The Larnachs

by Owen Marshall

  William tells me that often he sees acquaintances in quite a different light after hearing my opinion of them. Like obsequious Mr Bulte the shipping agent, to whose house we were invited on several occasions. He did his best to entertain and flatter us, arrange the delivery of fine wines, yet he spits on the pavement and speaks to his subdued wife cuttingly when he thinks they are alone. ‘You know nothing at all about anything, you stupid woman,’ I heard him say while waiting behind the carriage. I made sure there were no more visits. I will not be in the company of a man who talks to his wife, or any woman, in that manner. William was at first taken aback that I should be adamant in excluding a particular person from our house or company. He is accustomed to making those decisions. But when I put forward my reasons, he agreed with me.

  ‘I can see you intend to be the very modern and equal wife,’ he said, ‘even conscience for us both perhaps, and I love you all the more for it. I too hate cruelty and malice.’

  In the main, those first few months in Wellington were both happy and busy. William is gregarious by nature, as a young man sometimes uproariously so according to his friends and family. He doesn’t touch liquor now. I think this is because of Mary’s bouts of drunkenness, though we do not talk of that, or her. He likes people about him, and to be at the centre of the group. We were much in society in Wellington, and enjoyed the purchase and fitting out of our new house in Molesworth Street. William would have made all the decisions down to the last stool, curtain cord and doily, I think, had I not asserted myself, but he accepted with good grace my right to have opinion on everything within the home, especially once he realised from the comments of others that my taste was appreciated. Had I not taken responsibility for the furnishings, I fear that the rooms would have been stocked with unwieldy leather-buttoned chairs and settees such as he is familiar with from clubs and public sitting rooms — of the best quality admittedly, but not at all what I was after.

  In the interviews to find servants, I took the initiative also. Molly decided to come with me from my home, even though I told her she would not be housekeeper. She is a steady young woman, and not one to tittle-tattle about the lives of her betters. I like her, and to have someone familiar to me in the new house has made transition easier. Of the other people we shall see, but Cook has been recommended by my friend Doris Johnston’s family, and so far has pleased us all.

  William was considerate and attentive to me, despite his obligations as chairman of the royal commission investigating the Public Trust Office, and the continuing concern for his investments as hard times come to the country. His defeat at the elections last year does not appear to bother him and he says that public service has always been to the detriment of his financial dealings. Business is very important to him, but it is the one significant concern he has in which I have little aptitude, and less interest, apart from running an efficient household. In all public issues on the other hand, I ensure I am fully informed, and able to debate them with William, or anybody else, no matter what their station.

  When in Wellington we saw many friends, and both the Wards and Seddons are frequent visitors to Molesworth Street: the Seddons, in fact, are our neighbours. Joseph and Richard consider themselves connoisseurs of a dinner and the latter is very fond of euchre. I am expected to play the piano, with the others gathered about me afterwards to sing. Louisa Seddon is Australian born, a strong-looking woman who wears heavily patterned dresses and has given up a waist. She has a deal of perception and awareness of political issues, but has been kept from much involvement and making the most of herself by having a family of six daughters and three sons. I think she imagines I will follow suit. Even without so many children, I doubt if Seddon would encourage her to be active in politics. He is more conservative than William, or my late father, in his view of a wife’s role. Ballance, the premier, is not a well man, and William says Seddon is now the driving force.

  Joseph Ward is about my own age, and we have a good deal in common. He is very much the coming man. His wife Theresa, who is a decade younger, could pass for the daughter of William or Seddon. I wonder what she makes of them? She is tall, elegant and favours large, splendid hats. Although perfectly correct and agreeable company, she is not yet a confidante for me.

  Thomas Cahill remains William’s closest companion, and was often with us in Wellington. He is a handsome man with an easy and obliging manner. I like him. He is lively and interesting to talk to, but I see also that there is a certain calculation in his cultivation of William and other people of influence, and he receives significant official appointments. Because of his profession he is often called upon to attend the most bizarre and horrific deaths. This keeps his name in the papers, and also provides the stories on which he dines out. But he is no bore, and takes a sincere interest in the lives of his friends — unlike some who use them only as a sounding board for their own concerns. Thomas is also musical and well read, and has a fund of social gossip from his wide acquaintanceship for which he expects me, as a woman, to be avid. We enjoy our frequent talks, but, I feel, share a slight wariness of each other’s intelligence. As he is so close to William, it is important that I have him as my friend.

