The Cruel Peak

by Gil Hogg

  “Surprise me… I’ve known him all my life. Look, first I think I’ll take a walk around the garden. Maybe see the old house.” He wanted to get away from her before they had a row and he wasn’t interested in rushing to see Ernest Ashton.

  “The old house? You mean the ruins? Why go down there?”

  “Where I used to live.”

  “Down there? I didn’t know that. I’ll come with you.” She had a curious smile and a proprietorial air.

  He didn’t want her to come, he positively wanted to be alone, but he couldn’t resist her courtly motive. She pulled a baseball cap on to shade her face and slipped her feet into a pair of training shoes. They went out of the back door and walked through the lawns, a hundred yards down a cobbled slope to a lane of closed sheds.

  “You don’t use these for storage any more?”

  “No. Working the place has changed in the last few years. We have contractors who shear and take the wool, and others who manage the stock. And we now have deer and alpaca too. There’s no killing on the place. Hides and meat and wool are just pieces of paper on Stuart’s desk. He coordinates things, sorts out some day to day problems with the contractors. He’s not a real manager. I help him.”

  “Why not get a real manager?”

  “We might. We need one. I’d like to do it, but I want to go with Stuart on his longer trips. I’m spoiled.”

  He swept his arm across the horizon. “You know all about this stuff?”

  “Sure.”

  He was confused, but Tia didn’t give him time. She had a hint of his incredulity.

  “You don’t think a young Maori woman could manage this place?”

  “Tia, it would be an unusual job for any young woman.”

  “Balls. There are plenty of women managing farms or stations.”

  He didn’t say, ‘Not as big as Tamaki Downs,’ because she probably had an answer to that. He didn’t want an argument. He kept quiet. They had come to the end of the lane where the land fell away, disclosing the rolling downs, yellow in the sunlight, broken by groves of pines, and stretching into a haze which ultimately rose toward the Alps.

  He stood for a moment, viewing the landscape of his childhood. He realised then that he could only appreciate it fully if he was alone. Tia was as edgy as he was; in this atmosphere, instead of stimulating his thoughts, the scene was static, a landscape painting.

  “Look, Tia, I think I better go back. Ernest will be wondering why I haven’t been in to see him. I can visit the old place later. It’s only a trip down memory lane.”

  She dropped the corners of her mouth. They turned back, remote from each other.

  His sometime father-in-law Sir Ernest Ashton lay in state upstairs in ‘the big bedroom’. Ernest’s outline had shrunk, judging by the only visible parts of him above the sheets - his head, shoulders and arms. The skin on his arms was like an old brown jersey several sizes too big. His square jaw and high-domed head with a wisp of brown hair was hollowed and threatening like a Maori carving.

  Ernest turned stagnant eyes slowly toward him as he entered, full of reproach. “So you’re back. Good journey?”

  “Not bad.” He didn’t offer a hand, and Ernest didn’t stir the claw resting on the coverlet.

  “You’ve taken your time about coming in to see me. I saw the car out of the window.”

  “I wanted to find out about you first. See whether you’ve been round the stock this morning.”

  “You’ve been talking to the housemaid.”

  “Is that what Tia is?”

  The old man avoided the question with a grunt. “You’ve come for Petra’s wedding, eh? Why bother? You’ve ignored her all her life.”

  “Maybe, but it is her wedding.” He remained standing and Ernest Ashton didn’t proffer one of the armchairs by the bed.

  “Going to play the fond father, are you? She’s marrying a clod. But you wouldn’t know.”

  “She’s got to make her own choice.”

  “How righteous. You want to pose as the father of the bride. You’ve come out of your hole in London for a moment in the sun.” Ernest’s rictus represented a smile. “Maybe you were right to bunk off to London; children are leeches and thieves, they suck and take; they don’t come to you and say, ‘I’d like this,’ or ‘Can I have that?’ They don’t make a deal with you; they take over your life; they live your life themselves. You become an appendage to them. If parents are always living for their children, whoever is living for himself?”

