by Gee, Maurice
We sighed. One or two clapped.
‘Well done, my boy,’ Theo Mead said.
‘I don’t like the torture. And nor do I like “eunuch”,’ Euan Poynter said. ‘There’s also the matter of sentences without verbs.’
No one took any notice of him.
‘Who is he? This villain?’ Eric said.
‘Well,’ Owen said, ‘he’s from my dreams. I have them where I’m hunted and I hide and there’s someone coming for me but I never see his face. So I’ve tried to, in this … I can’t explain.’
‘No need. But what it means is we have to rewrite some stuff in the early chapters —’
‘Where is it leading?’ Euan Poynter cried. ‘Who is this villain, do we know? He was older and bald-headed in my chapter.’
‘We can fix that,’ Eric said.
‘He’s John Woodley’s illegitimate son, who’s been put in an orphanage, where he got his scar. Woodley’s kept him secret. But he’s hunted his father down —’
‘And killed him? Impossible.’
‘And it makes him Jennifer’s half-brother, which is why he’s kidnapped her. And why Rufus thinks he knows the man: he looks like her. As for the political stuff, he’s using the plotters for his private revenge.’
‘We could make that woman from my chapter, the one in the glory box — she could be his mother, how about that?’ Theo Mead said.
‘Hold on, hold on,’ I said.
‘There’s no going back, Sam. Not when we’ve got something like this,’ Eric said.
‘Writing like this,’ Theo said.
‘There was a misrelated participle,’ Euan cried.
‘I vote we pull out and let Owen finish it.’
‘How did he get his voice, this English voice? Not in an orphanage,’ I said.
‘By an act of will.’
‘And his money? He seems to have plenty of that.’
‘Will. Will power. What he needs for his revenge, he’ll get.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I don’t think it’s our story any more, Sam,’ Eric said.
‘I won’t give up my chapter,’ Euan cried.
We smoked more pipes and cigarettes and drank more beer and shifted around uneasily — several, perhaps, relieved — on the broken ground of our idea. Gave up at midnight, with nothing decided but with the knowledge that Owen Moody had picked us up and put us down in another place.
I had thought we might become famous. I had imagined laudatory reviews, an American edition, a French translation. I’d interviewed myself for the Wellington papers and held out my hand for fat royalty cheques.
Should I work out another plot and write it in secret, by myself?
Rose was asleep. I could not ask her.
• • •
I am trying to turn then into now. I’m pretending that I don’t know what will happen.
There must be no over-arching consciousness. I know what Owen Moody’s chapter means, but I did not know at the time. All I can say is, it delighted us while confounding us. Our arrogance, advantage in years, gone. I would have welcomed one of those woman writers along (those ‘girls’ we’d sidelined with such satisfaction) to cure Owen Moody’s own arrogance; teach him some measure and restraint.
‘I’ll be in touch, Owen. There’s some things we need to talk about.’
‘I’m a bit busy, Sam.’ I had not invited him to call me Sam. ‘Can it wait?’
So to bed — but little sleep. I was haunted in my half-waking dreams by the man with the silver scar.
Several days later Euan Poynter withdrew. He complained of ‘the cult of violence this young man promotes’ and ‘the proliferating of psychology’. For good measure, he Poynted out other people’s faults, including my ‘incoherent style and subfusc language’. Stewart Peebles wrote and said he had decided not to go on. Our group eroded. But I was not ready to give up. I thought Owen and I between us might complete the book. I believed I was better at plotting than him. Half the credit would be mine, even if he ‘unpleated’ my prose.
Chapter Seven
In July Charlie and Frank Siers held their joint show in Siers’s studio on The Terrace. Edith Lendrum, the flower painter, gave the speech. It was a brave performance: she liked what she saw, but knew the trouble she invited for saying so.
‘Painting cannot always stay the same,’ she said. ‘Year after year we perpetuate the Victorian taste. We suffer from arrested development. But here — look, look at this rumpus of colour. Astonishing. Colour without prettiness, form without a single easy placement or easy line. Everything, you say, is new and strange. Look harder, I say, and you will find that it becomes old and familiar. You will find nature’s primeval elements laid bare.’
