by Bowes, K T
Logan stood up and held his hand out to Hana so he could pull her up. He put his arm around her and they stared out over the lime green pastures, interspersed with areas of dark green native bush. “This is all mine, Hana, by right. This paddock links down onto the part that was stolen from me. I’m taking it all back.” The Tasman Sea looked flat and blue in the far distance. “The Du Rose house will be swept clean, Hana. It’s time.”
Logan kissed her then, a long, lingering action that took her breath away. She hungered for him, always wanting more and he obliged, stripping naked in the open air and making love to her in the downy grass which hadn’t been grazed for almost four decades. A black tui bird adjusted his white bib in the branches of an ancient kauri tree and squawked a warning to them as they wrapped their bodies around one another. Logan’s ancestors groaned in agony at the coming storm, knowing the legacy was about to reveal itself, burning everyone who got in its way.
Later Hana sat up in Logan’s bedroom, pretending to read a book. Downstairs in the family room her husband spoke to his parents about what he intended to do. Hana offered to sit with him while he faced them, but he kissed her fondly and told her not to worry. In truth, she hadn’t wanted to. She hated conflict and disharmony and was secretly relieved when Logan turned her down. “You don’t think a united front might help?” she asked sweetly and Logan smiled and shook his dark head.
“My business is yours too and I’m not trying to keep you out of it. But I know it’s going to be stressful and don’t want you upset.” Logan kept the other reason to himself. He suspected his change of heart could appear fuelled by his new wife and baby and didn’t want that inference made. It would be too easy for everyone involved to focus the blame on Hana and he didn’t want her as the new target for their hatred.
So his wife sat up in his childhood bedroom and pondered the things she didn’t understand and prayed for her husband facing his parents downstairs.
“No, no, no!!!” cried Miriam, big fat tears rolling down her face, “You’re starting a war!”
Logan shook his head firmly. “When he chose to take my money and cheat my father, he started it.”
Miriam thrashed and squirmed in her seat but Alfred sat next to her, calm and impassive. “You don’t understand!” Miriam implored, agony disfiguring her face.
“Dad?” Logan spoke directly to his father. He wanted Alfred’s wise head in on it, not his mother’s impassioned hysteria. Alfred looked into his son’s eyes, grey to grey, the Frenchman’s gene carried through both parents because of their twisted, interwoven heritage.
Alfred held his son’s gaze for a long time and then he nodded his head forward, slowly, an inner strength pouring across a hidden cord between them. “I’m satisfied,” he said, “that you’ve done right by your family and by me. You’ve upheld our good name and prevented our financial ruin, more than once. You’re a good son. I support you.”
Miriam went into a paroxysm of shaking and twitching before shrieking, “Foolish old man. Against your own brother? You would see him ruined again? Hasn’t he suffered enough?” Her voice sounded shrill and piercing in the stillness of the room, backed only by the crackling of the wet wood on the fire. She pointed at her son with jabbing movements, begging Alfred, “Please stop him, not this way, not by the hand of one of your sons, surely?”
Logan wanted to tell her to be quiet, there were guests around the hotel still, but he gritted his teeth and hoped her antics wouldn’t carry too loudly. Alfred turned his head slowly towards his wife of forty-eight years. His grey eyes flashed like Logan had never seen them and the calm and gentle father he knew, morphed into someone powerful and commanding. Alfred stood up. His stooped back was straighter and he looked down on Miriam with cold, hard eyes of steel. “One of my sons? Miriam, we both know, I have only one son left!”
Alfred’s gaze on Miriam pained her as something hideous passed between them and she squirmed under it. She appeared visibly relieved when Alfred turned to leave the room, squeezing Logan’s shoulder under his gnarly hand as he walked past. Logan swallowed hard, realising his mouth hung slightly open. He shut it quickly, hearing his teeth snap together. He rubbed his hands over his whole face, feeling stubble under his palms. Bile rose up into his throat and he fought to keep it down. Middle age faced him like a ghoul. He was forty and the fact sapped his energy, urging him to let it all go, sell up, make a life further south, start again, cut himself off from all he had known and been. But the land was in his blood. The hundreds of foals he had delivered and the cattle lines lovingly developed, coursing through his veins like a river, inseparable from his red and white cells. The tangata whenua called out to him from the paddocks and bush, from the rocks and soil. They had hailed him home from England. He had heard their voices. His ancestry shackled him to the land with an iron grip. And this was why. He was the only living son.
