The Larnachs

by Owen Marshall

  ‘Of course we wouldn’t come or go together,’ I said.

  ‘It wouldn’t matter. No, it won’t do, and you know it in your heart. Everything must fit with the outward life.’

  ‘We’ve taken risks in the past, haven’t we?’

  ‘Too many perhaps. You know how much I want to be with you, but we mustn’t let down our guard for a minute. Everything could tumble so quickly, so utterly. We make the most of what we have, and that’s so much more than most people can even contemplate.’ And she tilted her face up to be kissed, the lips cool in the insistent breeze, and her hand on the back of my head. ‘Tell me again when you began to love me,’ she said, and I did. Such repetition is all pleasure when there are only two of you in the world.

  The old man, of course, is back here too, and that I could do without. He goes through the books and claims they are in a muddle. With his own affairs in decline, he expects me to run things here quite free of the forces gripping the whole colony. There’s no reasoning with him. And I’ve never had the training of a clerk, or wanted to be one. The outside work with the stock and the men is what I enjoy, and the direct contact with businesspeople in their offices or at the club. Father doesn’t take into consideration the tie of the wretched telephone office, or accept my right to some independent life. He promised The Camp would be left to me in recompense for all that’s been spent on Donny, but there’s little talk of that now, and I know from comments Basil Sievwright made that he has considered selling both the peninsula properties and those in Central Otago. However, there are few buyers about, only hard scavengers.

  One of the few things here during the year that pleased Father was the outcome of the Magistrate’s Court hearing concerning one of our properties, an old, unoccupied house in Broad Bay. It was destroyed by fire and some local people insinuated that we’d instigated it in order to collect the insurance. A Mrs Walquest who lives nearby thought she recognised me at the scene the night the place went up, and when it proved I was outside Otago, she switched her suspicions to Patrick Sexton. Amazing what a proffered reward of twenty pounds will enable people to remember. I imagine that swaggers, or rabbiters, set fire to the place, but whatever the cause, the verdict was that no one could be held responsible and the insurance will stand. The newspapers made a big thing of it all, naturally, and Conny was quick to point out to me another example of the underlying envy and resentment some have towards our family.

  Father finds it difficult to accept his children are now adult, with views and ambitions of their own. He still wants to make decisions for us, and resents it when we resist them. The role of paterfamilias is so much a part of his dignity that it mustn’t be questioned. The past is the only place now in which Father and I feel comfortable — the time when Mother was with us and he going from strength to strength. In my memory he’s a different man. Donny, who was with him on his first visits to the site of The Camp, said he clambered up a tree to exult in the view and his possession of the place. After the bush was felled, and the hilltop blasted and levelled, it was our playground for many months while the big house was being built. Donny and I came to know the workmen well, including the French and Italian artists who painstakingly created the moulded ornamental ceilings, the carvers and stonemasons who created the Oamaru limestone sculptures and intricate wooden wonders Father’s so proud of.

  It’s François I remember most clearly. He was at The Camp for several years, and taught Donny, Kate and me to sing French songs. Originally from the south of France, he loved to spend time riding because he had grown up familiar with the horses of the Camargue. In our presence he was cheerful, and got on well with Father and the others, but there must have been times of incongruity for him: the man from Arles spending his days on internal scaffolding like Michelangelo, and cantering about the rough country of this peninsula so far from France. As a child I gave no thought to the sort of dislocation such a life brings, but I was to feel something of it myself in England, and on my return here.

  Where’s François now, I wonder, and how much of a dream does his time on the other side of the world seem to him? He was fascinated by the generator Father installed that provided gas from the long drops for lights in The Camp. He could sit absolutely still and silent for a long time, which in the whirlwind of boyhood, seemed very strange to me. Vegetables were important to him: he would often go to the kitchens and cook them to his own taste. He would sometimes get drunk in Dunedin, but the police knew him well and would hold him in the cells until someone came to fetch him. He carved wooden birds for us children, and wore a belt so broad that Donny said it had belonged to pirates. François is long gone, but his ceilings at The Camp exist as a reminder to those of us who knew him, and other examples of artistry evoke different craftsmen who were part of our lives then.

