True Stars

by Kidman, Fiona

  Mostly it reappeared a short time later, but today it had not.

  ‘Are you sure that nobody’s been into Kendalls’?’ he asked O’Meara again. He could have insisted that the visits be logged, but it had started out as a simple favour so that he didn’t have to go out of his way. He couldn’t help wondering if O’Meara called him an old woman behind his back and simply humoured him by appearing to make these visits. But it was beginning to look as if the Kendall woman’s complaints were making all of them look foolish.

  ‘Why don’t you take a look?’ O’Meara had been terse.

  Very slowly, Campbell drove up Cedarwood Grove to the bushed-in driveway that led to the Kendalls’ place. He parked, and just as O’Meara had suggested, walked around the house, peering in at the windows.

  The house was as desolate as before, abandoned but intact, furnished with ageing chairs and tables all in their place. There was no damage that he could see and all the doors held fast. It was very still around the garden. The swimming pool was full of leaves and debris. A wrought-iron chair was overturned, but it looked as if it had been lying on its side for a long time. Campbell righted it, and saw that rust was setting in where the paint had chipped.

  Nevertheless as he got back into the patrol car he could have sworn that he was not alone. He could not understand it. The Studebaker had disappeared but it was not here, or it did not seem to be.

  Then in a flash it came to him: the car was inside the garage with the automatic doors.

  Shaken, he drove back again to the driveway at the bottom of the road and pulled in. If he was correct, he would need help. But was this the right time to go in?

  He was so close to knowing, but still it eluded him. There were still too many pieces missing. He was afraid of moving too quickly and finding one thing only to miss some other, more important, clue.

  As he sat there he was alerted by a young woman, so slight she looked like a child although she carried herself as if weighed down with ancient care. She walked hurriedly, casting anxious looks over her shoulder, until she came to the Kendalls’ driveway, then she vanished. Campbell knew he was right, that indeed the Studebaker was inside the property.

  She sprigged herself on the holly bush and swore softly. Even though she had been here once before she could not find the glasshouse at once amongst the ngaios and the broom at the end of the garden. When she did, its windows, covered over from the inside, reflected her face back at her, frightening her as if she had been confronted by someone else.

  She knocked, even though she knew she had been seen. After a moment or two the door was opened by Jason and she was admitted into the warm and sumptuous smell of growing plants.

  ‘I told you not to come here, fuckwit,’ Gary said. ‘There’s been a cop snooping round. You want to lead him straight down the path?’

  ‘I thought you had the cops sewn up.’

  ‘Jesus you’re dumb.’ For the second time in the space of an hour Larissa was hit.

  Rose dreamed as she lay sleeping in a cool room at Delphi while the midday sun blazed down outside. She dreamed that she was in Wellington, dancing on a marble table top in the foyer of Parliament Buildings.

  When she woke, her pillow was wet as if she had been crying in her sleep for a long time. Not that this was immediately clear to her for at first she believed what she had dreamed was true, seeing it all with an absolute and terrifying clarity. She saw Kit standing beside her and his face was dark with rage. ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,’ she whimpered. ‘Please Kit, I didn’t mean to make you angry.’

  ‘You made me look stupid, you promised that you wouldn’t ever do anything like that again.’

  ‘I was dancing. I felt so gay.’

  ‘Everyone looked.’

  ‘They were all having fun too.’

  ‘Funny, yes. They were laughing at you.’

  ‘They’ll have forgotten by tomorrow.’

  ‘I won’t. I won’t ever.’

  ‘Here’s my ring. Take my ring, it’s all I’ve got.’

  ‘It’s all you’ve got on.’

  ‘That’s not true, Kit.’ She sat straight up in the bed, angrily denying such a falsehood, pulling her swirling peasant dress down over her knees and adjusting her bodice. ‘That’s Katrina you’re looking at.’

