Kehua!

by Fay Weldon

  ‘None of this is a joke,’ says Beverley, accused of homophobia, to Cynara, ‘and I take that rather amiss. I may be a hypocrite but so far as I am concerned your feminism has always been a sham. You just don’t like sex, and blame men.’

  ‘That is simply not true,’ says Cynara, and would have put the phone down but D’Dora, coming in (she liked to overhear Cynara’s conversations), gestures to her not to and picks up the extension phone. Beverley does not hear the click; her ears are playing up. So Beverley carries on. She would have done better to shut up.

  ‘If anyone’s to be pitied it’s poor Jesper. This absurd carry-on with D’Dora’s made the whole family look ridiculous. Are you really so desperate for a bit of sexual satisfaction? As for Lola, the poor girl actually believes she comes from a sperm bank.’

  ‘What do you know about it?’ asks Cynara, taken aback.

  ‘Oh for heaven’s sake,’ says Beverley. ‘Lola talks to Scarlet and Scarlet talks to me.’

  D’Dora, listening, makes a throat-slitting gesture – does she mean Beverley, Scarlet or Lola? Cynara fears for Lola, and is dis-tracted. She doesn’t want to quarrel with her grandmother one bit and can’t imagine why it is happening. She tries to concentrate.

  ‘Please don’t let’s argue,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry I said that about Harry. I know how upset you were when he died. If you’ll take back what you said about my not being a lesbian?’

  ‘But you’re not any kind of lesbian,’ says Beverley, dashing away the olive branch Cynara offered. ‘I don’t believe you’re even a feminist. You’re just another pig-headed, deluded Maidment. You’re like your father, any old cause will do so long as it upsets everyone.’

  Which of course was the one thing Beverley should not have said. This is the secret of secrets. That Winter Max, originally Julian Waxmann Maidment, somehow managed to impregnate his step-daughter Alice and so begat Cynara, a disaster which Beverley has not until now ever quite acknowledged to herself. Alice similarly has resisted all efforts by Cynara to elicit proper identification of her father.

  And if Cynara the committed feminist did indeed choose a sperm bank rather than her husband Jesper to conceive Lola, it would not be altogether surprising. Mothers do unto their daughters what has been done unto them. And Winter, after all, was only doing unto Alice what Arthur had done to Beverley way back when. Perhaps Beverley had even unconsciously anticipated the act, and in anticipating, made it the more likely?

  Be all that as it may, as a secret kept for nearly fifty years it was not something to be lightly revealed, and in its sudden and unexpected revelation created turmoil and event.

  How the kehua clattered and chattered. At Robinsdale their little bat feet pounded on the old glass and scratched it a little, and at Parliam Road they swung to another branch, of a lime tree nearer to the house, and a spatter of stickiness descended from the leaves on to D’Dora’s yellow Smart Car. The stickiness was due to a scale insect infestation and needs treatment, but Cynara has more to worry about today than this.

  Cynara puts down the phone, stunned, to think about what had just been said. She calls her grandmother over and over but gets only the busy tone. She calls her mother Alice and gets the answer-machine. She tells herself it doesn’t really matter who her father is. If it is indeed her grandfather, then he is dead, and she is who she is, just short of a quarter of the genes normally imported from another line of descent, and at least not the product of Alice’s rape at the hands of some psychopath, which she has sometimes imagined to be the case. The Maidments are a wealthy and respectable family. Her father was a hero, who died fighting a revolutionary cause, and her mother was of age and no blood relation. It could be a lot worse. But D’Dora wants some attention.

  ‘Who are the Maidments?’ D’Dora asks.

  Cynara says nobody, she doesn’t want to talk about it. D’Dora has been throwing out some of Cynara’s favourite kitchen utensils without as much as a by-your-leave – including the old aluminium pan Cynara kept especially for boiled eggs – and replacing them with her own, which look smarter but cook less well. She was talking of a civil marriage with Cynara as soon as the divorce from Jesper came through. She crushes all opposition before her.

  ‘If you wouldn’t mind just being quiet a little, D’Dora,’ says Cynara now. ‘I have various things to think about.’

