by Moir, Tanya
‘Aye,’ says Mary. ‘Wait till the creek goes down.’ She scans the ground around them. ‘We’ll go back up a bit and have a cup of tea.’
Hester stares at her in disbelief. But already Mary is walking up the road, searching its margins for dry firewood. Hester considers going on alone, wading bravely through the torrent. Another wave laps her feet. Her scalp tingles with the memory of the sudden, foaming, deadly rush, and she thinks of La Rochelle’s guide, his cold and lonely ending.
Mary soon has a fire in hand. ‘Tide’s going out,’ she says as she settles the billy into the flames. ‘The water’ll fall soon, you’ll see.’
Mary is right. Before two hours have passed they can proceed, through water no deeper than their ankles. After another mile, they see the farmhouse. There is smoke coming from George’s chimney. It spreads softly up the valley, like normality returning.
Hester’s dread lifts with it. As she picks her way down the narrow valley, blind to the sea, the smoke seems a signal of safe passage. The waves are not coming back; George, she is sure, would know. The ocean has finished with them. It is over. Warm and able bodies wait below. They have survived.
She finds Robbie standing in a pile of seaweed. He is holding a ladder against the side of the house. At the top of the ladder is Tommy, struggling with something in the gutter.
‘Robbie!’
He turns his head. ‘Hester! Are you alright?’
‘Yes. You?’
‘Yes.’
They stare at each other across the ruin of the garden, unable to find further useful words. Above, Tommy pulls out a large and lively eel, and drops it to the ground.
‘Jesus,’ says Mary. ‘What a mess.’
There is a large fire burning in the orchard, around which blankets and boots have been hung, salt-stains spreading as they dry. The doors and windows of the farmhouse are all flung open, and three mattresses and a sofa lean up against the posts of the verandah. Those trees left standing are covered in shirts and shoes and hats. Furniture is everywhere. Hester moves towards Robbie. She thinks it is like walking through a jumble sale, except that the air is full of smoke, and all the goods are muddy and wet, and smell vaguely of the sea.
The eel slithers towards her. She gives a little scream, and takes a quick step back.
‘Don’t let it get away!’ says Tommy.
Hester looks up at him. She looks at the eel. She looks at Robbie. Their eyes meet. There is a moment’s silence. The laughter takes all three of them at once, and they cannot stop, until the tears roll down their faces and Mary joins in, and George comes round with a bundle of kanuka poles in his hand to see what is so funny.
‘E!’ he says. ‘Somebody grab that eel!’ And they start all over again.
‘Did you see it?’ says Robbie, serious now.
‘Yes,’ says Hester. There is awe in his voice. ‘I saw.’
‘It was something, wasn’t it? Something to see?’
‘Yes,’ says Hester. ‘It was.’
‘E,’ says George. ‘We’re lucky.’
That night, back at La Rochelle’s Road, Hester puts out her light, and closes her eyes. The attic curtains are drawn, but she knows that beyond her window, the black hills curve around the cottage like the bulwark of a fortress. Far below, the surf still roars. She sleeps soundly, and dreams of a high stone tower, holding her up, beyond the grasp of a raging, wilful sea.
Eighteen
Robbie lies in his stretcher beside a hissing green-wood fire. He can still make out, in its light, the high-water mark on the sitting-room walls, a wide brown stain on the wallpaper a foot below the mantel. Above this, the room is oddly normal, the pictures quite dry, the books still on their shelves. Now that the windows have been shut, a salty stench of weed and silt and damp is filling the room, leaching out of the walls, coming up through the swollen floorboards.
Robbie pulls up his blanket. It smells of lavender and soap, and he thinks of Hester, and Mary. They will be high and dry now, back in the order of La Rochelle’s Road. He feels no envy for them. He thinks, for a moment, of his father, who did not come. But the thought falls back, and his mind is a broad, untroubled sweep, washed clean. He can hear Hine breathe. Beside him, Portia stretches and groans. He is warm, and tired.
