La Rochelle's Road

by Moir, Tanya

  They wear strange, flat-fronted dresses, magenta and chartreuse, their overskirts drawn up and ruched behind them like theatre curtains. Hester looks down at the swollen arch of her pale-pink skirt and sees it is out of fashion.

  ‘Look at those two,’ says Frank. ‘Like something out of the fucking circus. And him — he’s got a poker so far up his arse he can use it to keep his hat on. Want a drink?’

  As Frank heads for the tea table, a young man with a handsome face and a high white collar makes his way past them. He nods to Robbie.

  ‘Peterson.’

  ‘Good evening, Mr Richardson,’ says Robbie, ducking his head. Hester looks up at the rough beams of the shed, hung with spider webs and seed dust. Her brother’s deference seems to hang there, jarring, a misplaced note among the timbers.

  ‘May I introduce my sister, Miss Hester Peterson?’

  ‘Miss Peterson.’

  ‘Mr Richardson.’

  He hesitates over her hand, as if she is a small child offering a sweet out of a sticky pocket. Her gloves, she notices, are streaked with dirt; she must have brushed her fingers against the wall. He takes them, briefly, and makes a gallant bow.

  ‘Mr Richardson’s family has taken the old Rylance place,’ Robbie explains. ‘We’ve been over there fencing.’

  Richardson smiles, and Hester thinks of Lucy’s brother, Edward, come down from Oxford for the holidays. He had a certain look, when listening to his little sister and her friend. Then, as now, Hester would wish to think of something clever to say.

  ‘How are you finding the Peninsula, Mr Richardson?’

  ‘Very hospitable.’ His eyes focus somewhere above her head. ‘The soil is excellent. As you must know, of course.’

  Later, as she passes the brightly coloured backs of the Misses Sutherland, Hester hears Richardson laughing.

  ‘No, really,’ the elder Miss Sutherland is saying, ‘doesn’t everyone see that in Mr Dickens’ work?’

  Frank touches her elbow. ‘Hold that for me, will you? I’ve got to see a man about a dog.’ He hands her a mug of tea from which the smell of rum is rising.

  ‘You want to watch that stuff.’ Sarah Delacroix brushes past, red faced from dancing. ‘Don’t want to end up like your dad.’

  Frank reappears, adjusting his belt. ‘Right.’ He downs his drink in one gulp. ‘You want to dance, then?’

  He squeezes her hand as they waltz. Hester studies the weave of his shirt, while his thumb strokes small arcs upon her back.

  Thirteen

  As they cross the saddle, cloud breaks around their boots; over the sea, a heavy moon is rising. There is no need to light their lamps. They are casting shadows back upon the night, Hester’s skirts a black broom, sweeping the road with darkness.

  Robbie looks out across Karupoti Bay. He is sure he can see a light down by the beach, a fire or candle flaming. The open door, he thinks, of a lamplit whare. But ridge and bush play tricks in the silver light, and the distant lamp seems to shift and vanish.

  Frank hums a waltz beneath his breath and Robbie wishes he would be quiet. He has no wish to hear more of that music, its vapid rhythms and blind good cheer. It is muddling the whiteness of his thoughts, like a dog stirring up a streambed. Once again, pink faces, damp with sweat, surround him. Plump white shoulders with sunburned throats and hands. They are pudding-soft under his hands, these girls, held together with ribbon and wire. Beneath their corsets they have no bones.

  Far below, in the wash of the sea, are songs of sharpness, the beauty of knife points, the singular yearning of bones. Wet cotton. Brown legs. The peaks and shadows of taut skin, the black glint of stars and darkness.

  In the silence, Robbie can hear them. He feels light, like dancing.

  Fourteen

  It is roughly written; La Rochelle’s hand is so altered that Hester can barely make it out. But the words are there, thick strokes of black on white, his pen pressed hard against the page, feeling, in that flow of ink, his own existence. The next day, his hand is stronger.

  He has his face to a new horizon, Hester thinks. She remembers a slate-grey dawn over Stewart’s Island, away to the east, as green and soft as Eden. She remembers that widening of heart.

