Magpie Hall (5 page)

He decides to make the best of it and begins to relax after his second brandy is safely in his stomach. He is even starting to enjoy himself when Mr Collins approaches him with a young lady on his arm.

May I introduce my daughter, Dora, says his host.

Miss Collins. Delighted. Henry takes her hand briefly. She wears long gloves — they reach almost to her armpits — and they are cool under his fingers. She is not like the other women, this one. She doesn’t bray, or giggle, and he feels her gaze penetrating his chest, where it flickers from his face, as if she knows of the recent tattoo there. Her eyes are dark grey, and her blonde curls look as though they have been subdued rather than coiffed.

And how do you find our little town, Mr Summers? I’m afraid you’ll think us rather dull after London society.

Have you been to London? he asks.

Yes. She looks at her father, who finishes for her.

I took Dora there last year, when I met your father. The journey to and fro lasted nearly as long as our entire stay there. It was quite exhausting. Dora loved it, but I confess in my old age I like New Zealand more and more.

Henry surmises that he can’t be older than forty-five. Well, he says to Miss Collins, I’m sure you fitted neatly into the society there.

You needn’t compliment me, Mr Summers. I have no illusions about being anything other than a simple girl from the colonies.

She glances sideways at her father, who has turned away to talk to someone who has appeared at his elbow. She smiles as though she has got away with some transgression, leans closer and lowers her voice. Forgive me, she says, but you have something just here. She touches
her own lip, while her gaze drops to the floor, as if she can’t bear to look at his face while he finds the morsel of food.

Thank you, he says. People are so polite about these things. I might have walked about with it for hours.

She blushes. He chastises himself for suggesting she is improper, when he only wants to compliment her. Yes, he realises, of all the women here, she is the one he genuinely
wants
to compliment. But when he goes to apologise, she stops him with a shake of the fingers, as though they are wet and she is flicking water at him. Baptising him.

After Collins has steered her away, he is introduced to Herz, the director of the museum, and they fall deep into conversation about travelling and collecting. Once or twice he glances up to see Dora looking at him but both times she opens her fan and covers her face as she cools herself. The small room has become unbearably warm.

Despite his earlier reservations, the party has proved exceptionally fruitful for him. Herz will arrange for him to travel across the South Island with a man named Schlau, a fellow German currently employed by the museum to mount its considerable collection of animals and native birds. Henry is now gripped by the excitement of the adventures before him; all of the birdlife he has never seen. He feels something akin to bloodlust, a watering in his mouth.

He forgets about Dora until he bumps into her on the stairs as he ascends to his room. She is coming the other way and presses herself against the wall, as though in fright — so different from the confident young lady he met earlier.

Goodnight, he says to her softly, but she only nods at him, keeping her eyes on him as he passes.

The next morning he finds a letter from Mr Collins. The family has been called away to their country estate. He is to make himself at home and to feel free to visit them there. He only needs to send
word and a coach will come for him. He tries to remember if he has behaved badly; if he had one too many drinks at the party and said the wrong thing. But he can think of nothing out of order. Perhaps the family really does have to attend to an urgent matter. And now he is freed from politeness and can explore the country at will.

Rosemary

I woke in a panic. A noise had travelled through my dreams, a musical note, floating up from the front paddock, plucked again and again, a sound I had heard in my head many times since I had awoken to it all those years ago. As I lay there, my ears strained to find it, but it had dissipated. Just my imagination haunting me as usual then, not a ghost.

The curtains were still open and the night was clear. A shuffle outside, a moan. Just country noises, I told myself. The house was like a breathing body; it had always creaked and complained. But I had never been alone then. There was always someone else to investigate the sounds if they became unfriendly. I got up and crossed the room to the window. The night was still and the moon was out. Its light fell on everything outside: the neglected vegetable patch, the treehouse.
Far off, through the trees, the river. It was as if the house were watching, waiting for something to move, as I was. I heard a sound, like a footstep on the gravel driveway, but only one. I pressed my face closer to the glass to peer to the left, but I would have had to climb out the window to get a look.

That was when it happened. My hand rested on the glass and the window began to hum. I felt it pass through my fingertips, up my arm and down to my toes. The rest of the room began to rock gently, as if the house were a giant that I had disturbed from its sleep, shrugging its body from side to side, and my heart pumped so hard I could feel blood pulsing in my face. It was the sound that disturbed me the most as it travelled across the plains towards me, was all around me for a second, then travelled on through, a low throbbing.

