Kehua!

by Fay Weldon

  ‘I’m not suspicious,’ said Alice, ‘I just know the kind of thing that’s likely to happen next. I’ll come over tomorrow afternoon with Cynara and Scarlet – ’

  ‘Cynara, perhaps,’ said Beverley. ‘Scarlet, unlikely. Your younger daughter is off with an actor called Jackson Wright unless Louis has managed to stop her – really, Alice, you should take more responsibility for your children.’

  ‘I’m trying to,’ said Alice. ‘I’m coming over to tell you about Luke, my son.’

  There was a pause, gratifying to Alice, before Beverley spoke again.

  Out in the garden

  Ah, yes, Luke.

  In the back garden there had been a terrible row: a buzzard had brought down a jackdaw, and was squatting there on the lawn, treading the prey, tearing at its flesh with its beak, with that terrible defiant watchful toss of the head as it swallowed. The blackbirds were setting up their alarm, the loud chip-chip-chip they make when there’s danger about – first one, then others joined in, perching on the back of one teak garden bench, fluttering off to the next, settling on the overhanging branches where I saw the kehua in the storm; there were at least eight blackbirds. The racket was arresting. I’d no idea there were so many blackbirds in the garden; it was a real gathering of the clan. And then they got their act together and tried to drive the buzzard off. It finished its feed and disdainfully flew away, as if it didn’t notice the blackbirds mobbing and pursuing. I’d been watching from the basement window. Rex came down from the attic and we went out to look.

  ‘Poor thing,’ I said of the circle of black and grey feathers. They wouldn’t be there for long. The wind would take them and any bony remains be picked clean by armies of mice, and insects and squirmy things one seldom saw. All would be as if it had never happened.

  ‘We had duck for dinner last night,’ Rex reminded me.

  He went inside and I stayed out in the garden and thought about Luke. He’s come on board rather late in the day for a new character, but the whanau is calling. Who’s the buzzard? Jackson? Lola? D’Dora? Luke will lead us to him, or her.

  Luke is like Mr Mason in Jane Eyre, the pale stranger from the West Indies who suddenly arrives by coach to make everything clear about the mysterious mad woman in the attic. Cousin Clive, visiting the other day, observed that whereas Mr Rochester kept a mad wife in the attic, Rex lived in the attic and kept a sane wife (me) in the basement. I was reassured. Apart from this paranormal business, which has suddenly afflicted me, and with which I deal with admirable aplomb and scepticism for one who is its victim, I am otherwise perfectly, even notoriously, sane. But it helps to be told so.

  Well, here Luke is, and here he’ll have to stay. The long-lost child, waiting in the wings. Cousin Clive had suddenly appeared in my life one summer – adopted out of the family in an earlier generation – but still part of the whanau and now taken again into the bloodline.

  My ears are playing up a bit, but at least there’s no sign of kehua hanging anywhere in the branches. There’s not a bird to be seen; they’re keeping away, in mourning, shocked by the irruption of the buzzard into the routine of their lives. I’d clear away the grey mound for their sake, but it’s too disgusting. It will have to stay.

  It’s a bright day: the weather has been really pleasant since the storm and I’ve been keeping the basement window open. It’s a double window, badly in need of painting, and I reckon the ants have started in again at the crumbling filler where someone botched a mend. The sill is once again covered with black granules. The right frame opens; the left is fixed. When I push the frame out from inside it just clears the heads of the two straw birds Rex put outside on the grass to stare in at me from the garden as I work; he bought them in the bric-a-brac stall at the village fête to entertain me. Their eyes are beads, and catch the sun and glitter. I’m not quite sure about their friendliness, but they keep still.

  The basement has been moderately noisy from the other side lately; the steam iron hissing, the clatter of knives as they go into the knife box; the slow clank of hooves as some old nag comes round to the coal-hole, then the clatter of coal down the chute. They’re used to me: getting bolder, accustomed to me once again after my spell upstairs. But at least I’ve seen nothing, heard no voices. Now all I hear is things. That’s okay.

