The Larnachs

by Owen Marshall

  With all of this I should be cast down. I am not. I float and dance within myself, for Dougie has said he is absolutely in love with me, and I find I cannot refuse him. My God, what a declaration: at once the most unexpected, and yet the most natural, outcome of a true and deepening friendship. Everything has an added sparkle and significance that even William’s moroseness cannot destroy.

  Tuesday began in an ordinary enough way with the ordering of linen and a discussion about laundry. In the afternoon Dr Langley came to make a routine examination of William and I stood at the steps to farewell him as he waited for his horse to be brought. ‘Please go inside, Mrs Larnach,’ he said. It was not cold, but a fine drizzle came in from the sea, hazing the fruit trees planted beyond the glasshouses. The slight dampness was drawn into my throat as I breathed, and there was the smell of pine resin and the newly cut grass.

  ‘He’s started riding again,’ I said.

  ‘He says it gives his ribs no pain, unless he trots.’

  ‘So you don’t advise against it?’ I said.

  ‘Pain is the body’s message, but your husband has always pushed himself. Better that he use the buggy or carriage. I’ve told him so.’

  ‘You know William. He won’t be told.’

  ‘That’s true, but I’m sure you have influence and will persuade him to take greater care of himself. He’s not young any more, yet makes the same demands on himself.’ And when Boylan came with his roan, the doctor swung up and said goodbye. William had taken to him after the recommendation of Dr Hocken. A straight talker, William said, and a keen rugby man. Personally I find him rather too fond of himself, and entrenched in his opinions of social development, which are not progressive.

  I went back in to the library where father and son were talking in tones of mutual impatience. William was seated close to the window, Dougie standing with his hands in his pockets as is his way when nettled. They were arguing about the financial returns from the property. William’s own resources are diminishing, but he is still free with advice and criticism concerning Dougie’s management. William arranged for a telephone office to be set up at The Camp last year to serve the peninsula and Dougie is expected to be the telephonist, being paid threepence by the post office for each message he receives. He hates it because it is such a tie, and even more because of its menial nature. ‘This is what I’ve become,’ he said to William, ‘a bloody clerk.’

  ‘And who’s to blame for that? After all the opportunity I’ve given you, still you can’t make something of yourself.’

  ‘You kept saying you wanted me to look after things here, didn’t you?’

  ‘What else were you going to do?’ said William harshly.

  ‘What would you know about my ambitions, and what would you care!’

  They stopped their argument when I joined them but the tension remained. Their feelings towards each other have soured, as has so much else in William’s life. It saddens me. What an unhappy house it has become, with even Gladys and Gretchen preferring the homes of their friends.

  When we talked a little of Dr Langley’s visit, William said he was physically recovered, but found it almost impossible to sleep. He began again with his complaints about Ward and Seddon, how his political contribution went unappreciated while at the same time preventing him from concentrating on his business interests. ‘I’ll resign within the month,’ he said, as he has so many times before, but he will not, of course, as long as Seddon continues to flatter and use him — and dangle the promised knighthood before him.

  I left them, went upstairs and was about to enter my room, when I realised Dougie had followed. ‘The old man’s become almost unbearable,’ he said, trying for light-heartedness. He came closer. ‘You’ve got quite wet,’ putting his hand on my shoulder to test the dampness.

  ‘I was outside with Dr Langley,’ I said. ‘I’ll change before the meal.’

  Dougie said nothing, but his hand remained on my shoulder and he gave slight pressure. ‘I don’t think I can stay here much longer,’ he said, ‘not the way things are. It’s become unbearable. I so need to talk to you. I’m going to the vinery now. Come and meet me there.’ And he put his other hand on my other shoulder, leant forward and kissed me full on the mouth, as he’d done well over a year ago when William and I returned from Lawrence after the by-election. Yet this kiss was more than a welcome back and an expression of friendship. It was a long, ardent kiss with his breath held and his hands steadying me against the door jamb. William’s kisses have become abrupt, almost cursory: Dougie’s was both declaration and proposition. I could feel the insistent movement of his lips, taste the saltiness of spit and smell the slight tobacco mustiness of his wide moustache. None of them was at all unpleasant. Within me was the giddy instinct I had felt when pressed against Josiah at the Wellington party before my marriage, but Dougie was someone I trusted and liked so much more.

  ‘Please come and talk, Conny,’ Dougie said. Knowing that the maids could be anywhere about the house, he stood back, and when I made no answer he went down the staircase with just one hurried glance behind him, a look of vulnerable entreaty on a face so disturbingly a youthful version of his father’s. I made no promise, or reply, gave no commitment. Had I rebuffed him then, who knows the outcome? Maybe we could have carried on as the close confidants and supporters we had become, knowing that a boundary had been drawn; maybe our closeness and our trust would have ebbed away. A Tuesday of drizzle, a doctor’s visit and an admonition to surly laundry staff came to a moment right then that formed a clear crossroads in my life, and in those of others.

