The Larnachs (16 page)

‘Maybe it’s all just envy and speculation,’ I said. ‘Assumptions made because she has painted and exhibited the female nude figure. People are so easily shocked at any move to give women artists a greater share of the freedoms permitted their male counterparts.’

‘A woman is allowed less latitude in her actions, Conny. You know that. It must be recognised even as we fight against it.’ It was not so much what Bessie said, but that she put her hand on my wrist and gave it a brief squeeze. I passed off the moment with some general comment about unfairness, but assumed some personal criticism and warning all the same.

I hope I have guessed wrongly in all of this: when you have something to hide it is easy to imagine others have secrets also. Bessie here, and Annie in Wellington, have been the closest to me, but friendship and kinship are never the equal of love. Those who cannot understand the imperative of love have surely never truly experienced it.

C
onny’s back at The Camp, thank God. How I miss her when she’s not here. The place sinks back into monotony and trivial malaise. My life now is marked out not by birthdays, or business appointments, not seasons, or nights and days, but by the times I have Conny in my arms, and they are fewer than I wish. Almost fewer than I can tolerate. It’s damnably difficult to get her alone in Wellington when I do manage to have reason to be there, and even when all three of us were guests of the Palmers in Christchurch, opportunities for the greatest of pleasures were few.

On one evening, when Father was with our host in the city, and Conny had gone early to her room, I took the risk of going to her, with the pretence, had I been asked, of enquiring if she had any message she wished included in a letter to Gladys. She was reluctant to let me in, but only because we were within a family home. She
knew my fervour and need. We made love on a multi-coloured rug rather than the bed in case the springs betrayed us, although the rooms on either side were unoccupied. The rug smelled of camphor, and was rough on my elbows and knees. Conny made me go soon after, and I stooped at the door before opening it, listening for anyone moving in the passage. Love often means a strange, almost comic, loss of dignity, but what the hell.

I went out onto the verandah later with a fellow guest who was a judge from Auckland, and we drank good whisky and talked. He was an amusing companion and keen on racing, but it was all
anticlimax
after being in Conny’s room. Each time I lifted my glass to my mouth I could smell her on my hands, and the faint fragrance of camphor as well. No erudition, or goodwill, on the part of the judge could compensate, though we stayed talking for some time, with heavy moths swirling into the dim light from the window and through our pipe smoke. I’d be surprised by how many opium dens there were in Auckland, he told me.

There was only one other chance. Conny and I had taken a gig to the town, enjoyed the opportunity to talk and laugh, and because we were together even the shops of dresses and ornaments were places I was happy to linger in. On the way back I drove behind a derelict brickworks, half covered with undulating, blue-flowered creeper, and halted there in privacy. While the horse grazed in harness, tugging the gig this way and that, Conny and I held each other and kissed. She wouldn’t allow me more, but to put against that disappointment was the joy we always have in just being alone together. I told her I intended to take rooms with a private street
entrance in a business block close to First Church, so that we could meet there and spend time without anybody knowing. ‘It won’t do, I’m afraid,’ she said, shaking her head firmly. ‘Too many sharp eyes to notice and malicious minds to wonder why Mrs Larnach goes there often.’

‘Of course we wouldn’t come or go together,’ I said.

‘It wouldn’t matter. No, it won’t do, and you know it in your heart. Everything must fit with the outward life.’

‘We’ve taken risks in the past, haven’t we?’

‘Too many perhaps. You know how much I want to be with you, but we mustn’t let down our guard for a minute. Everything could tumble so quickly, so utterly. We make the most of what we have, and that’s so much more than most people can even contemplate.’ And she tilted her face up to be kissed, the lips cool in the insistent breeze, and her hand on the back of my head. ‘Tell me again when you began to love me,’ she said, and I did. Such repetition is all pleasure when there are only two of you in the world.

The old man, of course, is back here too, and that I could do without. He goes through the books and claims they are in a muddle. With his own affairs in decline, he expects me to run things here quite free of the forces gripping the whole colony. There’s no reasoning with him. And I’ve never had the training of a clerk, or wanted to be one. The outside work with the stock and the men is what I enjoy, and the direct contact with businesspeople in their offices or at the club. Father doesn’t take into consideration the tie of the wretched telephone office, or accept my right to some independent life. He promised The Camp would be left to me in
recompense for all that’s been spent on Donny, but there’s little talk of that now, and I know from comments Basil Sievwright made that he has considered selling both the peninsula properties and those in Central Otago. However, there are few buyers about, only hard scavengers.

