by Gee, Maurice
‘Yes, I do.’
‘You’re right about it, though. About Petleys. But we had it too, out here, just as important, another world. It had nothing to do with all that stuff in Loomis.’ She smiled sourly. ‘Rex grew up.’
‘Yes, I think he did.’
‘But you can’t put up walls, can you? There aren’t any little worlds where you can be safe.’
All I could do was shake my head.
‘The outside gets in. If we hadn’t been so happy … Too much happiness, he said. There can’t be too much, can there? You’re mad when you think that.’
‘Is mad what he was? Something came along and tipped him over?’
She turned away; and turned back as though accusing me. ‘Part of it had to do with morality.’
The word made me shiver, which Margot did not see. She went to the cupboard and poured herself a glass of wine. ‘He said you were a specialist at that.’
‘No, I gave it up.’
‘I don’t think you can.’
‘I gave up being a specialist. Margot, if you’d rather …’ She alarmed me. The dogs too had picked up her distress and were whining at the door. She opened it and calmed them, then washed their slobber off her hands.
‘OK.’ She sat beside me with her glass. ‘Tod. Ralph Murdoch. All the time we lived out here he kept on visiting. It wasn’t often. Once or twice a year. The others didn’t come, Melva and Lila and the rest, Rex went to see them. But Tod kept on turning up, we’d see him sitting in his car, grinning through the window, waiting for us to ask him in. He was by himself at first and later on with his wife and kids. Rex didn’t like him. I couldn’t see why, I thought he was harmless enough. But Rex – he didn’t like people coming here. You and Tony were all right. It was like you were accessories. But Tod was trying to break in. Get an entrance somehow, get himself a place here, I don’t know. And Rex wasn’t having any. He’d send him away at first, when he came by himself. Later on it wasn’t so easy, with his wife and the two little girls.’ Margot drank. She was dry-eyed and quick in her voice. She spoke as though she were reading minutes.
‘He seemed to think Rex had secrets. He knew something Tod had to know. I don’t know what he thought it was. Maybe it was what you call Petleys, and Rex was inside there and Tod was out. But God, Jack’ – feeling at last – ‘that was just an imaginary place, wasn’t it? I mean a place for his imagination. Everyone else, Lila and the rest, were pleased with Tod. No one else tried to keep him out.’
‘No.’
‘But he recognized the – magic? – OK, magic, somehow. I mean for Rex. He saw how it gave Rex another life. Once he came out here with some poetry he’d written, shitty stuff, he knew it was shit, but he was telling Rex he knew there was a secret place, and special meanings. Rex wouldn’t even read it, I did. I had to tell him it was no good.’
‘What did he do?’
‘Just grinned at me. He took it away. The important thing was, he’d signalled Rex. That was what mattered. God, he was like some black little bat with claws that wanted to hang on Rex’s shoulder.’
‘What was his job?’
‘He worked with some investment place, doing -I don’t know. He was one of those guys you see talking on two telephones at once, and watching the screen, and shouting at the girls with the chalk. He’d been some sort of whizz kid at first, I know that. He used to come out here in a flash sportscar. A Jaguar. But I think he must have burned out. They do that, don’t they? You have to be a top executive before it happens or they dump you. Tod wasn’t making it to the top.’
‘What was the firm?’
‘He changed a lot. Some fancy name at the end. The boss was one of those big wheels the government used to put on special committees, telling us how to reorganize and behave – you know, self-reliance, moral behaviour, and make sure everything makes a profit, nothing’s free. Trim the fat. They were getting ready to knight him. I think he’s coming up for his fraud trial soon.’
‘Hopkins. Lupercal.’
‘That’s the one. Anyway – money was important to Tod. He had it for a while. And he couldn’t work out why Rex had something he couldn’t have. Then 1987 came. Most of his money was in Lupercal. Poof. All gone. And as well as that he’d lost his job. Lila told Rex. We didn’t see Tod for a while after that. Not until after his wife and children got drowned.’
