The House Guest

by Barbara Anderson

  She flashed Rob a rictus grin, included him in her embarrassing attempts at goodwill and social concourse. ‘Do they, Rob?’

  He couldn’t believe it. Her. Wilfred. Any of it. ‘No,’ he said.

  Wilfred was moving stiffly, his left leg swinging wider than ever. He stopped suddenly without explanation. Emmie, taken by surprise, ploughed into him, apologised endlessly and made it worse.

  He stood silent, not looking at her, his mouth clamped tight as he gazed over the plain and waited for her to shut up. Rob stopped beside him, the suitcases held well above the ground.

  Calvin was now playing a form of free-range hopscotch among the droppings. Eventually, without explanation or comment, Wilfred moved on through the airlock porch to the kitchen.

  ‘Make the tea will you?’ he said crashing onto a chair. Bess’s kick had certainly aged him.

  Emmie was now banging on about the mess and muddle of the kitchen. It was wonderful, a real farm kitchen. Did Wilfred know she’d done a TV ad for drench? No she couldn’t remember which one. Not just at the moment, which was mad, but she would. Probably about three in the morning ha ha.

  Robin began to hope for Shara’s return; a counter-irritant of any sort would be welcome. He could not join the conversation, ask after Shara, about Doug who had given him the lift to Dunedin, about anything or anybody. Once or twice he opened his mouth and shut it again as she continued to behave like some sort of Mad Hatter hostess entertaining the old man in his own kitchen, making him welcome in his own home with hysterical overreach.

  She was on to horses, the shock of being kicked by and how awful. That was one thing she could bet on. One thing which would never happen to her, no way. Not in a bull’s roar. She had never ridden, never even sat on one, could he believe. Boy, she could see why the Brit cops use them for crowd control. Give Emmeline long batons any day.

  Rob could feel his teeth, his locked jaw. ‘Emmie,’ he hissed.

  She turned to him, her eyes bright, blinking, her mouth all over the place. ‘Yes?’

  Wilfred was laughing. Or something like it. The process was drawn out and appeared painful. It began slowly, forced its way into wheezing guffaws which turned to gut-wrenching explosions of mirth or grief.

  Calvin, who knew about jokes, grabbed another chocolate biscuit and joined in, yelping with excitement and spraying crumbs.

  Wilfred’s head was shaking, his eyes streaming, his hands clutching his sides like F. Christmas on a Ho-ho-ho jag. Calvin’s finger followed the old man’s pointing one. ‘Mum!’ he yelled.

  ‘And you say,’ gasped Wil, ‘you say you’re not her daughter.’

  *

  There were explanations of course. Explanations called for and given. Emmeline was not pleased. She sat stiff-backed and demanded them. She had not come all this way to be made a fool of, not that she minded that, never had, but she hadn’t wanted to come in the first place—or ever. And what Wilfred thought he was doing behaving as though she was some long lost Anastasia figure she couldn’t imagine. And as for Rob sitting around like a spare lemon and Calvin—Calvin could be quiet this instant, like now.

  Wilfred apologised. He should not have done that. He hadn’t meant to upset Emmeline, not for a minute. It was just the whole thing was a bit of a shock if you like. He’d never even seen a photo of Emmeline and then to see her climbing out of the car a dead ringer for Alice though the hair was wrong … It had knocked him for six. Had caught him between wind and water, left him speechless, and then, and then, and then …

  The old man was mopping his eyes again, leaving wet patches on a large checked handkerchief.

  And then to see her, to see her behaving exactly like Alice (hang on lass, hang on), like Alice in Dalgety’s tent or at a wedding or wherever, when she was nervous. No, it was too much.

  He shook his head, picked up Emmie’s hand and held it. ‘Too much,’ he said. ‘Forget it, lass. Won’t happen again. Just have a holiday. No sweat. Just relax.’

  ‘I am relaxed,’ snarled Emmie.

