Harlequin Rex

by Owen Marshall

  ‘You be sure she has a good time, and just be careful,’ she told David as they made plans. ‘I won’t have her upset.’ Roimata was one of those thin, beaky Maori women who break the physical stereotype of her race, and are sufficiently numerous to suggest some genetic alternatives far back in Polynesian history. Her smile was like a slash in her dark face, and she took no nonsense from anyone. ‘Don’t make me sorry that I’m doing this,’ she said to David. He got the message that the motivation for her kindness was the benefit of the sisterhood, and not his interests.

  Yet it was kindness, and she put herself at professional risk. On the Saturday of the weekend stay in Blenheim, Roimata took Lucy to some of the wineries. ‘Even my family has planted some grapes,’ she said, ‘and now we sell our crop of chardonnay to Hunter’s. When medicine gets too much for me, I’m thinking of retiring to the property and becoming a winemaker. I’m already doing a course from Massey.’

  ‘Let me come with you as publicist for the family business,’ Lucy said. Maybe Harlequin would let her leave the Slaven Centre if she had someone to vouch for her. She could get pissed among the vines and few people, perhaps, would know. She could become famous as a wine ‘nose’ — a back-handed gift from Harlequin.

  In the afternoon Lucy and Roimata drove up the Wairau Plain to the old Cresswell settlement and the new vineyards there, with a rose bush end to each carefully staked row. They took a cheeseboard and a bottle of sauvignon blanc to the wooden seats on the sloping lawn: the one green patch, by courtesy of sprinkler, in the dun, surrounding grasses. And Roimata made some excuse to leave Lucy sitting there; went back to the car park where David waited. He was surprised how awkward he found it to thank the doctor, and how awkward she was in accepting his thanks, as if both of them had a sense that their acquaintance was too slight to bear the burden should anything go wrong. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘I’ve got to start back for Mahakipawa early tomorrow afternoon, so you’ll need to drop her off at home by lunchtime.’

  ‘I’ll have her there by twelve. Jesus, just to have some time together out of that place. You know? Everyone does a good job, but you can’t forget what you’re there for, what’s happening around you.’

  ‘You help Lucy forget for a while then, David. You give her a good time until tomorrow afternoon, but remember how things are. You wouldn’t do anything silly like going off, eh?’

  ‘No,’ said David. How often he’d thought of that, and always reluctantly admitted to himself that Lucy wasn’t up to it, even if she’d wanted to make the break.

  ‘Anyway, Lucy’ll be wondering what’s going on. Go on out to the lawn and let’s hope she’s pleased to see you.’ Roimata Wallace drove away with just a flash of that smile from a face so sharp it always seemed to be one profile or the other, and David locked Raf’s car, yet another favour, surely, of which he was scarcely deserving, and hurried past the tasting room to be with Lucy.

  Just for a moment, as he approached across the lawn, before Lucy’s attention, her recognition, caused any response in her, David perceived her as objectively as he found possible. She had put on some weight since coming to the centre, as she frequently complained, but she could carry it in her tall, loose-limbed way. A certain assurance and confidence had been beaten out of her by Harlequin. She wore little make-up, or jewellery; her clothes were comfortable rather than smart. She no longer felt it important to make a statement to others by appearance. Her attractiveness remained, but her focus had moved elsewhere, and her expression was one of closed vulnerability.

  But when she saw him there was such quick pleasure that David felt the afternoon grow brighter, illuminated even, though there was nothing he could promise against her illness. He experienced a pang that was compounded of both joy and despair.

  ‘You bugger,’ she said, ‘you planned this all along, didn’t you.’ Her even, capped teeth showed in a wide smile, and she reached for his hand when he sat down.

  ‘Roimata made it happen really. I don’t think she’s all that taken with me, but she’d do anything to please you. Just remember to give me a good report tomorrow, or she’ll be on my case.’

  ‘She does all she can for me — she’s a friend as well as being staff. I wish she hadn’t gone so that I could thank her right now. You didn’t make her go?’