George and Tommy are sleeping, too, all four stretchers drawn up close, their heads to the warmth. Around them, the house stands open to the night and the drying wind. Here in the sitting room they have made a camp, banked up the fire with foraged wood, strung salty blankets against the draught. Exhaustion has settled over them, heavy and soothing, smothering nightmares, extinguishing fears.
Far away, above blankets and roofs and snoring, over the crackle of kanuka and the snuffle of dogs, beneath the lullaby of a woman’s breathing, there is the surge of the sea. Robbie hears it without concern.
He thinks, before he sleeps, of the whare he will help to remake, tomorrow, in the dunes. It will have an iron chimney, and a wooden door. It will have a platform, raised up out of the draught, on which to put a larger mattress. He sighs, and closes his eyes.
He is woken by Portia barking. The room is light. The dogs are at the kitchen door, their noses pressed beneath it.
‘Shut up!’ groans George.
Robbie gets up and pulls on his boots. He opens the door. Across the kitchen, in the porch, stands George’s cow. She gives a little bellow.
‘Daisy?’ George comes to the kitchen door. He walks over and rubs her head. ‘You alright, girl?’ He runs his hands over the cow, talking softly to her as he checks her legs and belly. ‘Better find you some feed, e?’
Daisy seems little the worse for wear, but the old man’s voice is suddenly shaky. For a moment, his shoulders drop. He sniffs loudly, and wipes his hands over his face before he turns.
‘Put the kettle on,’ he says to Robbie, with a little smile. ‘If you can find it.’
Nineteen
The road down to Pigeon Bay is washed out in several places. No tour parties ride it today. In the valley, Hester and Mary make their way across carpets of driftwood and weed, half-sawn logs and salt-warped timber. The remains of the mills are silent. At the end of the road, a scattering of piles leans out of the sea. The rest of the wharf is gone.
Out in the bay, a rag-tag collection of small boats is taking supplies off the Lyttelton steamer. There is a long, loud queue outside the store.
‘There!’ says Mary. ‘Didn’t I tell you?’
Hester is not listening. She is looking for Una Monroe’s white picket fence. It is still there. It lies caught between two fruit trees in the muddy, flattened garden.
Mary follows Hester’s gaze, and nods, not without satisfaction. ‘Go on with you, then. See how your friend is.’ She glances back at the crowd in front of the store. ‘Looks like we’ll be here a while.’
Una Monroe’s house is thrown open to the morning. Its lower boards steam in the sun. The crimson geraniums still bloom on the verandah, safe behind the sitting-room carpet, which has been hung out over the rail. The rug is now a dreary brown, stained here and there with violent, chemical pinks and blues. Hester walks past it, through the heavy stink of wet, soiled wool, to the front door.
Una Monroe is crouched on her heels in the hallway, sweeping sand into a dustpan. ‘Miss Peterson!’ she says, putting down her pan, and shifting her hand to the small of her back. ‘You’re just in time for a cup of tea.’
They walk past the sitting room, empty now, its windows stripped, the ruined paper peacocks bubbling from its walls. Their boots crunch on the floorboards.
There is someone else already in the kitchen. She rises from her scrubbing as they come in, and Hester looks, with some curiosity, on the face of a younger Una Monroe. She is in her twenties, a red-haired beauty. There is a smear of mud on her creamy forehead, and another across her chin.
‘My daughter, Mrs Jacobs,’ explains Mrs Monroe. ‘I’ll put the kettle on. Lydia, find us some shortbread, will you, dear?’
Hes
ter’s mouth begins to water. She swallows it back, ashamed. ‘Please. I just wanted to see if you were all right. I don’t want to be any bother.’
‘Nonsense,’ says Una Monroe, busy with cups and plates. ‘How are things at your place? Did you have very much damage?’
Hester shakes her head. ‘We live on the hill.’
‘Very wise. Milk or lemon?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘In your tea, dear.’
The kitchen table has been drawn to one side, its surface piled with crockery and utensils. Hester helps clear a space for the teapot. They sit close to the stove, away from the draughts of the open windows and doors. She looks around. The cupboard doors stand open, too. Piles of sand and debris lie in front of each one, where Mrs Jacobs has swept them out. In the centre of the room, an old packing case holds a mess of wet sacks and a silty, fishy porridge of ruined dry goods.