  She has never seen the plains. She imagines the mountains falling away to them, like the hills to the vast, flat sea, and envies him the crossing.

  Hester puts the journal away under her pillow. It does not leave her mind; she is eager for this new journey. She rests her head, and dreams of a shifting silver plain. It washes her towards a foreign coast, a vague smudge on the horizon, a stroke of violet, always over the next swell.

  Fifteen

  The southerly comes up with a growl. It hits Daniel in the chest, lashes his face and, for a moment, blinds him.

  ‘Bitch,’ he tells it. ‘Bitch.’

  He wipes his eyes with a blue-red hand, and pulls his hat down further, setting its dripping brim into the gale. He cannot afford to lose this day. But soon the clay is slippery as ice, and his body slow and stupid with cold. He takes a swing at a kanuka trunk, and loses his footing; the axe lodges in the bank, an inch from his knee.

  ‘Come in, you daft bugger!’ shouts Mary, behind him. ‘You’ll kill yourself out here.’

  It is cold in the parlour, too. In the ten months they have been here, the fire in this room cannot have been lit more than twice. Daniel reaches his ledger down from the shelf. The massed spines of his books confront him, and he shakes his head. It seems incredible to him, their presence here, the distance they have travelled. A dead fly rests, belly up, on The Odyssey. Daniel wonders what he might have got for all these on Shaftesbury Avenue; what other things, of use, he might have carried in their boxes.

  The house shivers in the wind. In the kitchen, rain is hissing on the stove. It is barely three o’clock, but the sky is dark, and Mary has lit the candles. In the half-light, Daniel stares at his figures, the neat columns, ruled in London, for income and expenses. Against long lines of flour and sugar, salt and tea, he can enter little. His wages, and Robbie’s, when they can get them. A third column, blank, untouched, is labelled ‘Debt Repayments’. It is, he sees, the composition of a failure.

  That night, he wakes from a dream of Platform 6 at London Bridge. The 5.15 had been coming in too fast, wheels rumbling, engine screaming. He realises the gale outside has risen.

  He listens to it test the house, probing iron and board for weakness. It blows up through the floorboards, raising the rug. At the windows, the curtains flap. Over the roar of the scrub, he can hear the roof flex, and the timbers groan and shiver. Still the wind increases. It gathers fresh force with each assault; it batters the walls, and hammers its rain against the windows. Between gusts, Daniel dozes, waiting for the final blow to knock the cottage from its piles, and lay it open.

  Sixteen

  The noise of a slow, steady rain fills the attic. If there was a time before it began, Hester cannot recall it.

  Hester stops, and reads this again. Her silver plains shimmer, and disappear. She feels almost angry. It occurs to her to consider what La Rochelle has achieved, and she finds that, if she is honest, she cannot call it much. He has swapped one set of limits for the next, and made hard work of the route between them.

  Hester thinks that to have crossed the Alps, at least, would have been something. An achievement to set him apart from his fellows, to show the world of what he was made.

  But perhaps it hardly matters where he arrived. La Rochelle, she suspects, had already found his own measure, on the banks of a swollen river, before ever they reached the snow. He could not wait to get on and leave it behind. To reach fresh country, where he might make himself again, as something new.

  Hester wonders what kind of a man he is now. She thinks she would like to find out. The face of young Mr Richardson crosses her mind, laughing at the dance, inside that closed circle of elegant, British backs. Even if she stood at La Rochelle’s side right now, it is unlikely he would notice her at all; H
ester can see no reason why he should.

  My life, she writes the next evening, shall not be extraordinary, it seems. It shall not matter much. It shall remain like an unpublished journal, of no interest to any but its author.

  She pauses to study a forget-me-not on the cuff on her nightgown. She can see Letitia’s head bent over the embroidery, long white fingers working the French knots.

  Still, she continues, I may as well live it as not — though it is beneath the notice of others.

  For a moment, there is silence. Then the rain spatters across the roof again and settles back to a constant drum.