  This gives D’Dora great offence. A row ensues. Insults are exchanged. Cynara pleads for peace and quiet because she has just discovered who her father is; D’Dora says Cynara is family obsessed. Cynara says S&M is a pastime for the sexually obsessed. D’Dora says Cynara is no fun at The Dungeonette and sexually repressed. Cynara says D’Dora is a sexual bully and emotionally repressed. D’Dora says she wishes she had never moved in. Cynara says she wishes she had never taken on the Pinfold & Daughters case and had never set eyes on D’Dora. D’Dora says it is a bit late now and grabs up the phone to ask Beverley about her homophobia and Cynara snatches the phone from D’Dora’s hand and throws it across the room where it breaks. Cynara then advances on D’Dora and slaps her hard, once on one cheek, once on the other, hard.

  ‘Shut up,’ Cynara says, ‘you perverted little cunt. What do you know about anything?’

  ‘One thing I know,’ says D’Dora, ‘is that your daughter left a message on the answerphone to say she’d just had sex with her uncle Louis and it was all your fault. I’m not staying in this horrid, cramped, dirty, dull little house a moment longer.’

  And she goes upstairs to pack.

  D’Dora leaving home

  Not only had both Cynara and Parliam Road been a disappointment to D’Dora, but the previous night she had encountered a beautiful, disdainful, young, handcuffed blonde with a big house in South Kensington who had raised her eyebrows in Cynara’s direction and said, ‘What, her? Why?’ The answer to D’Dora was now clear: why indeed?

  But before she started packing D’Dora looked up the Maidments on Google, and got from there to Winter Max and the Bolivian death which had made headlines, arrived at a few dates and reasonable conclusions and rang Alice. She didn’t even need a kehua to prompt her.

  D’Dora was from Llanberis in Wales, mind you, and had her own connections with the Cwn Annwn, the hounds of death. If she sometimes heard their growlings from underneath The Dungeonette club in the early hours, they could easily be dismissed as the noise of some repair train, heavier than usual, travelling and rumbling along the Northern Line where it runs beneath Charing Cross and the Embankment.

  Dogs of the Cwn Annwn, the Wild Hunt, had barked loudly enough on the night another of D’Dora’s ‘friends’, Gwyneth, had wandered along the tracks with Marcus the right-wing journalist, Beverley’s third husband, on the occasion of the launch of Marcus’ book, Slicing the Salami. Alas, poor Gwyneth had been too drunk to hear when the train approached, and Marcus was deaf to the sounds from the other side, and neither had leapt aside in time.

  The Wild Hunt was out in force that night, it being St John’s Eve, June 21st, and the moon was full. But no one takes any notice of this kind of thing here any more. In other countries the astrologers would have been out in force, shaking their heads at time and date, and insisting the book launch be on a different day.

  The Wild Hunt no longer sticks to its own territory but rides the railway tracks of Western Europe on its appointed nights. When the moon is full and clouds race across the sky, and you can hear the wail of the hounds rising and falling in the distance, then it is wise to take extra care with your step on the platform edge. By comparison to the Cwn Annwn of the northern lands, the kehua are mild and peaceful spirits.

  D’Dora digs Alice out of her hole

  Mischievous enough, however, to have D’Dora on the phone to Alice. Alice picks her mobile from her pocket where she stands on the banks of the lake at Rawdon, soothing her migraine, and watching the plump silvery trout leaping for midges and missing.

  ‘This is D’Dora, Cynara’s partner… I sound like a woman because I am a woman�
�� I thought you’d have realised by now your daughter was gay. Now I have a problem here – Cynara and I want children, and in order to decide which of us is to be the birth mother we need to know more about Cynara’s genetic inheritance than we do now. Is it the case that Cynara’s father is Julian Maidment, the hero of Bolivia, otherwise known as Winter Max?’

