A Many Coated Man (36 page)

Miles’s breathing is as audible and persistent as any of it. His mouth is open to make it easier for him and as Slaven takes his arm he feels the skin sliding directly upon the bone. Miles has nothing physical that he can trust anymore and every trip is a calculation and deliberate effort and awareness of body diminished. Yet he still has the frame and power of his mind and thanks fate for that. ‘What a companion for your only rest day before the rally,’ he whispers. ‘Thanks, thanks. Just see that I don’t fall backwards when we’re getting in. I’ve lost any quick reaction to my own failings and to think that there were nights when I could leap and pluck the moon one-handed from the sky.’

Both the pilot and Slaven would be surprised if told that the cockpit was familiar to Miles, given a few more technical advances since he was accustomed to fly himself from plant to plant, but he says nothing of it, can’t be bothered with the effort of getting it out, or the element of personal vanity it would reveal. So he sits quietly and seems impressed by the skills of the best man that his ‘Muche Safaris’ can provide.

As they rise up, Miles remembers his first meeting with
Mr Ng, sixty-plus stories high in old Hong Kong and the whole restaurant rotating slowly so that as Miles talked with Mr Ng they could see the skyscrapers of the island around them, then the bulk of Mount Victoria, then in its turn the sea and the towers of Kowloon and the ferries going back and forth. Mr Ng had explained gently how concerned he was about the takeover and the faith he had in Miles as a potential partner for New Zealand investment. He said that he knew there was respect for Miles in Germany. Miles remembers how few hairs were in Mr Ng’s eyebrows, scarcely three or four above each eye, how perfectly absorbed and still he was when listening, how scrupulous he proved to be in all his business dealings.

The chopper does a long arc before it sets direction and on the camber Slaven and Miles tilt their necks slightly and unconsciously to remain level-headed. The patchwork of the Canterbury Plains in subdued summer tones lies beneath them, marked in the gravel soils with a myriad sinuous contours of the old waterways which have built it up and the lines of willow, lupin and gorse which follow those braided channels which still have intermittent flow. Over Methven, Mount Somers and the moraines until the mountains rise abruptly and the Rangitata lies in its great glacial valley. The Havelock, the Clyde and the Lawrence are its headwaters and beyond that the perched snowfield known as The Garden Of Eden. Miles points it out to Slaven as they hang like a gnat in the clear air. Miles climbed there years ago and now he has lost his strength while the snowfield endures, glistening as an ermine pelt among the black-sided peaks. ‘Look at that then.’ says Miles in his rueful, hoarse voice. The westerly is blowing cloud up the other side of the Alps and it begins to show as a white, breaking surge at the divide, but for the present the sun still glitters on The Garden Of Eden, on the snow of the eastern mountain sides and the outcrops of rock, dark and gleaming because of the thaw. Even the pilot, whose livelihood is commercial scenery, cocks his head back and nods to affirm the impact of such country.

The helicopter hangs above the Rangitata like a gnat and Slaven resists the thought that it might fall, topple from
its high point to the rock and tussock below. Miles has the same thought in his own way — and welcomes it. Instead the chopper lets itself noisily down, dog-retchingly efficient, until it is above the Erewhon Alpine Camp which has those words painted on the roof of the recreation centre for skiers. There is a line of single family chalets, quite modern, and the old dormitory block for budget accommodation. And the scale of it, almost the very existence, mocked by the endless landscape still going its own way.

‘There’s some group in at the moment,’ says Miles as they sit with the rotors flagging and the noise dying away. There’s a cluster of cars and vans in the park and a few people coming and going around the restaurant and recreation building. ‘An ecology tour party, probably. They’re very popular with Europeans. Where they come from you can’t see a horizon for the haze.’

‘Muche Safaris’ has an interest in the Camp, which means that Miles is a part-owner in effect. He climbs out cautiously with Slaven and the pilot in attendance. Miles thinks finally to introduce them and the pilot says he’s a CCP supporter; been to meetings even, addressed by Thackeray Thomas and Kellie while Slaven was in the Beckley-Waite Institute. ‘I’ll be at the rally. You can put a ring around that,’ he says.

The pilot heads for the office. Slaven and Miles walk slowly towards the new chalets to visit Mr Ng. It’s hot, yet on the mountain slopes, seeming closer in the clear air, the snow still lies despite the sun, and the west wind, unfelt here, still drives cloud to the top of the range and it builds there, ready to spill over. It will be pissing down on the coast.

