Starlight Peninsula

by Grimshaw, Charlotte

Jack Anthony and Mariel Hartfield appeared in matching shades of blue, gold and red: her jacket, his shirt, his tie. Her heavily lashed eyes were smoky and calm. Behind them was a large photo of the Justice Minister, Ed Miles.

  Mariel’s throaty voice: ‘Justice Minister Ed Miles stunned his colleagues in the National Party today with the shock announcement that he is resigning from politics. Prime Minister Jack Dance earlier appeared blindsided by the news that his long-serving cabinet minister, one of the most experienced members of the government front bench, is to leave Parliament, reportedly to pursue opportunities in the private sector. Miles, who was widely touted as a leadership prospect, and the subject of much speculation recently about his leadership ambitions, especially in light of the Prime Minister’s low approval ratings, announced his decision at a press conference this afternoon.

  ‘Sources are describing Prime Minister Jack Dance as “surprised and flabbergasted” by Mr Miles’s sudden decision.’

  Silvio erupted in an explosion of barks. He shot off the sofa, scrabbled on the wooden floor, threw himself towards the ranch slider.

  Nick was standing on the deck. Eloise let him in.

  Political reporter Sarah Lane, was speaking outside Parliament: ‘Indeed, there has been intense speculation today, Mariel, as to why a long-serving, hitherto highly ambitious minister, strongly favoured as a leadership contender, with politics, you could say, running in his veins, has chosen this moment to resign for a career in the private sector. Mariel, earlier we sought comment from one of Mr Miles’s oldest political allies and backers, former prime minister Sir David Hallwright, who had this to say.’

  Eloise got a beer for Nick. They watched David Hallwright, interviewed in front of an ivy-covered wall.

  ‘His hair’s got darker. What’s he wearing? Is that a cravat?’

  ‘He’s had his teeth whitened.’

  ‘Look at his tan.’

  Hallwright said, ‘This is a loss to politics, sure. However, Ed Miles has given several decades of service to this country. And I think if you go out there, you’ll find that the vast overwhelming bulk of New Zealanders will recognise that a talented individual like Ed Miles now has a fantastic contribution to make to the country’s growth in the private sector. For me, personally, my focus is on the party, and the superb job that Prime Minister Jack Dance is doing. I am going to continue to put my weight behind Mr Dance, and to play my part, actually, to help New Zealanders understand the benefits the Dance government is bringing to the economy, and to the country as a whole. Jack Dance has made some tough calls, and frankly he deserves credit for them. There’s a whole raft of exciting things my wife and I plan to continue to be involved in, to help Jack Dance achieve a second term.’

  Sarah Lane again: ‘So there you have it, Mariel. A week is indeed a long time in politics. After the recent speculation that Ed Miles and Sir David Hallwright might have been seeking to unseat Prime Minister Dance, who has been struggling with his approval ratings, we have a different picture today. A resignation from Ed Miles, and a ringing endorsement for Mr Dance from powerful National Party figure David Hallwright. Mariel?’

  The Sparkler moved closer to Nick on the sofa.

  ‘C’n I have a sip?’ she said. He passed her the beer bottle. She raised it, clinking her teeth on the glass.

  ‘Hey,’ Eloise said, distracted, her eyes on the television.

  Nick stretched out his long legs. He said, ‘That Mariel Hartfield. She’s kind of sleepily gorgeous. The glossy hair and white teeth. The velvet voice.’

  ‘The eyes,’ the Sparkler said in a cartoon-ghostly voice, curling her hand into a telescope.

  Nick nudged her. ‘Give me my beer, kid. How much have you drunk? And her eyes. They’re amazing. With her beautiful brown skin. She’s Maori, but with green eyes. Kind of unusual.’

  Eloise said, ‘She grew up in Australia. But her accent is New Zealand. She doesn’t have Australian vowels.’

  ‘No. It’s pure Kiwi.’

  Mariel Hartfield’s eyes. Her voice.

  Nick was speaking, ‘Wait, here’s something about Minister O’Keefe. Maybe Miles is resigning so he can be a house husband. Do Baby O’Keefe’s nappies. Push the stroller around the park.’

  They watched. No, Minister O’Keefe was revealing nothing more than a comment about social housing: the government would like to sell all of it to private providers.

