Starlight Peninsula (29 page)

Note for the Rotokauri file: Leaf through copies of the
Woman’s Day
and the
New Idea
. Those shots of Mariel and Hamish Dark shopping, arriving at airports, leaving cafés. Look at pictures of Mariel Hartfield’s tall, curly-haired son. His name is William.

Is this what you were looking for, Arthur? Some fact that was hidden in the world you wanted to write about? You couldn’t decide whether you were a fiction writer or a journalist. Why pry the way you did, why not just make the story up?

Remember, Arthur, I used to think I was observant. What is Mariel Hartfield like? She is popular, a celebrity. Her husband, Hamish Dark, is a friend of the National Party. She is Maori, she has green eyes. She has a narrow waist, strong hands, is slim and tall, with a pulpy scar on her index finger. Every evening, Mariel Hartfield tells the nation how it’s spent its day. She lives her life in the public eye; she lives in plain sight.

‘The girl in the bus stop is crying,’ Eloise said.

In the morning, leaving Nick and the Sparkler to escort Silvio to the dog park, she drove across town and parked the Honda, barely bothering to line it up against the kerb. The Lamptons’ door was opened by a woman holding a mop and a bucket filled with cleaning fluids, who said, ‘Mr? Wait, I will get.’

Voices. He walked into the hallway. When he saw her, he came straight out onto the porch.

‘Let’s go up there,’ she said, and pointed at Mt Matariki. He took one look at her face and didn’t say a word.

Now they sat on the park bench at the edge of the green crater. Below them the suburbs stretched away, crossed by racing cloud shadows.

‘I’ve been writing things down,’ Eloise said.

She turned to him. ‘Arthur had the idea, Art before everything. No fear or favour. He used people’s personal details. He caricatured my mother. She appeared in a lot of his stuff, very thinly disguised. When we had arguments, he’d make them into comic sketches, or describe them in his columns. Nothing was sacred, everything was material. It made me angry. Hurt sometimes.’

Simon nodded slightly.

‘But he didn’t do it out of malice. He didn’t do it in order to offend. It wasn’t revenge or cruelty. He just did what all artists do. If you didn’t know him or us, you wouldn’t have recognised what material he was using.’

‘Okay.’

‘He went too far with the Hallwrights. Asking them about private details. It was … aggressive. He was obsessed with the idea of finding out, because he didn’t have access to their world. I guess he was prepared to be a bit too ruthless.’

‘To stalk them,’ Simon said. He cleared his throat. His voice was light, without conviction. He was sitting very still.

‘Not stalk them, just be enterprising. A cheeky journalist.’

Simon was looking at the backs of his hands.

She said, ‘Arthur wrote a note: your name and the name of a woman who’s missing. Simon Lampton/Mereana Kostas.’

Silence.

‘You used the words “missing items”.’

He looked at her.

‘When you said that, you reminded me the blue cups were missing from the flat. I wouldn’t have thought of it.’

He shrugged.

‘You wear some kind of aftershave. I could smell it after you’d been running, when we were in the car.’

He looked straight ahead. ‘Right …?’

‘You said I shouldn’t feel guilty that I didn’t call or text Arthur from the airport. You said, Imagine if I’d come back earlier, if Arthur and I had argued on the edge of the road and he’d tripped and fallen down the wall. You said he would be as much to blame for the fall as I was, because his behaviour had contributed.’

She looked out over the suburb, the grids of roads and houses. She went on, ‘You were talking about yourself. It was you. You were in the flat. You took the cups. You left some trace, some outline of yourself. It was you.’

He twisted to face her. ‘No. You’re wrong, Eloise.’

‘You said to me, Imagine if you and Arthur argued and he fell against a fence, and it gave way.’

‘So?’

Her voice rose. ‘I never told you he fell against a fence and it gave way. I
never
told you that detail. And it’s what happened. How could you know unless you were there? You were there. Why were you there? Was he asking you about your adopted daughter, about Mrs Hallwright? Or the missing woman?’

He was looking at his hands, squeezing them, turning them this way and that. He scratched his chin hard, thinking.

Silence.

Finally he took a breath, rolled his shoulders, rubbed his neck, turned to her.

‘Eloise,’ he said, ‘I have to tell you something. It’s going to sound strange.’

She waited. She wasn’t breathing.

‘I care about you very much,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘You. You and all your chaos. I’m old and married, and I really care about you. I think about you. You look stunned. Don’t worry, I’m not mad. It doesn’t mean anything other than that. You’re young and lovely; it’s no wonder I can’t get you out of my head. As for what you just said … Don’t get up, don’t fly off the handle. Wait. Just hear me out. Please.’

She stared.

