Scornful Moon

by Gee, Maurice

  The Scornful Moon

  Maurice Gee

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published by Penguin Group (NZ), 2003

  Copyright © Maurice Gee 2003

  The right of Maurice Gee to be identified as the author of this work in terms of section 96 of the Copyright Act 1994 is hereby asserted.

  Digital conversion by Pindar NZ

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  A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand.

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  ISBN 9781742288093

  Acknowledgements and Note

  The staff of the Manuscripts and Archives Section of the Alexander Turnbull Library found a number of useful items for me, including accounts of the trial (in 1920) of C. E. Mackay, Mayor of Wanganui, for the attempted murder of the poet D’Arcy Cresswell, and the typescript of Murder by Twelve (1935), an unpublished detective story by twelve Wellington literary men.

  I’ve made borrowings from My Scrip of Joy, by Lawrence Inch, Starry Skies, by A. C. Gifford, Journalese, by Robin Hyde, The Sugarbag Years, by Tony Simpson, Art in New Zealand 1928–1934, several of Pat Lawlor’s books and a number of newspaper reports and articles. I’m happy to acknowledge these although I can no longer identify them all.

  Several small changes in historical fact have been made to help the story along.

  Chapter One

  I wanted a neat bullet hole and no more than a trickle of blood. It fitted with my notions of politeness if not with my understanding of death. There would be no pain of a physical kind, and as for mental anguish and dark ways where the beast might lurk, we would discover those as we went along and shine on them the healthy light of reason, I said. Let’s keep it clean, a nice quick murder, or two, or three — there’s no harm in multiplication. As for plot: a twist and a double twist incorporating that dark place if we light on it (laughter), but nothing Viennese, we’ll keep away from sex, there’s altogether too much of that sort of thing.

  My collaborators nodded and quaffed their ale. A gunshot in the night. A corpse slumped over his desk. A modicum of creeping on dark stairs, a sufficiency of chasing and close shaves. The heroine in danger (of course). A sensible policeman who likes his pint of ale. The victim? Let’s start at the top. We’ll murder the Prime Minister. (Won’t mention his party. Ha ha.) Or Minister of something anyway. A cold fish, teetotaller, with a frosty wife and a pretty daughter — Jennifer will be her name, she’s not the flapper type, we can do without silliness. As for the killer: a prominent man, plain to see while hidden away. He’s smiling and unsuspected, but drops a single clue — not handkerchief, not cuff link, some word he shouldn’t know — for the clever ones. Let’s keep his motive above board in the psychological sense, while his actions are unforgivable, and cruel of course, as murder is. That’s agreed? And do you agree to some love interest too, a spot of dalliance for the distaff side? Why not? It’s bound to help sales. The pretty daughter and a young reporter, the sort of cub we’ll lick into shape.

  Myself when young, we said, smacking our lips, filling our pipes.

  So we began, not much more than a year ago, and completed nine chapters of the misconceived thing. It’s put away and never mentioned. When I run into my fellow plotters in the street we nod and pass by or speak of politics and the weather.

  My story is made up of the other things that were going on.

  I cannot, even now — my decision made — go headlong at them. I cannot hold them still, look at them and say, This happened, and that, because of a fault here, an easy way preferred, and there a choice made for the best of reasons, feeding a hunger not understood, barely recognised. Moral obligations are turned about and in the end evil, yes evil, is unleashed, and lives are lost, in divers ways, and lost too, forever, are the certainties with which we comfort ourselves.

  So I ease my way in, another reason being that I cannot bear to stand alone, even now when I have seen how all of us are alone. I cannot bear my weight of loneliness, but pick up this voice and that, this smile, that laugh, the pipe smoke, the tobacco smell, the taste of ale — the amber liquid, yes, we called it that. I give myself a base of ordinariness, and orneriness too, of human foible and of friendship.

  Roy Kember was there, my dear friend Roy, and Euan Poynter, a friendly acquaintance, who calls himself a belletrist and lifts himself a little too high for my real liking, and Marcus Waller, a librarian and, more modestly than Euan, a ‘scribbler’, and Theo Mead, who filled the back pages of his Railways Magazine with comic sketches rather too broad in their humour for me, and Fred Scanlon, an agricultural journalist, and half a dozen others, would-be or failed novelists and story writers — good fellows, most of them, and able men.

  It wasn’t all pretence and satisfaction.

  These paragraphs are like a stone lobbed into a pool. The ripples widen out and if I travel with them from the centre I’ll meet whatever stands in their way, rock upraised or floating log, where a counter-ripple begins its journey back. I’ll come back too, at my own pace, finding my way.

  Eric Clifton said to me, ‘Why shouldn’t a scientist try his hand? I might bring a new dimension, Sam.’ He pointed out that he had published more books and articles than all the rest of us put together. Now he wanted to try writing for fun.