  The Sparkler was tying up her laces. She looked up and said, ‘Mum got told at work. Eloise is right. The baby’s father is the leader of the Labour Party.’

  ‘Bradley Kirk. The old dog,’ Nick said. ‘Eloise, shall we take this kid out to dinner?’

  Eloise was thinking: Thee’s photos of the opera. Mariel Hartfield and Simon Lampton leaning against the plate-glass window, their elbows nearly touching. Simon’s words, ‘One of my sons grew up in a different family.’ He said a name. William?

  Note for the Rotokauri file: Leaf through copies of the Woman’s Day and the New Idea. Those shots of Mariel and Hamish Dark shopping, arriving at airports, leaving cafés. Look at pictures of Mariel Hartfield’s tall, curly-haired son. His name is William.

  Is this what you were looking for, Arthur? Some fact that was hidden in the world you wanted to write about? You couldn’t decide whether you were a fiction writer or a journalist. Why pry the way you did, why not just make the story up?

  Remember, Arthur, I used to think I was observant. What is Mariel Hartfield like? She is popular, a celebrity. Her husband, Hamish Dark, is a friend of the National Party. She is Maori, she has green eyes. She has a narrow waist, strong hands, is slim and tall, with a pulpy scar on her index finger. Every evening, Mariel Hartfield tells the nation how it’s spent its day. She lives her life in the public eye; she lives in plain sight.

  ‘The girl in the bus stop is crying,’ Eloise said.

  In the morning, leaving Nick and the Sparkler to escort Silvio to the dog park, she drove across town and parked the Honda, barely bothering to line it up against the kerb. The Lamptons’ door was opened by a woman holding a mop and a bucket filled with cleaning fluids, who said, ‘Mr? Wait, I will get.’

  Voices. He walked into the hallway. When he saw her, he came straight out onto the porch.

  ‘Let’s go up there,’ she said, and pointed at Mt Matariki. He took one look at her face and didn’t say a word.

  Now they sat on the park bench at the edge of the green crater. Below them the suburbs stretched away, crossed by racing cloud shadows.

  ‘I’ve been writing things down,’ Eloise said.

  She turned to him. ‘Arthur had the idea, Art before everything. No fear or favour. He used people’s personal details. He caricatured my mother. She appeared in a lot of his stuff, very thinly disguised. When we had arguments, he’d make them into comic sketches, or describe them in his columns. Nothing was sacred, everything was material. It made me angry. Hurt sometimes.’

  Simon nodded slightly.

  ‘But he didn’t do it out of malice. He didn’t do it in order to offend. It wasn’t revenge or cruelty. He just did what all artists do. If you didn’t know him or us, you wouldn’t have recognised what material he was using.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘He went too far with the Hallwrights. Asking them about private details. It was … aggressive. He was obsessed with the idea of finding out, because he didn’t have access to their world. I guess he was prepared to be a bit too ruthless.’

  ‘To stalk them,’ Simon said. He cleared his throat. His voice was light, without conviction. He was sitting very still.

  ‘Not stalk them, just be enterprising. A cheeky journalist.’

  Simon was looking at the backs of his hands.

  She said, ‘Arthur wrote a note: your name and the name of a woman who’s missing. Simon Lampton/Mereana Kostas.’

  Silence.

  ‘You used the words “missing items”.’

  He looked at her.

  ‘When you said that, you reminded me the blu
e cups were missing from the flat. I wouldn’t have thought of it.’

  He shrugged.

  ‘You wear some kind of aftershave. I could smell it after you’d been running, when we were in the car.’

  He looked straight ahead. ‘Right …?’

  ‘You said I shouldn’t feel guilty that I didn’t call or text Arthur from the airport. You said, Imagine if I’d come back earlier, if Arthur and I had argued on the edge of the road and he’d tripped and fallen down the wall. You said he would be as much to blame for the fall as I was, because his behaviour had contributed.’

  She looked out over the suburb, the grids of roads and houses. She went on, ‘You were talking about yourself. It was you. You were in the flat. You took the cups. You left some trace, some outline of yourself. It was you.’

  He twisted to face her. ‘No. You’re wrong, Eloise.’

