The Larnachs

by Owen Marshall

  The passing of the Electoral Act last year made her more excited than I’ve ever seen her before, and even Father’s failure to secure the Wakatipu seat at the election soon after did little to dampen her sense of victory. How wonderful, she said, that in this our small colony has led the world. It’s impossible not to be glad with her, though in my experience few women have the common sense and knowledge to use a vote wisely, and she does go on so. Those reservations I keep to myself, of course. On Monday, during the buggy ride into town to meet Father, I enjoyed provoking her by suggesting a whole range of matters most inappropriate for women to express opinions on, yet she had a quick answer almost every time. I like it that she’s not prim and proper when we’re together.

  Conny and Bessie Hocken organised a luncheon to celebrate the granting of the franchise. Thirty-three leading ladies, and no men allowed, not even as waiters. There were toasts and anecdotes from the long battle. I imagine that a good many politicians and civic leaders who had opposed them would have felt their ears redden and wonder why. Conny said it was great fun, and the talking point of the town for days. No doubt Henry Fish and his supporters regard it as the first sign of women’s general insurrection.

  Conny has found her proper level in Dunedin and is sought for her own company as well as being Mrs Larnach. She is unimpressed by dull, conventional people, whatever their position and influence. Mrs R. McGeadon, a long-standing hostess and patron of the arts, who claims distant kinship with Gladstone, tried to put her down at several starchy gatherings, but came off second best in the joust, and Conny’s reference to her as Armageddon is now a favourite witticism in town. The two have engaged in several skirmishes in the campaign for social supremacy since Conny’s initial disagreement with Mrs McGeadon’s pronouncement that a woman should on no account be seen in public without both hat and gloves. I teased Conny by saying that I’d heard the two of them crossed the street rather than meet, but she said the significant thing was which of them chose to cross.

  Conny’s friends have talents and progressive views. Bessie Hocken has become her closest ally, but Ethel Morley is often a companion also. I particularly enjoy it when Ethel visits, for she is quite beautiful. A great pity she is married, Robert says, and admits she’s the woman he most often imagines naked. I have done so myself when in her company and finding the conversation of others boring. Although Robert lacks deceit and malice, he likes to be louche when with male friends. Women’s flesh is heavier than ours, he insists. Most recently he made me laugh by describing his mother and father in pious discussion at Sunday lunch about the vicar’s sermon regarding the sanctity of marriage. ‘What a lot of cant is talked about it,’ he told me. ‘A man’s vision of marriage is to wake each morning with his wife’s hand on his cock. God knows what a woman’s is.’

  Conny and I have become great friends, and partly to keep her good opinion I’ve broken off my unofficial engagement to Ellen. Not that Conny ever made an open criticism of her, but I admitted to myself that I’d no intention of marrying, and became increasingly uneasy, for I knew Ellen’s hopes. Her family are decent enough folk, although the father mangles the Queen’s English, and the mother’s a snob. I suspect I’m not Ellen’s first lover. There were hints from her mother about the formality of engagement, and it became clear that some declaration had to be made, or the friendship retrenched.

  Ellen cried when I told her I didn’t wish to marry. I’d rather she’d been angry, though I’d made no promise. She wept and said she’d thought I loved her. The sadness was worse than any accusation. We were standing on the walking track above the sea at St Kilda, with others of our party not far away. I hadn’t meant the matter to come up in such circumstances, but she asked me if I wished to come with her family the next weekend to visit relatives at Palmerston, and in declining I found the conversation moved on willy-nilly to our future generally. We reached a point at which I was forced to contemplate an outright lie, or confess I had no intention of marrying her. So we finished standing awkwardly above the pale sand with its tidal patterns, close to dark green lemonwood scrub shaped by the sea wind, with Ellen trying to hold back tears, and me making some foolish comment about the small island just offshore, as the others joined us. I never feel satisfaction in inflicting hurt on anyone, and her white face turned away, and shaky hands, almost overwhelmed me, but I knew that if I comforted her then, the same situation would have to be faced in the future.

