The Larnachs

by Owen Marshall

  ‘You should,’ I said. Pigeons made good eating and one of the cooks has a pie recipe from her whaler father that William especially enjoys. Such an ordinary topic, and one we had no real interest in, yet perhaps it helped us to keep some grip on the everyday. He gave me a last kiss before we turned into the gates.

  For everyone else at the house it was an evening much like any other, perhaps rather more relaxed because of William’s absence. There is no doubt that he has become more tetchy, even with old friends and acquaintances. Dr Langley believes he has a stomach ulcer, but I think disappointment and worry are more the cause. Although I must perhaps take some blame for the disappointment, more should be laid at the door of Donald, Alice and Colleen. All he has done for them, and they have been ungrateful, demanding and vexatious in return.

  As there were no guests we had an early meal. Before it, Dougie and I had claret in the drawing room. Nothing out of the ordinary to cause comment among the staff. William stopped drinking before our marriage and preaches temperance to Dougie, who resents it because of William’s own indulgence when younger. We had a nice beef, and fish that amorous Mr Tremain had brought to the house as a gift. Perhaps he still hopes to soften Miss Falloon’s heart. My only cause for small complaint was that several pieces of cutlery were dull rather than gleaming.

  Afterwards I played for Dougie as darkness deepened outside and we sang ‘The Kerry Dance’ together:

  Oh, to think of it

  Oh, to dream of it

  Fills my heart with tears.

  His voice is true, but unremarkable. At least he doesn’t sway, or bellow, as Richard Seddon does at our Molesworth Street evenings. For my sake, Dougie has made a considerable effort to extend his knowledge of music. He can play no instrument, but we talk together about the nature of music and the merits of the best composers and performers, and he attends Dunedin events with William and me, and in Wellington when he visits. It is a game with the two of us that I play a piece with the music hidden from him, and he must guess the composer. That night I played light pieces from Sullivan, who is one of Dougie’s favourites, and will surely stand the test of time.

  When I said goodnight, he told me he was going to work in the library for a while, then said quietly, ‘I’ll come tonight to make sure you’re all right.’ Only if I wished to refuse him was there any need to reply. I am not a girl, and had been aware all day, and beforehand, what the night of such an opportunity would bring. We had allowed our feelings for each other to become so intense, so complementary, that only lovemaking could make us feel complete.

  A wind was getting up in the darkness, and I knew it was from the south because of the particular noise it made in the turret and chimney stacks. The mournful calls of a morepork were clear, but I was far from sad. As I lay in my bed, and my eyes grew accustomed to the dim moonlight from the windows, I could see the softened outlines of the furniture and the low wainscoting, still much as Eliza would have seen them from this bed over fifteen years ago. There was very little risk in Dougie coming to me late once his father was absent. The servants sleep far from this part of the house, perhaps with their own assignations in their own quarters to satisfy gossip. Here was a small, quiet world for Dougie and me.

  How differently from his father did Dougie enter my bedroom. He slipped in, concentrating for a long moment on closing the door without noise. He came close to the bed, smiled, held one hand up in a strange, small greeting, and when I turned back the bedclothes came quickly and easily in and immediately put his arms around me and kissed me. There was a care and eagerness that I had never before experienced — not in the insistent maleness of Josiah, not even in William’s mature energy of the honeymoon. But this was not about William or Josiah: it was about Dougie and me.

  I do not think we talked. If we did I cannot remember. We had talked when we wanted to make love, so we could do without talk when at last love was decided on and the opportunity was there. That night awakened me to the supreme experience between man and woman: insistent, continual and surging pleasure so that I took the sheets between my teeth to muffle my cries. Now I know what is possible between us, I am enthralled and joyous. I never knew such physical height of pleasure existed, but something in my heart has always yearned for it.

