The Cruel Peak

by Gil Hogg

  “Y’ can have your hat back if you say you’re a bum!” one of the hidden boys shouted.

  They shrieked with mirth, and Robyn struggled to release herself. Then there was the sound of aggressive intervention by another boy, and she was released. The boy who intervened - Tom assumed it was him - came through a gate further along the fence and returned the hat. The brim was smeared with dirty marks.

  Robyn was speechless for a moment. Her palms were red and blue. “Why didn’t you help me, Tom?” she complained.

  “I didn’t have time, Robyn.”

  “The Dump Road rat!” the boys over the fence chanted.

  The boy, who had hard, thin legs and a bare brown chest said, “Don’t take any notice of them. They’re Sunday School kids.”

  “Kill the Dump Road rat,” one of the boys behind the fence shouted. “Yeah, yeah, yeah!” his companions added, and one of them lobbed over a stone as big as an egg, which struck Robyn on the breastbone. The Dump Road boy dodged back through the gate, apparently in pursuit.

  Robyn looked down the top of her low-necked dress. Tom could see an inflamed area, weeping slightly with blood, and swelling.

  “You’re useless, Tom,” she said.

  “It all happened so quickly!”

  A man in clerical dress appeared in front of them. In the bright light he had smooth, almost girlish features which contrasted with the streak of grey which ran back from the peak of his black hair.

  “Maurice! I’ve been attacked!”

  Robyn pulled down the bodice of her dress to show the wound. They sat down on a bench.

  “At this time of day? In the churchyard?” Maurice was astounded.

  “They were kids. Wild beasts. Seven or eight years old, I guess,”Tom said.

  “Are you all right, Robyn? We must find them…” Maurice said, starting up.

  “No. I don’t ever want to see any of them. I was just a chattel in their hateful game.”

  “We can’t have this, not here,” Maurice protested.

  “We want to talk to you,” Robyn insisted.

  This was the first hint that Tom had received that Robyn herself wanted the meeting. She had previously described it to him as a waste of time. Maurice abandoned his quest instantly and sank back on the seat.

  “How’s Alison?” Robyn asked.

  “Fine,” Maurice said briskly, in a tone to close the subject of his wife.

  “We used to have such good times together,” Robyn said.

  “Yes,” Maurice admitted with clipped finality.

  “I can’t understand how the old Maurice Hewitt could become a priest,” Robyn said, not detecting the nuances of resistance from Maurice.

  “Well, I have,” Maurice said abruptly.

  A silence followed, Robyn smiling at memories.

  “It’s a bit of an about-turn, that’s all,” Tom said.

  “Well, that’s the way it is. Now, let’s talk about the young couple who have plighted their troth.”

  “Maurice, I don’t think Tom loves me…”

  “Hell, Robyn…”Tom moaned.

  “It’s a bit late to be thinking of putting off the wedding,” Maurice said, relaxing back on the bench, unconcerned. “Why not totter on with it, and see how you go? Lots of people have the jitters beforehand. Shall we walk? It’s hot out here.”

  He stood up and shook out the folds of his long black robe.

  “No. My chest hurts… I could never marry anybody but Tom. We’re fated to be together. I’ve changed since you and I met, Maurice. I’m not so crazy now. I’m supposed to be… What am I? A young actress and director beginning to make my way in professional theatre.”

  “An attractive girl on the threshold of marriage.” Maurice spoke cheerfully, sitting again.

  “I’ve had a baby.” Robyn’s contralto tones underlined the statement.

  “Robyn, surely…” Tom protested.

  “I see… A girl like you isn’t alone in that,” Maurice said, again unsurprised.

  “No, you don’t see. I’ve had a baby and given it away. You can’t know what that means.”

  Again, Maurice was unconcerned. “That’s a decision you made at the time, and very often the wisest one. A regular adoption, I suppose. I’m sure the child went to a good home. The authorities are very careful about this, as you know.”

  Robyn and Tom had already dredged through the emotional agony of her pregnancy, the birth, and the decision to give the child away, a thousand times. All that had shrunk to a speck of discomfort for him, but for Robyn it festered.

