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Authors: Owen Marshall

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Meeting Ellen almost immediately afterwards was a good deal less easy. She’d been shopping and stopped on the corner by the Octagon tearooms when she saw me, swinging her bag slightly back and forth. Both of us were somewhat embarrassed, as
happens
when people who once were intimate, and have retreated from that closeness, meet again. We talked a little of our common acquaintances, and of the fire that had destroyed a lodging house close to her home, and in which an old miner died. I know the man she’s to marry, but neither of us said anything of him, or that. As we talked it occurred to me that, but for Conny, Ellen and I might have already married. There was nothing I would change, but it made me sad somehow, chatting idly with her, and remembering when we’d been important to each other. Maybe her thoughts were similar, for her voice became more hesitant and she said she must go and meet her mother. ‘How are your father and mother?’
I asked, and she replied with platitudes. ‘Remember there’s plenty of cut firewood at The Camp, and they’re welcome to come for a load as they used to.’

‘We have ample at the moment, thanks very much,’ she said, and put her hand to her hat in a small nervous gesture I knew well.

So we stood apart and talked of firewood and acquaintances, when not so long ago I had slapped her thighs, held her breasts to my mouth, had her quick breathing at my face and her wrists held tightly in my hands. Her hair is long, dark and clean, always something I admired. I’ve disappointed her, hurt her by not proposing marriage, and although she has recovered from that, I wish I’d extricated myself in some way less abrupt and painful for her. What’s done is done, however, and I believe for the best.

Conny’s the woman I live for. God, how much I wish she was single like Ellen, and we could marry and be easy in the world.

Father’s often on at me to show more resolution, and now I’ve shown sufficient to be sleeping with his wife, but nothing that Conny and I’ve done is meant to hurt him. In all honesty I don’t think Father would find things much altered if the marriage ended, provided scandal was avoided. Money and position are his life, and the accumulation of public dignity brought by success in those pursuits. Whatever he achieves merely brings new ambitions into view. The CMG, being minister of mines, estates, grand friends, merely make him hungrier — especially for the knighthood. Conny says he’d wear the insignia on his pyjamas.

William Hodgkins stayed the night with us yesterday. He’s the driving force behind most of Dunedin’s artistic endeavours:
he founded the art gallery and promotes music and education. Conny’s fond of him and in her he finds a great supporter. He was bankrupted a few years ago, despite his legal practice, and that gives Father a slight feeling of superiority, as he’s managed at least to avoid that. Rather than William H. lacking industry, or talent, it was his generous community service, I think, that led to temporary ruin. Conny said to me afterwards that he didn’t look a well man, but he wasn’t called upon at table to take much of a lead in conversation. Father held forth once more about his visit to Wick, half a life away.

‘You can’t begin as a family much further north than Wick,’ he said, ‘and you can’t end much further south than Dunedin.’ Conny caught my eye. How often we’ve heard that opening, and indeed what was to follow. While in England Father had taken the long and inconvenient journey north to visit the town, and the thatched stone cottage where his father was born on the farm of Achingall in the Strath of Watten. ‘The valley was wide and rich, and Larnachs still plentiful,’ Father said. He walked for miles in the countryside and searched the scattered graveyards for family inscriptions. In a pub in Wick he met a Larnach who was a stonemason and poet, and who told him that Larnachs were descendants of the Vikings, not the Irish who moved into most of the rest of Scotland hundreds of years ago. This notion was attractive to Father.

Despite the appalling weather, he had watched the herring boats leave and sat on the river wall looking downstream to the old stone-arch bridge and the spire beyond it. Without the need for our guest’s polite encouragement, he elaborated on the pride his
stay-at-home Wick relatives had showed in his achievements, once he’d enlightened them. He hinted, as always, that the Larnachs in the distant past had been of considerable consequence, lairds there as he sees himself here.

Father is happy when he talks of such things. Although Donny, my sisters and I grew up with his stories of the Scots nation and our family affiliation, none of us found inspiration in them, or much connection. Uncle Donald’s life in Sussex was a good deal more to my taste. He has been dead less than a year, and little mourned by Father, but I remember him with gratitude. A quiet-living man, despite his wealth and possessions, he was never demonstrative, but he and Aunt Jane always made us feel welcome. The sense of clan was inbred.

They made one visit to the colony, not long after Mother’s death, and shortly before my return. Uncle Donald was impressed with The Camp, but too shrewd to invest substantially in the agricultural company that Father was promoting strongly. ‘I don’t like to be so far from my money,’ he said, and Aunt Jane termed much of what she saw in Otago, the wilderness. There’s tremendous opportunity when a new country is opening up, but great uncertainty as well. Fortunes rise and fall abruptly, or veer off in unexpected directions.

