After the Fall

by Norman, Charity

  ‘I feel . . .’ I thought for a moment. ‘I can’t believe this is our home.’

  ‘This light’s so intense,’ he said. ‘So clear. Strong, vivid colours. I’ve never come across anything quite like it.’

  ‘Not in Ireland?’

  He narrowed his eyes, squinting at the angular peaks and flickering inverted triangle of the sea. ‘Not even there.’

  *

  We’d been at Patupaiarehe about twenty-four hours when we had a visit from our neighbours. I heard a vehicle on the cattle grid and looked out as a blue farm truck stopped under the walnut’s spring foliage. The next moment a vigorous woman sprang out, wearing untrendy jeans and limp hair in a grey pudding-basin cut. Her four limbs seemed slightly too long for her, but she had the posture of a ballet teacher and the stride of a sergeant major.

  ‘Welcome to Torutaniwha,’ she announced briskly. ‘Pamela and Jean Colbert. We’re your nearest neighbours. We’re also running stock on your land at the moment so we thought we’d better drop by and say hello!’

  I hurried to meet her. ‘I saw you braving the storm yesterday. Where we’ve come from, our nearest neighbour lived five yards away.’

  ‘Well. We’re just over two kilometres as the crow flies or the quad bike buzzes. Quite a lot longer by road. Our boundary’s the river.’

  Pamela, I guessed, was in her fifties. I felt disconcerted by her fixed gaze: slightly vacant, like a seagull. I saw her eyes whisk over my spare tyre—I sucked my tummy in, but it was too late. However, I was prepared to overlook all that because she’d brought a tray with scones and jam and an interesting concoction that seemed to involve cream cheese, sweet chilli sauce and Mexican corn chips.

  ‘Jean!’ she called over her shoulder. ‘Did you remember the wine?’

  Jean was a relief: shorter than his wife, unashamedly balding and faintly paunchy. He trotted across from the truck, cotton trousers rolled up to the ankle, clutching a couple of bottles to his chest.

  ‘From our own vineyard,’ he puffed in a marked French accent, kissing me on the cheek in a delightfully Gallic gesture. Funny thing: after a month down here in the Antipodes, I suddenly felt fiercely European. At home, to be a part of Europe meant straight bananas and unelected bureaucracy and insufferable attempts to control the City of London; but here, Jean seemed a kindred spirit with centuries of shared experience and cultural understanding. He crouched down and made faces at Finn and Charlie, who were noisily spying on us from under the house. The boys wore nothing but torn shorts, and they were caked in mud and chicken mess.

  ‘We have boys also,’ chuckled Jean. ‘Four crazy bruisers. But they grew up. They no longer make dens under our house.’ He straightened and moved close to Pamela, taking her arm.

  Sacha emerged from the kitchen door and leaned her elbow on my shoulder. She was taller than me by a couple of inches, most of them in her legs, and her hair fountained out of a high ponytail.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, extending a graceful arm. ‘I’m Sacha Norris.’ I was proud of her. She almost made up for my filthy sons.

  Jean shook her hand. ‘And how do you like your new home?’

  ‘It’s lovely here,’ replied Sacha, with her wide, wonderful smile. ‘But I’m afraid I’m rather homesick.’

  We showed them around to the verandah, which was a suntrap. Close by, the magnolia was coming into bloom, white flowers skittering in the breeze. Sacha asked the visitors about themselves. Jean was originally from Normandy. He’d visited New Zealand in his twenties, met Pamela and never looked back. Pamela was Hawke’s Bay born and bred. Her ancestors arrived on one of the first boats, back in the nineteenth century.

  ‘Where will you be going to school?’ Pamela asked. ‘There isn’t anywhere terribly convenient.’

  ‘I’ll be catching the bus into Napier,’ said Sacha, and mentioned the name of the co-ed we’d chosen. It had good reviews—excellent for music—and was fifteen minutes from Capeview Lodge, so we could share a car sometimes.

  ‘Where did yours go to school?’ I asked.

  Jean sighed. ‘They boarded. In many ways we regret that, but it seemed the right thing at the time.’

  I was still holding the two bottles the Colberts had brought: red wine, dusty and with no labels, which made them seem very chic. I sent Charlie off to find a corkscrew, and Finn to drag Kit out of his studio. Sacha excused herself and disappeared inside to finish an email to Lydia.

  ‘Well,’ said Pamela. ‘We hope you’ll be very happy here.’

