The Trespass (45 page)

He washed himself all over in his spring for his first social call: he visited the McClellans, the neighbours, for Sunday dinner in the house they had built further round the coast, a house that had perhaps started, once, like his. There was a small community near the McClellans where the land was slightly flatter: some settlers had built houses, found enough flat land to plant crops; sheep grazed above. He saw abandoned dreams also – bush growing back over half-cleared land, signs of a struggle that had been lost.

Mr McClellan said grace and Edward found himself absurdly moved; when Mrs McClellan herself poured hot gravy over his roast mutton he swallowed several times, feeling himself in danger of choking with emotion. The McClellan girls smiled at Edward and cleared the polished mahogany table that had come with them from Scotland; Edward and Mr McClellan sat on the wooden verandah and smoked their pipes. Mr McClellan told Edward of his own bitter disappointments but also of his success with fruit trees and vegetables, how the work was hard but some things could grow on the hillside (though perhaps not Edward’s hillside). However, he gave Edward plants and seedlings and instructions. He advised Edward to hire labour. He spoke of the land problems everywhere, of the recalcitrance of the natives, of England’s less-than-enthusiastic support for the settlers’ arguments with the Maoris. Mrs McClellan served tea. There was no piano but the three daughters sang, very slightly out of tune but with great enthusiasm. Edward could not help seeing that the hands which they held before them as they sang were rough and chapped.

When other lips and other hearts (
they sang
)

Their tales of love shall tell

In language whose excess imparts

The pow’r they feel so well,

There may perhaps in such a scene,

Some recollection be,

Of days that have as happy been,

And you’ll remember me …

Edward applauded most keenly. ‘By Jove,’ he said, ‘you take me back to my own sisters singing in my father’s house. I am so very, very happy to be here.’

He reluctantly saddled up his horse just after the autumn sun set on the horizon. Down the hill and along the coast where his route lay the sea was still and he rode under the stars with his lantern, hearing only the sound of the sea and the steady rhythm of his horse’s footsteps. He felt peculiarly unsettled. The rustle of gowns so far from home had affected him greatly, the chapped hands also; he tossed and turned on his bed in his half-finished house. Occasionally a night bird called out in the darkness; perhaps Edward called out too.

Early next morning he began building again.

He became, at last, inordinately proud of his rough dwelling. It was just one room and the walls were logs, but they were good stout dry logs lined inside with timber planks and firmly put together; sometimes he would stand outside and run his hands over the logs with almost sensual pleasure. The roof tiles that the natives had nailed together fitted over the walls, more or less. He covered the hardened earth floor with rugs that his mother and sisters had packed, shaking his head as their shocked faces appeared to him. He planned to make a timber floor in time; in the meantime this was curiously satisfactory and curiously clean. The table and the bed from Kent were firm on the level floor and outside, beside the fresh cans of water from his spring, his fire was neat, and safe, surrounded by big stones he had carried upwards from the beach. It was not a house such as his family would expect to come to (he could imagine Augusta’s horrified face) but it was a start: one day perhaps (he dreamed) a big house could stand here in the sunshine close to the sea, and the hills would rise softly (covered in fruit trees of every variety), and wheat too would somehow miraculously grow on the hillside and wave gently in soft breezes. The McClellans had done it: he could do it too. His shack would become an outhouse or a stable of course and he would laugh at his youthful efforts. And yet he wondered as he stroked the logs again if anything would give him as much pleasure as this original building, built with his heart.

When on the twenty-seventh day Edward’s odd little house was finished, and huge stacks of firewood were piled up by the door and all his trunks and boxes were safely under cover, he lovingly unpacked the painting of his sisters and hung it on one of his planked walls, moving it slightly over and over again, until it hung almost straight. Augusta and Alice and Asobel smiled at him, like angels. Asobel’s doll, Lizzie, he sat on the end of the table. Outside the wind blew across the harbour.

And then he opened the bottle of whisky his father had given him and, all alone in his little house, toasted his future. He found himself addressing Lizzie, more than once.

On that twenty-seventh day he was cheerful enough after several glasses and toasts to hammer a small sign into the ground. It said WELCOME TO RUSHOLME SOUTH.