  We invited him along and he enjoyed our meetings, smoked his roll-your-owns and once a cigar, laughed a lot, pointed out mistakes good-humouredly, drank his bottle of ‘the brown stuff’, read his chapter, accepting criticism with good grace, promised corrections, volunteered to advise on gunshot science, medical science, all science, helped smooth ruffled feathers and was a good fellow generally.

  That is Eric: a man heavy, water-logged in appearance, yet light and airy in his mind. I lift him out of that company and put him down — put us down — at the point where I can begin.

  • • •

  There are three of us married to three sisters. Men of diverse temperaments, with interests overlapping here and there, although each in his centre stands far from the other two. We’re equal in ambition, unequal in the clamour we make and the light we shine. Primacy is granted to James Tinling, although he’s several years younger than me and, unlike Eric (his junior by five years), has no reputation outside New Zealand. James makes a gentlemanly clamour, but throws light of a penetrating kind, illuminating that most important arena, politics. He married first and, many would say (although not Eric and I), married best.
Violet was his bride — the lovely Vi, ethereal and docile at once (a curious combination), and frantic, baseless, behind her beautifully structured facade, when the deference paid her beauty began to fail. She had thought it was forever but when she encountered the daily circumstance marriage insists on she entered time, an element she had not noticed before and perhaps not even heard about. Violet’s beauty was her curse. She floated down time’s river like the Lady of Shalott.

  Vi had that effect on me — brought out comparisons and evasions. I’ll try not to be sad for her wasted life, which began as much in cruelty as silliness. She had a strong awareness of herself, and as a girl would not let the tiniest mark of generosity show in case it detracted from her status, ‘the beautiful one’. Ask Rose, ask my wife, who had the good sense to laugh at her and step aside.

  The young solicitor James Tinling married Violet Barr. I had met her sister Rose several times but did not know her well enough to be asked to the wedding, and Eric was years away from meeting May — ten years old, a flower girl — and so could not mar appearances with his bearish presence. It was, I am told, a brilliant occasion, for Violet was the prettiest girl in Wellington and James was a cricketer of renown, his father a prominent banker, his mother a leader in society. The wind, not invited, stayed away, and the sun, knowing its business, flooded the city in its bowl with warmth and light — this happy little city that framed the young couple so beautifully.

  I must stop this. I do not want to go back all that way. I’ll find myself stuck fast — a fly on fly paper — making a futile buzz, doing the 1890s while 1935 escapes behind my back.

  I had meant to start with Eric, for safety’s sake, but safety’s not a way I can take if I want the truth — whatever it turns out to be — so I’ll choose another occasion, a beginning that we all make a part of, where the sun shone too and the wind stayed away. No more looking over my shoulder. (The past looms like a towering cloud, joined to us by misty filaments but kept at bay — parenthetically — if the figure holds.) James is our ‘host’. He chooses formal language even for our family gathering.

  New Year’s Day. Eric and May called for Rose and me and we drove out to the Hutt Valley in his clanking Dodge car, which he wished would break down so he might have the pleasure of lifting the bonnet and doing repairs. He never learns to call a mechanic — and proudly shows the crooked thumb broken when his first car backfired while he cranked the engine.

  Rose, beside me in the back, asked May if she had seen Vi recently, but May hadn’t. Both, they agreed, were on holiday from Vi now that Charlie was home from London to do the nursing.

  ‘I never thought Vi would be pleased to see Charlie back,’ Rose said.

  ‘Well, is she?’ May said. ‘You can’t tell. Working out what goes on in her head is like sitting on a branch that’s going to break. That’s if there’s anything at all.’

  ‘Poor Vi,’ Rose said.

  ‘Poor Charlie.’

  ‘Amen to that,’ Eric said.

  I was curious to see sympathy turned in that direction, for it seemed to me that Charlie was doing no more than she should. James had a right to summon her home after supporting her in what he called her gallivanting, and, more severely, her daubing, for how long? — I worked it out, nine years. He had seen no return in the shape of presentable work. And a woman in her thirties, still unmarried, had a duty to nurse her sick mother — even if, in Charlie’s case, her mother had never shown her any affection. Rose believed Vi could not forgive Charlie for her imperfect nose and too wide mouth and too small eyes; that she had demeaned herself in bringing a plain daughter into the world.

  I had been pleased with Charlie when she was a child. Later I found her far too serious about her painting, but May and Rose corrected me. Why shouldn’t women paint and be serious? Did I think they were merely for decoration? For housework and breeding? For stroking your poor brow? They, Alecto and Megaera, were set to go on, but I stopped them by saying that Charlie would do better when she learned not to leave beauty out.

  ‘Beauty!’ May said, with scorn. ‘Yours aren’t the only pair of eyes.’

  That argument took place (it went on heatedly) in the year Charlie sailed away, 1925. Another like it seemed likely in the car (nine years had made Charlie even more proficient at leaving beauty out: she goes where the winds of Paris and London and St Ives blow), so I remarked on the importance of the year beginning, of the election that must be held before the end of it, and of the changes it might bring. It was better to have May busy with politics than family — but I had misjudged things, for she said, ‘You’ve heard about James’s latest stupidity. He’s talking about standing again.’