  We could hear Finn mimicking her accent as he trotted off. ‘Virry hippy here, virry hippy here,’ he was chanting, quite audibly. ‘Virry, virry, virry, virry hippy.’

  I giggled feebly, wondering how many more times my children would humiliate me before I grew too old to care. ‘Sorry,’ I said, flapping my hands. ‘It’s all new to them.’

  Pamela didn’t smile. Actually, she didn’t seem overburdened with a sense of humour. In an attempt to lighten the mood a little, I reached for one of her scones. ‘These are fabulous!’

  ‘She makes the jam herself,’ said Jean, piling cream on his. ‘Her own strawberries. She gets up at dawn, just to keep on top of the garden.’

  ‘Really? I could no more make my own jam than I could tap-dance.’ I was spitting crumbs as well as sycophancy.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Pamela consolingly. ‘You’ll learn! I’ll give you the recipe.’

  I thought then that Pamela Colbert and I would never, ever understand one another. I was alien. I would never care about baking scones or cutting a fabric on the bias. I would never swap recipes. I would never spring out of bed at five to tend my garden. I would never be a real pioneer. I was a fraud.

  Jean winked at me. ‘Be assured, Martha. After fifty years, you will be a domestic goddess.’

  ‘No need.’ Kit was loping along the verandah with his hands in his pockets and ebony hair rumpled. ‘She’s got me.’

  I was delighted to see him. He saved the day, settling himself beside Pamela, chatting as he uncorked their wine. Pamela seemed captivated. Her features came to life, and I had to admit she had good bone structure. It turned out that she was a pretty competent watercolour artist herself, which I suppose was inevitable. She was interested in botanical studies and sold them out of galleries in Napier. She seemed to think the same shops might promote Kit, which was a leap of faith since she hadn’t seen any of his work.

  ‘Is this your first visit to New Zealand?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ said Kit, his eyes widening as he tasted the wine. ‘Hey—this is pretty good! No—I travelled around as a student. I’ve always longed to come back.’

  ‘And here you are,’ declared Jean, raising his glass in welcome.

  To my delight, the Colberts were gossips. There was nothing and nobody in the area that escaped their notice, and they could go back several generations. They gave us the low-down on Jane at the dairy. Apparently her ex was a skunk who physically threw her and ten-year-old Destiny out of the canary-yellow bus before roaring off into the sunset. Then we asked about our neighbour on the northern boundary, whose horses we could see flicking their tails at a haze of insects.

  ‘Tama Pardoe,’ said Pamela.

  ‘Aha!’ I exclaimed. ‘I’ve come across him, then.’ As I described the scene with the red sports car, a fond smile tugged at the corner of Pamela’s mouth.

  ‘Yep, sounds like Tama. He’s running Glengarry—four hundred hectares, sheep and beef—entirely from the saddle. It’s less common nowadays but it makes sense because there’s some steep country at the back of his land.’

  I looked at the hills that reared to the north. They could almost have been Scottish highlands. ‘What’s he like?’

  ‘Tama? Nobody’s fool. His grandfather was a Scots immigrant who married into one of the local Maori families. Tama never saw eye to eye with his father—I knew old man Pardoe well, stubborn brute—so he left home at fifteen. He took a job as a shepherd on one of those immense stations way up i
n the hills. Thousands of hectares. He’d be on horseback twelve hours a day, seven days a week, training his own dogs and horses. Fifteen years old.’

  Kit whistled. ‘Younger than Sacha.’

  ‘Didn’t come home for years, not until his father was safely dead. He carried the coffin in the morning, got on with docking the same afternoon.’

  ‘Is there a Mrs Pardoe?’ I asked.

  Again, that indulgent smile. ‘Tama’s had no shortage of applicants for the post, and women have moved in from time to time. But I think he prefers horses to people.’

  When Pamela insisted on seeing Kit’s new studio—a crumbling black-and-white-tiled conservatory that had just the right light—Jean and I set out for a stroll. My neighbour’s command of English was impeccable; quite a lot better than mine, in fact. His delivery was deliberate and measured. I wondered about trying out my schoolgirl French on him, but thought better of it.

  ‘So you are English, and Kit is from Ireland?’ he asked as we followed the drive along the edge of the bush. ‘How did you meet?’

  ‘At a funeral, of all places.’

  ‘But he was not an artist then?’