  Shara was at the doorway in stockinged feet, her arms cradling a large half-dead lamb. ‘Shoot, that water race,’ she said. ‘I still say we need a fence.’ She glanced around counting heads. ‘Come and help, boy.’ The lamb was installed in a carton beside the hot-water cylinder. Shara explained about bottle feeding and frequency of same. Calvin’s grin was constant. A lamb of his own, a lamb none of the other kids had, a lamb called Spud whose tail jiggled when Calvin fed him. Misha had never let on whether she liked him or not.

  The time he could spare from Spud he devoted to Shara. They disappeared for the day (You’ve got to let him, Em. Yeah, I know. I know), Calvin crowing like a sun-screened rooster from the pommel end of the saddle, Shara behind. They saw a dead sheep with a lamb’s feet sticking out its bottom and a hawk eating a lamb. Shara said she didn’t know whether the hawk had killed it or not but Calvin reckoned it had, his hand demonstrating the killer dive.

  Is that a soldier hat, Wil? Yes. Can I have it? For now you can but only inside. Why not for always? No. Did you have a gun in the war? Yes. Did you kill people? Yes. Where is it? Handed back. Haven’t you got a gun at all then? Yes. Where? The cupboard was unlocked, the empty twenty-two and three-nought-three inspected, the differences explained, the mechanisms demonstrated. Can I have them? No. Do you use them? Nor often. Calvin nodded at the face peering down the empty barrel. ‘Getting a bit old, I suppose.’

  Emmie and Rob took over the food to Shara’s delight. It was the one thing, the only thing, that got up her nose about Central. Not being able to call up a Thai, a Mexican, even a goddamn pizza. Not even a deli-to-go. She had never been into food, let alone fixing the stuff. It was like, you know, the worst thing, the pits, knowing that every day after you’ve kicked off your boots you have to cook something dead and what was worse you have to think about it. Sure there was never anything but mutton, but would you broil, or baste, or fling bits around in a skillet? She couldn’t face it, except she had to, it was part of the deal. In fact when she’d first arrived it was the deal, and she had to say Wil was the unfussiest guy in the world. He’d eat anything and sometimes had to. So sure Em, sure, she’s all yours and Rob could come and help clean up after she killed.

  ‘How do you think he is?’ asked Rob hosing the sweet stench of blood from beneath the dripping carcase.

  The fluorescent light turned Shara blue, her nose purple.

  ‘I think he’s more frail, like he has little naps. I go in an hour later and he’s still out for the count with his mouth open. That kick didn’t do him any good.’

  There wouldn’t be many women you could ask. ‘How are the matrimony stakes?’

  ‘Naa. He’s too old. Before Bess maybe, and all this razzmatazz about Emmeline. He’s gotten to the stage of one thing at a time, emotion-wise as well. I’ll stay, mind. I like him. I’ll look after him, but then it’s good-night nurse.’ Robin, now busy with the straw broom, glanced at her. She was compact, sinewy, androgynous and straight as a die, a ‘lovely little outdoor worker’. I’ll miss him though. I like the old guy’

  Wil had rescued their arrival from near disaster and Emmie tried to do the same. There was the obligatory visit to the frocks. The shed was now stuffy, the smell of moth balls and unaired frocks more obvious in the heat. Emmie, finally speechless, stood in the middle, her hands twisting with misery or something like it, while Wil, oblivious and proud as ever, conducted his guided tour, explained the relative positions allocated to his ex-wives’ garments—the reason why Alice had fewer than Doris or Ivy being that, unlike them, she was not a home dressmaker. He invited Emmeline to feel, to handle, to admire and praise.

  Robin stood close to her.

  Wil had never again alluded to Alice as her mother, had never forgotten Emmeline’s name, nor indeed Calvin’s. He seemed, for all his frailty, to be in a state approaching euphoria. Controlled euphoria. He was not going to muck things up again. He tried to keep his eyes off Emmeline and often achieved it. S
he was his guest, she was here on holiday.

  They were being made happy, welcomed up Central for the farm holiday of a lifetime, but Robin was conscious of the tension at the end of the line. Something was ticking like the reel of an old western clicking from sprocket to sprocket as the charge snaked along the fuse to the keg at the head of the canyon and the camera flicked back and forth from the tense faces of the bad to the unknowing innocent good as they rode onwards. In High Noon it had been the clock at the railway station. Wittgenstein, like Emmeline, had loved westerns. He had read it somewhere.