  “You can’t get rid of the illusion that your kids have let you down, can you, Ernest? Not even at this late time?”

  “I’ve given them everything. That’s no illusion. And what is Stuart? Is he a farmer, a writer, a mountaineer, a soldier? What the hell is he? A bloody dilettante.”

  “Aren’t you a farmer, a writer, a mountaineer, a businessman?”

  Ernest let out a throaty growl. “I’ve had a fair degree of success at all of them. Stuart can’t even make a decent profit out of this place. Instead, he’s married a child who thinks she can. Bugger me, I’ve never heard the likes of it.”

  “Maybe Tia can manage this place.”

  “You don’t learn to run a station like Tamaki by getting a university degree in how to bottle-feed lambs.”

  “Maybe you do. Times have changed. And what’s wrong with Robyn as a daughter?” He asked because the old man - he was only in his early sixties - was like a politician; press his button and the story would be repeated.

  Ernest’s pale lips drew back from the dark teeth. “Theatricals and booze.”

  He couldn’t resist drilling further into the abscess. “You’d like her better as the wife of a national politician, or a judge, with a neat little family?”

  “I’d like her better if she reflected some honour on the household.”

  He didn’t have any brief to defend Robyn, but Ernest’s pomposity chafed him. “She’s a highly regarded theatrical director.”

  The clouded eyes swivelled toward him. “Used to be. But you had the answer to her career, didn’t you? You dumped Petra and Len with Robyn.”

  He had had these strictures from the old man before in a milder form, and he wasn’t particularly surprised that they should take on more stridency as the illness progressed. “Do we have to be like this, Ernest? Robyn insisted on having the children, you know that.”

  “You scarpered off to Britain with the parson’s wife.”

  This was bile, which Ernest liked to regurgitate whenever they met after a long absence.

  “The parson’s widow, to be precise. I did.”

  “You were shagging her long before Hewart died. Robyn told me. And you had a couple of kids from her later, ignoring Petra and Len.”

  “I wouldn’t say ignoring. I’ve been back here. I do live on the other side of the world, you know.”

  “Well, what the hell are you doing there anyway? At least if you were here you could see that broken boy occasionally.”

  “Let’s continue this pleasant talk when you’ve had a rest.” He turned to leave.

  “You didn’t want for opportunities here, Tom. I got you a good post at Gottley’s with Clyde Porter.” The old man’s tone was unaccountably warmer.

  “You bought it for me as Gottley’s biggest client.”

  “Well, lucky you! And what did you do? Got yourself fired in six months!”

  “Clyde Porter, personally, was a shit. I explained it to you at the time.”

  “He became one of the most respected judges in the country.”

  “But nevertheless…” Tom said, as he moved toward the door.

  “Just a minute. Have you spoken to Stuart yet?”

  “No. He’s out on the station playing the part of a farmer.”

  “Well, when you do, don’t believe all this crap from him about Mt Vogel.”

  “What crap?”

  Ernest raised a tired hand dismissing him. “Remember what I said.”

  He left Ernest to go downstairs, the
mention of Mt Vogel lost in the cauldron of emotions which his meetings with Ernest always aroused, emotions too about Reginald Clyde Porter.

  The Ashton influence had propelled Tom as a young law clerk to Gottley & Son, solicitors in Christchurch, which had no Gottley and no son, but a very large portfolio of Ashton interests, as well as a thriving court practice kept alive by the prominence of Reginald Clyde Porter, who appeared in some of the city’s most notable cases.

  Although he resisted it at first, he surrendered to the invitation engineered by Ernest Ashton, and told himself that even if he joined another firm of his own choosing, some of the Ashton work would follow inevitably, and he would be looked upon as a golden boy - so what was the difference? And a golden boy he was at Gottley’s. Clyde Porter and the other three partners could scarcely contain their pleasure at this almost infinite source of future fees, assuming he served his clerkship and became a partner. Although it was contrary to their feelings, the partners all treated Tom Stavely as a rather important young gentleman amongst the clerks.

