Kehua!

by Fay Weldon

  Only yesterday someone was talking about the ghosts of Roman soldiers seen marching along the old Roman road which runs from Badbury Rings to Bath. They march along as though amputated at the knee, on moving bands. My problem is I am the most suggestible, gullible person on earth.

  I go out into the garden to look but there is no dog. I didn’t really expect to see one. I project my own fantasies in rather too lively a way, that’s all. I am a writer: I make things up. I am not going to flee upstairs again. It’s pathetic. The dog will only follow me up there if I am in the wrong frame of mind. He was on the other side of glass. He’s not threatening me. I don’t suppose ghost dogs draw real blood, and anyway he seemed a friendly, relaxed and amiable creature. Had he looked in through the window I daresay he would have seen me, and I for him would have been a ghost and made his hair bristle.

  But he didn’t, and it didn’t. I turn my computer back on. It takes its time and then there’s the familiar sound of the ‘welcome’ chords of Microsoft materialising: real and not real, aetheric yet so very here and now. I suppose they are from this world, not the other, crossed over to delude us all? How could one tell? Do we understand the mechanism by which they are now heard in every house in the land?

  Beverley feels better

  Beverley thinks perhaps her knee hasn’t been infected with MRSA after all. Now her hair is fluffed out she thinks she will Skype her friend Gerry, an oil engineer prospecting in the Faröes, and ask him what to do about Scarlet. Should she call Louis and tell him to get home quickly before Scarlet does something silly, or should she just do nothing and not get involved? Perhaps a lifetime’s policy of not standing between her family and their follies, feeling it is always wiser to run than to stay, has been misguided. Better still, she decides, she will call Louis, before she calls Gerry, the minute Scarlet is out the door.

  ‘I mustn’t hold you up any longer,’ she says to Scarlet. ‘You’d better run along now. Where are you meeting your lover? Somewhere smart?’

  ‘Costa’s in Soho,’ says Scarlet. ‘You won’t know it. No one important will recognise him there.’

  Or he can’t pay for anything better, thinks Beverley, and if he doesn’t get recognised in Soho where will he be? But she doesn’t say so and smiles sweetly at Scarlet, to hurry her out of the door.

  ‘Why are you rubbing your eyes?’ asks Beverley.

  ‘I’ve got the beginnings of a migraine,’ says Scarlet, and she takes an aspirin out of the pack in the little Marc Jacobs handbag (£205, Harvey Nichols sale, 30 per cent off) she keeps in the Chloé tote bag, and swallows it without even bothering to find water. She coughs a little as it dissolves in her throat.

  ‘It’s hereditary,’ observes Beverley, and closes her own eyes to see how the flashes are getting on behind her lids and for once finds there are none. Thoughts of the kehua do not enter her mind, but they enter into mine, your writer’s. The voices which say run, run are stronger in Scarlet’s head than ever. The problem with dealing with ghosts is that they are so unpredictable. There today, gone tomorrow, undetectable by any technology so far discovered.

  Scarlet takes her nice little Stella McCartney jacket (silk, striped black and white, £965 – Jackson loves it; Louis, for all he’s in the fashion world, albeit on its edges, hasn’t even noticed) and prepares to go. It is a pity the Prada top is navy but it’s a dark shade and Jackson probably won’t notice in the haste to get it off. If as she makes her way to her smart little ecologically sound Toyota Prius an unexpected gust of wind follows her so she shivers in the silk jacket and wishes she had worn wool, the thought lasts only a second or so and is forgotten, but lingers with your writer.

  The souls of the dead in most cultures pass as breath in the wind but can do so with some force. The pain in the back, the flashes in the eyes – flail around and burn a witch! Perhaps some kehua forced themselves through the window seals to get into the Prius, perhaps others carried on to reinforce those already in Nopasaran down the road, where Lola was on the phone to Cynara. Beverley’s shower may have simply made them disperse, not disappear. That’s the trouble with the grateful dead: they are never convinced we are better off without their help.

