The Cruel Peak

by Gil Hogg

  “Who do you think you are, Stu? I’ve grown up with the famous Sir Ernest Ashton, and now do I see the great Stuart Ashton emerging? Or perhaps even Sir Stuart?”

  Stuart was without any tincture of humour. “You can be as sarcastic as you like, because you don’t know what it’s like to be publicly recognised for some achievement. I’m recognised internationally for the climbs I’ve achieved and for my television and writing on mountaineering. Those are… achievements.”

  “Heady wine… I hope you’ve made a will leaving your cufflinks to the Canterbury museum.”

  “Arsehole!” Stuart got up abruptly and went back to his line.

  He couldn’t doze now. He had a vision of his future; an aged, thin, tanned, white-haired man tending his cottage garden. A man who had lost his taste for television and books and films and galleries after being satiated with them over a lifetime. A man who was impotent, except perhaps sexually, clinging to the softly agreeable edge of human society. Would he have a female companion or would he be alone? Would he have a child (now an elderly adult) who would be interested enough to visit him? A man who bathed in the Sunday newspapers and the 7pm newscast on television, who led a fortnightly walk for pensioners, and took lessons in ballroom dancing at the town hall. A man in passably good health and poor spirits, who was confronted every day when he got out of bed by the cold fact that he had nothing much to do, and was pained and bored by the effort of doing what little he did do. A man who felt every day that his mind was turning to jelly and tried to disguise it… is this all there is?

  Then he saw an apple box floating past. ‘Rist, rist, rissst,’ one of the lines sounded as it ran out from the reel. They all crowded to the stern as the fish circled reluctantly to the surface. Stuart pulled up a snapper with a golden back, perhaps five pounds in weight. ‘Risssst!’ went one of the other lines.

  “Look,” somebody shouted. A school of porpoises about half a mile away was leaping and diving in pairs and trios; one shot up clear of the waves to stand on its tail for a moment before crashing down like a hooked game-fish.

  Now there were bites on all the lines, and they were bringing up gasping blue cod as fast as they could throw in their baited hooks. Cans of beer were passed around. He hauled a fat, foot-long cod up on his line, and poked diffidently inside the gills of the goggling fish until his forefinger met his thumb. He tore the hook from its mouth with his other hand on the line. He threw the pulsing creature into the box where the catch threshed and thumped. They chopped their bait, now in large chunks, and dug the hooks into it carelessly. The lines were alive in their hands. They called to each other with slaughterhouse excitement.

  He heard a chugging in the distance and saw two small boats heading toward them. The porpoises still cavorted a few hundred yards away, and suddenly, all around the boat the surface rippled with the ‘siseroo, siseroo sisss’, of a school of Kawhai breaking the surface. The sea glittered.

  “Hell, you could walk on them!” he shouted, as the carpet of feeding fish made the water boil.

  5

  He was welcomed as an old friend, with a lot of hugs from both Mark and Felicity Curran. They spread themselves out on the white leather couches in the lounge of the Curran home, with very large gin and tonics, as befits familiars who have done a lot of drinking together. Mark and his wife, and their two children (presently absent at Christ’s College) lived in a spacious house in the wooded, rolling northwest part of Springvale, settled by the leaders of the community and wealthy retired farmers.

  After the smiles and sighs, there was a silence. It had been nearly four years. ‘Jesus, Alison,’ he would say, ‘I sat there staring at them, and them grinning at me, and I had a sudden sensation that nothing had happened in four years. There wasn’t anything to say. I might as well not have been away.’

  Mark was a heavily muscled man, now paunchy, with a reddish-tan complexion and only a dry lock of front hair left on his head. He was much aged from his days at Otago University with Tom. They had shared lodgings; it was a time when they were each eyeing the other’s potential and speculating, sometimes in a drunken stupor, about what might become of them. At one point they were planning to go to Sydney to start an investment fund; a dream of tailored suits and fast cars and champagne and women.

  After graduation, for Mark, the lofty talk about conquering the world ended, and he simply said, ‘I’m going to find a cushy job and play a lot of golf and tennis.’ To Tom’s surprise, that is what Mark did; it was a life objective Tom had difficulty with at the time; but as the years went by, and his own affairs seesawed, it seemed to have more merit than he first thought.