  Why I should have thought myself other than ordinary, I do not know. I suppose everyone must do so, in the beginning. Even Mary. She must, at one time, have imagined more for herself than the scant thanks of a second-hand family, ill-used.

  Is it not strange that this idea of difference should beso hard — harder than nights at the theatre, or a fair complexion, harder even than Lucy — to give up? We set such store in the vastness of oceans.

  ‘New Zealand, Land of Promise!’ thinks Hester. The shipping firm’s prize-winning essay is here right now, beneath the lid of her trunk, ordered along with their New Zealand Handbook from Shaw, Savill & Co., for only an extra sixpence, including postage. She lifts her curtain, but outside, the renegade hills have vanished into cloud and darkness.

  We thought the ‘Matoaka’ bore us out of a trap when she cleared the Thames. But we sailed too far, and have come back to ourselves. Poor circumnavigators, who have succeeded in rounding the world, but have failed to find the least escape from it. Where can we go now? Like La Rochelle, I am trapped in a blind valley. No word of me shall leave it; none shall enquire as to my fate.

  There is freedom, of a sort, in this last sentence. Hester watches it, cautiously, for a time. The ink dries. It is still there, a small thing, but unfaded.

  When she wakes the next morning, the rain has stopped. Outside her window the hills appear again, redrawn in sharp light, edged with darkness.

  Seventeen

  Hester decides it is easier to allow Frank’s hand to remain up her skirt than to remove it; the latter course would require an effort of will and body she feels disinclined to make. The exertions of his tongue exhaust her. It, too, should have been refused. This next foray is the price she pays for failing to repel the first; it is a natural progression which cannot be complained of now. And though uncomfortable, it is at least new, and of interest.

  She hopes there is no clay on his hands. The stump digs into her shoulder blade, and she wonders what the time is.

  ‘I think I am happy,’ La Rochelle has written, from his hut down in the blind valley. ‘We are contained here; we find everything we need inside each other. A small universe, perhaps, but perfectly complete.’

  Hester likes these words, the shape of them.

  ‘We better go.’ Frank’s hand retires from its exploration. ‘They’ll be looking for us. Here.’ He helps her to set her skirt straight.

  ‘Are you staying to dinner?’

  ‘Got to get back. Get a corner post sunk before dark. I’ll see you next Sunday.’ He takes her hands, gives them a squeeze. ‘Hessie.’

  Hester flinches, but returns the pressure. ‘See you next Sunday. Frank.’

  The name is an odd lump in her mouth. She swallows it down, determined.

  That night, she reaches for La Rochelle, under her pillow. She fills her mind with his valley, and lets his small universe lull her towards sleep.

  Eighteen

  Matthew Halloran studies the weave of the cloth on the kitchen table. His big hands are spread across its surface, braced either side of his tea cup, as if the table might lurch up at any moment. He looks as miserable as a hawk in a downpour, hunched and suspicious, grounded.

  Hester wonders if she is required to offer him bread with his tea. If so, she will have to bake again. Her irritation rises.

  She hadn’t recognised him at the door. His face there had alarmed her. They had both taken a step back, and appraised each other, carefully, across the distance.

  ‘Mary about?’

  Of course, the tea party. Hester could still see that afternoon, through the dusty glass of another lifetime. Young Halloran, following behind his father’s dog. He had shaved off his beard and cut his hair, but this was surely Mary’s brother.

  ‘I’m afraid she’s gone into town.’

  He had looked quite angry at this. Perhaps, thought Hester, he had come to reclaim his sister, and put an end to her profligate ways.

  ‘She’ll be back soon. Won’t you come in and wait?’

  But Mary is taking her time. Beneath the table, Hester’s fingers tick off the things she has to do. She stares at a stain on the floor and wonders how she can rid herself of the reflex of politeness.

  ‘More tea?’

  ‘No. Thank you.

  ’Matthew Halloran’s hands are long, and narrow. The fingers swell out around each joint, where the skin thickens and splits; fissures, hard-edged and white, run down from the corners of his nails. They look raw, and very clean. Hester thinks of him scrubbing them, until they bleed, to come and see his sister. She begins to think it less likely he has come to order Mary home.