  When the last stone blocks were being placed on the turret, Father called all the family to see. There was a wet mist so Mother and the girls went inside again almost at once, but Donny and I stayed to watch Father put two sovereigns under the last block laid of the castellated wall and say grandly that they’d be there as long as the stones stood. After we’d all gone down and the mist had become steady rain, Donny and I crept back. From the top of the steep stone steps spiralling to the tower we saw that Drew, the youngest of the stonemasons, had returned too, to lift the last block and take the sovereigns from the fresh mortar before replacing it. As he stepped dangerously down from the wall, he noticed us, and stopped, cocksure and large. ‘What you two gawping at? You seen nought, understand me?’ He thrust his face close, and I remember how his long, fair hair was plastered over his forehead by the rain. As he demanded, Donny and I said nothing in reply, and nothing to anyone else. We weren’t afraid so much as astonished that anyone employed by Father could treat him with such contempt.

  So many people have come to The Camp over the years as guests, friends, tradespeople and servants, some ascending the lion steps and being welcomed by the family, some allowed only at back entrances, some doing their trivial business at a doorway without entering at all. Each has a story of the house, I suppose, from the premier to a scullery maid sent away for thieving, from touring Viennese violinists to the one-eyed man who used to buy the hides of dead horses.

  When I first returned from England, there was a Gaelic-speaking hermit whom Father let live in the stables for a time. Each day he would collect the eggs and take them to the kitchen. He talked to himself in his own language, but to nobody else, and one frosty morning he was found dead on his blanket. His only possession of worth was a basket-hilted claymore, which Father took for his library, announcing that it had almost certainly been used against the English at Culloden.

  It wasn’t just people that Father gathered from afar for his great enterprise, but materials too: heart kauri from the Far North, fire bricks from Glasgow, Belgian marble tiles, flagstones from Edinburgh, Marseilles cobblestones for the stables, Welsh slate, Arabian rugs, Italian marble baths and Venetian glass. So much of the very finest of European civilisation brought to adorn his great achievement built on a lonely, colonial hill. Everything had to be punted across the harbour from Port Chalmers, then carted by ox-drawn dray up the steep hill. The bullocky would sometimes let Donny and me sit up with him and raise the whip and shout, pretending we were in control. The workmen would laugh and wave as we came around the levelled sweep before The Camp. Like young princes, we accepted it all as our entitlement.

  Such recollections often come to me now, perhaps because of the realisation, at last, of the choice before me. There’s no way I can have The Camp and Conny too. To live with the woman I love, I will have to give up the place most dear to me.

  He seldom spoke of it, but Father felt a keen rivalry with the great Otago runholder Robert Campbell. Both were of Scottish descent, ambitious and determined to display their talent and achievement. Campbell’s stone mansion at Otekaieke, in the Waitaki Valley, completed at much the same time as The Camp, has thirty rooms and electric bells that aston
ished everyone. Father sent a man up to photograph it secretly, rather than go himself. ‘It’s stuck there like a sore thumb,’ he told me, ‘among those bare hills. I’ve chosen better by far, and I’ll outlast him.’

  As a boy I took it all for granted. Only later did I see Father’s extravagant confidence for what it was — a challenge to the fates. Too much, too soon, has become the truth for him and many of his friends at the colony’s highest level as fortunes founder. Hubris, old Roper would say, weighing a cane in his hand as a possible remedy for it. Father has found it a chastening experience to adjust to difficult times and to realise that so many people he accepted at face value are fair-weather friends. He blames them, of course, and the universal drying up of capital, rather than admitting he has bitten off more than he can chew.

  The difficult times have sapped the goodwill of many we come into contact with, and there are people who take pleasure in seeing their betters aren’t immune from misfortune. Even Conny is subject to gossip and envy because of her forthright views and position. Last Thursday, after a meal at the club and business in Stuart Street, Robert, Hugo and I went to the Piccadilly Rooms before parting. Behind us, at tables, was a group of reasonably dressed young men, none of whom I recognised, and despite the amount of noise in the room I clearly heard a voice say, ‘Constance Larnach needs to be ploughed.’