  ‘Can we be trusting towards each other?’ I asked him, when he came to visit soon after the honeymoon. ‘Surely we both want all that is best for William. You’re his closest companion, and I’m his wife. There’s no competition in that for me, and I hope you feel the same.’

  ‘I do indeed,’ he said. He appeared a trifle startled by my frankness, but he and I need an understanding, and I think we have begun well enough. He shares his love of poetry with me, and I imagine he writes it also. I will broach that with him when we know each other better.

  I hoped that, when we moved to Otago after the commission ended, William’s positive spirits would continue, that we could make a place for ourselves in the somewhat watchful community here, and that, more important, we would develop that intimate understanding that would make time together more meaningful than spending it with acquaintances.

  All, however, has been thrown into painful disarray by Kate’s death. William loves all his children, sometimes too unconditionally, but Kate was his favourite. Plain, sweet Kate, who I had hoped would come with us to Dunedin. Alice and Colleen dislike me not for myself, but because I am not their mother. Donald, a country away, I know feels the same, but perhaps because of fear that I threaten his prospects of inheritance. Well, maybe they dislike me personally as well, although, however amiable I am, it would make no difference to them.

  I was coming to share William’s love for Kate, and she and I spent much time together in Wellington after the honeymoon, but only a few months later she caught typhoid and died within five weeks. A nurse herself, she was very brave. When I visited her in hospital she would insist she was getting better, talk of what changes should be made at The Camp when her father and I moved down here, or of musical events we could attend in the capital during our stays there. She enjoyed music, though, as for her sisters, too much money has been spent on poor teachers. Rossini was her favourite, which showed her innate taste was sound. One evening while we sat and waited for William to come from a bank meeting, she told me she was happy for us, for the marriage. ‘Father needs people to love, and to love him back, but can’t seem to say it,’ she said.

  ‘He loves you a great deal,’ I said.

  ‘And he loves you. He’s been lucky and unlucky, hasn’t he. Nothing’s just ordinary for Father, but a lot of people don’t realise all he’s been through,’ Kate said. ‘What happens to him often seems to be on a bigger scale — the good things, but the bad too. He’s happier with you than he’s been in a long time.’

  That was Kate. She could not have known how much it meant to me to have that support, and she gave it while suffering from high fever and stomach pains, and being unable to eat. Even in her own agony, she worried about causing distress to her father, whom she loved above all. Some people recovered from the fever, the doctor said.
Would that Kate had been one of them. What purpose is there in such a death?

  William suffered enormously, despite an effort to be manly. Sometimes in the evening I would look across and see his tears glistening in the light, though he would be talking of public matters, or I would come into his study, and find him in the darkness with head bowed.

  We came down south with the casket on the Hinemoa, and I kept close to him for the whole voyage in case he leapt overboard. It sounds absurd, exaggerated, but not so. Once we reached home he was in virtual seclusion at The Camp for three months. All the money worries he has are nothing compared with the loss of his daughter. I know some acquaintances consider him a blustering and vain man, but if they could see him mourn his daughter, they would understand his capacity for feeling. After Kate died he laid flowers on her breast. Her body was placed in a glass coffin, which was displayed in the ballroom before the funeral. It was overly dramatic perhaps, but the emotion was completely sincere.

  Most people see him as the big man, with resources and abilities beyond their own, but the risks and the shocks are greater also. Two wives lost through sudden illness, then Kate as well. Her death is a blight on all of life. William never expresses it, but I think he fears it is in some way a punishment for our marriage; for disregarding convention and gossip, for trusting to fortune and the goodwill of others.

  ‘Were we too happy, Conny?’ he asked. ‘Why to God does happiness demand such a high price?’

