Living As a Moon (10 page)

‘He left me for my cousin, who is fat. I had been very happy, but obviously it was different for him. I miss him very much.'

I've met few people capable of such level honesty. So my physical similarity to the husband who deserted her, was what first drew her to me. She said, however, that after those first weeks as lovers, she came to see me as myself. ‘I made the right decision then,' she said. Said it with a smile, and with trust in her voice. Her hand moved towards mine on the restaurant table, but stopped before touching. I think I made the right decision then also. I wasn't angry. The whole time in Perugia was subject to different laws. My enduring memory of Crocetta is not of a small, angular body naked alongside my own, or a large-featured face, but of her sympathetic intelligence: her understanding of need, and that history diminishes the present by comparison, yet at the same time makes its brief opportunity the more precious.

Friday’s detention was held in Room 17, as were all detentions. Room 17 was close to the staffroom, it faced north for the sun and because it was in the old school block the master’s desk was on a podium below the board, which made supervision easier.

On most afternoons the master taking detention could stand at one of the windows and watch sports practices on the top field, but Friday was the one day of the week with no practices laid down for any code. Tweetie Pye could see just a dozen or so junior boarders playing the kicking game with the rugby ball they called ‘gainers’. Tweetie noticed that Laurie Cramm was the best of them; the boy had a more than passable right-foot spiral punt and also positioned himself well when the opposition was kicking.

Reluctantly Tweetie Pye left the warm, slanted sun and walked behind the five boys copying from their detention sheets, and up to his desk. The detention book showed that seven boys should have been present, and he had already noted the absence of Cody and Nichols. Dermot and Smyth were doing their time for bunking maths, Arvadson had persistently forgotten his PE gear, Crossley had accidently, but stupidly, broken seven test tubes, and Weymouth had been caught writing ‘wanker’ on the door to the sixth form dean’s office.

On another afternoon Tweetie would have done some marking, or preparation, during his detention duty, but Friday afternoon had a sense of relaxation, of the weekend stretching before him. All of Sunday he would have to spend constructing exam papers for his sixth form physics and his seventh form maths, but the Saturday he had set aside to go into the bush at Te Tarehi. There he would not hear another voice for six or eight hours at a stretch. Tweetie would climb up just beyond the treeline and sit amid the rock outcrops and tussock to take photographs of the gorge below.

He left the desk again and walked past the boys to ensure that they were still writing, and writing what was required of them. Crossley had drawn some diamond shapes on his left wrist with blue and red biros. ‘If I see any more of those you get a another detention,’ Tweetie said.

‘Yes, Mr Pye.’

‘Get rid of them straight after detention. I’ll check when you come to the dining hall.’

‘Right,’ said Crossley. He was a boy distinguished neither for brains nor physical skills, and so looked for little ways to draw attention to himself. He put his head down and smirked at Weymouth as Tweetie went on to the windows.

The teacher had the pleasure of the late afternoon sun on his face as he watched the juniors kicking and catching. The school was almost empty; most staff and all the dayboys gone, many of the boarders on town leave until 6 p.m. There was a BMW he didn’t recognise though, ignoring the ‘No Vehicles Past This Point’ sign and sliding up to the elaborate stone entrance to the original block. A man in blue trousers and boatshoes got out and went into the building. Tweetie couldn’t think of anything that a visitor would be searching for at 4.30 except the detention room, yet the knock at the door was so long in coming that he’d almost decided otherwise.

‘Miles Weymouth,’ said the man when Tweetie went to the door. They shook hands. Weymouth had a quick smile and a confident posture. ‘The thing is,’ he said. ‘my boy’s here and I need to pick him up. The whole family’s going yachting with friends and we need to be at the marina pronto.’

‘Detention doesn’t finish until half five,’ said Tweetie.

‘That’s why I’ve come in myself to straighten it out. No one’s a bigger supporter of rules than myself, and of course Sebastian will do his detention next week. It’s just that this weekend we have this opportunity to all be together for a cruise.’

