by Ian Wedde
She, the older sister of the groom, on the other hand, would still be living with their mother and her young brother, and was twenty-six years of age. In just under a year’s time she would graduate with a university degree, the utility of which ‘interested’ the councillor. Their Bute Street house was small and in an unfavoured part of the town and so the wedding breakfast, which could not be held in the Deutscher Verein because Ettie, in the opinion of the councillor, ‘was not from there’, was celebrated in the spacious garden at the councillor’s house.
Catharina could visualise Professor Hugo von Welden, with whom she had recently strolled in the nearby Botanic Garden, in the extensive and richly planted garden at the councillor’s house, but of course he was not there. A tennis court was there, however, and she could visualise him on it, in his whites.
Her mutti’s elegance was noticed and complimented, as was the fact that it owed much to its ‘simplicity’.
The councillor was a self-made man and professed to have no time for the toffs in his neighbourhood, but the weighty furnishings and ornate plantings of his home and garden were more than adequate announcements of the status his success deserved to win for his family, now enlarged by the fortunate addition of strong new blood captured by the charms of his niece.
Thus, in as many approximate words, ended the councillor’s toast on the freshly mowed lawn of his house, upon which the severed shapes of daisy plants stood out like small blots. Catharina found herself with downcast eyes counting the blots as he approached the end of his peroration.
There were at least fifteen kinds of sandwich, each with a little flag identifying what was in it – cream cheese and lemon curd, egg and olive, and others even more dainty. After the champagne for the toast there was a bowl of fruit punch and also cups of tea. A string trio was being ignored in a corner of the tennis court.
She watched Freddy reading the little sandwich flags and sampling a number of the delicacies – he caught her eye and winked. He was sun-dark from his time as a survey field cadet and his grin was a bright flash of wickedness as he popped his sandwich past it.
The extended families were there, and some friends of the bride and groom – But no one from the university college, Miss Hansen?
Councillor Hasty was paying her the compliment of an appraisal.
She noticed the appraisal but was looking past his looming broadcloth shoulder at her lanky, newly wed brother, and was distracted for a moment by the way he bent attentively towards and sometimes over the people he spoke to – at that moment it was Ettie’s mother, the widow Francis, who still wore a black mourning rosette at her bosom. Mrs Francis had taken both of his hands between hers and was speaking earnestly up into his face. His dark hair fell forward across his forehead and he politely released one hand from hers and swept the hair back, holding it from his eyes while he answered her question. The dark hair, of course, he had from the little man who was the father he never met. He got his father’s hair but not his small stature, nor the tidy stature of his little mother. How did that come about? And how thoughtful he appeared without trying to seem so. His slow, careful speech, likewise, seemed always to be fastened to thought, and the thought to what he saw in his mind as he composed the words in his mouth, which he then spoke with care, as if each one mattered as much as the next. They were often surprising because what he had perceived in his mind had been so. He could have been a poet, she thought, and perhaps he was – a poet of the forge!
Would Mister Hastings please excuse her inattention, she’d been distracted by the sight of her brother and his evident happiness! – and how fortunate he was to have found Miss Francis, a sweet young woman! – and what was the councillor’s question again?
Councillor Hastings’ appraising gaze had hardened a little. He’d wondered about her friends and colleagues at the university college, for example the distinguished German professor who’d become quite well known in the town, but never mind, Miss Hansen would understand if his duties as host called him away at that point.
He inclined his head and then moved off quickly to greet a recent arrival, a tall man with a luxuriant moustache above a rather pouty bottom lip. It was the mayor, Mister Johnston, the one who had organised the famous Jubilee Parade. Was he also a ‘friend of the family’?
But of course it was the councillor’s escutcheons that were on display here, his selection of sandwiches and his imported champagne, his house and lawns and tennis court and the beds of roses that surely required the attention of gardeners – this was the situation into which her thoughtful, courteous brother had indentured himself.
And then, as the last of the sun warmed the drab flanks of Mount Victoria in the east and the string trio struck up jauntily from the western shadows of the tennis court, the bride emerged from her uncle’s house in a plum-coloured going-away dress and was driven off in a trap by her husband who remained stooped over the reins and didn’t look back as she turned to wave with one hand while the other held her hat with two long crimson ribbons at the back – the breeze caught them as the trap rounded the gatepost at the end of the driveway, and their flutter was the last thing Catharina saw before she felt Mutti’s hand slide under her arm and grip it tightly.
‘Ah, so, there he goes,’ said Mutti. ‘My big Wolf.’ Then, after a while and a long intake of breath, she was looking around. ‘We had better find Freddy,’ she said. ‘He’s eating all the little schnacks.’ She relished her odd pronunciation of the word, making it sound like their old Kieler Plattdeutsch word for gossip.
And indeed, there he was, sharing a joke with Ettie’s brother Will. He performed a mime of weeping, rubbing his eyes with his knuckles, before giving his mother a kiss on the cheek.
‘It’s all right, Ma,’ he said. ‘You still have me.’
