Some Here Among Us (31 page)

Race was coming along last. He was thinking about the great tree behind him in the paddock which Lucas and Morgan used to climb as boys, and then he remembered climbing up around and around the trunk of a tree himself, with Morgan climbing above him, right to the top, which was as slender as a whip, the final handhold trembling—

‘
That was the tree!
’ he thought. ‘It was here all along’ – and he remembered waking from the dream in the airless cottage which Panos had never come to, and feeling the heat of the sun on his face at that perilous midnight hour, which had apparently known about the tree there in the paddock, and perhaps had even known about the heat of the sun beating down on them now decades later in the gale, and just then he felt the presence of that rarest form of authority: the authority of a dream.

The sunlight was magisterial.

They were now approaching the graveyard. Race couldn’t remember the actual interment. He and the others were the pall-bearers, they must have carried the coffin to this very spot, but of that he had no recollection. And then, at the end of that grey afternoon, they had all gone away, and none of them had ever been back. Race, surprisingly, had then almost immediately forgotten all about Morgan. It was early summer. He was in love. He was in love with Sandra Isbister! Sandra was still, admittedly, with FitzGerald, but when summer came she left him and took up briefly with Panos, then she left Panos and took up with Race. At last, Sandra was in his arms. She was in his bed. This was
his
summer of love. But it lasted only a few days, a few hours it now seemed, looking back, and then she was off again. It was the beginning of a ten-year pursuit, Race following Sandra around the world. She was in Melbourne, she was in Perth, she was on her way to India. At first, for a few months, Race had remained in Auckland. He was saving for a ticket to India. Everyone else was flying off in different directions. Candy and Adam were still officially planning marriage but they were fighting all the time. FitzGerald was in Benares. Rod Orr was in California. The Gudgeons were in London. It was 1970. The autumn came. It was cold and rainy in Auckland. Race walked the streets of Ponsonby between rain storms. He went to the park, making his plans – India, Sandra – and there, one day in the park, six or seven months after the funeral, he met Morgan Tawhai.

What are we to make of these illusions – as persistent across history as love or fear – of sightings of the dead?
The earth hath bubbles as the water has and these are of them
. It was not, in this case, love or fear. He had not thought of Morgan for months. Yet in some way he was not surprised. He sometimes had had a feeling that there was more to come, there was unfinished business between them. And now here was Morgan, in the park. There was a short preliminary, in fact, to his arrival. A flock of sparrows was on the grass – they suddenly all flew up together, on the slant: Race had the impression of a curtain being lifted. And there was Morgan, just visible against grey cloud. Of course, it was not Morgan in the flesh. It was a kind of picture of him, an image, although conscious, autonomous. And he was in trouble, Race could see that at once. He was in great trouble. He was drifting in the wind and Race saw that he was lost, he was moving this way and that, but his eyes were shut and he had no idea where he was, or where he was going, and then Race thought with a kind of dread that Morgan had been blowing this way and that in the dark without knowing where he was for weeks and months until he had come to this place where, so it seemed to Race, they were meant, for a moment, to cross paths. But why? This was the question. It struck him, again with a kind of dread, that there was something he had to do. There was some deed he could perform to save Morgan. But what was it? And then he knew that he wasn’t allowed to know – he had to agree first, and not only that, but the cost would be high: if he did, if he agreed, if he said ‘yes’, the penalty would be very great, not of ardour or exertion, but of shame, ridicule (and that was reason, he thought, now, approaching the graveyard, for that stern, searching gaze that Morgan had directed at him –
are you up to the test?
– in the dream when they were climbing the tree (so the fearful vivid midnight in the airless cottage had known about that as well, he now thought, had foreseen that test, and had warned him, and then woken him to review the warning in the silence and solitude of the cottage which Panos never visited, had stayed away from, detained by the hairdresser and the beautician solely perhaps in order that Race should receive and review the warning in silence and solitude)) and then there was no more time left to consider. Race had to decide. He could agree or he could refuse. The choice was his. Only moments were left: Morgan, the image of Morgan, autonomous, sightless, was already drifting and fading away, and unless he, Race, accepted the conditions – shame, ridicule – then he would be gone and would wander on in the sightless wind, for ever.

One by one, everyone had now reached the graveyard and stood outside the picket fence. More introductions were made.

‘Just look at that olive tree!’ said Inga. ‘
Never
have I seen an olive that size in this country.’

They looked at the tree on the sheep-terraced slope just outside the graveyard.

‘My great-uncle brought that back,’ said Lucas. ‘He went away in the First World War and he brought that olive home with him.’

‘Shoot or stone?’ said Inga.

‘That,’ said Lucas, ‘I don’t know.’

‘Look at the fruit!’ said Inga. ‘Do you harvest them?’

‘We don’t,’ said Lucas rather wearily. ‘It’s just not something we got the hang of.’

‘What a waste!’ said Inga, and she set her mouth.

‘What a scold!’ thought Race.

FitzGerald laughed at his scold of a bride. Lucas bent and turned on a tap by the fence and washed his hands, then unlatched the gate and the others followed him through.

The wind was immense, it poured down over the hill, pounced on them, there was an aureole around the sun in the spume-filled air, the leaves of the olive and the pines and pohutukawas on the hill were streaming.

‘I could have agreed, or I could have refused,’ thought Race. But there had been a third option as well. ‘I could simply have declined to believe it at all.’ That would have been the easiest, the most ordinary and straightforward – just reject the whole thing – the image of Morgan, the threat, the conditions – as an illusion. And yet suppose . . . suppose . . . it
was
true. There was Morgan fading now, and blowing away in the grey sky and then there was no more time to consider and so Race – because what else could he do? – accepted the terms, whatever they were, and said ‘yes’.