‘Sebastian’s already missed his detention once and had it altered twice more to suit his sports practices. He’s stringing us along, I think.’ They both looked through the doorway into the room. Sebastian Weymouth had his head down; the other boys were frankly curious in their gaze.

‘The thing is, I’m running behind time already. This place is like a rabbit warren. I’m happy to ring the school office, the rector, somebody, on Monday and go through it all then. Okay?’

Tweetie knew what the easy thing was, the obliging, no-fuss thing that suited the moment, no matter what the end result. Sure, sure he could say, flexibility is everything and no one need ever reach the bottom line. But maybe in the end the trivial begets the great. ‘I can’t give that permission. I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘Then I want to see someone who can,’ said Miles Weymouth.

Tweetie went back into the room for the detention book. ‘Arvadson,’ he said, ‘you’re the senior boy here. I leave you in charge.’ Arvadson puffed his chest extravagantly to deflect responsibility. The teacher and father went down the high corridor lined with photographs of past teams and distinguished old boys trapped behind the glass. Several knighthoods, judgeships, membership of parliament — all assumed unequivocally within the gift of the school. Out into the warm sun the two men walked and across the corner of the top field towards the school office. ‘I’m not sure if the rector, or his deputy, will still be in their office, but often they are.’ After he’d finished the sentence Tweetie realised that there was something grammatically questionable about it, and so went on rather fatuously to admire the weather. Well, he wasn’t an English teacher anyway.

Weymouth just looked at his watch and kept himself very erect. By the time they passed the fives courts and the memorial arch, Tweetie had persuaded himself that if the rector, or his deputy wasn’t there, then he’d let the kid go. Surely it wasn’t for him to stir up a ruckus.

They went up the wide stone steps and through the foyer with the vinyl chairs for visitors. The senior master’s door was closed, the deputy rector’s door was closed, the rector’s door was open and the rector was using the word processor. His glasses were on and his school tie was off and neatly folded towards the front of his long desk. His remaining hair began well back so that there was a considerable expanse of skin above his eyes: thick skin which had three or four deep creases like incisions rather than wrinkles.

Tweetie asked Weymouth if he’d mind waiting for just a minute or two while the rector was put in the picture, and the man sighed tightly and looked about the deserted foyer as if hoping that there might be someone impartial present who could be witness to the inconvenience and inefficiency to which he was subjected. ‘Thank you,’ said Tweetie. ‘Just a couple of minutes. It will save explanation in the long run,’ and he tapped on the office door and entered at the same time, knowing that the rector was already waiting.

With a closed door between Weymouth and themselves, Tweetie was able very quickly to cover the ground. Young Weymouth was well known to them both. Tweetie then invited the father in, gave him a chair and sat down himself at the rector’s invitation. Miles Weymouth had met the rector several times and judged at first that a line of easy comradeship would have results. ‘I told Mr Pye,’ he said, after running over the family’s weekend plans again, ‘that no one supports a tight ship more than myself. That’s why the boy’s here, but there are other times I’m sure that he could be kept in?’

‘He’s built up detentions for the next three Fridays. As a concession his form teacher let him choose those times so that he wouldn’t miss any sports practices. He’s been abusing our goodwill, Mr Weymouth.’ The rector turned the pages of the detention book as he spoke, and then a little time after. ‘Altogether too many misdemeanours, in fact,’ he said. ‘You had a letter of concern from the sixth form dean?’

‘The usual boys’ things. After all, the boarders have to make a life for themselves somehow, don’t they.’

‘I’m sorry that you’ve had to come this far, that Sebastian didn’t let you know, as he should have, that even though he applied for weekend leave, he couldn’t go until after detention.’

‘It’s absolutely ridiculous. Whatever happens at school should be dealt with in school time. Do you realise that you’re not just punishing him, but the whole family?’ Weymouth had abandoned the approach of easy comradeship.

