Living As a Moon

by Owen Marshall

  When I shifted to Auckland we spent a good deal of time together again, as single guys: not much in the clubs, but leisurely meals at smaller restaurants, and companionship at the movies, or theatre. Some evenings we’d just sit in his lounge, or mine, with a bottle of wine and put the world to rights. He’d talk quite openly about his cases, as I would about the business world. We trusted each other’s confidentiality. He was into politics, and I preferred classical music.

  Michael had a house set in the native bush close to Titirangi, and I have a more modest place in Mount Eden. Neither of us lived as monks, and quite often we made up a foursome and went to a gallery opening, or festival session. Katherine Broughton was the woman with Michael on these occasions. She was a legal secretary at his work: as dark and slender as Emma, but more demonstrative and more relaxed.

  Once four of us flew to Australia for the Melbourne Cup, although I cared nothing for racing. We had a couple of nights in Sydney too, and went to see Death of a Salesman. I became accustomed to Katherine’s distinctive and attractive laugh: sudden and often at things only she found amusing. She wore her hair long, and I admired the dark sheen of it.

  Another trip we did together was to Wanaka and Queenstown. Four of us flew to Dunedin and hired a car for a summer week.

  We spent a lot of time talking as we travelled, as we visited wineries and restaurants, as we sat in motel units. Katherine knew interesting stuff about Japan, because her father had taught at an international school there. She said that we don’t realise that there’s an entrenched traditional class system in Japan that still has enormous influence, but it’s not apparent to outsiders. She thought that in the end it would be the oriental races that controlled the world. I don’t remember what the woman I was with talked about. Katherine had a distinctive perfume — faint, but lingering.

  Michael liked a drink, especially beer, but seemed impervious to any effect of alcohol, not so much because of muscle mass, I think, as the power of his will. I’ve known few people with such implacable self-control. He hit me once, but it wasn’t a lapse, just full intention. We were at a party in Mission Bay, not long after I came back from establishing an outlet for my company in Singapore. The hosts were a couple rather older than us who ran an employment agency and bred Siamese cats that skulked, with the occasional strangulated cries, in the shrubbery at the edge of the paved barbecue area.

  You have no experience of yourself as the complete drunk: no personal recall of the point of extremis. That’s one reason you tend to dismiss the extent of your offensiveness. I remember only brief frames: one was the effort to skewer a cat with the barbecue fork, one reducing a silly woman to tears with loud argument, one a confrontation with the indignant hostess, one being punched hard in the ribs by Michael. There was the pain of the blow, and the pain of having it administered by a friend. There was the moon on the water as he drove me home round the bays and refused to talk to me. There was the vague, sour guilt the next morning, and two more people whom I hoped not to meet again.

  I rang the cat hosts and apologised. The woman’s response was icy brevity. I also rang Michael. ‘So much of what we do in life is involuntary,’ I said. ‘I blame those bloody Siamese cats. The noise of them would drive anyone to drink.’

  ‘You’re not funny, or clever,’ he said. ‘You’re a sad fuck who hurts himself, and other people as well.’

  ‘I’ve just hit a rough patch.’

  ‘You need to take stock of things before it’s too late,’ Michael said. ‘Time to stop playing silly buggers.’

  He was right, but that didn’t influence what life had in store for him. What’s fair has little to do with what happens, and that’s fortunate for most of us, but not Michael. Two weeks later he was the victim of a hit and run driver while jogging on a gravel road through the Waitakere reserve. He lay in a ditch for thirty-six hours before being discovered. The coroner concluded he would have been alive for some of that time. The driver responsible was eventually found, but that didn’t seem important to me. Michael was gone, that was the thing. The best and oldest friend, the one most casually treated and most valued.

  Michael’s father was long dead, but I met his mother at the service in Tauranga, and went back briefly afterwards to that same house in which I’d stayed for a single night while in the sixth form. I hadn’t seen Mrs Chute for many years, and Penny only a couple of times since school days, when she and her husband came north to visit her brother. ‘I can’t make any sense of it at all,’ said Penny outside the crematorium. ‘Just can’t see why someone with such talent and strength would have that happen. And Mum shouldn’t have had a religious service. You know Michael wasn’t religious at all. It was hypocritical, but nothing I said would talk her out of it.’