  ‘It’s a brainstorm,’ Eric said. ‘It won’t last.’

  ‘Yes it will. You don’t know James: “By gum, I’ll show them.” He’s practising the common touch. He hasn’t said “by gum” since he was on the hustings last time.’

  ‘The age of the gentleman politician has passed,’ Eric said.

  ‘James was never a gentleman. Not in politics,’ I said.

  ‘Or in business,’ May said.

  ‘I don’t think he’s got the energy for that sort of life any more,’ Rose said. ‘Can’t someone talk him out of it. It’s not fair on Vi.’

  ‘He’s got the cunning,’ Eric said. He smiled at Rose in the rear view mirror. ‘Don’t worry about Vi. She’ll survive.’

  ‘With a bit of help,’ May said.

  So we came back to Charlie, but also came to James’s gate and turned into the long drive and stopped by the front door, where Eric let us out. He nursed his car out of sight beside the garage.

  The house was open so Rose and May and I crossed the entrance hall and went past the kitchen, where May popped her head in to talk to Mrs Hearn, who did the cooking. The sound of a tennis racquet whacking a ball, Freddie Barr’s cry, ‘Good shot, Elsie,’ made Rose throw me a grin. I had left my sandshoes at home purposely. Eric had brought his, and the white trousers and sun visor James liked to see, everything correct, although Eric’s idea of tennis was to hit every ball as hard as he could for the one spectacular shot in ten he made. James had nick-named him, sourly, Big Bill, after the American tennis player Bill Tilden.

  The scene was English, made up: wicker table, sun umbrella, rose garden, lawns and tennis court, four players in white, a woman reclining on a chaise longue. She slanted her cheek for kissing. I ignored it; Rose obliged, then gave the searching look that Vi required.

  ‘Some colour in your cheeks.’ (It was most likely rouge.) ‘Have you been eating?’

  ‘I managed a little bit for lunch.’

  Eric arrived round the side of the house. Vi winced at the sight of him. ‘Food is so …’ She waved her hand limply. A barrier like an order of being stood between Vi and sustenance. She nibbled privately in her room, but with others watching would take no more than a sip of water, with a drop of port wine turning it the lightest shade of pink.

  Eric dabbed his mouth at her cheek, missing by the statutory sixteenth of an inch.

  ‘You’re blooming, Violet.’

  She gave a tiny smile, denying it while pleased to be the centre of attention. I turned away to watch the tennis players, who were James and Charlie against Freddie and Elsie Barr.

  As well as cricket for New Zealand, James had played inter-provincial tennis for Wellington. Now, with his springiness gone, he was like a pale stick insect on the court: arms and legs half-folded, body on a sway. He went left or right with a jointed step and blocked the ball neatly between his opponents.

  ‘Oh, Freddie,’ Elsie said crossly. In spite of her chubbiness, she’s a good player too, as quick as a guinea pig in her movements. Sometimes she could beat James at singles — not surprising as she’s younger by twenty-five years. Elsie had been almost a child bride, eighteen looking twelve and blushing plum-red in her peachy cheeks, when Freddie, dashing and middle-aged, married her. By the end of their honeymoon she had learned to scold him.

  James s
aw me watching and saluted with his racquet. ‘Shan’t be long, Sam. One more game.’

  ‘Sez who?’ Elsie said.

  Eric came to my side. ‘Lob him, Elsie. Make him look into the sun.’

  ‘Eric,’ Charlie said — a greeting. I wondered why she had not greeted me. It was her turn to serve. She managed it like pat-ball. Charlie had relearned tennis since coming home but had not done it well enough to satisfy James, who cried, ‘Toss it, girl. Toss it high.’ He gave her a lesson before she served again — a double fault.

  ‘Told you,’ Elsie cried, hopping excitedly on her plump legs.

  I turned away, not wanting to see Charlie humiliated. She’s quick and competent in things that interest her but when her mind baulks her body dithers: a flutter of indecision in her hands, hesitation, stumble-footedness — and, in tennis, a loosening in her wrist that sent the ball into the net or floating like a butterfly for Elsie to smash. Why didn’t she say, I’ve had enough of this? She has the strength of mind for it. But her father pressed her down. If she were a man I’d say unmanned her.

  I went to the table and poured myself some lemonade. Except for Vi’s drop of port, James ran a teetotal house. The players called back and forth, the racquets made their underwater sound, the ngaio trees at the edge of the lawn nodded like bishops in convocation, the sun beat down, lighting up the roses and shining on a clear stretch of the stream running through the bottom of James’s section — and I did not feel the lack of a glass of beer. I’m a connoisseur of beers and author of a manual for homebrewers that has sold quite well. Also, I’ve compiled a book of frothblower jokes and anecdotes — but enough of that. The day was beautiful. I did not miss my glass of ‘the brown stuff’.

  May came out of the house with a tray of scones and jam, Mrs Hearn behind her with tea. The players walked off the court and wiped their faces with towels.