Kehua! (27 page)
‘Do you understand nothing?’ he demanded. She thought he had taken to cocaine again. Worse, he had decided that the odd glass
of wine would do him no harm. ‘Don’t you see how this country is being destroyed by these cancerous, lying scum?’
She did not read the proofs. He told her once too often that she was a stupid, provincial cow. She’d been getting terrible
migraines, kehua wings beating in her head, visible in the vein on her temple, so her family worried.
Run, run, run.
She told him to find a wife who suited him better, and did indeed run to the divorce solicitors.
One-two, one-two, little knees up and down beneath the blue and white checked dress, little bloodstained footprints in the
yellow dust.
She went to stay with her friend Dionne in Paris. The kehua followed her and took up residence in the hydrangeas out on Dionne’s
patio. Dionne was just selling the last of her Chagalls. The suitors had not dried up, but Dionne’s interest in them had.
She would rather read the books she had forgone in her youth. Beverley did not get to the launch of
Slicing the Salami
.
Marcus had done as Beverley suggested and found a young
woman who thought as he did – as it happened, a member of the BNP – and invited her to live in Robinsdale while Beverley was
away. Then Marcus changed the locks so Beverley couldn’t get in without breaking in. The lawyers advised her against this
latter act. Perhaps when it was over, all agreed, Marcus would revert to sanity. They had really both got on very well until
this happened. Marcus called her from a pub when she was in Paris and said he was sorry, he had put the new key under a stone
beneath the lilac tree if she came home when he was out. He blamed Beverley for provoking him.
‘Perhaps I did,’ said Beverley to Dionne. ‘I am not a nice person. I thought I was but I am not. Look at me, I have betrayed
my friends. Why, why did I do it?’
‘For a bit of peace,’ Dionne said. ‘If a man moves into your life you do all sorts of things you wouldn’t do normally. It
doesn’t have to be love; it’s the sharing of the bed that does it. Propinquity. You sop up their vapours, in every sense of
the word. Besides, they were not really your friends. They were the companions of your youth, which is a very different thing.
See them as Marcus sees them – satanic lefty scum – and absolve yourself.’
Dionne tended to share Marcus’ political outlook, but then this was Paris and she was a courtesan and so oblivious to social
censure. The kehua, lost amongst the blues and pinks of the pompom hydrangeas, chattered and squeaked and Dionne said, ‘Do
you hear something?’ and frowned and Beverley said, ‘No.’ Her hearing was not as acute as once it had been. ‘All the same,’
said Dionne, ‘it might be safer not to go to the book launch.’
It was touch and go whether the launch of
Slicing the Salami
would go ahead. There was litigation up to the very last moment. The media forgot their normal plea of the public interest,
and
betrayed one of their own, that is to say, Marcus. All noisily and passionately agreed there must be a limit to freedom of
speech. Advance sales soared. The launch was on.
Marcus took the BNP girl since Beverley was not around. She was small, dark and pale and wore a lot of make-up. (She was a
friend of D’Dora’s as it happened. They belonged to the same rock-climbing club.) They were both very drunk. There were demos
outside and scuffles with the police before, and it was touch and go whether they could get into the publishing house at all,
let alone up to the penthouse on the fifteenth floor where the view over London is so great. But the GCGITS made sure they
got there.
Marcus and the BNP girl then apparently had an argument as to whether the view from the Penguin Penthouse in the Strand was
better, and they left the party together. After that their movements were uncertain – London was not yet so lavish with its
security cameras – other than that they ended up on the track of the Docklands Light Railway, where it runs overground near
Canary Wharf; and both were struck and killed by an automated train. There was no evidence of foul play. Book sales were stupendous,
Slicing the Salami
had a six-month triumph, stayed around for a year or two, and then was quietly remaindered. Whatever the GCGITS’ purpose
was, it was served.
There were so many if-onlies for Beverley to worry about, amidst tears – if only I had gone to the book launch, if only I
hadn’t provoked him, provided the research in the first place, driven him to drink and so on – that Beverley felt as guilty
as if she had pushed Marcus under the train herself. She sometimes remembered what he had said to her on the doorstep, that
the book could do no possible harm. But it had certainly created a fuss, and lost her friends.