*   *   *

It rained and the ground became softer; he worked even harder, trying to clear more land around the spring, cutting into the hillside; back-breaking work that made him cry aloud in frustration. Sometimes the wind was so strong it would whip the tree branches across his face and bend the low fern and bush to the north as if to say:
get away from here.
Then the wind would die and the bright clear sky would cheer him again. He knew he needed at the very least ploughs and huge saws and the help of others. But the land – in his heart he knew this – was the
wrong kind of land for farming:
it was not land for anything but reaching upwards to the sky declaring that man came and went, and the land did not. Still he worked on, morning till night. The trees mocked him with their strange foreign names the natives had told:
rimu, kahikatea, hinau.
He slashed at them with his knife. Sometimes he talked to himself, sometimes he sang: hymns, popular songs, thought of his sisters sitting in their pretty dresses in the drawing room singing ‘Then You’ll Remember Me’. Perhaps by now Augusta had found a suitor and was happier. He felt a pang in his heart as he thought of his father: how much he missed his wise advice. And smiled to remember the constant chattering of his youngest sister Asobel whom he loved so dearly. Often his thoughts would turn to his cousin Mary, how he wished he could see her dear, loving face, take her wise advice also: to no other woman had he spoken so freely of what was in his mind; he hoped he would find letters from her in the first mail. Their faces, all the faces of his loved ones, crowded into his mind as he struck and pounded at the terrible, stubborn land. This was worse than building a house because he could see so little for his labours. Five square feet of cleared land was a Herculean task: there were a hundred acres. Even though he knew it was almost hopeless he desperately wanted to plant just a little token of his wheat before winter came, to see if it would grow in this alien, rising ground. As he planted the wheat he remembered how his father and his brother had helped him to pack the precious seed, thousands of miles away, and his heart ached to think of his naïve enthusiasm for his new life. He planted the fruit trees and the vegetables that Mr McClellan had given him but the ground had set hard again and several times he almost gave up. His hands grew tougher, his back ached and he fell instantly asleep each night to the sound of night owls and crickets, calling in the trees.

And then he dreamed and often his dreams were nightmares: all the different ferns and bushes and brackens and wild native trees were one big green tentacled monster, bent on his destruction.

*   *   *

Mr McClellan rode over to tell Edward that a small schooner had brought some sheep and chickens across and would be going back to the town in the morning. Edward was relieved: the boat could do the journey in a few hours. He needed to buy supplies, and also needed to satisfy a deep desire to go to a real church on a Sunday and hear hymns sung. He needed to go to a barber. He needed to talk to other settlers. He needed to consider if he was being foolish staying on his harsh land and, if he was to stay, he needed to hire men to help him. He needed to find out if he could sell the timber from his hills anywhere. He needed to consider whether even the farming of sheep would be possible on his high, tree-covered land. He needed to buy a dog, to feel that he was not so totally alone.

And most of all he needed to search – just in case a ship had arrived – for mail from home.

*   *   *

Wellington was awash with gossip: Edward walked along the paths and the streets slowly, glad of the company of fellow settlers, greeting several people he knew, being introduced to others. It was a sunny afternoon: the weather was warm enough for ladies to be walking in cotton gowns, holding parasols, wearing gloves; the sight gladdened Edward’s lonely heart. As usual the main topic of conversation among settlers was land: complaints about the New Zealand Company; rumours about more trouble with Maoris and new rumours that the British government had decided that the New Zealand Company should be wound up. There was talk of the British government being too soft on the natives, there was talk of self-government for the new colony:
no-one but us here understands the problems; we should be in charge.
He was warned once again always to keep his gun near him. He heard news that a ship had arrived from England and mail was at the Post Office, he determined he must not be disappointed if there was nothing for him. He heard much satisfaction that all sorts of goods had arrived from Home: Souchong Anjou tea, turpentine, shot, parasols, tar, violin strings, brandy, corsets. He heard salacious stories of the behaviour of one of the ladies of the town; he heard intrigue concerning settlers who had ‘lowered their standards’.