‘Jesus.’ I knew who Tod Scahill had become. I had read about him in the papers and had nearly wept for the brave young man. His runabout was swamped coming down from Leigh. He tried to keep his wife and daughters afloat, but later on he swam for help. He swam all night, in the waves, and came ashore at Wenderholm at dawn. Searchers found the family roped to the half-sunken boat, the two girls and the pregnant wife; all dead. Harry read it to me. We did not know who Ralph Murdoch was.
I went to the window and saw the man at work: his legionnaire’s cap, his thin shoulders rising and dipping in the vines. ‘That’s him?’
‘Yes.’
Expressions of pity would have been insulting. ‘He doesn’t look as if he could swim very far.’
‘He’s strong. He’s one of those wiry skinny blokes.’
‘I can understand a breakdown. But I can’t …’ I could not see how it tied in with Rex.
Margot said: ‘You’d better sit down again, Jack.’
Now I must tell the rest of it, and not say what she did and I did: sipped our wine or water at first, stood up, walked about, looked at him again out the window, went pale with dread. (She told me I had gone as white as paper.) None of that. Tod’s story, then Rex’s story:
They started late from Matheson’s Bay (not from Leigh as the paper said). If it was to happen it must happen in the dark. But it was not decided on, darkness would not decide. He put it on the weather so the choice would not be his. Weather was a dice he threw.
A light rain came up, and wind and waves. Everything was swallowed up in greyness. He made a game of it at first, skidding down the waves, and his daughters shrieked with delight, but were soon afraid. His wife, Janice, was afraid too, but she trusted him. He told her they would head for Red Beach not Murray’s Bay, and go ashore there.
Then came his part, the decision was his. It was easy to seem to misjudge – to hit a wave the wrong way and fill up with water. He had wanted the boat to tip over but it didn’t happen that way.
His younger daughter was washed away. Desley was her name. He swam after her and brought her back, hoping his wife would be gone, but she was there, holding on to one side of the swamped runabout, with Jane on the other. So far it didn’t seem like murder. He grabbed a fishing line (not rope) from the slopping sea in the cockpit and cut lengths with his pocket knife and fastened the girls to a rail. Then he swam around to his wife. She was weak already. It was easy to unlock her hands. He turned her away from him, touching lightly so she would not bruise. He pushed her under the water and sat on her shoulders. The ledge of her belly made a place for his feet. He wondered how long it would take for the baby to die. Soon he was able to slide off. He tied her body to the boat. Then he swam back to the girls. Desley had not been able to hold her head up. She was dead. He knew he should drown Jane, but found he could not. He did not think she would last very long.
‘Hold on tight. Daddy’s going for help.’
He swam away.
‘All night,’ Margot said. ‘Some campers found him crawling up the beach at Wenderholm.’
And the papers got the story and tried to make a hero – tragic hero – of Ralph Murdoch. He would not talk to them and soon they were forced to leave him alone. The police left him alone too, after the questions they had to ask. He stayed in hospital for a week with shock and exhaustion. Then Melva took him home to Loomis and tried to ease him back into his life.
But Ralph Murdoch never came out of shock. (‘A special kind of shock,’ Margot said.) He seemed to forget how to talk. Words got lost. People got lost. His range of vision seemed too short even when they stood close to him. When Li
la and Tweet took him to Glen Eden he sat in the sunroom in Les’s chair. In front of him the curtains shifted in the breeze, but his eyes, open wide, never went that far. He watched something inside himself, unbelievable yet true, which he must keep his eyes fixed on. He seemed – not afraid – enormously grave.
One day he found his voice again. He told Melva and Lila and Tweet that he had drowned his family. They thought that he was taking blame: that holding under, swimming away, were a fantasy. ‘Tod,’ they cried, stroking him and holding him in their arms. He stood up and walked outside and did not come back.
No one knows how he got to Waimauku, but in the morning there he was, standing in the yard.
He told Rex. Rex believed him.
I could walk to the window and see Tod. I could see Rex almost as clearly. I did not need Margot to say, ‘He said … he thought …’
They went to the shack and stayed all day, while Margot waited in the house, knowing that her family’s safe time was at an end. Then Rex came back and told her everything that Tod had said; and that he had given him the shack, until they sorted out what the hell to do. He gave her a grin that was – Margot hunts for words – pale and afraid.
