‘I could sit like that for hours. Although it was usually winter when I drove there, almost always there was someone within sight along the beach, single people jogging or couples walking together, or a man carrying a sack from around a point. Or a vehicle moving across the wet sand, its tracks laid out behind it. At one beach, when the wind was right, there were young people on what looked like surfboards with wheels, and a sail that carried them along at a surprising pace. The sails were red or yellow or blue. The movement was so graceful you felt something of the joy of it, even sitting in a car with a plastic cup between your hands. Again depending on the wind, I might hear the hiss as they skidded past.
‘But I have not put it quite correctly, saying it like that a moment ago, “thinking of death”. Rather, it was the hovering presence of it as an idea—like another beach, say, that you knew must stretch there along the coast, beyond the dark high point at the end of the beach where one sat. It was like a tune playing at the back of my mind, whatever else might be occurring to me, taking my attention—the light, the cliffs, the sea coming in, breaking, breaking over and over, and beyond that, always again, so that thinking of death was the same as thinking of life. What is the point, Weston, of trying to say more than that? That programme I was watching the evening before Tom and Gareth insisted we go out to celebrate April’s new job comes back to me. I wonder at those people in the programme, those men and those women who so wanted to step aside, to step further than the limit of where we are told we may think, and I wonder at what point their thinking cuts across the repetition, the thudding rhythm of one moment and then the next, as they decide, quite reasonably, I would prefer this to stop. As Tom and Gareth and April decide each minute for something else entirely, this is where and only where they shall ever choose to be, inside their thin wave whose glitter is all there is.
‘And for an instant there, when the waiter stepped back from the table and the bright light fell against the white cloth, white as places you see in photographs taken by people trekking the Antarctic, the light running too across the cutlery and the knife I held tilted by chance and leaping with it as though I was holding a sliver of lightning in my hand, the man with the kindly face tapered like an axe was watching me so it seemed in the glinting second that it was mine to decide—to hold the wave, or to let it go.
‘I am trying to describe this for you, Weston, not exactly as it occurred of course but in a way that I hope you will understand; that you will see how, with the greatest goodwill in the world, nothing could be different, not after that. It was, however this goes against the drift of your defence, a rational decision that I made.’
She pushes back her chair, her hand resting lightly on her husband’s shoulder, before she moves towards the restrooms, the words ‘Tane’ and ‘Wahine’ for tourists to believe that was what Aucklanders usually said. Instead of entering, she keeps on to the end of the corridor, to an emergency door that leads to the car park. She hoists the light metal bar and steps into the evening. Tom’s car looks almost immodest among the elegant but still lesser makes. She passes an arguing couple at the bottom of the steps. She adjusts the rear-vision mirror, eases the driver’s seat forward. She waves back to a young man on a skateboard who stops inches from the exit drive, heeling back on the board so it rises and flips into his hand, and he touches the peak of his baseball cap without seeming to send her up.
It takes her twenty minutes to drive to the new house. The harbour, quite dark now, stretches out from the bottom of the cliff, where the section ends. ‘This time next month,’ Tom had said two hours before. Meaning they would have moved in, that the house he had dreamed of for years, the biggest name in architecture having told him, yet again, just how pleased he was with how it had turned out, the best site perhaps he had had the luck to work on. Grimsdale had told him that. The harbour as far as Rangitoto, as far as Coromandel, the Barrier—you name it—would be theirs. The ancient pohutukawa angled from the yellow cliffs, those too would be theirs. At Christmas they flared fifty metres to either side.
Mandy feels for the switches inside the front door. The big sheets the decorators spread as they worked are folded and stacked in the hallway. An expanse of glass, divided into sections of different colours that, this time of night, seem so similarly dark, leans in a wooden frame against one wall. She moves efficiently, but without haste. She prises up with a spattered screwdriver lying beside them the lids of one can of paint and then another, before she tilts them. The thick paint pours slowly, folding across itself in smooth spreading swathes. She brings in several old newspapers from a stack on the kitchen bench. She loosens the sheets of newsprint, crumples them, places them in a row along the walls of the lounge, which seems so large and echoing as she walks on its parquet floor and through to another room, where she opens another can of paint. She is fascinated by what she does, aware of its enormity, knowing she has no choice. But there is no emotion as she does so. It is as though there is a script, and this is what she is assigned. It surprises her, how an empty house is so very bare, so echoing, so large. How it is like a garage in fact, rather than a house. She thinks too how obvious, how final, each action is, now she has got around to doing it. Perhaps, she thinks, they are wondering why she has been so long away from the table. Perhaps they have already noticed the car is gone. It surprises her that an image comes into her mind of something running smoothly on rails. The man with the narrow face had been interviewed at one point on a train, between one Dutch city and another. Not that it stopped his talking sense. Truth is what it is wherever one finds it, Mandy thinks, her own mind so level, her hands so steady, as she watches the heavy buckling of paint fall across itself: it is like watching brocade unfold, before she again crushes the paper and places it around the room. She dislikes how bare they look, the rooms, how they ring as she walks across the floors. She takes the first bottle of turpentine from where it stands in a corner of the kitchen with its gleaming benches, its brilliant taps. She removes the cork and lets it drop, then flings her arm out in a circle, the liquid descending like a wide transparent cape. That too is how she thinks of it. She finds a second bottle for another room.
