by Gee, Maurice
The chairman called for order. He asked Drake to keep his language clean, which made the little fellow thin himself with astonishment. He’s got a clown’s face, Douglas Drake, it’s India rubber, and the timing of a vaudeville comedian. He mimed contrition. He pulled out his handkerchief and scrubbed the dirty word off his lips.
‘On their posteriors,’ he said, la-di-da.
It was entertainment as much as politics. Eric held his laughter in beside me. ‘I think he’s been sent to punish James.’
‘He’s been sent to convince him that he’ll win.’ I meant that he underlined who was the gentleman.
Drake used his full twenty minutes. Behind the entertainer there’s a politician who never misses a trick. ‘You know, my friends,’ he said at the end, ‘I read a bit of poetry. Yes, I do. I can see that surprises some of my fellow countrymen in the audience. They don’t think poetry is for working men. Well, they’re wrong, and here’s a bit. It’s from Shelley. You’ve all heard of Shelley. Got run out of England, he did, for daring to speak his mind. It’s a song to the men of England, but I reckon it does for New Zealand just as well. Listen:
Men of England, wherefore plough
For the lords who lay ye low?
Wherefore weave with toil and care
The rich robes your tyrants wear?
Wherefore feed, and clothe, and save,
From the cradle to the grave,
Those ungrateful drones who would
Drain your sweat — nay, drink your blood?’
I was less surprised by his choice (politician, I called him a moment ago, but he can also be a rabble-rouser) than by Eric’s reaction.
‘Bravo!’ he cried. He clapped his hands.
Drake grinned at him. ‘We’ve even got a professor on our side.’
James closed his eyes. He turned his head a fraction, opened them, held Eric in his gaze, then, I think, subtracted him from his world of certainties and concerns, made Eric cease to be, and me as well; signalled it by uncrossing his legs and recrossing them the other way. He took out his handkerchief, patted his mouth, folded it along its lines and slid it neatly back in his breast pocket. He can, by doing small things precisely, terrify.
Eric gave Drake a wag of his finger. He turned to me: ‘Had enough?’
We left the hall.
‘You’ve finished us with James,’ I said.
‘I was finished already.’
We passed James’s car, with Ferrabee behind the wheel in the dark. His eyes caught light as he turned his head. They glinted at us.
‘I’m glad I’m not in this electorate,’ I said.
‘Who would you vote for?’
‘Not Small. Not James either.’
‘I’d vote for Shelley. Hey —’ he increased his pace — ‘look at this. The little bugger.’ The two front tyres of his car were flat. ‘That’s Ferrabee. I’ll wring his neck.’
‘No, Eric —’
‘Who else could it be?’
‘They might be punctures.’
‘Both of them?’ Then Eric laughed. ‘All right. We won’t give him the satisfaction.’ He crouched and looked at the nearer tyre. ‘Jammed a match stick in the valve, see?’ He took the match out and tossed it away, then took off his jacket and threw it on the bonnet. ‘Exercise, my boy. Get your coat off.’
He fetched the jack and pump from the boot and passed from annoyance to satisfaction, lying down and fitting the jack, then to a kind of measuring interest in the working of his arm and the lifting of the car. He loosened the nuts holding the wheel, jacked again, gave them a twist with his fingers, placed them on the bonnet by our coats, then lifted the wheel off and laid it on the footpath. Sweat shone on his forehead. He wiped it with his sleeve.
‘Have a go at that with the pump.’
I coupled it, stood it on the pavement, set my hands and feet, and went to work, while three cars down the line Ferrabee watched from behind the wheel of James’s Austin. He lit a cigarette. His face was printed yellow then sank into the dark.
Eric brought the spare tyre from the boot. He bounced it on the road, hoisted it and lowered it three or four times over his head.
‘Let’s see little Lennie do that.’ He fitted the wheel, screwed on the nuts, tightened them. ‘How’s it going with that one, Sam?’
I was panting. My hands were burning. I wanted to rest but did not want Ferrabee to see.
Eric lowered the jack and gave the nuts a final jerk with the wrench. ‘It’s a bit soft but it’ll get us home.’ He shifted round to the far side of the car and lay on the road.
