Some Here Among Us (30 page)

‘Of course I’ll be all right,’ said Tolerton. ‘I’ll be glad to get some peace and quiet, you lot out of the way. I have some work to do.’

Tolerton was a High Court judge. He had been able to get away for only a few days and he had brought some judgments to write. Now he raised his walking stick like the starter at a race-track and the cars set off, FitzGerald and Inga in the lead in a smart new silver sedan, Race and Toby and Jojo in Tolerton’s old Land Rover. Toby and Jojo were not in fact going out to the Tawhai farm. They had strapped their kite-surfing gear on the roof-rack and were planning to jump out at one of the beaches along the way.

‘Here, Dad,’ Toby kept saying. ‘This looks great. Just stop here.’

‘Wait,’ said Race. ‘It gets better.’

He had been along this road now, he calculated, four times in his life – twice in daylight – and he remembered great sweeps of empty sand, the surf breaking for miles. No,
six
, he thought. Three times in daylight.

Toby meanwhile was getting agitated. Race might have been here before, he thought, but what did he know about wind-surfing? Look at those waves, look at those caps.

But the further towards the cape they went the stronger the wind blew.

‘Here we are,’ said Race, thankful that his memory had served him: two, three, four miles of sand stretched before them, not a soul, not a footprint to be seen.

Toby and Jojo jumped out, took down their gear from the roof, waved and were gone, over the low dunes without looking back. Inga and FitzGerald’s silver sedan was a speck in the distance. Race followed it and turned left at the crossroads and took the road to Cape Runaway. Everywhere he looked, the lie of the land had shifted, as if everything had swung slowly at anchor over the years. That roofline, that had not been there before, surely – yet the house was ancient, falling to bits in fact. This little creek he didn’t remember, with its white concrete bridge. And the cliff road, when he came crawling around it, was not nearly as high as it used to be . . .

And then, round the corner of the coast, there was a church with a scanty wooden belfry which was simply not listed at all in his memory.

In the distance he saw the silver sedan parked in the driveway of a newish-looking house by the road. Race stopped at the gate and got out of the Land Rover.

The wind here was direct, tremendous. He went up the path: all the new plantings – the flax and the giant grasses – were bending and shaking as if speechless at the wind and then, coming round the corner of the house, there was Morgan. But of course it was not really Morgan. ‘It’s only his brother,’ Race thought, but all the same he was startled, and impressed by the fidelity of the silent codes of inheritance. The man coming round the corner of the house looked just like Morgan might have, decades on. He had a startled expression on his face too, although he knew who Race was, he said, and he had come out to meet him.

‘I’m Lucas,’ he said. ‘I’m the big brother. You better come in out of this.’

They went into the house. FitzGerald and Inga were already there, installed in armchairs in the sitting-room. They sent up a sort of high-chinned twinkle as if to say ‘We’re ahead of you here.’ Lucas fussed around, bringing out tea in a teapot, cups and saucers and biscuits, all on a wooden tray with handles of chrome. He was a big, strongly-built, grizzled man. His eyes checked the tray, the biscuits; he was anxious everything should be done as well as if his wife was there. Lucas had just retired, he said. He had taught mathematics for thirty years at the University of New South Wales.

‘Your mother was a mathematician,’ said Race.

‘You remember that?’ said Lucas.

‘I remember Morgan teasing her about it.’

‘
Did
he?’ said Lucas. ‘I would never have dared. But Morgan could get away with murder. He was her favourite. He knew exactly how to get round her.’

‘Morgan was – wild,’ said Race suddenly, expansively. He thought of Morgan on the limo roof, Morgan in the fog looking for stolen jewels. He decided not to mention those. ‘Didn’t he get expelled from school?’ he said.

There was a silence. Race had blundered.

‘Something to do with tennis shoes?’ he said. That was so trivial, he thought, who would mind?

Lucas looked unhappy, all the same. Family honour seemed to be at stake.

‘Well, you know,’ said FitzGerald, ‘Morgan was brilliant. He just knew more than the rest of us.
What is the name of the liquor that flows in the veins of the immortal gods?
’

The house shook in the gale. You could hear the surf thunder and speak on the beach.

