by C. K. Stead
At the top I rang the bell. There was only a moment’s pause before Madame Hirondelle opened the door. She was wearing a strange brown hat that made her head look bird-like. Her face suffered the momentary convulsion my presence seemed always to inflict on it and then settled into an intensity I couldn’t interpret.
‘Monsieur Meell-aire,’ she said. ‘How kind of you. Please come in. You want to see my husband. And this must be your wife, and little one. Come in, please. Come in, ma petite. How very kind. This is a sad time. My husband is in here. This way, ’sieur, ’dame, if you please.’
Tears had begun to roll down her cheeks. She hustled us in, crying and talking at once so there was no chance to find the words for a reply. We were led into the sitting room. On the table there was a coffin half buried in flowers. In the coffin lay the architect.
‘Look at him,’ the old woman mourned. ‘Doesn’t he look fine? Ah, Monsieur, didn’t I tell you he would not walk down those stairs again? Tomorrow he will pass through his garden but he will not see it.’ Her grief increased. The brown hat nodded over her brow. She uncovered the dead man’s hands. ‘Look at his beautiful hands,’ she said, stroking them, rubbing them as if to warm them. ‘They were always beautiful—and so delicate, so gentle.’
I was struck dumb. Katy wept. Little Hermi’s bell-like voice chimed, ‘Want to see. Want to see.’
Katy picked her up, and Hermi stared. ‘Why is he on the table?’
‘Well you see,’ Katy said, ‘the poor man died.’
‘Was he old?’
‘Yes, he was very old.’
‘Is that his bed?’
‘It’s a coffin, darling.’
‘What’s a coffin?’
‘Oh god …’ She looked at me.
‘It’s a sort of box,’ I said, ‘for dead people.’
‘Will he get up soon? Does he have a cough?’
‘No he won’t get up,’ Katy said. ‘Because he’s dead.’
Madame Hirondelle smiled through her tears, patting Hermi’s cheek. ‘She asks questions.’
Katy nodded. ‘The usual questions, Madame.’
‘It was kind of you to come. Don’t weep, Madame. You are very kind, but it had to be.’ There was a suppressed sob, a pause, and then to me, ‘The car, Monsieur. It goes well for you?’
‘Very well, thank you, Madame.’ And I added, remembering what the young garagiste had said all that long time ago, ‘Elle marche comme un rêve’—it goes like a dream.
… The villa to which the telpher belonged was silent and dark. Katy and I lurched as the cage jolted to a stop. We let ourselves out. The others were waiting, whispering in the dark. The flames up there had been extinguished, or were hidden by the thickness of the pines.
We clambered over a low stone wall and found the track down to Garavan. I was beginning to sober up, with the dull-witted sobriety of someone badly in need of sleep. I said it had been an eventful day. I must have thought it was all over.
We stood in a circle under the umbrella pines by the Garavan station, holding on to one another, tottering. There was nothing to say except goodnight. We would talk about it when we met again. They were sorry about the car, but there would be insurance, and at least we’d escaped the raid—all of us except Ernst, who was back there with the Lamborghini. We went our different ways in the darkness—the Scarfs to their apartment, Peggy and Fabrice down to the port where his car was parked, and as for me—I decided to go at once to Javine. I felt guilty about her, and wanted to make peace.
There was just the faintest glimmer of morning light as I walked along the broad new promenade towards the old town. The sea hissed on the gravel of the new beaches. My pace got faster. I could see a light in Javine’s uncle’s house. I crossed the street and went in, looked for the key under the stairs but it wasn’t there. I tried to take the stairs quietly, two at a time.
Her door wasn’t locked. One lamp was on in the sitting room. I put a hand on the table to steady myself. There was a chess board set up, and a game had been half played and abandoned. I tried to assess the state of play, and moved knight to queen 4. Then I walked into the bedroom.
The shutters were open. Colourless in the pewter light Javine’s dresses swayed from their hooks in the ceiling. Her crowd of scarves stirred. I stood at the bottom of the bed and looked at her. She was asleep. So was her student friend Raoul, lying beside her. She faced the wall. He faced her back, one arm lightly over her shoulder. I remember noticing how their profiles seemed to match.
