Kehua! (2 page)

‘I can’t remember what my shoes were like,’ Beverley goes on, relentlessly, ‘it being such a long time ago – 1937, it must
have been – but I think they were yellow. Or that might have just been the dust. We were in New Zealand then, in the South
Island, on the Canterbury Plains. The dust on those dry country roads round Amberley was yellowy, a kind of dull ochre. You
notice the colour of the earth more as a small child, I suppose, because you’re nearer to it.’

Beverley too wonders why she has set this particular hare running: now she has, she can see it will run and run. But then
she takes a pleasure in rash action, and always has, and perhaps Scarlet
inherits it. There is something grand about burning one’s boats. And Scarlet, bound by the tale of the family scandal, longs
to get away to her lover, but like the wedding guest in
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
, holds still.

‘I was quite athletic as a child,’ Beverley says. ‘I even used to get the school gymnastic prize. And I was a really good
little runner, a sprinter, until my bosom began to grow, and I developed an hourglass shape, and bounced while I ran. That
was one of the early tragedies of my life. I expect it was that early experience of one-two, one-two down this dusty road
to Kitchie’s best friend Rita that made me so value running. I wasn’t otherwise sportive in any way. I ran because Kitchie,
that’s my mother, your great-grandmother, was lying dead on the kitchen floor. I wasn’t quite sure at the time what dead was,
I was only three, but when I tried to open her eyelids she didn’t slap my hand away as she usually did. There was a lot of
blood around; I remember thinking it was like the time when I blocked the basin with my flannel and the water overflowed and
I thought that was funny. But this wasn’t funny and it wasn’t even water, which is a nothing sort of substance, but a strange
red rather sticky stuff coming from my mother’s neck.’

‘They say you can’t remember things that happened when you were three,’ says Scarlet. She would rather not be hearing this.
It is making her very angry. What sort of inheritance does she have? What has her grandmother done? As happens with many when
they are shocked, their first instinct is to blame the victim for the crime.

‘I was rising four,’ says Beverley. ‘They say anything that suits them, and I am bad at dates. But help was required and I
was sensible enough to know it, which was why my little legs were going as fast as I could make them. And the reason my mother
was lying
dead on the floor, though I didn’t know this until later, was because she’d told my father Walter, while he was cutting sandwiches,
that she was running off with another man. So Walter cut her throat with the bread knife, leaving me, little Beverley, having
my afternoon rest upstairs. Men do the oddest things when sex is involved. And fathers weren’t very close to their children
in those days. They supported them and that was that. If it happened today I expect he’d have come after me too. In times
of desperation, the nearest and dearest get it in the neck.’

‘You never told me,’ says Scarlet. She could see the Alexandra Palace mast between the trees. She feels it was probably transmitting
invisible rays of evil, jagged and ill-intentioned, cursing her designs for the future. ‘What kind of genetic inheritance
is this?’

Today Scarlet is a little pink and feverish about the cheekbones; perhaps her blood pressure is raised? If it is, it is only
to be expected: last night she wept, screamed and threw crockery. A high colour suits her, brightening her eyes and suggesting
she is not as self-possessed as she seems, and might have any number of vulnerabilities, which indeed she has. After she has
had a row with Louis, and these days they are more and more frequent, men look after her in the street, and wonder if she
needs rescuing. Today is such a day, and Jackson is indeed at hand. She has no real need to worry about losing Jackson. He
would be hard put to it to find another more desirable than she, celebrity though he may be.

After last night’s row Louis went to sleep in one of the spare bedrooms of their (or at any rate his) dream home, Nopasaran.
The bedrooms are described in the architectural press, where they often feature, as alcoves, being scooped like ice cream
out of the concrete walls of a high central studio room. Guests are expected to reach the alcoves of this brutalist Bauhaus
dwelling by climbing ladders, as
once the cave-dwellers of the Dordogne climbed for security. Changing the bedding is not easy, and the help tends to leave
if asked to do it – there is other easier work around – so Scarlet finds the task is frequently left to her.