  ‘Yes and no. He’s been in advertising all his adult life—successfully, until the latest recession.’ I made a throat-cutting sign, and Jean’s eyebrows bobbed in sympathy. ‘But a shiny advertising executive—that wasn’t how he truly saw himself. All Kit McNamara wants to do, all he’s ever really wanted to do, is paint. His arty friends reckon he’s the bee’s knees.’

  We’d strolled a couple of hundred yards when Jean halted. ‘Ah,’ he said, peering at a ramshackle structure half-hidden in foliage to the right of the path. ‘The shearers’ quarters.’

  There were several decaying sheds on the land, and I hadn’t yet been into all of them. This one looked like the cottage in a fairy story. It had two windows and a door—eyes and nose—and a chimney at one end.

  Jean pushed at the door. ‘Something is making this stick . . . one big shove . . . there! I have got it open. It was this dead bird, you see, jammed underneath.’

  I looked at the lump of black feathers. ‘Charming.’

  Jean was edging it out of the doorway with his foot. ‘Oh, long dead and dried up. Doesn’t smell any more. It will have got trapped in here, poor creature. Nasty way to go.’

  He held the door for me, and I stepped past him into gloom. The hut smelled of abandonment, of rotting wood and heated plastic. Jurassic cobwebs clung to the cracked glass of windows opaque with dust. There were tattered greyish curtains. Giant ferns pushed their way through the cracks between the timbers, robbing the place of light and tinting it with an ethereal green.

  A bulb hung from the ceiling. I pressed the switch, and it glowed half-heartedly.

  ‘Still connected up to the power,’ I said, surprised.

  ‘Of course. Shearers were quartered in here originally.’ Jean turned a circle on his heel, looking around. ‘More recently, forestry workers used it for their smoko hut.’

  ‘Their what?’

  ‘You don’t know about smoko, Martha? But it’s a national institution! Tea break, to you Poms.’

  I explored the room. It was about twelve feet square, with an unlit lean-to at the back housing a toilet and basin. There was a pot-bellied wood burner, a table, wooden chairs and a rusty gas ring. There was also plenty of bird mess, especially on the windowsills. I guessed the creature had been imprisoned in here for a while before it died. At the far end I found sacks of fertiliser and sheep dip, which explained the plastic smell.

  ‘Perhaps Sacha might like this as a bolt hole,’ I wondered. ‘She can bring her friends—if she makes any.’ I held up two crossed fingers.

  ‘Yes! I can already imagine a sofa and a stereo. And when your boys are older they will smuggle in their girlfriends.’

  ‘Not until I’ve vetted them,’ I said primly.

  As we left I stooped to look at the dead bird beside the door. It was completely desiccated. I could see an empty eye socket.

  Jean picked up the sad bundle between finger and thumb and tossed it deep into the undergrowth. ‘A mynah, I think. Excellent mimics. Maybe flew in the chimney. See, the doors of the stove are open? And once he came down, there was no way out.’

  ‘A mynah?’

  ‘They’re vermin, really. Not native birds.’ Jean seemed to think this made the death less sad.

  ‘I’m not a native bird either.’ I pictured the frantic creature hurling itself against the mildewed windows. I wondered how long it had suffered. ‘I’ll put a net over that chimney,’ I said firmly. ‘No more death traps.’

  Nine

  It was no way to behave at a funeral.

  I blame the gleefully grieving mourners, with their hand-clasping and platitudes. They packed the pews. They swamped the graveyard with black umbrellas, a flock of dour ravens. Sacha stood close beside me in a black dress I’d found in Oxfam, staring with fascinated eyes at the awful, polished shape of Grandma’s coffin. She was six years old, and she’d scarcely known my mother.

  Poor old Vincent Vale had put on a grand spread for the love of his life, and held the after-burial do—what is it, a party? a wake? Rabbit’s Big Bash?—in the function room of his historic pub. It smelled of old velvet and canapés. Good venue for a wedding. I was wearing a funereal smile, peddling sandwiches from a tray. It was a shield, because if anyone else grabbed my hands, wrinkled their eyes and told me I shouldn’t blame myself, I’d knee them where it hurt. In that particular context, the words ‘don’t blame yourself’ translated very precisely as ‘this is all your fault, you spawn of the devil’.

  Mum’s younger sister was holding court, her neat figure set off by a polka-dot dress, flour-white hair caught in a black ribbon. This was mildly unsettling, because Patricia was the spitting image of my mother—right down to the patent court shoes and tea-rose-scented skin. She looked indecently composed; no hint of a rent garment.

