The Larnachs

by Owen Marshall

  There is a sort of dangerous blindness in Dougie’s love that I admire for its completeness, and fear for its unworldliness. What is love? I am unsure if Dougie’s dedication is the sign of utter selfishness, or the reverse. To have a man want you is a flattering, but commonplace, experience; to have a man truly care for you is indeed special. I tell him that we must fit our affection within the lives we have, bearing with the compromises that permit its continuation. After all, so much of what we share is quite open and legitimate as family and friends. The other is of concern only to ourselves. For Dougie, love seems an all or nothing thing.

  William was re-elected for Tuapeka, but even that gives him little joy. He became involved in a war of words with the editor of the Tuapeka Times over the coarseness of his language, and to a considerable degree was in the wrong, whatever the provocation. Bitterness now seems to seep into everything for him, replacing the generosity and goodwill that attracted me when I first met him. Money matters continue to plague him, and his investments are increasingly difficult to realise in cash. Seddon still demands support and advice, but holds off on the knighthood that is justly due. William is also becoming more and more accident-prone, almost as if he defiantly offers himself to the fates. In the middle of the year he scalded his hand so badly that Thomas Cahill made him spend time in the hospital, and not long after, while briefly back at The Camp, he was laid up from a kick on the knee by a cattle beast. Dougie said had it been a shod horse he would have been lame for life. At times, both of them seem walking exemplars of past misfortunes.

  This year, too, William’s uncle Donald died. He had been hospitable and helpful when William was in England many years ago as colonial treasurer, and was equally supportive of the children after William and Eliza returned to the colony. It is a disagreeable surprise to see how little William mourns his uncle, how scant the sympathy he expresses for his Aunt Jane. Although he has never quite said as much, I think he is disappointed he received nothing of substance in the will.

  In adversity some men show to advantage, while others retreat from the best principles they once held. I try to continue to be a good wife to William, but things are not as they were. The change is as much in him as me, and I confess to myself that I no longer love him, not in the way I thought I once did. I think that would have happened whether or not Dougie and I became close. In a strange way, perhaps what Dougie and I have enables me to be a more stoical and sympathetic companion for his father. I no longer expect, or need, William to be the close confidant I sought in marriage.

  Our disagreements grow, often concerning things apparently unconnected with our feelings for each other, yet reflecting in some way what has gone wrong. Last week we had a party for William’s Dunedin political supporters — all male, and mainly crass people seeking some advantage from the association. I was pleased not to spend much time in their company, and happy to stand with William at the lion steps to see them leave. On such a sunny afternoon the grounds were an attractive prospect as the buggies, gigs and carriages wheeled away. The trees and shrubs planted over twenty years ago now give The Camp a settled, attractive appearance, in contrast to the stark, raw wilderness of the first photographs. In another twenty years it will be quite as it should, whether I am here to enjoy it or not.

  It was warm and pleasant standing there, but watching the businessmen go reminded me of the times guests had scurried down the steps in rain, wind or hail. The Camp lacks a carriage cover, such as the best private homes provide, that would allow women in particular to come and go with comfort and dignity — and the weather is often unfavourable. On dark, inhospitable days, when I stand on the foreshortened steps and look up at the lowering sky, it seems the great stone mass of The Camp is about to come down in turmoil upon me.

  I mentioned it again to William, not as any reflection on his planning of the place, but his reply was impatient and unpleasantly sharp. It would spoil the appearance of the front, he said, and would be ridiculously expensive beside. ‘A minute in the rain isn’t too much to ask even of pampered women in society,’ he said. ‘You won’t melt, you know.’ So we went up the steps and inside — William to his library, I to the drawing room — and nothing more was said.

  How passing and inconsequential such a brush of different opinions might seem, but every exchange in a marriage is a signal of its underlying strength, or fragility, of positions taken and grievances maintained. The dismissal in his tone stayed with me, and we barely spoke to each other during the evening.

  On another occasion he rebuked me for not wishing to accept an invitation to a soirée at the McGeadons. Mrs McGeadon is a Dunedin woman of considerable wealth, but little understanding or talent, who has taken it upon herself to be a leading hostess in the community. Her gatherings are staid and the attendance, predictably, confined to families of influence. Bessie, Ethel and I have to some extent set up in competition to her and several others of like ilk, and I believe we have brought a breath of fresh air to social and musical gatherings. Earlier in our marriage, William would have been supportive of my decision, for he, too, is easily bored, but he complained that a refusal would give needless offence. ‘You need to consider our position, Conny,’ he said, ‘and not merely your own preference for variety. Many of these people are my business associates in one way or another, or political supporters. I wish you’d realise that the choice of our company can’t be solely your estimation of people’s wit and talent.’

  ‘By all means go yourself then. We’re not joined at the hip.’

  ‘But we are joined by marriage,’ he said, ‘and each of us is judged partly by the attitude and behaviour of the other.’

  There are more subtle indications that we have grown apart. We no longer ensure that each knows what is important in the other’s life. When we were first married, almost everything of import that William spoke of in company had been shared with me beforehand, but increasingly my knowledge of his feelings and doings comes from what he says in the presence of others, and I suspect that if they were not there I would not be told at all. William does not do it deliberately, I am sure, but it is painful to be relegated in this way. His thoughtlessness makes it the more telling and distressful, and I find myself in turn reserving all that is important of my inner life for Dougie alone.