  But there is something strange. Both straw birds used to look at me from the left window. Now there’s one on the left and one on the right. Why is that? Who’s moved them? Why? They can hardly move of their own volition. At least they’re not jackdaws to reproach me about not burying their dead when I can. They’re ersatz birds, straw coloured, yellowy, not the strange pewter grey and black of the jackdaw. If it hadn’t been for the detail of the frame previously just clearing their heads as I opened the window, I would have assumed they’d always been positioned like that.

  But as it happens I do remember the detail. However, I will put it down, like so much else, disappearing keys, reappearing letters, as just one of those things. My computer, for example, is very prey to the ‘just one of those things’ syndrome. Why does the page-numbering suddenly disappear? Why does an extra blank page appear at the beginning of the text so there’s nothing on the screen, nothing, when I ask Word to bring me this novel, scaring me out of my wits that I’ve lost the whole thing – until Rex suggests I try scrolling down and there it is. Just one of those things.

  Decades ago when I lived near Glastonbury, not far from the overflow to the Chalice Well, where a trickle of sacred water dropped continuously from a pipe sticking out of the side wall on to a patch of ground – where, I must say, grew the prettiest wild flowers – I’d fill one of those green plastic watering sprays you use for pot plants with the sacred water, and use it to spray anything that went wrong – like the computer, or the Hoover, or a burnt saucepan, or a needle that refused to thread – and it always worked. Rex used to fill his car radiator from the sacred well overflow but I always thought that was somehow sacrilegious. It needed to be used for small things. Needles, house keys, letters, straw birds – even the vacuum cleaner is too large. Poltergeists prefer dustpans they can spill when no one’s looking. One moment the dust is in the pan – turn your back and the whole lot is scattered again. At least it is up here at Yatt House. I take it these things don’t happen in Oxford, where Professor Dawkins lives, and domestic objects all obey the immutable laws of physics. Enough.

  Just one of those things. Back to Luke.

  The convergence of the clan, the convening of the whanau

  Where’s everyone? Louis is sleeping. Scarlet is in bed with Jackson; now she has what she wants she is not sure that she wants him. She is, do remember, very young, and has been bothered by kehua since her birth. Don’t lose sympathy for her.

  Scarlet’s kehua has already settled in the alternating green and white leaves of the ornamental kolomikta kiwi vine which grows up towards the skylights from its vast deep-blue ceramic pot – and very pretty and exotic it is. Jackson’s penthouse was designed and furnished as a show flat for Campion Tower, and the designers forgot to take their show plant away, though they meant to. Rather like the secret NWC files in Robinsdale which the members forgot to remove. People leave the oddest things behind. Ask anyone who moves house, or joins a train and finds a CD with a hundred thousand personal NHS details on it when he goes to sit down.

  The kiwi vine started its existence in New Zealand so the kehua feels itself at home and is peaceful and sleeps when it really ought to be vibrating with run, run, run advice, as it was so eager to do when she was with Louis. The kehua so often get things wrong. They try, but are out of their depth.

  Scarlet lies awake while Jackson sleeps and snores out of his perfectly sculpted nose, and his full lips (are they surgically enhanced?) tremble as the breath escapes, and she feels lonelier than she ever has in her life before. She thinks of the two babies she didn’t have but destroyed in the womb, one at seven weeks, one at ten. Perhaps she did wrong? Perhaps if they’d been born these odd things
wouldn’t have happened to her? She would have ended up in an ordinary house, not Nopasaran: she might have been happy with Louis if it hadn’t been for the house. And he’d probably have married her even if she’d had two children with two different men and couldn’t go through with either. She should have really and truly married Louis; he might even have been prepared to change his life for her. Her breath caught and she had to try not to cry and wake Jackson. She preferred him asleep than awake. She was crying, she realised, not so much for herself as for her lost babies, and what they were missing. All the crap, true, but all the other things as well: sex, love, music, special-effects films – you needed children to go to films with, not children like Lola, but ordinary kids – they’d miss just being alive. Just being alive was pretty good.

