The House Guest

by Barbara Anderson

  ‘Sure,’ said Emmeline. ‘Sure.’

  *

  ‘Mum,’ said Calvin licking tomato sauce off a slab of luncheon sausage. ‘There’s butterflies, Wil says. Blue butterflies. C’mon Mum, come on.’

  They set off in the truck. Shara had disappeared as she often did at weekends, leaving no message or evidence of her existence except small work boots side by side in the porch. If asked on her return of her whereabouts she said she had been mucking about and the race was OK again now but it wouldn’t last, no way. So why leave her working boots behind. Nobody asked.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ whispered Emmie in his ear.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said staring out the window. How could she be so obtuse as to be unaware that his great find, the heart of his original research, was being forfeited? Or perhaps she had noticed and had chosen to ignore it which would be worse. No, she would not do that.

  And what did he want her to do? Gush? Fall about with thanks? It was his decision. He was behaving like one of those bozos at Spiro-catered pre-Christmas functions. (Have you booked yours yet?) Guys winking man to man across tables as they overdosed on illicit cream and pork chops and advised each other not to let the wife see. Whose coronary is it anyway?

  But she might bloody well notice.

  ‘I will read the letters,’ she told him as they climbed out at the cemetery. ‘I said I would.’

  It was not enough. ‘Great,’ he said.

  Wilfred was right about the butterflies. Clouds of small blue ones rose round their ankles as they walked through grass dried to straw. They were an exact match with the pale blue wahlenbergias as he knew they would be. A redheaded kid chasing blue butterflies in a silver paddock, he thought sourly, is a pretty sight.

  Emmie had given him up and was walking beside Wilfred. They moved towards Alice’s grave while Calvin crashed about searching gravestones for Cs and Rs for Ruby and Hs for Haden.

  ‘Why are some of them crooked?’ said Calvin, his hand tilting.

  ‘Subsidence,’ snapped Robin and strode to the cliff edge. He now had bloodymindedness to add to stupidity, the stupidity of those who seethe in silence and expect others to determine the cause, to glance inside the head of the wounded and understand.

  Spiro’s fish were wrong. Words could help, it was just a matter of finding them and the time and the place. Nothing more. Easy. Robin stood staring across the plain to North Rough Ridge and Raggedy Range beyond, his chest tight with self-hatred. He stood there for ten minutes or more watching the heat haze, the dark shelter belts, the river. His breathing slowed, became regular, unnoticed as a sleeping child’s. He had a momentary glimpse of how life should be, could be. Anything seemed possible, levitation became an option as his arms moved and he felt again that extraordinary weightlessness as though wings could sprout and human beings could change and everything would be all right and he must find Emmie immediately to tell her, because she might not have noticed that this was a good place. That there are good places. He ran to join them, dodging graves and tussock, bounding around fallen headstones surrounded by warmth and sky and the bleached-hay smell of summer. It was important that he bring the news as soon as possible.

  They scarcely glanced at him. They were busy talking.

  ‘You said you weren’t married,’ said Emmie.

  ‘We weren’t.’

  ‘But it says wife. Third wife.’

  ‘I lied.’

  She took that one on board in silence. ‘And why didn’t you mention her books?’

  ‘Rob said that too, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She was very still. ‘Let’s go back and read the letters,’ she said.

  Wilfred made formal, almost ceremonial, arrangements. He escorted Emmie to the front room, handed over the cardboard box in silence, moved the Smoker’s Companion to one side, plumped the hessian cushion on the sofa where he thought she would be most comfortable because she would have more room and did not explain for what. He promised her she would not be disturbed, that he would look after Calvin. It was time the hens were fed anyhow and she was not to worry on that score and heaven knows where Shara’d got to. Come on, Rob.

  Rob glanced at her. She nodded. She would examine the evidence in private.

  He headed up the track to the low curve of hills behind the house. Emotional trauma, landslides, would be taking place in that musty hessian-coloured room; the only friendly charge, if any, from a plywood Ancient Egyptian with his hands out. Rob wanted to rush back, to burn his goddamn notes. To help her.

  He tried to work things out but failed. Thought happened inside, grim hacking stuff undistracted by spur-winged plovers and sprouting cowpats and an unknown fungus on a fallen pine.

  Shara was striding towards him in mud-stained Nikes. It was early evening, the air soft above burnt paddocks, space infinite, time running out.

  The sheep tracks were empty, the animals silent beneath the last of the sunset. It had not blazed; a trace of pink cloud, a few streaks of grey, a flattened sun balanced for a few moments on the edge of the world before sinking. Nothing spectacular.

