And Louis hardly knows what to think. He goes to bed and sleeps and sleeps and sleeps.
At the moment it is really very eerily quiet and normal down here. No chatter and clatter from Mavis or Cook, no cigar smoke.
The peace was making me uneasy. Then I realised I couldn’t even hear the birds singing or the keyboard clacking. So I took
time off and went down to the nurse at the clinic and had my ears checked, and yes, there was a lot of wax, which had to be
softened and washed out. I am sorry to plague you with this really rather disgusting detail – bad enough when characters have
afflictions, but one hardly wants the writer to offer hers up as well – but it is relevant. The nurse said yes, in the build-up
to the blockage one could get all kinds of sound effects in the ears, and yes, sudden changes of temperature might well affect
the wax, hardening or softening it, though she hardly thought the sense of smell would be affected. On the other hand – ears,
nose, throat – yes, it was possible. So all is explained. Well, quite a lot of it. It doesn’t explain the dog who wasn’t Bonzo
walking past my window. But the unlikely is not the impossible.
I walked back from the clinic hearing everything so clearly it was almost painful. I could hear the drains beneath the pavement
gurgling; the sound of the church bell ringing a celebratory carillon was as clear as that of the men moving a skip and shouting
each other instructions. My ears had temporarily lost the ability to sort out irrelevant sound from the relevant. Within half
an hour my
hearing was back to normal, and I was able to dismiss the thought that though I’d assumed the church bells were coming from
All Saints, the bells had been removed in the seventies. My sense of near sound and distant sound had been confused.
But why do I have the sense that I am being laughed at, that they are playing grandmother’s footsteps? One child goes ahead,
and the others creep up behind, and if the one in front suddenly turns round and if someone is discovered to be moving, that
person is out.
The weather’s been heavy lately, full of thunder, and very humid. Today really black clouds are blowing our way and seem to
be piling up just the other side of the
lonicera
hedge which marks the edge of the garden some sixty feet away. Well, more or less
lonicera
– in the manner of unkempt hedges everywhere it also includes attractive intrusions of holly, hawthorn and roses. A single
red rose and a shower of white ones stand out clearly against the black backdrop of clouds. I am so taken by it I stop typing
and just stare. I would go and get my camera except that this would mean climbing up the stone stairs, worn down by the footsteps
of the likes of Mavis, and Cook, and the laundress, yes, and occasionally Mr Bennett and his kind.
A crack of thunder comes so loud it makes me start up from my chair. A zigzag of lightning leaps through the clouds almost
without pause and makes everything as bright as daylight for a second: everything is visible except for some reason the roses.
My computer screen blinks and cuts out. I panic. But when I turn it on again – fortunately we have a kind of surge cut-out
gadget – every word is there. I saved, thank God, before I stopped to stare at the roses. Even better, the leylandia just
the far side of the hedge was struck and split – I have never liked it because it’s an unnatural heavy green colour and it
has blocked the view out of my bedroom
window, and now the leylandia is no more, it is gone. And the rain came pelting down and did the garden no end of good, and
everything smelled of fresh wet grass. So all was well.
Almost well. I say almost, because I’ll swear that in that instant flash of light I saw a cluster of kehua hanging from one
of the trees in the hedge, swinging gently in the rush of cool breeze that came just before the rain started down. It was
only the vision of an instant, but there they were. This is not good. This is outrageous – what are they doing in my life?
They are a fictional conceit. I brought them to this country. They come and go at my behest.
No wonder the dead staff are bloody laughing: they know what’s going on. The spirits of the world are in collusion. I knew
it was dangerous walking the edge of the occult. The more you think about it, the more it’s there. But I shan’t give up. I
am not so far from the end of this book. The kehua of the South, the kelpies and selkies of the North may unite and riot,
I shall stay down here and write.
Upstairs is too unhappy at the moment. The carillon I heard, from the bells that weren’t, was surely celebrating the end of
the First World War, from which two of the Bennett sons, William and Ernest, never came home. What good victory now? I can’t
bear it. Mr Bennett and Mavis’ carryings-on are bad enough but Cristobel’s grief is too near me, as she roams these now-desolate
rooms. It is every woman’s grief. Perhaps that’s what brought the kehua to my garden: they are bent on joining together all
the sorrowing families of the world, the ones destroyed by violence. They are learning globalism.