  Soon the Northern kelpies are going to enter on the scene, they too in search of their own. The living travel the world; nationalities no longer contain them. It’s no different for the dead. They’re all over the place, like the chords of Microsoft. No wonder the world is in a mess.

  What Lola is doing in the meanwhile

  Now yes, where were we with Lola? She is on the phone to her mother and her mother is dumping her in favour of her lesbian lover. I have neglected to tell you what Cynara looks like. She has the hard edges of the busy businesswoman, the accomplished and self-confident lawyer – though her confidence is currently under some threat. She is brisk and beautiful and has the plentiful frizzy hair and the wary, determined look cultivated by the committed feminist. (Though which comes first, the chicken or the egg, the hair or the nature, it is hard to say.) She is broader and dumpier than her young sister Scarlet, wears flats, and carries a rape alarm. Her grandmother, her mother, her sister, and indeed her daughter, would not deign to do either. It is not so much the set of the features but the lines into which the expression falls that mark them as belonging to the same stock. Male genes enter into the generations and cloud the mix. Cynara and Scarlet have the same mother but a different father, thus diffusing their genes still further, but Cynara and Scarlet are not aware of this, and Alice certainly has no intention of telling them.

  Cynara’s skin has seldom seen face cream. But she has fine eyes, a voluptuous mouth, likeability, high principles and a working mind. Sometimes she wonders how she and Jesper managed to beget this child, Lola, who seems to have so little to do with her. Her friends all seem to be wondering the same thing. It’s as if you didn’t beget your own daughters any more, but pulled them out of some central pool where they lie waiting to be claimed, ready formed. Some of them are better-looking than others but that’s all there is to it. All have longer legs than their parents. They speak a strange language, have alien views, communicate to their friends and find their parents as weird as their parents find them. Lola is at least one of the better-looking, brighter ones.

  Cynara tells herself it is her social and personal duty to follow the authenticity of her sexual orientation. In attempting to live her own life, go where her emotions direct and relate to women more than to men, she has done something admirable, not disgraceful. She, Cynara, would rather share her bed with D’Dora than with Jesper: that is the simple truth of it. If she is to create a different, better world for Lola to live in, and Lola chooses to take offence, too bad. She will live to thank her mother, so be it.

  Jesper, who had a Swedish father and an English mother, was himself a declared feminist, and so when Cynara texted him to announce her decision that he was to live elsewhere, he took it nobly. He was away on business in Dubai anyway, employed in the construction and design of the new museum of Atlantis. Cynara was even a little hurt at the ease with which he emailed back ‘OK’. Jesper put up with the present, because he had to live in it, but preferred the past. He did not actively reject the present, but it was not his main concern in life. The plan was that he would take some small convenient flat round the corner from where Cynara and Lola live, which Lola could see as a second home when he came back to England to present papers, see funding bodies, talk to colleagues about two-horned helmets, refute suggestions that Atlantis had been situated off the Danish coast and so forth, and everything would go on much as before.

  And so far so good. Jesper has even put down a deposit on a suitable flat, only now Lola has taken it into her head to move out and go and stay with her Aunt Scarlet, who in Cynara’s eyes is too young to be serious, and has no interest in the fate of nations, only in fashion. In her worst moments, angry at her daughter’s desertion, Cynara sees Scarlet as having bribed her way into the child’s affections from the beginning by buying her t
he in-present every Christmas, its only merit being that it was difficult to get hold of. And as D’Dora pointed out, it was Scarlet’s habit of buying little Lola ostentatiously expensive clothes far too precocious for her age that Scarlet would claim were ‘cute’ and ‘cool’, words which Lola would pick up and use against her mother as ammunition in the daily battle to get her to school in decent clothes.

  And now back for the detail of Lola on the phone only weeks after declaring she’s gone for good. Cynara reflects that the better everyone else behaves, the worse Lola will and probably none of it is Scarlet’s fault at all. Lola is a little cow, incapable of gratitude, and she, Cynara, chose the wrong father in Jesper; just because he looked like good breeding stock didn’t mean he was.

