by Gee, Maurice
‘Melling?’ May said. ‘What’s happened to James?’
‘He’s gone,’ Eric said, sharp eyed. ‘Drake has squashed him flat.’
‘Listen, listen,’ I said.
‘Drake, Labour, six thousand eight hundred and forty-three,’ the loud speaker boomed. ‘Gleeson, Douglas Credit, four hundred and twenty-nine. Small, Democrat, two hundred and thirty-four. Tinling, Nationalist, three thousand and one.’
‘And one, and one,’ echoed off the buildings behind us.
‘Goodnight, James Tinling,’ Eric said.
‘Oh, don’t be cruel,’ Rose said. Her eyes filled with tears. She found her handkerchief and pressed them dry.
‘Where will he be? They’re going to do speeches,’ May said.
‘In Melling. It’s only the locals here.’
‘James will be home with his front door locked,’ I said. I felt no gloating, but a sadness in my heart, the same feeling that had brought tears to Rose’s eyes. I clutched her hand, but said in a hardy tone: ‘Bolted tight.’
We stayed for the speeches, which were modest, jocular, shallow, insincere — ‘Why don’t they crow, they should rub it in,’ May said — from the winners, and oozing with good sportsmanship and democratic platitudes from the rest.
It was close to midnight when we walked home. Remembering that quake or tremor in the crowd, I joked that the pavement should be split, the faces of buildings fallen off and everything twisted round to face the other way.
‘It’s more like a tidal wave. Everything washed clean,’ Rose said.
‘There are dead fish after tidal waves, my dear. These fellows are politicians after all,’ Eric said.
‘But good ones,’ May cried. ‘They care.’
‘That would take a shaft of light from heaven.’
‘There was one, did you see?’
He caught her by the waist and swung her round, both of them laughing.
But underneath our buoyancy lay James Tinling. His corpse, although political, belonged to his family. Rose wondered what he would do, where he would go.
‘He’ll have Charlie with him,’ she said.
Eric and I kept quiet. It was more likely James would have Ferrabee.
‘She’s shifting into town. Not before time,’ May said. ‘James will turn her into an old maid out there.’
I let the others worry about her — she was simple. But I could not see James. Owen Moody, I could: fascinating, horrifying in his purity — pure self-absorption. Was James harder to find only because I’d known him for so long?
I pictured him in his chair in his darkened room, turning over his unlived life — his monkish life — and his crime, while somewhere in the shadows Ferrabee lurked. Their world was changed by the tremor too. Like my twisted buildings, they faced another way.
I could imagine nothing he might do but keep on sitting. His room was like the prison he had put Ollie Joll in.
Chapter Fourteen
It is late autumn, a time of slow breezes and soft rain. Leaves lie raked in corners, where I’ve left them to rot. We’ll have our winter storms before long. It is five months since I began telling our story — Eric’s and James’s and Charlie’s and mine. There’s still a bit of it left to write, but I’m afflicted with fear and unwillingness — and why those two? Shouldn’t I look forward to being free and so hurry on to my conclusion? I see the time when I’ll stand up from my desk and stretch my arms above my head and hear the vertebrae go click in my back, but I don’t see peace and freedom as I turn to leave; I don’t feel the warmth of completion or a settling in the molecules of remembered act and decision.
People carry on with their lives. Why should it surprise me? Did I suppose they would stop their progress and be still just because I fixed them in tableaux?
This morning there’s an item in the Dominion: ‘A young New Zealander, Owen Moody, has scored a critical success in London with the publication of his first novel, a detective story called Blood in the basement. Favourable reviews have appeared in several London daily newspapers and the young author is already hard at work on his second novel. Wellingtonians will remember Mr Moody as the unfortunate victim in a shooting …’
I daresay we’ll see it in our bookshops before long. I won’t buy it. I won’t read it. Won’t help him even with ten per cent of seven and sixpence.
I see Moody in smoking jacket and silk cravat, with brilliantined hair (even though his hair was never like that), sitting at a typewriter in his London flat. He smokes a Turkish cigarette. There’s a smiling scar on his mouth. Now that he is moving again, everything mixes up.