When Beverley had done her bit at the prompting of her kehua and had called Gerry and Louis, thus stirring up their lives
enough to wake the dead, she calls her granddaughter Cynara to point out that Scarlet has left Louis and that she hopes Lola
is not going to be homeless, because at this time in her life the girl needs guidance.
‘She can come and stay with me if she likes,’ says Beverley. ‘I’ll take her on.’
The kehua move closer, fluttering from the hornbeam at the end of the garden to hang from the branches of the wild cherry
or
prunus avium
, which rubs its branches up against the windows of Beverley’s conservatory, and which in spite of Harry’s advice she had
declined to have removed. (Harry is the second husband, if you remember, the troubled gay architect.) Sooner or later the
glass panes are going to start cracking and breaking under the pressure of foliage. Beverley, waiting for Cynara’s reply,
finds her ears are blocked and stuffy and blows her nose, which doesn’t help, but just makes sound the more distorted.
The kehua love event. They sniff it in the air. It makes them chatter and clatter. They like the idea of the family massing
together: ideally of course it would be in the marae in pakeha Amberley, the dead and the living at peace together, all the
rituals done. As it
happened both Walter and Arthur had Maori ancestry, albeit diluted, from the bloodline of the great South Island warrior Te
Rauparaha, but that was something you kept quiet about in Amberley in the 1920s. But the kehua have almost forgotten their
purpose: which is to get Kitchie and Walter, Rita and Arthur, and little Beverley and all her descendants back with the whanau
at last. The kehua have come to like the flora of this northern Antipodean land, the oaks, willows, ashes and aspens, with
branches which are far easier to hang from than the pohutakawas whose cheerful red fronds are scratchy, let alone the kauris
so tall and smooth you have to find an updraught to reach even the lowest branch. The flowering cherry suits them very well.
Beverley says she can well understand that Lola might find it difficult at her age to lose a father and find a second mother,
and needs a place to be where there is less tumult than there was likely in her new future, either at Nopasaran with a distraught
Louis, or at Parliam Road with her mother and D’Dora. At which Cynara, emotionally and physically exhausted by a wild night
in The Dungeonette, accuses her grandmother of being homophobic.
‘Could you repeat that?’ asks Beverley, whose ears are giving her real trouble now. Cynara does. Beverley is hurt and angry.
‘Good God,’ she says to her granddaughter. ‘I was married to Harry for long enough. Have you forgotten that?’
‘Yes but it was you who drove him to his death,’ says Cynara, who believes in frank speaking – one of the reasons Lola is
in such difficulty now. ‘Poor man. D’Dora reckons that speech you gave at the funeral was the most remarkable piece of homophobic
hypocrisy she’d ever heard in her life.’
Chatter, chatter, chatter, go the kehua. This is not going well. Their agitation is infecting all the members of the clan.
Up in the North Alice feels a migraine coming on and takes to her bed.
Lola, in a taxi on the way to her friend the party-drug dealer, feels stuffy in the head, opens a window and a cinder flies
into her left eye, which spoils her looks for days and in fact never really goes away, like the ice splinter in the eye of
the Snow Queen. It puts Lola off sex for years. Before she’d walked out on Louis she had left a message on her mother’s answermachine
to say she had just bonked her Uncle Louis and serve everyone right. Now she wishes she hadn’t. She needn’t have worried.
D’Dora had picked up the message and wiped it. Information meant power; secret information meant more power.
In LA Richie is struck by a sudden violent sore throat, and is on the phone to his physician. His children Waldo and Merielle
catch it from him: it seems to be some kind of antibiotic-resistant bug, and lasts several weeks.
Gerry had, I think, picked up some kind of plaintive kelpie water spirit of Fiona’s on the shoreline of Kalsoy, now crouching
unseen up there in the luggage rack on his flight to Aberdeen. Something at any rate caused a leaking bottle of water to drip
from the luggage rack so that Gerry’s trousers were drenched.
Louis’ kehua – Louis still being an honorary member of the hapu until we know whether Scarlet’s departure is permanent – crack
a pane of glass in the atrium skylight and drop splinters down, which fortunately miss Louis. He doesn’t hear but, traumatised
by women, sleeps on.
