by Fay Weldon
Coromandel is the peninsula that sticks its little finger out into the sea at the top right of New Zealand’s North Island. It is hot, sunny, romantic, craggy, wild and beautiful, and when Beverley was a child, and moved up here from Amberley in the South Island, with her adoptive parents, Arthur and Rita, it was still very much pioneering country. The nation is proud of its past, as well it might be. Its ghosts are plentiful and acknowledged. Even today reports of ghosts, presences, spirit orbs and so on are frequent, though there they seldom involve servants; Kiwis, as New Zealanders like to call themselves, never having been, like European forebears, in the habit of keeping others in servitude.
One hundred and seventy or so years ago, around the time Yatt House was built, emigrants were fleeing the country to escape oppression, poverty, dismal weather, agricultural depression, bad government, and indeed the servant culture, the better to build a new and better land. The indigenous people, the Maori, tried to reason with them, deal with them and share with them, but it ended with war and a good deal of bitterness, and it may well be that the paranormal, which features so much on today’s TVNZ, does indeed still linger. If modern New Zealanders are in the habit of seeing or sensing what is not quite there, the outward manifestation of the inner distress of the past, it is not surprising.
More so even than around Glastonbury down the road from us, site of ancient Avalon, though there it’s pretty bad. You can be sure a great deal of bloodshed, general mayhem and Dark Ages bitterness went on around there, even leaving aside what happened to the Abbot of Glastonbury a thousand years later. He thought he could appease Henry VIII by turning the other cheek, paying him the dues Thomas Cromwell demanded and more, not arguing. The only result was that the King, seeing there was no resistance, came in, seized all valuables, knocked down the Abbey, and beheaded the Abbot on the top of the Tor, so his head rolled down the hill to come to rest at the site of the school one of my children went to for a time. Spirits abound here too.
It is not surprising if when Beverley was a child, taniwha still lurked in the deep forest pools, tohunga flourished, kehua hovered above the hapless heads of the unabsolved, and nested in the bushes, and could emigrate if necessary to Robinsdale, and 11 Parliam Road, NW2, where Cynara and Lola (and D’Dora, but she has her own ghosts) have their homes, to Alice’s home, Lakeside Chase in the North, to Nopasaran, and inevitably, should Scarlet ever get there, and I am beginning to think she will, to the Campion Tower penthouse.
Beverley was no Maori, just a pakeha, a white person. But Kitchie, dying, will have prayed in desperation to all available powers for the safety of her child, and a three-year-old in any culture is a three-year-old worthy of care, so such spiritual beings as were in the neighbourhood may well have felt obliged to take her on as one of their own, birthright or not. Christianity still lay lightly on the land at that time. The pretty Anglican church in Amberley, built in 1877 on Maori lands, with love and gratitude to God for bringing them to this fertile land, was torn down by a hurricane in 1899 so it had to be rebuilt, and a few years later fire destroyed the church school, so it may well be that the God of Israel was having a hard time laying down His rules and rituals in this Southern clime. Be that as it may, Amberley kehua will have been on major alert that night in 1937 when murder was committed, as they are whenever violent and sudden death occurs.
The trouble was compounded because the house in Amberley where this murder happened was never properly purified, nor, indeed, were the bodies of the dead. The Christian rituals were not adequate. The karakia, prayers of exorcism, were not spoken. The ritual spraying of water never happened. The local kehua could not escort the deceased home and, the way I see it, attached themselves instead to the desperate little morsel of life that was Beverley, and thereafter did their duty by her. Decades later they were still there, hoping to chivvy her back to join her hapu, to find her urupa, her beautiful place, to be eventually with the whanau. They would follow her to the ends of the earth until it happened, until one day she finally chose to up sticks and make for home, and then they could get home too. Half blessing to her, half curse, her kehua welcomed change, anything to hasten the day. Run, Beverley, run! It was in their interests that she did.
Aroha and Tahuri call by briefly and unexpectedly, on their way to stay with friends in the West Country, and I come up from the basement for air, and we have coffee in the kitchen. Tahuri goes downstairs to see if the dried-up daddy-long-legs is still there on the windowsill and to my shame comes back to report that it is. She says she doesn’t like it down there and, when asked why, claims she has seen a kehua. Her mother assures her there are no such things. She loses interest. For her it is not so big a deal.