Wolf
So what exactly had been in his mind, if there was one in that great block of a head? That was what the councillor had wanted to know about his niece’s husband’s thinking when he was told about Wolf’s encounter with Fon Welden, a member of the town’s educated class and an aristocrat and wealthy so far as could be seen. And connected to the class of person building mansions out at Karori. Was the councillor and mayoral candidate to be associated with the blockhead’s giving-herself-airs slut sister? Whose brazen character would be seen by all?
Wolf stood there and let the man run out of breath before taking him by the shoulder and sitting him back down in his chair.
The professor had agreed to marry his sister after listening to what he had to say to him on her behalf, and on behalf of her mother and family. If the councillor called his sister a slut again he would break his neck and take the consequences.
The councillor had come up hard from hard times and was not a man who surrendered easily. As if to mark the fact that he had come up hard and now commanded a good view of what went on about the town, his offices were on the top floor of a grand building on Featherston Street. The building was entered past a uniformed porter with a high opinion of his own importance as well as that of the councillor. He sent a boy up to Mister Hastings with a message. To Wolf’s way of thinking the offices were intended by their fittings and furniture to make him feel small in the presence of the councillor but failed to do so.
Wolf spoke with care because the councillor was a hard man as well as a generous one. He had for two going on three years regularly paid his mortgage into the councillor’s account. He had undertaken work at a discount on the councillor’s properties. The councillor’s niece had given birth to a fine little girl called Agatha, named after her dadda’s German grandmother, in the house on Mount Cook. He had improved the house by the skill and hard work of his own hands, as well as building a sound hen house and tool shed at the back and installing well-forged palings at the front, the envy of their neighbours. He had taken good care of the councillor’s fatherless niece as was expected of a husband and father, even one as young as he. The councillor had no right to speak to him like that.
Th
e councillor remained seated and appeared to be listening to Wolf who had not yet stepped back from the man’s chair, though he had seen the effect on him of the mention of Agatha’s German great-grandmother and of course of the indignity of being made to sit. But then when the councillor stood up against Wolf’s chest he did step back and give the man room enough to feel respected, though his words about Catharina had not earned him respect. One of the room’s sash windows was open to its full extent and a cool breeze came by fits and starts into the room with its strong smell of the councillor’s tobacco. How often he had thought that the harbour’s breezes might be blowing over the blue ranges from country far in the interior where a man might be free to raise his family away from the reek of command that came from rooms such as this one.
Yes he was a good provider, the councillor was acknowledging as Wolf looked away from him in the direction of the window, but that was not the issue. The issue was why by all accounts, including Wolf’s own, the Wenczel family from a squalid part of the town had dispatched their eldest son to stand over the distinguished professor? And further, why that eldest son had now thought it necessary to stand over the benefactor of himself and his family, and what did he expect would come of that? Did Wolf expect that the councillor would become the patron of Miss Catharina Hansen’s marriage to the distinguished professor, as he had been of Wolf’s marriage to the councillor’s niece, the daughter of his sadly deceased brother?
Wolf redirected his attention from the window to the councillor, who was looking into a silence where there should have been respect. He was sorry, he told the man who kept the keys of his and Ettie’s house, and also of their future, in his locked bureau, he had not meant to stand over him, nor had he stood over the professor despite what gossip may have got around the town. He had merely told the professor the fact of his sister’s condition and requested he have the decency to consider his responsibility. And as for his visit to the councillor’s office, he had simply wished, on behalf of his mother and sister, and in the interests of courtesy towards a family to which they were glad to be connected, to clear the air of hurtful gossip by telling the councillor the facts of the situation, including the happy fact of his sister’s forthcoming marriage, which would take place in the Deutscher Verein, and to which the councillor and his family would be invited as was only appropriate, given their connection to his, and now his niece’s, family.
What both he and the councillor knew these thoughtful remarks concealed was the fact that the so-called gossip had got loose from the councillor’s own nephew, Ettie’s brother Will, who was Freddy’s best pal, the same Freddy who had been the source of it, but of course the councillor was well aware of that, though not of the way Freddy’s mother had expressed her anger at her thoughtless son and, by extension, at the councillor’s nephew Will who had also shared his story with his sister Ettie.
Oh yes, he could play the councillor’s game. It was clear from the man’s refusal to budge from the space provided by Wolf’s stepping-back that it was he, Councillor Hastings, who was accustomed to doing the inviting and he who chose when and with whom to associate his family. Well then, let him accept the wedding invitation or not, and let him associate with the bride’s family or not, what did it matter.
The councillor was measuring him with his eye but would not strike him, that was sure. But the man’s ill will was also clear, and no doubt its consequence would itself be clear soon enough.
Wolf thanked the councillor for hearing him out, and hoped to see him again in the not distant future. And then he went down slowly into the bustling street that seemed to have blowing through it the fresh airs of time to come. The fresh breeze was at his back as he went towards the forge in the Aro Valley. All he had to do was turn and go towards the time and place the fresh breeze came from.
It was at once something simple and something that could barely be understood inside the moment of its happening. It was as though time was a flap that opened and shut on where you were, but like the lid on the forge’s casting box. There would be the empty shape of the thing and then the liquid metal and then the hard thing that would always also be the molten thing and the empty shape of the thing. It was where he had been in the empty shape of the moment and it was where he was now.
