The House Guest

by Barbara Anderson

  But the last two I found tough. All those people and each one weirder than the last. A miserable pack of layabouts knocking their kids around and hating each other and whingeing and not doing anything. But I kept reading. I had to make myself, mind, especially All Fall Down. I read them. It took me a while, I don’t mind saying. Lying with Alice beside me telling me to stop because if I read them I’d find out about her and I’d hate her and she didn’t want that. Well, that made me keener if you really want to know, and I slogged on. Now I suppose I read them about twice a year, those last two. Not because of her being dead or anything but those people now, that pack of oddballs and nutcases, I know them better than most round here. If Nettie Rainer came in this room this moment I’d know her. Not from her daft clothes and her scraggle teeth, I don’t mean that. I’d know her because I know her in my head, the poor stupid cow. Not like her, maybe, but sort of give her the benefit of the doubt if you follow me.

  Yes.

  It’s easier to do that with books mind. Did I tell you about Alice’s voice?

  Tell me.

  She had the prettiest voice I’ve ever heard. I can hear it to this day. Mind you part of it was being American and the funny words but it had a sort of lilt, a snap to it.

  How did she react to the frocks? I mean as a …

  She didn’t go near them. I have to say that was a disappointment. I thought she’d take an interest somehow, but no.

  Did she realise um … Well she must have got rid of some dresses in ten years. Had you sort of started, as it were? On hers?

  She was a hoarder and I never kept things that weren’t in good shape. And in the natural course of events I would’ve passed away first being twenty years her senior, but no. Cancer. She was only in her fifties.

  Yes. I’m sorry.

  (PAUSE)

  When she died I had her at home. I didn’t want her lying down there in Bob Gravely’s fridge. I had her home, in here as it happens. She was the only one I had home. And you know what, that very night I had to go and see the vicar. He’d been tied up all day and she didn’t want a religious service so there was a bit of sorting out to do, but he’s a decent cove … name’s gone … doesn’t matter. Anyhow he’s OK like I said and he’d promised to see me, but that meant I had to leave her almost as soon as she’d arrived home. You can imagine. But there was nothing else I could do. The vicar was going to fit me in after vestry as it was and I knew I had to get everything tied up that night and I couldn’t think what to do. About leaving her I mean. (PAUSE) Know what I did?

  Tell me.

  I found a couple of old white candles we’d had by us for power cuts and I put one in each of those enamel candle-holders with handles like the old days and I lit them and put one each end. Do you think that was OK?

  I think that was inspired.

  Good. I’ve never told anyone that. You don’t think it was daft?

  No. (PAUSE) There’s something …

  Yes?

  You described her as lost, when she arrived in 1969. Did she tell you why she was so …?

  (SILENCE)

  No.

  Didn’t you ask her?

  No.

  Not even later when you were …?

  If she’d wanted me to know she would’ve told me, wouldn’t she?

  But you mean you never had even the slightest idea? Didn’t you have a suspicion, a clue, the slightest glimpse of what had left her so shattered?

  No.

  Why not?

  Because she didn’t tell me.

  Oh, fuck.

  Alice used to say that meant the truck won’t start.

  Nothing wrong with your hearing.

  Never has been.

  Another thing.

  Yes.

  When did you take …? Oh forget it.

  When did I take her frocks over?

  Yes.

  A few weeks after. Why’d you ask?

  I don’t know.

  You married?

  I was.

  What happened?

  She died.

  But you’re just a kid.

  She was twenty.

  Christ. What happened?

  I …

  Want to tell me about it?