‘He knew already.’
Someone else has a place in it. Sidgy was waiting at the end.
There is no getting past Sidgy.
Rex telephoned Glen Eden and told his mother and sisters Tod was safe. He sat inside next morning and wrote Margot a letter – explaining, trying to explain. (She’ll never ask for help with it although she can’t understand.) She worked outside with Sal, keeping busy in the vines, as though she might in that way keep them safe.
Rex walked up from the house and held her hands and kissed her. He kissed Sal. Then he heaved his dinghy on top of the car and drove away.
If he had come ashore he would have got past them, Tod and Sidgy, and stood on the other side, the Margot and Sal side, and been able to carry on. He must have expected to come ashore. He liked his chances. That’s what I think; Margot too. He would not have left Tod with her otherwise. But he was almost sixty, he wasn’t strong and wiry any more.
Tod, in his tipped pushchair, grabs the air. His mouth opens but he does not cry. He follows our canoes on Loomis Creek, keeping pace. I see his sleek hair shine and his knees flash. His skinny arms spear in the mangroves and haul him along.
It was always going to be Tod, for Rex.
He drives to Wenderholm and heads out to sea. The waves are smooth at first and the wind is soft. But I don’t need this. Not now. I have his end.
There should be more to say about Tod’s wife and daughters. I can’t say it. It has been hard even to write their names. (Was Rex trying, in some way, to bring them to the shore?)
And I have nothing to say about Tod. There he is. That is what he did. Like Rex I believe it happened that way. But I don’t have to take it on myself. I have to carry it round with me for the rest of my life.
He came with no warning, although I should have expected him. Rex expected him, in some way.
So I had the end of Rex. But I did not have his proper dimensions. Margot had to say: ‘Sometimes I hate him. What did he think he was trying to do? I needed him. Sal needed him. Why couldn’t he see Sal? Why did he have to put himself first?’
‘He loved you. He loved both of you.’
I sat beside her on the sofa, as I’d sat with Lila on the bridge. I put my arms around her and let her cry. Perhaps it was the first time she had cried.
‘When he knew he was going to drown, he must have been – I can’t bear to think about it, Jack.’
I asked her how long Tod would stay. She did not know. He understood where Rex had gone and what had happened to him. He had nodded his head and walked up the hill and sat in the sun. Margot thought Tweet would come and take him to Glen Eden when her mother died.
But what about now? I wanted to say. It was possible for him to do anything. He might tell his story to the police. He might go out to Muriwai and walk into the waves. He might decide that Margot and Sal had to die …
I looked at him again out the window. Still he worked.
‘I think he’s harmless,’ Margot said. ‘Anyway, my dogs …’
The thing he carries with him, though? What about that? Surely, surely, he should be locked up.
‘No,’ Margot said.
‘But it’s not your business any more.’
‘Yes it is. Rex let him in. It won’t be for ever.’ She smiled at me. ‘Crying helps.’
She got up and wiped her face dry.
I said, ‘I’ll have to stop Alice and John with their suicide story.’
‘Don’t bother. Do something else for me.’
She went into her bedroom and brought out a stack of exercise books – eight Olympics, my sort – and a folder bulging with papers.
‘I want you to edit these and have them published.’
‘What are they?’ – although I knew.
‘His poetry, Jack. He never stopped writing. There’s more than ten years of poems in there. Don’t read them now, take them home with you. Come back soon and tell me what you think.’
‘Are these …?’
‘The notebooks are his, the typing’s mine. My transcriptions. I might have made some mistakes. Places he meant to start a new line, things he crossed out. Can you do it?’
‘Yes. Yes. Are these the only copies?’
‘I’ve taken some carbons, don’t worry.’ She smiled again. ‘Each time he filled a notebook up he’d give it to me. I think that was his way of publishing them. Although he took them back sometimes and made alterations.’