  Thinking this, she felt comforted and suddenly less alone and in need of the mother who’d never seemed to want her. She could hear the rustle of leaves as the automatic air-conditioning switched itself on and played through the ornamental kiwi plant. No, reader, it was not for once her kehua stirring, but the arrival of reinforcements from the iwi: a couple of wairua, the spirits of her aborted babies, hanging around until their mother could rejoin the tribe and they could all be together again. Or perhaps it was that the attraction of the familiar green and white leaves had tempted them and they were prepared to nestle up against the whanau kehua, spirits of the unborn and the undead united. You have to be a bit careful of the wairua of the interrupted – like the kehua they can be tricky. If a bad tohunga got hold of them he could corrupt them and use them to damage Scarlet. But bad tohunga – or shamans, or medicine men, or witches, or wizards: those with malicious intent, anyway – are rare. Jackson may be bad, though he, like the buzzard, is hardly to blame for doing what it is in his nature to do, but he is no tohunga, no expert in sacred rites. Scarlet falls asleep.

  Louis’ mother Annabel is in France, looking through MetaFashion’s books and wondering if it is time to sell it, or alternatively Nopasaran if anyone would buy it in its crumbling state. A pity he couldn’t have married a girl with some money or background, instead of getting snared by this bright, brash girl who would do nothing for him except keep others more suitable out. She liked Scarlet, but she could not admire her.

  In Paris Dionne went out on to her patio in the moonlight and watered her plants; she felt they needed watering, but at ten at night? That was unusual. She gave a little to the kowhai bush, but not much: just a little, it would say to her, only a little, careful!, feeling apparently as Dionne does when a hairstylist advances on her with the scissors. Dionne talked to her plants: she got on well with them and they with her. The kowhai bush was the one from which Beverley took a cutting fifteen years back, which has since grown into a proper tree in Robinsdale, almost as attractive to the kehua as the green and white kiwi vine in Campion Tower. Dionne’s kowhai is still in a large pot, and somewhat root-bound. Twenty years back it was presented to a diplomat lover at a civic reception, when France was trying – not very hard – to repair relationships with New Zealand after the nuclear tests in the Pacific and the Rainbow Warrior affair.

  During a ‘cultural tour’ of the South Island they had stopped off at a small town called Amberley for afternoon tea – a meal unknown to the visitors, consisting as it did of various elaborate types of cake – and at the civic centre had been presented with a cutting from a kowhai bush, New Zealand’s national plant, in a pot made by a renowned local potter out of local clay. New Zealand does not in fact officially have a national plant, but New Zealanders know it to be so.

  Do you see where I am going, reader? Saving us a trip to New Zealand for which I have neither time nor energy just at the moment? I have to get out of the basement soon; it is becoming apparent that I am the haunter here, not the hauntee.

  All kinds of things conspire to stop one writing a novel – idleness, babies, alcoholism, men trouble, but this is a new one. It went suddenly dark in here just now and then I saw a flickering candle flame and heard a single bell struck and I’ll swear a man’s voice said something like, ‘We judge her damned, we declare her excommunicate,’ and a book thudded closed – a heavy Bible? – and the heavy male voice said, ‘So be it.’ They’ve been down here exorcising me with bell, book and candle! I feel really indignant. And rather angry, and thought, ‘I’ve a right to be down here as much as this lot, bugger them,’ and resolved to stay.

  The light went on again: Rex came down to ask was I okay? A fuse had blown all the lights in the house but he had fixed it. I’ve just got to get on. I am not as easily got rid of as they think. If my hair turns white overnight, these days one need only go to the hairdresser. Where were we?

  The diplomat offered the plant to Dionne on their return, since his wife might not appreciate it, and Dionne, who really loved him, put it in the sunniest, most sheltered corner of the patio, where it did well enough, but perhaps with not enough root space, and so remained comparatively small.

  ‘If I truly love a man,’ Dionne once said to Beverley, ‘I like to grow something in his honour. I can’t have his children – for me children simply will not do: I don’t want to upset the wives – but I can nurture what I have left of him.’

  When Beverley came to stay after Harry’s death they sat and drank their coffee outside on the patio, and Beverley marvelled at the wild tangle of flowers and creepers Dionne had created; tendrils crept into the apartment, under windowsills and beneath the door. Even Dionne’s hair, now she was old, clung like thin tendrils against her scalp.