  ‘Nobody makes Roimata do anything, you know that,’ he said. ‘She wanted us to be alone when we met, I guess. It’s a woman’s sensitivity, isn’t it? Even when you’re as tough and realistic as the good doctor.’

  Maybe that was how men should learn to be more responsive: observing the tender perceptions that women show in their dealings, the small vibrations through a web of emotion more delicate than the gossamer of spiders. He found it an effort, though, being always alert to subtle signals, affirmations that contained denials, apparent disinclinations that were coded for rapprochement. David watched Lucy closely, sat close on the wooden bench seat, squeezed her hand in his. He promised himself — he promised her without declaration of it — that he’d make their time together the very best within his power. Pledges and resolutions are easy enough, aren’t they, but so often circumstances change, and it seems that a compromise is in order.

  There were other people at tables on the slope of the vineyard, with their own intentions and histories, their own illnesses and causes for celebration, but David didn’t give a thought for them. He was concerned only with Lucy, and his own life. In any case, his background made him resistant to any glamorisation of rural land use.

  The vineyards attracted the townies. The staked rows above the dry soil so familiar from the holiday programmes on television, the tasting shops and tarted up storage areas for the oak barrels, the artfully created pond with a few clipped geese, the gravelled car park big enough for tour buses, the restaurants offering a ploughman’s lunch, or chicken kebabs in pockets of pita bread, the large, colourful signs at the frontages shimmering in the heat, the careful rusticity of vineyard and label titles.

  David was more drawn to the diminishing number of conventional farms: the closely cropped dry pasture with sheep dung in scatters, the tracks meandering to the concrete water troughs, the lopsided tractor sheds, the implements among the nodding brown-top by the fence. No tour buses there, just the memories of a different Marlborough and a different life. Up the drive, however, might come that northern yuppie money, and another family farm reward its founder’s descendants in a manner that even the most perspicacious had not envisaged.

  ‘Why aren’t there more people?’ asked Lucy. An observation rather than a criticism.

  ‘It’s late autumn,’ he said. ‘Some wineries will have closed for the year already.’

  ‘Around Auckland these places are busy all the time, just about.’

  They were, and David disliked it: a gaggling, superficial engagement with the countryside as entertainment. How could he explain to Lucy that the fewer people he had around him, the more clearly he heard the voice of the land. How could he express the satisfaction it gave him to be quite solitary among hills. And part of the difficulty was that he suspected such feelings originated in arrogance and selfishness. ‘Isn’t it better here, without so many others about?’ he said mildly.

  ‘Yes, maybe it is,’ she said. What did they care for other people anyway: each of them had reason to be blocking out much of life.

  ‘Sit closer to me,’ she said. ‘It makes me feel good that you went to so much trouble to be here with me — you asked Roimata for help, you arranged things.’

  ‘I wanted you to have something for your birthday that was absolutely apart from the Slaven Centre — except me, of course.’

  ‘It’s great to pretend we’re normal, isn’t it?’ Lucy said. ‘Sit here as if it’s an afternoon break in a conventional life. You could be a vet — you’ve got that half inside, half outside look about you, and I could be a teacher.’

  ‘Your tits are too good,’ said David. ‘Women teachers never have a decent pair. It must be something that’s dete
rmined in the selection process.’

  ‘Even my tits are getting bigger. It’s all that institutional food.’

  ‘A joke. I’m kidding, right?’

  ‘I know,’ she said.

  He did sit close to her. He cut gruyère and blue vein, he toyed with dark olives, which the folded card stated were grown near at hand. They talked in that oblique, relaxed way used by people who have let down some of their defences. They spoke when they felt like it, and not because of any need to prevent silences, for the spaces when they weren’t speaking filled up with concern and affection and the pleasure of being together. They stayed there until all other visitors had left, until both the autumn sun and autumn temperatures dropped, then they drove a few kilometres back down the Wairau Plain to a farm that had converted its married couple’s quarters to guest rooms. Lavender plots and rose bushes had replaced a vegetable garden, but there was still, by the steps, the large horseshoe used years before by workers to get their boots off.

