Kehua! (21 page)

The most satisfactory narrative Beverley could come up with, there in Auckland Public Library, in the free Reading Rooms beneath
the Victorian clock and tower that seemed to give the whole city such a feel of permanency, significance and purpose, was
that that her father Walter McLean had killed her mother Kitchie, because she was about to run off with someone – could it
possibly be popular Dr Arthur Audley? Who had discovered the body and married Rita on the rebound and had adopted her, Beverley,
because she was
there
? Or perhaps because she, Beverley, had on the parents’ death inherited the McLean farm? A matter which was never mentioned.

Now there was a thought.

When Beverley rejoined her school party she had been missing for three hours, and the library was ringing to the call of ‘Beverley!
Beverley Audley!’ She was glad they cared, though her real name was Beverley McLean. It was probably wiser not to mention
it, at least for the time being. She was given a detention, the first in her school life. Nobody seemed to notice that she
was now a different person. So perhaps she wasn’t. That was the trouble: how did you define what you were? How much of her
was Kitchie of the pale, lost lilies, and how much was Walter, desolate and sick of an old passion? And how much had she become
Beverley Audley the Doctor’s daughter, creature of habit, who brushed her teeth in the mirror and passed exams and helped
her mother about the house and didn’t want to upset the apple-cart.

All she knew was that now, on the rare occasions she got to Auckland and passed the Library, she looked away, and hated and
despised the tower and clock as small and provincial and dull, where once it had seemed impressive.

She matriculated early and was accepted by Auckland University for the following autumn.

On her seventeenth birthday Rita and Arthur told Beverley there were things she needed to know and the time had come to tell
her. But by the time they got round to telling her everyone was a little drunk.

Arthur her father had given her a violin for her birthday – she was good at music – and her mother a pair of brown court shoes,
with one-and-a-half-inch heels, to celebrate her growing up, and a scarlet lipstick which looked horrible to Beverley so she
said she’d keep it for a special occasion.

‘This is a special occasion,’ said Rita, hurt. ‘But have it your own way.’

They had had a special birthday meal when Beverley came back from her holiday job as a ward orderly at the cottage hospital
across the road. Roast chicken and kumera and peas from the back garden, and peaches and nectarines with cream for pudding,
and Beverley had been allowed a glass of sherry. The parents got through many bottles of beer that evening and Beverley wished
they wouldn’t. It made them noisy and excited and they were usually so quiet.

She asked for more sherry, because now they’d given up beer and started on the sherry the more she had the more quickly they’d
finish the bottle. They were feeling generous, and they gave her glass after glass of the thick, sweet, brownish liquid.

‘Let us have some music,’ cried Arthur, and Rita put on her favourite 78, The Wedding of the Painted Doll, with the blunt
thorn needle that needed replacing. ‘More sherry,’ he cried, and Rita told him to calm down, what was the matter with him?
He seemed almost to be crying, but telling her she was adopted, and she bet they weren’t going to tell her all the truth,
just a bit of it. What was going on? Arthur was Dowson, calling for madder music and for stronger wine: the shadow was Kitchie’s.
If he was Dowson, Cynara was Kitchie.

I cried for madder music and for stronger wine,

But when the feast is finish’d and the lamps expire,

Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine;

And I am desolate and sick of an old passion,

Yea, hungry for the lips of my desire:

I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

Rita scarcely had the ‘bought red mouth’ of Dowson’s description: it didn’t make sense. Beverley went into the bathroom where
she smeared her lips with the scarlet lipstick, and found the bra pushed into the back of her drawer, and the dress with the
oyster-shell design now much too short and tight for her, and went back into the living room wearing them. She thought there’d
be some sort of row about it, but there wasn’t. Rita stared at her with a kind of hostility and said, ‘You’d best break into
your savings, and get something decent that fits.’ But she could hardly complain, since she was the one who had given Beverley
the lipstick. As for Arthur he put his hands over his crotch and said nothing.

