Elena
A Stuart Roper is alive and living in Auckland. I found him in the phone book. Roper is not a common name. It could well be him. So Hamish is right, I must be careful for Jeanie’s sake.
Stuart had such a temper! Once I saw him kick and kick a small dog who had almost tripped him in the market. A little white puppy. It yelped and yapped fit to attract the attention of every soul in the area. Did Stuart care? Not one fig. When an old mango seller shouted at him, he simply shook a fist at her. When I scooped up the pup from under his very toe, he would have gone at me too, if I’d been a smaller person. Those mad eyes! And with everyone watching! The man was not normal.
‘Stupid cur!’ he shouted, whether to me or the dog was unclear. Then he glared at the small muttering crowd and stalked away, completely unrepentant by the look of his swaggering step, one hand slapping his fat thigh as if he were still at his beating.
He had attacked a plantation worker, too, I heard: a man from our village. When our matai came to complain, Stuart said the worker was insolent and lazy – but I heard John O’Dowd paid him off with a couple of sacks of bananas, which were as good as gold in those days after the hurricane. John must have felt right was on the worker’s side in some way. The matter never came to the police.
The intriguing thing was that Stuart Roper could be good company when it suited him. A short time after the puppy incident, we were both at one of the myriad welcome and farewell parties that punctuate the palagi year in Apia. Someone was always leaving and some new official arriving. Two year stints were the norm. This was, I seem to remember, a welcome. The new UNESCO expert sent to set up a teak furniture-making business. Or was it the United Nations expert checking on the yaws-eradication programme? Anyway, we were both there, and Jeanie. Stewart’s big face shone with goodwill (and maybe beer), his fair hair bristled in a new snappy haircut. His island print shirt suited him – well-cut reasonably muted colours, crisply ironed, which is more than one could say for many of the gaudy rags worn to those dos. When I joined his little group, he hailed me warmly: no hint of a memory there, in his eyes or manner, of the mangled puppy. I remember him telling a joke which had us all laughing. His arm lay across Jeanie’s shoulders; he looked at her often as he talked, as if needing her approval. She smiled back. I don’t think the father was there.
Yes that’s how I remember Jeanie with Stuart. A different person, as if there were two sides to her coin: one when he was about – unremarkable, pleasant, reticent; the other, in his absence – vibrant, curious, talkative and wonderfully sensitive to our island ways. Which is she now, I wonder?
I must see her.
PART TWO
Invasions
Ann
Gore, New Zealand, 1990
Ann Hope looks down the long drive, down past her patient donkeys waiting under the big macrocarpa, down to where a man is standing outside his car, black against the frosted grass. He is looking up towards her house. Does he have binoculars? She’s afraid to move lest he detect her. She breathes slowly, but her heart won’t steady. The man stamps his feet, looks away over the fields as if searching for signs, then back up at the house.
He’s uncertain, thinks Ann. It gives her hope. Step by quiet step she eases away from the window then runs to ring Michael.
‘Can you come over quickly? There’s a man at the bottom of the drive. It’s the second time I’ve seen him. I think he may be stalking me.’
‘The bastard! Shall I see him off then?’
Bluff Michael would deal with him as he would a disobedient dog – a flung arm, a sharp command – but Ann has a better idea.
‘Could you come over the back way? Make it seem as if you live here?’ She tries to laugh but the sound comes out ragged, ‘Then you can be as rude as you like!’
‘Take it easy lass. I’ll be there in five minutes. I’ll bring the twins shall I?’
The twins are Michael’s identical huntaways, Jess and Jack, lean exuberant animals, deep voiced – intimidating if you don’t know them.
‘Yes please.’
Ann makes herself look again. The car is still there, but the man is out of sight. For a moment she panics. Is he here at the door already? But there he is, still below, easing himself out of the car. He slams the door and begins, uncertainly, walking towards the drive. His body rocks from side to side – an old man’s walk. But he wouldn’t be more than fifty-five, would he? Actually, she realises, fifty-nine.
