The Larnachs (7 page)

Dougie enjoys it most when the command at The Camp is his alone. He is no scholar, but from what he has told me the Adams
School at St Leonard’s on Sea did nothing to awaken his mind and he was miserable there. He resents his father at times because of it, although William made the decision to have the children educated in England and on the continent from the best of motives. Somehow, however, it seems typical of William’s generosity: a failure because he did not consider the recipient’s wishes when bestowing it.

Dougie and I can talk about such matters and still not feel disloyal. I never criticise William, or enter personal dispute, within earshot of the household staff, or in the society of our friends. Dougie and I have come to trust one another and are free with confidences as close family should be. Both of us are concerned for William and the increasing pressures on him. He is not the man I remember in our Wellington home, laughing and reminiscing with Father, or ribbing my brothers about their dalliances. He is not the man I married. Kate’s death, the snide ingratitude of Donald, Colleen and Alice, and the difficulties he is experiencing in business, have altered and reduced him. Now entering his sixties, he expects his life to have a certain ease of accomplishment after his earlier spectacular successes, but finds himself beset by more difficulties than ever, and with his vigour impaired.

‘The times have moved against us,’ he said yesterday, as he prepared to go into Dunedin on business, ‘and I must fight to hold what I have, but sans peur, aye, without fear.’ Such is the Larnach motto he has chosen.

‘Surely things will swing back your way again,’ I told him. ‘Property doesn’t grow smaller, as Father used to say.’

‘Yes, but politics, too, has become a bog, and it threatens to
swallow all of us in scandal.’

‘Give it up then, if you neither need nor like it. It’s knocking the stuffing out of you, and all for other people,’ I said.

‘I feel I must stand by my old friends,’ he replied.

Seddon and Ward should have left him alone and not forced him back to the House to support them. The energy he will loyally expend there should be directed towards his own affairs, and there is no financial gain in parliamentary service. Even his natural
optimism
and goodwill are wearing thin. His outbursts of impatience have become more frequent, and he alternates between a demand for company he can dominate and an inclination for solitude. As his finances and patronage have diminished, so have the sycophantic followers, and he is increasingly disillusioned about the motives of almost everyone he meets.

Towards me he remains kind enough, but does not put himself out to please as once he did. In a strange way he seems to be ageing more rapidly, as if, having reached sixty, there is a canter downhill. I had hoped that after our marriage the difference in years would become progressively less significant as we became more familiar, but the opposite has occurred. He continues to put on weight but to lose hair, and there is a staidness to his movement. When he is awake his breathing is heavy; when he is asleep his snoring is thunderous.

He still likes to watch me dressing, but there is little exhilaration in our lovemaking, and often his embraces come to nothing. William is a clean man, but his body emanates a slight mustiness that I must steel myself to ignore, and hair grows upon his back as
well as his chest. That we have separate rooms here is something for which I am now thankful. All of this is a most private reflection: I say nothing of it to any other, and barely to myself. But it is so. Even to my sisters I would not talk so directly of such things. I have never felt with my husband that unnerving lurch of excitement I experienced with Josiah, that rush of blood, that constriction of the heart and giddy temptation to cast all reserve aside. Men are free to go in search of pleasure and satisfaction; women, who have so much more to lose and fear, yet equal power to feel, must wait for an approach truly based in love.

I have not seen Josiah since the day of my wedding, but being a friend of Alfred’s he will be about in the society we frequent in Wellington. I expect to confront him with equanimity, yet we will both be aware of those times when he was very pressing in his attentions. Sometimes I recall us together, alone, and the freedom he took with his hands and lips, despite being married, and my refusal. I think he would be a callous man, although very handsome. I slapped his face in the cloak room of a party for the Speaker of the House and said I would appeal to Alfred if he kissed me again. I am not a parlour maid to be so used. Yet I remember the disconcerting pressure of his lower body against mine, and the assurance with which he described a private entrance to a room in his legal chambers.