6. The departure
THE TAXI PULLED UP by the carpark and out came one two three, four Scarfs followed and hustled by Clifton with camera. ‘Hurry now, everybody,’ he said, looking at his watch, trying to get them to stand still against the background of the fish stalls outside the market. I went over and took the camera out of his hand. ‘Join the group,’ I said, and I got three or four shots of the whole family.
Then Clifton took one of me with Katy and the kids. Katy took one of me with Clifton. They promised to send me prints. It was before the days of digitals and emails and we were all still using old-fashioned film. It was all done in a hurry, but I still have the prints, which are very bright and clear. Those kids are married now, with children of their own, making the beautiful Katy (hard to imagine!) a grandma. Clifton was soon to be a full professor, and the last word I had of them he had become a vice-chancellor.
They were on their way to the station. They’d sold their car, someone had secured an apartment for them in Paris, they were leaving in just a few minutes. I embraced them all, singly and together, and we made promises (which have not been kept) that we would meet again. They jammed themselves back into the taxi, all shouting and waving and throwing kisses as it pulled away—and that was it. They were gone.
I closed my eyes against the glare of the sun. Though it was afternoon, the market long since closed, the stalls and pavements hosed down and scrubbed, still the smell of fresh fish and vegetables hung in the air. Half drowsing in the warmth of the wall I heard footsteps behind me, and felt a hand come down lightly on my shoulder. I opened my eyes, turning to see who it was. ‘Ah, mon cher,’ said Fabrice, ‘are these tears? You are so indelibly Anglo-Saxon. But never mind. That is life. People come and they go, and still the sun shines, n’est-ce pas? This evening, mon ami, you must come and have a drink with me and I will take you to a little place …’
True love
IT WAS A LONG time ago—many years—that my friend of that time, Mike Deniston, phoned to say he needed to see me. He needed help—it was urgent. There were no jokes, no obscenities, none of his usual stuff.
I said, ‘Come around here.’
He said, ‘No. Down at the boat.’
Since leaving school I’d gone in with my father as a fisherman. We took turns, or fished together, and shared the profits. Mum was gone already, a victim of what was called ‘medical misadventure’ or ‘a slip of the knife’; my two sisters, both a lot older (I was ‘the afterthought’) had married and left home. So it was just the two of us working together, keeping the boat in the water and the nets in use. But Dad was getting lazy, complaining about his back and his hips, letting himself off when the weather turned against us—and that suited me. I was twenty-one and already I could feel myself taking over, becoming the boss.
Mike’s tone suggested a crisis. I knew that voice well. We’d been at school together. He’d left as soon as he turned fifteen, the legal leaving age then, to be an apprentice builder. I’d passed School Cert and stayed on to the end of my sixth-form year, then became Dad’s partner.
It wasn’t a big boat, but fishing was good if you knew what you were doing and where to put your nets. We fished out in the Hauraki Gulf and north, up the coast. There were good days and bad days; there was fine weather and rotten weather; but I was out on the sea, which I loved, and there was for me a primitive hunting thing. I liked the chase, the excitement of a big haul; and I was making good money.
I agreed a time wi
th Mike and waited down at the boat, which was tied up in what’s now called Viaduct Harbour. He came in the small builder’s truck he drove for his boss. There was a tarpaulin tied down over the tray: it was yellow, and wet from a recent shower that made the colour shine.
As Mike slammed the cab shut and walked over to the quay I noticed how he looked around, taking note of who was there, what was going on. There was a lot of activity, plenty of people about. He climbed down to the deck and said, ‘Can we go inside?’ ‘Inside’ was a small cabin full of lines, nets, ropes, vats, gutting knives, and a bench on either side. We sat opposite one another, knees angled left and right.
‘I need your help,’ he said, and took out his tobacco tin and began to roll a cigarette.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘OK.’
He offered me the tin and I rolled one. He lit his. It was thin, finely made—he had delicate hands. He took a drag and said, ‘I’ve killed Rose.’
‘Oh Jesus,’ I said.