He fumbles with the gate. Ann leaves him to it. Knowing that Michael is on the way has given her the energy she needs. She runs upstairs to the bedroom. In front of the mirror she feels a moment of despair. Then with a cry of exasperation at her own weakness, she pulls her hair back tightly into a bun and with shaky hasty hands ties it with a yellow scarf, leaving the ends to drape. In her daughter’s bedroom she scrabbles in a drawer, finds an old bag of make-up and slashes at her face: bright lipstick, eye shadow, rouge even. Over her usual neat trousers and jersey she throws a loose woollen poncho and the heavy rope of ceramic beads Francesca made years ago at school. The effect is encouragingly stodgy. She tries on dark glasses but they are too unlikely, too obviously a disguise. Then remembers the magnifying glasses she uses for her weaving. Yes.
But there’s nothing she can do about her height.
The dread returns with the knock. A tentative rap. He can’t be sure. He can’t be.
Ann clumps down the stairs, trying to imagine herself as someone else. I am on stage, she thinks, this is Gore Repertory, and I am a country frump answering the door in the opening scene.
The man’s raincoat is unbuttoned; a dirty scarf hangs to his knees. Under it she can see a sports jacket and brown jersey. You would have thought he would come in his best suit. He is bare-headed in the icy air, and, but for faded stubble above his ears, bald. Ann realises that he has come bare-headed so that she will see the scar. The hand is hidden by gloves. He has changed so much, though, in other ways. Perhaps she has also. But then, she thinks, I recognise him.
‘Yes?’ She makes her voice rough. Makes herself look at him. ‘Are you selling religion?’
He stares at her.
‘I saw your car loitering at my drive yesterday.’ She wishes, too late, that she had remembered to say our drive. ‘I have everything I need. Please go away.’
He holds out a photograph. ‘Is this you? It is isn’t it?’ He’s belligerent, but also unsure.
Ann won’t look. ‘Goodbye.’
But he shoves his foot in the door as she tries to close it. Has something she has said or done made him more confident? Ann’s heart is beating so hard she can scarcely stand. This is ridiculous, she thinks, I can manage this. But knows that she can’t.
His face is red. He’s still puffing from the walk up the steep drive. ‘Jeanie?’ he says, part belligerence, part plea. ‘Jeanie, isn’t it?’
The dogs arrive baying, pounding around from the back, one each side of the house in a pincer movement. Clever dogs. At the same time Michael appears behind her in the hall.
‘What’s up here?’ He whistles to the dogs who sit immediately, panting and slavering, eyes on the stranger, only wanting, it seems, that he should make a move to set them off again.
‘Who are you?’ says the man.
‘More to the point,’ says Michael, ‘who are bloody you?’
The man holds out the photograph again. ‘I recognised her in this photograph.’ He nods at Ann.
Michael looks at the photo. Then at Ann. He grins. ‘I heard about that. Arse over tits in the Hokonui.’
‘Michael.’
Michael comes to attention. ‘Doesn’t mean she knows you.’ To Ann: ‘Do you?’
Ann shakes her head, keeps her voice steady and rough. ‘I’ve never set eyes on him.’
The man draws breath sharply.
‘You heard her. Now bugger off.’
‘She’s my wife.’ His cloudy blue eyes remain fixed on her, searching. ‘You see, Jeanie, I never gave up. I knew
… I knew you were here somewhere.’ He rushes on before either of the others can interrupt. ‘All these years I knew I would find you. That photo – I saw it in our local rag. A competition, you see for funny images. It was a sign. A special sign to me that we were meant to be together again. I never ever gave up hoping Jeanie.’
‘Lord bless us,’ mutters Michael. ‘A nutter. Look sport, off you go before I call the police.’
The dogs seem to recognise the word. They growl in unison.
‘And stay off our land. You’re not welcome. Got it?’
At a gesture from Michael the dogs rise. They each bark once and look to their master for further instruction. Ann could hug them.
The man shows the palm of his one good hand, a gesture that could be pitiful though the dogs are instantly on alert. He looks from Ann to Michael and back again, frowning. ‘Is he with you now? Does he know about us?’
‘Oh for Christ’s sake,’ Michael bellows, pointing at the drive. ‘Out!’
