The House Guest

by Barbara Anderson

  ‘So it wasn’t being stuck in the ooloo with Wilfred Q. Hughes?’

  There was a gleam in the eyes, a recognition. ‘What do you reckon?’

  Rob shook his head. ‘I don’t know. I just don’t know.’

  ‘There’s a hell of a lot you don’t know if you ask me.’

  The prescribed pills were being handed out in minuscule white origami containers; the blinds were drawn as they shook hands.

  ‘Bring her down, boy. Bring her down and I’ll give her the letters.’

  It would be so easy to say yes. So easy to flannel and much kinder. ‘I’ll try. I’ll work it out. I can’t promise.’

  ‘Promise nothing. Just do it, you drongo. Or I’ll come up.’

  Rob lay tossing on his hired bed, aware that he was being ridiculous, that he was behaving like some goddamned insomniac in a TV ad before his partner tiptoes smiling through the night to his side with the product and the glass of water and they flash their love across the covers and don’t have to say a thing. They have the cure. Unlike him. He was a fully paid-up participant in a moral dilemma and unable to sleep. He flung himself on his back and went through it again.

  There was no dilemma for Wilfred, who had loved his wife. He was an honourable man who had lied to him and why not. He had never clapped eyes on Robin before, didn’t know him and disliked both smart-arses and sniffers. They were town men for starters.

  No problem either for Emmeline. She knew right from wrong and was amoral which was an oxymoron. No, no, a paradox, get it right you fool, and that isn’t right either because you can sleep around, not that she does now, and still be good as gold and moral means virtuous in general conduct, as she is, as well as concerned with the rules of conventional morality which she is not. She has moral courage and it is a moral certainty that she will hate me for ever if/when …

  She will undoubtedly shoot the messenger.

  He turned on the light, turned it off. Life had not prepared him for this but then what could have. Only sons of widowed mothers are not trained for this sort of thing. He could blame his mother. Release the Inner Child. Oh fuck.

  Any decision, he had read recently in some corporate management magazine, was better than none. This statement, slipped among comments on front-end evaluation and income projections and an advertisement for a new voice-mail recruitment service, had surprised him. Wasn’t the decision to make no decision at that point in time a decision within the meaning of the act? A decision per se to defer the big one, the hot potato, the bottom-liner to another point in time at the end of the day. And if not why not? Perhaps if he could write it down. Tabulate. He put out a leg, pulled it back.

  Go to sleep you drongo. A good word, drongo. I am indebted to Mr Wilfred Q. Hughes for his permission to use the word drongo. I am indebted to Ms Emmeline O’Malley, O’Leary, for her interest in the word ululate. Would Emmie come creeping to him, smiling through the night with soporifics? Probably not, thank God. The sky was lightening beyond the thin curtains. He could get up.

  The airport was not busy. A ring of men and women stood staring at a cardboard container in the foyer, their faces thoughtful as cows ringed around a still-smoking meteorite. The box had contained cheese and said so.

  A man cradling a bike helmet gave a yap of laughter. ‘Perhaps it’s a bomb‚’ he said.

  ‘Reuben, come here at once,’ yelled a woman in a pink tracksuit. A teenager in a T-shirt labelled CREW lifted a downy upper lip and stayed. ‘Rube!’ she yelled again. ‘You want to get blown up or something?’ Rube shrugged and sauntered away, his muscular buttocks rolling with contempt.

  ‘Can’t be a bomb,’ said Robin. ‘It’s open.’

  He looked again at the label. Twelve times one kilo equals total weight twelve kilos. That made sense. Perhaps he could use the format for finding the solution. Robin shook his head. It was not funny and it never had been and there was something wrong with his gut too. Maybe he had picked up a little bug as Eileen would say.

  He swung his leg and kicked the empty carton high in the air as the herd scattered.

  A young Maori standing beside him dropped an eyelid. ‘Easy to shift, eh. Must be a little Pakeha bugger.’ He dropped his pack and took a leisurely drop-kick at the box which sailed towards the automatic doors. They opened obediently and sighed to a close behind it.

  The guy peered at him as he straightened his pack.

  ‘You OK man?’

