by Moir, Tanya
She does look at him, then. It is a look that shrinks him, strips him down, and leaves him squirming. A thief of a look, with the cruelty of a child, and a woman’s judgement. Daniel is stunned, just as if she has raised her hand and slapped him.
The look falters. Hester’s eyes drop, guilty, and afraid.
Daniel, too, feels a little fear. A lurch, like stepping backwards into a void, the support he had imagined proving nothing but thin air. Then there is fury. His daughter has taken things from him, things that ought to be his, beyond time and question. She cheats him of what he is owed. The ingratitude of it overwhelms him, and his hands clench up. He wants to make her give them back.
There is a silence, in which neither moves. The kettle comes to a boil.
‘Don’t just stand there,’ he says. ‘Get my tea.’
Robbie does not come back for the evening meal. Daniel looks at the empty chair and feels a tightness around his eyes. The suspicion grows, cold and hard like fear: he has not, after all, been obeyed. The disrespectfulness of it poisons every mouthful of his dinner.
As the hours pass, he begins to see that the betrayal might be larger. The magnitude of it rises, creeping up like water in the night, until it is all around him. He has no choice, now, but to stand his ground. He does not leave the table.
Mary comes in, and sits. She watches him cautiously for a time, her red hands clasped before her.
‘He’s taken his things,’ she says.
Hester crosses the kitchen, not meeting his eye.
Daniel nods. ‘So be it.’
Ten
Through the attic window, Hester watches the restless yellow light of a waning moon shift on the hilltops, picking crags and spurs and white-gold tussock flats from darkness. She tells herself that it is the clouds that move so quickly. But still she cannot lose the sense that the moon itself is racing, fleeing before some ragged, cold sea-blackness.
They are all gone, she writes in her journal. I am left alone with Father.
And Mary, she adds to herself. It is an odd sort of comfort.
Even Frank is gone. The impossibility of not having him confronts her once again, a cavern of uncertainty, in which his value amplifies, true and clear and undistorted by his solid presence. She thinks darkly of the unimaginable Mrs Rosie O’Keefe, perhaps at this very moment pliant beneath meaty, familiar hands. Hester shivers, and tightens her shawl.
Below her bed there is empty space. No more whiffling dogs or snoring boys. No more nightmares to disturb her. She wonders if Robbie is watching this moon, looking up at the hills from the warmth of the Karupotis’ kitchen. She imagines him, safe by the fire with Tommy and George, and the puppies curled in milk-soft dreams at their mother’s side.
Only she is alone tonight.
She hears Daniel close his bedroom door, sees the flicker of candlelight extinguished. She feels a sense of relief, a hint, almost, of triumph. There will be no questions tonight; he has not guessed at her role in her brother’s departure, or seen through her horrible half-lie. Tomorrow, of course, will be another day.
Hester considers, briefly, the many tomorrows to come in her father’s house. They are all quite indistinguishable from each other; like the scrub, one could cut away at them for years, to little or no purpose. She puts away her journal, and draws the curtains over the night. She wishes she could have gone with Robbie and the dog.
Under her pillow, La Rochelle waits. He takes her down with him, to Karupoti Bay.
‘Last Sunday,’ he writes to his mother in June, ‘George was good enough to take me out in his whaleboat, so that I might view my land from the water.’
Hester shivers. She reads on quickly.
Hester smiles as he slips his woman into the room, listening and laughing along with the rest, wrapped up in an ambiguous plural, and smuggled under his mother’s nose.
And there she is, revealed. The two of them entangled in the clinch of that lovers’ pronoun, from which he cannot extricate himself, alone.
There is the tap of rain on the roof. Hester closes her eyes. Through the night the rain falls gently, and she dreams of them, warm and careless, a jumble of limbs and breath, sleeping safely while the grey hours fade and the sun rises from a tender, milky sea.