No one in this book, other than peripheral characters like ‘the help’ as the particular reader may have realised, is particularly
short of money; that is all in the past for them. The need to avoid poverty, once both the reason and the excuse for improper
actions, no longer dictates their behaviour. This is not the case for Jackson, who is in financial trouble and has his eye
upon Scarlet’s good job and general competence, as well as upon her face and figure, but find me anyone whose motives are
wholly pure? He for his part could complain Scarlet loved him for his headlines, which once were large though they will soon
be small. None so desperate as a failing celebrity.

Murder will out. Poverty was not the cause of the crime which was to so affect Beverley’s future and that of her descendants,
and concerning which she had stayed silent for so long; rather it was love. And Beverley’s version of an event which happened
on the other side of the world in 1937 may not be as accurate as she believes. A different truth may still come back to solve
the problems of the present. Novels can no longer sit on shelves and pretend to be reality; they are not, they are inventions,
suspensions of reality, and must declare themselves as such. By hook or by crook, or even by the intervention of the supernatural,
we will get to the root of it.

Where we live influences us, though we may deny it. High ceilings and big spaces make us expansive; cramped rooms and low
ceilings turn us inward. Those who once lived where we live now influence our moods. A house is the sum of its occupants,
past and present. People who live in new houses are probably the sensible ones; they can start afresh. They may seem shallow
to us, hermit crabs that we are, these strange empty people, dwellers in the here and now of new developments; but perhaps
a kinder word is subtext-less. How can our precursors in the bedroom where we sleep not send out their anxieties, their sexual
worries to us? As you brush the stairs – should you condescend to do so – spare a thought for those who ran up and down them
before you. Something echoing from the past, as she changes the sheets in Nopasaran’s alcoves, tossing the soiled bedding
down, dragging the fresh up, almost drowns out Scarlet’s lust for Jackson.

Nopasaran, where Louis and Scarlet share their lives, was built in the 1930s when domestic help was easier to come by. It
was designed to an advanced taste: hailed at the time as a machine for living in. Machines in those days had a better press
than they do today. Louis loves the house; Scarlet hates it. Now she has resolved never to spend another day in it, let alone
another night. She wants to go and live with her lover, who has atrocious taste and shagpile
carpets – but livelier sexual habits than Louis. A row with Jackson would surely have ended with sex, not a disdainful exit
to different rooms, let alone scooped and moulded alcoves.

A lot of people assume that Louis is gay but he is not: indeed he is most assiduous, in a heterosexual fashion, towards his
wife. Two or three times a week is not bad after six years of togetherness, but there is nothing urgent about it any more
and Scarlet is conscious of a shared falling away of desire, which reminds her that soon it will be her thirtieth birthday,
that though she studied Journalism she is working in what amounts to glorified PR, and that her ambitions are somehow being
stifled by Louis, who will not take her job seriously while taking his own extremely so.

Louis has a wealthy mother, and it is through her family connections that Louis and Scarlet own Nopasaran, a house-name Louis
loves and Scarlet hates. No one ever spells it right: it frequently comes out as Noparasan in articles, and for some reason
this enrages her. It can hardly matter, she tells herself. Louis agrees. Perhaps she has the same over-sensitivity to language
that he has to design; she earns her living through words, as he earns his through the way things look.

Louis knows how to acknowledge difficulty, to soothe and disarm. He is a thoroughly reasonable, thoughtful and considerate
person. Nopasaran – which is Spanish for ‘they shall not pass’: the battle cry in the Spanish Civil War of the Communists
at the siege of Madrid – was designed in 1936 by Wells Coates, the Canadian minimalist architect. Enthusiasts come from all
over the world – for some reason disproportionately from Japan – to cluster outside and admire, to peer in as best they can
through billowing gauze curtains at the rough flat concrete walls.

Scarlet feels particularly bitter about the gauze curtains, which
Louis prizes. He managed to acquire some original gauze drapes from the Cecil Beaton set for
Lady Windermere’s Fan
, the 1946 production on Broadway. Scarlet, unlike Louis, does not feel the pull of history. Nor indeed of the future. She
sees in gauze curtains only the worst aspects of suburbia. Last night’s row had started, as so often, with disagreements over
Nopasaran. Scarlet argued that it was no place to bring up children – they needed a degree of comfort, and au pairs would
never stay: Louis argued that it was entirely suitable for developing their children’s aesthetic and political sensibilities,
and talk of au pairs ‘struck terror to his heart’. Surely she must bring them up herself? What was the point of having children
if you handed them over to someone else to rear?