  ‘I’m a murderer,’ I sighed, sinking into a chair beside her.

  Patricia took a sandwich from my tray. ‘She wouldn’t blame you, would she?’

  ‘Oh, of course she would, Aunt Trish. She’s always blamed me for everything! She wasn’t at death’s door. It wasn’t cancer that did for her, it was my tonsillitis.’

  ‘Hmm. Never big on forgiveness, my sister. She changed her will more times than she did her knickers.’

  ‘It was supposed to be our big reconciliation,’ I complained. ‘I dropped everything to get to the hospital for her birthday. How was I to know it’d kill her?’

  ‘Think she’ll haunt you?’

  ‘Well, she always has. I don’t see why being dead should change anything.’

  The words weren’t out of my mouth before Mum took a pot shot. Her sarcasm blasted right through my head; she might have been hovering above the chair.

  Trust you!

  ‘Mum,’ I argued silently. ‘Be fair. You could have gone anytime.’

  Stupid girl. You and your Judas kiss.

  I was about to defend myself when Flora—garden centre—touched my shoulder.

  ‘Your dad wants to go home now,’ she said, and I nodded. Dad had never stopped adoring his ex-wife with a quiet passion. It was the one bit of irrationality he’d ever displayed. ‘I’ll go with him,’ said Flora. ‘Could Sacha stop at his house tonight? She’s asked to, and she’ll be a tonic. Smiley girl.’

  I looked at Dad’s old friend, with her wispy hair and the faintest suggestion of a widow’s hump. She was a widow, in fact. ‘Yes, please. She’s got a toothbrush in his bathroom cupboard.’

  As soon as Flora moved away, a pair of my parents’ ex-neighbours accosted me. The wife clawed at my arm while her husband regarded me with drooping bloodhound eyes. Ex-neighbours, from before Mum and Dad became ex-spouses. I couldn’t remember their name. Bromham? Brigham?

  ‘So sorry. So sorry,’ whispered Mrs Ex. ‘Cynthia was one of the best. Such glamour. Such poise. Razor-sharp mind.’

  ‘I’m
glad you’re here,’ I lied. ‘Sandwich?’

  ‘You mustn’t blame yourself,’ murmured Mr Ex.

  ‘Life goes on, Martha,’ said Mrs Ex. And then she added four utterly chilling words. And I do mean chilling. ‘She lives in you.’

  The horrifying image of my mother living in me froze the blood in my veins. Abandoning politeness, I reeled past them and into the hall. The door swung shut behind me, deadening the hubbub. I stood for a moment, clutching my tray and breathing hard. There was a payphone in the narrow hall, and an old-fashioned smell of painted radiators and slightly mouldy telephone books. Hardly any natural light, just feeble, dusty stuff creeping through the stained glass of an outside door.

  I wanted refuge from that sombre crowd, all looking sideways at me and idly wondering whether I’d killed her on purpose. They’d go back to their own lives, soon. They could watch telly, feed the cat, talk about the lovely funeral and how dignified Vincent had been. But I wasn’t alone. A sprawling male figure slumped on a chair by the phone, invading the space, spoiling the sanctuary; I had a vague impression of dark, rampaging hair. He raised his head, and I found myself staring into a pair of uncannily vivid eyes—cobalt blue, under heavy brows. They weren’t quite focused, but they were mesmeric.

  ‘No,’ he said loudly. The voice was unmistakeably slurred, but I didn’t mind. Helpless inebriation was much more fitting than wordless hand clasping. ‘I don’t want a focking sandwich.’

  And those were Kit’s first words to me. Our eyes met over a focking sandwich.

  I lowered my tray to the floor. ‘Go on, take a couple. Mop up the alcohol.’ ‘Disgraceful behaviour. I’m drunk at a funeral, and it isn’t even my own.’ He looked thirty or so, just a little older than me. The striking eyes were spaced wide apart in a pale, shield-shaped face. An overcoat and scarf hung over one arm. ‘Did you know her?’ he asked.

  ‘No. No, I’m just a waitress.’ I closed my own eyes for a moment. Couldn’t shut it out, though. Death isn’t shut-outable.

  He hiccupped. ‘Waitress.’ Dimly, I wondered about the engaging lilt of his accent. It wasn’t strong, but I’ve an ear for these things. Ireland. West coast, maybe. ‘Me neither. I’ve spoken to Mrs Cynthia Vale . . . actually, I could count the number of times on this hand. I don’t think she liked me.’