It has taken no more than ten minutes. She then stands at the front door, looking back into the house. She holds the box of matches she has taken from the bench in the kitchen, where the workmen must have left them. She had seen four mugs on the counter. She was glad the workmen felt at home, that they felt free to use whatever was there, although the mugs of course must have been their own, as nothing for the kitchen had yet been moved in. She goes down on one knee, as she remembers seeing people do in church, and sets the tiny yellow smudge of flame against the twists of paper that lead towards the spreading pools of paint. The flame edges to where the paper is wet with turpentine and springs up higher. She turns off the switches inside the door, and now as the fire leaps the walls shake with orange light. She closes the door but leaves the key in the lock. It was not hers, the house. Locking in or out was not for her to decide.
There is a garden seat, dark green if you look at it in daylight, at the far end of the lawn, above the now dark cliffs, and the heavy presence of the ancient trees, leaning out towards the water that glints in tiny jigging points of light. It is a warm evening. She knows they will argue about all this, whoever ‘they’ will be, and it will be expensive. The wisdom of the law does not come cheap, any more than freedom. She hears the first loud crack behind her. A little later, as she sits and looks out across the harbour, she feels as though she is in the centre of an amphitheatre of circling distant houses, with herself at the centre of the darkened stage. But the light is growing taller, surely, behind her? She does not turn, but sees that her hands, lying in her lap, are wearing pale, flickering gloves that are becoming brighter.
Then the voices, calling out. She stands as they approach her, shapes growing against the glare. They seem almost shy, hesitant, speaking carefully, as if to an animal they are unsure of. What on earth do they expect – that she w
ill run away?
‘This is where I live,’ she assures them.
*
He did not tell them, there was no point in telling them, how there were times when he turned from the drinks bar with two glasses in his hands, looked across to his wife on the long Swedish couch, to see her silently shake her head, although it was only minutes since she had said yes, a gin was the very thing, and he turned back and placed them down. Or tell them of times when he would stop at the bedroom door, without her being aware of him, and turn and walk to one of the spare rooms. Only a week before he had stopped the car as they drove through the Domain, when he had said to her, more puzzled than angry, ‘You have to tell me. Whatever it is, you have to tell me.’ She had said to him, as she had said before, ‘I’ll tell you, Tom, if there is anything to tell.’
They were pulled over against a grass verge, only yards from the white marble statue of two quarrelling men, a relic of the city’s once Victorian taste. For most of his life Tom had thought, one day they’ll get rid of it, for God’s sake. He had said to her, in the curious stalled silence of the car, ‘You know that’s not an answer. What you have just said.’
Yes, she knew that. The unfairness of it even, she had said, her being unable to say anything more definite than that. But how was she to tell the man she had lived with for most of her life, how to explain without offending him, that she was walking across a plain, like figures in some story in the Bible, the plain of unbounded boredom, he must not for a moment think he was responsible for that, she couldn’t bear his thinking that. She could not tell him, ‘It is the fact of ashes.’ What a melodramatic way of putting it! But how too might she explain, that melodrama need not destroy the accuracy of the story it tells? Tom would never understand.
As she sat beside him in the warm bubble of the car, his head turned to the marble figures, the ring on his finger tapping against the wheel he continued to hold with both hands, she thought of the documentary with the quiet man with his tapering axe-like face, and the politician who argued against him, who brought down his opened hand on the studio table and shouted, then attempted to laugh at the silliness of what in anger he had said. And the thin-faced man had brought tears to her eyes when he said, ‘It’s because it was my mother that I am willing to be jailed for it.’ As she had watched it Tom left the room to go into his computer and Gareth came back to his favourite line as he saw his mother absorbed in yet another documentary, ‘Try getting a life, can’t you, Mum?’ They were miles away from the plain, from the distant fires burning companionably in the night, where those who crossed it camped. Yet how comforting faces were, when they smiled in the light!
‘I’m sorry, Tom,’ Mandy said. Then lamely, as she knew, ‘Time will take care of it.’ She felt his quiet anger, and his patience too, perhaps even what was left of love, before he said, ‘You’d better get over it soon, I can tell you that.’ And not wanting to hurt her, to leave it there, he said, patting her arm with the hand he took from the wheel, trying to make some kind of joke of it, ‘Otherwise we’re on the skids!’
When something appalling is done, we like to believe that only an aberration can account for it. The word ‘unnatural’ becomes our saving grace. It preserves us as the people we like to believe we are, from the contagion of similarity. Our ploy to excuse us for ourselves. So Weston thought, almost falling asleep with the dullness of it, these little forays into serious thinking as she lay in the no longer steaming water. A lawyer thinking outside the law, hadn’t one of her first tutors who rather fancied himself insisted to his first-year class, is on the verge of making a fool of herself? He was a smug little prick with his so carefully modulated pronouns, and for a term she had thought him marvellous. Romance, that had been another of his sayings, Romance, and then life takes over. He had died in a car crash with someone else’s wife. My God, Weston thought as she stood and reached for the big purple bath towel on its warming rail, I’m not old enough to be a cynic!
