‘Who are the Maidments?’ D’Dora asks.
Cynara says nobody, she doesn’t want to talk about it. D’Dora has been throwing out some of Cynara’s favourite kitchen utensils
without as much as a by-your-leave – including the old aluminium pan Cynara kept especially for boiled eggs – and replacing
them with her own, which look smarter but cook less well. She was talking of a civil marriage with Cynara as soon as the divorce
from Jesper came through. She crushes all opposition before her.
‘If you wouldn’t mind just being quiet a little, D’Dora,’ says Cynara now. ‘I have various things to think about.’
This gives D’Dora great offence. A row ensues. Insults are exchanged. Cynara pleads for peace and quiet because she has just
discovered who her father is; D’Dora says Cynara is family obsessed. Cynara says S&M is a pastime for the sexually obsessed.
D’Dora says Cynara is no fun at The Dungeonette and sexually
repressed. Cynara says D’Dora is a sexual bully and emotionally repressed. D’Dora says she wishes she had never moved in.
Cynara says she wishes she had never taken on the Pinfold & Daughters case and had never set eyes on D’Dora. D’Dora says it
is a bit late now and grabs up the phone to ask Beverley about her homophobia and Cynara snatches the phone from D’Dora’s
hand and throws it across the room where it breaks. Cynara then advances on D’Dora and slaps her hard, once on one cheek,
once on the other, hard.
‘Shut up,’ Cynara says, ‘you perverted little cunt. What do you know about anything?’
‘One thing I know,’ says D’Dora, ‘is that your daughter left a message on the answerphone to say she’d just had sex with her
uncle Louis and it was all your fault. I’m not staying in this horrid, cramped, dirty, dull little house a moment longer.’
And she goes upstairs to pack.
Not only had both Cynara and Parliam Road been a disappointment to D’Dora, but the previous night she had encountered a beautiful,
disdainful, young, handcuffed blonde with a big house in South Kensington who had raised her eyebrows in Cynara’s direction
and said, ‘What, her? Why?’ The answer to D’Dora was now clear: why indeed?
But before she started packing D’Dora looked up the Maidments on Google, and got from there to Winter Max and the Bolivian
death which had made headlines, arrived at a few dates and reasonable conclusions and rang Alice. She didn’t even need a kehua
to prompt her.
D’Dora was from Llanberis in Wales, mind you, and had her own connections with the Cwn Annwn, the hounds of death. If she
sometimes heard their growlings from underneath The Dungeonette club in the early hours, they could easily be dismissed as
the noise of some repair train, heavier than usual, travelling and rumbling along the Northern Line where it runs beneath
Charing Cross and the Embankment.
Dogs of the Cwn Annwn, the Wild Hunt, had barked loudly enough on the night another of D’Dora’s ‘friends’, Gwyneth, had wandered
along the tracks with Marcus the right-wing journalist, Beverley’s third husband, on the occasion of the launch of Marcus’
book,
Slicing the Salami
. Alas, poor Gwyneth had been too drunk to hear when the train approached, and Marcus was deaf to the sounds from the other
side, and neither had leapt aside in time.
The Wild Hunt was out in force that night, it being St John’s Eve, June 21st, and the moon was full. But no one takes any
notice of this kind of thing here any more. In other countries the astrologers would have been out in force, shaking their
heads at time and date, and insisting the book launch be on a different day.
The Wild Hunt no longer sticks to its own territory but rides the railway tracks of Western Europe on its appointed nights.
When the moon is full and clouds race across the sky, and you can hear the wail of the hounds rising and falling in the distance,
then it is wise to take extra care with your step on the platform edge. By comparison to the Cwn Annwn of the northern lands,
the kehua are mild and peaceful spirits.
Mischievous enough, however, to have D’Dora on the phone to Alice. Alice picks her mobile from her pocket where she stands
on the banks of the lake at Rawdon, soothing her migraine, and watching the plump silvery trout leaping for midges and missing.
‘This is D’Dora, Cynara’s partner… I sound like a woman because I am a woman… I thought you’d have realised by now your daughter
was gay. Now I have a problem here – Cynara and I want children, and in order to decide which of us is to be the birth mother
we need to know more about Cynara’s genetic inheritance than we do now. Is it the case that Cynara’s father is Julian Maidment,
the hero of Bolivia, otherwise known as Winter Max?’