I must have believed him at once. I didn’t say, ‘You’re joking’ or ‘What do you mean you’ve killed her?’ I just said ‘Oh Jesus.’
He said, ‘You’ve got to help me get rid of the body, Ken.’
I asked how he’d killed her and he said it was an accident. That was all he said about it—all he wanted, or was willing, to say.
I said, ‘You’re sure she’s dead?’ and he said yes he was sure.
Now I have to tell you about Mike and Rose. Rose was a nice middle-class young woman, engaged to a rich youth (sufficiently well off, anyway, for us to think of him as rich) who was slightly built, sensitive-looking, a bit of an intellectual. These days you might call him a geek. Mike on the other hand was a big strong good-looking rugby guy, a flanker who was big but fast—faster on his feet than with his tongue, but not stupid. Sometimes Mike’s silences could be more effective than my fast talk. He had ‘presence’. People were impressed. When he left school the headmaster told him it was a pity he was quitting because there was a future for him in which he might have been captain of the first fifteen and a prefect.
Mike said nothing to that; just took the reference he’d come for and left. He went on playing club rugby, and even made it into the Junior All Blacks. This was a fact that featured in the papers during his trial. There were vague stirrings of sympathy for him, especially when it was suggested his obsession with Rose had got in the way of his chances of representing New Zealand.
I’m not sure where he first met Rose. He would have been twenty-one, so no longer a green teenager; but he fell in love with her, head over heels. If that sounds like a cliché, that’s what it was—the size of it, the scale of his obsession. He was smitten, enraptured, besotted. He walked up and down in the darkest hours outside her house. He sent her flowers, cards, followed her, intercepted her in the street.
These days it might be classed as stalking. Then it was just a rather bad case of ‘love’. He’d declared himself within a week or two of their first meeting. She was flattered, then irritated, finally anxious. He went too far too fast; she was engaged to the rich boy, ‘in love’ with him she said, and told Mike to forget her.
I got news of all of this over many weeks—progress reports, the ups and downs of it—because soon Mike began to see signs that she was softening. She would let him walk with her to the tram, chat to her when he contrived to be in the same public place. Once, walking with her in the street at night, she let him put an arm around her waist; even, for just a moment, let her head rest on his shoulder.
‘I’m winning,’ he told me, even though that encounter had ended badly, with her weeping and begging him to please leave her alone. Her tears had moved him and he’d promised not to bother her any more—but that was a promise he knew he could not keep. He didn’t phone or write but he still waited in the shadows when he knew she would be coming home from the tram stop, and sometimes patrolled outside her house in the hours after midnight. So there was another encounter, another argument, shouting, threats, tears and a first kiss.
Soon the boyfriend was drawn in and gave warnings, made threats of unspecified consequences if Mike didn’t lay off. Even that seemed an advance. Mike couldn’t just be laughed at and waved away. He gained in confidence, and the boyfriend shrank, blustered, began to look weak and ineffectual.
Inch by inch Mike made inroads. He became the wedge, forcing himself into the life of this young woman, who was handsome enough, well-shaped, well set up, with good features, nice legs, commendable breasts, a nice voice and a lively personality, but hardly a great beauty. She just happened to be the measure of Mike’s dream. Six months after his first telling me about her, her engagement had been broken and she and Mike were lovers.
He was like a man who’d been visited by the Holy Ghost and entrusted with the secrets of the universe—quieter, more serious, more inward, with an exalted glow. Even so, I could see it wasn’t plain sailing with Rose. There were good times but there was turbulence too. She was still in two minds, remembering the intellectual boyfriend, missing his talk, his jokes and clever ideas, feeling sorry for him and asking Mike to allow her time to ‘sort things out’. Maybe the difference was sex—in Mike’s favour because I can’t think he had the advantage in much else. But who knows? These dynamics of attraction are always mysterious.
And then he killed her.
I only know as much as emerged during the trial. She had received lethal blows to the head—not just one blow, but three or four. I imagine a huge row, Rose saying she was leaving him, Mike losing his temper—perhaps one of those events where, once the first blow is struck, the striker finds himself unable to stop. But I’m only guessing. And then, it seems, while he was still standing there trying to comprehend what he’d done there was a knock at the door. It was a friendly neighbour, a woman who said she thought she’d heard someone calling for help.