‘That’s partly the point,’ said the rector. ‘For him to realise that actions have consequences, and that often those consequences affect other people.’

‘It’s absurd.’

‘Sebastian didn’t want to do his detention on any other day,’ said Tweetie. ‘We made two changes for him and now this. Probably he hoped you’d come along, just as you have.’

‘I don’t mind if you just smack his behind then. Cane him with my blessing. I got it often enough here and it did me no harm.’

‘The school doesn’t cane any more, as you know. We hope to get the boys to accept greater responsibility for their actions without violence.’ The rector’s tone gave no indication of the degree of success he saw in that, but his hair seemed even more in recession and his forehead more deeply scored.

‘I’m not prepared to put up with this nonsense. Not in this day and age. If I ran my business the way you run this mausoleum then I’d soon be down the road.’

‘A different type of clientele, I think,’ said the rector.

‘Thousands of dollars I’m paying,’ said Weymouth. ‘Good money and my lad doesn’t even like the place. If I go right down to that room and take my boy home are you going to physically stop me? Are you going to forbid me to take my own son from the premises?’

‘No,’ said the rector. ‘I’m not. But if you take him home today, then, Mr Weymouth, don’t bother to bring him back on Monday.’

‘You mean you’d throw him out for that!’

‘When he enrolled here, both of you pledged to uphold the school rules.’

‘I’m going right back now and I’ll collect my son as I’m entitled to.’

‘Very well. That’s up to you, but as I say, just don’t bring him back on Monday.’

Weymouth, still incongruous in his new matching yachting clothes, left the room without saying anything else. The door remained open and Tweetie Pye and the rector saw him walk quickly through the foyer. ‘Do you think he will?’ asked Tweetie.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Will the board back us if he does?’

‘I don’t know, but it’s a judgement thing. I don’t think you can run a school like the Weymouth furniture factories. Unfortunately, you can’t even run it as a democracy. When all’s said and done, we’re held accountable for what happens here, and I believe that it’s only fair that with responsibility goes sufficient authority to affect the outcomes.’ The rector knew it wasn’t Tweetie who had to be convinced.

‘I’ll let you know before I wind up tonight if Weymouth completes his detention.’

‘Thanks. Yes, that would be helpful.’

Tweetie left then, and as he glanced back from the foyer he saw the rector rub his face, reposition his plain, round glasses and concentrate on the computer screen again.

When Tweetie neared the original block he could see that the BMW was gone. As he walked up the corridor to Room 17, the talking there stopped, and when he went to the raised desk to replace the detention book, he could see that all five boys, Weymouth included, were writing quietly. Tweetie Pye stood at the window again and watched the boys on the field. Things were as they should be.

Margaret experienced relief when her husband died, and so did he in anticipation of it. The last few months of his life had marked an unbearable diminishment in his physical appearance and capability. And for much of that time he endured the knowledge of his dissolution. ‘I don’t want to be remembered like this,’ he told her in the hospice room, where everything was pale, washed out of colours: even his face, and his voice, which had the rustle of a reed bed. Yet that memory of course would be with her until she herself died, along with recollections just as sharp, but far happier and more sustaining. The end of his life was not the finish of hers, but was a marker of unequivocal significance. More was lost, more behind her, than could possibly lie ahead.

Her son, Andrew, had been an indifferent visitor in the last year, but came often to see her in the weeks immediately following the cremation. Avarice was the reason. Margaret loved her son and daughter, but saw quite clearly that Andrew’s main concern was to profit by his father’s death. He had suggestions for changes to the family trust that would be advantageous to him, but she decided nothing would be altered in the meantime. With prompt zeal he came and took away his father’s few tools. Also he wanted her to sell the Beamer and get a smaller car — a Honda Jazz, or a Hyundai Getz, he suggested. Andrew was like that: he knew the model names of cars. She resisted that also, and said she planned a longish trip after the ordeal of the final care. Nothing would be decided until she returned, she told her son.