  (END OF TAPE)

  They explored the diggings first. There was little wind and the frost had gone. Wil explained the machinery in some detail: the broken-down crushers, the remains of a sluice, an old race. The function of each half-buried, rusted hunk of metal was described in full. Robin, who was usually interested in industrial archeology but not today, did his best. He listened, he nodded, he bided his time. The grass was long and dry about their feet; elderberry trees and a few collapsed heaps of leafless climbing roses fell about nonexistent houses marked by an occasional slab of stone or the remains of a fireplace. Two tall brick chimneys weathered to pink stood some distance away beside a straggle of broken fence. It was difficult to avoid Ozy-mandias, easy to sentimentalise the lives of the men, women and children who had lived here. An existence which at best must have been rugged and at worst heartbreaking had become as picturesque as a churchyard with old-fashioned roses. Reality had gone for a burton.

  ‘Wil?’ said Rob as the truck slammed into action.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Did your wife …?’

  ‘Alice, man, Alice.’

  ‘Alice. Did she bring any books with her when she came?’

  ‘One or two.’

  ‘I would’ve thought

  ‘She sent for the rest. She sent to America and they came later. Months it took. Months. You wouldn’t believe.’

  ‘And where are they?’

  Wil looked at him. ‘I gave them to the bring-and-buy.’

  A hare zigzagged across the road and dived for safety. Rob forced his voice down. ‘When was that?’

  ‘When she died. The vicar said the ladies couldn’t shift many of them but he was grateful for the thought.’

  ‘Do you know what happened to them?’

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘Weren’t there any work notebooks—any manuscripts, anything?’ He was begging again, whining for scraps. ‘Things connected with her writing, anything, any piece of paper? I’d be grateful for anything.’

  Wil stopped the truck. ‘Here we are. She’s a bit stiff this one, from memory. Might have to heave her up a bit.’

  Rob lifted the gate into the paddock in front of the cemetery. There were two more larks, more sky than ever and peace for miles. He tried to remember later, struggled to visualise what it was that had stunned him about the place. He could think only of silence and a light breeze on his face and the plain below. There had been a church somewhere: a small church nearby as they walked across the paddock of dry grass.

  The burial ground was square and empty of visitors; there were headstones, white pebbles, overgrown mounds, the occasional crooked or broken memorial and dead or live flowers in jam jars. All the usual appurtenances of death and remembrance were present. None of which had anything to do with his reaction to the place, his sense of liberation, of soaring release. Nothing to do either with the conviction that this was the only place in the whole world where any man or woman in his or her right mind would care to dump their carcase. He had never thought of burial until Lisa died. Maureen had begged for cremation as Lisa had hated being shut in her room worse than anything in the world when she was tiny, and please oh please Rob, and what did it matter anyway.

  It was not that he wished to lie here. Quite the reverse. It was just the conviction that this was a good place. He walked to the fence beyond a couple of macrocarpas. The cliffs of the escarpment fell away sharply to the dissolving plain below; the faint lift of air moved his hair, his hands lifted.

  ‘We’ve been climbing see,’ said Wil. ‘You probably didn’t notice but we’ve been climbing since we left home.’

  ‘No, no, I hadn’t.’

  ‘This is the foothills of the Rock and Pillar.’

  ‘Oh.’

 
; Wil was swinging away to the right. ‘Alice’s over here. This way’

  ‘Good place, Wil,’ he said.

  ‘Why?’

  Robin shook his head in defeat, his eyes on the headstone above the mottled gravel centred by three crimson china roses below glass.

  Alice Amy Hughes

  1928–1979

  Beloved Third Wife of Wilfred Quentin Hughes

  Not lost but gone before

  Rob felt his mouth opening and closing. Third wife of widowed husband. Second runner-up to Ivy.

  This was the final resting place, this the epitaph of a woman who could freeze your gut and make you see. A woman whose characters knew that the trick is to survive, to expect nothing, to endure. To shut up and get on with it. Sometimes even to laugh because the world loveth a cheerful sufferer wouldn’t you say.

  Rob’s rage was dry in his mouth. He concentrated on the gravel on the grave below him. Fish, he remembered, don’t like their gravel too light. It dazzles them.

  ‘Why didn’t you say she was a writer? A wonderful writer. A writer that … It hasn’t even got her own name!’