One of the few things here during the year that pleased Father was the outcome of the Magistrate’s Court hearing concerning one of our properties, an old, unoccupied house in Broad Bay. It was destroyed by fire and some local people insinuated that we’d instigated it in order to collect the insurance. A Mrs Walquest who lives nearby thought she recognised me at the scene the night the place went up, and when it proved I was outside Otago, she switched her suspicions to Patrick Sexton. Amazing what a proffered reward of twenty pounds will enable people to remember. I imagine that swaggers, or rabbiters, set fire to the place, but whatever the cause, the verdict was that no one could be held responsible and the insurance will stand. The newspapers made a big thing of it all, naturally, and Conny was quick to point out to me another example of the underlying envy and resentment some have towards our family.

Father finds it difficult to accept his children are now adult, with views and ambitions of their own. He still wants to make decisions for us, and resents it when we resist them. The role of paterfamilias is so much a part of his dignity that it mustn’t be questioned. The past is the only place now in which Father and I feel comfortable — the time when Mother was with us and he going from strength to strength. In my memory he’s a different man. Donny, who was with
him on his first visits to the site of The Camp, said he clambered up a tree to exult in the view and his possession of the place. After the bush was felled, and the hilltop blasted and levelled, it was our playground for many months while the big house was being built. Donny and I came to know the workmen well, including the French and Italian artists who painstakingly created the moulded ornamental ceilings, the carvers and stonemasons who created the Oamaru limestone sculptures and intricate wooden wonders Father’s so proud of.

It’s François I remember most clearly. He was at The Camp for several years, and taught Donny, Kate and me to sing French songs. Originally from the south of France, he loved to spend time riding because he had grown up familiar with the horses of the Camargue. In our presence he was cheerful, and got on well with Father and the others, but there must have been times of incongruity for him: the man from Arles spending his days on internal scaffolding like Michelangelo, and cantering about the rough country of this peninsula so far from France. As a child I gave no thought to the sort of dislocation such a life brings, but I was to feel something of it myself in England, and on my return here.

Where’s François now, I wonder, and how much of a dream does his time on the other side of the world seem to him? He was fascinated by the generator Father installed that provided gas from the long drops for lights in The Camp. He could sit absolutely still and silent for a long time, which in the whirlwind of boyhood, seemed very strange to me. Vegetables were important to him: he would often go to the kitchens and cook them to his own taste. He
would sometimes get drunk in Dunedin, but the police knew him well and would hold him in the cells until someone came to fetch him. He carved wooden birds for us children, and wore a belt so broad that Donny said it had belonged to pirates. François is long gone, but his ceilings at The Camp exist as a reminder to those of us who knew him, and other examples of artistry evoke different craftsmen who were part of our lives then.

When the last stone blocks were being placed on the turret, Father called all the family to see. There was a wet mist so Mother and the girls went inside again almost at once, but Donny and I stayed to watch Father put two sovereigns under the last block laid of the castellated wall and say grandly that they’d be there as long as the stones stood. After we’d all gone down and the mist had become steady rain, Donny and I crept back. From the top of the steep stone steps spiralling to the tower we saw that Drew, the youngest of the stonemasons, had returned too, to lift the last block and take the sovereigns from the fresh mortar before replacing it. As he stepped dangerously down from the wall, he noticed us, and stopped, cocksure and large. ‘What you two gawping at? You seen nought, understand me?’ He thrust his face close, and I remember how his long, fair hair was plastered over his forehead by the rain. As he demanded, Donny and I said nothing in reply, and nothing to anyone else. We weren’t afraid so much as astonished that anyone employed by Father could treat him with such contempt.

So many people have come to The Camp over the years as guests, friends, tradespeople and servants, some ascending the lion steps and being welcomed by the family, some allowed only at back
entrances, some doing their trivial business at a doorway without entering at all. Each has a story of the house, I suppose, from the premier to a scullery maid sent away for thieving, from touring Viennese violinists to the one-eyed man who used to buy the hides of dead horses.

When I first returned from England, there was a
Gaelic-speaking
hermit whom Father let live in the stables for a time. Each day he would collect the eggs and take them to the kitchen. He talked to himself in his own language, but to nobody else, and one frosty morning he was found dead on his blanket. His only possession of worth was a basket-hilted claymore, which Father took for his library, announcing that it had almost certainly been used against the English at Culloden.

