“He wasn’t home.”
“Oh. Oh, I’m sorry. So you didn’t see him?”
“I met him for about ten seconds. He came in just after we arrived about six o’clock, grabbed something to eat and was gone again. He was on night shift, doing two jobs apparently. Pity. Still, it wasn’t an entirely wasted trip. I talked to the mother. The mother was there.”
It was late when I got back to Wellington. I arrived with an armful of old roses that Melanie Woodhouse, George’s wife, had insisted on cutting and sending down for Lisbeth. “Oh that Woodhouse!” Lisbeth said. “She’s famous.” Apparently Melanie Woodhouse was an internationally-known rosarian.
We talked about that and the Woodhouses. “You think I’m obsessional,” I said. “You should hear what George Woodhouse says about the father. Every year he comes back at the end of the season when everyone’s finished and cleans out the woolshed. It’s his prerogative, he won’t let anyone else touch it. He gets in amongst all the shit, comes out smelling like a drain. He wheels it out on a wheelbarrow. They spread it on the garden. Workaholic. The father used to bring Huey when he was small, shearing and rousing, brought the whole family, then after shearing the father would be back knocking at the window. ‘Any jobs going?’ He was there the other day, George said. Turned up at four in the morning, tap tap at the window. Woke George up. ‘Any jobs going?’ Of course he wants to be paid.”
“You stayed with them?”
“With George and his missus, yes. Lovely couple.
George reckons the father can’t afford to pay his telephone bills, yet he’s getting an 0800 number so Huey can ring him up from the prison in Auckland.”
“Pity you weren’t able to talk to him.”
“I offered to come back in the morning but he wasn’t keen. Said they had to visit one of the daughters somewhere.”
“He wasn’t just putting you off?”
“Possibly. I don’t think so. Interesting how they live. It’s a village, friendly little place. There’s a pub and a store, local museum, even a golf course. They seem to be well liked in the village. Everyone knows who they are. But when you ask around, it’s a sort of blank. Nobody can tell you anything about them.”
“They’re keeping their heads down, obviously. I know families like that.”
“Where, in Europe?”
“Here too in New Zealand.”
“Jewish families perhaps. Chinese maybe. But there’s a reason for that. Oh well. You were right by the way—the parents don’t speak a word of Maori.”
“I thought you said Huey went to a Maori college somewhere?”
“Yes. It’s over the hill. Pikipiki is up against the ranges on the Cornford side, and on the other side is the Maori college. Huey was there from about eleven on. That’s something I did ask the father when he came in.”
“So you did talk to the father.”
“Just for a moment. He was defensive. I suppose Huey must have had a scholarship to go to the college. He wanted to do Maori Studies, dead keen at first, his mother said. So I asked them about it. ‘He seems to have lost interest in the Maori side,’ I said to them. The mother didn’t say anything. The father got up from the table. ‘I told him,’ the father said. ‘I give him the option to learn Maori if he wanted but I told him, on one condition: You don’t come back in this house and hold it over us.’ He was quite vehement.”
“It’s understandable,” Lisbeth said.
“Is it? He stormed out. He got up from the table and got something from the fridge and was gone.”
Lisbeth said after a pause, “You know, I pictured the father as someone quite different from the person you describe.”
“How? I never described him.”
“Less abrasive, a little monkey man almost. Wispy. You dreamed about him, you said. That’s the picture I got. What’s the mother like?”
I said, “I wish now that I’d visited the college. The mother? I liked her. She reminded me of one of Dickens’s nurses, nice smell—‘a peculiar fragrance was borne upon the breeze, as if a passing fairy had hiccoughed’. Nice wet-nurse smell—”
“Doesn’t sound like Dickens to me. Dickens’s nurses were horrible.”
“Well, the mother isn’t. Warm mealy smell. Smell of pancake that’s been soaked in milk. The mother was in the shower when I arrived and apologised when she let me in. She can’t have been wearing much. Gusts of warm air coming out of her. Very thoft thpoken. I couldn’t understand what she was saying at first. She’d forgotten to put her teeth in. She kept bringing out snaps of Huey when he was small to show me, and the two daughters. She’d forgotten I couldn’t see.