  “How’s the Ashton portfolio?” he asked.

  “Very good. You’d be surprised how we’ve diversified.” Mark apparently wasn’t sure how much he should say about his client, because Tom was an outsider now.

  “Stuart tells me that Tamaki Downs is scraping along,” he said, to help.

  “It’s a vast asset, Tom, whatever happens. Money in the bank.”

  “Stuart isn’t interested in running it,” Tom said.

  “He’s OK. Prices haven’t been great,” Mark said, protectively. “We’re looking for a manager.”

  “What about Tia?”

  “Oh, don’t talk rubbish, Tom!” Felicity put in heavily. “She’s a kid in her twenties.”

  “She has the qualifications, and she seems a very together person.”

  “Ridiculous!” Felicity said.

  “Yes, well, it’s not for us to…” Mark said quietly.

  “If you men are going to talk business…” Felicity said.

  Mark had buried his history degree, qualified as an accountant and joined a small but prosperous practice in Springvale, which after a time was amalgamated with a practice in Timaru, and one in Christchurch. Eventually, these were all acquired by one of the big international firms. Mark profited financially; his biggest client was the Tamaki Downs Company. He was also a director of some of the Ashtons’ other companies, and a trusted adviser of the family.

  He had stuck to sport, his practice and his family, and there seemed to be no irregularities in his life. Years ago, when Tom and Robyn had begun to heat up Springvale, Fairlie and Geraldine with their parties, Felicity virtually withdrew Mark from the scene.

  ‘I don’t care if the Ashtons are Mark’s clients,’ Felicity said to Tom once. ‘It doesn’t mean that he has to screw your wife!’ This was after Felicity had been to bed with him, which was certainly acceptable to her at the time, but she wasn’t going to allow Mark the same latitude with Robyn.

  At one time, before he and Robyn married, Mark and Robyn had been a couple, and perhaps Felicity knew this and didn’t trust Mark. Tom thought Robyn had liked Mark. He had been attractive to women in those days, in a raffish way. She might have married him. The gossip at that time was that she wanted to, but Mark had withdrawn suddenly, and picked up with Felicity. She was an easier girl to cope with.

  Tom had pointed out to Mark, at the time, the Aladdin’s cave of treasure that lay ahead with Robyn. It wasn’t exactly a novel insight, but a nice subject to contemplate over a few drinks. Mark had been too reticent to say much. He was a shy, nervous man under a businesslike veneer. Tom’s guess was that Mark was edgy about a cleverness and sociability in Robyn that he couldn’t match. And he may have been overawed by her money; he had none himself. Felicity, by contrast, was a very unremarkable girl from a Springvale farm labourer’s family. She had incidentally, at that time, acquired the reputation for being an easy lay. She wasn’t challenging.

  Tom jumped into the awkward space in the stalled conversation. He assured the Currans that Alison and the children were well, and talked a little about them. The Currans said what a lovely couple Petra and Darren were. Tom listened to the achievements of the Curran boys at Christ’s College and heard about the renovation of the family apartment in Sydney and their recent vacation in Los Angeles. One or two local names appeared; a politician who was now a Member
of Parliament and a haulage contractor who had died. Tom wheedled Mark’s golf handicap out of him. “Six is brilliant,” he commented, quite impressed. Felicity added that the doctor had forbidden Mark, with his high blood pressure, to play squash, and to concentrate on golf rather than tennis.

  Felicity asked when Alison would be arriving for the wedding; both she and Mark knew Alison from ‘the old days’. Felicity gave a knowing nod when Tom said that Alison wouldn’t be at the wedding. Neither Mark or Felicity asked specifically why, which was either good manners or a tacit acceptance that the Ashton-Stavely excesses of the past still tainted the air. Of course, the Currans would be at the wedding themselves as valued guests.

  “Stuart surprised us by marrying Tia,” Felicity said, dropping a baited hook into a pause.

  “He must have got tired of chasing South Canterbury debs,” Tom said, blandly. He wasn’t going to admit that not only was he surprised, but irked that his good friend had told him nothing about the bride.