Jess and Jack set up a great, deep-throated baying and bound down the drive then back up to the transfixed man. Step by step they drive him down to the road, barking all the way, tails in the air, having a whale of a time. They are not often allowed to play like this.
Ann’s legs are about to give way. ‘Michael, bless you. Come and have coffee.’ Though she would rather be on her own for a bit.
In the kitchen Michael frowns at her. ‘What’s all this get-up then? You look like a tart.’
Ann has forgotten about the make-up. The glasses and hair. She tries to laugh it off. ‘That idiot thought I looked like someone he knew. I tried to make myself different. Silly really, but he got under my skin. He was snooping around the school a couple of days ago, showing the photograph, asking for my name.’
A month ago she had taken a history class to the Hokonui Moonshine Museum, had slipped on the polished floor, lost her balance and ended up in the life-size display of a group of moonshiners, her arm around a barrel of whisky. The girls had thought it a huge joke. Some visitor must have been tempted and taken a forbidden photograph – she remembered a flash.
‘What a creep.’ Michael spoons sugar and gulps down his coffee. ‘Well that was a bit of fun, Ann. He won’t be back in a hurry.’ He rises, smiling at her, rubbing her back as if she were a spooked horse. ‘Go and wash all that rubbish off. Shall I come over tonight, make sure you’re okay?’
Ann nods, invites him for dinner. The least she can do. Before he leaves, he unties her yellow scarf then ploughs his blunt farmer’s fingers through her hair, freeing it again. He bends to kiss the top of her head. She has not known him so tender.
‘Take care Ann.’ And he’s off, the twins running ahead, down the front paddock which is now striped with green where the sun has got to the frost.
No sign of the car.
But he knows, thinks Ann. Of course he recognised me. The stupid disguise would only make him more sure. The question is – will he give up? The man she once knew would not. He would hound her relentlessly, his pride wounded, but still, in some perverse and twisted way, in need of her. But surely after more than twenty years …?
Ann groans. Yesterday when he stood there, in the same place, just standing, for over an hour, she knew. Wouldn’t admit, even to herself, but she knew. That mad stubborn persistence. Will she never be free of him?
All that weekend Ann is restless. She goes about her normal chores, but it’s as if his visit has left a stain – something putrid – on everything. As she hangs sheets to dry in her sunny back yard she remembers the old times. How she had ever let him into her life? What had attracted her?
He had been lying still and pale in a hospital bed in Wanganui. A badly broken leg and abrasions all down one side of his face and arm. Ann flicks at a sheet, thinking back to all those hospital beds she had made. He’d been target shooting with his mates, from the back of a moving motorbike. ‘Stupid,’ he’d said with a grin, ‘but I hit the target! Then we hit the gravel bend. Curtains.’ Ann had replied as she dressed the wounds – something that made him smile.
‘That’s better,’ she had said at his smile, and he had complained, with another grin, that it wasn’t better at all – that smiling hurt his face. He had been charming to her, flirting with her, but in a gentle, helpless way that touched her deeply. She loved the blue of his eyes and the way they crinkled at the edges when he smiled, privately, for her. And the few sandy freckles across the bridge of his nose. He would joke about how weak he was, how frustrated that he couldn’t make a pass at her. Ann was flattered.
That’s it, she thinks, pegging out her smalls savagely, I was a silly fool, wide open to his blarney. Not many boys were interested in her, back then. She thought perhaps her size put them off; who would want to walk out with a girl who only came up to his armpit? Or perhaps her father was a deterrent. She didn’t want to admit that, but knew it to be so. There had been Tony, a real boyfriend when she was training. He had come home with her one night, to meet her father. Ann had thought it was a lovely evening. Her father was happy that night, the lamb she cooked was delicious, Tony was pleasant and attentive. But next day he’d looked at her strangely.
‘You never said your father was Chinese.’
‘Only part Chinese,’ she’d protested. ‘Why?’
‘You never mentioned your Chinese blood.’ It was an accusation. He sounded hurt, upset.