“‘They grow up and go away,’ she said. ‘All that’s left are the photographs.’ I liked her a lot.”
“It sounds as if she was pleased to see you.”
“Yes, I think so. She said that on the night it happened, he was on night shift. The old man. She calls the father the old man, he doesn’t seem to have a name. He got in after midnight, about two in the morning. He was just getting into bed, she said, when he felt a blow on the chest. ‘Like a wound’, she said. He rushed straight round to the daughter’s where she was living to see if she was all right. Apparently she’d just had a baby. He thought something had happened to the daughter. It was another three days—”
“How extraordinary.”
“Yes. It was another three days before they knew anything. The body was lying there all that time. Although the police had apparently been to the cottage. But they hadn’t noticed anything. Now why was that? I know. Because of the car. Huey had taken the dead man’s car and then he panicked and tried to sell it, but the ownership papers were wrong or didn’t match up. Well, obviously. So the police were notified. They went to the cottage looking for the owner of the car but never thought to look inside the house. Fancy that. The body was lying there undisturbed. Nobody knew anything till Huey telephoned the father three days later.
“That’s about it,” I said.
“Did the mother say anything else?”
“Not a lot.”
I was suddenly very tired. I realised I had let the mother burble on in her dreamy way without paying her much attention. We had been sitting together on stools at the kitchen table. The floor had sunk a little. The stools wobbled. It was a warm evening. The windows were shut and the air in the kitchen was stifling. The physical closeness of the mother and her warm smell mingling with a smell of boiled socks and other odours took me back to our house by the docks when I was a nipper. When my father left in the morning, I would sit on his wicker stool in the kitchen so as to be opposite my mother while she told me stories as she cut up and peeled the vegetables for the Sunday lunch. I gathered that Huey, however, had never been close to his mother in that way. He preferred rumbling with his younger brother or getting about with his sisters. He was very protective of his sisters, the mother said.
Lisbeth said, “You’re tired. You’ve had a lovely time, I can see that. But you’re not really any further ahead, are you?”
I have remembered something Huey’s mother said that evening. Now, after fifteen years, I remember. She said to me, “He liked brushing his teeth.” It struck me at the time as a curious thing for her to have said. When you’d have expected her to say, “He liked playing footy”, or “He liked sweets.” But perhaps I am remembering wrong, maybe it was the teacher, Di Abbott, who said it, not the mother at all. When Mrs Abbott went to fetch Huey at the aunty’s, after he’d run away from school that time, I remember her telling me she knocked at the door of the aunt’s, and the aunty came to the door and said, “Yes, he’s here. I’ll get him.” Then the aunt said to Mrs Abbott, “Come in, he’s in the bathroom. He’s probably doing his teeth.” The aunty added, “He’s funny like that.”
I suppose it doesn’t matter much who said it, mother or teacher. The question is, did I notice? I’m talking about a fetish about cleanliness, a giveaway. Did it register with me at the time? Probably not. Then again, it must have d
one. How else could I have been so confident that my hunch was right?
NINE
THE MATTER REMAINED dark as ever. Again and again I tried to imagine Huey’s actual presence, what he had looked like as a boy in the snapshots his mother had brought out for me, as if by summoning up his physical shape from the outside I might see into the quality of his mind and find an answer to the riddle that plagued me. And now? What did he look like as an adult? As a twenty-two-year-old? Was he disfigured? Did he bear scars from the scalding still? Huey had expressed remorse again and again (“I will take him with me to the grave”…“I would give my life to have the old geezer alive and kicking again”). But did the remorse show? Was it genuine? Huey had a light speaking voice. The register went up at the end of each sentence. (Not that he said very much.) I don’t know why but I pictured someone with a slightly crooked foot, and a limp.
He was powerfully built, Lawrence said.