  “It was all very sudden. Nobody knew anything,” she sniffed.

  “Love can be like that,” Tom said, flourishing his drink and taking a large gulp.

  “Love my arse,” Felicity exploded, “more like a jaded roue’s desire for sex!”

  “He certainly cut a swathe across the province!” Mark guffawed.

  Felicity frowned sharply at Mark. “We know all about that.” She returned to the subject determinedly, “What do you think of Tia?”

  “Seems a nice girl…”

  “Too young for Stuart, surely, over twenty years.”

  “I don’t know. Is it so important? And Stuart needs all the help he can get with the Downs. She’s a Massey graduate. Knows ten times more about stock and animal husbandry than he’s ever learned.”

  Felicity couldn’t decry this because she hadn’t finished secondary school.

  “She’s a big pea down at the marae I hear,” Mark said.

  “The marae!” Felicity said, huddling into herself on the couch as though there was a chilling breeze in the room.

  “Good luck to them,” Tom said, avoiding Felicity and Mark’s gaze by tossing off the last drop of his ‘big one’ and squinting at the elaborate plaster cornice on the ceiling through the bottom of the glass.

  “Get you another?” Mark asked, always a pressing host to justify his own replenishments.

  Felicity chipped in, “The marae around here is just a new thing, you know, in the last ten years or so. There wasn’t one before. It’s a kind of…” She trailed off, working her mouth without words. “It’s like inventing history.”

  “Tia’s from the Banks Peninsula, I believe,” Mark said.

  “What’s the problem?” Tom wanted to lance the boil.

  Felicity jerked, but remained huddled. “All this mystical stuff about Maori land!” she said, exhaling strongly, standing up and crossing her arms as though she was cold. She moved toward the door. “Excuse me, Tom, I promised to ring my mother…” She trailed the words over her shoulder.

  Mark gritted his teeth when they were alone, and forced a smile at the same time. “You know Felicity, she’s a bit…”

  “Why?”

  Mark paused. He was used to speaking carefully and authoritatively, but the words came out like a groan. “Oh… I dunno!”

  It was a question Tom hardly had to ask. He didn’t think it was entirely her impatience with near-parallel red lines of culture depicted in the Wellington museum. Ever since their mini-affair, on the occasions that he had met Felicity, she was awkward and withdrew from his company as quickly as politeness would allow. He was a very old friend, but also a memory, and an irritant. It was almost as though she had expected more from him in the past than a casual bedding, and that he had disappointed her. He was sure that she was now the irreproachable wife, but he detected her slight contempt for her husband. She could have been saying to Tom, ‘You left me with this guy, now clear out and let me get on with it.’

  “So how’s the job?” he asked Mark.

  Mark swelled his chest and thought again. “Oh, good, great, fine. I spend a lot of my time in Timaru or Christchurch. We’re busy.”

  “Uh-huh. Remember when we were going to chuck things in and go to Oz? Ever think of that now?”

  “No, hell, Oz is where I go on holiday. I wouldn’t want to live there. Not now. And there’s the kid’s schooling here.”

  “Sydney would be a big buzz, and there are plenty of schools there.”

  Mark sat up defensively. He had small, feminine hands which he waved to express himself better. “Look Tom, I have everything I want. A good wife, kids, a job and money. We have a yacht. We live well.”

  He didn’t reply immediately. Mark didn’t look as though he had convinced himself. “It’s a bit like living in a village on the Ashton’s manor, isn’t it? Small town, same people,” Tom said.

  “There’s some wonderful people here!”

  “Who are they?”

  “Don’t be funny.”

  “So no regrets?”

  “Whaddya mean regrets, Tom? I told you, I’m a happy man.”

  He probed Mark gently, accepting another drink. The ‘big ones’ were distancing him from the Curran lounge. “Don’t you feel kind of restricted in Springvale? I mean, it’s a beautiful place, not many people here, in beautiful countryside. It’s sort of quiet, and well, beautiful, but… nothing ever happens.”