  “Robyn, you must try to put it out of your mind. It’s past. You haven’t done anything wrong. Look to the future,” Maurice said.

  “But Tom is…”

  “Tom wouldn’t be marrying you unless he loved you. He’s a good man.”

  “Say something, Tom,” Robyn said.

  “Yes, that’s true. Of course I do… love you.” At this point in their relationship, the more often he declared his love, the more real it seemed.

  Maurice became more stern-looking. “Robyn, I take it you’ve closed matters with the father of the child. The child shouldn’t be a concern for either of you. The state has taken care of that. All that remains is that you’ve broken the relationship with the father. You don’t see each other, and I mean there’s no… remaining affection between you, is there?” Maurice asked.

  “Remaining affection? Shit, Maurice, Tom is the father!”

  “Tom?” Maurice swivelled his head around Robyn to turn his pitted eyes upon Tom. “Surely not.”

  “Surely, yes,” Robyn said.

  Maurice jerked stiff, upright. “But - ”

  “I never had time to love the child,” Robyn said. “It’ll turn into one of those devils over the fence. I’m home now from my overseas travels which nobody knows anything about, except Tom. I’ll lock that time away secretly and settle down to marriage, with my own home, children, and my husband’s career. Never mind my career.”

  “Children? Your career?” Maurice asked derisively, his ease gone, his eyes searing them both, his cheeks hollowed like the menacing priest in the pulpit.

  “I’d like to go on with my career, of course, but…” Robyn went on heedlessly.

  “Tom is the father, and now you’re going to marry him?”

  “For God’s sake, yes! Isn’t that why we’re here?”

  Maurice’s interlocked hands mauled each other.

  “What’s wrong with that?” Robyn asserted, her voice cracking.

  Maurice was silent for a few moments, stirring the grass with the polished pointed toe of his black shoe. “The family will always be incomplete. You’ll realise it every time you look around the breakfast table.”

  Robyn sniffed. “The child could have been taken away by illness. Many people have spaces at the table, as you put it.”

  “The point is that you both cast the child out.” His eyes, by turn, met their eyes.

  She raised her shoulders and dropped them quickly. “We didn’t actually cast him out. I don’t see what we did as a heinous crime… it was in the interests of the child. We had no home. We weren’t married. You think we acted badly? You should face abortion, or an illegitimate birth.”

  “I’m sure the decision to give the child away was the decision you felt you had to make at the time. I’m not criticising it. I’m not saying you acted badly.” His tone was hard and dry.

  “What are you saying, Maurice?” Robyn asked waspishly.

  “I’m saying that it’s a bit late to start thinking about marriage now.”

  “Why, why?” Robyn’s theatrically plaintive voice cracked again.

  “The missing child will haunt you.”

  “Oh, come on! We’re grown ups. We can live with our past,” Robyn snorted.

  “Can you? Maybe. But it won’t be easy. It won’t be untroubled, like marriage ought to be. Was marriage so much out of the question at that time - before you decided to give the baby away?”

 
“Get married pregnant? Everybody knows. And they never forget,” Robyn said.

  “Plenty of couples have a baby which they keep and marry later. Your appearance in the eyes of others, versus the child’s future?” Maurice’s lips curled in rejection.

  “I don’t - didn’t - we didn’t see it that way… did we, Tom? For Christ’s sake, Tom, say something!”

  “I agree…” He wasn’t sure what he was agreeing with. He thought Robyn’s confusion summed up their mental state at the time of the adoption. But Maurice’s firm view now was a shock, or at least something he hadn’t thought about. The fact of having had the child and given it away was more than a shared and secret experience; it was a kind of bond; a constraint which tied him to Robyn. He hadn’t gone beyond that realisation. Now, Maurice Hewitt was purporting to see the future, although in the hot, breezy churchyard at that time, Tom didn’t place weight upon Maurice’s view, didn’t ask himself seriously whether Maurice might be right. He didn’t take Maurice very seriously as a person. The man was an amusing amateur actor who might even now be playing a role, a drunk, and a rake - in fact, he had almost certainly bedded Robyn at some stage. Tom couldn’t at this time regard him as a seer, merely because he appeared in a black cassock and made a prediction. And yes, it was a prediction.