  ‘She didn’t want it,’ said Wil.

  And that I will not believe either.

  He would like to talk to Emmeline. He would like to talk to her now.

  Rob climbed back into the truck. Judgement was required, dispassionate critical analysis of the evidence available. Prejudging was out. It was no use leaping onto the wrong horse and cantering off into some subjective sociological liberated bloody sunset. Think man, think—‘… in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.’ Alice might have asked for nothing else. Cancer gives you time to decide. It was conceivable. But why?

  They drove in silence for a few minutes, but time was short.

  ‘There’s something else I’d like to ask you, Wil.’

  A quick hooded glance.

  ‘Did Alice ever tell you why she was so unhappy when she rang the first time? When she first arrived?’

  ‘You asked me that before.’

  So you were lying. Oh shit.

  ‘When she wanted to get outside all the time?’

  ‘She always wanted to get outside. She was an outside girl like … like what’s her name?’

  The worry on the face beside him, the searching hands.

  ‘Shara.’

  ‘Shara, like I said. Shara’s an outdoor girl. Likes to be outside.’

  His anger for Alice was now combined with numbness. He stretched his legs, lifted his behind, thought of the grass stirring at the edge of the cliff. In the summer there would be butterflies—small New Zealand Blues teasing wildflowers of the same colour, dipping above clovers and vetch. Possibly a Small Black Mountain. A Tussock.

  He tried again.

  ‘You never asked her?’

  This glance was hostile, the voice from dog control. ‘What d’you think I am?’

  ‘I just wondered.’

  It would be a flowering field in the summer. He would tell Emmie. Show her. Show her as he had meant to show Lisa. Yes.

  ‘Going to be a corker of a frost again tonight,’ said Wil. ‘A black one I shouldn’t wonder.’

  He was right. They stood at the farm gate next morning waiting for Rob’s teed-up lift to arrive. The ground was iron beneath a black frost, the plain stamped flatter than ever below the weight of the sky, the freezing air. Their breath was solid, came in chunks. Word bites.

  ‘You’ll say Hi to Shara for me. And thanks.’

  ‘Yes. Yes.’ Wil fished in his pocket. ‘You can have this if you like. I made a copy at the time.’ The message was brief.

  Long Creek,

  Patearoa,

  Otago.

  May 17th

  Miss Bowman‚

  My wife died yesterday. She asked me to let you know.

  Wilfred Q. Hughes

  ‘I’ve seen this before‚’ said Rob.

  The eyes snapped back. ‘How?’

  ‘My research. I’ve seen the original. But I’d like this. I’d like this very much if that’s OK.’

  ‘Keep the bloody thing.’

  ‘Would you mind telling me …?’

  ‘I don’t know do I? Not till you’ve asked.’

  Doug would be here in a moment, burning down the road in a Holden with roo bars. ‘Why did you write to Miss Bowman?’

  ‘Alice said to.’

  ‘Did Miss Bowman answer?’

  Carved from ice the word huffed back. ‘No.’

  At the sight of the car Rob lifted his bag, his voice gentle. Very gentle indeed. There was plenty of time. ‘Why did you keep a copy, Wil?’

  The blue eyes glared. ‘I’ll tell you why. I kept a copy because I wanted a record. A record of every word, every single last word I’d ever said to the bitch. Got that?’ He was waving, stamping about as the Holden slowed. ‘Come on. Here he is. G’day, Doug. Get in man, get in.’

  The handshake was a quick clench; the bugger was on his way. One hand slapped the side of the car. The face above was stern, the arm raised from the elbow in wooden dismissal. ‘Late already. Late. Off you go.’

  Doug was not a talker and disliked the Pigroot. They went the other way.