She had lain in the bath so long that her fingers were puckered in that way she had believed, when a child, our skin goes after we are dead. At least dozing off in the hot water took her mind from the case, from the woman who still puzzled her, from the law she more and more thought of as a kind of brace that some of us walk in more comfortably than others. She had watched the TV news and the quick panning across those on the steps in front of the court, the reporter sweeping back her blonde hair from a sudden push of wind as she read from her pad and summarised the day, the court’s decision, the reaction of some of those involved. The son spoke angrily, saying his life was in tatters, he had his mother to thank for that. There was a glimpse of the husband, but in the distance. Weston saw herself for a moment, her gown flapping as she turned into the breeze. She already had said there was nothing more to say beyond being pleased with the verdict. Russell Bates, tanned and poised as an actor, said that all things considered the outcome was scarcely a surprise.
Weston knew she had made, as they say, a good fist of it. As she walked through from the bathroom, she saw herself reflected in the ranchslider, her towel swathing her head, her knee-length Tahitian wrap, before she quickly drew the drapes. She sat in the deep leather armchair her father had given her when she graduated. A place he had told her to help forget about work. She poured herself a glass from a newly opened bottle before she took the envelope from where she had placed it on the table, and tucked her legs beneath her in the chair. A good fist of it, if not quite one that she believed. She closed her eyes, held the first mouthful of the wine to savour it. Then she looked at the watch she had put back on, as she always did, before she dressed after her bath. There was something oddly sensual in that, to stand naked for that half minute, with only the thin metal strap against her skin.
The phone would not ring now, it was too late for that. Or perhaps it would. It depended on so much, although she was beyond it mattering too much to her, beyond its distressing her as it might have a few months before. She set the glass on the low table beside the chair, and again slipped the card from its envelope. She had read it several times. Mandy had passed it to her before the closing session, before the jury returned. She had said, ‘Nothing to do with the case, I’m afraid,’ smiling slightly as she said it, her face calm, as it had been since the start, a calmness that itself masked whatever it was that mattered more to her, her indifference, was it, some deep fierce certainty, an attention to more important things, although quite what she had never said. Hinted at, but never actually spelled out.
It was a plain beige card on which she had written, ‘It was good of you to pick them for me that day, and to bring them in.’ Which Weston knew was not the truth, and that perhaps her client had guessed that too but wanted her not to think she had seen through her. For Weston had no sycamore, and no backyard, but remembered from ages back, from the long section above the river in another city where she had been a child, that one was likely to find them there, in the long grass beneath the rust-coloured tree, and sometimes snowdrops there as well, growing close by. She had bought them from a florist’s but rearranged them, removing the wisps of fern and crumpling the paper so it looked as if already used, so Mandy would believe they came from home. That she had picked them for her, that morning.
POSTING
Carol would remember not just to the day, but to the minute, the clock on the third floor of Kirkcaldie & Stains showing almost three, when she knew her life was somewhere other than she assumed it to be.
She was not a woman who had fretted about time passing by, as her close friend Angela had done, Angela who watched each small encroaching line at work at the corner of her eye, the fine threads that minutely began their business of puckering her upper lip, as if they were actually the rumour of some irreversible disease.
‘It is only getting a little older,’ Carol used to say, which annoyed her friend.
‘Each mark is final,’ she declared. When her marriage ended, rather late in the day as she said, and her lawyer won her more than she
felt she really deserved, Angela risked a little plastic reconstruction and went on a holiday in Europe. She was not in the least interested in grasping at romance, as did their mutual friend Jennifer, who had slept with a younger man whose name she realised a few days later she could no more spell than she could the medical condition she learned of a week after that, when she was in another country. No, Angela realistically said, it was not men she was after, simply the feeling that she wasn’t, in her soul, beginning to wither on the tree. Carol told her she was sounding like a junk magazine. ‘Soul,’ Angela reminded her, was hardly among the words frequently come across in Marie Claire.
Carol had been walking since childhood through that remarkable mix of kitsch and quality on an upper level of the big store, as her mother had for more than twenty years before her daughter was born. Her grandmother used to say, with what her daughter came to think of as Kelburn archness, that she had once known a young Mr Kirkcaldie at parties just after the First War, when the boys who survived, as she said, truly appreciated life, and the young women, whether they said so or not, knew there was a distinct glamour in holding a polite young man who was so much luckier than others who did not come back. ‘It was a time,’ her grandmother said, ‘when youth was indeed a gift.’ Carol’s mother never outgrew her embarrassment at hearing the old lady reminisce in that slightly pretentious vein. As a little girl Carol was aware of her mother cutting across the other’s talk. She knew too, without it ever being spelled out to her, that Gran did not think her father was really up to it, up to the family he had come down from Auckland to marry into, after another war. Her own mother’s frankness, as an old lady, was not something Carol had much liked either, her hard acceptance that when it came to romance, she ‘hadn’t backed a winner’.
The Families Page 16
