by Fiona Kidman
The old farmhouse had been stripped of lean-tos, tidied up and painted, and given a new roof. Nearby stood a brand-new house with Mediterranean-style arches, painted terracotta. ‘Now there’s a statement,’ Blanche said. ‘Wow, goodness me. I bet the old place is the sharemilker’s or some such.’
This turned out to be correct. A young man, tousled with sleep, came to the door. He was having forty winks he said, before the second milking of the day.
‘How early the cows come into season these days,’ Blanche said, and he looked at her as if she was an apparition on his doorstep.
‘Just go ahead, help yourselves, don’t go near the bull paddock, that’s all,’ he said, waving his arm, when they asked if they could look around. A child cried in the background, and a cross-looking young woman appeared behind the man.
‘She was probably just getting the baby off to sleep,’ said Blanche.
They walked across several paddocks, Blanche reminding Jemima to shut the heavy gates behind them.
‘The paddock. Do you remember where the drain was?’ Jemima asked, trying to hide her impatience.
They stopped, while Blanche stood staring in a puzzled way across the paddocks, dappled beneath passing clouds. ‘That stand of trees wasn’t there,’ she said.
The trees were tall and shapely, soft with spring’s new colour, shelter for stock. Soon it would be summer. The river flowed dark and insistent between the stopbanks. ‘I never thought I’d come back here,’ Blanche said.
After a few moments, she shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, Jemima. I’ve brought you on a wild goose chase. I’ve no idea where that drain went. There’s no sign of it now.’
Jemima stood silent. The thought had crossed her mind, more than once, since Blanche’s extraordinary disclosure, that she would lead people (the police perhaps, that seemed the obvious thing) to uncover a body. That it might still be preserved in the peat of the Waikato farm at the end of Hang Dog Road. The mystery solved.
Blanche stood beside her, muttering to herself. She was saying something that sounded like a prayer, an incantation, about being led from untruth to truth. ‘Lead us from darkness to light,’ she said in a firm clear voice. She opened the bag. Jemima knew she was going to offer her the piece of cloth and shook her head, although she reached out and touched it once more.
It was nothing, no proof of anything at all. She stood quite still. This was a place where her mother had stood. And, it seemed, her mother before her.
Fragrance Rising
SWIMMING
THE PRIME MINISTER’S TOWEL IS green with a narrow pink stripe at either end, a towel chosen by a woman. It lies where he’s tossed it aside before stepping into the swimming bath. In his woollen bathing suit, straps taut over his shoulders, he is a black seal slicing through the water, powerful arms plunging, shoulders rearing up and down and up again in a perfect butterfly stroke. Despite all the speed and energy, this is his time for reflecting, a place where there are no secretaries, or bells calling him to the chamber, or papers that can be pushed beneath his nose. This is the place where, in his head at least, he cannot be joined by others.
Not that he is without his spectators. There are people who enjoy the sense of being close to power, who can say that they have seen Mr Gordon Coates himself in his swimming trunks. So near I could almost have touched him, they will say, when they return home, for most of them are from the country come to town to take in the sights. And they love him, because he is one of them, a country boy who made good. Not an educated man, they will continue, someone like us who didn’t stay long at school, but look at the way we get by — like him, we don’t need fancy letters after our names, and he has risen right to the top. He has worn a braided jacket and white breeches and shoes with buckles when he went to meet the king. These viewers, who have come to watch the prime minister take his daily constitutional, huddle on the lower path near the water, rather than the sheltered gallery, so that when he has done with his swim he must pass them. The Thorndon Baths have a square tower above the dressing rooms and two domed ornamental roofs. Winter is close; there is menace in the wind. You would think that would deter the prime minister but it seems he swims wet or fine or even when Wellington’s southerly is whipping the harbour into a frenzy. The watching men wear trousers that are a little baggy and shiny at the knees, their Sunday best, and high collars beneath their jackets, scarves billowing about them. The women clutch their wraps, legs quivering with cold beneath the new short skirts of the day, woollen cloche hats pulled round their ears.