Edward drank in all the signs of civilisation and just walked about the streets, immensely glad to be among people. He was surprised yet again at how Wellington – despite the Maori villages situated at each end of the harbour – was already an English town with all the accoutrements of such a place: houses, shops, offices, banks. He saw a notice in a window:

ASSORTMENT OF HAIR JUST RECEIVED:

ORDERS TAKEN FOR WIGS, RINGLETS,

FRONTS AND PLAITS.

He passed the office of the
Wellington Independent;
saw several advertisements for a theatrical evening. He passed churches and shops and boys flying kites on a village green for all the world as if they were at home in England. A few soldiers from the barracks walked leisurely past: rumours about recalcitrant natives were probably grossly exaggerated: there had been war round Wellington but the war was clearly over. The soldiers widened roads and gave concerts on Wednesdays in their splendid red jackets.

Some of the larger houses on the hill behind the harbour would have been quite at home in England except that they were built of wood because of earthquakes: from one the sound of a piano wafted out into the colonial afternoon; he thought he caught a few bars,
I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls with vassals and serfs at my side,
slowed to listen to the remembered music. He walked past rows of small neat houses (wryly thinking of his shack), down again to the main street along the harbour. Here there were more neat houses, and other slightly more imposing buildings. In the Mechanics Institute a notice offered lectures:

PHRENOLOGY

ASTRONOMY,

TERRESTRIAL MAGNETISM,

ZOOLOGY

and then right at the bottom of the list in smaller writing, as if added as an afterthought, someone had written:
and the Immortality of the Soul.

Slowly he walked past warehouses and stores and hotels. The autumn dusk was falling now. Out in the harbour sailing barques stood at anchor among the schooners and the cutters: from Australia, from Africa, from England. Edward’s heart beat at the thought that one of them might at last have brought news of his family.

He took a room at the hotel he knew and then, trying, as he had been all afternoon, to prepare himself for disappointment should there be no letters, he at last set out along the quay towards the Post Office. The hotels were getting fuller and louder, horses were tied at wooden fences; Edward saw with a mixture of embarrassment and excitement that here women offered invitations, that accordion music blared out from the seedier hotels and men spilled outside shouting: whalers in long boots, forestmen with axes; and all the time the girls called and laughed and offered paradise, and lights began to come on all along the quay. People were selling things along the foreshore, shouting and laughing and fighting; natives with meat and vegetables, stockmen with cows and sheep, stalls selling hats, hammers, honey. Carts rolled past, one piled high with furniture, one with big cans of fresh milk. Groups of people stood talking on corners, the men wearing top hats. Natives sat on the shore in groups, wrapped in brightly coloured blankets: one of them sported a top hat also. Along the beach the whaleboats and the native canoes had been pulled up on to the shore for the night. The sun was going down behind the Wellington hills, he saw his own breath like smoke in the darkening, frosty air.

And then he had a hallucination and feared for a moment that solitude and disappointment and nightmares of the wild tangled bush had turned his mind: he thought he saw walking towards him in the dusk his cousin Harriet Cooper, dressed in black.

TWENTY-EIGHT

So great was the shock to Edward: to see Harriet standing before him in Wellington town and then to hear almost at once of his beloved cousin Mary’s death, that for some time he was simply unable to rise from the harbour wall where he had sat suddenly, stunned.

Finally, recollecting himself partly – but forgetting that he was to go to the barber, to bathe, to be presentable – he took Harriet to a small back parlour on the ground floor of his hotel where they could obtain tea in a cavalier sort of way, away from the shouts and the music. There he said over and over, incredulously,
on the day I sailed away?
Harriet told him of the events of that terrible night when Mary died of the cholera with lips turned blue, and, recounting for the first time to another person, lived it again, wept. People came in from the darkening streets, and although curious to see two young people so engaged were, in a disapproving way, used to this: news as well as people came sailing from thousands of miles away into the harbour, random, unpredictable. It was not considered polite, however, to show emotions, and the new arrival was carefully perused. Within fifteen minutes Harriet’s antecedents were known and passed on: her sister had died, her father was a member of Queen Victoria’s government.