Has he got rid of Taylor Barr? London must be full of young men.
I won’t read his novel but have just re-read his chapter. I’ve tied it in its pink tape with the others and hope I’ll never see it again. I’ll say what I know: Owen Moody writes well. I’m stupid to have held the belief that good writing, of whatever sort, rests on virtue.
James was the one who smoked Turkish cigarettes. Moody’s writing rests on cleverness. I’ve thought of being clever myself and writing the end of my book as an action story: the Professor drives to the rescue; confronts the villain and his henchman; saves the maiden; a secret is revealed — but I can’t. I’ve come this far with open eyes and mustn’t put on blinkers now, even though they’d help me present the facts without the messy outrage I go in for. Eric told me once that I had a sniffy nose. He meant my moralist’s nose; and he went on to argue that my sort of seriousness is replaced in modern times by inclusiveness — human inclusive-ness, he called it (implying that my judging is inhuman). If that is so — and the evidence suggests he’s right — the history of behaviour turns a corner (just as, in the year I’ve written about, politics turned). But morality is human, isn’t it? It is where we’ve got to and is fixed now in our blood. The sort of looseness Eric makes himself a spokesman for doesn’t lead forward but back down the road. On one side path it leads us to Ferrabee and Moody and James.
At mid-morning on the day after election day, May telephoned: ‘Sam, can you go out and intercept Eric. He’s walking over to the observatory. He should be just about on Tinakori Road.’
‘What for?’ I asked.
‘Charlie phoned. She’s in a state. James is on some sort of rampage. She wants Eric to go there. Can you hurry?’
I put on my jacket, called to Rose that I wouldn’t be long, and walked round to the top of Molesworth Street, where I found Eric crossing. We hurried back up the hill and he unlocked his garage. May called from the window, ‘She’s on the phone again. I can’t tell what’s wrong. Can you talk to her?’
‘Charlie,’ I said, ‘what’s going on?’
‘He’s smashing everything Mother owned. He’s even tearing curtains down. Can Eric come? I’m trying to pack. I’ve got to leave.’
Eric hurried in and snatched the phone, but when he spoke Ferrabee answered. Eric cried, ‘You put my niece back on, Ferrabee. If you touch her —’
The phone went dead.
‘What did he say?’
‘She’s not well, she needs to lie down. That bastard …’ He ran to the car.
‘Go with him, Sam,’ May cried.
We drove along the harbour road at speeds of sixty and seventy miles an hour.
‘He took the phone off her. I heard her scream.’
‘We should have telephoned the police.’
‘We’ll get there before any police,’ Eric said.
It took twenty minutes. I thought we would find Charlie dead. The entrance gates on the drive were padlocked. Eric pressed the car on them until the bolt sprang free. We drove to the front door, where I held his arm: ‘Eric, be careful.’ He seemed misproportioned by his fear and rage, and I felt we might meet beings in the house unshaped in some similar way — James and Ferrabee unnatural, homicidal. He rattled the door, then ran round to the back of the house. We saw Ferrabee busy at a fire by the creek, throwing flattened boxes on the flames.
Eric ran inside as
though bursting through scrub. We went past the kitchen into the hall and found tipped furniture, torn hangings, a broken mirror. He turned in a circle, lost, then swelled his throat and bellowed, ‘Charlie!’
She cried from upstairs, behind her door, ‘They’ve locked me in.’
He ran up, three steps at a time, faced the door, heaved on it with his shoulder, then stood back. I’ve seen it done in movies — a horizontal stamp, human horse-kick, at the lock. The door bursts in. Not for Eric, and I thought, He’ll kill himself, he’s too old. I found a key on the hall stand.
‘Eric, here.’
He turned it in the lock, rushed in, as James leaned from his study door.
‘You’re a fool, James. You can’t lock up a grown woman,’ I cried.
He stepped to the hall door and screamed, ‘Ferrabee.’