‘But if there were,’ I ask Aroha, ‘and you could catch kehua like the measles, would your children and your children’s children catch them too?’
Aroha says she supposes yes, since they too would be whanau. Family. Ghosts and spirits in many cultures, she points out, are used as metaphors for a hereditary dysfunction: curses last even unto the seventh generation: she cites et ta grandmère!, the mysterious French insult. Things come out of your family history to accost you. The present is always haunted by a past which needs to be acknowledged, purified. So I can see I am on the right track. And that the shower as Beverley washed her hair and stood naked under flowing water, together with Scarlet’s inadvertent blessing, could indeed shift something in the scheme of things. Certainly even this partial purification stirred up the kehua, pulled them back from listless dormancy, gave them a whiff of the possibility of change. Surges of natural affection have great power in the unchancy spirit world. Beverley now finds herself able to face one or two facts about her past, which hitherto she had not.
When Beverley was seventeen and fled her adopted whanau to the Antipodes, she assumed, as the young do, that she would be able to start a new life fresh over, but no. See it like this: that kehua came after her, with their naggings and their dubious advice, and so it was never really a new life, just a variation of the old. The trauma when she was three, as Kitchie died in a welter of draining life blood, and the run, run, run instruction which made her daughter’s stout little legs run one-two, one-two, white knees pumping, to safety, could never be quite forgotten either by Beverley or her kehua. Weakened and dispersed over decades as her kehua were, resigned to sitting it out a long way from home, they revived on occasion to parrot the phrase. Sometimes they were heard, sometimes not. Sometimes it could be misconstrued as kill, kill, kill. As Aroha pointed out that day on my basement stairs, when the subject of the kehua first came up, they are not all that bright, being dead.
But Beverley was lucky to hear them loud and clear on her seventeenth birthday, and did indeed respond to them, and just as well. That was in Coromandel, when her kehua were nourished by their native soil, and strong. On later occasions their advice was not necessarily good. This is the problem with ‘the other side’. It is all too prone to error, misjudging what goes on in our real world. The connections are often faulty. The keys that Uri Geller twists are no good for opening doors, the spoons he bends won’t scoop dessert, the watches he stops won’t tell the time, the worst ghosts in the night can do to you is turn your hair white. What’s the use of that? The Church of England provides ‘deliverers’, once called exorcists, to free buildings of lingering spirits but does so reluctantly and with as little publicity as possible. Take these things seriously and they become too serious. Write about them and they may become true. But I won’t dwell on that.
But I will just mention that in 1987 I wrote about a three-year-old who escaped alive from an air crash: she was in the very back of the plane with the smokers – those were the days – and the tail broke off and circled down like a sycamore leaf and landed in mud. ‘Oh come on now!’ said my editors, but a couple of months later a four-year-old was sole survivor of the crash of Northwest flight 255 in Detroit, Michigan. ‘It’s where the toddler sat that allowed her to survive,’ a spokesperson said. The child wa
s seated in the tail of a plane which came down in mud. And even as I write this they’ve just picked out of the sea a six-year-old sole survivor of an aircraft flying into the Yemen.
The run, Beverley run advice is embedded in her consciousness – much as today’s journalists are ‘embedded’ in a war, as if the army was conscious of itself as an entity with a single personality, rather than a muddle of dangerous activity. One way or another the kehua’s admonitions are, years later, still fluttering round Beverley’s head, beating her skull with their shadowy wings, though by now she is so old her legs will scarcely carry her anywhere. Immobility traps her. On occasion she may even have heard Kill, Beverley, kill before you are killed. If so perhaps the mother’s kehua linked with the father’s, he being the perp, to use the language of US cop fiction. The perpetrator. The perp and the taniwha are the same kind of creature, thrown up by the dark pools of any culture: destroyers and protectors both, villain and hero, like the Mafia boss. The thing that frightens you, and threatens you, yet keeps you in order, that’s the taniwha.