  For once Shara wasn’t squinting against the sun. Her crowsfeet were milky white, her eyes brown. ‘Where do you go to on Sundays?’ he asked.

  ‘I walk round the farm.’

  ‘Why not wear boots?’

  ‘Because if I wore them I’d work. There’s always something. This way I just look.’

  She gave a large sniff, a long drawn inhalation, a short puff out. ‘Emmie’s reading the letters, isn’t she?’

  ‘Yes. How’d you guess?’

  ‘I figured she would after seeing Mom’s grave.’

  Her head was at shoulder height beside him, a crisp loner with insight.

  ‘The letters prove it,’ she said.

  ‘I haven’t read them.’

  ‘Wait till you do.’ She kicked over a nodding thistle, attacked the root with muddy shoes. ‘I read the lot when Wil was in hospital.’

  You did, huh.

  ‘Emmie wouldn’t accept the farm. I’ve told you that,’ he said.

  ‘Get real,’ said Shara and strode on.

  Emmie was waiting with the box in her hands. ‘Hi, Shara.’

  Shara lifted a hand and marched into the implement shed. They could hear her slamming about inside.

  ‘Come round the front,’ said Emmeline. Geraniums and a few sun-scorched daisies crackled against them as they passed. For the first time in memory the front door was open. Drifts of cobwebs brushed their hair as they walked through to the stuffy room.

  Her face was stained and damp, her nose pink, her voice sharp with effort. ‘You’re right,’ she said.

  She shoved the box into his hands as though she hated him, them, the battered cardboard. ‘Here. Read them. I’m going to howl my head off.’

  ‘Emmeline.’

  ‘Read them.’

  The writing was bold; black, spiky attenuated shapes lay diagonally across the page in the latter ones. The early ones were printed in lower case in the daft way adults do in letters for little kids too young to read them.

  The letters were short, lively and of no literary merit. No mute inglorious Edward Lear awaited resurrection here. There were sketches to illustrate: a tortoise, a barn, a hysterical stick Alice jumping over a crescent moon at a letter from her daughter.

  Each letter began My darling child. There were early two-liners in cat/mat rhyme. Mock rhymes appeared later when Emmie could get the joke.

  My tortoise

  Is full of porpoise.

  He doesn’t mess about

  When the lettuce comes out.

  He heads across the grass with action

  For lettuce is a star attraction

  For all Hard Tops who love the good things,

  For all small girls that extra luck brings.

  And yes, there was the text, the goddamn subtext, even in the worst ones.

  Even a hen

  Can say When,

  Even
a stoat

  Can say Won’t.

  Whereas a Paradise Bird on appointment

  Can turn out a grave disappointment

  There’s no telling. That’s

  fine, yes. But quelling.

  It’s better when animals soar

  And not nearly as much of a bore.

  The last letter was written just before Alice left for New Zealand.

  My darling child,

  I can’t write sense. I am about to explode with happiness. You and Candida will have to stick the pieces together when I see you in Wellington. I hope you’ll do a better job than poor Humpty Dumpty’s medics!

  It was signed as always Your loving friend, Alice. Nothing heavy.

  Robin sat holding the empty box for some time before restowing the letters and heading for the pink bedroom.

  She was asleep. Well, that was good. That’s the best thing, isn’t it, when you are emotionally drained. My partner is emotionally drained. Sweet Christ, my sweet partner. She sat up. Letters skidded from the unbalanced box, cascading to the floor like plastic plates.

  ‘You all right?’

  That cockeyed half-smile. ‘Well, it’s a bit of a shock.’

  ‘Of course, yes.’

  She stroked pink floral cretonne, gave it her full attention. ‘It’s how she wrote. All that fun stuff, all longing hidden. So happy. That’s what gets me. Not even signing herself Mother or Mom or whatever. Alice didn’t know Aunt had ditched her. And it’s not only that. Think of the effort she must have made not to muddle me, to write cheerful letters without hooks, no “love me because I’m your mother and I am miserable” tags.’

  Her face was whiter than ever against the rioting pinks of the pillow roses. ‘I couldn’t do that. Not for eight years. Not for eight weeks. And not one of them read. Think about it.’

  She jumped up from the bed, grabbed a towel. ‘I’m going to have a shower.’ She turned at the door. ‘And where does it leave Aunt?’

  She said the same thing in the kitchen after Calvin had gone to bed and they sat around the kitchen table. Moths banged against the lighted window, a morepork called, Blake the labrador and Bugle lay sleeping muzzle to muzzle.

  Shara stood up. ‘Night,’ she said.

  ‘No, no, Shara, don’t go,’ said Emmeline.

  No fuss. I go or I don’t go. I do it or I don’t do it. Shara sat.