  ‘You did everything a father could,’ I said. ‘You did all possible and Kate loved you for it.’

  ‘I still hear her voice. I hear the footfall that was hers alone.’

  ‘Because you loved her.’

  ‘How she suffered at the end, my poor girl, and there was nothing I could do,’ he said.

  In the Molesworth Street house we sleep in the same room. At The Camp William has his own room on the second floor, flanked by bedrooms that had belonged to Eliza and Mary. Does a man ever understand how a new wife feels when brought into the home of her predecessor? The Camp is a mansion laid out like a huge stage set for a company of actors to which I do not belong. And so solid, personal and numerous are the props that they seem to call up the presence of those who have moved among them. Not just the phantom of one wife, of course, but poor Mary too. I say poor Mary because I can never see her memory a threat. Mary, who lived on the margin of her half-sister’s life with William, who married him after Eliza’s death more from mutual convenience than passion, who had no children, and who followed her sister to the grave within six years. And she occasioned the rumours that give people such pleasure, even as they feign reluctance to credit them, or pass them on. The servants sniggered about the sisters’ two rooms, one each side of the master bedroom, and wider and better society discussed the propriety of a man marrying his deceased wife’s sister.

  People from all stations in life thought to make insinuations in my presence, but I responded sharply. I make clear that casting aspersions on Mary, or Eliza, is not a means to my favour, and I will not collect gossip about William’s past. He and I begin life anew. I sent away one silly girl whom I overheard talking of the liquor she found hidden about Mary’s bedroom.

  We call this great house on the peninsula The Camp. Douglas tells me the name began as one of William’s little eccentricities from the time, in the early seventies, when the place was being built, and during his supervisory visits he roughed it in a cottage close to the workmen in their subsistence accommodation. Despite William’s enthusiastic descriptions, I was not fully prepared and found The Camp’s scale and sumptuousness indeed impressive, although in a slightly self-conscious way, perhaps, that indicates new money and the self-made man. My own upbringing has been privileged by colonial standards, but Father had neither the resources gathered by William, nor a nature determined that they should be conspicuously displayed. In my opinion, the quality of the inner man is more significant than any outward show.

  William originally purchased two thousand acres, much of which has been subdivided into farms and leased to tenants. He has chosen well as to the setting of his mansion, and the vistas are quite magnificent. Dunedin is clearly seen, with almost the full length of the harbour open to view, the small islands within it, the forested hills and, far beyond it all, an expanse of ocean. The gardens and grounds have now largely overcome the initial rawness of the place, so the house is settled into its surroundings. William has made considerable plantings of native trees and species widely gathered from overseas. The estate is almost a hamlet in its own right, with a forge, grooms’ quarters, an abattoir, a coach-house, a dairy, farm workers’ cottages and a four-roomed residential laundry among the buildings. The Great Stables, so termed, are architecturally designed, and visitors stand to admire their lantern skylight and slate and lead roof. I have joshed William that here horses have at least the same importance as women. There are busy people everywhere and as yet I still do not know the names of all those dependent on us.

  The interior of the house is superbly appointed, and in my opinion its proportions are superior to those of the outside, which are rather blockish and abrupt. There are twenty-five rooms, including the recently added ballroom that is thirty yards long, and also subsidiary small buildings around the courtyard. There are two kitchens, an ornate, but overly dark, formal dining room, and tessellated pavements in the entrance halls. William has insisted on the best of materials and workmanship, and so close was his attention and enthusiasm that he stipulated the exact and different colour for each room’s bell pull, and that the large double-glazed windows be hung on brass chains, not cords. I am delighted with the spacious music room, which has a fine tiled fireplace and a high wood-lined ceiling. It lends itself well to performance. I spend almost as much time there as I do in the drawing room — which William and Douglas call the ladies’ room.

