All her life was here and he had seldom given it a glance but then nor had she, or not that he had noticed.
A man in a clerical collar stood smiling upon the shagpile hearth rug. Small, spry and bald as a coot, he leaped forward, extended a hand stamped with a large Band Aid and laid it, inert and flaccid as strips of playdough, in Robin’s.
‘Clayton,’ said Eileen, her curls bobbing, ‘I would like you to meet my son, Robin.’
Robin yanked his mouth back into position and shook the hand again. ‘Robin,’ said his mother, ‘I would like you to meet the Reverend Clayton Nolan.’
‘Oh,’ said Robin. ‘Well, ah, nice to meet you.’ His eyes flicked to the Band Aid. Flesh wound? Wart? Stigmata? The other hand was naked. Nothing. Not a sign. What the hell was going on?
The Reverend Nolan fingered his collar and confided how happy he was, while Eileen bustled in and out from the kitchen to remove Gladwrap and return with Snax and paté and peanuts and nibbles which reminded her, she said, nodding her head shyly at the joke, of roofing iron. Not the taste or the texture, goodness me no. They were delicious but it was just the shape, just like roofing iron for pixies didn’t they think. It was clever of them to get them wavy like that wasn’t it, she would never have thought of it even. She paused for breath. ‘Clayton?’ she murmured.
‘Oops, sorry.’ The Reverend Nolan sprang forward. ‘Eileen would like me to offer you a drink,’ he said.
‘Beer thanks. Beer.’
This was very odd indeed. No one had said so, but presumably his mother and the Reverend Nolan were good friends, possibly they planned to marry, to live together according to God’s will till death did them part and good luck to them. There was a plumb bob at the bottom of his throat. Good luck to them, good on them. Good. Good. He must say something. He looked at his mother, pink-cheeked above her thundering great brooch with the rays and the sunburst of goodwill.
‘Beer it is!’ Clayton turned to the table with its white crocheted cloth and poured a can into a diamond-cut glass which Robin had never seen in his life before. It must have been stowed away. Stowed deep in a dark cupboard waiting for the light.
The Reverend Nolan checked his fiancée’s sherry glass, clutched his whisky, and was back on track. He was very pleased indeed to meet Robin about whom he had heard so much. A tutor he understood, a tutor at the university, so he had heard. He was sure Robin would understand. Yes. He was very grateful. God moved in mysterious … Yes. After his wife had left him he was for a time … Yes, well. In a Christian context of course but … He was sure Robin would understand.
He was now skipping about on small slim feet, touching Eileen’s arm or shoulder for a moment and then bounding away from the strength of the charge. He was unable to keep still, there was so much to tell, so much good news to impart. He had known Robin’s dear mother for yonks. Literally yonks. Such a worker. Dedicated in her efforts with the shut-ins and the olds. And my ex-wife and Eileen had once been friends, which was strange was it not. At school, he understood. But that was before, yes well, mysterious ways. Eileen had been a tower, a positive tower at the end. Clayton blew his nose. His spectacles were round and gold and sparkling with joy. ‘And afterwards,’ he added.
All this joy was unexpected and confusing. Obviously they did plan to marry. A good thing. A very good thing.
More congratulatory handshakes with Clayton concluded, Robin turned to his mother and took her in his arms. I am so happy for you. You deserve happiness. You are a good woman.
‘Mum,’ he said. He kissed her cheek, misjudged it slightly and banged his nose on something hard.
Gold had been dredged or mined, men had sweated, slogged, half-killed themselves to produce this small round ball in his mother’s earlobe. Why bother. What did it all mean. Forget it smart-arse.
‘I hope you’ll both be very happy,’ he said. And I’m sure you will.’
Twinned at the same height, hand in hand like wedding-cake toys, Eileen and Clayton beamed back at him.
Robin lifted his glass of beer and smiled again. His mother blinked at the beautiful back of his head, the generous smile of her son.
‘Thank you, my boy,’ said the vicar. ‘Thank you.’
‘Sundays are Clayton’s busy day,’ said Eileen suddenly. ‘Aren’t they dear?’
‘Yes dear.’
‘You live locally, I suppose?’