But gradually, like her family, friends drifted back, as did her
good spirits. Robinsdale was her own again. She had the whole place redecorated. The ceilings, once yellow from cigarette
smoke and the after-dinner cigar that Marcus had so enjoyed, were pure virginal white once again. She had a vestigial memory
of someone talking about virgins and cloning, but did not pursue it.
Lately Mr Bennett has been up and down the stairs rather too often for comfort. It is still terrifically hot up here – we’re
in a heatwave – and the whiff of his cigar smoke is so strong as to be offensive. I am a non-smoker. Marcus, I notice, once
just a cigarette smoker, has taken up cigar smoking as well. Go figure, as Beverley would say. Time to get downstairs again,
where it’s cooler, and away from the unseen collie panting in the corner, and what I am beginning to construe as the squeaking
of a double bed. I can’t blame the central heating at the moment and there’s no air-conditioning. I think I see Mr Bennett
as very like Marcus, only without the brains. But then Marcus has no reality either, come to think of it.
The other thing is that the father of my oldest child appeared to me yesterday, smiling, and I was conscious of a great affection
for him. He died fifteen years ago. I had not married him but chosen to bring up the child without him. Unkindly, and unthinkingly,
I had barred him from the whanau. When I say ‘appeared’ it was not quite in the flesh, nor in a dream: somewhere in between.
Just that I remembered what he looked like, how he was, what his presence felt like, so clearly he might as well have been
there in the real world. Mind you, I had just had three teeth out and was somewhat medicated. Though I was pleased to see
my first sweetheart, and so pleased to be pleased, it is always a little worrying when deceased
family members appear at one’s side.
I remember how when my mother was very old and in a nursing home the nurse phoned us early one morning. ‘You’d better come
now,’ she said.
I asked in alarm what had happened and she said, ‘Your mother’s in her normal good health. But when she woke this morning
she told me she’d had a vivid dream. Her father was coming towards her smiling and stretching out his hand for her. Back home
in Jamaica, at the training college, they taught us that if the patient was summoned by a family member in a dream we were
to call the relatives at once. So that’s what I’m doing.’
We went at once, and by the next morning my mother had died; we were in time to say goodbye. So if my son’s father comes to
me in a dream, I am glad to know he is in the whanau in spite of me, but I am also a little nervous. And I have to finish
this book before I go. The show must go on.
I’ll do it downstairs in the cool, not upstairs. Upstairs, once so tranquil and benevolent, hasn’t half got itself all stirred
up.
We’ll take a brief look first at Scarlet, since she’s so restless. The fates are with her: a parking space has opened up in
front of Costa’s. And she parks the Prius swiftly and neatly. She is a safe, confident, polite, alert driver – this is her
New Zealand ancestry: this is Arthur in the Mercury, taking the hairpin bends in his stride, pulling to one side if there
is a faster car behind him – not, once he had the Mercury, that there ever was. Arthur, as it happens, died in his bed, not
in the fireball that Beverley – with that part of her mind which ever allows Arthur to surface at all – half fears, and half
hopes for. He died of heart failure in 1980. Rita was at his bedside. She had been rising thirty when they married and had
been all the more pleased to be taken off the shelf.
‘Taken off the shelf ’ is a phrase not in common use today. It’s how spinsters – those who had lagged behind in the marriage
race and remained old maids by their late twenties – were spoken of. Rita, unmarried and thirtyish, having ‘put on her bonnet’
(in other words given up), had taken in little Beverley for company, in place of the child she was unlikely to have, and had
been rewarded. Any husband was better than none. But back, briskly, to Scarlet.
Scarlet manoeuvres smoothly and efficiently into a tight space which would defeat many another driver. Jackson, in spite of
his fears of being late, is in the café before her, sees her through the
windows, and his heart leaps. She is the solution to all his problems, and his joy is amplified by the slight stiffening feeling
in his pants, which suggests to him that this is indeed true love. His encounter with Briony had been bruising. She so despises
him, and so lets him know it, that the shortest conversation with her can leave him limp for days and in need of Viagra even
though normally he is all eagerness and activity and requires no chemical help. See, Scarlet can vanquish even Briony. Scarlet
sits, they lean towards each other, they take each other’s hands, they gaze into each other’s eyes. Those around feel warmly
towards them, and envious. Costa’s becomes a magic place.