  They sat on the small verandah in old cane chairs painted yellow. The chair backs were shredded by cats sharpening their claws, and a tabby watched them from beneath the lavender, gradually indistinct as night came on. David had brought some shit, and they smoked it there away from the sea, away from the institution, away from people they knew, away, for the moment, from Harlequin itself.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Lucy, ‘now this is prime stuff.’

  ‘Isn’t it, though.’

  ‘You’re the candy man all right.’

  ‘Happy birthday,’ he said. The lavender had lost its bees and colour; just a tail from the shadow remained of the tabby. The hills across the Wairau had become a sharp, flat backdrop.

  ‘Let’s not get heavy,’ Lucy said. ‘Any crap about what might happen to us. Not tonight, eh?’

  ‘Okay. Anything you like.’

  ‘I’m going to drink and drag and you can keep me amused.’

  ‘Okay, sure,’ he said.

  That was the way to live in difficult times perhaps: concentrate on separate moments that held their own satisfaction, and not allow all of experience to be linked with some ultimate despair. David took a long, slow pull of his best West Coast shit, and watched Lucy do the same. She was relaxed in the cane chair, her legs extended and crossed at the ankles. Her head was back, and her broad face quietly content. He was giving her a good time, wasn’t he? She was happy?

  Yet happiness accentuates the rest of life, as a candle in the still night draws attention to the darkness all around.

  TWENTY–SIX

  David knew from experience that if you treated the police as fools, then eventually you suffered for it. Although for a time you could look good because you chose alternatives for which they had no planned response, persistence by you, and them, almost always had the one result. That one mad gunman shoots the president, guarded by the whole FBI, isn’t evidence they’re all numbskulls, just the difference between the ease of selective initiative and the impossibility of covering every contingency. David didn’t much want to play silly buggers any more, but in agreeing to take Tolly Mathews to the national symphony orchestra in Picton he knew there was risk. At first he’d resisted the idea, but after a few joints his fondness for Tolly won out. Abbey had been taken in the small, official group to the Nelson performance, and been impressed. Tolly didn’t harp on to David, which only made his wish to go more importunate.

  ‘You’re going to get me into trouble. You know that?’ David told him.

  ‘Bullshit,’ said Tolly. ‘Picton’s nothing these days. There’s no trouble to get into since it lost the ferry. It’s all computer buffs, tourist chalets, goat cheese and yachts now, and women making natural dyed skirts so thick you can’t get your hand under them.’

  Yet in winter’s dusk it looked so much larger than it was: the lights a trembling margin of reflection at the port before the dark sea, and higher skeins of street lights, and the clustered yellow glow of the houses. All mundane and explicable enough, but David felt again that quick frisson of wonder at the diamond scatter of the lights on the plush of the night.

  How Tolly looked forward to their breakout: a chance to hear Bartok and Schoenberg, to slip for one night free from the host of Harlequin perhaps, and be one of a normal, enviable assembly. Odd in a way, for Tolly’s economics degree, his catch as catch can business pragmatism, his wealth, his physicality, his love of fishing at the float, all entrenched him against any refined art. But music was something entirely different, and more in keeping with the hours he spent with his telescope and the sky. ‘No, fair go,’ he said, ‘only Abbey and I in that place have any clear love of music. It’s the one pure language, isn’t it?’ He even took a tolerant interest in Raf’s jazz, as a parent might encourage a kid with comics, so as to draw him on to books.

  With no attention to the lights of Picton, Tolly was tapping the dash top of Raf’s Mazda, and humming extravagantly. ‘A quiet night, Tolly. That’s what we agreed. No nonsense, remember. We’re bunking and can’t afford to be noticed.’

  ‘Just some good music. Nothing else. I’m a pussy cat,’ said Tolly. ‘Nothing coming up from the depths at all.’

  ‘Otherwise we could both cop it.’

  ‘Yeah, I know you’re putting out for me, but no sweat, really.’