  Then she looked down at the glittering sheet fallen away from her and her robe drawn in modestly round her waist and glancing about saw that the room was empty. Her ring lay on the dresser beside the pitcher of water. She slipped it over her finger, staring down at it. Keeping up appearances. Sometimes she had thought of throwing it away because it was false. But it was her mother’s secret, she would keep it for her. She wondered if her mother had ever known or whether it had been handed on as it was and she had believed in it too. It occurred to her that her mother had died keeping up appearances. Perhaps it was a case of dying or going on pretending to be happy with Tom Diamond (though that was romanticising her death, her mother had simply died of cancer). But she could not remember her mother being happy. There were no servants and no frangipani and no cucumber sandwiches, none of which was Tom Diamond’s fault.

  It was still too hot to go outside but she did anyway, opening the shutters on to the balcony and sitting on a chair which had been provided. From there she looked down into a grove of olive trees and the Gulf of Itea shining beyond. A woman in blue sat on a rock below her gathering up flowers into her skirt, then stood up, brushing herself down and stretching in a voluptuous way, wandering away inside, unconscious of having been watched. The stark hills sheltered narrow streets and the white houses with their shingled roofs clung to the hillside. Early that morning she had stood in the Stadium in front of the terraces before the crowds came and there wasn’t another living person in sight. The night before she had met some Americans at Stamatis’ and joined them later at the bar of one of the larger hotels, drinking margaritas and exchanging extravagant travellers’ tales; she had not told them that she was the wife of an antipodean politician. Late at night as the conversation exhausted itself and the Americans began talking more to each other she smiled at the barman who propositioned her straight away. ‘It is lonely here, my family live in Athens. Why not you talk to me and be kind to me?’ he had asked. ‘We can talk later in my room.’

  She had shaken her head, smiling to soften the refusal.

  ‘But yes, why not? It is little thing.’

  ‘Because I have much family in New Zealand who love me and trust me to travel alone. Kalinikta.’

  He spat, and the Americans looked away from her, embarrassed. She knew what they were thinking; she asked for it.

  Nor had she exactly spoken the truth, for only the night before that she had visited the same hotel and sat in the same room with her son Richard, to whom she had said goodbye at the bus station the next day; the barman had not distinguished the mother as the woman who now travelled alone. Or perhaps he had assumed that she had a beautiful young paramour who had now deserted her. After all, Richard had held her hand.

  ‘Come back to Athens,’ Richard had said.

  ‘You can board an international flight on your own,’ she said. ‘You’re getting good at it.’

  ‘I don’t want to leave you here alone, Ma.’

  ‘I need a little bit more time amongst the ruins.’

  ‘Most people only stay here for a day. D’you think the Oracle’s going to speak to you?’

  ‘You never know.’ She made her voice light, mocking. Since he had arrived in Greece a fortnight before she had been happy. Travelling had been safe and easy for her in a way that it had not been when she was alone. He had grown taller since she had seen him last, and in his manner was taking on the assurance of an adult. From time to time she would put her arm through his, without thinking, in a way that she would not have done when he was younger, and certainly not in Weyville. He accepted the gesture as if it was perfectly natural and they had strolled along companionably through ruins and on the edges of bright seas. I
n a way, she supposed, she was in love with him, as mothers were said to be with their sons. Definitely, she reflected, the proceeds of the battered Metro’s sale had been well spent, bringing him over from America, not to mention paying off Buff Daniels before she left.

  ‘I wish Olivia was here,’ she said once.

  ‘I don’t,’ he had replied promptly.

  ‘You two, you’ll get on some day, you wait and see.’

  ‘Like your family?’

  ‘That’s different.’ Her retort was sharp.

  ‘Is it really?’

  He took up the matter of her staying in Delphi again, the night before he left.

  ‘Is it because you don’t want to see Dad?’

  She hesitated. ‘We’re having separate holidays,’ she said carefully.

  ‘Is he with someone else?’

  ‘Richard, don’t be silly.’

  ‘He is, isn’t he? What’s her name?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Please. Go on, tell me.’ He was a child again; it was a bad moment to confide in him.

  ‘Violet.’

  ‘Jeez. Aw shit, Ma.’

  ‘Forget it.’

