The Trespass (49 page)

Edward was very quiet, well aware of Hetty with her hair half-dry. The storm only confirmed that the land was unusable. He did not discuss it with the women but he had gone up earlier to look at his newly planted fruit trees. They had been battered to the ground by the ferocity of the wind. He felt his shoulders sink. He would have to go. He had a sudden bleak vision of the native bush triumphantly growing over the house he had built. What had happened to his future? And of course there was the problem of Harriet. Edward was absolutely certain Sir Charles Cooper’s powerful hand would soon stretch out, to this small bay round the coast from Wellington if necessary. He presumed that some official from the New Zealand Company would arrive any day now with letters and Harriet would be taken on board a boat bound for England. She would, of course, and this preyed heavily on his mind, have to tell his family of his failure.

Harriet was quiet also. The weather was her friend. Nobody could bring unwelcome messages in a storm. But as soon as the storm was over she would have to go, to find somewhere else to be safe. It meant, and she had never thought of this, never, that she could not stay with Edward.
It would take your father, with his contacts, fifteen minutes from stepping ashore to ascertain your whereabouts,
Edward had said. She did not know where to go.

Hetty’s eggs burnt dry. She was mortified. But they were eaten with bread that had become very hard, and pronounced a moderate success. They ate some apples from Wellington. The rain came further under the door and pounded on the roof tiles but the wind did not blow the roof away. Everybody went to bed early and kept dry as best they could: Miss Eunice dreamed of a white wedding in which she was the heroine: yet try as she would, she could not quite see whom she was marrying.

*   *   *

The storm passed in the night: the next morning was bright and clear. Edward had made himself a big tin of tea and was gone up the hill to the spring with his axes and his scythes and his water carriers and his dog before the others were to be seen. But he saw again the destruction of his trees and his wheat: of course nothing had had a firm enough hold in the hillside.

He looked down towards the house and saw that Harriet and Miss Eunice had somehow taken the tarpaulin roof off his lean-to and were laying it out on the bushes to dry. Hetty was stoking up the fire with her good arm and they seemed to have washed some clothes, some womanly things he noted with slight embarrassment, and hung them on the bushes also. The smoke rising straight upwards beside the shack sent signals to him of habitation and a kind of domesticity that warmed his heart after the lonely days before Harriet’s unexpected arrival. A house with women. A strange brightly coloured bird suddenly flew out of the bush. In one of the native trees another bird sang on and on, a clear bell-like sound that suddenly caught at his throat, and the sound of a cry seemed to come from somewhere and he realised it was from himself. He bent to his work angrily: he was getting soft. He had heard a hundred birds at home without such sentiment. As he wielded his axe again his dog barked somewhere just out of sight. Just for a moment Edward thought he heard a neighbouring bark far in the distance but he listened again and heard nothing. Perhaps it was an echo.

*   *   *

Miss Eunice swept the earth floor with an English broom, scrubbed and hung out the mats on bushes; it was heavy work and it was not what she was used to doing but she worked hard with intense concentration, pleased with the floor, pleased with the clean mats.
If this is to be my life I will thank Heaven for it. As long as I can share my life with Mr Edward Cooper. I am not so very much older than he, and I will make myself indispensable. Dear Lord, I beg you to let Mr Edward Cooper notice me and learn to love me.

Harriet scrubbed at the big pot, wondered if she could stay one more day, wondered how she could broach with Edward her return to Wellington, and her moving on to somewhere else. Sometimes she thought of all the servants in her father’s house: the cook and the maids and the footmen who kept everything so clean. And so silent. She was very careful not to waste water: she had never realised water was so heavy. Sometimes now she thought of her last maid, the girl with the watchful eyes, Lucy: every morning Lucy had carried water up to Harriet’s room from the basement, cleaning the floor and the bowls after Harriet had vomited (she scrubbed the pot harder, pushing away the memory, all the memories that had surfaced in the last few days).
I must go.

Hetty had decided their clothes must be cleaned. With her one good arm, she was preparing for washing. There was no hiding the fact that Miss Eunice and particularly Miss Harriet no longer looked quite like ladies: their gowns were filthy from travelling, from the mud. But the sun was shining; there was water, there was a fire for hot water; there was soap. She could sponge them and scrub at the worst parts at least. The others would have to carry the water but Hetty could scrub with one hand, see if she couldn’t.