You may have realised, reader, as I have just done, that in comparing Arthur’s driving excellence with Scarlet’s, I have suggested
a genetic connection between them. In other words Arthur is indeed Beverley’s father, Scarlet’s great-grandfather. I too have
been unsure until now. Did it happen as the Christchurch Press would have it, that Walter killed his wife in a crime passionnel,
and then shot his dog and himself? Or as Beverley suspected – that she was Arthur’s baby born to Kitchie, and Arthur used
the bread knife on Kitchie when she chose to stay with the long-suffering Walter, then took Walter’s gun as Walter fled for
his life to the quarry, and shot him and his dog. That months later Arthur stopped by and wooed Rita, in order to get his
daughter back. Even to wait until she was grown in order to possess her, to mark his own – it was sheep country, even though
he was a doctor – as he had possessed and marked the mother. Though he may have started with the best intentions and weakened
on the way: of that even I cannot be sure, and Beverley was doing the provoking. But Arthur as the killer is now the true
version. Scarlet has killer’s blood, murderer’s blood, in her veins, for all she appears so lightweight. Jackson had better
look out.
Scarlet called me back down to the basement. She wanted attention and she got it. There’s no cigar smoke down here, and no
panting noises and all is quiet; I notice that the green grass the other side of the window-panes has faded to brownish grey,
it’s been so hot and dry lately.
Now, though, here’s Samantha standing in reception at MetaFashion, a Yummy Mummy to dream of, dressed in Boden, sensible and
smart. She’s a much better bet for Louis and Nopasaran than Scarlet could ever be. A pity about her husband and three children.
But Samantha and Louis are just so right. Samantha would be fascinated by what went on at MetaFashion, able to follow the
thrills and tensions of the business, never be fighting against Louis where his beloved Nopasaran was concerned; no, she would
be with him all the way, outraged by the planning authorities, looking up in Google to prove that English Heritage had misunderstood
the law, going to night classes on the Brutalist architecture of the thirties, getting on well with his mother – there were
even family connections: her father had been at Bedales with Annabel’s best friend, Samantha’s mother becoming Matron only
because of reduced circumstances. If only Samantha’s mother had kept out of the laundry room that afternoon, how happy everyone
might have been. Only the GCGITS would not allow it.
Yes, and most of all Samantha was so obviously fertile and happy to have more children. She’d have had them trained to climb
the ladders to bed as soon as they could crawl and she would never utter a complaint. She was a brave, valiant girl and she
had loved Louis all her life, her first and only true love. No accident that in later life she often wore shoes with the seam
up the middle of the upper: she felt close to Louis when she did.
When Louis was warned by Beverley that Scarlet was running
off to her lover and the couple could be found in Costa’s if he hurried, Louis failed to hurry and who could blame him? Because
when he’d called Samantha on the mobile number he kept in his wallet, she’d picked up the phone. There, after years, waiting.
She had not lost the phone or changed her number. The GCGITS knows what he’s doing.
‘Louis!’ said Samantha. ‘I dreamt of you last night; how strange.’
‘It isn’t strange at all,’ said Louis, ‘I dream about you all the time.’
And it was as if the intervening years had all melted away. Samantha was shopping in Liberty’s: so she was round at MetaFashion
in ten minutes in a Boden cord blazer, a well-cut white shirt and a pretty flowered skirt, made of a thirties fabric print
with red poppies on a white background – so different from the designer jeans and T-shirt style that Scarlet favoured. Before
they knew it they were reunited on a sofa, and the stretch marks on Samantha’s tummy from the three pregnancies and the thinning
hair on Louis’ anxious scalp were as nothing.
Samantha’s husband was one of those business executives who had spent a lot of time flying around the world first or business
class, but now in the recession was reduced to making conference calls from his offices in Oxford. The close and continued
proximity of his PA had proved too much for him and he had enjoyed a weekend break with her in a famous country-house hotel
in the Cotswolds but had felt so guilty he felt obliged to tell Samantha about it, with contrition and apologies, and assurances
that the girl, a redhead, was to be transferred to their branch in Edinburgh.