  Women instinctively close ranks in such times. As we made our way back to the carriages they clustered around Ellen in support, glancing back disapprovingly at we men. It was assumed, I suppose, that I’d been cruel, and perhaps Ellen lessened her unhappiness afterwards by sharing it with her friends. The thing was clumsily done, I know, and I regret that, but it was unpremeditated and I was caught up in the sorry whirl of it. I’ve not seen her alone since and have spoken only superficially. However, her suffering is apparently over, for she’s often in the company of other fellows.

  The good thing is that there’s no slur, or gossip, attached to her, as far as I know. My fear was that she might become pregnant, despite precautions I disliked, and I’d be compelled to marry. It was almost entirely physical satisfaction that drew me to her. She’s attractive, in reasonable society, and prepared to indulge me fully, but I felt more and more uncomfortable about taking advantage of her. To be a cad isn’t my nature, and I’ve never discussed Ellen in a loose way with other men. Unlike some here, I don’t see love as some sort of game, and Ellen is the only woman of standing I’ve been long with. Robert says it’s far better not to get involved with girls of respectable family, but my few experiences with women of other backgrounds have generally been both sordid and disappointing. I sometimes go with Robert, Hugo Isaac and others to what used to be the Vauxhall Gardens above Andersons Bay. Women are easy to find there, but there’s a soullessness to such liaisons and I’m always in danger of being recognised wherever I take them. It’s usually only after rioting with the others that the need for a woman overcomes me, and I drink less, and less often, now. A man’s needs are best satisfied with a woman he loves, surely, yet those needs can be urgent.

  I feel The Camp is truly home for me, and although Father still talks occasionally of my taking up some profession — making something of myself, he says — this is where I belong. Melbourne’s just a few hazy vignettes of infancy; the good times were here as a boy with the building of The Camp and all of us happy. Then there seemed nothing Father couldn’t do, and all was on the up. The later trip across America and on to England and Uncle Donald’s was high excitement, though it ended for me in a sort of muted misery.

  All photographs have an element of sadness because their time is over, and some are doubly sad because of feelings they evoke. Recently I came across one of Tolden House, Adams School — ranks of us with keen faces and arms folded, all united in an apparent camaraderie. At the end of 1879, Father and Mother returned to the colony with little Gladys, and the rest of us were divided and left. Donny went grandly to Oxford, my sisters remained with Miss Visick their tutor, and I was stuck in the Adams boarding school at St Leonard’s on Sea. The only times we children reunited were at uncle Donald’s.

  My boarding school life is recalled like a time of sickness: an illness from which I could see no recovery. There are certain foods I can’t eat, smells that disgust, and sounds that deaden my spirit, and all because through them my school days rise up again. Even bells bring only the memory of rigid servitude and loneliness. Is there any institution more unbendingly conventional than an English boarding school, more driven by nonsensical conformity? I’ve dreams still in which I revisit that unhappiness: the dreary life in which there was no-one who loved me.

  Not one other boy came from New Zealand, or Australia, and I was marked and ridiculed from the first as an outsider. There were quite a few Raj boys whose parents were in the military, or the Indian bureaucracy. Some others had been despatched to board there by guardians, and even more by fathers
who wanted their sons to have a public school education, but neither their pockets, nor their influence, stretched to Rugby, Winchester, or Harrow. St Leonard’s on Sea I suppose was no worse than most second rate schools, and thankfully out of term time I wasn’t forced to attend the dingy exam-crammers that were a feature of the town, and staffed largely by the same grey teachers of the school.

  The rote lessons seemed to have no connection with my past, or future, and the teachers fawned on boys whose parents were of the slightest consequence. They would have been amazed to see The Camp, the many thousands of Larnach acres in Central Otago. At the height of its success, the firm of Guthrie & Larnach had more than a thousand workers and owned fourteen ships, I could say nothing of that, or else be fiendishly ragged as a skite. The stupid boy whose father owned three apothecary shops was more important. I was just a colonial brat as far as the masters there were concerned. At least in class I was safe from the theatre of cruelty that existed so often on the playing fields and within the dorms. How I envied the day boys, who could leave the place behind and go home to family.