Eleven
Robbie wakes at dawn, alone in a Sunday morning hush. He looks around the strange room, with its stacks of old newspapers and unironed washing, books and string and fishing line in boxes stamped ‘Habana’. Once a girl’s room, surely, with its little curved dressing table and matching drawers, its curtains of roses and butterflies and hovering birds, still bright with pinks and greens and blues between faded stripes of sunlight. It is the sort of print his mother would have liked.
The thought of her is like a weight on his chest. He thinks it is too much, on top of everything else, the anger and fear, the hating, the stranger’s counterpane with its smell of dust and age and mice, its quilted feathers of hummingbird wings, too much to bear, in this silent house, when he is so tired. He pushes it back, away. He puts on yesterday’s clothes and walks to the beach, in search of emptiness, and maybe something more, something large enough to fill the space, fill it up to the brim, so that there is no room left for anything else.
Portia looks up from the shed as he passes. The pups are silent in the straw, fat bundles of fur and sleep. Her tail wags an apology; she lays her head back down.
It has rained in the night. The valley is damped down, thin cloud clinging to the hills, and arcing over his head. Robbie walks on. The tide is low, the beach a bare sweep before a muted, grey-green sea. He has the sense of moving in another world, a crystal space in which to be, and think of nothing.
She is there, of course, at the centre of things; he could not really doubt it. She is wearing a man’s wool coat buttoned up to her throat, but beneath it, her calves are bare. In this world of his, she walks up out of the sea, to him. He waits for her touch, and the cloud comes down around them.
She sees through him, down to his bones. He thinks he will cry with the pain of it, the shame and fear and weakness. But her eyes grow soft and wide and there is salt on her lips, and he is falling through deep water. Drowning. Wet wool under his hands. Then stronger, moving surely, like a swimmer.
She takes his hand. He follows her into the dunes, and thinks of nothing, not for a long time, until he is back on the narrowed beach, the sea at his feet, below a clearing sky. He turns his hands in its light, to see if they look different. They hold the memory of her skin; he knows that they are changed.
He straightens his shirt, smoothes down his trousers. He has dressed quickly, clumsy, unable to look away from her lying there on the mattress, afraid he would never leave. The first time he tried, he had hesitated at the door, hanging his head, dull and stupid. ‘I don’t have anything to give you.’
She sat up, then, the blanket falling from her breasts, and her head tilted to one side. She studied him as she might an object washed up on the beach, weighing its value, considering its purpose. Then she laughed, and lay back down, stretching herself like a cat, watching his face as she did so. And he had thought he would die if he did not touch her.
‘There,’ she said, afterwards. ‘You were wrong.’ And later, softly, over his heart, ‘Have no fear, awhina. I will find all that you have to give me.’
He hesitates again, now, as his body grows cold under this hard sky, and yearns to sink back into the soft warmth of the whare. But he has been dismissed.
‘Go back to the farm now,’ she told him. ‘I am tired.’
‘May I come back?’
She considered him again. ‘Yes.’
‘When?’
‘Sometimes. I will find you.’
Back in the farmhouse kitchen, George is making tea. Robbie stands in the doorway, watching, like an actor who has forgotten the play: poor grey Bottom, no longer a king, thrown out of the fairy forest.
‘Where’ve you been?’ asks Tommy.
‘I went for a walk.
On the beach.’
Tommy stares at him. George passes between them, teapot in hand, and sets it down on the table. For a moment, he looks Robbie straight in the face.
‘Bring us some more wood in, e, there’s a good man. Seeing you got your boots on.’
Twelve
Hester bathes her face, supplejack-scratched and stinging, and brushes the dust from her hair. She has cleared a respectable patch of ground today; not as much as Robbie would have managed, perhaps, but still no small achievement. She likes the tiredness that comes at the end of the work, the slowness it brings to her limbs, and the heaviness of her body, sinking down, towards sleep.
In the attic, she looks out at darkness; the scrub can no longer be seen. She shivers, glad to be inside. Thin cloud blows past her window; above, the stars are rising, clear. She watches, for a while, this southern night, so pure and heavy that it seems sometimes more than she can bear. She wonders if La Rochelle remembers it. His ‘flesh of the sky’ cloaked in black, hung with silver, the only warmth in the world a candle in a window, here at the end of the earth.