Cousin James will take over Brambletye in an accepted and secure way that should be my path here at The Camp. It was Father’s promise to me, but everything has grown rickety, and Donny and the girls are full of jealousy despite all they’ve been given, and their desertion of the place. If Conny and I could be together here, life would be as complete as one could expect in an
imperfect world, but that won’t happen, and she remains adamant in her refusal to leave with me and live elsewhere.

Father has built here with such permanence and quality, such optimistic commitment. He dreams of Larnachs in residence at The Camp generations hence, when the colony has regained its equilibrium, when the houses and cleared farms stretch uninterrupted from peninsula to city, when the knighthood he has fought so hard for is worn easily by a descendant. He’s an odd mixture, my father. I think if he knew that vision was secure he would willingly put up with all that’s happening to him now.

I have Conny, but I’m trapped as far as resources go to get us away together, even if she could be persuaded. The Camp is my livelihood, yet the very thing we must leave if we’re to have a natural life together. I’ve no other source of money, no substantial savings, no immediately profitable skills. Even my ability to obtain credit relies on the name of William Larnach, which means little other than here in the colony. I’ve wracked my brains to find ways of raising the capital that would persuade Conny we could leave and establish ourselves elsewhere. Robert’s business connections in Argentina have again said I would have no difficulty in obtaining a position as manager of an extensive farming property there, but we know nothing of the location, or the conditions — nothing about the society in which we would be placed.

In other circumstances I’m sure James would find something for me to do in connection with horses, but it would be too much for even his liberal sentiments if I came to Brambletye with my father’s wife. How much better and more naturally everything would have
turned out if the old man had resigned himself to widowhood, and I’d met and married Conny myself.

I can’t be with Conny at The Camp as often as I’d like, and if I can’t be with her then I’m happier outside the house, and away from the damned telephone office. I like to be about the farm. I ride Tarquin on the roads and tracks of the peninsula, usually alone, since I can’t share with my friends what’s most important to me now. Life is at once fuller, yet narrowed down to Conny and me.

Yesterday I took the gun out for pigeons, walking from The Camp to the bush ridges. The New Zealand bird is heavier and easier to shoot than the English one: it’s slower in flight, and even when disturbed doesn’t go far before settling again. I imagine the Maoris made the most of them. I’ve no trained dog, and lost some birds in the undergrowth, but it was easy enough to get as full a bag as I wished to carry home.

The bush is cool and dark, even in summer, and I enjoyed the secrecy of it. Every part of England has been stood on, I imagine, but here, even at walking distance from roads and the partly cleared farms, you feel you may be the first man on a particular spot: the first to lean in rest on a tree trunk, to piss on a fern, or to fire a gun into the branches. Why that should increase the pleasure I experience I’m not sure, but it does. The bush here is very different to the open forest of England: the foliage uniformly darker, the undercover close and thick, with brown, furred fronds like monkey tails, and beneath your feet the damp give of rotting vegetation.

The shooting startled all the birds, not just the quarry, but
when I had enough pigeons, I turned back down towards the sea and the smaller birds came back on song. I walked the roughly cleared edge down to Barrett’s mill so that I would be in the afternoon sun. In time, I suppose, most of the bush of the peninsula will be felled and good farms will cover it. They were working at the mill, four men loading drays, and they waved and called out when I held up the leather game bag. Father complains sometimes at the damage the drays do to the roads, and of the smoke from the burn-offs that follow logging, but farmland is being won from the bush for better use.

I didn’t mention to Father that I’d been shooting. Perhaps he’ll make some comment when the birds appear upon the table. I left the bag at the kitchens and went directly to the telephone office to relieve Walter. He’s an odd boy, recommended by Professor Black because of his quick wits and lack of a father. He has hopes of going to university and has his books with him at the office so he can study them between calls. Conny says I should take more interest in him, but I’m too distracted by my own concerns.

Conny and I make our fun and seek our satisfaction when we can, and it’s more to me than anything else in the world. How shrewd she is, how attuned to the undercurrents around us. She said we must have an argument apparent to the staff, as a counter to any gossip and spying that might be going on among them. It would concern my failure to collect articles from dress shops in Dunedin, she decided, and she enjoyed setting up the little play beforehand. So we seemed by chance to pause unseen outside the room where Jane and a maid were changing linen, and have a
sharp exchange while trying not to smile. Later in the day we met, touched and laughed together. How close we are against the rest of the world. And how accustomed now to deception.