Despite this, the room has a holiday air. They take their tea with the determination of picnickers on a cold Whit Monday, and Hester, shortbread in hand, thinks that the sand and disarray seem almost jaunty.
‘We had hardly any water inside,’ says Mrs Monroe. ‘No more than three or four inches.’
‘Will you have another piece? Please do.’ Lydia Jacobs offers the plate. ‘We’re so lucky we have an upstairs.’ There is a noise outside, and she cocks her head. ‘Katie, is that you? Come and have a biscuit.’
A little girl clomps through the back door, another Una Monroe, this one six or seven, with ringlets, and a muddy white pinafore.
‘What have you been up to out there?’
‘I’ve built a fort,’ the girl says proudly. She reaches a dirty hand towards the plate. Mother and grandmother look at each other and smile.
‘And what will you do with it now?’ asks Mrs Monroe.
‘I shall read my book in it. I’m going to get it from upstairs.’
‘Good girl.’ Mrs Monroe reaches out, removes a twig from Katie’s pretty hair, and strokes the red curls into place.
Hester watches the girl toss her head and pull away, and feels a moment of pure hatred. She looks down, into her teacup. Its surface tilts. Slowly, the cup begins to rattle.
‘Don’t worry. Just another little quake.’ Una Monroe removes her own cup from its saucer and sets it on the table, which is rocking too. She looks unconcerned. ‘It’ll stop in a minute.’
It does not stop. A stack of bowls falls from the table and smashes on the floor. The broken pieces continue to rock. Katie climbs onto her grandmother’s knee and hides her face in Una Monroe’s shoulder. Hester grips the table’s edge. She thinks she hears rumbling. Above them, there is a thump, and the sound of breaking glass.
‘Do you think …’ Mrs Jacobs begins. The shaking stops.
Seconds pass. They look at each other. Everything is quiet. Through the open windows they can hear waves breaking down on the beach. The surf, it would seem, is rising.
‘I wonder,’ says Una Monroe. ‘Perhaps we should go upstairs.’
‘It could take hours,’ Mrs Jacobs says. ‘If it were to come at all.’
Mrs Monroe looks around her half-cleaned kitchen, taking in its fresh disorder. ‘Well, we can’t hang about all day.’ She sets her granddaughter down on the floor. ‘Katie, dear, go upstairs and keep watch through the telescope. If you see the sea coming, shout.’
In Hester’s mind, the Pacific gathers itself into a wall. She thinks of Robbie. The wall rises. There is nothing she can do. She thinks of her own way home, the slow climb up the river flats, her back to the sea. Too heavy a load to run.
Mrs Jacobs begins picking up the pieces of the broken bowls. Hester helps clear away the tea things, and makes her goodbyes. Una Monroe shows her out, past the wooden staircase in which she and her daughter place such faith. The verandah is littered with soil and bright geranium heads, the fallen pots smashed beyond repair.
‘Do come again, next time you’re down,’ says Mrs Monroe cheerily, as if future events are quite certain.
Mary is waiting at the gate. She looks impatient.
‘I didn’t think you’d be finished so soon,’ says Hester. ‘Did you feel the earthquake?’
‘What do you think?’ snaps Mary. ‘Christ, girl, the whole bloody colony must have felt it. Now will you come and give me a hand with the things, before some bastard steals them.’
Their goods are stacked up outside the store. The queue is gone, the road entirely empty.
‘Silly buggers ran for the hills.’ Mary shakes her head. ‘Scared another wave might be coming.’
‘And you’re not?’ Hester stares out over the bay at the blue horizon. ‘Aren’t you frightened at all?’
Mary looks at her as if she is quite stupid. ‘Wave or no wave,’ she says, ‘we need flour.’
Twice, as they walk up the valley, Hester thinks she feels the road move beneath her feet. There is a low sort of sound. The blood in her ears, perhaps; the wind, or an echo of the sea.
They arrive home to find the cooking pots on the kitchen floor, three broken cups, and a fine crack in the chimney. For days, Hester watches the ocean. She sees no wave.