‘No. No. This is not my parish. Never has been.’ Clayton’s hand touched Eileen’s sleeve. ‘We met at Synod. I am here to rejoice, to meet with folk. I return to work next week.’
‘To the coast,’ murmured his future wife.
Clayton’s hands rubbed. ‘The Gold Coast,’ he cried. Fingers touched again, burst apart. ‘Eighteen feet of topsoil,’ he crowed.
‘You must come and have a meal at the flat,’ said Robin. ‘Next week, why not?’ They leaned towards each other, murmured together and came up smiling. They could fit him in on Thursday if that would suit. Yes. Yes.
‘Would you believe,’ whispered Eileen beneath the global mausoleum, ‘she left him for another woman?’
‘Oh.’
‘Wasn’t it awful? And her parents were quite normal. They used to live in Miramar.’
He did not attempt to see Emmeline. So much pinkness, so much euphoric gentle joy sent him home depleted and early.
He wolfed down the steaming omelette, tore hunks of bread apart, slapped them with cheese and chewed on, his mindless and unseeing eyes fixed on the coffee-maker on the far bench which had developed some messy and expensive blockage. The silence spread in circles, flowed over the dove-grey three-piece in the lounge, beyond to the standard lamp with the coral shade because Robbie needed it for close work with all that awful marking. Lisa on the padded sofa swinging her ankle at the Renoir above the heater, which had both children and dogs and was a focal point.
He leaped to the telephone at the first ring. ‘Hi,’ he yelled.
‘It is I,’ said Spiro. ‘I wish to talk to you.’
‘Sure. What is it?’
‘I do not wish to mention over this thing.’
He could see the hand rejecting the telephone, damning its black unreliable soul, its army of eavesdroppers. Spiro distrusted telephones. He liked New Zealand and its people but their delight in technology did not please him. Their faxes meant nothing to him, their computers, their e-mails drove him insane. You could not fight them. Computer error they say. They have lost my papers. The computer has eaten them, they say. I know them. It is they who have lost. Computers are the patsy.
‘I’ve got a tutorial at five. After that.’
‘OK.’ Bang.
Robin tidied up as usual, rubbed the formica with a soft cloth for the purpose then turned to The Load beneath the lamp and kept reading.
Emmeline had had a calligraphy phase at one time, and the green ink was distinctive. He grabbed her letter from his pigeon-hole, his fingers tearing. It contained a single sheet of lined paper. The message was brief, the writing difficult to read.
Emmie’s message was even briefer. Her ‘Any use?’ filled the yellow stick-on label.
Long Creek,
Patearoa,
Otago.
May 17th,
Miss Bowman,
My wife died yesterday. She asked me to let you know.
Wilfred Q. Hughes
No year. But why should there be and he knew when she died. Fifteen years ago, and Wilfred Q. Hughes had been much older than Alice. What the hell was he doing. The essential was to get down there, to interview the old man before he died on him as Miss Bowman had done. He read the note again, searched the page. How soon could he get there. He would need time. Days and days of time, calm serene hours with the tape recorder and the old man telling him why his wife had stopped writing the moment she married him and how he had been entirely responsible as seemed likely. He must get down immediately, get down south for a weekend, get the feel, the taste, make sure W.Q. Hughes was in good health and likely to remai
n so until the August holidays when the interrogation could continue in depth.
His heart was beating with the panic of the hunter who realises he may lose his quarry through his own carelessness, who sees the antlered head lift to scent the breeze and scarper.
Wilfred Q. could be a hundred. He could be dead.
Robin dreamed that night that Cara had a D-minus for Shelley. It didn’t seem to add up. They didn’t do Shelley in Stage One.
‘Anne,’ he said next morning to the secretary of the English department whose screen saver had whorls of light instead of toasters with wings or cruising fish, ‘Anne, do we have telephone directories for the whole of New Zealand?’
He was rather proud of the pronoun. It indicated an intimacy, a pulling together for the good of the cause rather than an irritating interruption to a busy person from the most junior tutor of all.
She turned her head with polite interest. ‘No. Should we?’
‘I just wanted to look something up.’
But Anne was helpful to all. ‘I’m popping down town at lunchtime …?’