‘James, think what you’re doing.’ I ran down the stairs and took his shoulders, looked in his face, which was raw on one cheekbone where he had injured himself tearing things down. He beat me with his hands, birdwing hands, forcing me back.
‘Ferrabee, stop them,’ he said.
He appears like a manifestation, Ferrabee; he’s suddenly there. Although I’m not a man of action I hooked my foot on his shin. Saw his falling as a vision of rightness. Then he was upright and prancing on the stairs. Charlie and Eric stood at the top, with a suitcase each.
‘Get back,’ Eric cried, swinging his case.
Ferrabee tumbled again. He stopped himself with a grabbing hand on the rail, lay printed there, with bloody mouth. He spat a broken tooth out, moved again, would not be stopped; but Charlie screamed, ‘I’ll tell the police what you did. He was touching me —’ to James and Eric — ‘when he locked me in. He was putting his hands here and here.’ She pressed her hand on her breasts and between her thighs. ‘It was on purpose. You’ll go to prison.’
It stopped Ferrabee as blows could not. He might think himself in a world where inclination ruled — lust and greed — protected by James Tinling’s fiat, but he understood ‘prison’ all right and did not mean to end up there.
‘We’re going now,’ Charlie said, imperious. ‘Da, we’re going. I won’t stay here any more.’
‘Go then. Get out of my house,’ James said.
Charlie and Eric came down the stairs, shunting Ferrabee. I saw how he longed to attack.
‘Come here, Ferrabee,’ James said, as though calling a dog.
‘Sam, Eric,’ Charlie said, when she reached the foot, ‘will you put my paintings in the car. I won’t take a single thing else,’ she said to James.
Ferrabee grinned through his blood. ‘Too late.’
‘They were filth,’ James said. ‘I had every right.’
I made sense of the flat objects and the fire. ‘He was burning them.’
‘I won’t have filth in my house,’ James said.
Charlie ran past me, and Ferrabee called, ‘You can toast some sausages. Do one for me.’
‘Go with her, Sam,’ Eric said.
I did not know where I should be. Eric and Ferrabee were not finished yet. I went to the back door and saw Charlie running. The fire burned in its centre and smoked at the edge. She stood helplessly, half ran to the stream, ran back and plucked a painting from the flames. It flickered as she ran holding it away from her. She plunged it in the stream. I imagined the hiss, and her sob. She looked at it, laid it down, then sat and put her head in her arms.
I turned back to the hall and saw Ferrabee spread his hands. I heard him say, ‘I surrender all my rights, Prof. You can give her one. She’s dying for it.’
Perhaps he thought Eric would grapple with him, or set himself for a boxer’s punch. He was not ready for a clubbing back-handed blow. It took him on the mouth. The smack sickened me, yet his reeling to the wall, the little man, Ferrabee, and sliding down, filled me with elation. Then it was gone. I ran to Eric, grabbed at him two-handed, tried to drag him out of the house. ‘Have you gone mad?’
He shook me off and faced James, who was bent in the middle, like a cracked clothes prop, and gasping for air.
‘Don’t hit him,’ I cried, coming back at Eric. He held my shirt-front, easy now, and said to James, ‘That was for you. He’s your proxy.’
James did not hear. He made a little cry of love and sat by Ferrabee at the wall. He took him in his arms — the man gagging and spitting — then freed one arm and felt in his pocket.
‘Sam,’ he said, piteous, ‘a handkerchief.’
I gave him mine. He wiped Ferrabee’s mouth. ‘Lennie, dear boy, it’s all right, you’ll be all right.’ Then to us, pleading and courteous: ‘Will you go away now.’
We went out to Charlie by the stream. She was lying on her back, but turned on her elbow when she heard us, giving a smile I could not guess the meaning of. The painting she had saved lay face down on the grass. She stood it up for us to see.
‘It’s the only one left.’
The fire had scorched the frame along the bottom, burned a hole where James’s feet had been, and made the canvas bubble across his face. It charred Violet down the length of her body, but left her face china white and pure, as if some other dispensation held.
‘Do you want to keep it, Eric? I promised it to you.’
