The Book of Secrets (39 page)

‘There was a Munro, John his name was, he was out with McLeod you know, but he followed the Man to New Zealand in the end, and ended up famous and going into Parliament. You’d have heard about him, surely?’

Ben pushed back his hat, which he had forgotten to take off in his
discomfiture at finding the old woman looking at him like that. ‘I don’t recall,’ he said. ‘No, I don’t reckon it was that lot.’ After some deep reflection, he added, ‘There’s Munros and Munroes.’

‘Aye, I suppose so.’ She turned the bottle of liniment over in her hand.

‘Munroe with an “e”,’ he said helpfully, wishing he could now take his leave. The old woman kept hanging onto his liniment. She was weird but he felt sorry for her, thinking she might be lonely. He wondered about leaving the liniment with her and writing it off as a sample. Though the Depression was still close on his heels, with the thought of all those bad debts and the people who had promised to pay and had not. The firm had had to get careful with what you left with people. You only gave away goodwill when you were certain of a return, and he hadn’t really got used to times being easier. It certainly didn’t look as if Miss Maria McClure was going to be much of a customer, either now or in the future.

‘You wouldn’t think of her having nerves,’ he said, floundering now.

‘Mrs Munroe?’

‘That’s the one.’ Maria put the liniment down, but she was not finished in the black case. Her hand closed round a pot of lotion. ‘Sweet clover?’ she said, reading the label.

‘For the complexion, ma’am. Gum of the quince seed squeezed into that. Give you skin like a baby’s.’

Already she was unscrewing the top and he winced as she plunged her fingers into the soft creamy mixture. She hesitated, raising the swirl of lotion to her face and inhaling deeply before applying it in even sweeps. ‘Oh, it smells so beautiful,’ she smiled. ‘Yes. Yes, it reminds me of children, Mr Rawleigh.’

‘Er, Ben Harrison’s the name.’

‘Mr Rawleigh, Mr Harrison, what’s in a name? Do you know what they call me?’

He was silent. He had taken his hat off now and sat looking at the band of sweat that his head had left inside the crown. Maria’s hand was reaching out for a box of face powder.

‘And what is the trouble with Mrs Munroe’s nerves?’ she asked. She caught him looking at her busy fingers. ‘I am going to buy this, you know.’ She held up the sweet clover lotion that was standing with its lid off.

‘Oh. Oh, yes, ma’am, of course. You won’t regret it.’ And Ben Harrison was all smiles again. ‘Mrs Munroe, well its her son. Apple of her eye, Billy was. He’s gone and run off with some gal that his ma doesn’t approve of. Look, there is a little powder puff for that stuff, see, you pat it on your face, like so. The rachel would be best for your colouring if I may say so, ma’am, a nice warm touch of colour would match ideally.’ And with an inexpert but enthusiastic hand he was patting the powder onto her upturned face. She sat quite still, as she had when he first entered, smiling slightly and seeming hardly to dare breathe at this human contact.

He stood back to admire his handiwork, fumbling in his back pocket at the same time. That was where he kept his wallet and a greasy comb and a little slab of mirror, for he was a man who liked to check out his appearance. The customers appreciated someone tidy in their looks, and so did the girls who served him his dinners and breakfasts in the boarding houses where he stayed in tiny country towns, and told him, late at night, how they would give anything for a one-way ticket to Auckland.

He held the mirror up for her to see herself. She nodded, pleased.

‘I will take some of that.’

‘A good buy.’ He was getting into the swing of this now, almost enjoying himself, and he could see his sales quota filled without another visit that day. ‘Rouge? Just a discreet touch, perhaps?’

‘What is rouge?’

He took the little penny-shaped container and opened it up. The colour glowed like a jewel. He touched her cheek. ‘A spot here, and there. All right now?’

‘Yes. Oh yes, please.’

As he Worked on her, he felt her deep relaxed breathing.

‘What is this girl like, the one that Billie Munroe has run off with?’