  I believe my real life began there, close to Dougie, our quickened breathing and caressing hands, the sound of the wind in the chimneys and the morepork in the pines, and the soft light of a dim moon through the window. A better, more intense life, shared with someone who loves me more than I have been loved before.

  Six

  I find myself at a strange point in my life, at once experiencing moments of the greatest happiness and long periods of galling frustration. Conny has at last accepted me as a lover in all respects, and the fierce and utter satisfaction of that is greater than anything I’ve ever known before — even in drunkenness, or sex. But she insists that Father mustn’t be harmed, and all proper appearances kept up. Nothing I can say changes her mind. I urge her that the manly and honest thing is for me to tell Father and then she and I can leave to make a life elsewhere, in Australia, or perhaps South America, where I have a business contact. She won’t have it. I know Conny. She won’t throw away all that her family and mine entitle her to in society, but there’s also that strong duty she feels to my father. So much of his achievement is in jeopardy and Conny is determined that she won’t be responsible for bringing everything down.

  It’s sensible, perhaps, but it provides no proper future for us. Because Father spends more time in the house than in earlier years, the pretence Conny and I have to keep up is almost unbearable. I feel trapped in an unnatural way of life, increasingly unable to suffer Father and Conny as a couple. Nights are the worst, when Conny goes up to her room and then Father follows heavily after time in the library. Conny and I never talk of them together, but often I lie in my own bed and endeavour to repress the thought of him padding from his room to join her as husband.

  How wretched was this last Christmas and the start of ’96. Alice and her husband came with reluctance from Naseby, and Colleen too. Donny’s disapproval, and mockery of Father’s marriage, are conveyed by his sisters. All this spitefulness doesn’t deter any of them from constant requests for money. Even Gladys is being infected and has become less open and happy with Father and Conny. He had perhaps hoped to find another Kate in her, but she hasn’t grown up in the same secure surroundings and now shows a different disposition.

  We’re an awkward family, and Father has had a part in making us so. He used to be able to sweep us all along in his progress, but we aren’t children any more, and his dominating benevolence will no longer do. Injury, both physical and financial, has made him impatient and irascible; he feels all the world has turned on him. Conny is caught up in all of this and suffers through her determination to be treated as she deserves. God knows why she married the old man, but having done so she’s entitled to respect from all of us.

  It was the sour failure of the New Year’s Eve party, I think, that decided Conny and me that happiness would be found only between ourselves. Hogmanay at The Camp has always been an event of boisterous celebration, giving me some of my best memories as a boy before my time in England. Father delighted in fireworks for the occasion, and family and close staff would gather on the tower to sing, laugh and toast the New Year, as the rockets flared in violent colours across the plush sky.

  This year only Gladys, and Donny’s Gretchen, seemed happy, and that only from their companionship and irrepressible youth. Even the staff were subdued, knowing well the undercurrents within the family, especially my sisters’ animosity towards Conny. Alice is usually discontent. I hardly recognise her as the sister I once knew well. She lost her baby boy and finds William Inder a disappointing husband. A pushy man, but with little substance. I suspect the marriage will founder. I hope Colleen doesn’t find herself in a similar situation, for she too is eager to find a home of her own. They combine to harangue Father for money and
snipe at Conny, who is hurt, but determined not to show it.

  Father was as loud and managing as ever at Hogmanay, but there was an emptiness to his forced bonhomie, a watchful division within us as we gathered on the tower at midnight, gave our champagne toasts for long life and good fortune, saw the rockets shoot, flare and die. Conny and I were the last to go down the narrow curve of the cramped stone steps, and as we waited by the parapet, I lightly tapped her empty glass with mine, and raised the lantern I held so I could see her face.

  ‘Don’t worry about them,’ I said.

  ‘Happy new year, Dougie,’ she said, with a smile.

  ‘Let’s hope for a better one than last.’

  ‘I wish we could determine that by our own actions,’ Conny said, ‘but there’s too much at work beyond our control.’