  ‘We passed that Mazda at Middlemarch,’ he said and little more. He drove fast and well and the power lines looped and slid beside them and the rain started and changed from sleet to drizzle to great splattering drops as they approached the route to the airport which was signposted with small painted aircraft for extra clarity of information, or perhaps for the benefit of non-English speakers, for those dependent on visual images such as the stylised signs depicting gravid female figures with suitcases which now lined the route to the maternity wing in Capital Health, Wellington. They had been installed since Calvin’s birth after the regrettable incident of a prima gravida in a confused Laser.

  The signs looked to him like pick-up points for bulbous women awaiting holiday transportation but you always see what you’re looking for.

  Doug was going to pick up his wife who was due home on the two-fifteen flight from Christchurch after seeing the twins, so it had all worked out quite well and Rob needn’t give it a thought. Any time.

  Rob sat at the airport with a pad on his briefcase making notes. Rough What-the-hell’s-going-on notes. Let’s-clear-the-head notes. Lists of questions asked, lists of discrepancies, lists labelled Do. Thoughts on Where-we-are-at which seemed pretty much nowhere. He liked lists, they comforted him. Emmeline had told him once that if she had achieved something which had not been on her list she had been known to put it on so she could cross it off. He had laughed loudly.

  So what had he learned. Bugger all. Wilfred Q. Hughes had loved Alice O’Leary. Or had he. Wilfred Hughes was an honest man. Or was he. Alice O’Leary had not wanted any mention of her work, not even her birth name to be recorded. Or had she. Yet what would be the point of Wilfred mentioning her former life when she had been happy to flag it away while she lived with him for ten years and loved the place and the dogs, and, from the sound of it, the man himself and his bed to boot.

  And Wil seemed interested enough in her work, he thought, busy with his fine point and his paper and his confusing evidence. Proud even. Alice, it appeared, had not given a damn about posterity. Not, presumably, from a Christian death-of-the-temporal-and-spirit-to-the-Lord ‘perspective’, but merely because it didn’t matter. She knew she could do it. Or perhaps she had not given a damn, period. An interesting woman. He had always thought so.

  His visit to Central had made the waters even muddier. Not a word written while Alice had lived in Central and not a glimmer of explanation as to why not. And Wilfred’s sudden unexpected last-moment outburst against the good, the forthright, the gallant Miss Candida Bowman.

  Rob leaned back, closed his eyes. He had been aware of the alternative explanation from the start, of course, conscious of the kneejerk answer. It all added up did it not, the wretched marriage, the cryptic inscriptions in the books, the ‘He is de
ad’ letter, followed by the lilac and the weeping woman and the bird hide and the desolation.

  OK—so Alice was a lesbian given the push by Candida Bowman. A feasible explanation perhaps, but his heart sank at the analysis involved. The thought of R. Dromgoole searching for clues in such a minefield was disheartening. The baying of those entitled filled him with gloom.

  And anyway he did not believe it. Alice’s usual imagery was of grief, loss, despair; her sexual metaphors were often clumsy if not faintly embarrassing in so sharp a writer; locked doors, wrong keys, impaled specimens were bathetic images for sexual passion. It did not add up.

  He disliked the other quick-fix answer even more. The ‘buried in the Antipodes ergo death of the spirit’ myth had always infuriated him, but then it would, wouldn’t it. Damn and blast and bloody hell. Alice O’Leary continued to fan dance before him, teasing his mind with alternatives. The seven veils he thought, sourly turning a page of his workbook, would have been more illuminating.

  She was also shaky on affirmative feminist rhetoric.

  No woman has yet wet her pillow for her sister’s grief.

  She was a mean woman. Even the passings of her wind were counted.

  No. Not a good choice for Suffrage Year by and large in this day and age. Not one to be dialogued with at the cusp of sisterhood.

  He piled his notes together and headed for the plane.

  *

  The man in the window-seat wore a fringed silver-studded jacket and came from Balclutha. The tip of his tongue protruded slightly as he copied recipes from his friend’s Quick Cuisine. He had only got it for two days and the photocopier at work was on the blink so he had to snatch any chance he could get. Did Robin cook?