  They swam in the creek, picnicked on boiled mutton sandwiches and discussed next day’s plan beside the Smoker’s Companion. Their only failure was the Gold Trail.

  Calvin, having expressed mild interest in panning for the stuff, lost interest and demanded to get back to Spud. And there was a gate up the back needed fixing and he and Shara had to check out the race again and why couldn’t they go home to the farm and stay there?

  ‘This is heaven,’ she said scrambling up from the creek. ‘But it’s false pretences.’

  He was on his back watching the sharp leaves cut the sunlight to pieces. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why do you always agree? Why can’t you tell me I’m wrong? And now he wants me to look at letters or something.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘So why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘Because he wanted to. Hey—I’ve got a note of Alice’s I should’ve given back to you. From Miss Bowman’s copy of The Load.’ A Freudian flicker. He had not wanted, still did not want her to do a Murray. To get it all wrong. So he had forgotten. Forgotten temporarily, for six months.

  She was standing now, drying herself with her knickers. The patterns of light and shade were interesting, her trunk dappled as a plane tree’s.

  ‘What’s it say?’

  ‘“He is dead. I am coming. Hurray”’

  She paused, one hand across her breasts like a pared-down version of an Edwardian postcard labelled Summer Days.

  ‘Lovers?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s a thought though.’ She stood silent, dredging up memories. ‘Naa. I was only nine but … No. There was no affection, no tenderness or loving welcome. Anything but, from memory. Nothing in their mien,’ she said sending up the word. ‘Nothing at all. Just Aunt being tougher than ever and Alice moping about like a wet hen.’

  ‘There was nothing in their mien,’ he said removing a thread of green river slime from his foot, ‘because they were not lovers and never had been. By the time you saw them they were not even friends.’

  ‘You know he wants to leave Emmie the farm,’ said Shara as she flung the shovels into the tray of the truck. She was dressed as usual—boots, shorts, bleached shirt. Her arms and legs were tanned leather, the mahogany V of her neck edged with white.

  Not that. ‘No,’ he muttered.

  ‘Yeah.’ She swung the truck out the gate and headed straight into the sun, her eyes squinting up the track as she changed the subject. ‘The race needs a new ram. It’s junked out completely this time.’ She was giving him an out, a chance to leave it there. It was not his problem. She just thought she would mention farm legacies in passing.

  He looked at her sharp little face, her kid’s hands clamping the wheel, wondering why he found her so attractive, liked her so much, why she had become one of the few people of whom—when he walked into a room and she was there, drinking her beer, checking her Lotto ticket, standing on her head eating lettuce because Calvin wanted to see—he would think, ‘Good. There’s Shara. Good.’

  She was, you could say, centred. She had got it all together. Slice her where you like; longitudinal, sagittal or transverse, Shara would stain true throughout. He could not ignore her confidence.

  ‘How do you know?’

  Not a glance. Eyes still peering ahead. ‘How d’you reckon? The guy told me.’

  ‘Emmie wouldn’t accept it.’

  Now she did look at him. The pitying glance, the half-sneer of one confronted by the unfathomable ignorance of someone who does not understand about land.

  ‘I know,’ he insisted.

  ‘And what about Calvin?’

  He jumped out to open a gate. Had time to think before he slammed the door shut. ‘All kids love farms, that’s nothing.’ He put a hand on her knee, removed it immediately. It had turned into something unattractive, unwanted as a dead toad, a sloughed-off skin. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said.

  ‘Me? Why should I worry?’

  He told Emmeline in the shed later. They had reached the stage where everything was discussed automatically. It saved having to charge out shouting to reverberate hills and the answers were more interesting and conceivably there might be understanding, discourse, the exchange of thought.

  ‘Who said?’

  He was head down cleaning a shovel. ‘Wil, according to Shara.’

  Emmeline heaved herself onto the work bench, ran a hand along the vice. ‘You could crack macadamias in this,’ she said.