  “What would you have expected us to do?” Robyn asked, cuttingly.

  “Perhaps before you gave the baby away was the time to make a final decision about whether you were going to marry.”

  “I don’t see it. As if the door shut then, on a room we would never be able to return to? That’s nonsense. Tom and I went on together, shared our suffering, and came to realise what we meant to each other. And now we’ve decided to marry. Haven’t we, Tom?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “What was the child like?” Maurice asked softly.

  “What’s that got to do with it?” Robyn said uneasily. “I really don’t think about him too much. A blue-eyed, fair-haired boy. Tom’s colouring. Just a baby. He went to a good family. You can see why I’ve grown up. And what Tom means to me.”

  Maurice looked at her sadly.

  With a flushed face, Robyn said hurriedly, “Tom’s been going around with another woman. I found a woman’s make-up in the car.”

  “Ohhhh! Robyn, why do we have to…” Tom moaned.

  Maurice shook his head in bewilderment, and didn’t look at Tom. He spoke in a resigned and sterile way. “Tom is obviously going to marry you, and he’s a reliable guy. The problem is about you. Your doubts.”

  “My love for Tom is guaranteed!” Robyn’s voice resonated.

  “I think it’s conditional, Robyn. Conditional on Tom loving you in the way you want.”

  “Oh, Maurice, no.”

  “Do you have some misgivings about the marriage, Tom? Do you feel that you and Robyn have missed your opportunity to marry?”

  “No way. I feel like Robyn said. We’ve been through a lot, and now we have to get together…” He didn’t pause for an instant, because they had made their decisions, but he was professing a clear and attractive view of matrimony, when he did feel leery about it. The past with Robyn once had marvellous peaks of enjoyment. Now - at times - the past was like a lacerated body, with wounds that might bleed forever.

  “Maurice, that stuff about missed opportunity is just twaddle,” Robyn said. “Surely we don’t have to talk about things as complicated as that? Please be a priest, and not an amateur psychologist. What about this other woman? Who is she, Tom? She could be my best friend!”

  He began to see that this was what was on Robyn’s mind, even more than confessing her guilt about the lost boy. It was an attempt to screw information, and presumably a declaration of contrition and love, from him.

  “Look, I don’t want to go into this.” Maurice backed away from intimate details the old Maurice would have been glad to discuss in a farcical way. “It’s nothing that will stand in the way of the wedding is it, Tom? You can give Robyn that assurance.”

  He nodded his assent. He was committed to the wedding. He had been forced into admitting the existence of another woman because of Robyn’s discovery - and he supposed she had sensed that there was a part of him that wouldn’t mind if she wanted to call the wedding off.

  “I want to know who it is. It’s only fair,” Robyn said.

  “Nobody you know,” he said, as sincerely as he could. “And it’s all over. All over long ago.”

  “You swear it in front of Maurice?”

  “I do.”

  He told these untruths unhesitatingly, because at this time he was beset by uncertainty. The affair - the relationship - certainly wasn’t over. And of course it did involve somebody Robyn knew very well, and Maurice knew well too; it was his own wife, Alison. He had considered whether to tell Robyn the truth, but the same uncertainty which made him affirm a proposed marriage he didn’t wholeheartedly want, but which had many practical advantages, stopped him revealing a fact which would destroy Alison Hewitt’s already damaged relationship with her husband. In the churchyard this day, Maurice was a cuckold.

  “What about the cosmetics in your car?” Robyn said.

  “They must have been in the glove compartment for months.”

  Robyn seemed satisfied. She had serenely ignored Maurice’s unpalatable advice, and she had wrung enough of an assurance out of Tom. “I’m glad we’ve spoken, Maurice. It’s made me feel better. You haven’t persuaded me of anything, and that’s good. You’ve changed, do you know? At one time, we couldn’t be together for two seconds without having a joke. Do you remember? Now, neither of us want to laugh!”