  And while Alice clung to her mobile wondering what sort of nightmare she was in, D’Dora went on to explain that it was more damaging to a child to be kept deliberately ignorant of the father by the mother she was entitled to trust, than to know she was the daughter of an incestuous relationship. She, D’Dora, was a psychiatric nurse and knew about these things. The concept of incest was a social construct: it took many generations of family interbreeding before faulty genes became dominant. Alice should not worry; Cynara was healthy enough other than a few sexual inhibitions, and Lola, Alice’s grandchild, whose father was from a reliable sperm bank, where donors were properly screened, certainly did not inherit these, on the contrary. Lola was currently having it off with Alice’s son-in-law Louis. D’Dora went on to explain that Beverley had confided in her, D’Dora, about Cynara’s parentage.

  ‘I’ve no idea who you are, but you’re just poison,’ said Alice to her unknown caller, ‘and I don’t believe a word you say. Just stay away from my Cynara.’

  Alice threw her mobile in with the fish, who splashed and darted off. And she prayed to Jesus for strength, and also to the Jesus of Malta who had looked after her and babysat her when her feckless mother Beverley and her friend Dionne were off at the cinema, modelling nude for the Photographers’ Club or making money as best they could.

  Alice had more stamina than you might suppose. If she kept away from the family it was not because of lack of love for them, as they assumed, but because of an excess of it. Incest, according to her further studies, was both an inherited tendency and a learned one. So normally she stayed away and hoped for the best. But she could see that if this mad, vindictive woman was running round and upsetting everyone, she had better venture back into family territory. The kehua, who lived on the branches of the vine in her nice new conservatory, and could have been mistaken by the casual onlooker for a bunch of grapes, were pleased.

  After the row was over

  After the row was over and Cynara, unaware that D’Dora was on the phone to her mother causing as much trouble as she could, was quiet again, there now seemed to be two sets of voices in her head. One was crying run, run, run, in their familiar panic – and this was obviously absurd because the more D’Dora insulted her home the fonder Cynara became of it, and where was there to run to? The other was more cheerful, like a backbeat now, a call to acceptance and a kind of mirthful exhilaration running along beside it, a delight in the wayward nature of existence, in the unexpected. The backbeat was, though Cynara was also unaware of this, the spirits, or wairua, of Cynara’s two boy children who had never come to term.

  The kehua are servants of the bloodline; they are really no more than spiritual sheepdogs, rounding the flock up, irritating and sometimes frightening though they can be. But the wairua are the real thing, spirits straight from the atua, the soul of the whanau, than which there can be no higher or more joyful level of existence. These unborn wairua, or noho-whare, brought into existence by Cynara and Jesper, though flushed down the loo by Cynara when their gender was revealed, are, once conceived, indestructible, immanent. They carry mirth and lightness with them, they are not angry with you: they understand your necessity; the unborn of the whanau are as strong as the undead, and they stay around to help if they can. ‘Get her out of here,’ Cynara’s two male unborn cried, ‘the bitch! How dare she!’

  Scarlet had been right: Cynara had allowed only one child, Lola, the female from the sperm bank, to come to term. But here were the other two at Cynara’s side, and the air around her shimmered with elation, as if she was in some deep dark-green kauri forest on the other side of the world where she had never been, where the clematis hung dazzling white and sparkling and the karimako, the elusive bellbird, suddenly sang its impertinent, beautiful song and was gone again. Really, 11 Parliam Road and the forest were one and the same if you let them be.

  ‘I’m off,’ said D’Dora, stomping downstairs with her backpack, hoping to be stopped. ‘I’ve just had a really interesting phone call with your mother.’

  ‘Go, go,’ was all Cynara said, laughing, ‘and take your crampons with you.’

  ‘I’ll come back for my stuff,’ said D’Dora, ‘when it suits me,’ and went.

  Cynara called Beverley, and apologised for putting down the phone and said yes, if Beverley wanted to take Lola in for a bit, she, Cynara, would be very grateful. D’Dora was moving out, but she, Cynara, needed headspace. She did not mention the Louis business. Lola was probably just trying to cause trouble, leaving messages on the answerphone in the hope everyone would hear.

  Beverley in her turn apologised for her faux pas. The secret of Cynara’s birth was not hers to reveal, but Alice’s. But she had to go now. She had just had a phone call from Gerry saying he was at Heathrow and coming over.