‘No, no thanks a lot, but …’ He drifted down the herring-gutted corridor to his consoling graphics and his unfinished letter which was taking time to write. He wanted detachment with polite interest, courtesy without obsequiousness, results without guile. There were several corrections to be made.
Dear Mr Hughes,
My name is Robin Dromgoole and I am a tutor in English Literature at Victoria University, Wellington. I have chosen the work of your late wife Alice O’Leary as the subject for my thesis for a postgraduate degree.
I would be extremely grateful if it would be possible for me to come and talk to you soon about the life and work of your late wife. I would be free any weekend in the near future which would be suitable to you.
I enclose my home telephone number in case you prefer to ring me collect.
I very much hope you will be able to see me.
Yours sincerely,
Robin Dromgoole
He searched the Dunedin directory in Lambton Quay, his fingers riffling through the south for Hughes. There was a W.Q. in Patearoa. Wilfred was extant.
He sent the letter Fastpost.
Spiro opened the door with a dead fish in one hand. The Angel Fish lay limp, the billowing transparent driftings of its fins clotted, its eye clouded.
‘Dead,’ he said.
‘I’ m sorry.
‘It happens, Robin. It happens.’
They stood staring at the fish lying inert in the large palm. ‘Just this moment I found him.’ Spiro’s other hand turned, flicked, went belly up. ‘Come,’ he said. ‘Come in.’
He placed the fish on the slab bench, gave it a final pat and rinsed his hands.
‘Coffee or ouzo?’
Ouzo, like dope, had been a disappointment in the past. ‘Ouzo.’
‘Good man.’ Spiro poured a slug of oily liquid into a glass and watched as the water swirled to smoky opaqueness. Small marvels pleased him.
He lifted his glass to the small convex shape on the bench and drank. ‘Ahh! good. Very good.’ He dragged the back of his hand over the grey exuberance of his moustache, sat opposite Robin at the narrow formica table and lifted his glass again. ‘Yámass,’ he said and drank.
‘Yámass,’ said Robin. The remaining fish drifted in their glass world, turned and returned to turn again. Shreds of green broke loose from an undulating aquatic plant and floated upwards. There were two ornaments on the gravel bottom, a Buddhist temple and a drowned castle where timid fish could hide. A weighted plastic frog burped bubbles.
Robin gave a quick chuck of his head towards the corpse. ‘I wonder if they know it’s dead.’
Spiro shrugged an acknowledgement of defeat. ‘We cannot ask. They cannot tell,’ he sighed. ‘He was a purposeful fish, my Angel.’ He leaned forward to make his point. ‘That is why I like the tropical freshwaters the best. The tropical marines have such beauty, ah, such beauty. They float, they drift. What need have I to hurry, to work, to be quick. I am beautiful.’ He gave a quick explosive puff of displeasure. ‘They are Betty Boops those Marines.’
Betty Boops?
Spiro was still shaking his head. ‘They are not working men’s fish. Fifty dollars or more for each. Each! No. For me the freshwaters every time.’ His tongue was busy, his face contorted, winking and pumping with the effort involved. ‘I have a tooth,’ he said. ‘I must see the man before it is lost.’
He drank again, cradled the glass between both hands, guarded it on the table. His moustache was moving, working itself up to something. ‘I have something to say, Robin.’
‘Yes?’
‘To you.’
‘Yes?’
It was taking him a long time. Spiro hummed, hawed, chewed his moustache and started again.
A fish trailing silver streams surfaced sudden as a cork to gape, its eyes beseeching the ceiling. Robin could watch the fish for hours and might have to at this rate. He turned back, tried to help. ‘Go on.’
‘You are my friend, Robin, as well as my offsider. Yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘A friend to be trusted. A friend I could entrust.’
‘I hope so.’
‘What do you mean hope? Is it or isn’t it?’
Would I say No I am not to be trusted? Think man, think. People don’t say that. You were the one who told me. You and the fish and their agendas. But you are safe, Spiro, safe as houses. ‘Robin is so responsible,’ Miss Newman had told his mother in Form One. ‘I would trust him with anything.’ He saw the tufted mole, the sweetness of the smile. ‘Anything,’ she repeated.
