No.
11
Parliam Road, NW
2
is a small, mean but practical terraced house, its ground-floor front converted into a garage, a kitchen extension out the
back with the bathroom on top of it, and a sooty plane tree all that is left of the front garden. Many a time Jesper has wanted
to move to a more salubrious dwelling, and many a time Cynara has refused. She wanted to be where the ‘real people’ were.
Also, it was easy to keep clean, convenient, near the Underground and Lola’s school; and she could be at work in Holborn within
twenty minutes.
Now she sees she was stupid. If Lola wants to come home, where can she be fitted in? Cynara should at her age be living in
a bigger, grander house. She could easily have afforded it. She rode out the media storm Lola whipped up for her, and her
relations with WVB have survived, just, but does she want to stay with them? She has lost interest in legal work. Once it
seemed fascinating. Now it seems boring. She can hardly bear to answer the phone. Her mobile is switched off. She has abandoned
ongoing cases to her assistants.
A young Muslim woman is claiming damages from her employer who runs a hair salon. She has been fired for turning up to work
in full niqab. While she is working out her notice, fully veiled,
the shop windows are broken on three occasions. Is it her brothers who object to her working, or Islamophobes who object to
the niqab? The girl herself says she has grown a nasty wart on the side of her nose so she wears a veil not for religious
reasons but aesthetic ones. Is the employer entitled to fire her or not? It had seemed so interesting and important, now it
just seems depressing.
And Jesper quite understandably now says he wants half the value of the house. If she doesn’t regain her interest in her job,
how is she going to live? And support Lola? And support D’Dora, who hates to have financial matters discussed and makes her
feel an uncreative fool if she does? And who so far has paid nothing towards her keep? The disadvantages of living with D’Dora
are becoming more and more apparent.
When it came to moving furniture, for instance, Cynara missed the husband D’Dora had ousted. With Jesper’s help, what she
was doing would have taken her half the time. He was physically strong and as a male his spatial awareness was better than
hers. Even D’Dora acknowledged this particular superiority of the male, it being useful up mountain peaks in adverse weather
conditions when ‘mental visual rotation’ was required, though not enough, in D’Dora’s opinion, to make up for the multiple
other failings of the gender.
And if only D’Dora didn’t travel so heavy. Jesper always travelled light. He would set out for foreign places with a change
of underpants, a spare sweater and a memory stick in a backpack. What has she, Cynara, let herself in for?
And though Lola is giving D’Dora as an excuse for dropping out and leaving home, Cynara can see the advent of D’Dora hasn’t
exactly helped. Jesper is the one really at fault, in not showing strength and fighting back. But Cynara has to admit that
D’Dora
didn’t just
happen
. Both she and Jesper had weakly bowed down to a force of nature; the marriage, growing in the wrong place, had simply cracked
and fallen like a lone pine tree in a mountain gale. But then she couldn’t be expected to go on suiting Lola’s convenience
for ever. Lola had become impossible.
Can a few hours of sexual exhilaration a few times a week really be worth all this trouble? Cynara is weighing all these things
in the balance when the phone rings, and it is Lola.
In the battle to show the toughest love, who will win: Cynara or Lola? Lola, by wanting to move back in, has declared defeat.
But if Cynara declares a truce and lets Lola back into the house, she will have to shift all D’Dora’s stuff into the garage
and henceforth join the battle for parking places in the street, where there is no residents’ parking. This, for Cynara, is
the tipping point. She decides. All you need is sex.
Beverley once told Cynara that nature had designed teenagers to become so difficult that when they left home the parent felt
not grief but relief, and Cynara had dismissed the notion as ridiculous; now it seems a perfectly reasonable supposition.
Tough love wins. Cynara decides to say no to her daughter.
Just a little more about Louis. Samantha the school matron’s daughter used to wear shoes in which the two pieces of leather
were cut and joined centrally, not down the sides, and Scarlet was wearing similar shoes when Louis first met her. Sometimes
he thinks that the ‘love at first sight’ surge of attraction that overcame him when he met Scarlet at a media party was because
of the way two pieces of shoe leather were stitched together. This, and the need to prove his heterosexual credentials.