  He must look a mess. ‘Me? Yeah, I’m fine thanks, yeah.’

  There was one comfort. He had lost Murray’s Dunedin telephone number which Emmie had given him.

  ‘Yeah. Fine‚’ he said again.

  Eleven

  Emmeline was gathering momentum, spiralling into storm. ‘I told you not to go. I said. I said leave the poor old guy alone. You go there and dig up all this mess and expect me …’ She was tense with rage, flinging her disbelief in his teeth and his little bug and hating him.

  As he had known she would.

  ‘No!’ she said.

  He had prepared his case with care, had sat for hours in front of the computer getting the chronology right, sorting and dividing the evidence, correlating the events of Alice’s life with the echoes from her books and his memories of Miss Bowman and the woman with the coiled hair weeping. He was going to be calm. Tactful. On Emmeline’s side as always.

  He resorted to cheese-carton graphics, fiddled about with arrows in an attempt to induce thought.

  Which they did and were no help. The final version would demonstrate one thing and one thing only to Emmeline. Alice had abandoned her twice. He could hear the rage—the flashing eyes, the floating hair. Betrayed! Who says she was betrayed? Even if it’s true, all your dinky little diagram shows is my so-called mother loved me so much she dumped me a second time. No! I’ll take Aunt.

  And what other words were there? Abandoned. Left. Ditched. Went south up Central. You say she loved me. So why did she go?

  Because she loved you.

  He decided against the diagram.

  The time charts were easier.

  1947, 1948 Poems.

  1953 Alice marries Edwin. Meets Stephen.

  1956 The White Mountain and Other Stories.

  Inscribed: For Candida.

  Images of locks, wrong keys etc. Misfits. Minor disasters.

  Ellen Maybury’s inflatable bra let her down. It burst on the Philadelphia flight. It was the pressure, the flight hostess explained. They should tell people.

  1957 The Mystic Scroll.

  Inscribed: For you.

  Love is precious because it is rare and ephemeral and dies in the hand.

  1957–59 Love affair with Stephen.

  1959 The Hand of Time.

  Inscribed: And again.

  Finished while she was pregnant.

  It is best to face despair at an early age. It strengthens the heart muscles and the sky does not fall.

  1960 Emmeline born.

  Adopted immediately by Miss Bowman. Emmeline’s name changed to O’Malley after she and Miss Bowman reach New Zealand.

  1962 All Fall Down.

  Inscribed: No Words.

  When babies open their mouths their gums are new and their teeth, they tell me, are pearls. They have not been here long.

  1966 The Load.

  Inscribed: Soon.

  The bleakest of all.

  The Peaceable Kingdom is not to be found in family life.

  All grief is self-pity.

  The book is the man, they said, the writer the work. How could they have been so simplistic, those erudite old guys, those pontificating dons, those precious belles-lettristes. So dismissive of imagination, of the creation of brave new worlds and splintered old ones.

  And how do you go on T.S. Eliot then. What are your views, man, on the theory of impersonality. Let’s hear it starting now for the Words on the Page Alone School of Modern Dance soon to be sashayed into the wings by the high-steppers of nouvelle critique and the rock’em sock ’em fin
ale, Death of the Author centre-stage.

  Yet here he was like Cara before him, searching for babies overleaf, lovers between the lines and clues in everything.

  But you have to believe in something do you not. Join some sort of dance, make some sort of decision or the bugaboo of consensus will get us all.

  Alice had seen life clearly. She had looked into the goddamn pit and disliked what she saw and laughed the wrong laugh and her words stayed in the mind as did her characters. Aunt Eunice who had bought a new coat ‘because she had several funerals coming up’. Her neighbour Darlene who fed her piranha fish spaghetti dipped in menstrual blood to cheer them up. The ratcatcher’s astonishment when his wife left. She didn’t make the bed even, nor leave me no dinner neither. Rats come in families so extermination takes seven days or more. You just have to keep laying it down, ma’am, just keep laying it down. You’ll get them in the end.

  The baby that had climbed up. Climbed way up the ladder and fallen on her poor baby head.

  The old cop sighed. ‘So how come the fingertip bruises on the backs of her poor baby knees?’