And while Alice clung to her mobile wondering what sort of nightmare she was in, D’Dora went on to explain that it was more
damaging to a child to be kept deliberately ignorant of the father by the mother she was entitled to trust, than to know she
was the daughter of an incestuous relationship. She, D’Dora, was a psychiatric nurse and knew about these things. The concept
of incest was a social construct: it took many generations of family interbreeding before faulty genes became dominant. Alice
should not worry; Cynara was healthy enough other than a few sexual inhibitions, and Lola, Alice’s grandchild, whose father
was from a reliable sperm bank, where donors were properly screened, certainly did not
inherit these, on the contrary. Lola was currently having it off with Alice’s son-in-law Louis. D’Dora went on to explain
that Beverley had confided in her, D’Dora, about Cynara’s parentage.
‘I’ve no idea who you are, but you’re just poison,’ said Alice to her unknown caller, ‘and I don’t believe a word you say.
Just stay away from my Cynara.’
Alice threw her mobile in with the fish, who splashed and darted off. And she prayed to Jesus for strength, and also to the
Jesus of Malta who had looked after her and babysat her when her feckless mother Beverley and her friend Dionne were off at
the cinema, modelling nude for the Photographers’ Club or making money as best they could.
Alice had more stamina than you might suppose. If she kept away from the family it was not because of lack of love for them,
as they assumed, but because of an excess of it. Incest, according to her further studies, was both an inherited tendency
and a learned one. So normally she stayed away and hoped for the best. But she could see that if this mad, vindictive woman
was running round and upsetting everyone, she had better venture back into family territory. The kehua, who lived on the branches
of the vine in her nice new conservatory, and could have been mistaken by the casual onlooker for a bunch of grapes, were
pleased.
After the row was over and Cynara, unaware that D’Dora was on the phone to her mother causing as much trouble as she could,
was quiet again, there now seemed to be two sets of voices in her head. One was crying
run, run, run,
in their familiar panic – and this was obviously absurd because the more D’Dora insulted her home the fonder Cynara became
of it, and where was there to run to? The other was more cheerful, like a backbeat now, a call to acceptance and a kind of
mirthful exhilaration running along beside it, a delight in the wayward nature of existence, in the unexpected. The backbeat
was, though Cynara was also unaware of this, the spirits, or wairua, of Cynara’s two boy children who had never come to term.
The kehua are servants of the bloodline; they are really no more than spiritual sheepdogs, rounding the flock up, irritating
and sometimes frightening though they can be. But the wairua are the real thing, spirits straight from the atua, the soul
of the whanau, than which there can be no higher or more joyful level of existence. These unborn wairua, or noho-whare, brought
into existence by Cynara and Jesper, though flushed down the loo by Cynara when their gender was revealed, are, once conceived,
indestructible, immanent. They carry mirth and lightness with them, they are not angry with you: they understand your necessity;
the unborn of the
whanau are as strong as the undead, and they stay around to help if they can. ‘Get her out of here,’ Cynara’s two male unborn
cried, ‘the bitch! How dare she!’
Scarlet had been right: Cynara had allowed only one child, Lola, the female from the sperm bank, to come to term. But here
were the other two at Cynara’s side, and the air around her shimmered with elation, as if she was in some deep dark-green
kauri forest on the other side of the world where she had never been, where the clematis hung dazzling white and sparkling
and the karimako, the elusive bellbird, suddenly sang its impertinent, beautiful song and was gone again. Really, 11 Parliam
Road and the forest were one and the same if you let them be.
‘I’m off,’ said D’Dora, stomping downstairs with her backpack, hoping to be stopped. ‘I’ve just had a really interesting phone
call with your mother.’
‘Go, go,’ was all Cynara said, laughing, ‘and take your crampons with you.’
‘I’ll come back for my stuff,’ said D’Dora, ‘when it suits me,’ and went.
Cynara called Beverley, and apologised for putting down the phone and said yes, if Beverley wanted to take Lola in for a bit,
she, Cynara, would be very grateful. D’Dora was moving out, but she, Cynara, needed headspace. She did not mention the Louis
business. Lola was probably just trying to cause trouble, leaving messages on the answerphone in the hope everyone would hear.