  ‘I want to come home,’ Lola was saying. ‘Scarlet’s such a bitch. She treats me like a servant. She threw a vase of flowers at him last night and left me to pick up the pieces. I got a bit of china in my hand and it’s bleeding and she doesn’t care; she’s just gone shopping at Waitrose. Shop, shop, shop. Now she’s had the nerve to ask me to pack her things, because she’s running off with Jackson Wright. She’s been having it off with him for ages under poor Louis’ nose. She has this white blouse thing from Brown’s, which she’s far too old and fat to wear. I asked her if I could have it and she said no, just to be mean.’ Which was true; Scarlet had. ‘Now it’s got blood all over it and serve her right.’

  ‘But darling,’ says Cynara, ‘you told me you were never coming home. You were staying with Auntie Scarlet until your flight was arranged. So I’m clearing your room out. It’s hard work.’

  ‘You mean you’ve given my room to your fat dyke friend?’ screeches Lola in her nasal, druggie voice, or so her mother heard it.

  ‘Dyke is not a word of opprobrium,’ says her mother. ‘On the contrary. I’m using your room to store my things, and as it happens D’Dora is sharing my bedroom.’

  ‘You’ve thrown all Dad’s things out too?’ shrieks her daughter. ‘To make way for her? You bloody cow!’

  ‘No darling,’ says her mother peaceably, ignoring the insult. Lola had got into the habit of flinging insults and Cynara of taking little notice. ‘Daddy helped me take them up to the attic,’ she lies. ‘He was just here on a flying visit. He sent his love, said it was a good idea about staying with your Auntie Scarlet and wishes you well on the Haiti trip.’

  ‘What have you done with all my things? Burned them?’

  ‘They’re all safe and sound in the attic too, darling, so you can come and take them away when you have a place of your own.’

  ‘So what’s happening in my room?’

  ‘D’Dora and I are using it as a workshop. We’re weaving wreaths and making felt flowers for the Mother Goddess festival. You should do more crafts, Lola. It would make you feel so much better about yourself.’

  Lola makes sick noises down the phone.

  ‘I feel just fine about myself, Mum,’ says Lola. ‘But how do you feel – about you? You never wanted me anyway. Why didn’t you just abort me in the first place? The reason you don’t want me around is D’Dora fancies me. She gives me the creeps. She’s only with you to get at me. Like Humbert Humbert with Lolita.’

  It has occurred to Cynara that this is a possibility, just as any mother of a fetching sixteen-year-old is wise to check a new partner out. Indeed, the police run a special service for worried single mothers to do exactly this for fear of possibly paedophile new step-fathers, and what is sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose. But Cynara has dismissed the thought with contempt. More reasonable to be worried that there was something slightly unhealthy about Jesper’s interest in his daughter, or, rather, in Lola’s interest in her father. Just as Cynara’s more extreme friends spread the doctrine that all men are rapists, so do D’Dora’s friends suppose that all fathers are child abusers, thus clouding any number of issues.

  At the end of the phone call Lola slams down the phone then calls Help the Harmed, tells them she is cancelling her membership, they’re a racket anyway, she’s too young to go to Haiti, and she wants her money back.

  She will stay and keep Louis company. She will find out if he is really gay. That will serve everyone right.

  What happened next, in that other country long ago

  Beverley grew up more or less believing herself to be the daughter of Dr Arthur and Mrs Rita Audley of Coromandel, North Island, New Zealand, the World, the Galaxy, the Universe, Space. Beyond the vision of her pumping knees on some desperate errand, and the bloodied dress above them, and playing in the yellow dust under the macrocarpa hedge, and a young woman turning cartwheels on the lawn – whom she assumes to be Rita – she has only the scantiest memories of her very early life. Usually between the ages of two and three years, the brain of a child switches from the tactile and olfactory to the verbal processing of memories. After that age we develop a self-image and can place other images within that main one – before that, all is amnesia.