Louis had hoped when he declared his intention of marrying Scarlet that his colleagues at MetaFashion would stop pressuring
him to go with them to gay clubs. But then when the wedding was cancelled, and only the party remained, they giggled and assumed
he and Scarlet had made a non-marriage of convenience. ‘You closety old girl, you!’ they cheered. Wasn’t her sister the famous
Cynara Olsson, the gender lawyer who was all over TV, and who kept both a husband and a lesbian blog in which she complained
about him? That was style.
But these he knew to be unworthy motives, and when he and Scarlet were not living through the fall-out of a row, which lately
had become a great deal of the time – more especially since she had met Jackson, though she would have vigorously denied that
this was the case – Louis blanked out these thoughts, and remembered
they had got together because he loved her, and because she and he balanced each other – she so outgoing, confident and sociable,
he with the quiet inner seriousness she knew she lacked.
And while her family taught him about generosity and immediacy of response, he in his turn had been able to teach her many
things to which her family seemed blind. How to choose a good bottle of wine, how to tell the difference between a Monet and
a Manet, how not to apologise or explain, how not to let your social aspirations show – Scarlet sopped up his instruction
like blotting paper; and in the end, he thought, displayed the quizzicality, sophistication and self-confidence that a good
education brings. Anyone, meeting Scarlet casually, would assume she had been if not to Oxford, at least to Bristol or St
Andrews.
For her part Scarlet could admit that his love of Nopasaran – before she realised how difficult and time-consuming a house
it was to live in; minimalism meaning high maintenance, as she assured her friends – demonstrated something special and endearingly
eccentric about Louis. It was a point of singularity, and of many gratifying conversations. Louis was not like other men.
Louis’ mother Annabel, her expectations of a career for her son as a concert pianist or a latter-day Einstein dashed, let
him drift out of her quiet life. She too assumed he was gay, and his proposed marriage to Scarlet took her by surprise. This
bright, noisy, effective, undereducated girl – a BA in journalism from Kingston? Where was that? – this quiet, thoughtful
man: what perversity could have attracted him to her?
When the wedding was cancelled Annabel was relieved, but went to the party along with everyone else, in a floaty grey outfit
and a powerful white hat, curious about the girl’s relatives, and finding them disconcerting, people of little background,
goodish looks,
some notoriety, forceful opinions, and not a title between them, she smiled sweetly at them all. Then, duty done, she allowed
them to absent themselves from her life. She rather hoped Louis and Scarlet would split up before there were children. The
world was overpopulated as it was, and she did not want to end up with grandchildren who took after their mother and not their
father. They probably would; the genes, she could see, were strong.
That’s enough of Louis, more than enough, other than that he makes love in the missionary position. That used to be no problem
to Scarlet: she would be thinking of something else anyway; orgasms came easily, just a kind of shiver on the surface when
she turned her attention to what was going on. If she wanted anything more profound or exciting she could look for it outside
the home. Louis wouldn’t notice, so it didn’t count as infidelity or betrayal of trust. But now she has found Jackson, suddenly
it is not so okay as it was. Indeed, it now constitutes a real grievance. If only they had ever got married she could argue
that the constant missionary position amounted to mental cruelty, grounds for divorce.
She has tried talking about it to Louis, as the therapists advise, but if she starts any conversation during sex his thing
shrivels and weakens at once, and if she tries at other times he looks so distressed and embarrassed she desists. She is fond
of him, and would rather not distress and embarrass him. But she does feel this lack of imagination in him legitimises the
unholy passion she feels for Jackson.
The basement is quiet today, and has been for a couple of weeks, enough to make your writer feel all this vaguely paranormal
disturbance has been wholly of her own creation. If she doesn’t write about them it doesn’t happen. So she’s stopped.