  At the house Mrs Chute took refuge in duties as a hostess, bearing plates of club sandwiches, and spotting mourners who had no tea or coffee to console them. But when you were close to her, a quivering rigidity could be seen in her face.

  She put her hand on my forearm. ‘I’ve put some photos on the other table,’ she said. ‘There’s some of you together at varsity, and you’re in the wedding ones of course. I’ve heard nothing from Frances. Not a line, not a phone call. I don’t suppose you’ve kept in touch?’

  Mrs Chute had placed the photographs in rough chronological order, so it was possible, in a circuit of the dining room table, to have a haphazard overview of Michael’s life. Because he was a physically imposing guy, it was especially difficult to realise that now he filled no space in the world at all. There were the formal shots of the wedding, graduation, Michael being called to the bar, and candid pictures, including one of us both on the Honda 350 he had when we flatted in Patiti Crescent.

  Katherine came to the house after the service, but her relationship with Michael was unknown to his mother. ‘I’m just someone from the office as far as the family’s concerned,’ she told me. She was pleased to find me there, as she knew hardly anybody else. Katherine, too, was surprised that Frances hadn’t appeared. ‘I met her once briefly at work,’ she said. ‘It was after the divorce and over some division of assets stuff. I think Michael pretty much gave her everything she asked for.’ I almost said that was out of character from my experience, but it wasn’t the time for that sort of comment. Katherine didn’t stay long, and after looking at the photographs, slipped away. Together with Mrs Chute and Penny, I suppose she was the most affected by Michael’s death, but I was probably the only one there who knew that. Perhaps her grief was augmented by not being able to declare or share it, by not appearing in any of the snapshots of Michael’s life. As I waited to say goodbye to Mrs Chute, I saw through the window Katherine going down to her car alone. Dark clothes, dark hair and neatly slim. During our conversation we hadn’t said anything significant of our loss.

  ‘Did you like the the vicar’s words about Michael?’ Mrs Chute asked me as I was leaving.

  ‘Very moving,’ I said. After all a eulogy, the whole business, is more for the benefit of the living than the dead. Michael couldn’t give a stuff.

  ‘He’ll live always in our hearts,’ his mother said.

  To be honest I think my feeling after Michael’s death, initially at least, was weariness rather than anger, or sorrow. There was a pointlessness about so much that I’d assumed significant before. But that would pass, I told myself. It’s a predictable emotional response and then equilibrium is restored.

  Katherine rang me a fortnight after the cremation.

  She wanted the chance to talk about Michael, she said, and we met during lunchtime in a small sushi bar not far from her work. She was there when I arrived, and I sat on a high stool beside her and ate sushi, although it’s not my sort of food. Katherine had only a herbal tea. ‘How are you managing?’ I said.

  ‘I’m feeling rotten.’

  ‘A sudden death like that. It’s such a shock, and there’s no chance to say goodbye, is there? No preparedness at all.’

  ‘You don’t mind talking?’ sh
e said.

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘I’m feeling rotten because he’s gone, and because I’m pregnant,’ Katherine said. Her voice was quiet, composed, but a declaration of pregnancy has an intrinsically melodramatic element somehow, and for just a moment I was aware of that, and just as quickly ashamed of the response. Maybe because a man never faces pregnancy, there’s always an element of make-believe, or amused complacency — even deus ex machina.

  ‘Did Michael know?’ I said.

  ‘Oh yes. We’d been talking about it a lot before he was killed. He wasn’t keen on having it, although he said he’d support me in whatever decision I made. I don’t doubt that at all. You know what he’s like.’

  ‘Were you going to get married?’ I wasn’t embarrassed to ask Katherine such a question — after all she’d come to me — but there was a sense that I was intruding into Michael’s life when he didn’t have one any more. He’d made the decision not to tell me of the most important thing happening to him, and now it was being revealed to me in a way over which he had no control. Michael and I had come to value privacy in our friendship.