  So William and I have reached the tolerated and baffled partnership that always has appalled me when I recognise it in others: a fortitude of composure lest expression of real feelings release pent-up disappointments. Ethel Morley shares this with me, I know. When they were last with us, Lowell contradicted her brusquely at the table concerning some matter of their proposed trip to Sydney and she gave way graciously. When I mentioned it afterwards, she seemed resigned. ‘Oh, we rub along together. That’s the way of it for most women in their marriage, I suppose.’

  William seldom comes to my bed now, and though I have rarely refused him, I am glad of that. When he does come, he begins with a sort of desperate urgency that has no satisfying outcome for either of us, and afterwards he will mumble something and return to his own room rather than lie with me and talk as once we did. And how predictable he is always in lovemaking, with none of his son’s exhilarating and impulsive ingenuity. William seems quite suddenly to have become an old man, and to be both aware and resentful of it. Small things, such as the hairs growing in his ears, the cracking of his knuckles, the sleep residue at the corner of his eyes, and his open-mouthed breathing and puffing moustache, irk me now. The tolerance of such things, which is part of love, has gone.

  I endeavour to encourage him in most things, but not in coupling. Dougie is the only man I welcome in that way, though the situation holds special penalties for me. The most dismay and self-reproach I have experienced since accepting him has been in those times when, after some fervent tryst with him, carefully organised within The Camp, or the town, his father has come to me in the night, and I have taken the weight of a husband after that of his son has barely lifted. I have wept when by myself after such
encounters, and made pledges to tell Dougie all is over, but they are never kept. He said one night that if I conceived a child, it would not matter who in appearance it favoured, because of his similarity to his father. He meant it as humour, but I felt only pain and anger, and told him so.

  There are, though, wonderful and open times with Dougie that require no subterfuge and make all difficulties worthwhile. Yesterday afternoon we sat in the cane chairs on the northern verandah, which looks out to the great stable and the glasshouses. The sun was warm through the glass and the sky powder blue. This is one of my favourite parts of the house. High up are slim panels of green, blue, red and yellow Italian glass, which were made jewels in the bright light. William was with us for a time, talking of Ward’s bankruptcy and Justice Williams’s part in forcing it. Expressing bitterness and hostility has become one of the few remaining ways in which he gets satisfaction. But then he went and Dougie and I were left to talk together. ‘He’s stirred up,’ said Dougie. ‘He’ll off to the den and write to Seddon, telling him how the finances of the colony should be managed while failing in his own affairs, and asking for his knighthood.’

  ‘Yes, but let’s talk about us,’ I said. William occupies enough of our lives as of right, without being the subject of the time we have together. ‘What dreams have you had that we can puzzle out an explanation for?’

  ‘I can’t believe you don’t dream. You have them, but won’t share them, or you wake too slowly and they drain away before they’re fixed in your memory.’

  ‘I never seem to dream. I do sometimes have a sense of their experience fading, like colours walking off in the distance.’

  ‘I don’t always dream,’ said Dougie. He feels, I think, there is something childish in the nature of dreams; in the discussion of such things that are not practical. He reveals them to no one but me. William never talks about his dreams, and I don’t ask.

  ‘No, but tell me your last one,’ I said. Dougie has full cheeks like his father, and a full moustache also. His skin has a slight, attractive burnish from the sun. The light caught his strong hands resting on his lap, a curved pipe in one. I felt a passing frisson at his obvious delight in our being together there: our sharing, the trust we have in each other. We are a lucky couple, here, now, despite our odd situation, of which, I hope, the world knows nothing.

  ‘It was St Leonard’s again. I was standing in the cold shadow of the chapel,’ said Dougie, ‘and I could see Roper, the classics master, in a singlet and long, soft trousers, doing exercises in the quad. He was a sort of muscular Christian who believed strongly in original sin and he had a fat wife who hardly ever appeared outdoors. No one saw her. Anything that was very rare, we used to call a Roper’s wife. Anyway, in the dream he was doing these exercises, clapping his hands above his head and jumping astride at the same moment, then bringing his legs together and hands down again. And he was calling out, “I see you, boy. Come here at once, boy”, but moving his head about as if blind.’

  ‘Did you hate him?’

  ‘Not really. Almost all the teachers seemed in some way preposterous.’

  ‘And that was all the dream?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, it got dark suddenly, as if there was an eclipse, and even colder. I couldn’t see him any more, but I could hear his hands clapping above his head, and his voice calling out to me, “I see you, boy.”’

  ‘You’re free of all that now. You have a life among people to whom you matter.’

  ‘I suppose he’s dead now and left a fat widow in hiding.’ Dougie waved a hand as if brushing aside unpleasant memories, diminishing their power.