Greta was truly supportive. She had loved her father, but was aware of the desperation at the end. She brought her two small sons often to the house as a welcome distraction from grief. Their selfish energy and joy, the fresh smell of growth and health, their emblematic proof of family continuity, were more healing than the awkward phrases of adult consolation. Margaret often stood in the semi-darkness of their room, and marvelled at the relaxation of their sleep, the silent ease with which they took breath.

‘A trip would do you good,’ Greta told her mother. ‘You go if you feel like it, just up and bloody go. It’s what Dad would have wanted.’

‘It’s Melanie’s fortieth wedding anniversary. And I thought I could have stop-offs on the way up. Maybe the Puriri Street house, seeing I’m going all that distance.’

‘Would you like me to come?’

‘No, I’ll be fine.’

‘I could. I could take a few days off and the boys would be okay with Matt.’

‘No, but thanks, said Margaret. ‘I’ll know people at Melanie’s do, and there’s friends I can drop in on in Christchurch if I feel like it.’ There were people, but she had no intention of calling on anyone before Melanie. Just to be by herself; just to have no responsibility for someone else, no obligation to pretend that the process of dying was the same as passing time in other ways. ‘If you could keep an eye on the house and so on though, that would be great. I’ll text and ring.’

‘You always forget to turn it on,’ said Greta.

‘I’m getting better. I’ll be fine. I’ll be back and coming round to see you before you know it.’

‘Are you sure you’re up to it, Mum?’ Greta said. ‘I can’t bear to think of you sad in some crummy concrete block motel.’

‘I’ll be absolutely fine, and whenever I want to, I can turn around and come home.’

Even preparation was a relief. Just her own needs to consider, and to have them as priority without guilt. Just her own timetable, or lack of it, the indulgence of heaping things in the back seat, rather than containing them in careful suitcases in the boot. She would have to learn to be a widow, to live alone in the house she had happily shared. She understood that, but knew too that there was no hurry. Time enough to live there alone as a widow. The experience was not a pressing one, even though she accepted it as inevitable.

Andrew and Greta knew she intended to visit their old house in Christchurch on the way to Nelson, and Lake Alexandrina where her family once had a bach. She had other places in mind too, for reasons that mattered only to her. Peter had talked increasingly of Ladbrook during his last months, the regression perhaps one way of ignoring what lay ahead. His family had farmed there, close to Roxburgh, and Margaret had visited the place several times before it was sold.

‘Cheryl and I used to stand at the road gate summer and winter waiting for the school bus,’ Peter had told her after a bad night in the hospice. ‘It seemed miles down the track from the house when I was at primary school, but I suppose it was only a few hundred metres. Mr Higginson was the driver for years, and if we were late he’d give a blast on the horn, and the other kids would jeer. Not that we were late often, Mum saw to that. In the winter the grass was white with frost and as brittle as iron filings: in the summer burnt yellow brown. We used to throw stones at the metal flag on the post box, and argue about kids and teachers at school. Because Cheryl was older she couldn’t be bothered with my friends. Higginson had two fingers missing on his left hand, and people said he had a secret gold-panning possie in the hills, and had squirrelled it all away.’

Margaret and her husband had been looking out onto the hospice garden from his room. There was a boy of nine or ten idling there, bored no doubt from confinement in a room much the same as Peter’s. Maybe the sight of the boy plucking catkins from the small silver birch tree had reminded him of his own childhood. ‘Dad was always into some job or other by the time we were at the gate. He’d wave from the tractor, or the sheds, or as he headed off with the dogs. He was hopeless at school himself everybody said, but was keen for us.

And the outcome had been a good one, Peter successful at varsity and becoming a senior partner in his accountancy firm. But at the end it was farm, family and weather he’d talked about, not the figures, not the finance, of his profession.