He lifts his head from the water, and on this fresh morning in late May, he smells a whiff of wood smoke curling from the houses nearby. All of a sudden there is an ache at the back of his throat, and he sees not the blue floor of the swimming pool but the heavy green light that glances through the ebb and flow of the Arapaoa, the slow salt tide between mangrove banks. He catches the fragrance rising from log fires in open paddocks, a fallen macrocarpa perhaps, or old apple trees from the orchards. Beyond the sky-high flames stands a house built close to the ground with low-slung verandahs and creepers winding around the pillars. Across the green lay of the land, there is laughter and song on the quiet still air of the Kaipara, telling him his Maori neighbours have risen to begin their day. He stops to listen.
In that moment when he lifts his head, he sees the child, a little girl with eyes as dark as a zoo panther’s hide, although her complexion is pale sepia. She is perhaps five or six years of age, shivering in a ragged yellow cotton frock. She doesn’t appear to know where she is. The prime minister is aware that poor children live in this area but as a rule they stay close to their homes along Sydney and Ascot streets, where the workers’ cottages huddle side by side, close enough for the children to hold hands with each other if they reach out the windows. This child looks as if she is lost.
There is something wrong here. For a moment he thinks, It can’t be, it isn’t her, one of them. How could she have found him? And then he thinks, Of course not, the child is too young. He pulls himself up on the edge of the pool, his taste for swimming over, and stands, abruptly shaking water from himself, his moustache showering tiny arcs of dew over his chest as he grabs the towel to wipe his eyes clear. A man steps out, pointing his Box Brownie at the prime minister’s large frame.
‘No,’ he says, holding the towel up and shielding his face. ‘Not today.’ He recognises the man’s peaked cap, worn back to front with a journalist’s flamboyance. He has seen the fellow more often than he likes, and it wouldn’t surprise him if he was a plant for the Liberals. The pictures he takes of the prime minister have been snapped at the oddest moments, such as when he is dancing in the most gentlemanly fashion with the wife of one his cabinet ministers, the kind of duty he undertakes out of the goodness of his heart, or when he is dining in a restaurant and stops for a cigar between his meat and potatoes and the arrival of dessert. There is a suspicion in his mind that the man wants to make something of a clown of him at least, or a womaniser at worst.
‘Mr Coates,’ calls out an admirer, holding out a scrap of paper and a pen, ‘your autograph, sir.’ He brushes past without a second glance. ‘Brusque, a man who can be a bit short,’ they will say later on. ‘He has much on his mind. The economy, it’s not in good shape. It’s us he will have been thinking of. He just didn’t see us that day.’
In the dressing room he breathes deeply and evenly, trying to recover his composure. He dries himself with care, lifting his balls above his groin as delicately as a girl’s dress, dusting the folds with talcum powder. When he is fully dressed he stands in front of a mirror, adjusting his spotted tie, buttoning his waistcoat, checking the white handkerchief in his pocket, then flicks a tailor-made from the packet in his inside pocket and inhales.
Outside, a sleety rain has begun to fall. The crowd has dispersed. Only the child is standing there, looking at him. Or perhaps just at the space before her, as if trying to discover where she is supposed to be.
‘What is it, c
hild?’ he asks her. He has daughters of his own.
Still she does not speak. On an impulse, he kneels before her. ‘You’ve just come here to live, eh?’
She nods.
‘How many days?’ He holds up one hand, the fingers splayed, counting them aloud, curling his thumb in his palm then the others, one by one. When he comes to two, the child puts out a hand and clasps them in his.
‘Two days, eh? Just two days. Where are you from?’
She shakes her head dumbly.
‘What is your name?’
‘Janie,’ she whispers.
‘Janie who?’
‘Janie McCaw.’ He catches the slight burr in her voice.
‘Do you know where you live now, Miss Janie McCaw?’