Were I a novelist sitting down to invent a tale of intrigue and mystery, I can’t imagine picking a character like Huey Dunstan or devising a plot that relied so much on intuition, not to say guesswork, where logic and a priori reasoning were submerged in so much cottonwool and where the process of deduction from empirical facts led, precisely, nowhere.
One day Lisbeth said to me, “I’ve got a feeling the father is heading for a breakdown.”
“Eh?”
“Either a breakdown or a stroke.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Guilt. He’s trying to assuage the guilt.” Now what, I thought.
“There’s no other explanation, Charlie. You say the father is beggaring himself for the sake of the son. Making sacrifices. You keep talking about a person Glen and nasty noises in a caravan. What if nothing happened in the caravan?”
“Just a minute.”
“What if there was no caravan? Seems to me you’ve been taking a lot for granted.”
“Now just a minute!”
“Has anyone ever checked—checked, verified, corroborated—that there was an actual caravan? What if it didn’t exist? What if everything took place not in a caravan but in the home? You say the father disciplined the boy for stealing. ‘Disciplined’? He picked up the kid and threw him against the wall. He did. It’s in the transcripts. How do you know that that wasn’t just the beginning? You said yourself the punishment was recurring.”
“Good lord. You’re not suggesting—?”
Lisbeth was silent. I felt a constriction in the throat and had difficulty breathing. I had to sit down.
She said, “I have to go out in a minute. By the way, I forgot to tell you. Lawrence rang yesterday. He said he wanted your opinion on something but it wasn’t urgent. I think he just wanted to chat.”
“It wasn’t to do with the case?”
“Don’t think so. We talked for about ten minutes. He said he’s been asked to run for mayor in Cornford. Did you know about that? I laughed, told him it was a mug’s game. We had quite a chat. I told him my theory about the father being the one.”
“You didn’t!”
“Why not? It can’t do any harm.”
“What did he say?”
“He sounded intrigued.”
I moistened my tongue and said, “What exactly did Lawrence say when you told him your theory?”
“I don’t remember. He didn’t say anything.”
*
The father?
I thought about it for a long time after she went out. I told myself the idea was ludicrous, even as I continued to turn over the possibility in my mind. Lisbeth has a way of upsetting one’s preconceptions and insinuating a thought into the subconscious that remains like a hangover long after the trouble has passed. All right. The father was a hard man. That was what Huey had said, “a hard man”. Yet I had presupposed a bond of affection between father and son, a deep bond, that remained unbroken. Certainly the father had “disciplined” the boy. But what did that mean? Certainly father and son had moved apart in the days before the killing and a violent argument had taken place when Huey announced he was going away, so the court heard. The word that appeared in the transcripts was “devastating”.
“What do you mean, ‘devastating’?” Lawrence had asked the father. He cross-examined the father saying, “Did the two of you come to blows?”
“No, no,” the father replied, mildly. “I think we just avoided each other.”
For some reason Lawrence had accepted the father’s reply uncritically and left it at that.
The father was quite fly, according to George Woodhouse. He drove a five-dollar car of Russian descent, a small ill-tempered vehicle with a bent fender and a broken side lamp; the windscreen was pitted and on the back seat sat a plastic drench can containing petrol, with a hose running under the bonnet to the engine. The petrol tank had rusted out.
So what did that make him?
There was something about the father that resisted close analysis. OK, he had given the boy a hiding for stealing a sum of money when he was seven; he had picked up the boy and thrown him against a wall. He could be violent. But I refused to see him as a monster.
I heard nothing from Lawrence. I had not told him about my visit to Pikipiki and saw no reason to inform him now. I spent the days preparing a seminar on prison reform and reading into jurisprudence, of all things, trying to plumb the breaches of human rights that were occurring in Fiji (there had been another coup), and hoping the New Zealand government in its wisdom might send me up there again. The seminar I had been asked to organise, on “prisons and problems”, was to be held at the Quaker Settlement in Wanganui. A Quaker most of my life, I had a mistrust of orthodoxy—I think of spirituality in terms of individual relationships and the memory of people I have known and admired—and had never visited the Friends’ Settlement at Wanganui where the young James K. Baxter had once gone to school. I accepted the commission with some reluctance.