  The house is not easy to keep clean, because of so many polished surfaces, and laps and crevices up high, and I have had words with Miss Falloon concerning the cursory efforts of some of the maids, but there is much to admire. I never tire of looking at the marvellously embellished moulded ceilings, the result of years of work by French and Italian artists, and the birds, flowers and butterflies exquisitely carved in dark woods by the Godfrey brothers, whom William encouraged out from England. And the striking spiral staircase of mahogany and oak with not a single nail in all of its construction. Such craftsmanship brings together perfectly both function and beauty. It is little wonder that William has taken such pride in it all, and in happier times squired new guests on a tour of its features.

  My goodness, it is a cold place, though, here on the hill, even though the double verandahs have been glassed in since originally built. The height of the setting and closeness to the sea seem to attract a polar fog in winter and the southerly wind is bitter in that season too. Often at night I have pottery bottles in the bed and a fire in the grate. I cannot abide to be cold. The master bedroom has six windows and is marvellously light, but unlike the two flanking rooms has no fireplace, and its two free-standing marble pillars are austere. I am glad not to go to bed there.

  I am resolved not to be cut off here on the peninsula, over nine miles from the city, nor confined to domesticity, despite William’s understandable wish not to be much in society at present. I have joined the Arts and Musical Society and accepted invitations to play in several private homes, but my chief concern, apart from consoling William, has been to advance the cause of the franchise for women. One of my disappointments is being unable as yet to meet Mrs Kate Sheppard, for our visits to Christchurch are rare. In Wellington, with William’s support, I was active in gaining signatures on the parliamentary petition, and even though he was without a seat when we married, for my sake, and in accordance with his own liberal opinions, he wore the white camellia that represents women’s political rights.

  I am not a convinced abolitionist, but the other of Mr Sheppard’s beliefs I favour strongly — the rights to contraception, divo
rce and education, and opposition to constricting clothes for women that prevent their full participation in sports and activities such as cycling. My father was staunch for the rights of women, particularly in regard to education. It is partly in memory of him that I support the cause also. I have paid for additional copies of Mrs Sheppard’s pamphlet, Ten Reasons Why the Women of New Zealand Should Vote, and distribute it where I see advantage.

  Here in Otago there are many adherents, but it is also the home of Henry Fish, presently in the House, and a chief opponent of the granting of the franchise to us. He is a horrid, crude and vain man, in the pay of the liquor trade, which denigrates women and their supporters. His language is execrable in both grammar and vocabulary. William has in the past had some dealings with him as a fellow politician, but I have stated that I will not have him at The Camp, or attend those homes at which he is welcome. Even Seddon, a much better man, is opposed to us, but John Hall, Robert Stout, Julius Vogel and my William are strong for the necessary change. I find it all quite heady, and feel that success is not far off. What a cause it is, and what change could flow from its success.

  William’s grief is such that at present everything else is immaterial. He has neglected billiards, which is a great indoor love, and for which he had a room added to the main house, with elongated windows to ensure even light. It is not the time to talk to him about how I feel surrounded by the possessions and practices of his previous wives. Still in their rooms are faint traces of perfumes, heavier than those I would wear myself, the disposition of furniture seems ordained, and the household staff are reluctant to break old habits.

  Miss Falloon and I had early differences, but if she thought I was too untried as a mistress to run a household, she was soon disabused. As the eldest daughter of a fatherless family of four daughters and three sons, whose mother was acquiescent, I had taken charge of a considerable household, and told Miss Falloon so. She is a very competent woman of about forty, with unusual long blonde hair that appears almost yellow when freshly washed, and square horsey teeth, yet she is not unattractive. William tells me her family have rather come down in the world because of the loss of the father, and her efficiency is sometimes accompanied by a rather pained air, as if she is slightly demeaned by the necessity to be in service, even as housekeeper in charge here. I feel, however, that she and I will pull together in time. On several occasions when I have been at the piano alone, I have been aware of her listening at some remove, and that interest alone counts well with me. I believe she has had some elementary training herself, and is drawn to music, which is even more important. I have not been rude enough to question her, but I have a sense that she is still unmarried because she feels superior to all those with whom she is ranked, yet has not the opportunity to mix on equal terms with men to whose company she feels entitled. If I am right, then it is indeed a difficult situation for her, and I have sympathy.