Mike told her Rose was unwell and had vomited. He was going to call a doctor or take her to the hospital. And then he did something daring. He said, ‘Would you like to come in and speak to her?’
The woman hesitated but then said no, not if Rose was unwell. Perhaps she’d call tomorrow.
What did he have in mind? What would he have done if she’d said yes? Would he have killed her too? That was a question that was left hanging at the trial, suggesting he was an extremely dangerous man.
And now he wanted my help getting rid of ‘the body’—all there was left of his dream girl. I went out on the deck to straighten up, to stretch, to breathe. The smells of fish and of the salty harbour were clean and fresh. There was a pleasant whiff of smoke from the Devonport ferry, just then chugging out and hooting. Mike followed me and we stood side by side looking over at the truck with its yellow tarpaulin. I said, ‘Mike, if you mean she’s in there, we can’t load a body into the boat.’
‘Not here,’ he said. ‘You take the boat around to the wharf at Maraetai, I drive, and we do it there.’
I told him dumping a body in the sea never works. ‘Even if you anchor it to something, they always come loose and wash up somewhere.’
It was strange, ‘surreal’. I was talking as if he’d presented me with a practical problem and I wanted to help.
He said he wanted her ‘buried at sea’. He thought that was what she would want. We would take her body a long way offshore; and he had some concrete to keep it on the sea floor.
‘Will you do it?’ he said. And when I took my eyes away from his and looked down to my shoes he said, ‘Please, Ken.’
I said OK, I’d do it; but as I steered my boat out into the harbour that afternoon, past Devonport, on down that coastline, with Rangitoto and Waiheke Island away to the left, my mind began to clear, and I knew I couldn’t. Heading into the wind, which was coming up from the north-east and would soon bring rain, I made that decision. How could he expect me—really, seriously—to do that? It would make me a party to whatever he’d done. I was so relieved to be free of this responsibility a sort of hilarity briefly took hold of me and I sang
a song of those times:
Girl of my dreams, I love you
Honest I do …
At Maraetai he was waiting on the wharf. I tied up and climbed the steps. There was no one about and it was getting dark—perfect for what we were there to do. I could see the truck, which he’d brought as close as possible to the wharf. We would not have far to carry Rose’s body …
He came up to me on the wharf and I said, ‘Mike.’ I think I even grabbed his wrist.
‘What?’
‘I can’t do this.’
He didn’t say anything. He stepped back, found a rail or bollard and sat. I could still see his face in the half-light. I felt bad. ‘Sorry, mate,’ I said.
He rolled a cigarette and handed me the tin. My fingers were cold and blunt but I rolled one, crouching there, and we smoked in silence. The rain was coming now, feathery showers, and the wind getting up, whipping them along. When the cigs were finished he stood up. I wanted to tell him why I couldn’t help, but he knew why. I wanted to say he would be better to admit what he’d done, explain how it had happened, and take the consequences, but he must have known that too.
‘You sure?’ he said.
‘Quite sure.’ And then, again, ‘Sorry.’
Another long silence. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘You know nothing—I’ve told you nothing. This didn’t happen.’
I said, ‘Yes of course.’ There was no handshake—no need for it. He turned and walked back down the wharf, got into the truck and drove off up the hill. The yellow tarpaulin was caught for just a moment in the light of a street lamp—my last sight of Rose.
Heading back to Auckland Harbour that evening in the rain and with the wind behind me I felt I’d failed him but also that I’d had no choice.
The next day, or it might have been the day after, was a Saturday and we were to go together, Dad and I with Mike, to watch Auckland play Otago at Eden Park for the Ranfurly Shield. It was a time when Auckland seemed invincible and held the Shield for I think it was four years through more than twenty challenges. I didn’t expect to see Mike, but he came, and we went by tram and then on foot. Nothing was said about Rose; and not much about anything else. We had some beers and sat on the terraces.