  At least she knows now that I have sufficient love for her to outweigh all the deficiencies in others. In the drabness of the New Year celebrations, the falseness of our toasts and gifts, she and I gave each other true support. I admire her strength and poise while feeling sympathy for her isolation here in the south, so far from her own family and friends. Even in the buggy accident at Anderson’s Bay before Christmas, she didn’t cry, and was more concerned for Father and me than for her own welfare. She isn’t the most patient of women, but she showed considerable tolerance of Father’s temper during the time he was laid up.

  In those weeks we spent more time together than ever before. I had to carry out Father’s business tasks in Dunedin so Conny took the opportunities to visit Bessie Hocken, Ethel Morley and other friends. Twice we stayed at the Hockens’ to attend recitals, once with the Cargills, and Conny likes to get relief from The Camp by accompanying me about the peninsula properties. She even pretends some interest in the piffling mechanism of the telephone office so that we have the chance sometimes to sit and talk, free of any chance of being overheard. For some considerable time our friendship has been a sort of alliance against boredom and misunderstanding, as well as the expression of the pleasure we find in each other’s company. There was nothing deliberate in it to threaten Father, or Conny, but all that’s changed now.

  These things happen gradually, naturally, moving forward until you find yourself at a point of decision almost impossible to step back from, and inescapable in consequence. Any man would fall in love with Conny. She’s a stunner, with the figure of a girl, but without any giggling foolishness. In conversation she can hold her own with any man, even Stout, and the premier, who can’t bluff her as he does most people. Father at first found her spiritedness admirable, but now often takes offence at any disagreement. She won’t be put down, Conny, just for being a female. I’ve never known a woman so adamant about her right to be treated as an equal, and I admire her for it. And it means that when she does agree to submission, what special and urgent pleasure there is.

  When you share so much, however, you want to share everything — well, I do. I became so conscious of Conny’s presence that even the traces of her scent in a room were a difficult distraction, and when we were in society I had to remind myself to address other people and not just her, to look at other women and not entirely at her. At The Camp I found myself often willing Father to go and leave us alone together. Nothing he has to say weighs in the balance against time alone with Conny.

  When he went to Timaru several weeks ago Conny let me come to her. I knew she would because of the freedom with which she leant against me on the drive back from the Dunedin station. Even when Traveller shied at the overhang corner coming up to the gates, she didn’t care, allowed me a long kiss and for the first time didn’t forestall me when I felt with my hand for her thigh, the material of her skirt sliding beneath my hand. ‘I trust you,’ she said.

  It was a long evening. Conny seemed able to be her normal self, and even went off after dinner to talk to Miss Falloon about housekeeping matters while I fretted in the library. Then she played for me in the music room, and even that seemed just a way of whittling time before bed. I watched her small, pale hands, the curve of her breast beneath the closely buttoned dress, the sheen of her brown hair accentuated by the light from the chandeliers. Her hair is usually worn up in the manner of modern women, but often I imagine it long and free. Until Conny, music was never vital to me, but it’s so much a part of her life that now I feel her presence in the music she loves, and it’s grown important to me also. Her playing is not just an indifferently demonstrated accomplishment but an expression of feelings and awareness quite beyond me. She plays alone often during the day, so that the notes steal through the hallways and rooms of the big house and drift into the grounds, and when we have guests there is always a call for her to entertain.

  Conny takes great pleasure when artists of distinction come to the colony, and loves to make up a party to attend a concert or recital. The company she prefers at The Camp is that of musical and artistic people, but these gatherings are not at all stiff: she’s opposed to the separation of men and women at social occasions.

  That night it seemed to me she played with particular emotion, and the pieces were among those she knew I most enjoyed. We sang some Irish laments together, although we were far from feeling sad. I’d sing anything with Conny. Any other time that would have been enough, but my mind was fixed on the later rendezvous neither of us had acknowledged in words. When she went up, I told her that I would ensure later she was safe and she lightly pressed my hand. When in my own room, I stood at the window and watched the dark outlines of trees swaying slightly against the night sky. I thought of Conny playing the grand piano, and all around The Camp the barely touched roughness of the peninsula shrouded with drifting cloud. And then Conny waiting for me to join her.