  Hester feels some relief at this; there is a whole pig yet to be salted. She wonders why Matthew Halloran has come today, why he is not at work, like her father and Robbie. It seems an odd time for a visit.

  ‘You still got all them books here? In that other room?’

  ‘Yes.’ Hester sighs, nods, waits. ‘We have.’

  He has long eyelashes, too, she sees. They are thin and fair, like pig bristles.

  ‘You read them all?’

  ‘Some of them. Most, I think.’

  He nods. ‘Take you a while, I s’pose.’

  His fingernail picks at a breadcrumb stuck to the tablecloth. Hester feels shame for her slovenly kitchen, as well as her unearned leisure.

  ‘You must know a lot of things.’

  She looks up, catches him watching her. His eyes are a very pale blue. They look serious. He shifts them, quickly, elsewhere.

  Hester considers what she knows, and finds none of it very useful. She smiles. ‘I wouldn’t say so.’

  He nods again. ‘I thought they looked good. The books. You know.’ He pauses, lost. ‘I thought they looked nice, on the shelf there.’

  Hester is not expecting kindness. For a moment she does not recognise it. Only slowly does it occur to her that Matthew Halloran is apologising for his long-gone father’s long-past slight. She wonders that he noticed, much less remembered it; she imagines it one of many. But she is moved, nonetheless. ‘Would you like to see them again?’

  Mary’s unused stretcher confronts them as Hester opens the parlour door. Matthew does not seem to notice. He looks, dutifully, at the bookcase. The midday sun highlights dust, dried flies, frayed binding.

  ‘Nice,’ he says again.

  ‘Borrow one, if you like.’ Hester is feeling generous. She wonders if he can read.

  He keeps his hands in his pockets. ‘There was a story my old man used to like. About a bloke and a whale.’

  ‘Moby Dick?’

  Matthew shakes his head. ‘Jonah, I think his name was.’

  ‘Here.’ Hester reaches up, across his chest. She can smell strong soap and woodsmoke. ‘This is good.’

  ‘Can-did-e?’

  She smiles. ‘Or, The Optimist.’

  ‘What’s it about?’

  She is holding it just in front of him, almost touching. He does not take it. She can feel him looking at her, his eyes moving over her skin. It raises the hairs on the back of her neck. She dare not look up.

  ‘Mattie?’

  Hester jumps. Mary stands in the doorway. She has put down her sack of flour, and is smiling. Her face is soft, her eyes crinkled up. She looks young and flushed and happy.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ She holds out her arms, and Matthew crosses the room into them.
r />   ‘I came to see you.’

  Hester holds the book to her chest, forgotten.

  Nineteen

  There is snow still on the tops of the hills. An occasional gust of wind coming down from them cuts the warmth of the sun, and Tommy hunches his shoulders and rubs his hands. Past the heads, on the lumpy horizon, towers of cumulus stand against the breeze.

  They pause at the top of the bluff, looking back on the bay. The tide is out, and the beach shines wide and wet beneath them. Robbie rests on his heels and considers the whare just below. It is a fragile affair — a heap of raupo and driftwood piled at the back of the dunes, as if by wind and tide. No smoke rises from it, nor can he see any chimney. It has only one opening, over which a grey blanket is strung for a door. He thinks of the woman, sleeping, inside.

  ‘What’s she like?’

  The morning is quiet. Robbie can hear his own voice, cracking, heavy with his question.

  ‘Who, Aunty Hine? She’s alright.’ Tommy, too, stares at the hut. ‘Bit different.’

  ‘How?’

  But Tommy’s face has closed down. ‘Dunno. She just is. You coming?’

  Robbie is not. ‘Who’s that?’

  A man is crawling out of the whare. He is in shirt-sleeves, boots in his hands. He puts them down, and stretches his back while he looks around at the dunes.

  Tommy walks on.

  ‘Do you know him?’