She could only have been speaking of Charlie’s work. Frank Siers’s was not like that at all. I would not have been surprised to learn he’d meant to show up Charlie and prove that her teacher still knew best, but she threw him neck and crop. Put him in the shade with her colour, side-lined him with her composition. Perhaps he had an edge in draughtsmanship; he had more tact. Yet at his own show, in his studio, she pushed him into second place.
I write as if I liked her paintings on display (the one of James and Violet was not there). I tried to see them with a friendly eye, yet I found them ugly and ill bred. There was, Mrs Lendrum told us, a Cubist influence. I could see it — a ramshackle pedalling after Cézanne and Picasso. Fragmented shapes, pieces of things tipped sideways, defying gravity. I am being unfair. I’ve heard and read explanations of this style — but it’s all bizarrerie and nothing is put in to please. Nothing’s beautiful.
Charlie showed her nude studies as well. As these things go, they were not excessively bare. Some were done on paper, in what I believe is called oil wash, and those, especially, exhibited a flowing line, not unpleasing. But wasn’t there an ignorance of anatomy? Eric stood by my side and tutored me: ‘See them as paintings, not as people.’ That’s all very well, easy to say, but the eye must proceed through habit and familiarity to an understanding of the new or we’re at sea. There’s nothing to wrap the mind around. One steps in the hole, incomprehension. A face, four limbs, a torso: don’t you need those parts to make a person?
I did not like naked men and women bathing together, even though their backs were turned.
‘Bolshevism,’ said old Harold Fine behind us. He would be writing the review for the Dominion.
Frank Siers sold half a dozen. Charlie sold two, at five pounds each.
‘Who would buy a thing like that?’ I whispered to Rose.
‘Me,’ she said. ‘And before you go off half-cocked, I used my nest egg, Sam. My own money.’
‘What nest egg? Don’t I provide? Rose, that thing —’
‘— is a woman standing in a pool. Calm down. I like the way she’s so still. And the water’s still. I think I want to look at it for a long time. Sam,’ she whispered, ‘it made the hairs on my neck stand up.’
‘Is there any need … any need … ?’ I meant for this sort of thing, in a world where knowledge was plain and beauty never more than a head’s turn away, and truth somehow — wasn’t it proven? — the product of those two and the sum of art; and what could a half-woman in a muddy pond contribute to this hallowed stepping forth?
‘Don’t gabble, Sam. Don’t talk nonsense. I don’t like those ones that are broken in bits. I don’t see the point. But I do see the point of this — at least I think I do. And I bought it with my money.’
‘It’s your sister, isn’t it? That damned May.’
Rose went red. Suddenly she was angrier than I’d ever seen her. ‘Do you think I can’t do anything by myself? I’m going home. No, I’ll walk. I don’t need you.’
Out she went, a stranger to me; and, of course, I followed, desperate to bring us together again, which I accomplished, with the rain’s help, although each of us is a different person now … It isn’t in my story, so I’ll leave it.
In my dashing out I collided on the stai
rs with James. Eric told me that he circled the room. People made way for him. The party chatter fell away. His shoes made a mensural ticking on the floor. Charlie watched, pale in her forehead, red in her cheeks; she advanced a half-step at him, half-raised her hands, but he went by, eyes turned to her paintings, which people stepped aside from so he could see; and when he’d made his round of the room and reached the door he found Frank Siers with his eyes, gave a nod of thanks — gentleman James — and went out from the fog of silence he had made.
Out into the first lashing of rain, where Lennie Ferrabee waited in the car. They drove away.
It was the night of the southerly storm — the great downpour, the drenching and thrashing of the city by wind and rain. Water soaked Rose and me to the skin, it ran inside our clothes, as we made our way home — I ten steps behind at first, then at her side, then holding her, holding on to lamp-posts and railings to stay upright. It came like a fist-blow from the south and knocked down trees. It turned streams into rivers, humping and leaping, and brought down cuttings across roads. Going up Hobson Street, we were lifted and propelled, and tried to stay like beetles close to the pavement in some layer of stillness that might survive down there, but felt the storm poised like a boot over us, and held each other and ran for our gate, our path, our door.