There were flapping noises in Beverley’s head and flashings before her eyes. She was not used to alcohol. But she noticed
well
enough where Arthur’s hands were and arched her back and thrust out her chest and flung back her head and ran her fingers
through her hair to provoke him. She somehow couldn’t help it. She had seen the Coromandel bad girls parade down the high
street ‘flaunting themselves’ as Rita described it: now she was doing it and she liked it. Cynara was Kitchie, her mother,
of the pale lost lilies, white with loss of blood; she, Beverley, would be the bought red mouth and survive.

‘Stop that,’ said Rita sharply, so Beverley did.

‘Go on,’ said Arthur, ‘tell the girl what you need to tell her and be done with it.’

He crossed one leg over the other and bent sideways to switch on the lamp and his domed forehead gleamed. Then a moth got
under the shade and fizzled up, and the smell of scorched insect was everywhere.

Rita told Beverley that she was adopted and that they loved her very much and had been in two minds about telling her, but
on balance thought they should. The speech had been prepared and Beverley had already seen it in Rita’s Keep Out drawer. Beverley
asked about the circumstances of her birth.

Rita said she would tell her, but Beverley must be careful what she said to other people about it. Better to keep it secret.
Others tended to think misfortune was catching, like the measles. There was no way – as there was not, at the time – that
her birth parents could be traced. Arthur and Rita had been unable to have children of their own and had decided they wanted
to adopt, and had chosen her from among dozens at the Girls’ Receiving Society in Christchurch. Beverley asked if they knew
anything at all about her real parents.

‘We are your real parents,’ said Rita.

Beverley said politely, of course, but could they tell her anything at all about her genetic parents? They said they had found
out that her mother had been a young university student from Canterbury College in the South Island who had got herself pregnant
by a soldier – an officer – so she had been offered up for adoption.

‘Says you!’ said Beverley, rather rudely, and then composed herself. ‘It’s a nice story, and I’m sure you tell it to make
me feel good, so thank you. Especially the officer bit. But my mother was a farmer’s wife in Amberley called Kitchie McLean
and my father Walter allegedly cut her throat because she was running off with another man and then shot himself, and you
took me in, which was nice of you, Rita, and probably quite advantageous to you, Arthur, but it doesn’t change the facts of
the matter. I am the daughter of a whore and a murderer.’

On balance, she had decided, she was probably Walter’s child. It could be that she was Arthur’s, and Walter had found out.
If she pushed her hair back from her face her forehead was domed, but then lots of foreheads were. It could even be that Arthur
had murdered both Kitchie and Walter, because she, Beverley, was his child, and he wanted both his child and the farm, and
had faked the suicide, in which case she was still the daughter of a whore and a murderer.

I worry, reader, that as I get further into this you’ll forget about the others milling about in the basement and you do need
to keep them in mind. I will go down and sort them out presently, when I’m a bit stronger, but in the meantime life for them
has moved on only an hour.

Scarlet is currently in her Prius on her way to Soho with two suitcases. She decided to use a car instead of a taxi in case
Lola chose to borrow it in her absence. She could take the keys but it was not beyond the bounds of possibility that Lola
knew how to hot-wire.

Lola is indeed currently looking for the keys.

Jackson is caught up in a tremendous jam in the Strand and is panicking in case Scarlet changes her mind.

Louis is waiting for Samantha to visit him in his office. She just happened to be round the corner in Liberty’s, her favourite
shop, when he got through to her.

D’Dora is looking up Facebook to find more details about the pretty girl she met at The Dungeonette last night, and forgetting
that she is meant to be standing in for a colleague who has gone home with flu.

Cynara is wondering how much she really wants to earn her living working with felt flowers.

Beverley has almost fallen asleep over the Tom Clancy book,
which is so heavy it tires her wrist, and is still worrying in case she has brought up her children all wrong.

Gerry has his flight booked back to London and Beverley.

And now I am in the middle of a thunderstorm.
Sturm und Drang
. Really black clouds racing behind the church tower: I can’t see a lightning conductor but I expect there is one, we’re on
such a high point. The interval between lighting bolts and thunder claps is shorter every time, it is coming this way: I have
displeased the basement folk. I am meant to be writing about Beverley. A crash shakes me and the room, even as the space flashes
brilliant electric white; there’s the smell of sizzling moth. I’m not usually frightened by storms but this time I am. It’s
gross. Odin is out to get me.