‘Eloise. In your usual headlong way, you’ve constructed something out of the air. You’ve mounted a case against me, and it’s half fact, and half your beautiful, clever, imaginative mind making all kinds of leaps. I know you’re lonely. You spend too much time alone and you dream up connections, because that’s what lonely people do. You feel bad about Arthur, you feel sad and guilty, you have this idea you didn’t ask questions when he died, and so you’re trying to fit it all together in a way that isn’t random. Because we fear the random. We want things to make sense, to have a logic, a justice. The idea that people can die by pure, freak accident is terrible. You’ve fastened on the idea you should have rung or texted Arthur when you landed at the airport, you didn’t because you didn’t trust him, and as a result he died. And the story you’re making up is so important to you, so much a part of your … recovery, that I’m almost reluctant to put you right. But I have to, because in the end you won’t be served by getting fixated on something that isn’t true.
We have to get at the truth. We agreed, remember, to work this out together. We’ve been thrown together by weird circumstance, and I’m actually not sorry about that, not sorry to have been spending time with you — although the cleaner’s sure to tell my wife I’ve been talking to a pretty young woman who came to the house while she was out. She’ll be thinking we’re having an affair, and we’re going to have to work out what to say. We don’t want her knowing what we’re talking about, because she’s incredibly indiscreet.

‘Now don’t say anything, just let me finish. Eloise. Darling. Just listen. Just breathe. I mentioned the fact that Arthur fell against a flimsy fence for the simple reason that the police told me he had. It’s just a detail I remember from their questions. I said something like, How the hell does a guy fall off a wall in broad daylight anyway? And they said, He stumbled against a fence and the whole thing gave way. Freak accident. Simple as that. Maybe I mentioned missing items. I don’t remember. I put on aftershave, sure. But so do most other men I know. Arthur wrote some woman’s name next to mine in a note, okay, but I have no idea why he did that, except I assume he was intending to contact both of us at some stage. He rang me. He was probably going to ring her next, whoever she was, or is. I have no idea.

‘Eloise, don’t look at me like that. Please just let me tell you, I’ve become fond of you, and I want us to be friends. I don’t mind what you said. I don’t mind you accusing me. You’ve had a hard time of it lately. I understand your feelings of guilt. I understand them. Let’s work on them together. Your husband left you, you’ve had a lot to deal with emotionally.

‘It’s okay, Eloise. Everything’s going to be fine. I just wonder, I really do. My lovely, chaotic friend.
How could you have got this so wrong?
’

The bump, the grind, of the rings of light. The interval between the words could be expressed as a forward slash.

Bright light made her screw her eyes shut. They had walked down from the mountain. Now, Simon stood next to her by the pool. The heat struck up off the concrete patio and she could feel his eyes on her, the intensity of his watchfulness, his calculation. But she felt as weightless and insubstantial as the wavering rings dancing on the blue walls of the pool.

She turned and looked at the big, square villa, its weatherboard walls and orange tiled roof.

‘It’s a beautiful house,’ she said, and then added carelessly, ‘The house is a metaphor for the mind.’

‘I know it is,’ he said, which surprised her.

‘Do you?’

‘Or it represents security. One of my patients had a marital crisis. She told me about it: when it was all going badly, she dreamed about broken-down, ruined houses, also houses she was locked out of. When she got back with her husband and all was well, she dreamed about beautiful mansions.’

‘I’m trying to get my mind back in order,’ Eloise said. ‘That’s why I’ve been seeing a therapist.’

‘It’s a good idea. To process your feelings of guilt.’

Eloise looked at him. ‘Shall we sit down for a minute.’

‘Sure.’ He pulled up a deckchair and they sat looking down the length of the lawn to the base of Mt Matariki.

She faced him. ‘I know who Mariel Hartfield is,’ she said. ‘She is Mereana Kostas. Her son is your son, William.’

Simon sat very still, his hands in his lap.

‘Detective Da Silva described her: tall, slim, Maori, unusual green eyes. Scar on index finger. In the past, she had a criminal conviction. She was jailed. She left the country, changed her identity. She must have had help to do that. No, don’t get up. Don’t fly off the handle. Hear me out, Simon. Just breathe. You said it, we’re working it out together,
remember. I assume Arthur found out there was a connection between the two of you, he came looking for you. He was pushy, ruthless. He invaded your private life, and he didn’t care if it hurt you. You’ve told me the rest. You told me when you came to my house.’

Simon turned to look at her. His eyes had no light, no depth in them. His face was expressionless. He said, ‘How have you come up with this fantasy?’

‘The information was out there. It came to me.’

‘You mean there’s gossip?’

‘No. Definitely not. No one knows.’

His voice was harsh. ‘It’s completely untrue. A fairy story. One that could cause damage to innocent people. Good luck with putting it about. You’ll get slapped with a defamation suit, just for starters.’

‘I’m not going to put it about. I just want one thing.’

He waited. His eyes were opaque, his face was set. But she could sense something rising in him.

She said, ‘You’re right, I’ve been wracked with guilt about Arthur. I failed him. My husband’s left me. I’ve been unhappy, lonely, lost. I want security; I want to put my mind in order. I’m seeing the shrink, but there’s something else that would properly put my mind at ease.’

She gestured towards the house behind them.

‘You said it to me, Simon, you know people.’

He squeezed his hands into fists and said in a quiet, dogged voice, ‘What do you want?’