‘Your parents were proud of you,’ Margaret had told him.

‘I wish I’d done a lot more for them,’ he’d said.

‘You were a good son to them.’

‘Why didn’t I do more?’

She hadn’t answered. It was grief he was expressing, not guilt.

So Ladbrook was Margaret’s first destination, and she left Invercargill in a soft, Irish drizzle and drove through green Southland towards the tougher country where Peter had been raised.

Maybe she should go overseas again. She knew several women who had taken a world trip after the death of their husbands. Denise had married a retired Oklahoma pharmacist she met on a twenty-three-day Mediterranean cruise. She said he gave her the best sex she’d experienced since her twenties. She said her all-round health improved considerably because of it, even the arthritis, although there was a slight weight gain. Margaret was thinking of Denise as she had a flat white in Gore, sitting alone close to a window that showed the main street. Women weren’t particularly clothes conscious in Gore, she decided. She liked Denise, the candour of her, the liveliness, but she wasn’t looking for a husband, or sex. And travelling alone in a foreign country, especially to those places visited before with someone you loved, must surely have an aspect of regret.

‘We had some damn good trips together, Maggie, didn’t we? What’s the top place you’d most like to return to?’ He was in the clear time between the drowsiness of morphine and the preoccupation with pain. Margaret had talked of Croatia and Turkey, and he’d lain there, his eyes intent as he drew up images in his mind to match her reminiscence. His smile was wide, but in those last weeks a parody: the teeth seeming to have grown too large for his mouth, the skin and flesh retreating from the bone and cartilage of his face. ‘Yes, Ephesus was great, wasn’t it. To think it had been an ancient port and now miles from the sea. Marvellous place.’

‘So hot, though, wasn’t it?’

‘You were always rinsing our stuff out and hanging it overnight in the hotel bathrooms.’

‘And you were always working out the exchange rate.’

And as they talked he fell asleep, leaving her looking down on his open mouth, the equine teeth quite strange to her.

In her own country there was emotional challenge enough. Margaret had some difficulty finding the turn-off to Ladbrook after Roxburgh, and even when on the unsealed road, finding the farm wasn’t easy. She identified it finally from the green summerhill stone of the farmhouse, built by Peter’s parents, and the great, ramifying macrocarpa at the gate where Peter and his sister had waited for the school bus. There was little flat land, and the hills with occasional schist outcrops rose up more steeply than she remembered. There had been a group of assorted fruit trees close to the house, but no sign of them remained. Even country women had given up on bottling, she supposed. There was still the cluster of willows at the turn of the creek marking the one pond on the farm big enough to attract ducks. She and Peter had walked to it during a farm visit before their marriage. Lovemaking was difficult when staying with his parents, and Peter had urged her into the privacy of the maimai, and they had sex leaning against the unsteady side of the hide. Fenceposts, wire and light branches of broom and lupin woven in. Margaret’s strongest memory was the feeling of the resilient wire behind her thighs, the fragrance of foliage and the muscular smoothness of Peter’s neck. Youth.

She didn’t want to go up to the house, to meet people with whom she had no connection, to witness all the changes that had been made since the place was Peter’s world. She stood distanced at the road gate, the pulsing sun above her, and thought of her husband as a boy and a young man. This was a place in which he had never been seriously sick, or weakened: a place of natural possession. Where she stood, he had waited as a school boy with his sister, a home-made lunch in his bag. He had ploughed the few flat paddocks for his father. He had mustered the hills, and carted hay to the barn still standing by the windbreak pines. He had shot mallards on the pond, and made love to her there against the wire and brush of the maimai. It was healing to stand in the hot sun and feel Peter’s presence. The place was very real, ordinary in the best sense, and the images it conjured for her stood against the memories of the pale hospice room and slowing time. As she drove back to the main road, Margaret sensed she wouldn’t go again to Ladbrook. There was no sadness in that.