Again she shakes her head, but he has decided. The name has told him as much as he probably needs to know. There are few Maori here nowadays, although once they had pa sites all over the town. The child will live in one of the workers’ cottages, probably along Ascot Street. There will be a Maori mother, a Scotsman for a father. If her father was Maori he wouldn’t have been given a place to rent. I have a wife and a child, the man will have said, and nobody the wiser about the wife until he had moved in. Janie will have set off for school, on this her second day, and now she has lost her way. Mr Coates has worked all this out as he stands and takes Janie firmly by the hand. There is a cabinet meeting in half an hour but if he moves quickly, he will just have time to return Janie McCaw to her mother. His towel is damp, not soaking, and he wraps it around the child to protect her from the wind. In truth, his curiosity is sparked. He wants to see this mother of whom he already has a picture in his head.
Hand in hand now, the two of them walk briskly, or rather Janie trots as she tries to keep up with her protector, back along Tinakori Road. He picks up his pace as he passes his own house, preferring not to be seen. They pass shops and the Shepherd’s Arms, where a few men are taking the first drop of the day, a refreshment after work, possibly on the night-cart, which collects the buckets of human faeces. Or perhaps they are bakers who have made the morning’s first batch of bread, or railway men. You can’t tell one from the other when they are tired and unwashed, and banging their fists for a pint, except for the bakers, dusty white with drifting flour. In response to a shouted greeting, Mr Coates touches his hat without a further glance, intent on the task he has set himself. The pair make a sharp left turn, and then again, and they have entered Ascot Street.
‘Is it here, Janie? D’you think you live in this street?’
The child nods and points. The houses are small and shabby, paint peeling and bubbling in Wellington’s salt-laden air, but there is an atmosphere of respectability here as well, lines of washing flapping in the damp air, rows of winter vegetables, cabbages and carrots, the soil dark with recent tilling. Only the house that Janie is pulling the prime minister towards is forlorn and neglected, a blind hanging askew in the window, weeds flourishing in the wasteland of what was once a garden. The family has just arrived, Mr Coates thinks to himself. Soon they will have this place shipshape.
The little girl releases herself from his grip and darts along the path. Before he knows it, she has disappeared into a lean-to washing shed to one side of the building, and next thing a door bangs, and she is gone.
This is not good enough. He gives a peremptory knock on what passes for a front door.
Over the fence a woman’s head appears. ‘Why, Prime Minister, to what do we owe the honour of this visit?’
‘I found the child wandering,’ he says stiffly, feeling as caught out as if his own wife had appeared out of Premier House, these few minutes past. ‘Where is the mother?’
‘Ah,’ says the woman, ‘there’s no mother there. Just a man called Jock turned up with the kid last week. Dead, he reckons the mother is, taken with flu in the epidemic.’
‘I thought the child younger than that.’
‘Oh who can tell, that’s his story. She looks after herself. Which way did you walk, your honour? Past the Shepherd’s Arms? I’m surprised you didn’t see her old man, or perhaps he’s passed out already. Someone will bring him home round dinnertime.’
The prime minister fumbles in his trouser pocket. ‘I’d be obliged if you’d keep an eye on her for me.’ He presses a pound note into her hand.
He hesitates before stooping to pick up the green and pink-striped towel where it has fallen from Janie McCaw’s shoulders onto the path.
GOVERNING
HULLO, THE GANG’S ALL HERE,’ the prime minister shouts as he rushes through the cabinet room door, as if he is exactly on time and waiting for his ministers, not they upon him. He waves a sheaf of papers over his head.
The men gathered at the table look up from their study of the day’s order papers, and it’s hard for them to suppress smiles behind the wreaths of smoke. This is the way it is: just when things seem gloomy and the books don’t balance, Coates bounds in and the serious business of governing the country seems lightened. But this morning he is not in a mood to dally with jokes.
‘I have a new idea,’ he announces. ‘I’m going to introduce a bill that will provide more educational opportunities for young Maoris.’
‘That’s not scheduled on the order paper,’ says Albert Davy, an adviser to the party who, of late, Gordon Coates has begun to look upon with suspicion. He has appeared a stalwart friend in the past, but these days he has a sly air about him, as if he is not quite open. At times he is aggressive in his manner. The night before, he and Coates dined together at Bellamy’s. Over pork chops and a whisky or several, Mr Davy had said, in a tone tinged with dislike, that the Right Honourable Prime Minister was playing to the Maori vote to the detriment of the wider population. ‘Do you not think,’ he had said, ‘that if the banks run out of money, your European constituents might have grounds to complain that not enough of the vanishing funds have been spent on them?’ This is the very same man who devised the brilliant advertising slogan, ‘Coats off with Coates’, which helped sweep him to victory in the last election.