At that instant, Morgan’s eyes opened. He saw something – he looked straight across the sky – and Race saw that he saw and he turned to see what he was looking at, and by the time he turned back Morgan had gone: he had gone, fast as a hawk to its prey, as fast as sight, as fast as the lightning that says ‘Here I am!’ – and there above the rooftops outside the park Race imagined another figure, tremendous, triply abstract – he first thought of the judges of the three races of mankind, Rhadamanthus, Minos, Aeacus – but then he thought there was only one, and then this phrase reached him from some far nursery: ‘
into the bosom of Abraham
’.

It was there, he thought, Morgan had vanished.

That was his puzzle as he came last into the graveyard, and closed the gate with the latch. The latch was metal in the shape of a half-moon. He had said ‘yes’. But what was the deed that he must do, and what was the punishment? Ever since, he had been expecting the bill to arrive. But perhaps, he thought now, for the first time, it had. He had said ‘yes’. He had agreed, in other words, to believe. Perhaps that was the deed, and also the penalty: belief itself, poor, much mocked, richly ridiculed belief.

And there had in fact been a heavy cost, he thought. He once tried to tell Sandra the story, and later Candy, but he had lost them both in the telling. Sandra looked inscrutable. Candy had simply laughed at him. It was one of the reasons, he thought, they began to drift apart. In the end he kept it a secret, the story, his story of Morgan, camouflaged it, hid it away, almost from himself, in the absence of a single verifying detail. And then he had stopped just back there and looked at the top of the tree, as slender as a whip, and Lucas pointed: ‘We used to jump off there, Morgan and I . . .’

The latch closed with a click. The others had gone in ahead of him. Suddenly, surprisingly, everyone was in a good mood. Here they were in the sun, far from their usual lives and about to visit Morgan who had never really left their thoughts. The wind was blowing through all the trees outside the graveyard, and all the bushes inside were bowing this way and that. In his mind’s eye Race saw Toby and Jojo on the other side of the hill, wind-surfing on the swirl of the waves. The wilder the better – that was Toby’s view. Race saw all the brushstrokes of the wild sea, and he thought of his son and daughter-in-law with a pang of dread.

‘But what can you do?’ he said aloud.

‘What
can
you do?’ said Tolerton, who was sympathetic, as a general principle, to all.

Then Race thought suddenly – ‘Toby!’

Maybe, one day, he would tell Toby. And he saw Toby and Jojo, no longer children – Inga was right, after all – going out of sight among the brushstrokes of the future.

And he and Tolerton went on through the bowing shrubs.

But there was another surprise waiting there, something that none of them had ever really thought of. The gravestone, a hundred yards from the sea, was wind-worn and sun-whitened and starred here and there with patches of silvery lichen.

‘Oh, God,’ said Candy.

Morgan’s grave was old.

Acknowledgements

With thanks to Randall Cottage Trust and Creative New Zealand.

The author and the publishers acknowledge the following permissions to reprint copyright material:

Extracts taken from ‘All Along The Watchtower’. Words and music by Bob Dylan © 1967. Reproduced by permission of B Feldman & Co Ltd/ Sony/ATV, London W1F 9LD

Extract taken from ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’ from
The Collected Poems of Wallace
Stevens by Wallace Stevens, Copyright © Wallace Stevens, 1954, copyright renewed 1982 by Holly Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC and by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd. All rights reserved

Extract taken from ‘Chantilly Lace’. Words and music by J.P. Richardson © 1958. Reproduced by permission of Glad Music, USA, Peermusic (UK) Limited

Extract taken from ‘Heartbreak Hotel’. Words and music by Mae Boren Axton, Tommy Durden and Elvis Presley © 1956. Reproduced by permission of EMI Harmonies Ltd, London W1F 9LD

Extract taken from ‘Blue Smoke’. Words and music by Rangi Ruru Karaitiana © 1949. Reproduced by permission of the Estate of Rangi Ruru Karaitiana

Extract taken from
Ravelstein
by Saul Bellow, Copyright © Saul Bellow, 2001, used by permission of Penguin Books Ltd

A Note on the Author

Peter Walker is a New Zealander who has lived in London since 1986. He worked for seven years on the
Independent
, and three on the
Independent on Sunday
, where he was Foreign Editor. He has also written for the
Financial Times
and
Granta
. His first book,
The Fox Boy
, and his second,
The Courier’s Tale
, were both published by Bloomsbury in 2001 and 2010 respectively, and were widely praised.

By the Same Author

The Fox Boy

The Courier’s Tale

Also available by Peter Walker

The Fox Boy

The story of an abducted child

Mutual kidnapping between the Maori and the English inhabitants in New Zealand had dated back to the 1760s. In 1869, after an English defeat in battle in the Taranaki forest, one Maori boy, aged five, was captured and adopted by the Prime Minister.

Educated to become a lawyer and an ‘English gentleman', Ngataua Omahuru (or little ‘William Fox’), had played a crucial role in New Zealand's history. As Peter Walker followed the little captive out of the forest and into the drawing rooms of Wellington and London, he found himself on a personal journey which converged unexpectedly with the tale he had uncovered.

‘The Fox Boy is a triumph’

Independent on Sunday

www.bloomsbury.com/PeterWalker

Also available by Peter Walker

The Courier’s Tale

As the King’s young cousin, an admired scholar living in Italy, it falls to Reginald Pole to make the case for Henry’s divorce from Katherine of Aragon. And it falls to the hapless Michael Throckmorton – the younger son of an impecunious titled family – to become Thomas Cromwell’s messenger to Pole in Rome.

This dubious privilege makes Throckmorton’s life a tragicomedy of endless journeys back and forth between England and Italy, but it also makes him a canny observer of the great dramas of his time. And like his King, he too nurses a thwarted desire. . .