Now there was Agatha’s little bony hand holding the last two fingers of his right one, and there was the stink of Adam’s shit in the napkin he’d filled while grunting comfortably across his daddy’s forearm. There was the curly-haired black bitch setter that Ettie had named Curly who was panting in the heat and had taken care to lie across Agatha’s feet as if minding her pup. Because of the heat there was also the stink of the trench dunny a little way off at the bush line. Everything was dusty, including Curly. The mud heaped up around the slab-timber base of the tent wall had baked into shapes that showed where the roots of trees had been and in many places the roots and stumps were still there and men had used them as anchors for the tent walls. Behind the tents, that were almost becoming cottages made from the material spaces where the trees had been, great trees still rose into the hazy sky. The hot sunny bush behind was ticking like kindling in a new campfire, and far away across the range in the next valley, the one they were going to, smoke haze from the burn-offs turned the air blue. The vaporous sky above the dry ranges was at once the sign of what had been there before the fire, what was there now, and what would be there after the smoke had blown away and with it the last branchy rubbish of the trees. All of that stuff would be ash. Then, by that time, his fancy told him, he would have built their house in the next valley out of what could be made of what otherwise made smoke. And the ash would become grass and the grass would become wool. The trees were already wool, once you lifted the time lid.
There was Yorky with his pants rolled up below the knee showing his scrawny white shanks and with a wire-handled kerosene tin in his right hand. Back at the forge in Wellington they’d used top-cut-off kerosene tins to hold water for the fix trough. In his other hand Yorky had an empty wicker basket. He was looking at Agatha and it was already clear why he was doing that, even though that moment hadn’t happened. Even though it hadn’t it might as well have.
The others were all waiting but none of them had kids. Ambrose had his axe and was striking a ready-for-work pose, and old Bill had his camp oven for making bread and his patient expression. The other two were smoking. The Italian had his hat on at an angle above one eye as was his way.
Would Miss Aggie like to take the basket up to the bush just over there and get some dry twigs to light the fire for old Bill? Then they could all have some bread with their tea when that time came.
Yorky’s teeth were all gone, and the way he said bread made his lips stick out past his moustache before they got sucked in again. Agatha put her doll over her mouth to stop her giggle.
And since the brrreahdth would be all the tastier without the stink of shit, would Wolf mind taking his bhoohy to the dunny and filling its water tin on his way there? If he went by way of the creek to fill the tin, well then Miss Aggie could go with him?
Yorky held out the basket and the kerosene tin. He smiled at Agatha who looked at his gums and then up at her papa with an anxious expression, but the look Wolf saw next directed at him by Yorky was a lesser kind of smile and a less kind one. It said that if his work was to be minding his own children then the sooner he was on his way down the valley the better.
By all means, Yorky, that will be my pleasure, were the words he thought but did not say.
No he would not rise to the taunt that all he was good for was running errands for the Yorkshireman.
Off they went with Curly trotting along.
Oh yes the sooner the better, and just as soon as Ettie was better, and the sooner she was better the better. Off they would go down the valley. He was already in that moment.
After scraping the shit off Adam’s napkin into the scrub he left the kiddies getting twigs for old Bill’s cooking fire while he washed the napkin in the cr
eek, giving it a good sound bashing on a rock, and then filled the kerosene tin. Then he knotted the damp napkin back on Adam who struggled and screamed against it and they went back down towards the camp. One of Yorky’s boys was squatting across the dunny pole when he put the full kerosene tin of water there. He had the skitters and looked at Wolf with a horrible smile while the shit squirted out of him into the trench.
‘Thanks for the water, Wolf,’ he said. ‘Oh Lord I wish this would stop.’
Oh yes they had to get out of there the sooner the better and over the hill and far away from the camp sickness and into the smoke that would soon enough be blowing clear away from their house.
But now could he kindly go across to the smithy, said Yorky when he got back, they needed a couple of boxes of three-inch square-head nails, rough as guts would be fine, the fools were nailing slab timber down in the valley and couldn’t get enough of them nails.
Wolf was meant to be away from that forge work because it was unsafe with the kiddies. Yorky knew that. They’d agreed upon it. And he could hardly go to the railway cuttings with the navvy gangs and take the kiddies with him.
Yorky sucked his toothless cheeks in and made a popping sound with his mouth while he waited for an answer.
‘You know I won’t do that work while Ettie’s sick.’
‘Well, then you can fuck off and wipe all their arses somewhere else.’
So that was it, the thing that had already happened in his mind’s time was going to happen where he was, with Agatha holding on to his hand and Adam escaping the crook of his arm and Curly pressing herself wearily against his leg. It was the wise dog that then led the way back to where Ettie was lying on her cot, with the bucket next to it and the big flies droning to and fro in the stink of her sick.
‘Hello Wolf my darling man,’ she said with an expression that was both a brave smile and a sign that she knew what was happening in that moment and had perhaps expected it. ‘So we’re off now is it?’