  How the kehua shrieked. In their excitement they fell off the cherry branch and crawled over to the kowhai tree and clung there, and felt instantly at home. It is a bushy tree endemic to New Zealand, and had grown from a cutting given to her by Beverley’s old friend Dionne years back, planted on a sheltered sunny slope of Robinsdale’s large garden, near enough to the stream to really flourish. The kowhai tree grows startling clusters of bright-yellow rattling seedpods, which hang and cluster for all the world like kehua, except the latter are a blackish grey. Hanging there, though, encouraged and invigorated by renewed contact with the once-familiar plant, now all but forgotten in this sooty land, Beverley’s kehua quickly adopted a pleasant yellowish tinge.

  Alice prepares to leave Lakeside Chase

  Meanwhile, up at Lakeside Chase, shocked by D’Dora’s phone call, Alice had decided to act. Her children needed her. She had no wairua, no unborn souls, hanging around to help and make her laugh – she was a serious and responsible person – but her kehua were calling her to action. Run, run, run, time to run! Down to the South, lose no time. Perhaps self-interest contributed to the kehua’s vehemence, if they felt like lightening up a little and becoming a bit more yellow than grey.

  Alice promptly organised her next day’s flight from Manchester to Luton, from whence she would go back to Robinsdale, her childhood home. Then she called Cynara to say she’d had a nasty phone call from a madwoman but had taken no notice. All the same she thought perhaps Cynara needed her help and she was coming down to visit in the morning. She would meet Cynara at Robinsdale.

  ‘But Mother,’ said Cynara, ‘are you sure? I am a lesbian. Your church will not approve.’ And she began to cry.

  Alice said that was irrelevant, it was only lesbian bishops who were a source of confusion to the Church; at least Cynara had a child, so now she was free to take her sexual pleasures where she liked; but she should just be a great deal more careful with whom she associated. Discarded lovers often knew where too many bodies were buried and could be vindictive.

  Cynara stopped crying in astonishment and said, ‘But you hate gays. You wouldn’t even come to Louis and Scarlet’s wedding. You thought everyone in the fashion industry were sinful perverts.’

  ‘What an extraordinary thing to say,’ said Alice. ‘I didn’t come to the wedding because I was too busy and it’s a long way and registry office weddings aren’t worth travelling to. They cancelled it anyway.’

  ‘Because you wouldn’t come,’ said Cynara.

  ‘That’s absurd,’ said Alice. ‘Scarlet was looking for excuses not to tie herself down, and I provided one. She was far too young. And as for you, there are things I need to tell you.’

  ‘About my father?’ asked Cynara.

  ‘No, no, no,’ said Alice impatiently, ‘about Luke.’

  ‘Who is Luke?’ asked Cynara.

  ‘My son,’ said
Alice, always, like her mother, one for a bit of drama. ‘Your brother.’

  ‘I look forward to it,’ said Cynara, faintly. ‘Is he a full brother?’

  ‘Nothing like that,’ said Alice. ‘A half-brother, younger than you, inconveniently begotten but nothing worse than that.’

  From which Cynara was able to conclude that yes, indeed, it was true. She, Cynara, was the child of the forbidden union between young Alice and the wicked, albeit idealistic, Winter.

  That done, Alice looked up a number in a file on her laptop marked ‘personal: do not enter’ and called it. After only three rings a man answered it, which seemed to take her aback a little. But he was healthy and quick, and sounded educated and rather pleasant.

  ‘Are you a Luke Addison?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes. Why? Who is this?’ He had an accent. She thought probably Australian.

  ‘I think you’ve been looking for me. At any rate you were a couple of years back. You may have changed your mind, of course. But I’m your mother.’

  A brief conversation followed, after which Alice called Beverley and said she would be in London the next day because she had things she wanted to ask, and things she wanted to tell. Would Beverley be at home?

  ‘Where else would I be?’ asked Beverley tartly. ‘You may have forgotten I’m immobile. But what do you want to tell me? There is such a thing as too much information. I was living a perfectly calm life until Scarlet turned up and told me she was leaving Louis. Since then it’s been mayhem. I can’t stand any more. Do you remember Gerry? He’s just called and said he’s on his way over.’

  ‘I thought he was married,’ said Alice.

  ‘He’s widowed,’ said Beverley. ‘Don’t be so suspicious.’