‘Just
look
at your windows,’ said Inga. ‘They’re all salt.’

‘I was divorced last year,’ said Lucas, rather humbly, as if that might explain things.

Inga left the room. After a minute or two she appeared on the veranda with a hose in her hand. She began to sluice down the big panes.

The men then laughed.

‘My wife!’ said FitzGerald, not without some pride.

Lucas beamed, in order to conceal what he was thinking: ‘My precious tank water!’

‘What a nerve,’ thought Race, admiringly.

‘There,’ said Inga, coming back into the room. ‘Now you can see yourself think.’

‘Would you like to see the grave?’ said Lucas.

They went out into the booming gale. The sun was hot through the rushing air as they set off across the paddock, FitzGerald and Inga going on ahead. Race noted Inga’s air of elegance as she walked away over the rough turf. Then he smelled an ammoniacal tang and he saw the roots of the big tree, dark-ribbed and polished bare in places, wisps of sheep’s wool caught in wood fissures. He liked exposed tree roots, Race thought, they were a natural form which appealed to him. Then suddenly he stopped. He was struck by a thought. It was odd, he thought, he had never seen the tree before, never noticed it, the 100-foot pine standing alone in the middle of the Tawhai front paddock. He must have looked straight through it on his previous visits, crossing the field first with Morgan on a summer morning long ago and then, within the year, coming back again with a coffin, he must have blotted it from view – a poor old Norfolk pine, the city councillors’ favourite, which by some error of chance or judgement had been pitched there on the Tawhais’ front doorstep. And yet now, walking out beyond the tree’s shadow, he stopped to look back and saw how wrong he had been all those years ago: it was beautiful, this great tree, branches stirring tautly in the cloudless rush, the dark mast beaded with resin, and he thought, ‘Of course, genus
Araucaria
! The monkey-puzzle, the hoop pine, the Norfolk . . . Straight from the Jurassic.’

Lucas had stopped and was looking up at the tree as well. He had forgiven Race his
faux-pas
about the tennis shoes. It was true, Lucas thought, Morgan
was
wild, in a way they had all run wild –

‘We used to climb that when we were kids,’ he said, stretching his head back to look at the very top of the tree. ‘We’d climb right up there and then jump off.’

‘Jesus, Lucas,’ said Race.

‘Yes, we’d just jump and drop down through the branches to the ground. Or we’d go out to the lighthouse and swing by our fingertips from the balcony. Twelve, fourteen, we were. Our parents? They never knew.’

At that moment Race felt a kind of cheerfulness, almost a wave of relief: all his life, he thought, he had never been sure what happened to Morgan on the night that he died, but now he thought that whatever had happened it was all right, at least it was all right now, and maybe it was even all right then, and then, still standing there with Lucas beside him, he saw a pair of magpies appear in the upper branches, one after the other, villainous, defiant – you thought of a pair of bouncers caught out in the daylight in their tuxedos – and then Race remembered the first time he had ever seen Morgan, walking round FitzGerald’s room, slinging couplets back and forth with Griffin –
The moment when we choose to pla
y
/ The imagined pine, the imagined jay
.

‘That was the start,’ he thought, ‘that was the beginning of the story, for me at any rate, the story of Morgan, and now it’s coming to the end . . .’

But what was the end? Lucas had turned and walked on after the others. In the distance Race saw a red car come hurtling along the road, a cone of dust rising behind it. It seemed to speed up even more as it approached the gate, then it braked sharply and slewed in the gravel before coming to a stop.

‘Candy!’ Race thought at once. ‘She should never be allowed to drive,’ he added, automatically, in his thoughts. ‘Never be permitted behind the wheel of a car.’

The red car had stopped behind Tolerton’s old Land Rover. Out stepped Candy, and Chadwick, and Tolerton.

Race stood still in the paddock, then he began to walk back towards the newcomers. The others, FitzGerald and Inga and Lucas, also stopped and turned to watch, but they had gone too far to come all the way back.