‘No,’ he said. He took it and walked to the fire; held it upright with a hooked finger; let it fall face down; watched it burn.
‘I’m glad to have all that old stuff gone,’ Charlie said. Yet she was grieving, and grieving for her father in the house.
‘Is there anything you need from in there?’ Eric said.
‘No, nothing.’
‘Do you you want your paints and canvases?’
‘Yes, I suppose so.’
We carried them from the shed — canvases, paints, brushes, easel, books — and put them with her suitcases in the car, watching all the time for movements in the house.
Eric winced with pain. ‘Sam, will you drive? I think I’ve broken something in my hand.’
‘I won’t even look back,’ Charlie said, falsely brave.
Halfway to Wellington she began to weep, but dried her eyes and composed herself as we turned up the hill to Eric’s house.
May had telephoned Rose. They took Charlie to the sitting room. I carried her belongings in while Eric bathed his hand. I found him in the bathroom, trying to bandage it.
‘I’ll get May.’
‘No, leave her. Tie these ends for me.’ His face was white with pain. ‘I haven’t punched anyone since I boxed at school.’
‘You need an X-ray,’ I said.
‘Later. Let’s see how they are.’
We came into the sitting room in time to hear Charlie say, ‘I’m going to marry Frank Siers.’
‘No you’re not,’ Eric said.
‘Eric,’ May warned.
‘He’s twenty years older than you. And he’s a fool.’
Charlie flushed. Her tears began again, instantly. ‘He’s a kind man. And he won’t bother me. I’ll have a place to paint.’
‘I won’t let you.’
‘Eric, be quiet,’ May said.
‘She can’t marry someone like that.’
May stood up. She faced him, leaning forward as though to bite. ‘Go outside. Go away. And don’t come back in here until I say.’
‘May —’
‘Now, Eric.’ There’s a kind of boiling coldness she generates. Eric can do nothing against it. He blundered out.
‘You too, Sam.’
I followed him across the lawn and down into the garden, where we sat on a bench facing the harbour. He nursed his hand. After a while, I said, ‘She really is your daughter, isn’t she?’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘How did it happen?’
‘It isn’t the sort of thing you want to know, Sam.’
‘Probably not. Does May know?’
‘Of course she does.’
‘And Rose?’
‘They’re sisters. They talk.’
‘So I’m
the only one who doesn’t?’
‘You. And Charlie. And James.’
‘He doesn’t?’
‘He doesn’t know who. I don’t —’ Eric tried to smile — ‘come within his frame of acceptability.’
‘Will May tell Charlie now?’
‘I hope not. But you never know with her.’
‘Charlie only needs to look at you, then in the mirror.’ I was astonished that I hadn’t seen it before.
He reached with his good hand for his tobacco. I took it from him and rolled two cigarettes. We smoked side by side, although I would have preferred my pipe.
He said, ‘She was a sad woman. But perfectly normal in most ways. She could have got the marriage annulled. Or got a boyfriend. James would have looked the other way.’ He smoked a while, then grinned maliciously. ‘You would have been acceptable. More the gentleman.’
‘Was it before you married May? It must have been.’
‘I knew that’s what you’d ask. Yes, it was. Though we were engaged. To everyone’s consternation, eh Sam? Violet’s especially. I wonder how it was that an oaf like me was the only one who could see what was wrong with her.’
‘Did it go on long?’
‘I could ask your questions for you. It’s odd how you and I stay friends.’
‘I suppose you’re going to say you did it for her?’
‘No, Sam, that’s what you’d say. I did it for me. But I felt pretty sure she’d enjoy it too.’
He had touched her by accident one day, walking in the garden — and heard her gasp and felt her tremble. He rode his bicycle out to Lower Hutt the next morning, when he knew James would be at work.
‘I had to go easy, Sam. Not frighten her. But once she’d got the hang of it we kept going all day. I was just the sort of stud bull she needed. So once in her life …’ He grinned. ‘No, that’s lies. Like I said, I did it for me. But when I tried going back next day she’d turned into the Violet we all knew. Couldn’t go on with it. She was terrified.’