‘Letting off steam,’ I reminded myself and lay back down on the bed. Even though I knew it was an earthquake, I couldn’t get rid of the feeling that the house had caused it somehow.

The last time I saw Grandpa his world had shrunk to his bedroom and the adjoining bathroom. He no longer read his beloved books — they hurt his eyes — but he often fell asleep with the TV or radio blaring. I could hear him at night from my room down the other end of the house. Waking up and unsure of the time, he would turn on the television and fall asleep again while infomercials blinked by, peddling exercise machines and kitchen appliances he would never use.

Sometimes I read to him from his favourite novels, novels by Dickens and Tolstoy, but I suspect he only heard half of what I said; the strain of shouting got too much for me, as did the strain of listening for him.

It amazed me how quickly old age had changed him. He was tiny in his bed, surrounded by plumped up pillows, and his wrists were thin and mottled. In contrast, his ears seemed to have grown and his face was yellowed like cotton sheets left out in the sun too long. It hurt to see him like this, and he knew it. When I sat and held his hand, he had a look of concern on his face that wasn’t for his own health, but for me.

‘You mustn’t worry about me, chook,’ he said. ‘I’ve had a long and happy life and all the cliches. You know that, right?’

I nodded.

‘I can tell by your face that I look terrible.’

I tried to protest.

‘You can’t deny it.’ His face cracked open in a smile. ‘You’re just lucky that I’ve put my teeth in for you. Susan doesn’t get that privilege, do you, Susan?’

The nurse didn’t look up from where she sat in a chair by the window, doing her crossword. ‘That’s right, Percy,’ she deadpanned. ‘You’re a monster.’

He chuckled. One of his last pleasures was the banter he had with her, and the two sniped at each other like a married couple. Susan was a squat woman whose children had all left home, so she could devote more than the usual amount of time to him. Grandpa had an alarm that he could activate if he needed her in the night, and she lived only a twenty-minute drive away. But sometimes, on the days when he seemed to be slipping away, she stayed the night in the austere single bed in the next room. She was tireless in her care of Grandpa, but when I tried to tell her how grateful I was, we all were, she shrugged it off and told me she was just doing her job, that she was well paid and satisfied.

It was his greatest joy that I had pursued his hobby of taxidermy;
that it had employed me for a time after I left school, and again when I found myself penniless and alone in London and I took to crafting outlandish creatures and fashion accessories for a curiosity shop in Greenwich. Grandpa asked me again and again for stories of my creations — the hats I adorned with sparrows chirping in their nests, or the brooches I made from tiny mice, their tails replaced with silver chains and their eyes with jewels. I created strange hybrids of animals: cats with pigeon’s wings, rabbits with the antlers of a young deer. Grandpa lay basking in my words as I told him about the time my flatmates had come upon me, in my pyjamas, sawing the head off a dead fox on the kitchen floor, and had banded together to have me evicted. There wasn’t much blood, but they thought I had murdered it. I had actually found it dead and perfectly intact in the backyard, snout grubby from the neighbourhood rubbish bins. Poisoned, probably.

‘I’m glad you see the funny side,’ I said as he roared with laughter again. ‘I was homeless as well as broke.’

But I always found my feet. I ended up living with the young couple who owned the shop. They had no problems with me bringing home animals to store in the freezer.

‘Talk me through it, Rosie,’ he said, his eyes closed. ‘What did we do with that magpie, that first time?’

‘We cut it,’ I said. ‘Airway to arsehole, just as you told me.’

‘And then?’

He was like a child listening to bedtime stories. I told him about the time I worked in the professional studio, right after I left school, mounting hunting trophies mostly for rich American tourists — stags they had paid a fortune to kill. I was fired when I decided to give a wild boar a happy, friendly face instead of the fierce snarl I had been instructed to produce, and I never went back to that kind
of taxidermy, where the animals were killed only for the purpose of mounting them. I only used roadkill after that, or donated pets, or even recycled specimens that I restored and gave a new life to, and when I left London to come home after my grandmother died, I started studying for my academic career and never seemed to find the time or space for taxidermy.