So we will go to the capital and spend a good deal of time there during sessions. Alfred is presently mayor of Wellington, which he sees as more advantageous for his legal firm than parliamentary duties. William and I will take our choice of society, and I will be
close to many friends of my single years. I think I understand the nature of politics better than most women, and indeed most men, because of my family, my education, and my inclination.

William says little to me about business, but much of the time is unhappily preoccupied with his finances. Basil Sievwright comes often, other men with legal and financial advice at times. The Colonial Bank and its connection with the staggering Bank of New Zealand have become a quagmire from which William struggles to extricate himself. For me, even as explained by Dougie, it is a boring mass of manipulated figures, of claim and counter-claim, but I see clearly enough that William fears it could bring all down.

When we returned from Lawrence and our adventures, it was so good to see Dougie, and he was happy to have me back at The Camp. As I got down from the buggy he came quickly from the lion steps. ‘Back at last,’ he said, and kissed me impulsively on the mouth. He has never done so before, but it seemed very natural and open, a salutation between close friends and close family. William was present, and if he noticed he saw nothing untoward in it, and neither did I.

He was in good spirits that evening. We had no guests to entertain, and Gladys was at boarding school, so the three of us sat together until late, Dougie giving Dunedin and household news, William and I cropping the best of the Tuapeka experiences. William was pleased to have bested a big man like Scobie Mackenzie, and even the carriage disaster, and the poor food throughout most of the trip, were made a joke.

Harriet Connelly, one of the laundry maids, has provided our household scandal by falling pregnant. Dougie says that even Miss Falloon cannot persuade her to name the father. I can see that my welcome-home task will be to confront her and her family. She is a quiet, obstinate thing, not one I would have picked to give in to the farm men, who like to flatter the girls. I imagine she is little to blame, but unless she names the man and we can have them married promptly, we shall return her to family. I believe firmly that men must accept their responsibility: too often they escape it and the women involved do not insist sufficiently. My guess is that poor Harriet has fallen prey to a married man, who has offered her money to say nothing. It is a sad situation, but a common enough one.

Because William and I have been married only three years, and he is so much older, I must sometimes expect from him
conversation
about places and people with which I have no connection, and I try to accept that without impatience. I wish, however, that he would stop occasionally to think how little interest there often is for me in such recollections. In Lawrence we stood before the church and post office in the cold, because they had been designed by Robert Lawson, another Scot, the architect of The Camp and also of the mournful miniature of First Church that William commissioned as Eliza’s tomb in the Northern Cemetery. The second evening of our return ended with William talking at length about his friendship with Lawson and wife Jessie, whom I have never met and who shifted to Melbourne before our wedding. Dougie sensed my boredom, but was unable to move William on
to subjects more interesting to me, so I excused myself and went to my music.

I have become even more appreciative of the compositions of Rossini, especially since the series of concerts last year arranged by musician Charles Baeyertz. He is an amusing and outspoken performer and critic who has gingered up the local artistic community. I intend to invite him here before we leave for Wellington. At one of the concerts we heard him give a humorous recitation called ‘A Masher’s Story’. William was much taken, but the clog dancing by others and the demonstration of the new phonograph machine were less entertaining. When I talk with Mr Baeyertz I will point out that low vaudeville is well enough catered for here and he should ensure he gives us more Rossini, and Beethoven.

Also I shall challenge him to explain why there are no great women composers, while in literature, singing and art they
increasingly
assert themselves. I am sure it is not any absence of talent, but the blinkered conviction of male critics, backers and conductors that they are not worthy. I would like to make a serious attempt myself, but am reluctantly realistic enough to realise that I have neither the supreme ability, nor the dedication to the point of sacrifice, necessary to succeed. A paradox, perhaps, that I have had too pleasant a life to focus entirely on the one thing most important to me.

