‘Georgie rang me yesterday,’ said Jessica.
‘She rings us most days. I’ve run out of things to say, but she and Mum talk for ages.’
‘She asked me how I thought you were coping.’
‘I get on a lot better with her now. She’s pretty shrewd about people.’
‘Well, you’d hardly spent any time together as adults before you came back here. She’s not just your little sister now, is she?’
‘So what did you tell her?’
‘That you seemed okay to me. I think she feels you’ll go back to a city paper in the end, and maybe get a better handle on things than before.’
‘I’ve hardly thought about it. I’m in a sort of limbo here and actually quite enjoying it. I could set up as a local reporter for the Otago paper. And I’m expecting quite soon you’ll invite me to move in.’
‘Dream on,’ said Jessica.
‘I could be your cover so nobody knows the truth.’
‘But there’s nothing to be ashamed of. It’s just nobody’s business.’ Not even his business, but he knew from the tone of voice that it wasn’t her intention to make that plain. Sheff watched her hands steady on the steering wheel and her face in profile, mouth relaxed, a slight shimmy of her dark hair because of the car’s movement. She turned briefly to him to smile, but said no more. He let his head tip back and watched the tawny hills fold in around them, with the ground on the shady side of the rock outcrops worn bare by sheep. In places the schist was like old scabs on the land, elsewhere sometimes resembling crouched birds with beaks raised.
The Vallance farmhouse surprised him: large and modern, big windows, and solar panels on the roof, but it stood on the site of an earlier home, for the established garden and fully grown trees were undisturbed in encompassing it, and the sheds and yards a little downhill were much older. ‘These people are fourth-generation farmers,’ said Jessica as she stood by the car and put on the jersey and a cap with a long, soiled brim. No dogs barked them in. There was just the pinging noises from the car as the engine cooled.
As they approached the house a slight, fair-haired young man came out, greeted Jessica with cheerful familiarity and was introduced to Sheff as Sam. His handshake was unusual, and Sheff noticed that the little finger was missing. Sam was interested in Sheff’s article, and talked of farming as becoming increasingly a science and a business, as well as a lifestyle. ‘I don’t imagine my grandfather ever had a vet come onto the property, or ever did an annual budget. He was a hell of a stockman, though, and could read the weather in the sky. I seem to spend as much time with the accountant as anything else.’
There was a high pipe and wire netting gate to keep animals out of the garden, and suspended scrap metal ensured it shut firmly behind them as the three went down to the yards. ‘What paper are you with?’ Sam asked. It’s the custom in the south to take the piss out of anything to do with Auckland, but Sam wasn’t bothered by Sheff’s answer. ‘Well, we’re happy enough with Jessica. She’ll do me. You can quote me on that.’
Jessica paused as they passed the kennels. ‘Flotsam and Jetsam okay?’ she asked Sam, but with a glance at Sheff. She knew he’d pick up the dogs’ names to use in his story as a touch of quaintness in a practical world. There was a small mob of merinos compactly penned at the yards, and Sam and Jessica began checking rams. Sam had a notepad computer and recorded information on each animal as they worked. He was enthusiastic about the part breeding played in improving productivity. National lambing percentages had risen twenty-nine per cent since 1986, mainly through genetics, not management, he said.
Sheff leant on the grey, timber rails and asked questions, made notes from the answers and his casual observation of the activities. His more intense awareness was of Jessica, her competence and ease within her chosen setting. He wished he had a hat, like the others, for the sun beat on his head and he couldn’t look at the blaze of the sky. He had enough experience with photography to be apprehensive concerning the effect of the harsh light, and when Jessica and Sam had finished, he asked if they would come into the shearing shed and let him include them in shots there. The interior was large, shadowed, and almost all the surfaces had a patina from fleece oil, and a lingering smell of dags and sweat. A new wool-press stood out as a modern incongruity. Sam told them the shed was a hundred years old, and the timber had been brought all the way from Wanaka.
‘Come up and have a drink,’ said Sam when Sheff had finished with camera and questions.
‘We should push on. I told the Harpers I’d make it by lunch, and there’s no way now,’ said Jessica.
‘Text them. You can’t go on without a wash-up and a cuppa. Di’s away with a school trip to St Bathans, but she’s left baking and given me instructions about using the plunger.’
They drank seated on a patio paved with the local closely banded stone, and with a view of a shingle creekbed partly obscured by gorse and broom, and with bare sweeps of rising ground beyond. With work over, Sam and Jessica didn’t talk of stock, but of the spread of wilding pines. Both of them belonged to a local group campaigning for greater action against the threat, and gave time cutting and spraying seedlings. Sheff thought of his own constant complaints concerning his chosen profession, and his equally consistent failure to offer anything constructive towards its improvement. ‘There used to be snow tussock up to the stirrups over a lot of this country originally,’ Sam said. ‘Before the sheep and the spread of rabbits, of course. The rabbits have become a fair bastard again. They’ve developed resistance to RHD.’
He leant forward and took two pieces of shortbread with the hand lacking a finger, held them like a small sandwich and took a bite. ‘There’s lots of stuff you could write about here,’ he told Sheff. He seemed very much of the place in which he lived: tanned, fit and with longish, restless hair, itself almost the colour of tussock.
‘One story at a time is enough to be going on with,’ said Jessica, although Sheff was more drawn to Sam’s suggestions than to Albie Waltenberg’s fervent fears of refugee hordes. Perhaps, however, it was just that Sam’s problems were local and manageable, and Albie’s on too large a scale. Misery, malice and malpractice were rampant in so much of the world, and Sheff felt for a moment the privilege of being in a quiet, clean place, with attractive, intelligent people, and where threat was the incremental spread of pine trees and the multiplication of rabbits.