Logan ached for Michael, his favourite brother, in the light of Alfred’s revelation. They had suffered together against the spiteful older Barry and shared guilty relief when he didn’t return from the grave to haunt them. Michael wasn’t his older brother or his father’s son and never had been. Logan felt grief and loneliness, like a huge part of him had been ripped away. Barry was so different from them and they always knew he didn’t belong. He hung with the family next door, miles away though that was, feral and wild like them, frightening and alien. Everyone knew Barry was Reuben’s bastard. They were wrong.
Please, not Michael, his heart cried. Liza-Michael-Logan. They were a team, they looked the same, they were the same. Liza and Logan; now they were a team of two. Logan felt robbed of a brother and a whole childhood as the thought took root in his head.
A strange noise registered in Logan and Miriam’s hearing, eerily distant and faint, but unmistakable. Logan stood rooted to the hearthrug, dealing with the internal ramifications of the tragedy as his mother visibly writhed in her seat, looking anguished. The sound was alien and strange against the backdrop of the old man’s devious revelation. But as he walked down the corridor into the annals of the house, Alfred Du Rose laughed fit to burst.
Du Rose Legacy
Chapter 15
“How did it go?” Hana asked, the moment Logan came through the door. She sprawled across-ways on the bed, trying to watch the TV over the footboard. It looked uncomfortable. Her husband appeared white and sick. He glanced at her blankly and then ran into the ensuite.
Hana sat up in alarm as she heard him retch and lose his dinner. She clambered off the bed and hovered by the half open door. Hana remembered from her morning sickness how humiliating and undignified it was throwing up in front of people. When they rubbed her back and talked aimlessly, it just heightened the fact they were there when she really wished they weren’t. Besides which, she fretted her delicate stomach may decide to join in which wouldn’t be at all helpful. So she waited until she heard the toilet flush and then pushed the door open.
Stepping over Logan’s legs, Hana filled a glass with water and held it out to him, like he had done so often for her in the last few months. He sat back against the shower cubicle, the rivets in his jeans making faint scratchy sounds on the tiled floor. He took a drink, smiling weakly at her. “That awful?” Hana asked him in a whisper.
“Worse,” he replied.
Hana ran a facecloth under the cold tap and squatted awkwardly down next to her husband, her rounded belly jutting out between her legs. She pushed his hair back tenderly and used the cloth to wipe the beads of sweat from his brow. Her touch was gentle and kind and Logan watched her features intently, studying her. He had grown to know every expression that flashed past her green eyes, betraying an inner thought or feeling. He knew every freckle, every mark and every curl which tumbled down around her porcelain face. He reached out and took hold of a ringlet falling forward near her left shoulder. Logan shut his eyes and twisted it between his thumb and forefinger, feeling the softness run over and over his flesh. It gave him clarity. She gave him clarity. And di
rection. If he were the only legitimate son remaining, then he would make a stand. And see it through to the end. Otherwise, what kind of example would he be to his own child? “I love you, Hana,” he said softly. “I’ll make all this right somehow.”
Hana tried to help Logan up off the floor in the small space, giggling when he almost pulled her down with him. Some of the colour returned to his cheeks and he cleaned his teeth furiously. They took a shower together, with lots of laughter and fooling around and didn’t come out for a long time, selfishly draining the hotel’s copious tank of hot water. The heaviness in Logan’s heart lifted as Hana distracted him but returned as she sat on the bed, pink and peachy, swathed in a fluffy bath towel. It settled like foreboding clouds around their future, bringing a cloying darkness of the soul with it.