All the same I have a premonition that they’re all only biding their time; that if they’ve stopped chattering and Mavis has
given up clearing her grates, it’s only because the cold weather has rendered them somnolent. When the north wind changes
to a south-westerly, and the hard winter ends, there may again be more general downstairs activity to be heard, more vibrancy
in the warmer air. Mavis may be back scattering crumbs, and Cook and the laundress be back about their business. Next time
round, is my fear, I may actually
see
someone walk between me and the window. I don’t want that to happen, so I will get quickly on to another subject.
The weather sites tell me northerly winds have set in for quite a while, and I am relieved, safe for the moment to deal with
the fictional kehua without stirring up too much other-worldliness down here.
I will transport you back to Coromandel, New Zealand, in the 1940s, placing time and distance between you and the flashy metropolitan
people we have been discussing. Beverley spent most of her childhood in Coromandel, and the place is very relevant to
what she has become today, as childhood landscapes are, and to the fortunes of her children, her grandchildren and now, indeed,
her great-grandchildren.
Coromandel is the peninsula that sticks its little finger out into the sea at the top right of New Zealand’s North Island.
It is hot, sunny, romantic, craggy, wild and beautiful, and when Beverley was a child, and moved up here from Amberley in
the South Island, with her adoptive parents, Arthur and Rita, it was still very much pioneering country. The nation is proud
of its past, as well it might be. Its ghosts are plentiful and acknowledged. Even today reports of ghosts, presences, spirit
orbs and so on are frequent, though there they seldom involve servants; Kiwis, as New Zealanders like to call themselves,
never having been, like European forebears, in the habit of keeping others in servitude.
One hundred and seventy or so years ago, around the time Yatt House was built, emigrants were fleeing the country to escape
oppression, poverty, dismal weather, agricultural depression, bad government, and indeed the servant culture, the better to
build a new and better land. The indigenous people, the Maori, tried to reason with them, deal with them and share with them,
but it ended with war and a good deal of bitterness, and it may well be that the paranormal, which features so much on today’s
TVNZ, does indeed still linger. If modern New Zealanders are in the habit of seeing or sensing what is not quite there, the
outward manifestation of the inner distress of the past, it is not surprising.
More so even than around Glastonbury down the road from us, site of ancient Avalon, though there it’s pretty bad. You can
be sure a great deal of bloodshed, general mayhem and Dark Ages bitterness went on around there, even leaving aside what happened
to the Abbot of Glastonbury a thousand years later. He thought he
could appease Henry VIII by turning the other cheek, paying him the dues Thomas Cromwell demanded and more, not arguing. The
only result was that the King, seeing there was no resistance, came in, seized all valuables, knocked down the Abbey, and
beheaded the Abbot on the top of the Tor, so his head rolled down the hill to come to rest at the site of the school one of
my children went to for a time. Spirits abound here too.
It is not surprising if when Beverley was a child, taniwha still lurked in the deep forest pools, tohunga flourished, kehua
hovered above the hapless heads of the unabsolved, and nested in the bushes, and could emigrate if necessary to Robinsdale,
and 11 Parliam Road, NW
2
, where Cynara and Lola (and D’Dora, but she has her own ghosts) have their homes, to Alice’s home, Lakeside Chase in the
North, to Nopasaran, and inevitably, should Scarlet ever get there, and I am beginning to think she will, to the Campion Tower
penthouse.
Beverley was no Maori, just a pakeha, a white person. But Kitchie, dying, will have prayed in desperation to all available
powers for the safety of her child, and a three-year-old in any culture is a three-year-old worthy of care, so such spiritual
beings as were in the neighbourhood may well have felt obliged to take her on as one of their own, birthright or not. Christianity
still lay lightly on the land at that time. The pretty Anglican church in Amberley, built in 1877 on Maori lands, with love
and gratitude to God for bringing them to this fertile land, was torn down by a hurricane in 1899 so it had to be rebuilt,
and a few years later fire destroyed the church school, so it may well be that the God of Israel was having a hard time laying
down His rules and rituals in this Southern clime. Be that as it may, Amberley kehua will have been on major alert that night
in 1937 when murder was committed, as they are whenever violent
and sudden death occurs.