  ‘You said to me, Imagine if you and Arthur argued and he fell against a fence, and it gave way.’

  ‘So?’

  Her voice rose. ‘I never told you he fell against a fence and it gave way. I never told you that detail. And it’s what happened. How could you know unless you were there? You were there. Why were you there? Was he asking you about your adopted daughter, about Mrs Hallwright? Or the missing woman?’

  He was looking at his hands, squeezing them, turning them this way and that. He scratched his chin hard, thinking.

  Silence.

  Finally he took a breath, rolled his shoulders, rubbed his neck, turned to her.

  ‘Eloise,’ he said, ‘I have to tell you something. It’s going to sound strange.’

  She waited. She wasn’t breathing.

  ‘I care about you very much,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You. You and all your chaos. I’m old and married, and I really care about you. I think about you. You look stunned. Don’t worry, I’m not mad. It doesn’t mean anything other than that. You’re young and lovely; it’s no wonder I can’t get you out of my head. As for what you just said … Don’t get up, don’t fly off the handle. Wait. Just hear me out. Please.’

  She stared.

  ‘Eloise. In your usual headlong way, you’ve constructed something out of the air. You’ve mounted a case against me, and it’s half fact, and half your beautiful, clever, imaginative mind making all kinds of leaps. I know you’re lonely. You spend too much time alone and you dream up connections, because that’s what lonely people do. You feel bad about Arthur, you feel sad and guilty, you have this idea you didn’t ask questions when he died, and so you’re trying to fit it all together in a way that isn’t random. Because we fear the random. We want things to make sense, to have a logic, a justice. The idea that people can die by pure, freak accident is terrible. You’ve fastened on the idea you should have rung or texted Arthur when you landed at the airport, you didn’t because you didn’t trust him, and as a result he died. And the story you’re making up is so important to you, so much a part of your … recovery, that I’m almost reluctant to put you right. But I have to, because in the end you won’t be served by getting fixated on something that isn’t true. We have to get at the truth. We agreed, remember, to work this out together. We’ve been thrown together by weird circumstance, and I’m actually not sorry about that, not sorry to have been spending time with you — although the cleaner’s sure to tell my wife I’ve been talking to a pretty young woman who came to the house while she was out. She’ll be thinking we’re having an affair, and we’re going to have to work out what to say. We don’t want her knowing what we’re talking about, because she’s incredibly indiscreet.

  ‘Now don’t say anything, just let me finish. Eloise. Darling. Just listen. Just breathe. I mentioned the fact that Arthur fell against a flimsy fence for the simple reason that the police told me he had. It’s just a detail I remember from their questions. I said something like, How the hell does a guy fall off a wall in broad daylight anyway? And they said, He stumbled against a fence and the whole thing gave way. Freak accident. Simple as that. Maybe I mentioned missing items. I don’t remember. I put on aftershave, sure. But so do most other men I know. Arthur wrote some woman’s name next to mine in a note, okay, but I have no idea why he did that, except I assume he was intending to contact both of us at some stage. He rang me. He was probably going to ring her next, whoever she was, or is. I have no idea.

  ‘Eloise, don’t look at me like that. Please just let me tell you, I’ve become fond of you, and I want us to be friends. I don’t mind what you said. I don’t mind you accusing me. You’ve had a hard time of it lately. I understand your feelings of guilt. I understand them. Let’s work on them together. Your husband left you, you’ve had a lot to deal with emotionally.

  ‘It’s okay, Eloise. Everything’s going to be fine. I just wonder, I really do. My lovely, chaotic friend. How could you have got this so wrong?’

  The bump, the grind, of the rings of light. The interval between the words could be expressed as a forward slash.

  Bright light made her screw her eyes shut. They had walked down from the mountain. Now, Simon stood next to her by the pool. The heat struck up off the concrete patio and she could feel his eyes on her, the intensity of his watchfulness, his calculation. But she felt as weightless and insubstantial as the wavering rings dancing on the blue walls of the pool.

  She turned and looked at the big, square villa, its weatherboard walls and orange tiled roof.

  ‘It’s a beautiful house,’ she said, and then added carelessly, ‘The house is a metaphor for the mind.’

  ‘I know it is,’ he said, which surprised her.