The hall made a rumbling cough, a clearing of its throat, as the audience — men, I almost wrote, but there were women too — poured out. I used their flowing by as a reason to stop pumping. Wound my handkerchief round my palm.
‘Puncture, matey?’ said a man.
‘No, someone let our tyres down.’
Douglas Drake stopped in a group. ‘That’s politics for you.’
Eric’s face rose like a moon over the bonnet. ‘It was personal.’
‘Let’s lend a hand,’ Drake said. He took the pump from where I had let it fall and set to work. The car rose on the other side as Eric jacked. Perhaps it was exhaustion: the night began to seem unreal. Along the road James paused by the door of his car. Ferrabee leaned across the seat and opened it. I thought, The world is changing, you can feel the breath of it, we’re in a new time.
Drake took off his jacket and handed it to one of his friends. He spat on his hands and fell to pumping again. Ferrabee drove away, with James staring ahead.
‘Tin lung,’ shouted the men waiting by Eric’s car.
‘Go easy on him, boys, he’s an old man,’ Drake said. ‘Jump on that, Jackie, and see if it’s tight.’
One of the men stood on the tyre. ‘She’ll do.’
Drake carried it round to Eric, who lifted the second wheel off.
‘I’ll put a bit more air in this,’ the man called Jackie said. He fastened the pump to the tyre Eric had changed and set to work. Eric and Drake fitted the wheel on the other side and tightened the nuts. I took my tobacco pouch from my coat and filled my pipe. I was light headed from my unaccustomed work, and from overturning Ferrabee and defeating James. Was that what we had done, defeated him? The notion was in keeping with my heightened sense of the night, of our pocket of good fellowship in the enclosing streets, and Eric and Drake instructing each other as they worked.
As if returning things to their mundane state, the car slumped level on its wheels.
I lit my pipe and smoked while Jackie and two others took turns in pumping the last tyre. Eric reached into the glovebox for a packet of tailor-mades. He offered them round. Then he and Drake exchanged bits of Shelley — ‘Man who man would be, Must rule the empire of himself …’ — until each was satisfied. Drake shook hands and walked off with his cohort to ‘whet our whistles down at Jackie’s place’. Their hats shone under the streetlamps; their laughter rang off fences along the street. James can’t see them, I thought. He hasn’t the faintest notion where they came from or where they’re going.
Eric started the car and we drove home.
‘Sore hands?’ he asked.
‘I’m all right. It was Ferrabee who let them down. James wouldn’t stoop.’
‘Maybe. I’d like to know one thing, though. What’s he keeping on a thug like Ferrabee for?’
Chapter Eleven
I picked up a chill from sweating and Rose kept me inside for the rest of the week. I spent the time writing to the surviving members of our murder story group, explaining that I would not be carrying on as editor, or as contributor either, offering those who wanted them their chapters back, and suggesting that they get together and restart the novel, or a similar or a different one, if they were inclined. I did not expect them to be.
I had not heard from Owen Moody since the shooting. Addressing me as ‘Sam’, he wrote: ‘You can keep my chapter as a souvenir. It got me thinking about what I sho
uld do, so it wasn’t wasted. What a load of codswallop, though, a bunch of old hacks — and young ones too (self excluded) — setting up as Agatha Christie. I won’t be playing that sort of game again.
‘You ask about my health. Do you mean the bullet? It’ll take more than that to finish me. Joll caught me by surprise with that pistol but what’s the use of using it if you can’t shoot straight? Now I’m off to the Old Country. I’m sailing on the Ionic the week after next and I don’t intend coming back. Why spend your life in the bottom half of the world? O. M.’
The bullet hadn’t damaged his conceit.
• • •
I was sitting in the summerhouse on a mild afternoon, reading one of my favourites, Georgette Heyer, and learning how to make characters move and a story flow — I thought I might write my own light novel but turn her Regency heiresses and beaux into departmental clerks and D.I.C. shopgirls — when I heard the gate open and saw Freddie and Elsie on the path. I considered hiding, then called them over to spare Rose.