  So we sat in the warmth and security of The Camp verandah and talked of Dougie’s cold dream of unhappy school days. How altered the Dougie I know now from the diffident yet inwardly sensitive person I first met. Then he was on the periphery of my concern, now he is essential to it. Gradually his life is revealed for me in his confidences, his behaviour, his lovemaking, the places dear to him. Our affection has given us another sense with which to understand each other, and now we cannot live without it.

  ‘I’ve been reading of Phaedra,’ I said.

  ‘Never heard of it.’

  ‘Her. Another sign of the deficiencies of your Mr Roper.’

  ‘In what way?’ Dougie had a hand up as a sun visor so that he could read my expression.

  ‘Phaedra was the wife of Theseus, King of Athens, and she fell in love with her stepson, Hippolytus.’

  ‘And they had a damn good time of it, I imagine,’ Dougie said.

  ‘They both died.’

  ‘Everybody dies,’ said Dougie. ‘Just tell me that they loved.’ He lay well back in his chair, relaxed, happy and vulnerable.

  ‘You’ll have to find out for yourself,’ I said, but I knew he was unlikely to bother. Dougie is not much of reader, certainly not the classics. He might dream of Mr Roper, but he developed no enthusiasm for the subject he taught.

  ‘Tell me about it tonight,’ he said with purpose. William was to be in town.

  Now that we are lovers in all respects, there is a change in Dougie. He laughs more often, is more optimistic, seems younger. I am reassured and gladdened to see how happy my affection makes him. He likes to create small secrets and signs between us, code words only we two know. He has christened one of the young Newfoundland dogs Potf, and likes to have it with us when we walk in the grounds. ‘What?’ said William on first hearing it. ‘What sort of a name is that for dog? No meaning and unpronounceable as well.’

  ‘It’s Egyptian,’ said Dougie. He and I know that it stands for the pleasures of the flesh, so important to him that he burns to seize me at every opportunity. Potf is a silly joke between us, but there is a childishness to love that speaks of trust and spontaneous happiness.

  In our case, however, there is apprehension too. The bond Dougie and I share has become the focus of my life, but a price of anxiety must be paid for it. In moments of despondency I envy those women who have given up expectation of a close understanding with a man and reveal their true selves only to women friends. They are free from the scrutiny of connection between the sexes that society delights in, and the emotional dependence, painful rebuffs and misunderstandings. It must, though, mean the loss of the most fulfilling and natural relationship of which we are capable.

  Not long ago, when Dougie and I were walking by the raised Italian garden, he told me that only when with me did he feel a complete man. What a lovely, flattering paradox, and all about me seemed the brighter, fresher, for it: the sun, the colours, the fragrances. A single seabird, high in the sky, was wheeling freely, as if from some natural joy of flight. I would have kissed Dougie had we been in private. ‘Pick me some flowers,’ I said.

  ‘Anything but foxgloves,’ he replied, for they are William’s favourite.

  On the 17th of December Dougie and I attended a pre-Christmas entertainment in the Choral Hall, put on by the Dunedin Shakespeare Club. Several times over the last few years, its president, a Mr Wilson, has invited me to join, and once to be its patron, but besides being too busy, I have heard reports that the club consists almost totally of middle-aged women more interested in the social cachet of membership than in study of the great man. The evening proved to be rather like George du Maurier’s curate’s egg. Professor William Salmond, small, thin and yet another Scotsman, gave an excellent lecture on the uses of poetry, but the readings from King John were a trial to sit through and the musical selections mediocre. Dougie said I could have played Grieg’s ‘Auf den Bergen’ so much better myself, and although love makes him partial, it is true.

  On the way back with the Morleys, with whom we stayed the night in their Forbury Road home, Dougie amused us by talking of ordinary things in an outrageously theatrical voice, and would have attempted to come late to my room had I not made it obvious, in a brief moment apart from the others, that the risk was too great. He consoled himself by drinking excessively with Lowell at a late hour and had a heavy head on our ride back to
The Camp the following day. I had little sympathy. Not only is drunkenness unappealing, but who knows what Dougie in his cups might say about us. The trip home lacked its customary pleasure.

  I visited Ethel again just a few days afterwards. The Morley shipping money has provided one of the finest houses in the town, but it is Ethel’s taste that sets it off to advantage. She is one of those women nature has fashioned to a man’s inclination: tall, olive-skinned and full of figure. It is no surprise that eligible Lowell Morley chose her from among her rivals. Her more enduring asset is intelligence. Appearances would suggest she has everything, but her marriage offers little apart from position and security. While we were walking in her garden, Lowell came out briefly to say he was leaving for the club and to remind her of an evening engagement. Wealth dresses him notably, but it cannot give him presence, or sensibility. Already balding, he has a mole-like, protuberant face and a humourless laugh. He is all physicality, lacking the perceptive response to life and his fellows that would bestow character.

  ‘I am married to a silly man,’ Ethel said when he had left us. It was not said with malice, or particular disappointment, but with candid resignation. She had weighed up the advantages and drawbacks of the life he offered, and made her choice. She stood with me in the lovely garden before her fine house, dressed in a manner admired and imitated by other women, and admitted she was tied, of her own will, to an inferior person. William is admirable by contrast, yet I also find myself in a trap of my own choosing. My advantage is that I have someone to love, my dilemma that it is forbidden.