‘What happened to his finger?’ Sheff said when he’d shaken hands again in farewell, and he and Jessica were back in the car.
‘I’ve no idea. I’ve never thought to ask. It doesn’t seem much of a hindrance.’
‘No, but you always wonder about the cause when someone’s got a part missing. So many bizarre possibilities.’
‘It’s how your mind works,’ said Jessica. ‘Always on the lookout for an angle.’
‘I’ve been accused of worse. Anyway, he seems a nice enough chap.’
‘He is. He plays away a lot, though – notorious for it. Poor Di. He’ll drive all day for a shag.’
‘I’ve never heard you talk like that before,’ said Sheff, pleased that she could be so relaxed with him.
‘We’re in the country now.’ Jessica grinned.
‘How long to the Harpers?’
‘About twenty minutes. I’m running late as usual. I guess I’ll have to chop one of the calls.’ She stopped at Sam’s road entrance which was a considerable distance from the house, and Sheff got out to open the gate. Instead of driving through immediately, Jessica came and stood with him on the rise above the gravel road. He watched her taking off the work jersey: an unselfconscious arc of arms and torso that had its own natural grace. ‘Don’t need this on now,’ she said.
The two of them stood for while, attention caught by the landscape. Patches of thyme gave a green-grey smudge to some of the ridges across the dry creek, and because the sun was high there were few shadows, little escape from the heat. There was no other building in sight, no cloud in the burning blue sky. The
landscape was unfettered and with the beauty of harsh simplicity. Quietness is not the same as emptiness, or silence. There were the muted, harmonious sounds of open country – the movement of the breeze, the crunch of gravel at the gate, the faint carry of the stock at the yards.
‘It’s difficult land to farm,’ Jessica said, as if Sheff had expressed admiration. ‘Drought in the summer and snow in the winter.’
‘It’s got something, though, hasn’t it? I’ve always liked it.’
‘Good. You can get yourself sorted in a place like this.’
‘Mum says she doesn’t want to leave, not permanently anyway. I think that’s the best decision, because of all the people she knows here.’
‘She seems a strong person to me,’ said Jessica. She went back to her car and stopped at the door. ‘Bugger,’ she said, and more loudly, ‘Bugger, bugger.’
‘What?’
‘I’ve left my hat at the house. We’ll have to go back.’
‘I’ll wait here,’ Sheff said. ‘Have the gate open for a quick getaway.’
He watched the car accelerate up the track. He was happy in the day and being with Jessica. He felt no need to justify himself, or find some sensible link between present and future. Things couldn’t be reined in, you had to make the best of them. No longer able to believe that life was fair, he gave more weight to love and beauty.
While walking up to Sam’s patio from the yards, he’d found a single stone in his trouser pocket, the last of those few he had taken from Warwick’s bowl, and all of which he thought he’d put in his case. Sheff took it out again to examine while he waited for Jessica. It was small, and so smooth that it reflected sunlight as if from water, and there were glints of green and blue within dark swirls like galactic images.
‘Goodbye, Dad,’ he said. It came without conscious meditation, but brought a surprising relief. So he repeated it several times, and felt better for it. There was no guilt whatsoever. The right thing had been done. Perhaps in the future he’d be able to say goodbye to Charlotte also. It seemed possible now. ‘Goodbye, Dad.’ There was no voice in reply, no apparition, no sudden darkening of the sun, but there was an easing in all around him, and within himself. The landscape held something of his father. There was nothing of the supernatural in that, just the strong, plain truth of association. He placed the stone on the grey gatepost and the sheen was such that it seemed to quiver.
What did it matter that he had no neat plan for the future, and no greater ambition than to be at peace with himself and at ease with others? Here was a place to get himself together, and he could be with his mother when she needed him. And after his visit to the school, he doubted Pamela Rudge would do for him with a staple gun, or stifle him in his sleep. He’d have Jessica’s affection in whatever form she was comfortable with, and accept that. There were people with worse prospects. Millions and millions, no doubt. It was days since he’d experienced a nosebleed, there was no click or discomfort when he turned his neck a long way around, and although there was the faint cicada chorus of tinnitus in his ears, surely that was just because the world was so quiet.
So often little seems to happen, but things are changing all the same. Sheff was okay with that. He would cut himself loose from the tyranny of the past, be open to opportunity and optimism. He would hold no one accountable for the loss of his daughter and father, not even himself. Things were all right, he decided, better than they had been for a long time, and that was enough to be going on with.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I AM GRATEFUL TO the Henderson Arts Trust for the opportunity to be the artist in residence at Henderson House, Alexandra, in 2013, during which time much of this novel was written.
All the people and events in this novel are fictitious, as are some aspects of setting.
OTHER TITLES BY OWEN MARSHALL
Drybread
Living as a Moon
Owen Marshall Selected Stories
The Larnachs
Watch of Gryphons
When Gravity Snaps
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Harlequin Rex
Living as a Moon
Owen Marshall Selected Stories
Sojourn in Arles
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About the Author
OWEN MARSHALL has written, or edited, over twenty-five books. He has held fellowships at the Universities of Canterbury and Otago, and in Menton, France. In 2000, he received the Officer of the Order of New Zealand Merit (ONZM), and in the same year his novel Harlequin Rex won the Montana New Zealand Book Awards Deutz Medal for Fiction. Marshall is an adjunct professor at the University of Canterbury, which awarded him the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters in 2002. He was awarded the Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit (CNZM) in 2012 for services to literature, and in 2013 received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Fiction.
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