  ‘He doesn’t mean it. Come to Athens and we can have a good time together. Anyway, she won’t be staying at the Espiria with him, will she, not when he meets me?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘I won’t stay there if he brings her. What’s she like?’

  ‘I haven’t met her.’

  ‘Shall I write and tell you?’

  ‘No. No, please don’t do that.’

  ‘When will you go back to New Zealand?’

  ‘Soon, I expect. My money won’t last much longer.’

  ‘Get some from Dad. He owes you.’

  ‘It’s not like that.’ It was on the tip of her tongue to say that Violet had paid for Kit’s trip but she stopped herself in time.

  ‘Will you go back to Weyville?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ She laughed. ‘It’d be a bit hard getting round Weyville without a car. Anyway, I like Wellington.’ She wanted desperately to ask him if he would come back to New Zealand, only she had promised herself that she would not. She guessed that he would not return for a long time, maybe never, if he could find a way to stay abroad. It had been important to her that she see him, to tell him in a way that did not threaten him with her need, that it was all right, that she understood. Now she longed for him to go home with her. If she went to Athens she would be lost.

  ‘Are you leaving Dad?’ he asked her at the bus stop. It was on the roadside, beside a steep bank. Their backs were to the sea, and the port of Kyrrha. The gilded dome of a church gleamed in the morning light. Rose shivered in the sun; she wondered if she would ever come here again. Yesterday she had bought a kilim to remind her of it. It had exhausted the last of her funds.

  ‘Maybe we’ll leave each other. It’s too soon to say.’

  His kiss was quick, his voice grown-up and brusque as he said goodbye; she knew he would cry on the bus.

  She remembered her conversation with the Americans. The women all had jobs. They were resting up from being lawyers and doctors and corporate executives. This was clear even without them saying so in so many words because they gave her their business cards. I’ve run out, she had told them, but actually I’m a film director.

  ‘Telephone for madame.’ The woman dressed in blue stood behind her.

  As she trekked down the stairs it occurred to Rose that hotels with telephones in the rooms were not her strong point, even accepting that in Greece they were a rarity. For a dreadful moment she thought she might pick up the phone and discover that the line was dead, or that the caller would hang up, like the other time.

  Instead, the operator asked her to hold for a call from Naya Zeelandia, and then Jeffrey Campbell was talking on a static-laden line from Weyville.

  ‘Your glasshouse,’ he shouted. ‘They’re camped in your garden.’

  ‘What? Who?’

  ‘Your niece. Larissa, and her mates.’

  ‘What are they doing?’

  ‘Growing dope.’

  ‘They’re not, oh, they’re not.’ Suddenly she began to laugh.

  ‘Mrs Kendall.’

  ‘I’m sorry, it’s just so funny. Right under our noses. I can see the headlines. Politician cultivates pot plot. It’s good, isn’t it? Who knows about it?’

  Campbell’s voice was stiff. ‘At the moment, just me … er, and your investigator, Mr Daniels. I thought you ought to know.’

  ‘Larissa.’ Rose was wary. ‘I’ve thought about her but I didn’t think so. She’s got an awful boyfriend though. What are you doing about it?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Why not?

  ‘There’s a problem.’ He was anxious to change the subject. ‘I’ve been watching them since the funeral.’

  This was something Rose did not want to hear. She was tempted to hang up, pretend the line had cut out. The laughter in her voice fading, she said, ‘What have they got to do with Toni?’

  There was a pause at the other end. ‘Not Mrs Warner’s funeral.’

  Then nothing at all was amusing any more. ‘Basil,’ he shouted, and she shouted the name back. He was trying to tell her something else but the satellite started to echo and she could not understand.

  Kit rang later, from Athens. He knew about Katrina. He had been briefed, he explained: Katrina was in jail and they were disgraced.

  ‘Where’s Sharna?’ she asked.

  ‘Sharna? How should I know?’

  The last bus for Athens for the day had left. She went to Stamatis’ and ate skewered meat and tzatziki and drank retsina and thought about Richard, already somewhere over the Atlantic heading for La Guardia and a connecting flight south, and how easy it would be for a woman like her to make her way to lonely Greek barmen and how like a movie scenario her life was becoming.