The days passed. In February Lisbeth’s cousin Bubi came from Melbourne. The two cousins had been at school in Hungary when the war came, then fled with their parents to Austria when the Soviet Red Army entered Hungary and “liberated” them in 1945. They had fetched up in displaced persons’ camps in Austria, then lost touch and found each other again twenty years later on the other side of the world, Bubi having migrated to Melbourne and Lisbeth, after meeting a New Zealand diplomat, having married him and ended up in Wellington. Lisbeth and I met in 1966 after she and her husband separated. We were married in 1968.
Some time in March I was approached by a publisher to write my memoirs. I protested, saying that although I was the author of more than two hundred published papers and articles, none of them having the slightest pretension to literary merit, I didn’t see that a book about my life would prove any different. The editor who approached me was one of those postmodern persons, by name Victor (actually a “she”), who seemed to think of Quakers as slightly trembling Anglicans who had run amok; after pumping Lisbeth about me, she had evidently persuaded herself that a blind Quaker who had seduced his landlady’s niece at fourteen and later smuggled her aboard an Admiralty cruiser in Plymouth dock must have the potential of a Dan Brown. “Don’t hold back,” she telephoned. “Let it all hang out.” The woman rang when I was in the bath. I was affronted.
Little does she know how I hate writing about my emotions!
However, I said I would try. I drafted a couple of early chapters and showed them to Lisbeth. “How interesting,” Lisbeth said. “You realise you haven’t said a word about your mother?”
“Nonsense. There’s pages and pages.”
“No, hardly anything. It’s all about your beloved grandfather.”
My mother [I had put] was a gentle creature. She gave me my first book. I don’t remember her ever smiling, except once when she was sitting down one day to peel the vegetables for the Sunday lunch and she saw me looking at her across the kitchen table. “What are you looking at?” she said. “You,” I said. I had caught her smiling secretly to he
rself and was waiting for further developments. “What is it?” I said to her, and she stopped smiling. Smack. Like that. As if smiling were forbidden, as if she were committing some immoral act.
But that was all I’d said about her. (Lisbeth was right.) The memory of my mother’s dear face had suddenly metamorphosed into her father’s, my maternal grandfather—into the half-smile that was always playing about his lips. And I had begun writing about my grandfather instead. In the writing, something stranger still had happened:
My grandfather [I had written] was a ganger. He told me about his time on the lighters and working with gangs cleaning up after the bargees had unloaded their cargoes of coal and jute and tanning extracts. He loved the docks. His stories were so vivid, the sounds and smells he brought to life so penetrating and pungent, that even today nearly seventy years on I can not only recall them but can also hear and smell them upon recollection—the noise of dray horses striking the cobbles, the cries of the lightermen in the fog-filled air, the oppressive odour of boots and dog dung and the sharp stinging smell of vinegar from a pickle factory.
The air was saturated with pungent smells [I continued], the warm fetid breath expelled from the nostrils of the animals as the shearers paused in the early morning watching the mist clear over the valley through the rows of tall kahikateas…
I stopped, puzzled. I was listening to the words coming from my screen reader in the study. I walked out of the study and into the living room. Lisbeth was on the phone, talking to her friend Miriam. I went back into the study and reviewed the text again, hearing in a state of some bewilderment the lines I had dictated played back to me. How to explain it? Blackwall Pier had become a sheep farm in Pikipiki. George Woodhouse’s woolshed near Pikipiki overlooked a wide valley of kahikatea trees ranged like torsoes running almost to the horizon. At some subliminal level my mind had allowed a scene by a clutch of dockside streets in London to be displaced by an image of Huey’s father bending over with the hand-piece shearing for George Woodhouse in the early morning in central New Zealand. I had fast-forwarded everything seventy years without realising.
The Crime of Huey Dunstan Page 8