Alexandra had been her destination for the night, but she reached it by mid-afternoon and wasn’t tired. She drove on through the gorge to Cromwell and Lake Dunstan, and booked into a motel not far from the shopping centre and district high school. The woman in the small reception office was thin and wore blue shorts. Margaret judged her age to be mid-forties, but the sun of Central had been destructive for her skin. Lines fanned from her eyes when she smiled, and some parts of her tan had deepened to the colour of the age spots Margaret was aware of on her own hands.

The woman was called Promise. The novelty of it would mean that she, and that Cromwell motel, would remain in Margaret’s memory always, although significant in no other way at all. Promise displayed that apparently sincere interest in others that some retain despite dealing with a constant stream of people in their working lives. Some of Margaret’s nursing colleagues possessed the same virtue, while she often tired of the press, the expectations, of those around her. ‘So where have you come from today then?’ Promise asked as Margaret filled out the accommodation form, and she went on to enquire about the weather experienced on the journey and the final destination.

‘I’m heading for Nelson,’ Margaret told her.

‘You live there?’ asked Promise.

‘No. An old friend of mine is celebrating her fortieth wedding anniversary.’

‘It’s a credit to her,’ said Promise emphatically as she took a pottle of green top milk from the fridge and set off across the forecourt to usher Margaret to Unit 8. ‘There’s so many marriages hit trouble these days, aren’t there. Mind you, I have to say I’m separated myself, but we stuck it out until the kids were safely gone.’

‘So often the way.’ Margaret chose not to detail her own situation, despite travelling alone.

‘Come over if there’s anything you want to know,’ said Promise. ‘Ring the bell if I’m not around.’ Her shorts were a narrow cut, but still loose on her thin, brown legs. She moved briskly as if to deny anxiety the time to settle. There were things Margaret wanted to know, but they would be beyond Promise, despite her invitation.

The shopping centre had the uniform architecture of recent creation — stained wood and feature stone walls, full-length windows. Margaret could remember the old Cromwell before the lake was formed, but you had to fight against the impulse to make comparisons, didn’t you. It was a sign of age to set Punch past to every Judy of the present. She would curb that tendency in herself.

She ate pan-fried fish and a salad, neither as appetising as those she could make, but that was another comparison she rebuked in herself. She didn’t want to become one of those dried-up old women for whom criticism was the only way to gain attention. Like Mrs Ellington one down from them, who gave abrupt and gratuitous gardening advice whenever in other people’s sections. She once told Margaret her roses needed dead-heading. Peter called her a bossy old bitch, but not to her face. ‘Don’t shut up shop, Maggie,’ he’d said towards the end. ‘And don’t spend all your time running after the kids either. You’ll get over all this business, and I want you to go on and, well, I mean you’ve been so supportive of me, and there’s time for you to do all sorts of things.’ The business he talked about was his dying. ‘Don’t live in the past,’ Peter said. But overall it had been a past worth living in.

Margaret wasn’t accustomed to eating alone. It made her slightly self-conscious, and more aware of other diners. The talk, the demeanour, of other people drew her attention when she lacked the absorption of a conversation of her own. Two men at a nearby table discussed difficulties they were having in getting building permission for a lakeside subdivision. Although they responded in conversation, she was surprised how little attention they paid each other. One man, athletic and bald, seemed absorbed in burrowing into his plate, and the other stared through the window as he spoke, watching passers-by in the still bright evening sun. Margaret noticed how his gaze followed women rather than men. When women talked to each other the words were accompanied by eye contact, by emotional exchange of one sort or another: men seemed content to rely on simple meanings. ‘If I’d realised there was going to be such a bloody rigmarole, I would’ve got onto it earlier. The lawyers will lap it up, of course,’ said the window watcher. He glanced at Margaret with a mere passing flicker of interest. She would get used to it in time. A fifty-seven-year-old woman by herself, after so long with a husband, so long with a social position established by a partner.