It wasn’t just people that Father gathered from afar for his great enterprise, but materials too: heart kauri from the Far North, fire bricks from Glasgow, Belgian marble tiles, flagstones from Edinburgh, Marseilles cobblestones for the stables, Welsh slate, Arabian rugs, Italian marble baths and Venetian glass. So much of the very finest of European civilisation brought to adorn his great achievement built on a lonely, colonial hill. Everything had to be punted across the harbour from Port Chalmers, then carted by ox-drawn dray up the steep hill. The bullocky would sometimes let Donny and me sit up with him and raise the whip and shout, pretending we were in control. The workmen would laugh and wave as we came around the levelled sweep before The Camp. Like young princes, we accepted it all as our entitlement.

Such recollections often come to me now, perhaps because of
the realisation, at last, of the choice before me. There’s no way I can have The Camp and Conny too. To live with the woman I love, I will have to give up the place most dear to me.

He seldom spoke of it, but Father felt a keen rivalry with the great Otago runholder Robert Campbell. Both were of Scottish descent, ambitious and determined to display their talent and achievement. Campbell’s stone mansion at Otekaieke, in the Waitaki Valley, completed at much the same time as The Camp, has thirty rooms and electric bells that astonished everyone. Father sent a man up to photograph it secretly, rather than go himself. ‘It’s stuck there like a sore thumb,’ he told me, ‘among those bare hills. I’ve chosen better by far, and I’ll outlast him.’

As a boy I took it all for granted. Only later did I see Father’s extravagant confidence for what it was — a challenge to the fates. Too much, too soon, has become the truth for him and many of his friends at the colony’s highest level as fortunes founder. Hubris, old Roper would say, weighing a cane in his hand as a possible remedy for it. Father has found it a chastening experience to adjust to difficult times and to realise that so many people he accepted at face value are fair-weather friends. He blames them, of course, and the universal drying up of capital, rather than admitting he has bitten off more than he can chew.

The difficult times have sapped the goodwill of many we come into contact with, and there are people who take pleasure in seeing their betters aren’t immune from misfortune. Even Conny is subject to gossip and envy because of her forthright views and position. Last Thursday, after a meal at the club and business in
Stuart Street, Robert, Hugo and I went to the Piccadilly Rooms before parting. Behind us, at tables, was a group of reasonably dressed young men, none of whom I recognised, and despite the amount of noise in the room I clearly heard a voice say, ‘Constance Larnach needs to be ploughed.’

I turned and challenged them, but they just laughed, asked me to repeat what it was I claimed to have heard and denied any mention of Conny. I couldn’t be particular, and they enjoyed my hurt and fury. I’ve never been more angry. ‘Not so high and mighty now,’ one said.

‘You need to keep it in your britches, Larnach,’ said another amid the barracking. I forced my way to him and took him by the throat, close, so that I had a whiff of his beery breath, but he kept laughing even as we grappled and others intervened to separate us. ‘The Highlander’s blood is up. I’m quaking in me boots,’ my adversary said while his friends whistled and clapped.

As we left, Hugo told me their sort weren’t worth confronting. It was a most damnable experience, bad enough if meant to ridicule Conny and Father, worse if it shows a general assumption concerning Conny and me. I’ve said nothing to her. I hate the thought of these inferior and ignorant people talking about her at all. She says she’s not concerned about opinion, but reputation is everything with a woman of her consequence, and I know she’s suffered slights recently. Not things said, so much as invitations not extended, and those she’s made declined, or not responded to. I hope she’ll come to see there’s only one way out of our predicament, and that’s to go away — start afresh in a new country
where we’re able to live openly together.

Only days later I met Ellen near the city centre. By odd
coincidence
, a few minutes before I recognised Harriet Connelly on the street. She’d been in service at The Camp, and become pregnant. She had no child with her. Neatly enough dressed, she was walking with another young woman. My conscience was clear, and I would have addressed her, but she averted her head and talked more rapidly to her companion. She’s making a new life, I suppose. Who could blame her for not wanting to be reminded of the way things ended for her at The Camp. I remember once passing the laundry and glimpsing her blowing her nose on a sheet. Harmless, and human enough, I suppose.