Twenty
‘Spring in these hills’, writes La Rochelle to his fiancée in September, ‘is a subtle creature.’
A farm. In his letters to Juliana, the Karupotis have no name. It is an odd sort of loyalty, Hester suspects, which prevents their introduction. He does not sketch them for her amusement; he does not put them forward for her judgement. Likewise, Hester doubts that he ever spoke a word to them of Juliana.
She looks back through his papers, to the previous draft addressed to Juliana. It is dated a month earlier, to the day. Perhaps there were others in between, composed without fault, and briskly consigned to the mail. But Hester does not think so. She hears silence between his sentences, the leaden fall of time.
There is a scrabble on the windowsill. Hester looks up, and catches her breath. A sparrow. For half a second, she thinks of calling out to her mother. She breathes out, and shakes her head. The hen-sparrow looks at her, head tilted, little dark eyes expectant. Hester stares back, at the ordinary greys and browns, so blessedly familiar. The colours of dirt and soot and London. Slowly, she reaches out her hand. There is a flutter, and it is gone.
Beyond the open window, the grass is growing long. It is thick and glossy now, fattening on earth and sunshine, and she wonders if there is a name for that kind of green.
Too soon for whom? Not Juliana, Hester thinks. La Rochelle, perhaps, agrees, for the letter is now abandoned. Instead, he has scrawled a sprig of apple blossom in the centre of the page, a simple, absent collection of looping lines that holds the delicacy of a Dorset May, drawn from memories of English springs.
She turns to the next page. The sketch takes her by surprise. It is of the cottage, looking back from the top of the cliffs, with the ragged hills behind it; a working drawing, surely, for the painting propped between two rafters on the chest beside her bed. But the foreground of the sketch, unlike the painting, is not empty.
Hine sits there. This time, the woman’s nakedness makes Hester blush. It is no longer a stranger’s body. She does not wish to consider the real Hine, sprawled so loosely, so possessively, here, in front of her own house. The French windows stand open. Behind them, perhaps, is an unmade bed.
Hester wonders how it would feel. To sit there like that. She imagines herself, walking slowly through those long glass doors, the salt-breeze running over her skin, to arrange herself before the artist’s eyes, just so, according to his whim. To be looked at, in that way. Her whole body painted in sunlight.
‘You finished up there?’
‘No!’ Hester hurries to her feet, and picks up her duster.
‘Aye, well. Mind you get on with it, then.’ Mary’s voice rises easily through the floor. ‘There’s plenty more needs doing down here, when you’re done.’
Hester returns to her cleaning, but the image of Hine’s body will not leave her. She c
an see it, now, in the painting. It is there on her wall, in the flow of paint across empty spaces.
She shakes her duster out of the window. The sun is warm, the wind light and full of the sea. She closes her eyes. When she opens them, she sees the muscles curve beneath the skin of the hills, the jut of bone, the long, loose arcs of the ridgeline. She turns her back, but the hills remain.
Twenty-One
The harvest begins in December. By dusk on the fifth day, the Petersons’ cocksfoot is in. Hester stands in the shaven field, beneath a sky blue and deep as open water. The wind has dropped, and the sweat cools on her back. On the road above, Jean Delacroix’s wagon makes its way across the skyline. Hester watches until the bullocks and their load can no longer be seen. It seems to her that they owe the departing grass some kind of celebration.
Daniel falls asleep at the kitchen table, over a plate of cold potatoes and salt pork. Mary wakes him when the dishes are done, and it is time to go to bed.
The sky is still light; out to the east, the moon is rising. Hester sits by the attic window, looking down on the altered view. From this distance, the field looks like a neat green lawn, sloping down to meet the sea.
We have our first crop, she writes. Now we are truly farmers.
Below, she hears Daniel snore. The rest of the house is silent. Hester stares again out of the window.
There is the scent of cut grass on a strengthening breeze. She describes it for herself, this waft of forgotten parks and garden squares and soft, moist summer evenings. She imagines what Lucy would say, if she were here. She shapes phrases for them to exchange, arm in arm, looking out at the reaped field for which they have waited so long, and come so far. She thinks they might run down to the lawn, to feel the short grass beneath their feet.