In the morning I woke early. Looking around in daylight it was hard to conjure up the eeriness of the earthquake and the still moonlit night. My head was foggy from the dust in the room. I still had my clothes on, but at least I had kicked my shoes off in the night. For the first time in a long time I didn’t feel the need to get up for anything. I was used to waking alone; Hugh had stayed the night at my flat only once, after he had returned early from a conference and not told his wife. My flatmate Rita had come across him at the kitchen table, my pink dressing gown straining across his chest, and she had backed from the room, apologising, as if she had found us naked. I hadn’t told her about him, but I think she instinctively knew there was something clandestine going on, because that evening she avoided me, and she never mentioned him or asked me about him.

Thirty-three years old and still waking up alone, despite the number of men I’d had relationships with. I had a tattoo for every time I’d been in love and that didn’t take into account the other men I’d slept with, or kissed. I didn’t really know what had gone wrong. To love so many, and yet none of them lasted. I enjoyed being single, but had never been so for long. I could have seen myself with Hugh, in our cottage in Wales, but as that dream faded, I had nothing to replace it with. Most of the good, interesting men were taken and
were starting families, as were some of my friends. I knew that if I stayed with Hugh for as long as he wanted me to, my chance would pass me by altogether. Not that I needed a man to make me happy. Up until then I hadn’t thought that I cared whether I had children, but now I wasn’t so sure. It was nothing big, nothing conscious, just a feeling that was gradually closing in on me. That I would like at least to have the choice.

I made my way down the stairs, studying the family gallery as I went: snapshots of children and dogs and parties, blown up and framed like paintings; formal studio portraits that my family had organised for my grandparents’ fortieth wedding anniversary, with embarrassing hairstyles and clothes that were never to be worn again. That was the last time the wall had been updated, as though the life of the family stopped when I was thirteen. I suppose it did, in a way. Certainly there were no more brightly coloured family gatherings at Magpie Hall after that, just the occasional visit, with my mother always anxious to get away. At least when I visited later, on my own, I could concentrate on Grandpa and not linger over past regrets.

Further down the stairs, black and white photos of my grandparents and their children, on picnics and at weddings. My father and his brother as boys, smiling under Davy Crockett hats, rifles slung over their shoulders and a bouquet of dead ducks hanging on a stick between them. My aunt, Helene, looking serene and beautiful in a white wedding gown, her husband a good two inches shorter.

Further still the photos became grainy. Stiff portraits of my grandfather as a child, dressed in a smock with a big bow, held by his mother, a hard-faced woman with a Louise Brooks bob, not unlike my own, and flanked by his father, Edward Summers. Daughters were dotted about them; daughters we had long since lost contact with, as they married and drifted away to other parts of the country,
or were absorbed into their husbands’ families.

In most of the photographs, the house stood in the background, solid and unchanging. That was what I liked about it — it was a constant in everyone’s lives. I loved the fact that some of the furniture hadn’t changed, that the layout of the rooms was just as it had been when Grandpa was a boy, perhaps even his father before him; that Grandpa had courted Gram in the same way my father had my mother — by bringing her to his massive house in the country and showing her the gardens, the river, the outlandish taxidermy. And the women had fallen in love with it all; the house had become as much a part of them as it was of Henry Summers’ direct descendants, although my mother grew more detached from it the more it fell into disrepair.

Finally, at the bottom of the staircase, two very old and faded photographs in heavy oak frames. One showed a large group of women in Victorian jackets and long skirts with straw boaters, standing beside bicycles. I recognised the wide avenues from the park not far from where I grew up, although the trees were much smaller.

I had glanced at the other photo many times on my way past, but had never really stopped to examine it. It was a posed studio portrait of Henry Summers, the collector at work. He was dressed casually, in tweed trousers, with leather boots and leggings. Hatless, he gazed sombrely at the camera. He had a strong nose, slim brows and intense, dark eyes. Like my father and uncle, he carried a rifle, and at his feet sat a dog, with a bird held patiently in its mouth. I couldn’t be sure, but it looked like a pukeko, or a takahe. Henry was tall, with long, strong-looking limbs and a confidence born of status and achievement. I couldn’t tell when the photo had been taken. Before or after his wife’s death? He certainly didn’t look scarred by grief. Rather he was a man looking at the horizon and all the challenges and hopes it might bring.