  I changed into a dry dress, pretending to myself I was deciding whether to go and meet Dougie, but I knew I would go. I knew without any rational toting up of pros and cons that I needed Dougie in a life becoming more unhappy and lonely day by day, and I felt almost an exultation that he had felt the same so strongly. For the first time, there in my room, with the mist silently clustering on the window like insistent, liquid insects, looking at myself in the mirror, I felt all the world except us recede a step, and Dougie and I come forward, magnified and in brighter light.

  With an umbrella, but wearing only house shoes, I went out through the little courtyard with its servants’ rooms and across to the vinery. Dougie was standing at the far end, his face slightly upturned in his typical way. ‘I was about to go,’ he said.

  ‘I’m not coming in,’ I told him. ‘Let’s not be ashamed of anything we have to talk about. I don’t want to start by hiding away out here. Come back to the drawing room and let’s be together,’ and I turned from the door and returned to the house.

  I knew William would be in his library until the meal, and if he should come into the room, what of that? How often Dougie and I sat and talked together, walked in the grounds, took the buggy into town. Our conversations were sometimes flippant, but also often confiding. Why should we feel guilt?

  Dougie came in not long after me and we sat in the high-backed chairs close to the unlit fireplace, where he’d told me Mary used to spend much of her time. For a house little more than twenty years old, what a deal has happened within it; what vain dreams and aspirations have gathered, and how little affection it created in its first two mistresses. ‘I’m not angry that you kissed me,’ I said. ‘I take it as a true and natural expression of our feeling for each other — our closeness and trust.’

  ‘I need to be with you. It’s as simple as that,’ said Dougie. ‘I realised it when you went back to Wellington, and we no longer had so much time together. Although I was free of Father’s interference, nothing seemed to matter here afterwards. No one could replace you, and everything seemed flat and humdrum. I couldn’t even write to you as I wished. You must know how I feel.’

  ‘There’s love and love, Dougie,’ I said.

  ‘No one else means as much to me. I miss you so much. When we can’t talk often, life gets out of kilter somehow. So much of our lives is connected now, so much understood is between us. I need you. We need eac
h other.’ His face was pale and his eyes insistent.

  ‘We couldn’t be closer friends,’ I said. Our life had been busy in Wellington, and the trips back had been few and hectic, but I had missed Dougie’s company, and his declaration made me realise how much it meant to me.

  ‘But we could,’ he said. ‘We could be closer, and we should.’ And he reached out, took my hand in both of his and kissed it.

  People who do not know him well would form a completely wrong assessment of Dougie’s nature from his appearance and manner in society. He is not as handsome as Donald — has his father’s less regular features. Unlike William, however, Dougie has a fine head of hair. To be honest, he looks more than his thirty-two years. The lasting effects of his injuries have no doubt contributed, but there is also a striving for dignity that disguises uncertainty. Uncertainty arising from his experience at his English school, an awareness sometimes of alienation here, and living in the blaze of his father’s personality and achievement. Colleen told me once, with considerable satisfaction, that her friends think him pompous and ordinary. If that is so, and not merely an expression of her malice, it shows how little of the real Dougie they understand. The true man revealed sat before me. We looked into each other’s face and admitted how much we valued each other, how significant was the understanding we shared. ‘It’s a damned predicament, isn’t it,’ he said with an uneven laugh, ‘but I had to tell you. I’m not ashamed of it. I refuse to be.’

  ‘Why should you be? Love’s always a tribute. It comes from admiration and respect.’

  ‘Damned if I know where it comes from, but I feel it,’ he said. ‘I hope you do too.’

  So there it was, his statement of love for me, and my welcome of it as a natural thing with no guilt attached. After all, we are family, and only seven years separate us. We are united by circumstance, by the need for support, by enjoyment in each other’s company. Nothing was said then of what the kiss at the top of the stairs conveyed, the pressure of Dougie’s hands on my shoulders, the closeness of his body. Nothing was said, but a possibility was clear to both of us, and it vibrated so in the quiet room that when Jane came in with a question from Miss Falloon, I half expected her to become aware of it. ‘Tell her I will come myself presently,’ I said.

  ‘You must have known,’ said Dougie when she had gone.

  ‘You’ve been the only real friend to me in the family. The only one who gave thought to what it meant for me to marry William, to have regard for my feelings, not just your own.’

  ‘But it’s my own feelings I’m talking about now.’

  ‘We have to be so careful, though, in everything we do. Careful not to deceive William, but still share what we’re entitled to.’

  I believed that when I said it. I believed it as we sat at the table later, just the three of us, and Dougie was in high spirits, joshing me about the Brandon family pretension in passing on the eldest son’s name. My brother bore our father’s name and passed it to his own son — Alfred de Bathe Brandon. Even William seemed enlivened despite the earlier argument, and joined the banter, seeing no irony in laughing at the vanity of my family, while sitting in his great house some derided as a castle, and having commissioned a family sepulchre. William and Alfred presently have disagreements about mutual investments. This no doubt inclines William to welcome Dougie’s fun.

  When a man has declared love that is not repugnant, he seems quite different afterwards, seen and judged with emotions not extended to other men. The feelings may change, or ebb away, but he will never be seen in the same way again. For a woman, there is a transformation, and to be honest, part of that is a sense of power.