‘I want a house,’ Eloise said. ‘I want my own home.’

Dear Klaudia,

I regret the necessity of the therapeutic blank screen: the fact that you know everything about me, and I know almost nothing about you. I have only a few details, an outline, with which to construct a picture. You own a soulful brown dog called Linus. Your mouth turns up like the Joker’s when you are amused. You have blonde hair, a sharp nose, and a sly, crafty smile. When you are irritable, your eyes turn darker blue behind your glasses, and your face sets in a square frown. Before you speak, you pause, swallow, and rest your blunt fingertips on the desk. You are at your most charming when listening. Your familiar, and therapeutic assistant, is a large, brown rat.

I have to tell you, Klaudia, my ex-husband came to the peninsula. My neighbour, Nick, and I were walking back from the dog park when Sean turned up with an entourage: his secretary Voodoo, and a Jaeger’s lawyer. For a moment, we stood on the path between the flax bushes, watching them milling around on the deck. They spent a bit of time peering at the fire damage along the fence. (The grass is growing back in patches, but the bushes are black.) Voodoo got her high heel stuck between the boards of the deck. Assisting her, Sean looked plump and uneasy, and even quite short — shorter than Nick, I noted.

The Jaeger’s solicitor told me a lot of things. He was extraordinarily verbose. Sean paced about, looking agonised. I watched him covertly. I miss him, but he’s determined, it seems, to stick with his actress girlfriend.

Eventually, they told me there is one point on which I can put my mind at rest. I won’t have to leave the peninsula. After discussions with advisors and his Jaeger’s partners, in a spirit of magnanimity, Sean, with the blessing of Lady Cheryl and Sir Jarrod Rodd, has offered to let me have the house. There will be no forced sale. I will be given sole ownership. I have been advised to consult my own lawyer on other matters, and further negotiations are pending, but I sit here now in my own house, knowing I won’t have to pack my bags.

As I write, the tide is racing in the creek, the seagulls are crying over the house, and the sun is going down. There is a change in the air; it’s the beginning of that special kind of iron light, signalling autumn is on the way. The sky is bright, hard, blue; the air is very clear. Along the peninsula road, the windows are lit up with red fire. In the living rooms, Mariel Hartfield, all smoky eyes and sleepy, enigmatic smile, is telling the nation how it spent its day.

A layer of the world was hidden from me. I wanted to ask questions, and with your help I found the courage to do so. I received answers, and I have also let some questions, as Sean would put it, ‘lie on the record’.
The Rotokauri file, which documents the last days of Arthur Weeks, remains an open one. I’ve done as Kurt Hartmann jokingly advised me, and given it a spook-style working title: SOON.

I asked Kurt Hartmann, ‘Do you think I’m being followed?’

His answer was unequivocal: Yes.

There was a man with black hair and a dragonfly tattooed on his hand. I haven’t seen him lately. Was he a phantom in a migraine dream? I was so ill and lonely — perhaps, now Nick is always near, and I’m drinking less and I feel safe, I’ve stopped seeing ghosts. I don’t really believe this. Did the dragonfly man vanish once he’d stolen Arthur’s file? Or once I’d stopped talking to Hartmann? What about the figure I saw in the abandoned stucco house? These questions are why I’m keeping the file open. It won’t be closed. Because I am still watching. And across town, Simon Lampton is watching, too.

That morning, when we saw in the dawn together, under a sky ‘riddled with light’, Simon Lampton and I came close — as close as two people whose interests are implacably opposed could come. Do you understand what I mean, Klaudia? We came close, and I made a choice, based on what I had. You probably won’t approve, but I made the kind of choice Arthur wanted to make. He loved the Woody Allen film,
Bullets Over Broadway
; he wanted to be ruthless, like the gangster in the film. He thought that would mean he was a real artist. But he wasn’t so tough. Arthur was a good person. I loved him for his goodness. I don’t think he knew just how ruthless the world can be.

You told me the past is a dead star, its light still reaching me. You told me to try to live in the Now. And you also said, Klaudia, that a house is a metaphor for the mind. I came close to losing mine. What I want to do now is fill my house with people.

For lunch this weekend, I’ve invited Nick, and Scott Roysmith and Thee Davis, and their three daughters, Sophie, Sarah and the indomitable Iris. Scott and I will, no doubt, discuss our upcoming
story on mass hysteria. He will argue in favour of balance, but in this case, I suspect management will be hoping for something thoroughly one-sided.

My sister Carina and the Sparkler are coming, along with Silvio, and Carina’s husband Giles, on a rare break from his bridge-building project in Thailand. Nick has offered to help me with the food. I suggested my usual, takeaway pizzas, but he had the quaint idea that he and I should cook.

I would like to invite you to come, Klaudia. I feel as if you’ve spent a lot of time here on the peninsula, in the haunted house of my mind. Assuming it would be professionally inappropriate for you to accept a lunch date, I will send you these thoughts instead. And I will dedicate this record —

To the memory of Arthur Weeks. And to you.

Eloise Hay

Starlight Peninsula

4 April 2014