They had been to visit Eric and May but not found them home, so had brought themselves down the hill to Rose and me. Elsie, mottled from walking, fanned her chest with her blouse, while Freddie took his jacket off and adjusted from city gent to man at ease in his family. He mopped his face.
‘A drink would go down well,’ he said.
‘Something cold?’
‘Tea,’ Elsie said. ‘Beer makes Freddie belch.’
‘It’s my indigestion,’ he protested.
I left them disputing — she butting on, he giving ground — and asked Rose to bring out a tray.
‘What do they want?’
‘No idea. Elsie’s got her bull-at-a-gate look.’
‘And Freddie’s rubbing round her like a moggy, I suppose.’
I took out a bottle of beer for myself.
‘We really wanted Eric’s advice,’ Elsie said as I sat down.
‘But I’ll do?’
‘Is Rose coming out? No offence, but she and May and Eric —’
‘The sensible ones?’ I was lumped in with Freddie. ‘Doesn’t it strike you that a lifetime working on newspapers … Ah, never mind. What’s Taylor done this time?’
‘How did you know it was him?’
‘It usually is.’
‘He hasn’t done anything bad, Sam,’ Freddie said.
‘Just something stupid?’
‘If you have to be rude we’ll go somewhere else,’ Elsie said, her redness flaring.
I apologised, and asked them, as civilly as I could, what the matter was.
‘He borrowed money off Freddie. Borrowed, that’s a laugh. And made him promise not to tell me.’
‘Broke my promise,’ Freddie joked, apologetically.
‘I knew when I saw the ticket who must have paid.’
‘What ticket?’
‘For the boat. He’s going to England. He and that friend of his, Owen Moody. He’s too young, Sam.’
‘And he’s got no job,’ Freddie said.
‘No job he can do, except working behind a counter, which I don’t have to tell you was a huge disappointment to us.’
‘He spends all his money,’ Freddie said.
‘He can’t save.’
‘But he sold his motorbike, Elsie, remember that.’
‘Pooh. Twenty pounds. And that’s all gone. I know what will happen when the pair of them get to London. They’ll be sending back home to us for money.’
‘I’m not worried about that. It’s what might happen to him.’ Freddie turned his head to hide tears in his eyes.
‘It’s the wrong time to be gallivanting round the world,’ Elsie said.
‘He’s nineteen,’ Freddie said.
‘And that Moody’s the sort of man who could get him into trouble.’
‘A man who’s been shot,’ Freddie said.
‘That wasn’t his fault. But he’s a smart alec. And he’s got no job either. The pair of them could starve. Taylor just laughs when I say that.’
Rose brought the tray out and poured tea. Elsie repeated her complaint.
‘It’s no use asking us,’ Rose said. ‘Taylor will go his own way. There’s more to him than you think, Elsie. He’ll survive.’
‘That’s easy for you to say with your two married and gone.’
‘I think he’ll bounce up like a rubber ball.’
‘What we wanted —’ Freddie began.
‘All we need to know,’ Elsie said, ‘is if you think we should stop him. Which we can do. Because he’s still under twenty-one. He’d be upset —’
‘I can imagine,’ Rose said.
‘— but he’d thank us in the end.’
‘No,’ Rose said.
‘No, what?’
‘Don’t stop him. If you want my advice —’
‘Sam, what do you think?’
‘He’d find some way of sneaking on board. I’d let him go. Moody’s not a bad chap. He’ll keep an eye on him. And when they run out of money they can work their passage home. Plenty of young chaps do that.’
‘Yes, but …’ Elsie went round again. When she had finished and we’d softened our advice (while keeping it the same) Rose took her into the house. I rinsed my glass at the garden tap and poured Freddie the last of the beer.
‘Stand up for yourself, Freddie.’
‘I can’t. I’ve tried. She runs right over the top of me. I’m not complaining. We’re happy in our way.’ He tried to grin. ‘Even if it’s not much of a way. You’ve no idea …’
I waited.
‘You’ve no idea what having Taylor meant to me. Having a son. As long as he was all right I was all right, I didn’t mind. But when he went into his own place …’
‘What is it, Freddie?’