  He could have added, ‘Nothing except adultery and boozing, and maybe the odd line of cocaine,’ but he wouldn’t say that, because although the Currans might be heavies on the dinner party circuit, that is about all they were.

  Mark was looking at Tom curiously now, his brow corrugated. “Whaddya mean, nothing happens?” Then his expression smoothed into a grin. “Isn’t the wedding of Petra Stavely something?”

  “Sure…” Tom said warmly. “I’ll explain, Mark. My plane touched down in Auckland before coming on here. I picked up a copy of The Auckland Herald from the steward when we took off. It headlined a taxation niggle, a company fraud, and a Maori claim to fishing rights. I had a sense of déjà vu. I thought it must be the same paper I picked up on my flight four years ago. I checked the date. It was current.”

  “Yeah, well…”

  Mark had set up a defensive wall, and Tom didn’t want to appear to be trying to break it down, at least not any more on this occasion. The hazy look in Mark’s eyes, and the way he wiped the palm of his hand uncertainly across his mouth, suggested to Tom a reflection on goals set, and not pursued.

  He walked across the lawns at Tamaki Downs. The gardeners had fought the wind and the sun successfully and produced a lush carpet. From the pine belt, he could see clear across the golden uplands to the slate gray line of the Southern Alps. At this moment, the snow-topped peaks appeared to be floating above the island like a long cloud. The sight made him want to hoist a pack on his shoulders and start walking; walk out of this thicket of prickly relationships to an icy calm. Then he went inside to a ground floor bathroom with a marble bath and gold-plated taps. On the window-sill in front of him as he used the lavatory was a pink clam shell, and beside it a pile of five smooth, grey river stones, artfully leaning on each other.

  He fondled the stones; they were from a stream at Mt Ruapehu, a trophy which Robyn had gathered. She had relegated them from her bedroom, but they had been faithfully retained by the housekeeper in this inferior position. Just as the red velvet couch had attracted him for reasons which were only partly to do with affection, a short time later his fortunes were diverted at Mt Ruapehu.

  He returned to sit in the sun on a sheltered chair on the lawn and dozed.

  It was about two months after the red couch incident when he swung high above the mountainside at Mt Ruapehu. He could see a puff of steam from the crater of Mt Ngaurahoe. A slight breeze brought a sudden chill. The chairlift passed up a face of rock, a waterfall in summer, now a pillar of ice. The rocks on the face were brown-black, stacked like bricks but crushed into irregulari
ty by the weight of ice above. At the top of the cliff, on gentle slopes, human figures slid down like bright twig insects. Closer, a few teenagers were agilely swerving through a self-made slalom course, throwing up silver veils of snow. After he had been dropped by the chairlift at the crest of the slope, he skied to the end of the slalom course. The children raced past him at speed and stopped daringly near the edge of the cliff in sudden turns; they panted healthy enjoyment.

  Then he skied, and by one in the afternoon he was exhausted; his legs were too tired to control the skis; his face burned, a tomato under his woollen hat. He had a sensation of being crushed between the white earth and the blue sky. He snapped off his skis and planted them upright in the forest of skis and poles outside the cafeteria. He pushed slowly through the crowd. He found Stuart sitting on a rail at the top of the cafeteria steps. Stuart pointed to the drink and the pizza he had ordered for Tom.

  “Where’s Robyn?” Stuart asked.

  “I haven’t seen her since I left the lodge.”

  “You two are OK, are you?”

  Perhaps he sensed that something was wrong. Tom had an urge to confide in him, but although he knew Stuart better than anybody else, he didn’t know how Stuart would react. Stuart had liberal views, but where the Ashton clan was concerned, Tom thought he cherished a spotless escutcheon.

  “Of course we’re OK. You know she likes to ski blue.”

  Stuart munched his pizza enthusiastically. He had a way of picking up articles in his large hands, or tasting a morsel of food, which showed the pleasure these things evoked in him. His gusto in doing simple things was infectious. Alone, Tom might have gulped the pizza down without remarking its taste, but today he lingered over every mouthful, so hungry that he couldn’t pause to talk, but so anxious to taste every morsel that he couldn’t hurry. The lemon drink, half filled with crushed ice, pierced his sticky throat.