In night clothes and slippers and dressing-gowns we sat by the fire, I drinking whisky and she port, when there came a banging on our door, and Charlie and May and Eric tumbled in. They had come from the studio in Eric’s car to find where we had vanished to, and on the way had learned that trees were down in Wadestown and the suburb was cut off.
‘We’ll have to stay here,’ May said.
‘Yes, yes,’ Rose cried.
But Eric borrowed my oilskin — failed to get my gumboots on — and went out into the storm to see if his house was standing upright. It was the sort of adventure he loved.
‘I wonder if Da got home,’ Charlie said.
‘Shall I telephone?’
‘No, best not. He hates it when people fuss.’
I rang all the same but the operator told me a line was down on the Hutt Road.
Eric came back. The house was all right. The footbridge was plunging like a whaling boat, he said. ‘Come and see.’
I refused. He stood dripping water, Captain Ahab, in my hall, and I stripped him of his oilskin, talked him out of his shoes, told him I had whisky and hot water in the next room, led him in with trousers rolled up and white cold feet, sat him down close to the fire. He was set to tell the women how brave he had been but they did not want to hear, for Charlie was weeping about her father — his cold cruel circling of Frank Siers’s studio, and more, and more, all his coldnesses and cruelties, and why, why should she go on wanting his approval, wanting love?
‘All the time I was away I was tied to him. Every time I lift my brush he’s standing in the way …’ A herd of complaints, contradictory, complementary, on and on; and Ferrabee too, battened on James, leeched on to him, helping with his overcoat and scarf, fetching his umbrella, opening this door and the next, carrying tea to his study on a tray, and saying with his sly grin, ‘Yes, Sir James’ — ‘Sir’ his joke — ‘hunky-dory, sir.’ He was butler, valet, chauffeur, handyman, sycophant. ‘I hate him,’ Charlie said. He drove James to his office and came back; lay smoking on his bed in a corner of the garage, only a wall’s thickness from her as she worked; or he was in the kitchen, frying eggs, in the bathroom shaving, and once his face appeared in her window as she was dressing. ‘Saw nothing, Miss Tinling, cross my heart,’ he cried. He pranced on up the ladder to clean dead leaves from the gutters on the roof.
‘Does James allow this?’ May said.
‘I haven’t told him. Anyway, he never hears. He doesn’t hear me.’
‘What about Vi? What does she say?’
‘She’s frightened of him. Ferrabee’s got a way of not being there, and suddenly there. She says to me, “Who is he? What does he want?” She told Da once there was a strange man in the house, but he just said, “He works for me.” So Mother stays in her room. As long as I’m there, or Mrs Hearn or Mrs Dyer …’
‘She’s there tonight?’
‘Yes. Mother quite likes her. She’s more refined than Mrs Hearn.’ Charlie, after all her tears, managed to smile.
‘I’ll telephone again in the morning,’ I told her. ‘If there’s no reply we’ll go out.’
The house shuddered and the ceiling groaned. Rose said we should all try to get some rest. She had beds prepared and night clothes warming. So we slept, all of us fitfully, as the storm raked the house and bent the window glass.
The weather was subdued in the morning: a supportable wind, unmalicious rain. When I looked in the street, the gutters were running quarter full. I tried telephoning James’s house but lines were still down.
‘We’ll all go,’ May said. ‘See the damage.’
Eric had to dry the sparking plugs first. We set out shortly after nine o’clock. I see it as a crossing — but I won’t get ahead, or send my sensibilities nosing into the past, where they’ll only put things out of shape. Let me stay with journalism. Spray from the sea splashed over us. We went chassis deep through flooded streets — so on, so on. James’s gate was open. His driveway was mushy with silt. Eric crept the car underneath the portico. The house seemed empty. May, finding the front door unlocked, strode in; and down in the kitchen we found the man Ferrabee frying eggs, as Charlie had described.
‘Didn’t hear you knock,’ he said aggressively.
‘Where’s Da?’ Charlie demanded. ‘Where’s Mrs Dyer?’
‘He’s in his study. She went home last night. She was worried about her nippers in the storm. I had to drive her.’