  Both from her own words and from Wilfred’s Robin knew Alice to be of equal fighting weight to her opponent, yet he had seen her despair; had witnessed the collapsed and broken house guest yet to receive Miss Bowman’s coup de grace of the letters.

  He tried this tack with Emmie, begged her to read the books again to find the woman. She refused. It was the last thing in the world she would do. ‘But they are true, gutsy.’ He held her arm, insisted. ‘How can you not like them? They’re you.’

  She pulled away, rubbed the arm.

  ‘I mean it,’ he insisted. ‘I promise.’

  ‘Promise what?’

  ‘You won’t be happy till we sort this thing out and …’

  ‘Oh, do belt up. I know you mean well but …’

  ‘God in heaven, mean well.’

  She grinned and held out her arms. Thin women’s bodies are more interesting, he had always known it.

  Their mouths were brushing, moving gentle as fish breathing water as Calvin appeared. He was not happy. His pants itched and Haden had got a hand gun.

  Robin, overcome with love for all skinny redheads in the world, swung the child in the air.

  She was reaching for her son with maternal advice. ‘Hand guns are for thugs.’

  Robin heaved the wriggling child higher. ‘By the way I lost Murray’s number, thank God. What’s he doing down there anyhow?’

  Her face did not change. ‘Looking for a flat for next year.’

  The flying feet were too near his glasses. ‘Who’s this Haden?’ he asked quickly.

  ‘Just Haden.’

  ‘Has he a sister called Shelley?’

  ‘Yeah, but she’s a girl.’

  They talked for hours that night. Robin encouraged her, guided her along the path he wished her to follow. He wanted her to take off on her own, to convince herself, to find the truth in his truth as his father had hoped with his mother and stamps and he with Lisa and the bush.

  He had no illusions that Lisa would bless his union from beyond the grave. Stuff that John Middleton Murry crap and rightly so. He had loved Lisa, remembered her daily. She was a memory from another country where he had once loved and been happy and was grateful.

  His thumb and finger tightened around his wedding ring. It was not as shiny now, a bit rubbed but still golden, still ‘making a statement’. He saw Maureen fussing with her back-door key after Van Gogh. ‘Not now. It’s too soon. Later.’ That was what she had been on about. Give me the wedding ring my daughter gave you any time you want to get shot of it, Robin. I would like to keep it now that it is no longer of any relevance to you.

  Miss Bowman had undoubtedly been poured from steel.

  Emmeline made it clear that she had no intention of changing the habits of a lifetime because Robin had a thing about clutter and horizontal surfaces. The front room was an exception largely because they seldom entered it. Smoke belched occasionally from the basket grate Miss Bowman had declined to use, billowed inwards like a lick of sea mist shrouding rocks. Everything else was the same; the lumpy curved reef of sofa and chairs, the rug, The Old Shepherd’s Chief Mourner, Napoleon.

  Rob nodded at the lowering face. ‘Did you know he had a new chamois pocket sewn into his jacket each day so he could take snuff on horseback?’

  She was drying her hair, her face hidden as she knelt, her voice muffled. ‘Why is it everything you tell me is either mildly nuts or totally nuts or really interesting?’

  He touched her hair. ‘Don’t ever get it cut.’

  ‘OK.’

  The fire was dying, the carton of red wine alongside approaching mulled wine before he risked it.

  ‘Tell me what Miss Bowman told you about your mother.’

  She was now cross-legged, tucking a foot in.

  She gave a sigh, the pained sigh of the receptionist who has already explained that the consultant has no appointment free for four months and why pick on her. ‘She said my mother Marie died when I was born and she adopted me.’

  ‘Any mention of your father?’

  ‘Oh yes. A ne’er-do-well attorney, she actually said that. I imagined him charging around New England getting the hell out of it in a ne’er-do-well sort of way. But that was when I was a child. I started getting suspicious when the other kids did. It kind of rubs off on you, like nits. You get the feeling second-hand. “Your Dad up Mount Crawford clink then?” “No, he died in Vermont.” “Vermont, where’s Vermont?” “Emmie O’Malley’s got no daddy.” You know what little snuggle-bunnies girls are. Can’t think why I didn’t switch to boys sooner.