‘Miss Harriet,’ called Hetty.

Harriet looked up from her scrubbing and her thoughts.

‘We should try and clean your black dress. Have you another?’

‘My boxes are still at the Gentlewomen’s Hotel.’

‘Well,’ said Hetty, ‘if you wouldn’t mind, just while I worked at the black one, I have my other dress, my blue dress, my luggage is all here because I ain’t got much and I had nowhere to leave things, look!’ She pulled a blue servant’s dress out of her small bundle. ‘It is not a lady’s garment, of course, and you are not as fat as me, but I do not think that Mr Edward will mind. And you should not wear the black one any longer until I have tried to clean it a little. I tried to brush the mud off yesterday, but it is not just mud, it is everything!’ With her good hand she helped Harriet take off the black skirt and bodice and put on the blue one.
Hetty is well enough now. I will decide today. When I have talked to Edward. I will walk up to the spring.

Just for a moment both the young women were conscious – not just that Harriet was wearing servant’s clothes – but that she was not wearing black. Hetty had never seen her not wearing black. Harriet caught her thought. ‘I think Mary would not mind,’ she said. ‘She would be so interested in my life here, she would not mind what I was wearing.’ And Harriet, going back to the recalcitrant stew pot, smiled: at Hetty, at the thought of telling Mary about her adventures, at herself dressed in servant’s clothes and scrubbing a pot. She must go. But – just one more day at this beautiful spot? She would, definitely, go tomorrow.

At last she stopped her work, stretched her back. And despite the forebodings that had returned to her so cruelly and so clearly she could not help looking about her in a kind of joy. She loved the sounds: the sound of the sea there below her, calm; the birds and the insects in the wild bush. The birds sang and called to each other but did not come near the shack; their colours flashed between branches as they flew above her. The bush-covered hillside stretched upwards, dark green between the blue of the sea and the blue of the sky: who would not feel joy at this and the fresh fragrance of the clear autumn air? Eddie’s dog barked up on the side of the hill by the spring where Eddie was working and she remembered Quintus again, chasing the rats in the cesspits under Bryanston Square. Cesspits. How far she felt from the sight and the smells of London cesspits. Here Eddie made holes in the ground, they filled them in again and laid sweet-smelling leaves and branches across so that none of them would forget where the holes had been made. Oh, the things she could tell Mary of, in her blue servant’s dress the colour of the sea! And it was then that Harriet turned and looked out across the blue sea where the morning mist had cleared.

A small boat was coming towards her.

It was still too far away for figures to be clear. She stared out to sea as if rooted to the spot. She heard Eddie’s dog bark. She saw the sun catch the sails of the boat. The boat came inexorably nearer and figures began to emerge and clarify: men, at least four men. Hetty ran from the fire towards the shore to get a clearer view; she called excitedly to the others. At first the boat seemed to be going further to the west. Then it seemed to see the clearing, or the shack, or the figures on the shore, and changed direction slightly and came straight towards them. And then there was the sound of oars, coming across the water.

‘Why, I believe it is my brother,’ said Miss Eunice, moving down to the shore also. And then Edward called, his voice nearer and nearer as he came down the hill, but Harriet Cooper had turned to stone in her blue dress. Now Edward’s dog was barking excitedly, running down towards the shore and then back to his new master: tail wagging, ears back. No dog answered: there was no dog on the little boat. Edward, who had brought water down as he always did when he made the journey, put the pails on the ground with a grunt, then stared intently at the approaching boat. And then looked at the pale, expressionless face of his cousin.

‘I believe it is your father, Harriet,’ he said.

She stared not at Edward but at the sea.

She had not believed that it could happen. And she had stayed too long.

I could run, I could take the horse, I could ride away through the bush.
But of course, the meeting with her father would thus only be postponed, not cancelled. Another thought clarified coldly:
It cannot begin again. I would rather die.