‘What about Mother? Where’s she?’
‘Haven’t seen her this morning. Mind if I eat my eggs?’
Charlie ran up the stairs. Eric and I knocked on James’s study door. He half rose when he saw us. ‘Eric. Sam. Has something gone wrong?’
We explained that we had come to see if he had reached home safely, but got no further, for Charlie came clattering down. ‘She’s not in her room. Mother, where are you?’ she called.
‘What?’ said James, confused to find his house full of women.
‘Where’s she gone?’
‘Not upstairs? Have you tried the bathroom?’
‘She’s not there. She’s slept in her bed but it’s cold. Where is she, Da?’
‘I’ve no idea. Would she go outside? Ferrabee. See if Mrs Tinling is in the grounds. Have you looked everywhere, Girl? Tried all the rooms? You don’t think she’d get into a cupboard somewhere?’
We searched the house, then Eric and I paddled down the garden paths and squelched across the lawns. We looked in the garage, where Ferrabee had made a bivouac in a corner; tried Charlie’s studio door but found it locked. Ferrabee was nosing in the ngaio trees.
‘Vanishimo,’ he said.
We walked along the side of the stream, which ran fast and muscly between its entry hole in one brick wall and its exit in the other. It had fallen from its night-time high, marked by a line of leaves and twigs on the lawn.
‘She’s not here,’ we told them in the house.
James repeated what he had told the women: he had sent Mrs Dyer home with Ferrabee, had looked in and seen Violet sleeping, had sent Ferrabee to bed when he came back, and then sat up turning things over and listening to the storm for half the night. Turning what over? Was it Charlie’s paintings or his whole life? He seemed to me brought to a point or edge. There was a strange colour in his face, and something almost bloodied in his manner — a pulse of life undisciplined? He said, ‘She never rang her bell. But of course I wouldn’t hear it in the storm.’
‘You said she came down though,’ May said.
‘Yes, she did. About two o’clock. I saw her there, in the door, so I asked her what the matter was, and she said there was too much noise and the house kept moving. She said it was turning round to face th
e other way. I told her it was only the storm and not to worry. She asked for Mrs Dyer and I told her she’d gone home, she was worried about her children being alone. Violet didn’t seem to know she even had any children. I helped her back upstairs, into bed. I tucked her in.’ James looked surprised. ‘I got her another pillow and told her to go to sleep. She said she would. Then I went to bed. And that’s all. I can’t understand how she got downstairs again.’
‘Were any doors open?’ Eric said.
‘I lock everything when I’m finished for the night. But the back one was. I thought it was Ferrabee. He comes and goes.’
‘Shouldn’t we be searching?’ Charlie cried. ‘Or shouldn’t we get the police?’
‘Oh, no police,’ James said. ‘She’ll just have wandered away.’ He frowned himself back to his usual state. ‘I don’t want this getting out. Sam?’ He meant could I keep it out of the newspapers.
‘We’d better start asking at the neighbours’,’ Eric said.
Then Ferrabee came shouting over the lawn: ‘Mr Tinling.’ He skidded through the doorway, almost falling on his knees. ‘She’s in the creek.’
We ran through the garden, through the trees, to the hole in the wall where the stream ran out. Iron bars, six inches apart, stopped large debris from getting through. Torn branches lay tangled against them like pick-up-sticks. A whirlpool sucked the water down in front. Eric and I had seen nothing there, but now we saw, all of us, Violet’s arm like a branch stripped of its bark. It nestled among others, curved and white. Her hair was wrapped about a torn fence paling that turned and slid in the current, showing half her face, then hiding it.
Ferrabee climbed like a monkey on the bars. I held a ngaio branch, gripped Eric’s hand, and he waded in. Between them, they freed Violet and dragged her, white and girlish, on to the lawn. She was naked, colder than the water that had held her down. Eric took his jacket from where he had thrown it on the lawn and covered her. He picked her up like a sleeping child and carried her to the house, up the stairs, laid her on the bed; then we, Eric and I, withdrew. Left her there with James and Charlie and May and Rose. We joined Ferrabee in the kitchen, and soon James came down the stairs and went into his study and closed the door.