‘I have the support of Sir Maui Pomare,’ the prime minister had said then, ‘and on the other side of the house, Sir Apirana Ngata will support me to the utmost, no matter that we are in opposition to each other.’
‘That is the trouble,’ Davy had replied. ‘You have friends in all the wrong places. You’re a farmer but you run with Maoris and Red Feds. You’ve lost your sense of the rest of this country.’
‘I’ll thank you to keep a civil tongue in your head, Mr Davy,’ Coates had said. He had lit a cigar and blown some smoke over Davy’s roast potatoes. Now he wished he had not.
‘I suppose Sir Maui already knows of this,’ Davy says evenly, turning to the Minister for Internal Affairs alongside him. ‘But the honourable member is Minister for Health, not of education.’
Maui Pomare turns his large handsome head towards the adviser with an expression of contempt. A doctor once, he had spent many years in America. He speaks with a faint twang. ‘Health, education, they go hand in hand. Ask any fool that, and he will tell you the obvious: it’s not enough for Maori children to be sound in body, though that is surely a beginning, but they’ll go nowhere in the Pakeha world without knowledge of its ways.’
‘Perhaps Sir Maui has known what is in your head a lot longer than the rest of us, Prime Minister.’
Coates returns Davy’s stare. ‘This idea of mine is one I thought of on my way to work,’ he says. ‘It’s to do with the responsibility of parents to ensure that all children attend school on a regular basis, whether they be native schools or otherwise.’
‘Then if you have only thought of it this morning, we can’t put it through on today’s order paper. The bill has to be written.’
Coates shrugs. ‘The matter will be raised, the public made aware.’
He laughs, runs his hand through his auburn hair. The debating chamber awaits, with its ornate furnishings, lush carpet and green leather chairs. He prepares himself for a pe
rformance to the visitors’ gallery, where the public watch. The ladies sit in a separate compartment and, even though they have to queue for a ticket in the way that the gentlemen do not, there are always several there, many of them dressed to kill, a fur stole draped casually around shoulders, hats with tilted brims, mouths red bows. He looks up now and then, aware when one tries to catch his eye.
He will keep his cabinet guessing. He knows the rules as well as they do; whether he will try to break them or not is entirely his business.
HOMING IN
THE GREEN SWEEP OF THE trees beside the driveway is what he loves best about Premier House. They are true trees of New Zealand, glossy-leaved, dark and dense and, on a night like this, dripping with fog-strewn cobwebs, shining in the light spilling from the house. When he walks up the drive he remembers a particular section of land up north that stands apart from the burnt-over earth, with its stumps of scrub where grass has been sown. He owns this piece of land; it’s best not to remember that, but it keeps coming back to him, as if in a dream. It’s an area of bush so thick that a man could lose himself in a minute if he didn’t keep his wits about him. He has planted a kauri tree here in the grounds of his official residence, and one day, a thousand years on, someone will look at it in wonder, marvelling at how it came to grow here in the city.
Premier House, 260 Tinakori Road — the two-storeyed wooden house also known as Ariki Toa, home of the chief — is set above the road. A huge glassed-in verandah on the right shelters the entranceway; beyond is a reception area, bay windows with handsome stained glass and leadlights, twinkling chandeliers. Its grandeur encompasses him. He always knew he had a place in the world. Like destiny.
The children’s voices rise to meet him, and then they are throwing themselves at him, one grabbing a hand, another throwing herself at his knees, a flurry of arms and legs. Irirangi, the one on whom he has been allowed to bestow a Maori name, although her skin is as pale as buttermilk, her hair with a hint of auburn gold like his own; and Patricia and Josephine. ‘Father, Father,’ they cry. ‘Where have you been?’