Edward, in politeness and with the deference due to his uncle (but somehow uneasy), left his cousin and walked towards the shore as the boat came nearer and nearer. First Mr Burlington Brown was observed, his black cape billowing slightly in the wind as the boat came towards the shore. Then a stranger none of them recognised. Then Edward and Harriet clearly saw Peters, Sir Charles’s manservant, dressed in black as he always was. And at the back of the boat, very still but staring forward intently, stood the Right Honourable Sir Charles Cooper, MP.

When the crewman jumped into the shallow water to pull the boat up on to the pebbles, although Mr Burlington Brown was standing at the front of the boat it was Sir Charles who leapt ashore first. Both Miss Eunice and Hetty looked in amazement at his fine clothes and his long boots. Edward said, ‘Welcome, sir.’ But Sir Charles strode upwards as if he did not notice them, strode upwards to the motionless blue figure by the little shack. Peters climbed rather than leapt ashore; the stranger who turned out to be an official of the New Zealand Company got his feet rather wet; the crewman helped Mr Burlington Brown, who greeted his sister but looked disgruntled. Out of respect for family feelings they all stayed by the boat so no-one but Harriet heard Sir Charles Cooper’s words as he engulfed her in his arms, no-one heard what he whispered into her ear, or saw his hands upon her breasts.

There was little delay. Sir Charles made it clear that Harriet would come back on the boat to Wellington town where he had taken rooms in the largest hotel and where they were expected to dine today with the Lieutenant-Governor. He said little else except to order Harriet to put on her mourning dress, smoking a cigar impatiently in the small clearing by the house while Harriet got ready with Hetty’s help. He gave short answers to Edward’s questions about his family in England; took in without comment the rough dwelling, the washing on the bushes, the servant with the cricket bat tied to her arm, the unwelcoming aspect of the land. The whole thing was a farce, his posture said, and nothing to do with him. Mr Burlington Brown, staring in disbelief at Edward’s house, said at once that he did not wish his sister to stay any longer. Peters stood by the boat, did not even come as far as the house.

Miss Eunice, who would not of course for a moment have thought of disobeying her brother, nevertheless did not wish to leave Edward, especially not in the company of Hetty. But when she tentatively mentioned to the general company Hetty’s health and the uncertainty of Hetty’s fate none of the men even bothered to answer her.

Finally Sir Charles addressed the official from the New Zealand Company. ‘If this is the land you were offering to farmers unseen, Thompson, then my nephew Edward Cooper has been made a fool of.’

The official had been prepared for this, had had conversations with other company officials before he embarked on the boat journey across the harbour, had made plans for this. Sir Charles Cooper was a member of Her Majesty’s Government after all and the New Zealand Company needed all the help it could get. He inhaled rapidly and began talking fast.

‘Sir Charles,’ he said, ‘there has been a terrible mistake. Mr Edward Cooper’s land is not
here,
it is further northwards, through the hills at a place the natives call Wairarapa – and there is more land up at Wanganui by the river, we have much good land there. He of course has a
choice,
Sir Charles, a choice of a fine agricultural acquirement, we were just, as it happens, in the process of informing him of our regrettable mistake when you arrived on the
Lord Fyne
yesterday. My deepest apologies, Mr Edward, I will take you north tomorrow or whenever suits you and indeed, Sir Charles, we would like you to see the flat, fertile land we have in store for him, to take the good news homewards, as it were.’ He looked at Sir Charles anxiously but Sir Charles merely pulled on his cigar and said nothing.

‘I am heartened to learn of your mistake, Mr Thompson,’ said Edward, expressionless. ‘If there should be room on the boat for me to return with you now I certainly will not let you out of my sight.’

‘There is not room on the boat,’ said Sir Charles, ‘for either you or Mr Thompson if the two ladies are to return.’ Mr Thompson’s look of horrified protest was ignored. ‘It will do you good,’ said Sir Charles, ‘to live on the land you so easily dispense to others. I understand that the journey is rather tedious by road. I will, of course, although I hope to return to England in two days’ time with my daughter on the
White Princess,
keep a close eye on the progress of the farm of my nephew, and thus of the progress of the New Zealand Company. I am sure the Prime Minister will be interested in my report. There has been much talk of your activities in the House.’