She looks down at a letter written at the end of June. She shakes her head. He has not got very far.
The paper below is stained with a number of reddish splashes, and spattered with traces of something which might be wax, as if a neglected candle might have dripped there. His hand, when it resumes, is altered, sprawling loose across the page.
Hester reaches for the next page. It is an account of lava flow formations near an old pa site, in which his pen has faltered upon the word ‘tumultuous’, caught up in the loops of the treble vowel. It seems his own outpouring ended as suddenly as it began, and was discarded. In the light of day, perhaps, he saw things differently.
She looks out again, to the hills, where Matthew Halloran once lived. Perhaps if she sleeps now, she will dream of him. A red blanket, silver-grey in darkness. His eyes closed, his breath gentle, through the night.
Thirteen
At opposite ends of the kitchen table, Hester and Mary are doing the ironing. The morning is almost windless, and the house rests, quiet but for the creak of the tin roof stretching in the sunshine.
‘Have you seen him?’ Mary demands, quite suddenly, causing Hester to start and burn her finger.
She sucks the blistering knuckle. ‘Who?’
‘Rob, of course.’ Mary clicks her tongue. ‘Who do you think?’
Hester, whose mind had been occupied in pleasant daydreams of Matthew Halloran, examines her finger, and shakes her head.
Mary gives her a measuring look. ‘He’ll be down at Old George’s, no doubt.’
Hester reapplies the hot iron to Daniel’s shirt sleeve, carefully, and says nothing.
‘Somebody should go down there. See he’s alright.’
There is a silence. Hester moves on to the other sleeve.
‘No need for your father to know,’ Mary continues, after a while. She sets her iron back down on the stove to heat, and glances out of the window. ‘It’s a good enough day for a walk.’
Mary is right. It is a good day for a walk. On the cliff path, Hester turns her face to the sun. She stops, and closes her eyes. She hears the waves rolling in to the beach below, and nearer, a bellbird sings. She considers sitting here for a while, on the warmth of the rocks, looking out over Karupoti Bay. It would be pleasant, just to listen to the sounds of the bush, and watch the colours of the sky shift across the water. But she has to get back before her father comes home, and she dare not risk the time.
A little further down, the roof of George’s house comes into view, bare tin glinting between patches of dulled red paint. It is somewhat less neat, now, than La Rochelle first described it. It occurs to her that it must have been he who made this path. He and the woman, going down for evenings of lobster and rum, and tutu-berry wine. She is walking in their footsteps.
Before her, a muddy cow ambles out of the scrub, pausing briefly to stamp and stare, before disappearing into the trees on the other side. She can see George’s boat now, drawn up on the bank of the stream, its hull glowing white in the grass just above high water. She fails, for a moment, in her determination not to think of the last time she walked this path. The memory of Letitia rushes in like water. Another escape. Sooner or later, it seems, they all end up in Karupoti Bay. Hester breathes in, and continues walking.
She finds Robbie well before she reaches the house. He is digging potatoes, stripped down to his vest in the middle of a field, a picture of Arcadian contentment. The muscular, brown-skinned sort one might glimpse from an English train, but was not supposed to wave to.
‘Hester!’ Robbie stops and grins, appearing perfectly easy in body and mind. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I came to see if you were all right,’ she says, a little accusingly.
Robbie’s grin widens. ‘Very well, thanks.’
There is something different about him, Hester thinks. Something irritating. A lumbering sort of confidence, as if he knows his own measure now, and finds it entirely to his satisfaction.
‘Here. You forgot some of your things.’ She holds out the sugar sack that Mary has packed.
‘Thanks.’ He sinks his shovel into the ground and yells across the rows of plants. ‘Tommy! Lunch?’
Hester settles herself awkwardly on the sack while Robbie gets up a fire.