  Emmeline explained, her face lit by the fluorescent light blinking above the sink and the hundred watt overhead. Wil had to realise, she said, speaking slowly and carefully, that although she believed Wil, and Rob, and most of all the letters (how could she not), Wil still had to realise the whole thing was a shock and when she had finished the letters she couldn’t move, had sat poleaxed for half an hour but still he must realise …

  The old man’s face was shadowed. The violet opalescence of the light above the sink did not affect him, he had his back to it. That was all very fine and large, he said. He had realised it would be a shock. He had made allowances for that, but when was Emmie going to come off her high horse?

  High horse?

  High horse. What about Alice? What about her loss, her misery, her torture at the hands of that woman? What about that then? ‘What about my girl!’ said Wilfred, his fist clenching, a spoon jumping. ‘What about Alice!’

  ‘Yes,’ said Robin.

  Shara looked at him thoughtfully. Emmeline lifted her chin.

  Her head was high, her hair catching every glint. ‘I agree she was my mother. No one could read those letters and not agree. They’re …’ She was gulping now, swallowing, ‘they’re the best thing I’ve ever had and the whole thing is heartbreaking, but can’t you see? It was Aunt who brought me up, fed me, biked for miles, loved me silly. I will not,’ said Emmeline, ‘hate Aunt.’

  ‘You don’t have to,’ said Rob.

  They stared at him, Emmie blankly, Wilfred enraged, his face still halved by shadow.

  Shara was sitting beside Rob. She was so small that much of her was beneath the table, her whole head was flooded with light: a sharp-nosed nocturnal animal blinking in the glare of revelation. She lifted one hand, swept her open palm against Robin’s in a misdirected high-five. ‘All right!’ she said.

  ‘We’re all nuts,’ begged Rob his hands wide. ‘All slogging on. Crashing about. Getting it wrong. They both got it wrong. Weak? Vicious? Saint? Bitch? How do we know?’

  ‘We know what she did,’ said Wilfred.

  ‘I’m talking to Emmie. Take both.’ He was insisting now, hammering it past her staring eyes into her head. ‘Why can’t you love both for Chrissake?’

  ‘No,’ said Wilfred. ‘I’ll never accept that.’

  ‘Then don’t. I’m talking to Emmie.’

  They went on for hours. They wouldn’t stop. Shara went to bed and Robin missed her; her steel, her sense, her lack of imagination and her calm.

  How would you feel if some false friend had stolen Calvin?

  She didn’t steal. She offered. And how many would?

  Many women, hundreds. She wanted a child.

  You think, you think … Try bringing up a child on your own.

  I wish I’d had the chance. But I wouldn’t steal one.

  Aunt did not steal. Did she Rob?

  She probably didn’t mean to originally. But yes, she did.

  You say that? You say that to me?

  The letters, he said. The unopened letters.

  They reached a compromise eventually, from exhaustion—from sense—from whatever it is that occasionally, just occasionally, enables antagonists to agree to differ. From affection despite all.

  Wilfred produced a bottle of Glenfiddich he had been hoarding and they lifted a glass.

  Emmeline would accept the evidence, she would find out all about Alice and love her as she deserved to be loved, would tell Calvin about her later as long as she did not hear one word, and she meant one word, against Aunt.

  ‘Your hair’s wrong,’ said Wilfred, ‘but otherwise …’ He turned and passed the bottle. ‘There’s a toast,’ he said. ‘More of a ladies’ toast, if you like. I taught it to her and she loved it. When we had a drink and it was just the two of us she’d say it, say it to me. Only when it was just us, mind.’ The old man lifted his pale amber glass to Emmeline.

  Here’s to you, and to you, and to you again.

  If I hadn’t of met you

  I couldn’t of let you,

  But I met you

  And I let you

  And if I met you again

  I’d let you again.

  So here’s to you.

  They left the following week with Calvin bawling his head off. They would come the same time next year. Earlier, if there was a chance, but definitely next summer. They would come every summer.

  They didn’t, of course. Not every year. But they meant to.

  ALSO BY BARBARA ANDERSON

  I think we should go into the jungle

  Girls High

  Portrait of the Artist’s Wife

  All the Nice Girls

  Copyright

  VICTORIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

  Victoria University of Wellington

  PO Box 600 Wellington

  © Barbara Anderson 1995

  ISBN 978-0-86-473288-0 (print)

  ISBN 978-0-86-473712-0 (epub)

  ISBN 978-0-86-473869-1 (mobi)

  First published 1995

  This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without the permission of the publishers

  The author acknowledges the assistance of a Scholarship in Letters from the Arts Council of New Zealand Toi Aotearoa

 

 

 
ends