Do you know the place? Sure you do. Up Lizard Gully there’s that bit of stunted native bush, barely hanging on, but bush all the same. The creek choked with boulders and its catchment just screes and bare, eroding spikes and ridges. And you cross the broad scree fans at a trot so that you don’t get caught in any slide that you start and the stone that was the mountain rattles away beneath your feet — another process of dissolution. Dark sedimentaries, slates and shales, some of it with fossils laid down beneath the
sea and now it lies thousands of metres up beneath The Garden Of Eden.

Mr Ng and two of his staff are staying in the chalet with the best view across the flat expanse of the glacial valley and the braided channels of the Rangitata with the white-grey of the greywacke shingle. On the other side is Mesopotamia station and the sudden mountains behind. Mr Ng knows all about Slaven, all about the leadership gift discovered by accident — yes — in middle age and the political power as a consequence of it. As a business man he sees the possible advantage in it, but he’s too polite to talk of matters which Slaven and Miles don’t themselves raise. There will be time perhaps when Slaven has shown that his grasp more nearly equals his reach.

Since the change in China Mr Ng spends much of each year in the south there, not far from Macao. He has a grey brick home built in the style of the old double-level farmhouses and from the upper windows he can see the people making pilgrimage to the family home of Dr Sun Yat-sen. Most of the carpets sold at the gates there are from one of Mr Ng’s industries. He is in retirement he says, but has agreed to act as an advisor for what has been termed the protective modernisation of the region.

‘This for you must be one of the few quiet times amongst many busy hours,’ Mr Ng says to Slaven. His English carries a variety of influences, most strongly that of Hong Kong in colonial times. He is much the same age as his friend Miles, but showing it less, because there has always been little flesh and bone on which age could take effect. He’s a very slight man, very tight and instead of a face sagging outwards. Mr Ng is in a process of gradual dessication, with the skin moulded to the fine bones and no sign of moisture in all the glitter of his eye.

‘I’ve persuaded him to have this one break, one quiet day in the preparation for the Coalition rally, then he’s back in the cauldron,’ says Miles to his old friend.

‘The election makes it all doubly hectic,’ says Slaven. ‘It’s got to be a king-hit affair. I imagine that you’ve had a good deal to do with politics yourself.’

‘Only as an advisor,’ says Mr Ng. ‘Someone else must then make a decision and be publicly accountable for it.’ He and Miles smile together: men whose power is quietly exercised in the main and not dependent on popularity, but practical matters like supply and demand. Spiritual hungers they tend to avoid.

From the chalet they can all see the bare mountains on the other side of the river and nothing seems to move in all their view. ‘What a contrast this must be for you,’ says Slaven. ‘All this towering, empty country.’

‘Amazing certainly and very restful, contemplative. Yes, very different from Hong Kong, or Wuchow, but in China there’s a great deal of very high, cold country, also bare. It’s this inland China that Erewhon reminds me of, except that here the country is not so strongly marked by the signs of people’s persistent failure.’ A small group of figures has come from the main building below the chalets. Several remain there talking. Three others walk slowly in discussion up to the dormitory block.

‘What’s the group in at the moment?’ asks Miles.

‘I’m told they are enthusiasts for one of the great writers of your country,’ says Mr Ng. Is it Button, Bustler? I’m sorry.’

‘Samuel Butler, I suppose,’ says Miles. ‘Erewhon.’

‘That’ll be it,’ says Slaven. He has read nothing of Butler’s, knows nothing of his life except that he lived briefly here and that Erewhon commemorates it. ‘Erewhon, right,’ he says.

‘Ah, Samuel Butler. Butler.’ Mr Ng is pleased to have it right. ‘It is some special time for Samuel Butler,’ he says.