‘You are going to say next,’ said Scarlet, ‘that my job is of no importance.’

‘I wouldn’t say that,’ said Louis, ‘just that any literate girl from a mediocre university with a 2: 1 could do it and you
are worth more than that.’

He meant it as a compliment but she did not see it like that. He had been to Oxford, she to Kingston.

She said that one thing was certain: until they lived in a proper house she would not be breeding. Two-year-olds weren’t any
good at scuttling up ladders to bed. They tended to fall.

‘This is a proper house,’ said Louis. ‘We are privileged to live here. What you really mean is that you’ve decided against
having children.’

‘No I haven’t. I just want them by a man who isn’t a total nutter.’

‘I resent that,’ said Louis. ‘Have you been drinking? Wells Coates brought up his own children in this house. My grandmother
used to visit him here.’

‘Any minute now you’re going to reveal that this is your an cestral
home,’ said Scarlet.

‘No. I am just telling you that the only way I am ever going to leave this house is feet first.’

‘Me, I’d leave it with a hop, a skip and a jump,’ said Scarlet. ‘And I may yet.’

Scarlet had been drinking caipirinhas, clubland’s current favourite, snatching a quick drink with Jackson before getting home
from work, and Louis had shared a bottle of champagne with a colleague before leaving Mayfair, where he works. Lola had been
staying, though she was out late tonight, and that had disturbed their usual equilibrium, making them see each other as outsiders
saw them, not necessarily to their advantage. Both were quicker to anger than usual. Starting a family was normally a subject
they skirted around, but that evening they had both piled into it with energy. Louis maddened Scarlet further by raising his
eyebrows and sighing as if to say, ‘What have I done in marrying a woman so bereft of aesthetic understanding?’ He should
have refrained: it was this look from him that tipped her into defiance, making Jackson’s tasteless shag pad and pile carpet
seem not so bad after all, for all the module in Art History she had done at Kingston, alongside her Journalism degree.

But then Louis did not suspect Scarlet of having an affair; it would be too vulgar of her. That she would allow herself to
become physically and, worse, emotionally involved with someone as flashy and uneducated as Jackson was not within his comprehension.
That Scarlet could move from a lover’s bed into the marriage bed within the space of an hour – as in the last couple of months
she had, five times, on her way home from work – well, it shocks even your writer. Louis would be dumbfounded, undone. But
Scarlet is good at hiding her tracks; it is part of the fun.

It occurred to her even now, mid-row, that without the deceit Jackson might not seem so attractive. She had loved Louis and
lusted for him when hiding that relationship from her family. They would find him boring, etiolated like some rare, pallid,
carefully nurtured hothouse plant. Scarlet, out of Beverley, being more the tough, all-purpose, all-garden, all-climate-growth,
adaptable and robust kind. As it happened, when she did finally present Louis, they liked him and said he would be good for
her (what could they mean?) and even seemed to be more on his side than hers.

Louis is tall and thin and gentlemanly; he has a cavernous kind of face, good-looking in an intellectual, sensitive, gentle-eyed,
slow-moving kind of way. Observers tended to murmur about ‘the attraction of opposites’. Beverley once remarked that theirs
was the kind of instant unthinking sexual attraction that usually moves on to babies, as if nature was determined to get the
pair together whatever society might have to say, but Scarlet, whose second three-year contraceptive implant is coming up
for renewal, and who has already booked her appointment with the doctor to see to it, has so far thwarted nature.

‘So what you are telling me,’ said Scarlet, as the row moved up a notch, ‘is that I have to choose between this house and
you.’ He was being wholly outrageous.

She heard the kind of chattering noises in her head she sometimes hears when she is about to lose her temper. It is somewhere
between the clatter of cutlery in a kitchen drawer being rattled as a hand searches for something urgently needed that isn’t
there, and the chatter of a clutch of baby crows rattling their throats in a nest. It sounds like a warning to run away, but
probably has some boring cause to do with plumbing – there is a pump perched up in the roof next to something called a coffin
tank.