Beverley in her turn apologised for her
faux pas
. The secret of Cynara’s birth was not hers to reveal, but Alice’s. But she had to go now. She had just had a phone call from
Gerry saying he was at Heathrow and coming over.
How the kehua shrieked. In their excitement they fell off the
cherry branch and crawled over to the kowhai tree and clung there, and felt instantly at home. It is a bushy tree endemic
to New Zealand, and had grown from a cutting given to her by Beverley’s old friend Dionne years back, planted on a sheltered
sunny slope of Robinsdale’s large garden, near enough to the stream to really flourish. The kowhai tree grows startling clusters
of bright-yellow rattling seedpods, which hang and cluster for all the world like kehua, except the latter are a blackish
grey. Hanging there, though, encouraged and invigorated by renewed contact with the once-familiar plant, now all but forgotten
in this sooty land, Beverley’s kehua quickly adopted a pleasant yellowish tinge.
Meanwhile, up at Lakeside Chase, shocked by D’Dora’s phone call, Alice had decided to act. Her children needed her. She had
no wairua, no unborn souls, hanging around to help and make her laugh – she was a serious and responsible person – but her
kehua were calling her to action.
Run, run, run, time to run! Down to the South, lose no time.
Perhaps self-interest contributed to the kehua’s vehemence, if they felt like lightening up a little and becoming a bit more
yellow than grey.
Alice promptly organised her next day’s flight from Manchester to Luton, from whence she would go back to Robinsdale, her
childhood home. Then she called Cynara to say she’d had a nasty phone call from a madwoman but had taken no notice. All the
same she thought perhaps Cynara needed her help and she was coming down to visit in the morning. She would meet Cynara at
Robinsdale.
‘But Mother,’ said Cynara, ‘are you sure? I am a lesbian. Your church will not approve.’ And she began to cry.
Alice said that was irrelevant, it was only lesbian bishops who were a source of confusion to the Church; at least Cynara
had a child, so now she was free to take her sexual pleasures where she liked; but she should just be a great deal more careful
with whom she associated. Discarded lovers often knew where too many bodies were buried and could be vindictive.
Cynara stopped crying in astonishment and said, ‘But you hate gays. You wouldn’t even come to Louis and Scarlet’s wedding.
You thought everyone in the fashion industry were sinful perverts.’
‘What an extraordinary thing to say,’ said Alice. ‘I didn’t come to the wedding because I was too busy and it’s a long way
and registry office weddings aren’t worth travelling to. They cancelled it anyway.’
‘Because you wouldn’t come,’ said Cynara.
‘That’s absurd,’ said Alice. ‘Scarlet was looking for excuses not to tie herself down, and I provided one. She was far too
young. And as for you, there are things I need to tell you.’
‘About my father?’ asked Cynara.
‘No, no, no,’ said Alice impatiently, ‘about Luke.’
‘Who is Luke?’ asked Cynara.
‘My son,’ said Alice, always, like her mother, one for a bit of drama. ‘Your brother.’
‘I look forward to it,’ said Cynara, faintly. ‘Is he a full brother?’
‘Nothing like that,’ said Alice. ‘A half-brother, younger than you, inconveniently begotten but nothing worse than that.’
From which Cynara was able to conclude that yes, indeed, it was true. She, Cynara, was the child of the forbidden union between
young Alice and the wicked, albeit idealistic, Winter.
That done, Alice looked up a number in a file on her laptop marked ‘personal: do not enter’ and called it. After only three
rings a man answered it, which seemed to take her aback a little. But he was healthy and quick, and sounded educated and rather
pleasant.
‘Are you a Luke Addison?’ she asked.
‘Yes. Why? Who is this?’ He had an accent. She thought probably Australian.
‘I think you’ve been looking for me. At any rate you were a
couple of years back. You may have changed your mind, of course. But I’m your mother.’
A brief conversation followed, after which Alice called Beverley and said she would be in London the next day because she
had things she wanted to ask, and things she wanted to tell. Would Beverley be at home?
‘Where else would I be?’ asked Beverley tartly. ‘You may have forgotten I’m immobile. But what do you want to tell me? There
is such a thing as too much information. I was living a perfectly calm life until Scarlet turned up and told me she was leaving
Louis. Since then it’s been mayhem. I can’t stand any more. Do you remember Gerry? He’s just called and said he’s on his way
over.’