  “There’s nothing to laugh at in what you’ve told me,” Maurice said resignedly. “I do sincerely wish you both the best of luck.”

  The noisy and salacious humorist of earlier days had become a sombre and cadaverous priest. The wind was starting to blow harder. The trees in the churchyard were shushing. The sun overhead suffused everything with a shadowless, powdery light. They stood up to part.

  “If you don’t mind me saying so, Maurice, you don’t look well. Your colour is… grey,” Robyn said spitefully.

  Robyn and Maurice embraced slightly. He clapped Maurice on the arm.

  “I’m not too well,” Maurice admitted.

  Robyn didn’t stop to enquire into this. She removed her hat, took Tom’s arm and shaking her hair out in the wind, headed for the churchyard gate.

  He passed by Ernest’s bedroom when he returned to Tamaki Downs, having had a steak pie with flaky pastry and brown gravy at Pete’s. Pete was no longer there, but the pie was as appetising as it had always been, served with a polite smile by the Vietnamese proprietor. He had also had a beer in the dark, brass-bound bar at the Royal.

  Ernest saw him and called his name and Tom went into the room. The old man had eaten his meal in bed. A tray rested on the counterpane.

  “So what did your work on the mountain produce?”

  They had reached the stage where they could omit every preliminary, and even every politeness.

  “Nothing. We couldn’t find the man who has the relics.”

  “You don’t believe this tosh, do you?”

  “No, I don’t, but Stuart wants to be certain.”

  “Ah, Stuart…”

  “You can’t blame him.”

  “Things might have been different,” Ernest said, letting his chin sag down on his chest.

  “The world of ‘might have been’. Don’t let’s go there.”

  “If you’d stayed here, Tom…” He had an agreeable melancholy.

  “I could never have stayed…”

  “Why?”

  “Because of the way you treated Stuart.”

  He had stirred the old man up. “Daah! You’ve got a mind like a mincing machine. Measuring every little scrap of life against your swollen ethics.”

  “And the way you treated my mother.”

  Ernest was more restive at this. He jerked his body around in the bed. “Your mother? I
cared very much for Grace. I let her - and you - stay in the house. I never charged any rent…”

  “You never charged any rent? Well, that was generous, I must say. You screwed her at least twice a week, you old goat! I remember you coming around, stinking of liquor, so pissed at times you could hardly stand up. A nice, cheap little fuck-shop in your own backyard.”

  Grace had always insisted to him that Ernest Ashton was a good man, who treated her kindly. ‘Where would we go,’ she had asked Tom when he questioned the visits, ‘a mother and a young boy, with no home and no means of income?’ Besides, he had to concede that she probably got some sexual pleasure from Ernest’s attentions, although she would never have admitted it. She had been cruelly beaten as a wife, and while his father’s death released her from this, she always retained the refuge mentality of the beaten wife. Bill Stavely had punched the spirit out of her. Her feelings of insecurity were as acute after his father’s death as they were before it, and made her a captive on Tamaki Downs.

  “Yes, I cared for Grace,” Ernest insisted in a heavy voice, not looking at him.

  “You kept her in the backyard.”

  Whatever merits there were in Grace’s relationship with Ernest, Tom burned at the thought of the way Ernest had treated her.

  “No!”

  “She was a skivvy in your eyes. A backstairs job. Never a friend.”

  “No.”

  “Did you ever, just once, take Grace out, on your arm, to a party or a show? Did you ever have her up to the house when you were entertaining?”

  “Grace was always up here,” Ernest blustered.

  “Yes, in the kitchen, or cleaning the bathrooms.”

  Tom walked out of the bedroom.

  8

  He flew up to Wellington for a day with Stuart who had board meetings to attend. Tia was with them. The flight was expected to take about two hours. With Stuart at the controls of one of the Ashton Group’s Cessna aircraft, they took off in blustery weather from the airstrip at Tamaki Downs. He was apprehensive at first, although he had flown with Stuart a number of times, but Stuart and Tia were at ease up front, talking about the day ahead, not apparently concerned about the buffeting wind which shook the small plane or the clouds which obscured their vision.