  My companions were oddities like myself, and we drew together not by attraction, but because of exclusion by the mob. I made only one staunch friend. Jeremy Pointer, my Housemaster’s son, and shunned by most because his father was detested. I detested him too, but recognised from my own unhappiness the injustice of Jeremy being blamed for his father’s ridiculousness. Pig Pointer was disdained even by his fellow teachers, but Jeremy had a blind loyalty that caused him to rise to every insult made. I admired that loyalty even though I saw the persecution he suffered because of it.

  Jeremy was in another House, but often on half days we would go down to the shore, and for a few hours imagine our lives different. We would buy beer at the old Horse and Groom pub, and drink it by the stone steps while we watched the shop girls. We would take a dinghy out, or walk up to the common used by the school for the annual cross country run, and sit amongst the cover to smoke our pipes, and light fires that in the summer came near to disaster. We would talk about everything except the school, and yet that hung over us, was always the inevitable return.

  I’ve happily forgotten the other boys I knew at St Leonard’s, even those I then claimed as friends, and those known as enemies, but I wonder sometimes what’s happened to Jeremy Pointer, and imagine what relief he must have found it to leave school and go into a world where his father was unknown, and no longer an encumbrance. No matter how much of a ragging he got, he always stood up for his useless father, perhaps because his mother was dead, but more I think from stubborn allegiance. And he and I never talked about his persecution, as if ignoring it denied its existence. I wish just once I’d told him I admired his unflinching and misplaced fealty.

  He was mad on conjuring and tricks of magic, bought books on it, and practised with cards and small, false bottomed caskets purchased from advertisements. In every school concert he came on to universal derision, the only applause when inevitably something went wrong. What strange courage he had. In war I imagine he’d be marked out by some great feat of heroism, and die in the execution of it. When we left the school, he and I pledged to remain friends, and he wrote a few letters to which I made no reply, not because I didn’t value him, but that his comradeship was borne down by my greater resolve to leave everything of St Leonard’s behind me. In his last letter he said he intended to become an artist, and that he’d met a girl whose father was a museum curator with a famous collection of butterflies.

  The single person I see fondly in recollections of St Leonard’s is Jeremy Pointer. His long face and flat, dark hair: his failures as a magician, and his absolute loyalty as a son, and friend to me. All that’s long gone, but memory is beyond conscious control. We can’t choose our past, or ever quite bury it.

  I received the news of my own mother’s death while still at school. It was a wretched winter day, and I was in sick bay because of a flare up after my riding accident. Pig Pointer came, and in front of the only other boy there, a junior I despised called Davidson, told me he’d had a cablegram with the news. ‘Letters will follow, lad,’ he said, standing as usual with his legs well apart and his great flaccid, downy cheeks catching the dim light. ‘I’m sorry to be the bearer of such bad tidings. I’ll tell matron you’ll be better in here for the night,’ and then he went. I turned away from the other boy so he couldn’t see my face. The beds were of thin, knobbed iron, the bare wooden walls pale and scratched like a zoo pen, and the sky as grey as the blanket under which I lay.

  I was determined not to cry in the presence of the other boy, and lay in a quaking misery waiting for darkness. I could hear boys shouting and laughing on High Field as if nothing in the world had changed, and later matron brought in shepherd’s pie and a dark custard stuff we called Mississippi mud. I couldn’t stomach either, and Davidson had the cheek to ask if he could have the tray. ‘I’m fair starved,’ he said, having hogged everything of his own.

  So little of my time at St Leonard’s gave me pleasure, or even placid monotony, yet I know Father thought he was doing well by me. His welcome letters would come addressed to ‘My Darling Son’ and in typical schoolboy fashion, in return I would only hint at unhappiness. He thought everyone like himself, possessed of presence and the ability to impose on any situation. He never understood how much out of place I felt, though after Mother’s death I spoke strongly about wishing to return. Donny’s extravagance and hasty marriage may have influenced Father’s final agreement, so in that at least I have some reason to thank my brother.