‘With Owen Moody … Sam, do you think there’s maybe something unhealthy there?’
I felt the tiny jolt of mind that comes when one glimpses, then loses sight of, the insupportable. ‘No, Freddie, no. Moody’s all right. He’s a funny sort of codger, that’s easy to see. And conceited. And selfish. Arrogant too. But look how he put Joll’s weights up as soon as he found out what he was like. If anything, he’ll be a good influence on Taylor. Stop him playing silly games, I mean.’
‘You think — Taylor’s all right?’
‘Yes, he is. He is. He likes to pose a bit, that’s all. He’s young. He plays football, Freddie. I’ve seen him score tries.’
‘And Moody plays cricket.’
‘They’re just a couple of young chaps feeling their oats. Let him go away. He’ll be grown up when he comes back. You won’t know him.’
I helped him wrap up his suspicions and put them in some back corner of his mind, where I hope they’ll stay. I had never dreamed of his great love for his son. But now I harboured something that kept out of sight, moving each time I turned my head.
I repeated to myself what I’d said to Freddie: he’ll be all right, he’s young, he plays the fool. That forced opinion stayed in the forefront, hiding just sufficiently the thing I would not see.
Eric telephoned the following day. ‘Come to the wrestling, Sam. It’s Ken Kenneth versus Bronco Nagurski. I’ve got the tickets.’
‘I can’t. I’m still sneezing. I’ll get another dose.’
‘Wrap yourself up. Kenneth’s your man, isn’t he? I’m for Nagurski. I hate going to these things by myself.’
He called for me at half past seven in his car.
‘Wrong way,’ I said as he turned up Hill Street instead of heading for town. He pulled over to the side of the road.
‘First off, I’ll say I’m sorry.’
‘What for?’
‘We’re not going to the wrestling. I just said that to get you out of the house.’
‘Is it James?’ I said, alarmed.
‘No. Listen, Sam, I know you’re not going to like it. I had a note from Lily Maxey yesterday. She wants to see you and me about — she wouldn’t say what. She says she’s thought about it and it’s something we shoul
d know. I’m sorry about the mystery —’
‘What can she possibly know that concerns me?’
‘That’s what we’ll find out. She’s expecting us.’
‘I’m getting out. I’ll walk home.’
‘Sam —’ he grasped my arm, fastened it down — ‘Lily’s not a fool. If she says she’s got to see us, it’s important. I’m going. If I find out something you should know … ?’
‘Come and tell me.’
‘I don’t think I will.’ He let go my arm. ‘If you want to know what’s in the back room, Sam, you open the door.’
‘What room? What door? Does May know you’re going to this woman?’
‘I’m not “going to her”. But I’ll tell May if it’s any of her business. You coming? If not, jump out.’
I stayed in the car. I calmed myself as well as I was able while he drove along to Tinakori Road. I’ll confess to a thrill not wholly of alarm, and resolved to be worldly and practical.
She had bought a cottage up the road from the Hill Street corner: a tidy place in a rubbing-shoulders row.
‘She’s a widow with private means, don’t worry, Sam.’
‘So there was a Maxey?’
‘Nice chap. A house painter. He sang comic songs. He died in 1919 in the flu.’
‘He let her do what she did?’
‘She’d given up. She only went back when he died. As boss-lady. He left some cash.’
He opened the gate, climbed the two steps to the door, used the knocker: rat-tat, rat-tat-tat — a sequence that filled me with suspicion. Mrs Maxey, spectral behind lace curtains, crossed the room.
‘Eric, come in. Mr Holloway.’
I had expected her to play the lady, to be in a role that denied her past — and perhaps she was: the sturdy housewife. Yet it seemed natural to her as she took and hung our coats inside the door and showed us to chairs and went unbustled to the kitchen to fill the kettle and put it on. Her living room was unexceptionable, even to my eye that looked for mark and stain in cheap furniture and showy ornament. An upright piano stood against one wall. A bookcase of novels, Jane Austen to Charlotte M. Yonge, filled another. I sat discomfited in my easy chair.
‘Eric,’ she said, coming back, ‘you’re quite a stranger. Are you busy?’
