Kehua! (20 page)

Arthur had a new Ford Mercury with a mighty V8 engine, of which he was inordinately proud. It was a great black monster, which
had survived Axis submarines to get to New Zealand. It climbed the hills with impressive alacrity –some were so steep in Coromandel
that the old Model Ts could only get up them in reverse gear. Little Beverley would sit in the front passenger seat beside
him in the Merc when he went on house calls, sharing his pride. She was the Doctor’s daughter, and the title gave her a sense
of prestige and status which stayed with her for the rest of her life, and which even in direst circumstances would come to
her aid. If some strange man bent over her naked body taking his pleasure at her expense, breathing fish and chips vinegar
over her (only once, that), or she was reduced to cleaning toilets for a living, she could still say to herself, ‘Yes, but
I’m still the Doctor’s daughter.’

Rita wouldn’t go with Arthur on these excursions, too terrified of the hairpin bends, the rough surface of unmade-up roads,
the precipitate drop down the mountainside if anything went wrong. Beverley was without fear. One day, halfway over the hill
road to Kennedy Bay, the engine began to steam and they had to stop and get out and wait for it to cool. Arthur opened the
bonnet and
showed her how engines worked.

‘Lie down beside me here,’ he said, so she lay beside him in the yellow dust and he pointed out the brake cable and said this
was the way to get rid of enemies. You weakened the cable by slicing it almost through with a Stanley knife. On these steep
hills, with these hairpin bends, brake cables were a matter of life and death. Beverley thought that was a strange thing to
say. He could be quite a frightening man, as well as a charming one. They lay there in the dust until the engine cooled; then
they got up and brushed themselves down and continued on their way.

She’d waited three hours in the car that day while he delivered a baby. It was a difficult birth: a Maori family, and they
had no money to pay. She wondered if there was anyone he wanted to kill? He was so good to his patients, but not always nice
to Rita.

‘Quite the little figure you’re getting there,’ he observed, on the way home.

She was wearing a summer dress with a pattern in blue and white oyster-shape whirls and she quite liked it, except she had
noticed that instead of falling straight down it poked out a little on either side of her chest. It hadn’t quite occurred
to her that she was going to turn into a woman. She preferred herself as an eternal child. She blushed, and he laughed, and
brushed his finger up against her cheek, affectionately, and through the cotton dress to feel the nipple, which stood up the
way it did when she was swimming and the water was cold. That made her tingle and there was a sudden sort of plunging feeling
between her legs. She supposed it was all right but wasn’t quite sure. Then he added, ‘Every day in every way, more and more
like your mother.’

It didn’t make sense. She didn’t look in the least like Rita. Rita these days was flat all the way down and getting flatter.
Did he see
nothing? She stopped going out with her father on house calls, saying she had too much homework to do. She had, too. She was
doing English, Maths, Latin, History, French, Chemistry, Physics and Biology for her school certificate. Beverley lost her
admiration for Arthur and padded around after Rita instead, grateful for her attention, helping her with the surgery, looking
after the livestock grateful patients left in lieu of payments – chickens, ducks, rabbits, once a sheep. She asked Rita if
she could get a bra like the other girls, and Rita found her a strange garment with circular stitching, which made her small
breasts stick forward like beacons. The men who stood around outside the Star and Garter waited for her to go by with the
milk pail after school, and at home she would catch Arthur looking, so she stopped wearing the bra: instead she wore a too-tight
vest, one she’d grown out of, to flatten herself, and got on with her lessons.

Her periods started, and the news that this was going to happen to her once a month, five whole days of that month, was shocking.
She worked it out. That was a sixth of your life until you were fifty when you might as well be dead anyway.

Rita must have told Arthur because he looked at her in the odd way men had begun to and said, ‘I hear you’re quite the little
woman, Bev.’ She would have to change her name. Bev was intolerable: Cynara, perhaps, after Dowson. ‘I have been faithful
to thee, Cynara, in my fashion.’ And she quite went off Rita, too. They’d talked about her behind her back.

Just a short break from my account of Beverley, because I was thinking of Lola at the same age, and wondering whether heredity
showed through as far as a great-grandchild. It didn’t. Lola became for a time so ethereally lovely that people of all genders,
all ages, looked after her in the street. The sudden burst of oestrogen, running so near the surface of a tender, still childlike
skin, was almost shocking in its impact. But Lola didn’t mind: she liked it: she knew everything: she watched porn. It became
her habit to sit on her father’s knee while they watched TV, her firm peaky breasts pressed into his chest, her chin nuzzling
into his neck. Jesper would shift uncomfortably and say, ‘You’re too old for this, Lola,’ and once Lola replied ‘Why call
me Lola then? It’s a bad-girl’s name. What did you have in mind for me?’

Her mother Cynara had caught the daughter’s eye and knew that she was being teased and not very pleasantly, and that what
Lola felt for her mother was not so much love, as competition and anger. Cynara had had to subdue the impulse to slap. The
stage passed quickly, thank God, the transparent quality went, so that by sixteen she was just another pretty, too-thin girl
in a too-short skirt. She still had her virginity, so far as Cynara knew. As D’Dora remarked, ‘Lola sees herself as Paris
Hilton and probably has plans to wait until it’s legal and then surrender it on YouTube.’

Beverley lived in a culture where children were seen and not heard, schoolgirls didn’t date, nudity was shocking, porn unobtainable,
and at the approach of puberty the sexes were segregated. Even in the primary schools there were separate entrances for boys
and girls. You did not answer back, and you respected your elders and betters.