  ‘He didn’t want to get married,’ Katherine said. ‘He had that experience with Frances, and I think his parents’ marriage was pretty unhappy. Not that he talked about them a hell of a lot, but it was a sad family in many ways, I think. There wasn’t any neglect, or abuse, or anything, but an absence of warmth I suppose.’

  I looked at the counter trays of sushi, so many different compositions that seemed the same at a glance. I remembered the separateness of Michael’s parents within their marriage, and the brisk personal ambition he and Frances showed when they were together. ‘What are you going to do?’ I asked.

  ‘I need to talk to his mother. She should know that Michael’s left a child shouldn’t she. My hope is that she’ll welcome it — a grandchild to make up just a bit for Michael. That’s my main reason, but also I think I’m entitled to some support from Michael’s estate. He was going to buy an apartment for us and see to things when I couldn’t work. You know he was quite well off by ordinary standards, and my job isn’t highly paid. I stayed there at the office mainly because of him. Everybody there knew.’

  Even in that situation, having lost the man she loved, and left pregnant and unmarried, Katherine could show sensitivity to the feelings of Michael’s family. I admired her a lot for that. She could have gone in guns blazing to get what she could for herself and the baby, but she had concern for Mrs Chute, Penny and Michael’s memory. She had never met his family until he was dead, and wanted my advice, my assistance as to the best way to make an approach. She didn’t want to go there with demands, she said, but as someone who had loved Michael as much as they had, and with a living part of him to share. ‘I don’t think I can do it on my own,’ she said, ‘but you’ve known them for years.’

  ‘Well, not really. I saw a bit of them when we were at school and varsity, but bugger all since.’

  ‘At least they know who you are.’

  ‘Katherine, I’m happy to do everything I can,’ I said. ‘You’re in a hell of a position, and the family needs to be told for all sorts of reasons. It’ll work out.’

  What a situation for her, but I never doubted her sincerity. I’d seen them together, I knew the loyalty of Michael’s nature, and in an age of DNA testing there was no swiftie to be pulled regarding paternity — not that I mentioned that to Katherine. Did we make a comfortable couple, sitting on our high stools in the sushi bar and talking confidentially? She looked as slim as ever to me. Who could guess that we talked of a road killing, personal and family grief, an unborn child, and money. Michael had come to the best time of his life, and not been allowed to prolong it. ‘At first,’ said Katherine, ‘I thought of ending it for both of us as well, but I snapped out of that.’

  I rang Mrs Chute and said I’d like to come down for a chat about Michael. I didn’t mention that Katherine would be coming with me, because that would lead to questions I didn’t want to answer on the phone. The Sunday we went was a cloudless day, with the blue sky like a great suction cup that threatened to draw us from the surface roads, shelter belts and green dairy farms. Katherine and I talked about the trip to the Melbourne Cup, and the Central Otago trip, and she asked me about Michael when he was younger. She was surprised when I said he had something of a reputation as a tightwad, and hated to be taken in over anything to do with money. She said he was always wanting to buy things for her, and often left money in her office desk. She was surprised too that he’d been so good at sport, and said he’d jogged and gone to the gym only for health reasons. Recently he’d become interested in local government through his work, she said, and I remembered his talk about what was needed to preserve the lifestyle he enjoyed in the Waitakeres.

  Katherine wasn’t feeling great, and we made two comfort stops before Tauranga. She was going as the pregnant girlfriend to visit the unsuspecting mother of her dead lover: enough to deal with surely without having morning sickness. The paleness of her face accentuated her dark hair, and she had small emerald studs in her ears. There was a symmetry about her as a woman that was especially attractive. Everything seemed to be in keeping. ‘How do you think she’ll take it?’ she asked as we neared the Chutes’ place.

  ‘Whatever the outcome, you’ve got nothing to be ashamed of at all.’