It is conceivable that whenever Beverley gave birth the kehua split and multiplied and travelled, even in this strange new Antipodean land of piled-up concrete, mist and rain. A whole tribe of them by now, clustering round Beverley’s female bloodline, embedded no doubt in the mitochondrial DNA, coming down through the female line, prodding and murmuring, Run, Alice, Cynara, Scarlet, Lola, run, run, run, so they all hear it and partly hear it. It’s in their heads as they wake up.
Look at Scarlet this morning, with Lola egging her on. One long Let’s get out of here. They run instead of turning and facing. Fair enough in a three-year-old – quite right not to turn and look: who else could have been in that slaughter room? – but scarcely appropriate in adult women. Even Alice in her turn has chosen to run; if she sings hymns loud enough she can blot out the voices. Richie, being Beverley’s son, and male, will have been spared them.
Be that as it may, we can be satisfied that the ritual purification in the marae, the tribal meeting house, did not happen as it should. The burial in the Anglican church of Amberley did not suffice. Too few people attended; the vicar was too old to understand what was going on, having been told only by the Bishop in Christchurch that the young man was not to be buried in consecrated ground, but only the young woman. It seemed so odd and unkind an instruction that the vicar told the churchwarden who told the gravedigger to bury them both together. And the gravedigger chose outside the wall because the ground there was softer and easier to dig and he too was old and tired. Whatever the rites, from whatever religion, and however apparently unreasonable, they need to be properly observed.
It is possible, on the other hand, that when Scarlet played the shower over her grandmother’s body, some part of the purification ceremony was completed, and the hovering kehua just left Beverley and went to Scarlet, because Beverley is old and tired, and Scarlet young and vigorous, in the same way a magnetic current leaps from what is weak to what is strong. We will see.
And again, the question of why the kehua claimed little Beverley as their own in the first place may need more explanation. Kehua do not usually bother the pakeha. Perhaps it was more than pity; perhaps the little blonde girl had just played in the yellow, sandy soil too much, and they claimed her only as she ran along the dusty road, one-two, one-two, in her little cotton blue and white check dress with the white collar, and then went back to claim Kitchie and Beverley’s father too, chattering and clattering, summonsed by the sudden violence of their demise.
We find it as hard to understand the motivation of the restless undead as they find ours.
Down here writing
The weather’s getting warmer. The wind has switched to the southwest. The basement ghosts are coming into their own again. Just as I had begun to be confident that the earlier phenomena were nothing but this old house adapting to the weather with creaking joists and contracting plumbing, and that all the new fictional characters I was bringing to life on the page just happened to be throwing up random Mavises and Cooks and Mr Bennetts, I am obliged to rethink. Even as I write this I see a pattern emerging on the old faded striped wallpaper I stare at when I raise my head from the keyboard. It looks like a face: round large eyes, a slash for a mouth, shaggy hair. A rather cruel face. I look again and it’s just splodges of damp: of course. All the same, it wasn’t nice.
It’s a wet and windy March: the drains outside this window blocked last week and there was quite a flood; rainwater flowed down the concrete stairs from the garden to basement level, and under the back door into the corridor, and was only held back when it reached the stone step up to this room where I work. Like the major traumas of the past, these events are never quite over. Mop up as we will, now I have faces on damp wallpaper, alarming me. I’m going upstairs for some coffee. I turn off my laptop. I do not want anyone who does not understand it to see what’s on the screen. The face does not look as if it belonged to anyone computer-literate.
Novels do not drop ready written from the skies. They have to be written in real time. Your couple of hours’ reading is my half-year’s work. Don’t think I’m grudging you – get to roughly the halfway word-count and the process begins to be enjoyable. You know enough about your characters, and what they are going to do next, to stop feeling anxious and insecure and accept them, even taking pleasure in their company. Like Scarlet at the moment, I’d rather have Jackson, rat that he is, than uptight Louis – though I can un-uptight him at will, tilting the balance of choice in his favour. And I know pretty much by now how Lola is going to meet her come-uppance. At five o’clock this morning I was startled awake by the clear realisation of what was going to happen at the end of the book. I sat upright in bed like someone in a cartoon, hair sticking up.