‘We were worried about you,’ she says.
‘Did he send you?’ At last, Robbie sounds worried himself, and Hester feels a tiny, spiteful pleasure.
‘Mary and I. Father doesn’t know. That I’m here, I mean.’
‘You told Mary where I was?’
‘She guessed. It wasn’t hard.’ Hester looks around. ‘Where else would you be?’
‘I’m just helping out here for a while,’ says Robbie defensively. ‘I’ll have a place of my own soon. I’m going to build it.’
‘Oh.’ Looking at her brother now, Hester does not really disbelieve him. He appears quite up to the task. But it does not seem fair, all that capability and strength, where she has only fear, and ironing, so she lets a silence hang in the sun like doubt while he brews the tea.
Tommy arrives, and sits himself down on the ground beside her. He, too, has taken off his shirt, but he is not wearing a vest. He has a red handkerchief tied around his head, like a newspaper serial picture of a Caribbean pirate. Hester tries not to look at his sweaty, naked chest.
‘How are the puppies?’ she asks, waving off half of Robbie’s cheese sandwich.
‘Fat!’ says Tommy. ‘They’re little monsters, e. We got homes for three of them already. You should go up to the house and see them, while they’re still here.’
Robbie nods, chewing. ‘They’re in the shed at the back. George is there, he’ll show you.’
The sun is shining into the ramshackle shed, a patched affair of warping boards and rusting iron. Portia’s tail moves in welcome, stirring up a musky smell of fur and milk and straw. The pups are indeed much larger. Hester watches them for a while, exploring their little world as best they can, crawling on soft round bellies, their pink mouths open, querulous. They are blind and dauntless.
George leans beside her, a basket of apples at his feet. He is wearing a red wool shirt that smells of pipe tobacco and frying bacon, and Hester is reminded of Grandpa Williams in his orchard.
Neither of them notices the woman at first, although she has walked right by them. She has already set her baskets down when Hester turns to say something to George, and sees on his porch a familiar figure. For a moment they stare at each other across the yard, like forgetful acquaintances, seeking their connection.
‘E, Hine,’ says George, and more, which Hester does not understand.
The woman comes closer. She moves with the grace of La Rochelle’s lines, and Hester stares at her face, the bones of her cheeks and the hollows of her eyes, the tight curves of the moko. Gaunter now, fiercer, perhaps. But there is no doubting that presence.
‘E,’ she says, and ex
amines Hester in return. Then she nods, and turns, and walks back down the path to the sea, closing the gate behind her.
Hester lets out her breath, a thief overlooked, though surprised red-handed. Her eyes full of the stolen pasts of strangers.
‘You know Hine?’ says George.
Hester opens her mouth, then stops. ‘No.’
The old man watches her. ‘Maybe you seen her up around your place. She goes there, once in a while — has a word with the spirits, you know?’
Hester is silent. Together, they watch the woman’s back until it is lost in the dunes, a fine stroke of red on a brown landscape.
‘George, did you know the man who built our house?’
‘Etienne La Rochelle.’ George’s accent is perfect. He rolls the name around his mouth reflectively, as if tasting a good wine.
‘What sort of man was he?’
‘A good enough sort.’ George turns, and picks up his basket. ‘Here, come and get some apples.’
He will not take no for an answer, and Hester carries a bag of apples home, another guilty secret. She eats two on the way. She thinks they will have to hide the rest, but Mary is quite shameless.
‘Apple pie?’ says Daniel, that night. ‘Where did the fruit come from?’
‘Sarah Delacroix brought it round,’ says Mary, calmly. ‘Says her trees’ve got more than she knows what to do with this year.’
She cuts him another piece, and for once, Daniel neglects to mention the extortionate cost of sugar.
Fourteen
A frost is forming over Karupoti Bay. It grows out of the folds of the hills, silvering blades of tussock, furring facets of red rock. In George’s garden it freezes the hearts of the last roses, and in the long grass beneath the trees, the juice of fallen apples swells beneath their skins.