  ‘So I had my suspicions OK. And Aunt’s letter confirmed them. The one I showed you.’ She leaped up taking warmth with her to search in the drawer beneath the yellow-toothed ermine and the scrimshaw and the photograph.

  ‘You’ve put Alice back,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s a good photograph.’

  He had not seen it for years but was not disappointed; the folds of the cloak, the hood around the still face, even the hand on the staff were familiar. Wil was right. It was a pilgrim’s face; it was not just the cloak. ‘Wil would love that,’ he muttered.

  ‘Give it to him.’

  He glanced at her stern face. ‘No, I will not.’

  She handed him the letter, shrugged. ‘Read it,’ she snapped.

  Your father was a lawyer. He is dead now. My family were in timber. My grandmother stood by me and the bits and pieces we have were hers …

  His eyes flicked over it again.

  You have been my joy, and Calvin also …

  ‘Emmie, it does not say that Miss Bowman was your mother.’

  ‘It doesn’t say she wasn’t.’

  ‘She doesn’t mention her sister Marie, the one she said was, she doesn’t give you any evidence, she doesn’t …’

  ‘So?’

  So quite a lot. So the shrewd old bat I admired more than somewhat and who was decent to me, except at the end and I can now see why, never lost her cunning. She might as well have put Emmeline’s origins through a scandal-defeating shredder as leave a letter as ambiguous as this. What had she hoped to achieve? Birth records could be traced despite Emmie’s having travelled on Miss Bowman’s passport. Miss Bowman had opted for delaying tactics. They had seen her out and that was the essential, though she must have hoped for a continuing effect. And would have succeeded if he had not come stumbling along like a clown on a spavined horse to rescue a maiden who preferred the dragon. Take me, take a dragon and to hell with the truth.

  The letter was more skilful than he had first thought. If it had said, ‘You are my child, I wished to spare you pain,’ and Emmeline had checked and found this to be false the armour of her love for Miss Bowman would have been dented if not pierced. Pierced at the linchpin if armour had such things.

  And if he felt depleted at the thought what would Emme
line? Feet of clay are one thing—hell, who hasn’t. But feet of clay on a figure renowned for upright stance could be lethal. He leaned forward to touch the hollow at the base of the neck beside him. It was surprisingly deep.

  ‘Do you want me to help find documentation?’ he asked casually to show how inessential it was.

  ‘No.’

  His eyes were scratchy. I tried Wil, I tried. I did try. And bang goes my thesis but let’s get our priorities right wouldn’t you say, Wil, wouldn’t you say.

  Except, Robin realised as he watched the changes of colour, the sudden snaps, crumbles, puffs of gas among the flames, he would not give up. Like the yes man who finally stood firm against corruption, like the coward turned unlikely hero, he would tell the truth. The truth about Alice O’Leary which would involve telling the truth about Candida Bowman.

  Calvin, he remembered, had called it Rob’s thethith. It had seemed rather cute at the time.

  Emmie stirred beside him.

  ‘You’ll come down in August?’

  Small flecks of light glinted on her pupils. ‘It would be great for Calvin. But no, how can I?’

  He poked the embers, wriggled the poker. Soot fell. ‘I’ll ring the chimney sweep tomorrow.’

  ‘Do that.’

  They sat still, the silence sparking around the room, the smoke belching. ‘Come to bed,’ he said.

  ‘No.’ Her nose was scarlet from the fire, the rest of her face white. As with her feet, pink and white were localised. He put out his hand as she drew back. ‘I think we should sort things out right now,’ she said.

  He paused, a reflective thinking-man’s pause. ‘Why now?’

  ‘Because you believe something I refuse to believe and if we stay together, very gently you will muddle me into beginning to doubt, into believing something I don’t believe and will not believe and why the hell should I?’ She lifted her hand. ‘Stop. Let me finish. It’s too soon. It might always be too soon. If you take Aunt and give me some dumb-bum who shot through twice, what help is that?’ She was sitting very straight, her red nose gleaming. ‘I don’t want to know,’ she said.