Conny has far more imagination than I have: a marvellous sensitivity, which may be the same thing, but strangely she doesn’t dream much, while I, ever since childhood, have had the best and worst of dreams. At St Leonard’s they were a form of escape from the misery I often endured there, even the nightmares providing at least a variety in unhappiness. The happy dreams were a great solace, though I spoke of them to no one, not even Jeremy. Often they took me to Brambletye, especially the brick and slate stables and the long Park meadow, or the old nursery room that James and his brothers had made a den in which to smoke and drink; Aunt Jane knew to keep away. What a stink it had — of pipe tobacco, port, horsehair furniture and our indolent bodies.

Some of the happy dreams were of us all at The Camp before Mother died, some of the expedition to England across America. Only nights ago I dreamt of Kate, first and best of my sisters. We were in a train, travelling across the continent from San Francisco, and all was as I experienced it as a fourteen-year-old — the jogging motion and clatter over the tracks, the landscape streaming past, which became, as days went by, as accustomed as a life settled in one place. How plush those carriages were compared with trains here, and how well appointed and serviced: velvet backings, ornate mirrors, polished wood and brass cuspidors, yet all with the finest grit on every surface that’s the mark of coal and steam.

Kate, only a year older than me, was always a close companion,
and in my dream we sat together and she told me she wanted to be a nurse. I saw again her homely face with its high brow, and her hair tightly pulled back. She said that no doubt she’d marry a very poor man and have to depend on me to support their numerous children. The idea set her laughing, and that’s the best part of the dream. Kate’s long, open-mouthed face tipped back in laughter, and behind her a country strange to us in apparent motion. Only in the no-man’s-land between dream and memory can I meet dear Kate now, and see her still laughing.

I have such dreams still, but more special now are the visions I have of happiness for Conny and me. I dream of us meeting and she is unmarried; I dream of us having begun a new life in a foreign, but welcoming, place; I dream even of Father having died, and so freed us to be together.

I
have never been happier than I am now, and don’t expect to be so in the future. William, Dougie and I are in Queensland in consequence of William being appointed by Seddon as the colony’s commissioner to the Brisbane Exhibition. My happiness has nothing to do with the exhibition, or the people. Here Dougie and I are released from the constant scrutiny we bear in New Zealand, the ever-present need to maintain the appearance of a conventional relationship between stepmother and stepson. In this place being a Larnach is of little concern to anybody, and we have a freedom that is heady indeed. So liberating, in fact, that I remind Dougie we must not relax entirely and be discovered.

We have three months here. William is less pleased: he sees the position as a sop and remains put out that, despite his letters to Seddon before he went to London for the Queen’s diamond jubilee,
no knighthood has eventuated. William and Richard Seddon are in many ways alike. They have known each other a long time, and there is competition as well as companionship in their friendship. They are both what the papers call ‘big men’ in the colony, but it is Seddon who holds the ascendancy now, and William chafes at that, while still valuing the bond. Both have the common touch, both are ambitious and with a natural instinct to dominate, both are talented and had great energy in their prime. And it must be admitted they share a certain coarseness and blustering conviction that they know best what should be done in the lives of others as well as their own.

The premier has been a frequent visitor to 45 Molesworth Street, often part of the group singing around our piano. He unbends among society he trusts, and I have seen tears in his eyes when singing popular songs of pathos, and also when telling his sentimental tales of the ordinary people he had much to do with as a younger man. As well he loves to laugh, and like William, and as my father used to, takes delight in practical jokes. He knows all the words to ‘Daisy Bell’ and ‘After the Ball’ and sings them with greater gusto than tunefulness. He likes to drink too, and thinks rather less of William for having put that aside. I hear rumour of his other manly interests, but gossip surrounds every person of note and is often exaggerated, or unfounded. In my company he is no more than tolerably suggestive. Had he had the opportunity for a university education, I’m sure he would have taken great advantage of it, for he has a quick and original mind.

Once, when we were travelling by carriage to an evening civic
function with my brother, a group of larrikins in Lambton Quay shouted at Seddon, calling him a fat bastard. One man with a great moustache, but no hair on his head, even jumped onto the carriage and held the door for a time, then spat a great gob inside that barely missed my dress. As he fell back, laughing, a few stained and broken teeth showed in his open mouth. No doubt he was drunk. I expected Seddon to be loud and angry, but he apologised to me. ‘Unhappy people endeavour to make others unhappy too,’ he said. ‘What they really hate is their predicament.’

‘So what must be done for them?’

‘Decent jobs, Conny,’ he said. ‘Work gives self-respect.’