  I turned and challenged them, but they just laughed, asked me to repeat what it was I claimed to have heard and denied any mention of Conny. I couldn’t be particular, and they enjoyed my hurt and fury. I’ve never been more angry. ‘Not so high and mighty now,’ one said.

  ‘You need to keep it in your britches, Larnach,’ said another amid the barracking. I forced my way to him and took him by the throat, close, so that I had a whiff of his beery breath, but he kept laughing even as we grappled and others intervened to separate us. ‘The Highlander’s blood is up. I’m quaking in me boots,’ my adversary said while his friends whistled and clapped.

  As we left, Hugo told me their sort weren’t worth confronting. It was a most damnable experience, bad enough if meant to ridicule Conny and Father, worse if it shows a general assumption concerning Conny and me. I’ve said nothing to her. I hate the thought of these inferior and ignorant people talking about her at all. She says she’s not concerned about opinion, but reputation is everything with a woman of her consequence, and I know she’s suffered slights recently. Not things said, so much as invitations not extended, and those she’s made declined, or not responded to. I hope she’ll come to see there’s only one way out of our predicament, and that’s to go away — start afresh in a new country where we’re able to live openly together.

  Only days later I met Ellen near the city centre. By odd coincidence, a few minutes before I recognised Harriet Connelly on the street. She’d been in service at The Camp, and become pregnant. She had no child with her. Neatly enough dressed, she was walking with another young woman. My conscience was clear, and I would have addressed her, but she averted her head and talked more rapidly to her companion. She’s making a new life, I suppose. Who could blame her for not wanting to be reminded of the way things ended for her at The Camp. I remember once passing the laundry and glimpsing her blowing her nose on a sheet. Harmless, and human enough, I suppose.

  Meeting Ellen almost immediately afterwards was a good deal less easy. She’d been shopping and stopped on the corner by the Octagon tearooms when she saw me, swinging her bag slightly back and forth. Both of us were somewhat embarrassed, as happens when people who once were intimate, and have retreated from that closeness, meet again. We talked a little of our common acquaintances, and of the fire that had destroyed a lodging house close to her home, and in which an old miner died. I know the man she’s to marry, but neither of us said anything of him, or that. As we talked it occurred to me that, but for Conny, Ellen and I might have already married. There was nothing I would change, but it made me sad somehow, chatting idly with her, and remembering when we’d been important to each other. Maybe her thoughts were similar, for her voice became more hesitant and she said she must go and meet her mother. ‘How are your father and mother?’ I asked, and she replied with platitudes. ‘Remember there’s plenty of cut firewood at The Camp, and they’re welcome to come for a load as they used to.’

  ‘We have ample at the moment, thanks very much,’ she said, and put her hand to her hat in a small nervous gesture I knew well.

  So we stood apart and talked of firewood and acquaintances, when not so long ago I had slapped her thighs, held her breasts to my mouth, had her quick breathing at my face and her wrists held tightly in my hands. Her hair is long, dark and clean, always something I admired. I’ve disappointed her, hurt her by not proposing marriage, and although she has recovered from that, I wish I’d extricated myself in some way less abrupt and painful for her. What’s done is done, however, and I believe for the best.

  Conny’s the woman I live for. God, how much I wish she was single like Ellen, and we could marry and be easy in the world.

  Father’s often on at me to show more resolution, and now I’ve shown sufficient to be sleeping with his wife, but nothing that Conny and I’ve done is meant to hurt him. In all honesty I don’t think Father would find things much altered if the marriage ended, provided scandal was avoided. Money and position are his life, and the accumulation of public dignity brought by success in those pursuits. Whatever he achieves merely brings new ambitions into view. The CMG, being minister of mines, estates, grand friends, merely make him hungrier — especially for the knighthood. Conny says he’d wear the insignia on his pyjamas.