‘Where are you?’ I cry to Rex.

He comes down from his attic, says there’s a wonderful view from up there, better shut down the computer, it’s protected against
surges but you never know. Save. Shut down. I do.

The storm has passed, but it was right overhead; the lightning hit the old rowan tree, the one with the pink roses over it.
They are no more, withered and gone, once flung so riotously with Dawson’s wild living throng. Quickly back to the Coromandel
of long ago, before worse befalls.

Where were we? Yes.

‘Daughter of a murderer and a whore,’ Beverley was saying to her adoptive parents. She knows she is overstating her case but
she has reason to be aggrieved. She is at an age when honesty seems to be of great importance, and instead of being grateful
to Rita and Arthur, especially Rita, for taking her in in the first place, and trying to preserve the child’s good opinion
of her birth parents in the second, Beverley chooses to see only hypocrisy and deceit. She could say more. She could say Arthur
fathered her, and murdered her father Walter, she could accuse Arthur of marrying Rita for her money and ask what happened
to the farm she, Beverley, presumably inherited, but she does not. She is wise. And whore and murderer is enough to be getting
on with.

After she says this there is silence. Then Rita says:

‘Your mother was a sweet, lovely girl married to the wrong man. She was looking for love, and deserved it.’

‘She deserved what she got,’ says Arthur.

And Beverley thought, well then, no, probably not her father; Arthur was not the mystery lover. Otherwise their lines would
have been the other way round. And only then did they want to know how she had found out.

‘I know because I was there,’ said Beverley, ‘and I remember stamping about in the blood.’ She doesn’t quite remember that
bit but, as I say, she is aggrieved. ‘Can we stop having this conversation now before things get worse?’

‘You can’t possibly remember,’ said Arthur. ‘You were too young.’

‘It was in all the newspapers,’ said Beverley. ‘With really big headlines.’

‘You were too young to read,’ said Arthur.

‘I could read when I was three,’ said Beverley. ‘And anyway I read all about it in the Auckland Library. It was like an epiphany.’

‘Whatever that means when it’s at home,’ said Rita, suppressing the urge to slap her daughter. ‘Real mother’, indeed, after
all that. If she hadn’t taken Beverley in she could have had two children or more of her own. They’d have been bright enough,
Arthur being a doctor, and she could at least have read their minds, as ordinary mothers of ordinary children did. And Beverley
was quite right, as she all too often was: Kitchie had a whore’s temperament and Beverley had inherited it, look at her strutting
around just now in a dress three sizes too small for her, and she, Rita, had always rather fancied Walter herself except he
had a vile temper.

But the McLeans were the liveliest couple around, and Kitchie had a gift for wearing clothes just so, which she, Rita, had
copied for a while but had given up when she married Arthur. She didn’t know what Arthur did for sex these days, but he had
to be really angry with her for it to happen, and he was slow to anger, as was she.

‘My guess is you read about it but you didn’t see it,’ said Arthur.
‘You weren’t there when it happened. You were upstairs asleep.’

How did Arthur know that? Had he been in the room too?

‘And then my father went and shot the dog, or someone did,’ said Beverley. ‘He was a nice dog. His name was Patch. I remember
him. There was no need for that. Dogs can’t talk.’ She poured herself some more sherry and no one tried to stop her.

She had £230 12s 6d saved in her Post Office Savings Book, the accumulation of wages from holiday jobs at the hospital, school
prizes, Christmas gifts from family friends and relatives who lived serenely in that other world parallel to this one, a world
not tainted with murder, fear, flight, where the yellow-brick roads weren’t sprinkled with pools of blood but were fit for
dancing along.

‘The only thing I don’t know,’ said Beverley, quite clearly and firmly to her father, ‘is the name of the man she was running
off with. I suppose it wasn’t you, Daddy?’