Logan stood behind his wife, gently drying the ends of her hair with a clean hand towel. When wet, her auburn hair reached almost to her bottom, long coils of curls and tresses. Logan twisted it up and piled it onto her head and Hana snapped a clip onto the top to hold it until it dried. She turned to look at him. “I can see your brain working,” she said casually, “your ears are steaming.”
He stuck his tongue out at her and went over to make a drink on the stand in the corner, hiding the haunting misery in his eyes. “Telly’s crap,” he said absentmindedly, glancing across at the pictures flitting across the screen. “Reality TV or cooking shows. What happened to the good old stuff?”
He made tea for Hana and coffee for himself and brought it over to the bed. A thought occurred to him and he grappled around in the back of the cupboard under the TV and came out triumphantly, holding a dusty looking DVD. “I knew it was here somewhere!”
Hana sat up to look but couldn’t read the title. “What is that?” She shook her head and laughed disbelievingly when the music heralded the actor’s names scrolling across the screen. “Bonanza!” she said grinning, “I haven’t seen that for years! That’s all cowboys and Indians and early settlers in America!”
“Oh yeah!” replied Logan, hurling himself and the DVD remote control onto the bed and settling down to watch it with his wife.
The atmosphere in the house seemed surprisingly unstrained the following day. There was a light-heartedness about Alfred and Miriam, as though a burden had been lifted. Logan didn’t share Alfred’s hint about Michael, instead spending time trying to explain how he would retrieve CircleLine’s cash from his uncle. “Are you understanding any of this?” he asked his wife as he watched her eyes glaze over for the tenth time.
“Yep,” Hana smiled convincingly and Logan warily continued.
“You’re taking all of this really well,” he commented with surprise in his tone and Hana nodded. She tried to understand, but the fact remained she had very little interest in her husband’s business affairs. She received Logan’s attempts at openness with enthusiasm that gladdened his heart, but no comprehension at all. Unaware of this important fact, Logan ploughed on, explaining about his stocks and shares and Hana smiled and nodded credibly in the right places. “I need you to know all of it, Hana. In case. All of it.” Logan squeezed her hand and narrowed his eyes.
It was little wonder therefore that Hana found herself sitting down to a lavish luncheon on Sunday, at a Chinese restaurant on the Auckland North Shore, wholly unprepared. The couple were greeted like long lost friends by a greying man of Chinese descent, dressed suavely and precisely in a black pin-striped suit. He looked like a banker and spoke the Queen’s English impeccably. Apart from himself and his wife, a small, thin woman with black hair pulled harshly back from her face, the restaurant was completely empty.
“Dress smartly,” Logan asked Hana and that should have alerted her, being unusual for him to dictate. Apart from gifts of clothing, he generally approved of whatever she wore. When he dressed in a suit and tie, it stirred Hana into making more effort than she originally intended. By the time they pulled up outside the restaurant in a deserted Sunday street, Hana felt nervous, not least because Logan’s continual flow of information seemed to have dried up between the hotel and the Harbour Bridge. He had an unaccustomed air of unease and the quick looks he darted at her as they got out of the car betrayed in more than words, his discomfort with whatever lay ahead. “Just let me do the talking,” he said, his voice sharp as he slammed the car door behind her.
The restaurant was immensely plush, the walls and décor a riot of red and gold. It was not somewhere Hana would ever have afforded to eat. All the tables were laid with cutlery and sumptuous serviettes, as though waiting for unseen customers to arrive, but a round central table was set aside and from it, the couple rose to greet Hana and Logan. Hana held her hand out for a formal handshake until she saw Logan put his hands together and bowed and so did they. She copied him but somewhat late. Hana bobbed like a chicken and the Chinese man smiled indulgently as though humouring a small child, but the woman looked coldly at her. Hana felt shivers go through her and instinctively protected her bump. The woman noticed, just a flick of the eyes and Hana saw her lips tighten ever so slightly. Hana closed the gap between her and Logan, disappointed to discover she was expected to sit next to the woman.