‘For heaven’s sake, Tony,’ she’d said, angry with him, with his moodiness. ‘Whatever is it? I’m one quarter Chinese. One hundred per cent Pakeha. So what?’
They’d had a row. And then, to her amazement, he’d never wanted to patch it up. They never went out again. After that she was sensitive about bringing boys home. Her father asked after Tony and she’d had to make excuses.
But Stuart never seemed to care. In the long weeks when he was in traction, his great white cast strung up, pulleys and weights dragging the damaged bones and muscles into shape, he would watch her quietly as she came down the ward. She knew he watched her. His smile was always warm; he always joked with her, when other patients might criticise or complain.
Once, when she was washing him, his hand reached up to touch her breast. His eyes were so beseeching, so sweet, that she let it rest there for a moment, fearful of discovery but excited. After that, he often touched her, hidden behind the discreet curtains. Didn’t bother to hide his erection. If another nurse was rostered to wash him, he was disappointed, and let her know it. When his dragon of a mother came to take him home, Stuart had introduced Jeanie as if they were engaged. Jeanie was flattered, pleased. He was older than her, with a good job in a law firm. It was only later, after they were married, that she realised that he was not actually a lawyer.
Ann sighs. Walks back into the house with the empty basket. Get out of my head, Stuart. Don’t you dare invade Ann Hope’s comfortable life. She stamps out into the garden and attacks weeds savagely. Each uprooted plant is part of Stuart, left to wither in the sun. Gradually the rhythm soothes her galloping mind. The freshly turned soil smells sweet and damp. Soon she will sow spring vegetables. Already the broad beans are in need of staking. She forgets the invasion and becomes Ann Hope again.
But sitting over a pile of students’ books that afternoon, memories return to torment her. She rehearses again all the old questions. Why? Why did I give in to him? Was it pressure from her friends? They were all married or engaged. Perhaps she had felt this might be a last opportunity. And she really liked Stuart. He was fun; didn’t complain about his injury; was pleasant to her father. When her father produced a deposit on a house as a wedding gift, she was so touched she cried; Stuart put a gentle arm around her shoulder and thanked her father warmly. It was a lovely moment. Jeanie thought of it as the beginning of a wonderful life with both Stuart and John. Stuart didn’t even want to wait until he was properly back on his feet; he married her on crutches, which her friends found sweet and touching. His shooting club, grinning and cheering, made an archway with their rif
les. It was a happy day.
Ann’s pen flicks back and forth in her hand; the essay in front of her remains unmarked. Her eyes are fixed on the ticking clock on the wall but she views old scenes, a different time that has remained blessedly buried for many years.
Could she and Stuart ever have made a go of it? For a few months they did. They often set off to work together on Stuart’s new motorbike, went to the pictures, lazed on the beach in the weekends, made love. Stuart was a good, energetic lover. Inexperienced Jeanie loved it all. Especially the nights.
But then it seemed that the more Stuart recovered from his injury, the more difficult their relationship became. Jeanie invited John to their flat (Stuart didn’t want to buy a house just yet) a couple of times a week. Perhaps her father was lonely. He descended into one of his ‘quiet’ periods, speaking little, gazing at the carpet for minutes on end before answering a simple question. Jeanie was used to these times; would jolly him along, or ignore him. But Stuart became really irritated.
‘Why doesn’t he answer? I asked a civil question.’ Stuart would not accept that John was depressive. ‘He’s just doing it to annoy me. He doesn’t like me. Don’t invite him while he’s like this, Jeanie.’
But of course Jeanie had to. These were the very times when she was needed. Sometimes Stuart would stay at work if her father was invited. Or go to the pub.
Then the violence started. Jeanie was so shocked the first time he hit her, that she hit him straight back, as hard as she could, then ran out of the flat and over to her father’s place. Stuart had come home drunk, had criticised the meal, the state of the flat, her father; even Jeanie’s new hairdo. Nothing was right. When she answered back, he hit her.
Next day, he came into the ward and handed her a big bunch of flowers, gave her a lopsided smile, kissed her gently and left without another word. Of course she went back that night and cooked a special meal with candles and a bottle of wine. The love they made that night was wonderful.
Inheritance Page 10