by Fay Weldon
No matter, says Beverley. Anyway it’s all pulled down now, he says.
‘Never mind,’ says Beverley. So Luke presses her further and she tells him, and all of them, of her trips to the Auckland Library and how she had discovered her origins, and about the murder. ‘My father murdered my mother.’ It seems to her as if she is relating a dream.
‘Oh Mum,’ says Alice, ‘don’t distress yourself. I know all that already. I have done since I went on a school trip to Paris. I ran into Dionne at the Louvre. She was blonder than ever and standing on the plinth next to some dignitary or other who was cutting a ribbon, but I recognised her at once. She used to look after me a lot when I was small. She took me out to tea and told me all about Arthur and Walter and all that. We had brioche and apricot jam. It was a long time ago.’
‘Dionne had no business telling you,’ is all Beverley can say.
‘No more than you had telling Cynara,’ says Alice.
‘Hang on!’ says Cynara to Alice. ‘Stop. You mean my grandmother Beverley had my mother, you, by my great-grandfather Arthur, and you had me by your stepfather? Is there such a thing as an incest gene? My God, supposing Lola gets pregnant.’
Luke is beginning to look quite put out. So is Gerry. They have come here on a momentous day to put their own lives in order and the women are upstaging them.
Politely the women desist, and turn their attention to the men-folk. There are no secrets left.
Down in the basement
How they’re crowding around me now, these characters. They too want to get out of here. Time is compressing. They’re trying to wind this story up. The kehua are back in the cherry tree at Robinsdale now, up against the window, attracted by event, and the promise of more, but looking over their batlike wings at the kowhai bush, which is in danger of getting too damp, developing mould. Gerry’s dripping kelpie is perhaps making matters worse. Someone is going to have to do something about that, in time. The tree may have to be replanted away from the stream nearer the house.
Luke has decided it’s warm enough to have a barbecue in the garden. Luke loves to cook. He learned from a tohunga when he was small. The tohunga was a Samoan, working as the cook in a refugee camp, a vast man who wore a ragged tie-dyed T-shirt in reds and yellow and greens which reached to his knee, and sandals on dirty feet. But he could cook anything even remotely edible and make it taste good, and the child watched and learned, and pattered after him as he performed the rites and rituals of his calling. Today Luke notices the wilting kowhai tree and fears it doesn’t bode good. The habits of kehua and kelpies alike are not unknown to him, and come to mind; he has after all studied anthropology.
He is on a sabbatical in London with his wife and children, but even scientists are affected by the knowledge they pick up along the way. His wife is up in the Hebrides recording the folk myths of the outer isles, and the children are in the garden, running around under the sprinkler, fully dressed and avoiding the water rather than seeking it, because it is frankly not that warm, happy enough, if complaining from time to time that their ears are still stuffed up from jet lag, and claiming that boiled sweets would clear them.
If Janice from Glastonbury was around she could probably learn to see hanging kehua in the same way she has learned to see haloes and recognise walk-ins from the binary Dog Star Sirius.
Even Janice is down here in spirit, good God. At least there has been no more bell, book and candle stuff going on, though twice now the power for the basement has blown, but I had everything on the computer saved on its emergency battery, and the black-outs lasted only a couple of minutes anyway. Rex says there’s a loose connection somewhere: the wiring is ropy down here and someone will have to come in to look at it. I say, not until I have finished the novel. He says, surely I can work upstairs, but how can I explain that upstairs now is even more disconcerting than downstairs? Rex was out last night and I didn’t dare go up to my study to do another hour’s writing, I was too scared. That hasn’t happened before. When I can see and hear the past it’s not so bad; when they’re silent it seems more sinister. I took sleeping pills and went to bed.
But even through the pills I dreamed of Scarlet and Lola. I am getting fond of Lola. She’s just into the madness that sometimes possesses teenage girls when they are allowed no escape into romance, and end up bouncing their skinny thighs on top of older men.