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Or it represents security. One of my patients had a marital crisis. She told me about it: when it was all going badly, she dreamed about broken-down, ruined houses, also houses she was locked out of. When she got back with her husband and all was well, she dreamed about beautiful mansions.’

  ‘I’m trying to get my mind back in order,’ Eloise said. ‘That’s why I’ve been seeing a therapist.’

  ‘It’s a good idea. To process your feelings of guilt.’

  Eloise looked at him. ‘Shall we sit down for a minute.’

  ‘Sure.’ He pulled up a deckchair and they sat looking down the length of the lawn to the base of Mt Matariki.

  She faced him. ‘I know who Mariel Hartfield is,’ she said. ‘She is Mereana Kostas. Her son is your son, William.’

  Simon sat very still, his hands in his lap.

  ‘Detective Da Silva described her: tall, slim, Maori, unusual green eyes. Scar on index finger. In the past, she had a criminal conviction. She was jailed. She left the country, changed her identity. She must have had help to do that. No, don’t get up. Don’t fly off the handle. Hear me out, Simon. Just breathe. You said it, we’re working it out together, remember. I assume Arthur found out there was a connection between the two of you, he came looking for you. He was pushy, ruthless. He invaded your private life, and he didn’t care if it hurt you. You’ve told me the rest. You told me when you came to my house.’

  Simon turned to look at her. His eyes had no light, no depth in them. His face was expressionless. He said, ‘How have you come up with this fantasy?’

  ‘The information was out there. It came to me.’

  ‘You mean there’s gossip?’

  ‘No. Definitely not. No one knows.’

  His voice was harsh. ‘It’s completely untrue. A fairy story. One that could cause damage to innocent people. Good luck with putting it about. You’ll get slapped with a defamation suit, just for starters.’

  ‘I’m not going to put it about. I just want one thing.’

  He waited. His eyes were opaque, his face was set. But she could sense something rising in him.

  She said, ‘You’re right, I’ve been wracked with guilt about Arthur. I failed him. My husband’s left me. I’ve been unhappy, lonely, lost. I want security; I want to put my mind in order. I’m seeing the shrink, but there’s something else that woul
d properly put my mind at ease.’

  She gestured towards the house behind them.

  ‘You said it to me, Simon, you know people.’

  He squeezed his hands into fists and said in a quiet, dogged voice, ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I want a house,’ Eloise said. ‘I want my own home.’

  THIRTY

  Dear Klaudia,

  I regret the necessity of the therapeutic blank screen: the fact that you know everything about me, and I know almost nothing about you. I have only a few details, an outline, with which to construct a picture. You own a soulful brown dog called Linus. Your mouth turns up like the Joker’s when you are amused. You have blonde hair, a sharp nose, and a sly, crafty smile. When you are irritable, your eyes turn darker blue behind your glasses, and your face sets in a square frown. Before you speak, you pause, swallow, and rest your blunt fingertips on the desk. You are at your most charming when listening. Your familiar, and therapeutic assistant, is a large, brown rat.

  I have to tell you, Klaudia, my ex-husband came to the peninsula. My neighbour, Nick, and I were walking back from the dog park when Sean turned up with an entourage: his secretary Voodoo, and a Jaeger’s lawyer. For a moment, we stood on the path between the flax bushes, watching them milling around on the deck. They spent a bit of time peering at the fire damage along the fence. (The grass is growing back in patches, but the bushes are black.) Voodoo got her high heel stuck between the boards of the deck. Assisting her, Sean looked plump and uneasy, and even quite short — shorter than Nick, I noted.

  The Jaeger’s solicitor told me a lot of things. He was extraordinarily verbose. Sean paced about, looking agonised. I watched him covertly. I miss him, but he’s determined, it seems, to stick with his actress girlfriend.

  Eventually, they told me there is one point on which I can put my mind at rest. I won’t have to leave the peninsula. After discussions with advisors and his Jaeger’s partners, in a spirit of magnanimity, Sean, with the blessing of Lady Cheryl and Sir Jarrod Rodd, has offered to let me have the house. There will be no forced sale. I will be given sole ownership. I have been advised to consult my own lawyer on other matters, and further negotiations are pending, but I sit here now in my own house, knowing I won’t have to pack my bags.