Like William, he has, beneath his personal ambition and vanity, a sincere wish to improve the lot of the colony’s most ordinary people. The incident reminded me also that he has a natural and shrewd perception concerning human nature. I did notice, however, that he had balled his hand and seemed tempted to strike out at the spitter. Had I not been with him, his response might have been different, for it is said that during his time on the Coast he often settled disputes, even debts, with his fists.

William complains about the heat here, the lack of clean water, and having to spend his own money on the trip. He is not impressed with the city and its convict origins. The exhibition itself interests him in parts. He was delighted to see that the stand of our own Mosgiel Woollen Company was awarded two gold medals, and the bush house fernery took his fancy. He returned to it several times and Dougie and I accompanied him on one occasion, escorted by William Soutter, who is responsible for the display. More than
three thousand staghorn, bird’s-nest and elkhorn ferns, and untold numbers of palms, orchids and potted plants. It was quite lovely, and our favourite of all the exhibits, but as we stood in the shade house among the greenery and listened to the curator’s recital of plants, it was Dougie’s discreet and passing hand pressure on my back I was most aware of, and which gave the greatest pleasure.

He accompanied me also to the hall display of needlework samplers and silk embroidered memorials. Such painstaking and time-consuming work, that I wonder if it is the best use of women’s days, but there were some quite beautiful pieces, especially a series on classical themes from the French city of Lille. The colours are breathtaking, and the pride the custodian madame took in their charge made them even more impressive. I imagine that such work would be done by two very different sorts of women — those privileged and with infinite leisure time, and those skilled drudges paid such a pittance that the endless hours could be recouped in the sale. Such disparate origin, yet the beauty of each indistinguishable at the end.

Many of the exhibits and activities, though, are crass and commercial, and loud with self-advertisement. I quickly tired of sitting in the heat to see troupes of animals circling to be judged, or standing to have the purpose and workings of some clacking machine explained in detail. There are the exceptions, but most of what I have seen is clearly of interest mainly to men. The importance and inclinations of women are neglected.

But here Dougie and I have been able to live more the wished-for life. William has his official duties, so Dougie and I
spend much time together. At The Camp we have always to consider the servants and guests, in Dunedin and Wellington we meet acquaintances everywhere, and are recognised by many people unknown to us. Here in the hotel, and in the city and the countryside, we experience comparative privacy. We have even remained together on several nights, when William has been away investigating the prospects of Queensland mining companies. Business opportunities are always uppermost in his mind. Gold has not been as plentiful here as in Victoria, but he has hopes for involvement in that as well as other ventures.

Three weeks after our arrival he went to Laidley with a Mr Riddell, who is a leading Brisbane businessman. He was away two nights, and Dougie and I said we preferred to go north of the city to see the banana groves and pineapple plants. We stayed close in a bungalow at Kirri, set in a eucalypt clearing, with an Aboriginal couple as servants. Neither of them was disposed to work, and every task required of them had to be mentioned individually. They made no assumption that because we had needed breakfast yesterday, we would require it today, and even after having been given simple instructions, they would have a long discussion in their own language before the woman did the work.

They came only during part of the day, however, and nothing could spoil the time Dougie and I had together. The privacy of a bedroom, humdrum for a married couple once the honeymoon is over, is bliss for us. It was a substantiation of what we could only dream about at home. Night and day together, free of constraint, able to laugh and tease and touch, to be a man and woman in love.

On the first afternoon we paid a courtesy call to the Noakes family, who owned the property, and came away as soon as we decently could, strolling together along the farm track and through trees. We walked slowly, for it was exceedingly hot despite the shade: even in my lightest clothes I perspired unpleasantly. Dougie took my hand, and for once I could be at ease with that, gently scratch his palm with a finger. There were brightly coloured parakeets with discordant cries, and heat hung heavy in the air. The clouds seemed to move faster than at home, rolling across the sun suddenly and away again.

Such was my pleasure that I had an almost physical pang of regret that the moment could not be indefinitely prolonged, despite the heat: Dougie and I walking happily and close together in a place quite strange to us, and totally unknown to William. My mind seemed to lift from my body, and from a distance I could see the two of us walking side by side, as another quite separate person would do, and see how well matched we were, how intent upon each other, how obviously in love. And yet behind the joy of that realisation was the shimmer of the knowledge that it must pass, that even devotion and completeness cannot hold back time.

We were caught in a cloudburst not far from the bungalow, yet walked calmly through it without caring. When we got back Dougie sent the Aborigines away and they wandered into the downpour just as unconcernedly as we had arrived. The sun was out again even before they were lost to sight among the loose-barked trees, and a soft haze of steam obscured their legs so that they seemed to be walking on their knees.