  Falling in love again, never wanted to, what’s a girl to do, sang Dionne then in her already cracked voice, can’t help it. Beverley remembered then how when they had gone to the pictures when they were young, and had left Baby Alice in Jesus’ care, and happened to go to the thirties’ film The Blue Angel because there was nothing else on, Dionne had said, ‘That’s what I want to be, that’s how I want to live.’ Dionne had made Marlene Dietrich her idol, rejoicing as she did to see the old man in love humiliated, made to crow like a cock to prove his love, then spurned. Beverley had been rather appalled, but Dionne had slapped her on the wrist for being so provincial. It was the only quarrel they had ever had. As well Dionne had not had sons, Beverley had thought then, she would have given them a terrible time. Just as well she had plants instead.

  When Beverley came to stay her kehua chose the kowhai bush on which to hang amongst familiar yellow seedpods, naturally enough. They do so long for home; who of us doesn’t, the living and the properly dead, the unborn and the undead, all of us, whatever mode we’re in, spirit or flesh? And of course Beverley, moved by some childhood recollection, once took a seedling from Dionne’s patio home in Paris to Robinsdale, wrapped in damp newspaper, with some wet earth still clinging to its roots.

  On the day little Beverley ran one-two, one-two from the red death kitchen to Rita, the kowhai had been in yellow pod, and the whole dusty road alight with gold. Death is often accompanied by beauty: nature celebrates the passing by making the sunset more glorious, the moon more mysterious – or perhaps it’s just that in the presence of death the senses become more acute, and shock makes time seem to change its pace.

  But Gerry is coming

  Beverley has limped to the bathroom and back – she is more mobile than she lets on – and done her face; not much make-up, it can make matters worse at her age, changed her wrap to a silky one by Natori and fluffed up her hair. She is really grateful that Scarlet washed it for her this morning, and hopes the girl is getting on all right. Beverley even gets to the front door and puts it on the snib for easy entry before getting back on her sofa, looking as delightful as anyone of nearly eighty can. How old is Gerry? Sixty-seven? Well, she has the house and a life; he hasn’t. Will she turn him away, or will she forgive him for Fiona and take him in? She’ll see what she feels like when he gets here.

  And then the doorbell rings and she calls, ‘Come in,’ and a man enters who is not Gerry. He approaches cautiously and politely, stretching o
ut his hand. It is shaking with emotion. He is long and lanky and in his mid-thirties, has a domed forehead and for a moment Beverley is reminded of her stepfather and possibly, probably, father. Taller, rangier and quicker moving, but still Arthur.

  ‘Are you my grandmother?’ he asks. ‘Mrs Fletzner, née McLean?’

  ‘You must be Alice’s Luke?’ she enquires, cool as a cucumber. Run, run, run, rattle the kehua in the kowhai tree. Cucumber sandwiches equals knife, equals blood on the sand. But Beverley can’t run; bad knee.

  ‘That was quick,’ she says. ‘I’ve only just got to hear about you. But that’s Alice for you, she never tells you the important things.’

  ‘I’m glad she’s called Alice,’ he says. ‘A pretty name. She said she’d be at this address tomorrow. The kids and I are staying around the corner, isn’t that a coincidence? I just had to be sure. I don’t want her to get away. She could change her mind.’ He has a New Zealand accent.

  ‘Quite a coincidence,’ Beverley says coolly. ‘But I don’t think she’ll change her mind. My daughter is a very consistent kind of person. Why don’t you go back to them now and come again tomorrow at the time she arranged. I may say without consulting me.’

  ‘I have three children,’ he says, unabashed, as he leaves. ‘That’s three more great-grandchildren for you; aren’t you pleased?’

  The whanau are gathering. The clans are coming home. Their energy is restoring Beverley. It is just as well because when the phone goes yet again as she undresses for bed it is Lola on the other end, and she will need every scrap of strength she has, both morally and physically.

  Lola is weeping on the other end of the phone. Beverley is accustomed to her whining, moaning, yelling, sniggering, jeering, reproaching and snarling, but she has never heard Lola actually crying, let alone in terror and panic, as she is now. Beverley has reared innumerable children but has never heard anything quite like this. She is at once alert.