  ‘They’d be squashed.’

  She wiped the back of her hand in a slow outward curve beneath her nose, inspected threads of hair. ‘We’ll have to go home. It’s bad enough being here under false pretences without this courtiers-hissing-in-the-wings stuff.’

  ‘“I thought the King had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall?”’

  She looked at him with something like despair. ‘Well, you’d know.’

  Central Otago was on slow bake; heat shimmered above the plain, the creeks were low, even his hayfever had dried out. Calvin’s sunscreen had to be renewed hourly. He was a pinker shade of pale, Emmie a proud ecru, Robin tanned to a crisp. They looked as healthy as Aucklanders or Australians or other outdoor persons at risk.

  Wilfred and Calvin appeared to enjoy each other’s company. They devised games, walked together each morning to collect the paper from the gate so Wilfred would have all day to fulminate about its contents. The first time Rob saw their back views disappearing hand in hand down the paddock he pulled the pink-rose curtains shut quickly. She saw his face, sat up. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  She was out of bed beside him, tugging at roses. She hid her head on the back of his neck for a second.

  ‘We still don’t know the date of the hearing.’

  ‘It takes time.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, it does.’

  The ground rules of the minefield game were simple. Fowl droppings were mines, the explosion of which was euphemised by Wilfred to the pop of a deflated balloon. They laid the path together, Wilfred wielding scissors, Calvin laying masking tape to indicate safe passage. Inspection was made each morning for enemy action and adjustments made as required.

  Wil straightened to greet them. ‘Minefields,’ he said, ‘are messy.’ His eyes were very blue. He had been there and he knew and he had nothing to hide. They stared at masking tape and bird shit.

  ‘Calvin and I are going to his Gran’s grave this afternoon. Anyone coming?’

  ‘No,’ said Emmie.

  She would not. She had said right at the beginning that she would not. OK, OK, she was prepared to accept the fact that Wil hadn’t meant it, that Gran had just slipped out, whatever that meant, and how anything could slip out if it hadn’t been there in the first place was beyond her. Wil had promised he would play it cool. Gran wasn’t cool. Gran was hot as hell. The whole thing was too much. She had had enough, she didn’t mean to be ungrateful but he kept changing the rules like that shitty game. They’d had a wonderful time and he was a nice old guy, she meant it, but oh Rob, let’s go home now. And she was going anyhow.

  The skin beneath her eyes was damp, her hands moving. Emmeline, like Shara or Aunt, was tough, but when she was nervous, bewildered, when life was beginning to fray at the edges, it showed.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘It’ll be all right.’

  So that’s another thing solved wouldn’t you say, man, wouldn’t you say.


  They told Wilfred they would be going home on Friday. They stood shoulder to shoulder carrying the banner of solidarity between them and thanked him profusely, Emmie smiling, Robin not. He was disgusted with himself. And God. Eileen’s God, Miss Cranborne at Sunday School’s God, the God who died for us and gives us the peace that passeth all understanding, when we forget self for the good of others, right.

  He had given away the guts of his thesis for Emmeline and was happy to do so. Hell, yes, more than happy. So why did he feel like a plucked capon, something emasculated and by no means at peace? Because his work, his work which was not done, was important. Not important in the overall scheme of things whatever that was, but important to him. His. And not only his. That was one of the main reasons for his frustration. He had discovered something of interest which would illuminate the work of Alice O’Leary who was a good writer and undervalued. Something which should be said. And here he was giving that away and he should feel better, not worse. Infinitely worse. An ineffectual angel banging and bleating away up Central. His anger started with himself and moved on. Not for the first time he wondered how anybody who did not believe in God could be infuriated by Him.

  The old man had watched them in silence, eyes hooded, mouth turtle-clamped. He was detached, dry as a sunbaked stone.

  ‘You haven’t read your mothers letters.’

  ‘Don’t call her my mother.’

  Wilfred stood there, stood there hatless in the sun stroking his axe handle, the blade glinting as he changed hands. ‘My wife then, and she wasn’t that either. I want you to read Alice O’Leary’s letters.’