The round table would have amply seated eight people. But it had been laid for four, the Chinese couple in the centre and Hana and Logan either side of them. Hana panicked, her green eyes widening in fear, until Logan smiled calmly across at her and she realised that he would be better able to give her eye contact from where he was. She concentrated on breathing deeply and calming down.
Kitchen sounds came from behind them, the noise of metal being clanged loudly. It was distracting and jarring and Hana missed the first attempts of the woman next to her to begin a conversation. “I’m terribly sorry,” Hana gushed, chagrined, “could you repeat that for me?”
Logan appeared to be in deep discussion with the gentleman but Hana sensed his eyes watching her. She felt immediately guilty. The lady sighed quietly, but loud enough for Hana to hear and repeated her question, “When is your child due?’
“January we think,” Hana answered enthusiastically, “do you have children?”
The woman’s face curled into an ugly lemon-sucking-mask and she spat her answer nastily, “No!”
Hana felt instantly lost for words. She was making a complete mess of things and badly letting Logan down. Wishing she had listened harder to his careful instructions the night before, she shot him a look of desperation, rewarded with the special smile he kept just for her. “Mr Che,” he said respectfully to the man pouring tea into a tiny cup and saucer next to him, “my wife has accompanied me to the hotel for the weekend. Our baby is due in January.”
The man tilted his head sideways and lifted the teapot in salute, a smile breaking out across his face. “Ah, congratulations,” he said graciously, “May I pour you some tea?”
Hana nodded and thanked him, taking the tiny cup carefully and peering in at the dark, black contents. It was the smallest teacup she had ever seen. As she held the delicate china in her hands, Hana felt the woman’s eyes burning holes in the side of her face and put it shakily back into the saucer, lest she drop it in a fit of clumsiness. Mr Che clapped his hands and a hoard of waiters appeared. With feverish accuracy they loaded the table with platters and dishes, more than four people would ever be able to eat. Hana peered at the various foods, trying to keep the trepidation out of her face. She didn’t know what half of it was. Perhaps that’s chicken, she thought to herself, spotting some white meat over near Logan, but there were lots of battered items and things that looked suspiciously like sea creatures. Surely that wasn’t a baby octopus which had been set down in front of her. Hana fought with the bile that instantly rose up into her throat.
She felt completely inept. She prayed a grace inside her head, asking God to bless the food to her body. It was as though she had become a large fat blueberry, like Violet Beaureguarde in ‘Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory,’ seeming to clatter against the hostile woman with every move she made,
drawing sighs of irritation. With each breath, Hana caused some great offence and it made her clumsy and afraid to move or speak. Please God help me, she thought desperately. She looked across at Logan, collected and easy in his movements, dishing food onto his plate as though he had done this a million times. Hana mistakenly thought it was a social gathering but plainly this was a business meeting. Logan tried to warn her, to prepare her for this luncheon. A fog descended over Hana’s mind and she couldn’t remember a single word of his careful explanation. She felt hot and sick, undeserving of his faith in her.
I can’t do this, I can’t do this, her mind screamed and the desire to run away became overwhelming. Hana’s blood pressure climbed as she sat miserably wondering if she could feign illness and get out of the situation. But that would mean Logan had to leave with her and signify her total failure. Besides which, he would be his usual attentive self and she would shrivel under such kindness if she were a fake. Fake. Fake. The word went round and around in her head, blocking out sensible thought. Hana felt the baby lurch inside her, reacting to the spike in her blood pressure and heart rate, adding guilt to the growing pile of her failures. Then the baby kicked her hard in the ribs and Hana let out an involuntary groan and grabbed at her side.
The woman turned her steely gaze onto Hana and the men stopped talking. Logan’s grey eyes pierced her soul. They were alight and sparkling, more animated than she had ever seen them, but there was a depth of something she had not previously encountered. He looked like a moth which deliberately flies too near a flame, thrill seeking. “You all right?” he asked her.