‘I should have come sooner. These are …’
‘I knew you’d get here in the end. There wasn’t any hurry anyway. I liked it when they were only mine.’
She came out with me to the car. Ben and Mac looked me over again. They are not dogs I would mess with. But it was Rex’s poems, banging on my calf in a supermarket bag, that seemed to promise Margot and Sal would be safe. Tod, up the hillside, had crossed paths with them and now was moving steadily somewhere else. I’d like to say, in order to dismiss him, that he was in some anti-matter universe; but that won’t do, he’s here all right, he’s in our universe, he is Margot’s and Rex’s and mine.
‘Was there some insurance? Was that it?’
‘No. None. But everything he had was all gone. He had to start again. He couldn’t have them round his neck.’ She shivered. ‘He was trimming fat.’
I turned away from him. I cannot disbelieve in Tod.
I needed Sal. I needed to see her. She got down from the school bus at the gate. The dogs bounded to her and turned themselves into puppies. I waited in my car in the yard. Margot brought her to me and said, ‘This is Jack. He was a friend of your father’s.’
‘I met you once. You were swimming in the creek.’
She did not remember. A girl in an ugly school uniform, with a name and telephone number inked on the back of her hand. She had her mother’s Tinakori plumpness, and something of young Rex in her face. No single feature held it – eyes and nose, forehead, jaw: little bits of Rex here and there.
‘Go and get changed, love.’
‘Does she know about Tod?’
‘No. God, no. She just thinks he’s …’ Circled her forefinger at her temple. ‘She keeps out of his way. Thanks for coming, Jack. I won’t give her the halva until tea.’
I drove back to Castor Bay with Rex’s poems on the seat beside me.
Not all of them are good. In some plain statement fails from too much simplicity. But half, more than half, are almost as good as the Loomis poems or the hospital ones. If they are less good it’s because they are less hard – but that is not to say that they are soft.
I mustn’t measure in this way. It’s not for me to judge but to present. Before that I’ve had to A&D. Not difficult, they were arranged already, chronologically. As an archivist I’ll hold to that. As editor though, what should I do? There are forty-nine sonne
ts scattered here and there. (Several of the exercise books have the water safety cartoon on the back.) I’d like to bring them together, but did he intend them as a sequence? It’s hard to tell. Did he mean those poems he does not title independently but calls simply ‘Moments’ – which in other hands might sound twee – did he mean them to stand as a group? I have asked Margot but she has nothing to say. It seems to me she browsed in the poems and chewed this and that one like a cud. No editorial problems for her. Did he mean ‘Seasons’ – there are more than four – and ‘Years’ to stand in groups? The only answer I can find is that he didn’t mean them to stand at all, unless it was in Margot’s mind. So I’ll have to work it out for myself.
He catalogues the place from the road-edge to the creek, and fence to fence. He kept his sharp eye but lost his ear to some extent. Happy poems should sing, but Rex doesn’t sing. Happy poems are hard to do. The less successful ones are not much more than a friendly ramble; unhurried steps through the grass, swish, swish. The fence wires squeak. He pants a little going up the hill. (How did he ever think he could swim five miles?) But the good ones are tight, hard, intricate in stepping in and out and round and down, they make music of a sort, and strike resonances, in me at least: I hear Rex Petley’s voice and it is continuous with his Loomis voice. They are better – they’re more interesting and please me more – than most of the verse he wrote when he was with Alice. But I won’t get into that argument.
Margot is there: in work poems and kitchen poems – quotidian but never trivial – and in love poems too. It surprises me she did not hold some of them back. She’s sometimes ‘Margot’ not just ‘you’ and ‘she’. I’ll have to decide whether to bring the love ones together. It might be best to publish half a dozen thinner volumes. And Sal is there. There’s music in his poems about Sal – so quiet you almost don’t hear it at times.
Each of the exercise books has a dedication – ‘For Margot’. Perhaps he did go a little soft.
Happy poems. They won’t please everyone. Some people are going to say, Where’s the tension? Some are even going to say, There’s nothing here, no content. But it seems like poetry to me, even though it rarely gets off the property.