  Mrs Chute hadn’t gone to any trouble for me. She was in her gardening clothes and wielding secateurs when we arrived. I think she assumed Katherine was my girlfriend, and didn’t seem too put out by her appearance. The three of us sat on white plastic chairs on the verandah, the overhang of which reduced somewhat the blue, expansive sky. Mrs Chute said she was finding the section a trial, and was thinking of selling and moving to be closer to Penny in Palmerston North. She remembered that Katherine had worked for Michael’s firm, and she said she’d had a very nice card from the partners and staff there.

  It seemed to me that the longer Katherine and I left telling her the reason for our visit, the harder it would be, and I didn’t want Katherine to have to do it. When Mrs Chute went into the house to get coffee for us, I followed her, and stood by the bench as she prepared the tray. ‘I hope you both won’t mind instant,’ she said. ‘I’ve got used to it now there’s only me. I don’t bake now either.’

  ‘Katherine was Michael’s partner,’ I said. ‘They were together for over two years before he died.’ Mrs Chute was feeling the side of the jug to judge its temperature.

  ‘Well that’s all over now,’ she said. ‘Michael never mentioned anything to me, but it’s very sad for her. Maybe she’d like to visit the crematorium gardens and see the plaque. I had it put on the natural stone terrace wall, quite close to his father.’ I think that was the first time I ever heard her refer directly to her husband.

  ‘She’s pregnant with Michael’s baby.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about that,’ she said. ‘Nothing’s been said about any pregnancy, and Michael’s gone, hasn’t he.’ I suppose I had expected Mrs Chute to show signs of shock, or dismay, or even joy perhaps, but she didn’t look directly at me, kept fiddling with the tea things, the kettle, the cellophane on the chocolate sultana biscuits. Just the way she had found distraction when Michael’s father was alive. There wasn’t any easy way to drive things home to Mrs Chute. I told her there wasn’t any doubt about the baby, and what a wonderful thing it could be for all of them. On the other hand there could be an appeal to the court for recognition of parentage and support from Michael’s estate, with all the publicity for the family that entailed.

  ‘Michael loved her very much.’ I said. ‘He often told me.’ He hadn’t, but it was true nevertheless.

  ‘Why didn’t they get married then?’ asked Mrs Chute.

  ‘Ask yourself what experience he had of marriage,’ I said. ‘What he saw of marriage here, and then with Frances. Why would he want any of that again?’

  It was abrupt and cruel. I knew that even as I said it, but there wasn’t time
for sensitivity. Katherine was waiting on the verandah, alone and pregnant. I expected Michael’s mother to fire up at what I’d said, but she turned to me, gave a sort of smile. ‘But you’ve never been married have you?’ she said. She was looking directly at me: for the first time I noticed how dark were the irises of her eyes in comparison with the hollow paleness of her complexion and her hair from which age had leached out the vital colours. ‘Never mind, never mind,’ she said after a pause, as if I’d made an apology. ‘I’ll go and talk to Katherine. What’s her other name again?’

  ‘Katherine Broughton,’ I said.

  She took the tray with the instant coffee and bought biscuits, walked from the kitchen down the passage. I didn’t follow immediately. The rest was up to them. It was women’s work: sons, lovers, pregnancy, babies, families, compromise. When I did go to the door I could see them farther down the verandah, talking steadily, or listening. Mrs Chute’s stained gardening gloves were still on the round table, but she didn’t fiddle with them. I stood far enough out from the door to enjoy the porcelain sky and a glimpse of the sea, but not close enough to overhear Katherine and Mrs Chute. I imagined Michael as a boy in that house. His physical strength, and the indifference to other people’s opinion of him that never left him. I remembered him telling me that his mother didn’t keep well, and now she was making vital decisions, and he was dead.

  Everything that I heard about matters after that visit came from Katherine. I’ve never been in touch with Mrs Chute, or Penny, again. Katherine said that Penny was by far the more understanding of the two, and she was the main benefactor of Michael’s will. Mrs Chute didn’t put up any obstacles to a fair settlement, but she showed no great interest in the baby girl when she was born, while Penny was supportive and wanted her own children to grow up knowing their cousin. I know that was important for Katherine. I like to remember that on the way back to Auckland that day, Katherine told me she didn’t think she could have gone down to see Mrs Chute without me.