And then I dreamed of Cynara, Dowson’s Cynara, not mine, a ghostly figure from a lost age.
I cried for madder music and for stronger wine,
But when the feast is finish’d and the lamps expire,
Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine;
And I am desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, hungry for the lips of my desire:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.
Dowson’s Cynara was ‘Missie’ Adelaide, the owner’s under-age daughter at his favourite Soho restaurant. He was hopelessly in love with her. We know too much. It was a better world, I think, before we all became so cynical and knowing, before women wanted to be men, when sex was deep, mysterious and forbidden. I blame the men.
I had a good day’s writing down in the basement, in spite of everything. By the evening hobgoblins and foul fiends had fled away.
Another’s day’s writing
This evening I went out into the garden, which at the moment seems the most neutral place around here. And also of course to get a little sun for my skin. They say you need ten minutes’ exposure to sunlight a day, so your body can produce the vitamin D it needs. Let them say away, I am fair-skinned and burn easily and try to be in the shade whenever I can. Though thinking about it I realise the caution only set in when I was thirty-five and my sister died of melanoma, a skin cancer. It was after that that the sun suddenly stopped being my friend, and became a dangerous, glowing ball of light which didn’t like me and I didn’t like it, and I dived underground.
But it’s evening now, and the light is beautiful and calm. I need have no fear of lightning strikes and sudden visions of kehua, at least for the next few hours.
The sun is too low in the sky to be dangerous; our hilltop is suffused with a golden glow; and the white clouds are rimmed with pink, and over to the west above the stone wall the whole sky is streaked with oranges and reds. It is like a child’s colour wash of a sunset, but expertly done. The wall is old, made from nicely dressed blocks of stone taken from the ruined abbey – after the dissolution of the monasteries the townsfolk were allowed to carry off the stone to compensate them for what amounted to the sudden lack of social services.
Do not think the abbeys of this country fell gently into ruins; people as well as buildings were hacked to death. I don’t know where the stone was originally quarried but it seems to throw back a grey-pink glow that’s all its own when the setting sun strikes it, as if at any moment it was going to burst into flames. Everything carries memories of the past, and the past is a mixed blessing. What starts with violence turns into beauty, and vice versa. Thanatos, the death wish, is as strong as Eros, the will towards life: they seem to take turns.
There is a pets’ graveyard in the garden patch near the stable block where once the Bennetts kept their gig. Just a row of head-stones for family pets, dogs and cats, I daresay a rabbit or two, or even a parrot; though you wouldn’t get too many of those in a lifetime. Lucky if they don’t outlive you. You might find a few slim remaining bones of these once-beloved creatures if you dug, but the rooting wildlife will have had more than enough time to scatter the remains over a hundred years or so. This is the most neglected part of the garden: it is shaded and overgrown, and a little spooky, but I do want to see how the pear tree is getting on. It clings to the brick wall of the old stables: no claw-hold here for my own kehua, for I may well have collected a few on the way. I comfort myself with the thought that at least my sister had a proper funeral, and was properly mourned.
There is nothing inside the stables, when I pull open the creaky
door and look, but spiders, a few glass windows still valiantly whole but clouded with murk, some garden chairs we forgot to take out last summer, and a hole under the eaves where swifts in search of spiders understand how to dive, retrieve and get out again as fast as they can. I think I may be getting the whiff of cigar smoke and a man’s voice calling, Here Patch. Here Patch. Please no. I retreat, back from the step.
And then, looking down, I see what I never noticed before: that there are words engraved on one of the larger stones. I look more closely. Patch the Collie, 1890–1904, RIP. And I have just remembered that months back this was the name I pulled out of the blue to give to the McLean dog, which got shot back in the thirties for the crime of witnessing a murder. I don’t quite see how, outside in the glowing air, and the sun setting so punctually, to timetable, rationality ruling, this is significant. I must have seen the inscription once upon a time and forgotten that I had.
And then I hear the sound of car wheels on gravel and know it is Martin and his collie Bonzo. I wonder if Bonzo is a descendant of the original Patch.