And what would Samuel make of it? If he could look across from his hut at Mesopotamia and see the zig-zag road up to the ski-fields, the new chalets of the Erewhon lodge, the hard shell of the helicopter winking in the sun and a gathering of enthusiasts for his later work. Seminars on his Italian travels and his discovery that Homer was a woman; toasts in his honour. Vindicated, wouldn’t you say, is how he’d feel. His bitterness assuaged after the sustained contemporary neglect. And he’d notice perhaps that despite the one road, the ski-track, the few buildings, the modest
gathering of his fans, the great Rangitata was unchanged. ‘That torrent pathway of desolation,’ he called it. From the Mesopotamia hut of course he would not have heard the three of them in Mr Ng’s chalet — two men of great wealth and a renowned political activist — even though they’re talking of him. Maybe you yourself know something of the man and his friends. Jones, whom he visited in old age bearing bottles of turtle soup, Pauli who was the handsomest man god ever sent to San Francisco, and Hans Rudolph Fäesch, murdered by a discarded native mistress in 1903. Quietus now.

Maybe of course Butler would be surprised and delighted to hear that there’s been an unauthorised release of snow leopards in the High Country and that they’ve become quite established.

Slaven leaves Miles and Mr Ng to their reminiscences and walks in the sun towards the communal buildings. He has a feeling of both release and relief.

He meets up with the group of three, two men and a woman, all middle-aged and with intelligent faces which show no immediate recognition, or expectation, as he joins them. They stand with their backs to the warm wood of the dormitory block and Slaven introduces himself just as Aldous. There is scattered gorse and briar on the river bed, glints of water in the channels, the abrupt mountains beyond with the great bench marks of ancient glaciers well up their sides.

Yes, they’re members of the Samuel Butler Society they say and here to celebrate his association with the place. Forty-two of them apart from the three talking with Slaven and including some from overseas. Professor Hankie from the University of Swansea has come even and a deaf woman from Beth Car whose family once lived at the Butler rectory in Langar.

‘When was he here?’ asks Slaven. These people want nothing from him. They have no barrow to push apart from their love of a didactic Victorian writer with a tenuous New Zealand connection. Slaven finds it a luxury to talk of anything, anything, but the CCP and the coming rally. The taller of the two men has the wonderfully gaunt face of a
prize-winning physicist and tells Slaven that in 1862 Butler did a pen-and-ink sketch of his hut at Mesopotamia and clearly labelled Mount Potts and the Jumped Up Downs on the Erewhon side of the river. The other two enjoying the sun are the McElries, husband and wife. Mr McElrie is a great repository of quotes from Butler’s works and he intersperses them amongst the conversation of others whatever the subject. He smiles to himself in a preparatory sort of way before delivering each gem and usually looks away modestly in the act of it. ‘While to deny the existence of an unknown kingdom is bad, to pretend that we know more about it than its bare existence is no better,’ says Mr McElrie, regarding the chalets.

‘Tomorrow,’ says the physicist, who is a master butcher from Gore, ‘we’re all going over to the Mesopotamia side for photographs and then in the afternoon Professor Hankie is going to give the keynote address. If the weather holds, we’ll tramp the Butler Pass the next day; well at least the fit amongst us. Do you know much about the great man? Mr McElrie has his smile and quotation ready before Slaven can reply.

‘Life is one long process of getting tired,’ he says.

Mrs McElrie’s speciality is personal and rather salacious material. ‘Lucie Dumas was the mistress he shared with Jones. Butler visited her once a week for many years.’

‘Dumas. How wonderfully appropriate,’ says Slaven. By what chance are they here, the four of them, in the barren beauty of the glacial valley, gateway to a mirror image of Butler’s Utopia. Slaven draws satisfaction from the thought that the peaks, the headwaters of the Rangitata, The Garden Of Eden, will all be the same after the CCP rally, after the elections, after the four of them have moved on as Butler moved on. McElrie is smiling.

‘Every man’s work is always a portrait of himself.’

‘A young student at Heatherley’s art studio once asked him if New Zealand was not the place where the hot water grows wild,’ adds Mrs McElrie.

‘Samuel was born on December 4th,’ says the physicist. He thinks that Slaven as a stranger to the life, should first be acquainted with a sound historical context, rather than
anecdotal material. ‘His grandfather was the famous Samuel Butler of Shrewsbury — the school not the biscuit.’

Slaven can feel the warmth of the weatherboards of the old building behind him and the sun shines on his face so that his eyes lower before it. If he’d stayed at the Coalition office rather than coming with Miles, he would most likely be deciding with Kellie and the executive the endless questions generated by the run-up to the elections. Some matters of grand political strategy, others as trivial as the slavenisms for bumper stickers — Politics Is Not A Party, People As The End And Means.