  Gottleys occupied rooms on the first floor of the Temperance Building on Chancery Lane. The décor was original - what it was when the firm first gained the tenancy forty years before: the furniture a dark, dry brown, the walls the colour of milky tea. Piles of papers and old books littered every available shelf and cabinet. On his first day, while he was waiting to meet one of the partners, he turned idly to a file on the top of a cupboard and saw the title Enquiry into the sinking of the SS Suva Rose, August 1938. The firm had moved reluctantly into the late twentieth century with a few word processors, laser printers, copiers and a telephone exchange, but it could not shake off the detritus of an earlier era.

  Tom’s relationship with the esteemed senior partner started on a note which made him uneasy. His first sight of the great man, then in headlines in the newspapers on a lurid case, was sitting on a chair in the Christchurch Law Library. Clyde Porter crouched, his bespectacled eyes bright and beaky nose up, staring straight at Tom as he came in the door. He had scarcely entered when Clyde Porter launched himself across the floor to grasp his hand. ‘I’ve heard a lot about you, my boy, from Professor Phillips. You’re just the person we need! You’ll do very well! Exceptionally well, a lad of your talent. I have to get away now. Justice calls!’ He dropped Tom’s hand, which he had wrung unceasingly, and bolted out of the door. Thus Tom was inducted into the firm of Gottleys without a question, without being able to ask a question, without being acknowledged as anything more than the words on a curriculum vitae, and a certified harbinger of Ashton munificence.

  Tom’s job was to devil for Clyde Porter - prepare a legal basis for his cases. Often, Clyde Porter asked him questions, the answers to which Clyde Porter already knew very well. ‘Thomas, what’s the Rule in Babcock’s Case?’ ‘You can’t remember?’ Or he would have Tom leaping at the bookshelves to find law reports. ‘Addison v Symons isn’t in the King’s Bench Reports, Thomas. All-England. Didn’t you know that?’

  He felt rebellious at being humiliated, but said nothing. Most of Tom’s colleagues in the law told him he was lucky being able to work for such a man.

  In the back room of Gottley’s, on the light well which admitted little light, Fred Needham, a qualified solicitor had worked for seventeen years. He did the prosaic but profitable work of conveying houses, arranging mortgages, and drafting leases. He sat at his desk like a doll, his straight black hair parted in the middle and shining, black eyes as still as two beads. He could be relied upon to be there from eight o’clock in the morning (having already collected the mail from the firm’s box), until the staff left at six in the evening. He was, for Tom, a friendly repository of technical and procedural information about the law.

  Fred was not a partner. When Tom asked one of the clerks, Roderick Crawford, why, Crawford said callously, ‘Not the right material.’The tea-room gossip belittled Fred. He wasn’t married. He drank too much beer. He always wore the same grey double-breasted suit; it had become baggy, and the lapels had acquired a greasy sheen which was unpleasant to see. Doris Crail, the office matriarch said, “It’s no laughing matter. It’s a disgrace, and something ought to be done,” but Fred appeared to be impervious to hints, and blind to his appearance.

  One morning, Fred failed to arrive at the office. Doris’s testy call to his landlady elicited that he had the ’flu. A call a few days later found that he had been taken to hospital with what his landlady now described as ‘a nervous breakdown’.

  After a week, when Doris Crail had to collect and sort the mail, two hostile letters from mortgage companies were discovered demanding their long overdue securities, and a threatening letter from a client requesting his title documents.

  When Doris showed the letters to Porter, she reported to the tea-room that he looked nauseated. “Get the files from Needham’s desk and I’ll have a look at them,” he demanded.

  Tom was summoned to the back room by Doris. “I can’t move this drawer. It’s locked or jammed,” she said.

  “Let me have a try.” He shoved the drawer roughly, and accidentally pulled it out of its slide. The contents fell on to floor; pencils, rubbers, note-pads. With the drawer out of its place, he was able to look down into the space below where a profusion of legal documents rested. He plunged his hand down through the top opening and scooped up mortgage documents, transfers, titles, tenancy agreements, wills and letters, all of which appeared to have been thrown in at random.