I was able to follow my inclination and determine all the pieces to be played at the ball held here at The Camp early in the year, and to invite individually the five players for an ensemble to accompany the dancing. It was quite the grandest social affair William and I have attempted since our marriage, and one that both of us enjoyed
planning and on the night. Although quite imposing and spacious, the ballroom is seldom used for its avowed purpose. The exposed beam ceiling captures sound. I had the three great fireplaces dressed with holly and flowers. The double entrance door from the house has oak leaf and acorn carvings that I love to brush with my hand. They are in such wonderful relief that I almost feel I could pluck them in passing.

More than a hundred and sixty people in a considerable variety of formal dress. All my friends, and a few of my enemies if their families were sufficiently significant. Even Colleen and Alice put aside petulance for the night, and visited to dance with us. Every bedroom in the house was in use, with other rooms pressed into service besides. Often the weather frustrates, or limits, our plans, but this night was almost balmy. William claimed to have achieved it by drinking an alcohol-free toast to his Scots forebears the night before, Dougie by commissioning a Maori chant to the weather gods.

William spoke well, and briefly as I had advised him, and what interjections were made arose from good humour, wine and the high spirits of the occasion. Ethel Morley later told me she knew of two proposals of marriage made after the dancing, one of which was accepted on the spot — perhaps before it could be retracted. I stood up with a number of men apart from William and Dougie, and was paid the usual compliments. Dr Langley, who said my dancing made him acutely aware of his own deficiencies on the floor, also commented that he had never seen the ballroom so resplendent. Mr Guthrie said he knew of no other woman so light on her feet.

There was a moment of farce when Mrs Paisley tripped in a turn and fell on her husband, so injuring his leg that he had to be carried from the dance floor, attended in the house by Dr Langley and then taken home early. Very cross that he had proved such a weakling and denied her the pleasure of a full night at the ball, his wife accompanied him with distinct reluctance. Dr Langley murmured to me with a smile that he feared Paisley might suffer further harm at home.

During a waltz, Dougie told me I should go outside and see how the ball had drawn the farm workers and tenants to catch a glimpse of it all. I did so, keeping some distance in the dark from the building. In the glow from the tall windows of the ballroom, children and adults were clustered to peer in, some whispering excitedly about the goings on inside, others silent, but intent on a life so different from their own. There were carriage men too, watching their employers after a supper at the kitchen door.

Standing in the warm, still night, mistress of it all, but for the moment, like them, an observer on the outside, I had a powerful sense of the privileged existence that was mine. How little I considered that, how much I accepted it as my right, how readily I found limitation and inconvenience in it. How it must seem to ordinary folk: the bedecked private Larnach ballroom, the spilling light and music, the laughter and dancing of important, well-dressed people who all seemed to know each other. How perceptive of Dougie to have noticed these gawpers, and to understand how they would affect me. When I was caught up with the whirl of the ballroom, that seemed everything the world held,
and then I was standing in the darkness, on the soft grass, with natural scents of trees and blossom rather than women’s perfume, and the realisation that, even in that one place, experiences were quite different. How multifarious life is, and yet we assume our own activities and feelings to be the sum of it.

When I came back into the ballroom, Dougie soon sought me out. ‘Did you see them?’ he asked. ‘Another population on the outside looking in, isn’t it? I wonder what they think of us.’

‘They want to change places, I suppose.’

‘The children,’ he said, ‘they’ll go home and dream of it, I imagine.’

‘You and your dreams, Dougie. The real world has enough interest for most of us.’

‘But not everybody has our world.’

The ball was a considerable success, and quite repaid my many days of preparation and the money spent by William. For a time he was quite buoyed up by it all and read aloud the numerous cards sent by those who enjoyed our hospitality. Old Mrs Hallan, who still carries smelling salts, wrote that it reminded her of the great private balls in the Edinburgh of her girlhood. Dougie’s friend, Robert, told me soon after that he had never before seen so many animated and good-looking women together, and said there should be a Larnach ball every year. To have the event go off so well reassures William of his position socially, even though his business dealings are faltering. I wonder how many of our guests, who so readily accepted the invitation for the night, would support him if he needed it.