  When she slept, briefly, before dawn, it was neither Larissa nor Basil’s name that echoed in her head but that of the child Sharna.

  11

  Rex Gamble’s ministerial car was waiting at the airport for Kit and Rose. So was Gamble himself.

  Kit said, ‘I wasn’t expecting this.’

  He looked drawn from the flight. Rose had suggested that he follow commonsense procedures about drinking and eating in the air, but he ignored her advice in a pointed way. She guessed that an idyll was over for him. It bothered her when she first met him at the airport in Athens, that his stricken face and sense of loss might be due to some misplaced sense of conscience on her account. But it soon became clear that if Violet had been relinquished, or Kit relinquished by Violet (and it was all rather unclear), little had altered between herself and Kit. The hours passed in silence. Anyway, she had not much to say either. The sheer catastrophe that had befallen her family in her absence, and the fact that such momentous events could transpire without her being there to prevent them or, at least, supervise their outcome, had rendered her still and apart from him.

  Now, despite his pallor, Kit was coming to life in the back of Gamble’s car, as if undergoing an adrenalin charge.

  ‘Have you kept up with the play, mate, or shall I fill you in?’ Rex Gamble leaned over from the front seat of the car as it picked up speed along Cobham Drive.

  ‘Run through the essentials,’ Kit said, and Rose gave him points for that.

  ‘RSL’s collapsed.’ He pulled a face.

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘Bad news all right.’ From the tightening of his knuckles along the back of the chauffeur’s seat, Rose guessed that this was personal as well as political.

  ‘And SLU’s are up.’

  ‘What are SLU’s?’ asked Rose.

  ‘Surplus Labour Units.’ Gamble was brisk.

  ‘Unemployed people?’

  ‘Something like that,’ Kit said.

  ‘How many?’

  ‘Six thousand this month.’

  ‘Je-siss.’ Kit drew a sharp breath. ‘It can�
��t go much higher.’

  ‘Courage.’ Gamble blew a long stream of smoke towards the car’s roof. It curled over and fell, gently engulfing Rose. ‘Sunshine, wait till you see our inflation figures. We’ve knocked them for six.’

  ‘What’s Prebble up to?’

  ‘The dear boy is in strife with the risen Messiah but what’s new about that? The Prime Minister, incidentally, still bears a remarkable resemblance to Billy Bunter in spite of all the health foods. They say he’s eating them as well as.’ He tapped the side of his nose.

  ‘What’s going to happen?’

  ‘Oh, he’ll have to go.’

  ‘Who, Prebble?’ Rose could hardly contain her eagerness. She felt Kit lean against her, wishing to restrain her without being seen to.

  ‘No, dear. The Prime Minister of course.’ Gamble chuckled.

  They were coming up alongside the boat marina at Evans Bay, and would soon turn up to Hataitai where they were to be let off at the flat.

  ‘Oh, yes. And they’ve found some mining prospects in a bit of scrub up the back of Weyville. Your electorate, no less.’

  ‘What bit of scrub?’

  ‘A bit they call the reserve, I expect you know it. It’s nothing serious they tell me.’

  ‘They can’t touch that.’ Kit’s voice was tense.

  ‘They can’t not touch it.’

  ‘Who says?’

  ‘Market forces. The pickings could be rich. No room for greenies in territory like that.’

  ‘Kit’s a forester,’ said Rose. ‘You must know that.’

  ‘And your sister’s in jail, I hear.’

  A hard lump choked Rose’s throat. As if she had not always known what politics was about.

  Hadn’t she?

  Always the trade-off. And her family were playing straight into it.

  The car had pulled up. ‘Attempted murder, isn’t it?’

  ‘Aggravated assault, I believe,’ said Kit.

  Their luggage was following by taxi. As they stood in the road waiting for it to arrive, Gamble’s Crown car did a U-turn and he wound the window down with an electric flick. ‘Don’t get wet, my children,’ he said, ‘it looks like rain.’