  Brambletye was my refuge while in England. Uncle Donald and aunt Jane were ever hospitable, and the cousins carefree companions. William, the eldest son, was sixteen years older than me, yet he too was supportive and generous. I was saddened when he died suddenly at only thirty four. James, next in line, was the horseman Donny and I aspired to be. Sydney and Herbert were closer to my age, and although still senior were both friendly. In that family existed an amiable cheerfulness and encouragement quite lacking in my school life.

  Father would like The Camp to be a sort of colonial Brambletye, but it doesn’t fit as comfortably in its surroundings, or in the minds of Dunedin people. The Sussex estate wasn’t quite a heaven, but certainly a haven, and St Leonard’s almost a hell. At Brambletye no-one quizzed me, or mocked my speech. People there didn’t take pleasure in the humiliation of others.

  My Sussex cousins were a champion, outdoors band, seeming to show no reflection of their quiet and polite parents. Privilege and indulgence were their right. The house is not more than twenty-five years old or so, and famed for its frescoed ceilings, wall papers and furniture. Uncle Donald has a magnificent conservatory for his collection of rare plants, and it’s the custom for all visitors to scratch their names on the large glass door. My signature is there among all the others, and I hope some day to return to underscore it, and relive the pleasure I received there. The family also owned a fine home in London’s Palace Gardens.

  Odd misfortune then that it was at Brambletye I had the fall from the hunter, Mercury, that almost killed me. I suffer from the effects still, and yet the moment of it is hidden from me. The mind’s way to protect itself perhaps. I remember a long chase across a flat past a spinney, being shouldered by another horse at a low hedge, and then lying on my back, a clear sky above and a damnable pain in my leg. And the smell of sweat not my own, for someone had put a jacket under my head. Concussion that reoccurred for many months, fractured cheek bone, broken bones in the left arm and leg. Even the convalescence from all of that could not save me from the return to boarding school at last. I would’ve chosen a second tumble if it could have kept me permanently at Brambletye.

  I have vivid memories of the place, some inconsequential, but almost all happy. Once, coming back from swimming in the bridge pool, Herbert and I found spawning frogs in a warm pond. Dozens of pairs on the weedy surface, each male clamped on the back of its mate with forelegs tight about her throat. So strong was their urg
e that they took no notice of us, and we scooped up many into our towels, just because we could. What variety of slick green they had, from the faintest glass blush to deepest emerald.

  Another time he and I were part of the search party for the local idiot who had become drunk on cider and begun beating sheep and cows with a paling. We found him asleep in the big meadow with straw in his boots, blood on his hands and no trousers. His cock was small, but it was my first realisation of how hairy are a full adult’s genitals. When he was woken, he laughed and sang in front of us all. His old mother came and took him away like a child. How different he must have found the world.

  Although Father put me at the school, I never doubted he felt it for the best. I received many letters from him while I was recovering from the accident, and he welcomed me warmly on my return to New Zealand, despite our differences. Some years later, when I had to have further corrective surgery in Dunedin, he came all the way from Wellington to be with me. When Basil Sievwright, Henry Driver and others came with business they said was urgent, Father turned them away and sat with me for hours, talking of Mother, Aunt Mary and the days he, Donny and I spent on the peninsula while The Camp was being built. Soon after, he made a sortie to Australia in an attempt to bolster his businesses, but that was another financial disaster for him, and he narrowly avoided being dragged down by Melbourne swindlers. He was very low when he returned and, with Mary not long dead, he found The Camp the sad place it remained for him until Conny made it home again.

  Father isn’t a confessional man: he believes in fortitude, trusting that energy and hard work will enable him to succeed. But yesterday, on what may well turn out to be the last trip to town before he and Conny leave for Wellington, he spoke more openly about his feelings than he has for a long time. The day was blustery, and he complained of the new horse as we passed his failed Dandy Dinmont hotel at Waverley, which I knew better than to refer to.