  William Hodgkins stayed the night with us yesterday. He’s the driving force behind most of Dunedin’s artistic endeavours: he founded the art gallery and promotes music and education. Conny’s fond of him and in her he finds a great supporter. He was bankrupted a few years ago, despite his legal practice, and that gives Father a slight feeling of superiority, as he’s managed at least to avoid that. Rather than William H. lacking industry, or talent, it was his generous community service, I think, that led to temporary ruin. Conny said to me afterwards that he didn’t look a well man, but he wasn’t called upon at table to take much of a lead in conversation. Father held forth once more about his visit to Wick, half a life away.

  ‘You can’t begin as a family much further north than Wick,’ he said, ‘and you can’t end much further south than Dunedin.’ Conny caught my eye. How often we’ve heard that opening, and indeed what was to follow. While in England Father had taken the long and inconvenient journey north to visit the town, and the thatched stone cottage where his father was born on the farm of Achingall in the Strath of Watten. ‘The valley was wide and rich, and Larnachs still plentiful,’ Father said. He walked for miles in the countryside and searched the scattered graveyards for family inscriptions. In a pub in Wick he met a Larnach who was a stonemason and poet, and who told him that Larnachs were descendants of the Vikings, not the Irish who moved into most of the rest of Scotland hundreds of years ago. This notion was attractive to Father.

  Despite the appalling weather, he had watched the herring boats leave and sat on the river wall looking downstream to the old stone-arch bridge and the spire beyond it. Without the need for our guest’s polite encouragement, he elaborated on the pride his stay-at-home Wick relatives had showed in his achievements, once he’d enlightened them. He hinted, as always, that the Larnachs in the distant past had been of considerable consequence, lairds there as he sees himself here.

  Father is happy when he talks of such things. Although Donny, my sisters and I grew up with his stories of the Scots nation and our family affiliation, none of us found inspiration in them, or much connection. Uncle Donald’s life in Sussex was a good deal more to my taste. He has been dead less than a year, and little mourned by Father, but I remember him with gratitude. A quiet-living man, despite his wealth and possessions, he was never demonstrative, but he and Aunt Jane always made us feel welcome. The sense of clan was
inbred.

  They made one visit to the colony, not long after Mother’s death, and shortly before my return. Uncle Donald was impressed with The Camp, but too shrewd to invest substantially in the agricultural company that Father was promoting strongly. ‘I don’t like to be so far from my money,’ he said, and Aunt Jane termed much of what she saw in Otago, the wilderness. There’s tremendous opportunity when a new country is opening up, but great uncertainty as well. Fortunes rise and fall abruptly, or veer off in unexpected directions.

  Cousin James will take over Brambletye in an accepted and secure way that should be my path here at The Camp. It was Father’s promise to me, but everything has grown rickety, and Donny and the girls are full of jealousy despite all they’ve been given, and their desertion of the place. If Conny and I could be together here, life would be as complete as one could expect in an imperfect world, but that won’t happen, and she remains adamant in her refusal to leave with me and live elsewhere.

  Father has built here with such permanence and quality, such optimistic commitment. He dreams of Larnachs in residence at The Camp generations hence, when the colony has regained its equilibrium, when the houses and cleared farms stretch uninterrupted from peninsula to city, when the knighthood he has fought so hard for is worn easily by a descendant. He’s an odd mixture, my father. I think if he knew that vision was secure he would willingly put up with all that’s happening to him now.

  I have Conny, but I’m trapped as far as resources go to get us away together, even if she could be persuaded. The Camp is my livelihood, yet the very thing we must leave if we’re to have a natural life together. I’ve no other source of money, no substantial savings, no immediately profitable skills. Even my ability to obtain credit relies on the name of William Larnach, which means little other than here in the colony. I’ve wracked my brains to find ways of raising the capital that would persuade Conny we could leave and establish ourselves elsewhere. Robert’s business connections in Argentina have again said I would have no difficulty in obtaining a position as manager of an extensive farming property there, but we know nothing of the location, or the conditions — nothing about the society in which we would be placed.