  Midnight had almost come when I went to her room. We had been close for so long that there was little awkwardness, no need for talk. She turned back the covers and we lay for a while in a full embrace. How often had I imagined it: Conny and I lying together. I didn’t give a damn that it was my mother’s bed, and my father’s wife. It was Conny and me, that’s all that mattered: nothing to do with anybody else. I have greater physical satisfaction with her than any other woman I’ve been with. She’s totally giving and open, and in her own way insistent, which powerfully excites me, but beyond all of that, perhaps the cause of it, is that we love each other.

  I have never before felt such love for anyone, or experienced such affection in return. How different from Ellen’s amused, sometimes anxious, tolerance. Different, too, from the hurried scrabble with shop girls, or the weary familiarity of the Maclaggan Street women. Conny has known no man before my father, and we awoke in each other a physical longing equalled only by the complete joy of its satisfaction. In our abandon we marked each other’s skin, and I handled her so closely and fervently that our bodies were slick and smooth to the eager touch. How wonderful is the smooth flesh of her inner thighs, and how her dark nipples rose under my tongue. Often I relive that first magical grapple, and am quickened in both body and spirit.

  Nothing has been the same since that night. Conny has become the touchstone of my life, and all that concerns her is of heightened significance to me. This must be kept hidden from the world, of course: Conny is absolutely determined that my father not be hurt by direct disclosure or by knowing gossip of society. I’ll agree to any compromise she insists on, but already I wonder how I will bear her absence. How natural Conny was at breakfast after our night together, showing only by a smile that nothing had been forgotten or regretted. ‘Now we are truly friends,’ she said when we were alone. ‘Each of us is in the power of the other.’

  That morning a Mr Pettigrew was coming out to talk about armless chairs in the ballroom, but she said she’d like to come in with me in the afternoon to pick up Father from the train. I saddled Tarquin and, after checking on Walter in the telephone office, rode out to inspect the property. Such was my mood that I took the high gate leading down to the Stars and Stripes paddock at a canter. He’s not a big horse, at less than
sixteen hands, but he doesn’t lack mettle and has a soft mouth. I had him trot and then at the gallop. And all the time I knew the real source of my delight was that Conny loved me.

  It was as well that I was out and about, because by the east boundary I came across three young coves trespassing on our land. They were a surly trio, who obviously gave me false names. One of them I recognised as a labourer who had injured his hand when the carriage-house roof was being repaired. They said they were cutting through our property to reach the shore and shellfish, but I suspect they were on the lookout for a sheep to slaughter, or maybe even a cattle beast. We’ve lost animals in the back paddocks, seen the remains, and Patrick Sexton has a man ride the property most days. There’s an element in the colony who see law only as an impediment to their advantage, and who hate those who have built up property and resources through industry and foresight. All three of them needed a damn good bath, and when I sent them on their way, they said, ‘Yes, Mr Larnach. Yes, Mr Larnach,’ with an exaggerated deference that was yet an insult.

  In all respects but one — that it must end — the trip into Dunedin with Conny was the perfect ride. The sun, the sea, the opportunity for us to talk with complete openness and, for the first time, the relaxation that comes from having enjoyed each other utterly. As the buggy took us around the hills, and the gulls swooped and bickered in the bright light of the shore, I thought of Conny in the warm bed, allowing me in the darkness to slip the nightdress from her shoulder. How much greater was the satisfaction because of the many months of anticipation preceding it. Conny and I have embarked on a difficult course, but there’s no other way. We’re entitled to love: everyone is entitled to such fulfilment, if and when they are fortunate enough to find it. I’m determined to regret nothing and seize what happiness I can.