Bonzo makes his usual galloping inspection of the garden while Martin, Rex’s friend, rings the doorbell. Bonzo doesn’t see me. Nobody goes into this part of the garden. As soon as Bonzo’s done the garden, he does the house, casing the joint, up first to the attic where Rex works, then to the basement where I do, making sure everyone is where he expects them to be, or has good reason for being elsewhere. But today he takes an extra turn around the garden and sees me and stops short, almost skidding, baring his teeth, like a dog in a cartoon, one who’s just seen a lady with her head tucked underneath her arm. It is me he is looking at.
The bristles on the ridge of his back go up; he is growling, snarling as he backs away. I am hurt: I am upset. Does he see something unnatural in me? Am I still the ghost? Or perhaps the dog that comes bouncing towards me is not Bonzo at all, but Patch? He turns and makes for the house, and down the corridor into the kitchen, tail between his legs; which is nothing at all like his usual body language, but he is certainly Bonzo. I follow him into the kitchen, where he too seems confused, and has had to sit down to recover his composure. He recognises me as me, with a reluctant banging of his tail on the floor as if I had played some dreadful trick on him, and he is now prepared to accept me as myself, but only just.
Rex is on his way home from the market. I am glad to take a break and drink a pot of tea with Martin, whose presence is as always genial and reassuring. He is a calm man. He has faced enough physical danger in his working life not to be afraid of fancies. He chuckles at Bonzo, and reassures him too.
When they’re gone I go back down to the basement. I might as well write some more.
The cleansing of Robinsdale
The purification ceremony was up to a point inadvertent. Luke’s first thought on hearing of the murder/suicide in Amberley was to hope that at least the McLeans had been properly buried and their homestead cleansed. He was not a superstitious man, and believed himself to be perfectly rational, but respect is due where respect is due. The Maori had been well established in North Canterbury at one time – though few choose to live there today – and it remains a numinous place. The old religions break through everywhere. If both Walter and Arthur, or either one, had Maori ancestry it would not be surprising. A number of English missionaries had gone native and had had to be recalled, but not before their offspring were settled in the area. And the Coromandel and Kennedy Bay hapu were powerful enough to drag Beverley into theirs, and include any dependent kehua, which would be hard on her heels.
He’d never heard of kehua travelling overseas. Traditionally, sanctified spirits travelled north to join their ancestors in Tane. They slipped down the trunks of the pohutakawa trees of the far North-West, lined up on Three Mile Beach, and then followed the path the setting sun lays upon the glittering water to reach that golden land. But he supposed if a few were restless enough they could end up in England, land of the long grey cloud, or even Scotland. Luke wondered how they would get on with the kelpies, the water ghosts of the North, and he laughed, and the others joined in, out of family loyalty rather than because they found him funny; just very, very loquacious. But in family life you have to take the rough with the smooth: that is the point of it.
Your writer did not laugh as she listened. She kept her head down and tried to concentrate through the noises that were now coming at her through the walls from all sides. The dog barking, Cristobel wailing, Mavis giggling, Cook swearing, and still she was all too conscious of the change in the fall of the light, as something passed in front of the window where the little straw birds sat, and when she looked, they were at least in the same place, though now they were lying on their sides, so they were staring at each other and not at her. Which seemed to be slightly better. If things are impersonal one can cope. She thought perhaps her own wairua were passing by, not the grateful dead, but the helpful unborn.
Just as well, as it turned out, that Scarlet’s wairua were there in the ornamental kiwi plant in the penthouse at Campion Tower, albeit snuggled up to her kehua, asleep. The children were clamouring for a barbecue in the garden. Luke nipped round to Waitrose to buy the best steak, though his new-found grandmother berated him for his extravagance. In his tour of the garden – a veritable urupa, he called it, the place you always want to return to, the beautiful place where you feel grounded and at home – he’d taken a twig of the kowhai tree to examine it closer. Now he placed it beneath the steak as it cooked to give it flavour. Beverley hobbled out of the house, helped by Gerry, with greater ease than she had thought possible. She had been reared in New Zealand, after all, and if there is something to be done, you do it, weakness or not.