‘We made it,’ cried Candy, coming through the five-barred gate. ‘I simply couldn’t bear it if you were here and we weren’t.’

‘We made it,’ said Chadwick. He was in a lightweight suit, and striped tie. He looked extremely serious and important as if the fate of nations was in his hands.

‘You’re here too,’ said Race to Tolerton.

‘I had to come,’ said Tolerton. His face was red. ‘Chaddy’s never been here before, and Candy couldn’t remember the way. I was therefore required as navigator.’

He was still in his dressing-gown, with one bare foot.

‘We’re going to see the grave,’ said Race, and they set off again, all of them, Inga, FitzGerald and Lucas some way ahead, and Candy, and Tolerton in his dressing-gown, and Chadwick and Race bringing up the rear. Candy had a walking stick. Tolerton was also on a walking stick. They marched across the grass, those at the rear going into the shadow of the Norfolk pine and out again, in procession, and then, no one knew why, they fell out of step with each other and ended up in single file crossing the big paddock, each with their own thoughts.

Inga was thinking: ‘
I
did this. I hope they’re grateful, that’s all. It means frankly nothing to me, but if I hadn’t been here to organise them—’

FitzGerald was suddenly feeling guilty. ‘Morgan knew I’d slept with Candy,’ he thought. ‘I wonder how. But that was why I gave him the pot that night. I gave it to him and maybe that’s what killed him. Was
I
to blame for his death?’

He had never thought of this before and a strange quizzical expression – he could feel it – came to his face.

Lucas was wondering just what it was that had brought these people here, and what he thought about it. He wasn’t sure that he liked it really, though he didn’t know why. ‘After all, they were his friends,’ he thought. ‘They came and buried him, and I didn’t even know he was dead.’ Lucas had been overseas at the time. ‘And now I see them,’ he thought, ‘I know what
he
would have been like if he’d lived. My kid brother!’ And it felt to him, meeting these strangers, that he had lost Morgan in another way, which he’d never thought of, long ago.

Candy was looking brave, but she suddenly felt afraid. She remembered a dream she’d had of Morgan after he’d died. He’d come to her angry, accusing, even dangerous. His hands stretched out to her neck. She’d woken in terror. ‘What did
I
do?’ she thought. ‘Did he hate me for some reason? Or was it that he was in love with me!’ After Morgan died she and Adam almost immediately had begun to fly apart. ‘Was it Morgan who kept us together?’ she now thought. ‘Was it
him
that I really loved?’ She didn’t know the answer. ‘Did I ruin my life?’ she thought. She went on bravely.

Tolerton was hobbling along on a stick, in his gown. His foot was now rather painful. It didn’t seem a good idea to be walking on a naked swollen foot over the rough paddock. ‘I should have worn a flip-flop,’ he was thinking. ‘I shouldn’t really be here at all. And not only did I have to come, I had to endure Candy’s driving. She should never be allowed behind the wheel of a car, that woman. Never. Plus – I should have stood up to Rod Orr that night and let Morgan stay on the sofa. What was the problem? Something about a curtain. A
curtain
! But still – look at this place! It’s completely unchanged!’

Chadwick wanted to swing round and talk to Race but something inhibited him. ‘I’ve never been here before,’ he was thinking. ‘I wasn’t even at the funeral. We weren’t friends. I didn’t want to be.’

A secret stirred in him then. He had not wanted to befriend Morgan out of snobbery, even racism. He, Chadwick, black, an outsider, though from exciting California, had felt his star might be dimmed by the other outsider, a Maori boy from the back of beyond. It then struck him that he had been sorry about that for the rest of his life. He had never rid himself of the memory of Morgan with his sign, an arch in red and blue, saying: ALL YOU NEEDIS—

‘Hardly a coherent programme for a foreign policy,’ he thought, ‘and yet it mattered at the time. That was an important moment. The people who hated it’ – he thought of the students of Strauss –
triply abstracted, mild goggles covering his fiery judgements
– ‘got into power and have brought nothing but disaster. I set myself against them all my life. That’s what made me who I am. But Morgan and I were never friends.’