In the bedroom the shutters were still open and the sunlight made bright oblongs on the matting. We took off our wet clothes quite freely before one another and stood there in the warmth. Dougie picked up my chemise and put it briefly to his face. ‘Take off the ring too,’ he said. ‘I don’t want anything of my father about you. Not his house, not wearing clothes he bought you, not within miles and miles of him.’

How easily the wedding ring came from my finger; how readily I put William from my mind. There are moments of such fulfilment that their blaze makes past and future immaterial. We stood for a long time together before going to the bed. Under my hands I could feel the structure of Dougie’s body, so much younger than his father’s, and more responsive. Even the bumps where the bones have roughly healed after his terrible accident and the succeeding operations. I know the contours of his body better than I know my own, and he is equally familiar with my form. There is a gratefulness in Dougie’s embrace that I never feel in his father’s, or experienced in Josiah’s unsought advances. What relief and release to be able to relax completely: to lie on the bed with Dougie without a part of myself alert for interruption by the servants, or William’s unexpected return, even the anxiety that Dougie might leave something in my room that would be noticed. For once there was no hurry to make love and part, no furtiveness. Anticipation could build beneath our quiet talk, and the gentle, companionable aspects of real love could be expressed, as sometimes we had enjoyed them on our buggy rides about the peninsula, or into Dunedin. The days at Kirri will live with me
always. Benjamin Disraeli said the traveller sees more than can be remembered, and remembers more than can be seen. Such is my experience here.

‘This is the way it should be,’ Dougie said. ‘How it should be all the time for us.’ He bent my leg up at the knee and ran his hand back and forth on the flesh behind the bone. ‘We’ve got to be together somehow. It’s the only right thing for all of us. My God it is. Life’s unbearable otherwise.’ I could see he was close to tears, which is unusual in him. Although he is a man of feeling, his school and family life have accustomed him to affect a bluff, conventional manner as protection.

‘Oh, let’s just enjoy this while we can,’ I said. ‘Make the most of what we have, and don’t ask for more. ‘

‘But we must have it all — be brave enough to declare what’s most important for us. Robert told of me of a saying from his home in Yorkshire: take what you want, and pay for it. He lives by it, and so should we.’

Of course it was as it should be, but Dougie refuses to see that so much in life is not as it should be, and that it cannot be, because of the maze of decisions and happenings from the past that restrict our choices now. There is no socially acceptable way I can leave William and be with Dougie. And although I love him, I know too that there is a feckless quality to his nature, as with Robert’s, that will prevent him from succeeding in the world. I am sufficiently his senior, in judgement rather than years, to understand that.

But there in the bungalow I was not going to mar our time together by arguing with him again. It was opportunity to smile,
to talk, to be as loud or gentle as we wished in our lovemaking: a rare chance to be as lovers should — focused just on ourselves, with no care or responsibility for any other. Alone and together in the self-regarding heart of shared and complete love. How natural to lie with my breasts free, not exhausted, not tired even, but wonderfully spent. How absolute to talk to a man as honestly and directly as to oneself, to ask for satisfactions never admitted, or expressed, to anyone else. Since Dougie came to me, I know how love and marriage should be, and I rejoice that I have had that experience, whatever cost is demanded.

I have seldom seen Dougie’s face when he is asleep, for almost always he must slip back to his own room when we have made love. So even to have him inert beside me was both a novelty and a delight. The face reveals its true contours in sleep, adopting no pose for public scrutiny, attempting no message to accompany words. William’s face is heavy and somehow fallen back when he sleeps, Dougie’s is youthful and trusting: fine, pale lines fan from his eyes as he lies relaxed, and there is a small, raised scar high on his cheek. He didn’t wake when I kissed him and brushed back hair from his forehead. He didn’t wake when I repeated his name for my own pleasure, and took his hand in mine. I do love my Dougie.

The time in the bungalow at Kirri, and the few, precious hotel nights in William’s absence, so much valued by Dougie, are not the only advantages to our visit. Anywhere he and I can be relaxed together is given a sort of halo by that alone. To share the inner life, to talk in an open and trusting way is equal in importance with physical satisfaction. How happy we are here.

Strange in a way, for otherwise I would not wish to spend much time in Brisbane. It is a thrusting, practical place that still bears much evidence of its origins, and the heat is enervating. The convicts have long gone, but there seems to be a considerable number of German settlers. Material gain is the preoccupation, and there is little evidence of a regard for anything cultural. William has heard terrible stories of the treatment of the Aborigines here. The first free settlers did not recognise land ownership by the local Turrbul people. They were shot, driven away, or died from new diseases. Our servants at Kirri were most unsatisfactory, but people nevertheless, and the indifference to them is callous.

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