Beverley thought Luke was overcooking the steaks and bent over the barbecue to turn them. At that moment the barbecue, behaving so far like a quiescent sunspot, suddenly went nuclear, and a surge of flame leapt upwards and singed her hair, and the kowhai twig caught fire instead of baking gently. This twig, remember, was child of a bush which had spent a long time in a pot crafted by a local potter out of Amberley clay, and plants too, like the birds and the animals, have their own wairua, or soul. At any rate the two flames mixed and as her hair burned and others screamed and ran around trying to put the flames out, the necessary oblations for Beverley were complete.
The kehua that had followed Beverley, pleading with her, since she was a tiny child, and all its descendants too, as the hapu split, and split, and split again, could now return home to the marae satisfied. But the marae was not there any more, the urupa, the beautiful place, was covered by bungalows, and TV aerials and mobile phone and police masts, and would be hard to locate even if anyone still cared. They chattered and quaked and covered their eyes against reason, and leapt back to the kowhai tree, which recovered from its grief at losing them and stood proud again. The kehua thought they might as well stay; the conservatory could be the marae, the urupa could be found in the garden, Winter, Harry and Marcus could be gathered in, and even Fiona and Gwyneth. And no contrary instructions being received, the kehua settled in, content.
Just how much of a drama it was no one noticed. They were too busy dousing Beverley and allocating blame. As it happened Beverley’s scalp was hardly touched though her hair was noticeably thinner and frizzled at its ends. Gerry wound a tie-dyed scarf in red, blue and green around her hair, and she forgot about the damage to it. He did not mind how much or how little hair she had, Gerry said. He was after her mind, and her experiences, not her body, and she was rich in both.
It was a gallant speech. He said he wanted to marry her but she was dubious about that. It would interfere with the children’s inheritance. He was whanau, she accepted that, but only a rather recent member. She was not sure whether she wanted him in the house. He was not as young as he had been, and his eyes watered.
Scarlet’s brush with death
The anticipation of change and event was already reverberating through the subtext of the spirit world, and up in Cam
pion Tower Scarlet’s wairua woke with a start, and up in the decorative kiwi her kehua went into alarm mode, and just as well, because even as Alice’s flight was delayed and the traffic on the M1 ground to a halt, Scarlet, her face disfigured by rage and hate, was advancing on Jackson with a serrated bread knife raised about to strike, slit and slice. The past had sensed a time slip and was seeping through as best it could.
This is what had had happened between Scarlet and Jackson.
After their first night together Jackson had brought Scarlet coffee and toast in bed and instructed her not to leave crumbs. Well, it is the natural habit of men to instruct young women. Scarlet had objected.
‘Don’t you shout at me,’ said Scarlet.
‘Don’t you screech at me,’ said Jackson.
Scarlet’s kehua, always sensitive to raised emotion, rustled in the blissful comfort of the ornamental kiwi plant. They were half inclined to start up their habitual refrain as duty demanded, run, run, run, but did not. The wairua were snuggling up so close and cosy to them it seemed too much bother. Yet why, when of all times now she needed their advice, did the kehua not squawk and flap their alarm, as the blackbirds did when the buzzard got the jackdaw?
I just got up and cleaned the cobwebby windows. I used the Windolene, which is kept with the other cleaning materials and cloths in the old pantry. Don’t ask me why I suddenly felt the need, after months of living and working down here with the spiders and the ghosts, to get round to doing this. I thought if I looked more clearly out to the garden I would see more of what was really there than what I thought was there. Spirits surely dislike dust and dirt and dereliction. I can see I have been colluding with them to make their life easier. The ammonia smell of the cleaner quite masks that of the drifting cigar smoke, at any rate. It was very powerful in the pantry just now. God knows what Mr Bennett had been up to down there.