  “My goodness. What is it?” Doris said.

  “Looks to me like a lot of work not completed.”

  When Tom, accompanied by Doris, placed the pile of incomplete securities and files before Porter, he spent a few moments picking them over. He groaned. His calculating eyes knew at once that here was a hoard of documents neglected over months or perhaps longer, obligations unfulfilled. He was contemplating the certainty of claims against the firm for negligence and damages.

  “No wonder Fred insisted on collecting the mail,” Doris said.

  “He’s let me down, and he’s let the firm down,” Porter said, exhaling heavily.

  “The firm’s let him down in a way,” Tom said in the silence.

  “What do you mean, Stavely?” Porter looked at him like a bird of prey, beak poised, ready to strike.

  Tom had always been Thomas. He hesitated, because his comment had been almost involuntary. “I mean… in the back room… for seventeen years.”

  “Mrs Crail, I would be grateful if you would leave us!” Clyde Porter said, bringing both palms down heavily on the desk.

  When Doris had gone, Clyde Porter struggled off his chair, stalked across the room, slammed the yet partly open door, and turned fiercely on Tom. “How dare you speak to me in that manner! And in front of Mrs Crail!”

  “I spoke quite civilly. It’s… what I think, that’s all.”

  “I’m talking, Stavely, about the substance of what you said. It was insulting, uncalled for from a clerk in your position, and entirely without foundation. And unless I have a forthright personal apology from you within twenty-four hours, you will find that you don’t work here any more. Is that clear?”

  A silence.

  “Well, Stavely?” Clyde Porter cocked up his beak, waiting.

  A few more seconds passed in silence.

  “May I go now, sir?”

  2

  His untimely departure from Gottley & Son was still capable of stirring him today, but he calmed as he entered the ‘drawing room’ as it was called; it was lofty with an ornate plaster ceiling, the tall windowpanes displaying a wide view of the lawns and gardens. With its chandeliers, drapes, paintings, tapestries and rugs, the room was a Victorian showpiece, rather than a useful living room. Some of the articles here were beautiful, and priceless; there were two oils by Rubens, a Utrillo, a Monet, a baroque cabinet from the Gobelins’ workshops, jewelled clocks and marquetry tables. The antique furniture had been carefully polished and the gold brocade curtains aired by housekeepers over the y
ears, but the room had only seen the most sedate receptions. Nobody in the latest generation of Ashtons had ever used and enjoyed this grandiose space.

  The pretentious grandeur was like those salons he had seen - as museum pieces now - in Punta Arenas, where the wealthy Chilean colonists, English, Irish and German, preened and paraded themselves in the latest European fashion more than a century ago, at the bottom of the world; Ernest’s forbears at Tamaki Downs probably swaggered about in much the same way.

  He was attracted to a deep red velvet couch which lay invitingly before him, still occupying virtually the same position as it had over twenty years ago, in a quadrangle of other valuable hand-crafted couches drawn up around a Persian carpet. The velvet was only a little faded, and the plumpness had gone from the cushions, but it remained an elegant and inviting seat.

  He eased himself down and rested, recalling his triumph when he had sex with Robyn Ashton - he didn’t seduce her - on the couch, all that time ago. It was an adventure for both of them in getting to know each other better, but that night one of nature’s keys was pressed and consequences followed.

  He told Alison a version of the event after they became close. ‘Robyn and I didn’t exactly grow up together as friends,’ he said. ‘We were children, playing kids’ games in the woods and streams, swimming down at the creek, sailing on the river, riding, camping. Stuart was part of it. But we didn’t seem to be children for very long. Stuart and I were working on the place in our early teens, and then schooling broke up our trio more effectively. Sure, they were rich and I was poor.’

  ‘And you resented it,’ Alison had said.

  ‘The differences between us were the norm, what I’d grown up with,’ he had replied to shrug it off, but even to a six year-old, the differences were glaring.

  ‘Robyn went away to Marsden, a private school for girls in Wellington. I saw her only occasionally and momentarily in summer holidays.’