There, I should not have left Beverley. It is eleven o’clock on a hot Sunday morning and I can hear the church bells ringing,
though there are no services over the road. The sound must be blowing up from St John’s in the High Street. The window is
wide open. And something flies in. It looks like a baby hummingbird, tiny, darting, brightly coloured, wings beating so fast
they’re just a blur. It rests for a moment on the top of my computer and stares at me with tiny glassy eyes, and is off again,
and I am worrying for it almost as much as for me that it will blunder into something and hurt itself. Then, as suddenly as
it has appeared, it is out of the window and is gone. Rex comes in – I must have cried out – and I describe this apparition
and he laughs and says it was a hawk moth, and closes the window. But I take it as a lesson not to deviate from my account
of Beverley, without straying into Lola territory, and then the untoward is less likely to happen. Sorry, folks.

Beverley was a weekly boarder at Thames High School for Girls (founded 1880: motto,
Ut Prosim Patriae
– That I may be worthy of my country). The bus journey from Coromandel took a couple of hours along the coast road, and landslips
or sudden torrential floods often made it impassable for days at a time so it was more sensible for her to board. The school
uniform consisted of a blazer with the school crest, a white shirt, a pleated gymslip which disguised the figure, lisle stockings
and lace-up shoes, a felt hat in winter and a panama in summer. In high summer a blue and white checked summer dress in cotton
with a white collar was optional. Beverley chose never to wear it, which others found a little strange, but she was otherwise
a gregarious, biddable, clever child among clever children, youngest in her class, serious but popular, with a gift for entertaining
her friends, a way with words and no trouble at all to her teachers, other than the slight lift of the eyebrows, surprise
at others’ total crassness, that had irked Rita. She was even made Head Girl, in spite of a few doubts expressed in the staff
room.

‘She’s laughing at us,’ said Miss Butt, who taught Latin. ‘She runs rings around us and pities us.’

‘It’s true,’ said Miss Ferguson, the gym teacher. ‘When she’s working on the vaulting horse she gets this expression of, what
– incredulity? Otherwise she’s too good to be true.’

But Miss Crossly who taught maths said just because she was too good to be true didn’t mean she wasn’t. Mrs Barker the headmistress,
who had been sent papers on the child’s background, was the only one to know the girl’s history, and said nothing.

Beverley as Head Girl proved to be fair, just and reliable. She knew no boys of her own age. While you wore school uniform
you were out of bounds to men, and you could easily be in school uniform until you were eighteen. She had a vague theoretical
notion of what went on in marriage between men and women, but had scarcely seen a naked body either in the flesh or in photographs
– though there was a Fuseli in the Auckland Art Gallery,
The Serpent Tempting Eve
, which was instructive, and the Dowson poem,
Vitae Summa Brevis
, which haunted her, and made her long to be older and better able to understand it.

They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,

Love and desire and hate:

I think they have no portion in us after

We pass the gate.

They are not long, the days of wine and roses:

Out of a misty dream

Our path emerges for a while, then closes

Within a dream.

And then of course Cynara:

All night upon mine heart I felt her warm heart beat,

Night-long within mine arms in love and sleep she lay;

Surely the kisses of her bought red mouth were sweet;

But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,

When I awoke and found the dawn was grey:

I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,

Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,

Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind;

But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,

Yea, all the time, because the dance was long:

I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

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.

She found it almost unbearable. She wanted to cry, but couldn’t be sure what about. It was so strange, so unlike any passion
anyone could admit to in this practical landscape; no one flung roses here. They drank too much beer; but no one called for
wilder music or for stronger wine. She was not sure she fancied being Cynara, she of the pale lost lilies. The one of the
bought red mouth probably got a better deal of it from Dowson. Then she found from books – teachers never told you this kind
of thing – that Dowson had been unhappily in love with a girl of twelve, who was probably Cynara, and died of alcoholism at
the age of thirty-two, and Beverley didn’t know what to think.

Every now and then Arthur would talk about her looking more and more like her mother, and the more she looked less and less
like Rita the more puzzled she became. She waited until her parents were out and looked through the drawers marked ‘Private
– keep out – that means you’. She found adoption papers in Rita’s drawer that referred to the Canterbury Girls’ Receiving
Society. She escaped for long enough on a school trip to the Auckland Library to look up records in the Christchurch Press
from the mid-thirties. She came across headlines:

Amberley Tragedy: local farmer and father kills young wife and dog

Walter McLean’s body found by cousin: locum Doctor James (Arthur to his friends) McLean finds slain farmer in ditch

Balance of mind disturbed…financial crash claims new victim

Party-goer Kitchie McLean, 23, new migrant from England, slain in ‘crime passionnel’

‘She never settled’, claim neighbours

Friends say farmer Walter McLean had become recluse

Orphaned three-year-old to be cared for by family friend: local beauty and heiress Rita Davies.

Local beauty and heiress? Rita? It depended on your standards. Beverley went back into the obituaries. Rita’s parents had
been killed in a farming accident and she had inherited the farm when she was twenty. That would have made her attractive
to Arthur, Beverley could see. Arthur would often talk about the depression and how so many doctors had been out of work,
how the war had brought prosperity as well as hardship. Beverley felt fond enough of Rita to be glad she had once been seen
as a beauty, even though now she was just another of the tightly permed and kindly, effective matrons, who in practice ran
the country while the men ran it in name.

Rita was a good sort, Beverley decided, but not a patch on Kitchie, a snapshot of whom, turning a cartwheel on the lawn, had
been published in the
Christchurch Press
. Beverley felt quite calm and cool about her discoveries, almost numb. Or perhaps she had been numb until now. She thought
perhaps she had always known the broad strokes; it was just the detail she was missing. Beverley turned the paper upside down
to study her mother’s face. Pretty, short wavy hair, big eyes, and a wide-lipped mouth. She could see she looked like her
mother. She would be her real mother, then, but she would always run away before worse befell, as her mother had not.
Party-goer Kitchie
, shorthand for ‘no better than she should be’. Good wives did not go to parties.