There is a degree in which novels will write themselves if you allow them to, but the process of allowing them to do so is tiring, difficult, and registers with the writer as really hard work. You use bits of the brain which are not normally exercised; it’s like taking a strange dog for a walk on the end of a lead: it either charges ahead in the wrong direction, or has to be tugged behind, or turns and snaps at your ankles, or worse, just sits down on its haunches and stares at you. When all you were doing in the first place, in taking the dog for a walk, was fulfilling some social obligation – a favour you owe the neighbour who looked after your cat, or your friend who is sick. It’s bitter. But by the time you get the creature home again, you are normally on good terms, albeit exhausted. I am on good terms with this novel.
I wasn’t sure at first about the kehua business but it becomes more and more convincing. It is as plausible a way of explaining the way some of us turn our lives into a mess as any therapist’s notion of compulsive behaviour. The sins of the past, the traumas that our forebears endured, come back to haunt us, like stains through wallpaper. If you don’t bother to strip the old wallpaper off, but cut corners, just putting up new over old, it looks fine at first, but give it a bit of damp and eventually the old pattern shows through and you are left with a mess and have to start all over again. I can see the troubles of my own life, forget Scarlet’s, as being due in great part to the tragedies and traumas that afflicted my own family’s past, though they did not include murder. Their restless ghosts are still with us; we try to forget them, but they speak to us in our sleep.
End of coffee break. Back to the laptop.
Today’s New Zealand is no longer a country of embattled pioneers; it is regarded by the rest of the world as the most socially conscious and peace-loving nation in the world. The rich myth and legend of the Maori peoples feed into today’s culture, though the battles on the way were fierce. If you go up to Coromandel these days, up to the subtropical North, where the pohutakawa trees line the rocky coast, and the dolphins sport in a warm sea, and in the deep dark kauri forests where the tui birds break the silence and the bellbirds chime, you could well believe that the spirit of the taniwha has been put to sleep. But it is too much to hope that, wi
th Scarlet’s inadvertent blessing and the purification of the shower, the kehua hanging around Beverley’s head could finally have been satisfied and gone home. Resolution is not so easy.
The modern translation of all this being ‘The tendency to dysfunction in a family is hereditary, until therapy undoes the traumas of the past.’ Without therapy it may take several generations for the family to, as they say, ‘move on’. And yet ‘moving on’ is such a giving up, such a disgustingly timid denial of the realities of the past, of rage and discontent and vigour, such a flaccid response to the savagery of those Maori wars – while Hone Heke’s rebellion was being put down, this house was being built – such a welcoming of entropy, I am reluctant to embrace it.
I do not mean to be defeated. I’ve gone back down to take my seat in my spooky room, haunted both by the ghosts of my imagination and whoever once lived and worked here, and sure enough, the face on the wallpaper is gone. It has dried out. I left the central heating radiator on full blast.
‘Then fancies flee away.’ I sing to myself Bunyan’s hymn, To Be a Pilgrim: ‘I’ll labour night and day…’
Hobgoblin and foul fiend, I’ll have no more of you. Tap, tap, tap goes my keyboard. I shift in my typist’s chair to ease the ache in my back. I expect you feel the same, Mavis, as you bend to sweep the grates. And you’re younger than me in one way, but a hundred years older in another. I hope I’m not inadvertently discommoding you, by even thinking of it.
Everything is going to be fine. No moans from Mavis, no untoward noises. I tell myself I have set my own kehua to rest. Then I hear barking. But there are no dogs who live round here. I am instantly paranoiac. But it’s not a whining, complaining irritating bark – rather that of an excited dog playing a game of catch in the garden with the Bennetts’ children, Ernest, Thomas and William. A kindly-looking dog, a black-and-white Welsh border collie, walks by the window: not exactly walks, more like gliding, as if attached to a moving band. I take it to be Bonzo, which means our friend Martin his owner is upstairs having a cup of coffee. But I didn’t hear his car drive up. And Bonzo usually walks by from the other direction – out the back door, in the front. This dog is walking in the opposite direction. His white patches are differently arranged. It’s not Bonzo. Bonzo is older and has a limp. Then the dog on the moving band is past the window and gone. But it’s not on a moving band, of course; what I saw was a dog walking from the knees up – the ground level will have risen since its original passed by this window. Oh my God, too much knowledge.