  I think of Josiah’s intent face so close to mine in the cloakroom, and another time beneath the dim archway of Mulvey’s carriage cover, as he urged me to come to him secretly, of the bobbing Adam’s apple of the vicar with aspirations beyond his station, and of William’s somewhat contrived naturalness on the beach at Island Bay as he suggested marriage. What woman is without a sense of theatre at such times, of an intense focus on herself from which everything else fades for the moment. And all immensely gratifying to one’s self-estimation. That Tuesday, so ordinary in its start, became for Dougie and me the beginning of something greater than any friendship. It proved the sea change that altered the direction of our lives.

  We have not dared yet to talk much of it together, for then complication and evasion, expectation and justification begin. When in this little village of The Camp, I have had only two consistent companions of my own station in life — William and Dougie. Both are unrelated to me by blood, and Dougie is closer to my age and less preoccupied with public matters. After seeing the best and worst of both men, I have come to enjoy the trust and companionship of Dougie even more than what I share with his father. How difficult it is to admit that even to myself, but it is the truth, and if I evade it I betray my character. I see, too, that I have been in danger of confining the inner me to my music. Dougie’s avowal is an illumination that makes me realise how false my life had become, how tied to the material and mundane.

  When I think back, perhaps there was an earlier clear sign of Dougie’s feeling for me. There was the evening he told me he was no longer considering an engagement to Ellen Abbott. Dougie had made it plain to me that he was no longer serious about that match, or any other. At the time I thought he intended me to feel complimented that he would share such personal decisions with me; now I see that the intention was to show I was his choice.

  The bond I have with Dougie makes most of the time spent with William barren in comparison. Less and less does William enquire about and support my life and needs; more and more he is concerned with maintaining his position as a man of influence and wealth. He takes less interest in his Central Otago land, and even in his peninsula properties, except for the profits and rentals to be gained, which are below his expectations, and spends much of his time in the study writing his long letters to Seddon and parliamentary colleagues, or disagreeing with Basil Sievwright and business associates concerning what can be saved from his affairs. Everything seems to be about the banks, and Ward’s indebtedness, which threatens to bring the government down. William has been a man of friends, yet now he talks mainly of enemies, and has found a new one in Mr Justice Williams, who is attempting to bar him from continuing as one of the liquidators of the Colonial Bank. It is all sad, selfish and boring. He and I now share few of the light-hearted and confiding moments we enjoyed immediately before our marriage and for some time afterwards.

  Sometimes I think the buggy has become the centre of my true life: riding with Dougie about the properties, or back and forth to town, a drive of more than an hour. Then we can talk and laugh quite openly, showing the affection always consciously muted at The Camp and in society. We can sit close, and Dougie will lean across for a kiss so long that it becomes both a risk we will be observed, and a defiance of that very thing. The horse walks or trots on. Were it heading for a precipice, Dougie wouldn’t care, and I must push him away for safety, although his ardour stirs powerful feelings within me. Even when William is with us, if Dougie isn’t driving he will often seek my hand beneath the rug, or move his knee against my own. And he will call our attention to particular nooks and stopping places, praising them in an apparently innocent way while knowing that I recognise them, that there we have kissed, held each other, shared confidences. I am sure that Dougie does this not in any triumph over William, but to remind me of our love.

  All of that has led in the end to us making love physically, as we knew would follow. It was a night when William was in Timaru on business. We took him in to the train on a lovely, bright day with the green sweep of the peninsula bush in contrast to the gentle, blue-green undulation of the calm harbour. Even William felt his mood lifted and was amused when Dougie advised him to eat nothing in Timaru, because of the scandalous Tom Hall poisoning case there. William claimed that after the foods he had survived while on the goldfields and in mining camps, he wasn
’t shy of a dose of antimony, and told us a good deal about the poisonings passed on to him by Professor Black, who had been consulted as an expert witness, and Robert Stout, who led the prosecution. What a cause célèbre it all was, because of the connection to Sir John Hall, and the monstrous betrayal of the wife. ‘There are always people so much worse off than yourself,’ William said, as we passed through the bay and on into the town. He was roused by the prospect of his trip, Dougie and I by the thought of his absence for the night.

  Dougie and I came back to The Camp almost as if we owned it: came back with a sense of closeness so special to lovers, as if, apart from the strangely distanced and impersonal world, existed a place of brightness and warmth for us alone. Dougie told me how he loved to stand by the piano when I played, and that no matter who else was there, it was my perfume he was aware of, my voice among the singers, my hands moving on the keys. When no one else was in the room, he would come to the piano, he said, and be aware of my fragrance there. He joked about my feet, saying that he had never seen them, and that perhaps my toes were webbed. I told him I had never seen his, and that if they resembled his father’s they were not at all aesthetically pleasing. How close and safe and correct we appeared there in the buggy, returning home from delivering William to his train. Mrs Constance Larnach and her stepson, with a civil nod or wave to the few who passed us, and no way for them to know that our hands were clasped beneath the rug, and our hearts close also.

  As we went up the hill towards The Camp, wood pigeons flew so near that the whoosh of noisy flight startled the horse, which reared in the traces. ‘I’ll take a gun and bag some,’ said Dougie when things were calm again.