anecdotes to a group of women, mothers of the children who went to school with his kids at the local primary school. Several of them had husbands who were employed by him. These ladies were anxious to please: yummy mummies all in a row, with glistening eyes and gleaming hair. One of them had complimented him on his beautiful home, so perfect as the venue for a party. 

'Yeah,' he said, 'It's great. I love having the house full of people. Love having parties. I did draw the line once though, a few years ago, when I walked into my own room and found two people having sex in my bed'.

The mummies squawked nervously. Marina glittered her unspoken contempt. 

'I wouldn't even have minded that', he said, 'But the bloke still had his boots on!' 

Marina suggested that it might have been because teenagers are notoriously quick to finish, and anxious to make a fast getaway. This response to her host was described as 'unnecessarily provocative' by Marigold, in the car on the way home. 

Marina had had a sense she was being spoken to in forms of code, by both the host and his wife. At one point, avoiding her host's attempt to speak to her by moving rooms, she had gone to sit on an isolated Queen Anne style brocaded chair overlooking the view out to the valley. The host's wife came and said to her, 'That was the chair on which I nursed my children'. 

It was subsequent discussion of this party, with Marigold's husband, who had been drinking too much, that led to an opening up of greater rifts which Marina had been sensing. The man said she was reading too much into the host's behaviour. He had been merely trying to make her welcome, and she had misunderstood him. 

Marigold's husband was a man who looked rather like Tony Blair did, when he first came into office, in the early 90s. His sons boasted that their daddy imported their breakfast cereal from England, and he was indeed very possessive of his English condiments. Branston Pickle was apparently very hard to find in Auckland, and clover honey was so expensive. Clearly Marina was expected to ration her servings of it, at every meal. 

The ungenerosity, the stinginess, the minginess, the blinkeredness of the man became evident to her over many minor skirmishes. Her friend seemed impervious to these. And the children were (as much as possible) shielded from them: the unpleasantness created by their father, for example, over the sticky fingermarks on the glass doors after they had had fish and chips from the elder boy's favourite local fish shop. Marina had taken some kitchen serviettes and wiped the marks away, to save pointless argument and passive aggressive hints peppering and salting the subsequent conversation. 

Tony Blair was famous for making speeches with sound bites made for TV transmission. 'The people's princess' was a phrase he coined, cashing in on the death of Princess Diana. And Marina remembered him publicly criticising some massed protestors during the May Day demonstrations, seeking to hypocritically diminish the social inequities their challenges showcased. 'The limits of tolerance are passed', he had said, 'when misguided protestors in the name of some spurious cause seek to inflict fear, terror, violence and criminal damage on the lives and property of the peaceful citizens of this realm'. 

The guest room overlooked a tiny lower deck and part of a hill which was so steep the grass could never be mown on it. And below it was the coarse volcanic sand, striated in layers from dark to light, and the water, in streamlined banners of shades of blue, gleaming and glinting, sparks from the sunlight scattering and shimmering in intermittent sweeps and cascades. The cries of the gulls, the clouds which drifted above and through the misty hills: sometimes when she woke, she felt as Lucy Pevensie did, waking up on The Dawn Treader. 

One afternoon, Marigold asked her to come upstairs and meet someone.There was a young man in the living room, sitting familiarly on the sofa. He was the local handyman, who had become great friends with the family since they had come to stay in the area. He was a genial individual, and Marina could see he knew where everything was kept, in the kitchen. 

After he left, Marigold asked her how she thought she had been, around him. 'Kittenish', she said. 'Be careful. I don't know what the state of the world is these days, when it comes to morality, but it is probably not appropriate, even in the most liberated societies, for a man to frequently visit a woman when her husband is not at home'. 

Her husband worked during the week in Auckland, and drove up for the weekends. He rang her every night at a certain set time. 

Glimpses of a rigid pattern of preferences set by him were shown when his wife  forgot to put the bread machine on for his morning hot bread, or one dreadful night when he came up and ordered her off the computer, because she had duties to do close to home that were clearly more important. 

She tried to explain that she was on email to her old teacher, whose son had just been found killed in Arizona, after weeks of being missing, but her husband didn't care. She was supposed to get her focus right. 

Later, in an awkward attempt to smooth things over in front of the guest, he said that he would really not know what he would do without his wife. He was so lucky that she had chosen him, and had the patience to put up with the challenges of living with him. 

Marina's bus left early in the morning. No way the boys would get up to say goodbye, their father had said, but both of them were up and dressed, and in the car coming to see her off, one with a small handshake, the other casting himself like a garland over her, telling her how much he loved her, over and over again, like a delighted self-discovery, like being in love with love.

Afterwards, when she was back home, Marigold wrote to her. 'Everything I sacrifice for my family I do willingly,' she said. 'I love them more than life itself. I have never been happier than I am here. This is my place.'

   
    Marina read that letter several times. She saw how the writer sought to portray her far from untroubled life as a dream within a dream, residing within a series of circles, the deep happiness at its core invisible to the outsider. She had learned to overlook the displays of stubbornness, the stiff-necked strutting and predictable petulance of her husband, and move on from each incident without bitterness or recrimination. 

    It was like dodging bullets: awkward at first, but, through practice, becoming as fluid in motion as a dance routine, many times rehearsed. After a while, living in a war zone, it must become instinctive, and the ambient awareness you developed would shield you from every attempt of the enemy to pierce or penetrate. By negotiating, by acquiescing, by doing what was required, and absenting her attention at points of unwanted impact, Marigold had created spaces and interstices in which she was  - intermittently - left in peace. 

    Marina remembered her friend: honey gold fierce, fiery, glorious tresses shielding her face against the sun on the deck, feeding the little fat brown birds the leftover crumbs from the morning breakfast bread. 

She remembered how they fluffed themselves up, against the cold winter air, and she trusted to the sea and the high, bright stars and the atmosphere at the end of the earth to clear away the human residue of unexpressed despair, rage, outrage and disillusion that did not belong in the picture