  Tolly was wearing a dark suit and a tie with diagonal stripes of red and blue. A quality suit and quality tie, which he wore easily. David had never before seen him so close to his pre-Harlequin self of successful manufacturer, and it made him aware of his own off-the-rack slacks and casual jacket with a stamped metal button missing. Some sort of role reversal in terms of responsibility could so easily occur.

  There was a park behind the pie factory and from there they walked to the hall, which had a facelift entrance of glass and tiles, but a gaunt, wooden interior. Tolly had paid for two of the best seats, but could find little advantage in them. ‘At least we’re not behind a bloody pillar,’ he said loudly.

  The concert was such a splendid novelty for Picton that there were speeches beforehand from the mayor and the chairwoman of some regional arts organisation. Each commended the other’s part in achieving the event, and both were given applause only mildly derisive. Bartok began the programme.

  David enjoyed it all, but largely as spectacle, because he had little musical understanding; no standards of skill for attainment, or comparison. What he saw was as memorable and as absorbing as what he heard: the variety of appearance and response in the audience and the orchestra. Those who were musical showed their affinity for the performance in their posture, their faces, with stirrings and whispers at the mention of their special gods. In front of David was a thin woman with grey hair piled up rather elegantly, and her neck became pink during a second movement. The oboe soloist had the forearms and fingers of a pit-sawyer, dark hair mole sleek on the backs of his hands, yet when he rose and played, the great plate of his face was full of tender pride because of the sounds he could create. One of the lead violinists had a necklace which she moved adroitly on her smooth neck each time she was to begin, and as she played her body swayed in its slim dress as a cypress does.

  In times of exhilaration during the programme, Tolly quite ignored David, as if his musical incomprehension made him invisible, and communicated with complete strangers around him in a temporary bonding of musical appreciation. The catching of another’s eyes, nods, eyebrow flashes, small sounds of accord with the performance which were half grunt, half sigh. David noticed that Tolly became increasingly restless; not at all from boredom, but rather that he wanted to express his involvement and pleasure in ways more immediate than clapping. His face became almost comically animated, and his hands were an avian flutter as the tremors through his body ended there. David had seen it many times before — the first puckish breath of Harlequin through the system, which might be all that was manifest, or the sign of tempests to come.

  After the concert, Tolly imagined that the orchestra would be delighted to see him, that he had
a summons which would give him entry, but David talked him out of the main doors and into the Picton streets. ‘Take it easy,’ he said. ‘You could be heading for an episode if you don’t steady up.’

  ‘Oh, knock it off. Just because you’ve no feeling for music, you think I’m sickening for something.’ Yet he had a very high walk, poised on the balls of his feet; his spread fingers combed the night; his eyes were expansive, and glittered with each street light as David looked across at him.

  ‘What am I doing at that bloody place of yours?’ Tolly said. ‘Eh? A family, a business, enough money to burn, and I’m tucked away at your bloody Scout camp at Mahakipawa. Where’s the sense to that?’

  ‘Pass,’ said David. He wondered how those refinements of musical appreciation and astronomy had come to be among all those pragmatic aspects of Tolly’s nature.

  Around them moved many others of the audience on the way to the car parks. The majority were women, and Tolly Mathews suddenly slipped off among them, flicking up dresses and skirts with almost balletic dexterity, his soft hands half glancing from, half impacting on, thighs and buttocks. It was done so quickly as he eased past, that the reaction of most was a startled laugh, or a bewildered clutch at their own clothing. Tolly passed beyond threat so smoothly, was so well dressed, that most of the women didn’t realise what had caused their skirts to lift, and looked at companions, at the surroundings for snags, at the ground for some air vent and grille.

  David made no attempt to follow. He didn’t want any association with what was going on, and besides, he knew that even a whiff of Harlequin could provide enough juice to keep Tolly well in front. Just let it not be the start of an episode, that’s all he asked. He walked to the car but, after a few minutes during which Tolly didn’t come, he went back into the shopping area, walking down towards the lawns at the edge of the sea and the jetties. Tolly was sitting on the wall, looking out over the sound: quiet, so well dressed, almost as if he were the one being kept waiting and too tolerant to mention it. ‘I could do with a cigar,’ he said.