A perfect miniature. It could be in an oval frame hanging on embossed wallpaper. Instead it’s between the covers of a book.
Young Kezia Burnell and her family live in Wellington, New Zealand. It’s the beginning of the 20th century. They are moving from the house where Kezia had “come forth squealing out of a reluctant mother” to the new house which her father describes “on the strict q. T. Linda I’ve got the place dirt cheap”.
Kezia and her sisters travel in the horse-drawn dray, driven by the storeman, “who never wore a collar. . . The back of his neck was dark red”. It’s night when they arrive. The house: “The soft white bulk of it lay stretched upon the green garden like a sleeping beast.” Tomorrow the garden will be explored.
Thus, The Aloe is a story of exploration. Not of mountains, desert wastes, icy continents, but of a world encompassed by the "high paling fence that separated the tennis lawn from the paddock", through which Kezia has seen a bull. It's a world in close up.
Grandmother, Mrs Fairfax, matriarch and comforter, whose “body was the colour of old ivory”; father, Stanley, businessman and provider, “so saturated with health that everything he did delighted him” ; mother Linda, “whose breath rose and fell in her breast like fairy wings” ; Pat, the handy man who kills a duck with a tomahawk and “wore little round gold earrings. How funny”. The duck. “It lay, in beautifully basted resignation, on the blue dish.”
A safe world, in daylight. But when “the day flickered out. . . Her old bogey, the dark had overtaken her. . . Nearer came the terror”. And among the familiar garden plants stands the Aloe with “leaves curved up in to the air with their spiked edges. . . the fat swelling plant with its cruel leaves its towering fleshy stem”.
Mansfield understood the light and the dark. She died of TB aged 36. She bequeathed her miniatures to us. We thank her.