Cynara’s sight is blurry. Perhaps she is getting a migraine, for she has had a lot of stress lately; a lot of tying and blindfolding
went on in The Dungeonette. Her grandmother has made her a kindly offer, and she has repulsed it. What had D’Dora done to
her that she returns evil for good? Her kehua, sensing danger, move closer on the dusty
branch of the plane tree.
Run, run, run,
they plead.
Time to get out of here!
And all Cynara wants to do is not to have to listen to her grandmother, to have a quiet night’s sleep without D’Dora, and
not have to think about Lola: just run. But where could she go?
You can blame any number of injuries and accidents on the troublesome, and now globally peripatetic, undead. Kehua work in
particular through ears and eyes, but with noses and throats in reserve. Their nature becomes clearer and clearer in your
writer’s mind now she’s back in the basement and has caught an actual look at the kehua hanging upside down like fruit bats,
leathery wings folded over their ears.
‘None of this is a joke,’ says Beverley, accused of homophobia, to Cynara, ‘and I take that rather amiss. I may be a hypocrite
but so far as I am concerned your feminism has always been a sham. You just don’t like sex, and blame men.’
‘That is simply not true,’ says Cynara, and would have put the phone down but D’Dora, coming in (she liked to overhear Cynara’s
conversations), gestures to her not to and picks up the extension phone. Beverley does not hear the click; her ears are playing
up. So Beverley carries on. She would have done better to shut up.
‘If anyone’s to be pitied it’s poor Jesper. This absurd carry-on with D’Dora’s made the whole family look ridiculous. Are
you really so desperate for a bit of sexual satisfaction? As for Lola, the poor girl actually believes she comes from a sperm
bank.’
‘What do you know about it?’ asks Cynara, taken aback.
‘Oh for heaven’s sake,’ says Beverley. ‘Lola talks to Scarlet and Scarlet talks to me.’
D’Dora, listening, makes a throat-slitting gesture – does she mean Beverley, Scarlet or Lola? Cynara fears for Lola, and is
dis-tracted.
She doesn’t want to quarrel with her grandmother one bit and can’t imagine why it is happening. She tries to concentrate.
‘Please don’t let’s argue,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry I said that about Harry. I know how upset you were when he died. If you’ll
take back what you said about my not being a lesbian?’
‘But you’re not any kind of lesbian,’ says Beverley, dashing away the olive branch Cynara offered. ‘I don’t believe you’re
even a feminist. You’re just another pig-headed, deluded Maidment. You’re like your father, any old cause will do so long
as it upsets everyone.’
Which of course was the one thing Beverley should not have said. This is the secret of secrets. That Winter Max, originally
Julian Waxmann Maidment, somehow managed to impregnate his step-daughter Alice and so begat Cynara, a disaster which Beverley
has not until now ever quite acknowledged to herself. Alice similarly has resisted all efforts by Cynara to elicit proper
identification of her father.
And if Cynara the committed feminist did indeed choose a sperm bank rather than her husband Jesper to conceive Lola, it would
not be altogether surprising. Mothers do unto their daughters what has been done unto them. And Winter, after all, was only
doing unto Alice what Arthur had done to Beverley way back when. Perhaps Beverley had even unconsciously anticipated the act,
and in anticipating, made it the more likely?
Be all that as it may, as a secret kept for nearly fifty years it was not something to be lightly revealed, and in its sudden
and unexpected revelation created turmoil and event.
How the kehua clattered and chattered. At Robinsdale their little bat feet pounded on the old glass and scratched it a little,
and at Parliam Road they swung to another branch, of a lime tree nearer to the house, and a spatter of stickiness descended
from the leaves
on to D’Dora’s yellow Smart Car. The stickiness was due to a scale insect infestation and needs treatment, but Cynara has
more to worry about today than this.
Cynara puts down the phone, stunned, to think about what had just been said. She calls her grandmother over and over but gets
only the busy tone. She calls her mother Alice and gets the answer-machine. She tells herself it doesn’t really matter who
her father is. If it is indeed her grandfather, then he is dead, and she is who she is, just short of a quarter of the genes
normally imported from another line of descent, and at least not the product of Alice’s rape at the hands of some psychopath,
which she has sometimes imagined to be the case. The Maidments are a wealthy and respectable family. Her father was a hero,
who died fighting a revolutionary cause, and her mother was of age and no blood relation. It could be a lot worse. But D’Dora
wants some attention.