Rob lifted his glass again. ‘You can trust me, Spiro,’ he said pompously. But something was required. This was manly handshake country; covenants sealed by the clasping of hands whose weapons have been left beyond the ramparts. ‘What is it?’ he asked.
Spiro was now looking shy, or as shy as a face as ingenuous as his could look. He stood up, eased his crotch and sat down again.
In love as well? Getting married also?
‘I wish to go home to Crete,’ he said.
Robin glanced up in surprise. ‘For ever?’
‘No no no no, boy. For a month, three weeks is all. And I am making you an offer because I trust you.’ Spiro’s hands widened, arms embraced the air above the table. ‘Because I hold you in my heart.’
‘Offer?’
‘I am inviting you to take charge, sole charge of Dionysus Caterers Ltd while I am away.’
‘But I can’t. My job. Everything. No.’
The beauty of the secret, the glee of Spiro’s hands, the excitement of his arms reminded Robin of the bridegroom-to-be. ‘That is the wonder of it,’ he explained. ‘I am not wishing to go until November for my niece Amalia’s wedding. And by November,’ one finger stabbed Robin’s guernsey, ‘by November the university is shut and Robin will take charge of Dionysus Caterers and grow fat with profit and I will dance.’ Spiro’s arms lifted, turned and dipped to plangent chords. He was home, fêted by loved ones, glad to sniff the wild thyme and to dance, to leave his trusted offsider in charge. Spiro leaned over the table and embraced him. ‘Good,’ he said.
Not good. Not good at all. ‘But …’
‘Is no problems.’
Yes there bloody is. Sure the lectures will be over, the place empty, but that’s when you do the work, that’s when you get on with it, day after seamless day of searching and unfolding and thinking. Of clearing his mind of Cara and Helen and Rebekkah and Wes and getting on with his own work. Getting something down.
I don’t want to. I refuse.
Robin sat silent. One who was considering all aspects of the proposal before coming to a wise decision. ‘Three weeks,’ he said hopelessly.
Spiro gave him a quick elbow jolt across the table. ‘Not long enough? You wish to get fat for months? No, three weeks is enough. Any more the fat arse.’
‘Spiro, I can’t.’
‘Of course you can!
Would I have let you if I did not know you could and I could trust you? You are too modest. Here you are, the best, the most reliable of men in Wellington and telling me you can’t. You are strange some of you Kiwis, you say can’t, can’t, even when you can and know you can. For modesty you say no. No Cretan does this. No Greek. It is mad, mad. You need wings Robin, wings to lift you to the sky like my Oscar. My Icarus.’
Not a good role model.
He was eight years old, barefoot on the haircord, chewing his pyjama cord, turning up the radio for the beat and swoop of the weepie.
‘Put silver wings on my son’s chest
Make him one of America’s best
One hundred men we’ll test today
But only three win the green beret.’
He tried again. ‘November’s a very busy month,’ he said.
Spiro was now pouring more ouzo. He turned with the glass in his hand.
‘More fat on the arse. And the Wine Festival also which is the big one.’
Dionysus Caterers was Spiro’s life work. He and his bride Kostoula had arrived years ago, had sailed into the unknown without words or money. Robin had heard it all. The sponsor uncle that Spiro had fought with the first day, how they ran away down the hill and past the tram terminus to sleep on the beach. Next day a job washing up, jobs washing up. Oh it was easy then. Jobs they fell from the sky in those days. How they had cooked day and night on their rented Baby Belling supplying other caterers for a pittance, for two pittances, and finally enough to ‘take off on our own’. Each detail, each triumph and the one or two failures (the baklavas too messy for the mayoral function; the overseasoned stiphado) had been recounted. How Kostoula had asked a bride’s mother how much her pink satin with black revers had cost and been told off by the groom. How she had asked a councillor’s wife if her diamonds were real. It is different in Wellington. The wind blows and oregano must be cultivated and no pride in the price paid for anything. But despite Kostoula’s despair at no babies they had been as happy as most. Sometimes Spiro wondered whether if he had stayed in Kalives he would have been happier, would have had more slabs of pleasure remembered from tavernas and scented hills and the sea. But he was an honest man. They had been happy enough and made money and he still had Dionysus. It was his life and his reason for life and he was entrusting it to his best friend Robin who he loved.
The House Guest Page 16