  Beverley was a bright child – as is Lola – and had developed her language skills, speaking, writing and reading early, so more memories were likely to be retained. Experiences deposit images, and though childhood trauma can have the effect of wiping out whole sections of memory altogether, Beverley was a tough and resilient little creature and the images remained. Which is why I say ‘more or less believing herself to be the daughter’, etc., and not a simple ‘believed’. Ask little Beverley for the names of her parents and she’d pause for a second before replying Arthur and Rita, and she’d look at you with a slight air of doubt once she had done so.

  When at the age of six her friend Evelyn Hammer confided that she, Evelyn, had been switched at birth, and was really a princess, Beverley said, ‘I wasn’t switched, I was adopted,’ and knew it to be true, though how, she couldn’t say. Nobody had ever told her, let alone suggested it. She thought she’d probably imagined it, just as Evelyn imagined herself to be a princess.

  ‘What’s adopted?’ asked Evelyn, and Beverley explained. ‘It’s when your mother dies and you get put up for sale and somebody buys you.’

  Rita was a young woman of twenty-seven when little Beverley, bloodied, came knocking for help at her farmhouse door. Rita phoned the operator who phoned the neighbours and all quickly congregated at Walter McLean’s door, to find the horror of poor dead Kitchie, his wife, inside. Nobody had to break down doors; nobody locked doors then. A search party went looking for Walter, who was found in a nearby gully, lying dead, a blackened bullet hole in his temple. His dog Patch lay dead not far away, his own Webley revolver was lying beside him, and assumptions were easily made.

  The unfortunate Walter McLean had taken a knife to his faithless wife, fled the scene of the crime, and then turned his gun first on Patch, then on himself. The child had woken from her afternoon rest to find the mother’s body and, brave little thing, had run to the neighbour, local farmer’s daughter Rita Hardy, for help. Police from Christchurch, thirty-four miles away, were called in, and both bodies were wrapped and transported quickly to the morgue in that city. The weather was hot. There had been no real evidence of a lover, but the general supposition from the first was that there must have been. Kitchie, a flirtatious lass from England who put on airs and was no kind of wife for a hard-working Canterbury sheep farmer, must have driven the poor man to it. The name of Arthur Audley, the newly qualified doctor, was bandied about as a possible lover – mainly because he was young and handsome and the only local man anyone could envisage Kitchie taking an interest in – but the rumour soon died. Walter was known to have a temper, and Patch was not the only dog he had shot. Dogs suspected of worrying his sheep got short shrift, sometimes off his own land, and this had caused some local feeling. The inquests had been brief and to the point. Marital murder/suicide was always unpleasant, but not a rarity in rural parts.

  Rita, unusual in her generosity and kindness, had done her neighbourly best to befriend Kitchie in the early days of her marriage, one of the few who did, and now extende
d that kindness to little Bev. Rita was lonely, plain, valiant and unmarried in a town where most were married by the age of twenty. She had inherited the farm from her parents; it was going to rack and ruin but she had property, so she had suitors. She also had her pride and her principles, and was almost thirty and still unmarried when Bev turned up on the step. Rita thought that put paid to any chance of marriage – who would ever want to take on another man’s child, let alone Bev, with her history – but she took her in nonetheless. Then young Dr Audley had come courting, and been prepared to take Bev on. They would adopt her formally, sell the farm, and move north for the child’s sake, to be distanced from scandal and memory.

  So that is what happened. Rita sold the farm and with the proceeds Arthur bought a practice in the town of Coromandel, on the rugged, mysterious peninsula of the same name south-east of Auckland. Fifty years before, with New Zealand’s own gold rush, the place had grown and swelled from sleepy fishing village to rough and raucous gold-mining town, complete with saloon, banks and whorehouses, but as the gold veins ran out and the population melted away, it had sunk again into a quiet, benevolent, satisfied sleep, as might some respectable matron with a wild past.