‘Eh?’ He thought she had forgotten the neighbourhood gossip. ‘Oh a Maori gal he met up with.’

‘I cannot see what the difficulty is,’ said Maria firmly.

‘Well, no, got nothing against ’em myself,’ said Ben. ‘But you know how it is with some people. Well, I dunno, young Billie got fed up with the farm and took off for a bit, I guess that didn’t please his folks too well, and he went working down in the hotels round Rotorua, there’s plenty of work down there. He wrote up home to say he’d
met this young lady, and how as he’d be bringing her home. His mother said no. Prejudice, I suppose you’d call it. You’re quite right, ma’am, it’s not a good thing.’

He stood back again, manoeuvring the mirror so that she could see herself.

‘Funny, though, this young lady’s family come from up this way a long time back. Cripple gal, the mother was, with a Dally name. They don’t half get mixed up these days.’

‘Cripple, you say?’

Suddenly Ben Harrison noticed that the hand on his sleeve was like a claw, and was afraid. ‘Lipstick?’ he asked shakily.

‘Eh? Oh, whatever you say.’ She seemed to be groping for something.

They were both trembling as he took the top off the lipstick case and began to draw a line around her mouth. When he was half done, she plucked at his hand for him to stop.

‘What is it?’ he gasped, certain that he was about to be overtaken by something dreadful.

‘Was her mother, this girl’s mother, a widow?’

‘A widder woman? I don’t know, missus,’ he said, reverting to his earlier address, perhaps confused by the complexities of the married state. It was a condition he had never experienced. ‘Yeah, maybe, I don’t know much about it.’

‘And the young lady’s name?’

‘I don’t know,’ he cried wildly, for now he was looking at the lined face full of pink and orange creases, so garish and excessive that he was ashamed.

‘Christie? Was the girl’s first name Christie?’

‘Oh aye, I reckon it was something like that.’

‘But you must remember.’

‘Missus, I said, yeah, I reckon. I mean people tell me things, it’s not for me to pass them on. Do I look like a gossiping man? No sir, I leave that to the ladies. Now, will that be all?’

‘Yes. That will be all thank you.’

The magic was over. His pencil flicked over his pad, totting up sums.

‘If this war comes, it will fix things,’ he said to break the tension. ‘Everybody’ll be off to that, and a good thing too, I reckon. We could do with a war.’

‘There is to be another war?’ But she was not really listening to his reply.

‘Ah, who knows? That’ll be fifteen shillings and sixpence.’ And he stripped the paper off the pad, planting it on the table in front of her.

She stared at him, an uncomprehending expression on her face.

‘The money, that’s how much.’

‘I have no money,’ she said.

‘What? Oh jeez, I don’t believe it.’ He looked at the opened pots in front of him.

Now she began to understand what she had done. ‘I’m sorry,’ she gasped, rubbing at her face, as if she could give the sticky stuff that was on it back to him. He looked menacing in the dark kitchen where the afternoon light lay dying, though it was more that he was scared of how he was going to explain away all this stuff to his employers.

‘If you go to the store,’ she whispered at last, ‘they will give you the money.’

‘The store? You’re joking.’

‘No I am not,’ she said, with sudden resolve. ‘Didn’t you know that that is where I obtain my credit? I thought everyone knew that.’ She was imperious now, commanding him in such a way that he began to wonder why he should ever have doubted her. In a few minutes he was backing out the door, thanking her for her custom.

When he was outside her manner softened.

‘Thank you,’ he heard her say. ‘Thank you, Mr Harrison.’

Glancing back, it seemed to him that she was pleased with the visit, that she was happier than when he came. But he thought of himself as an ordinary person, and he could not understand why this might be so. Safe in his van he hesitated. Perhaps the heat had got to him? He turned the vehicle around and pointed it in the direction of the store.

Maria shook her head at what she saw in the mirror and would have laughed except that her head was full of what she had heard. It was something to know that Christie was alive. She supposed that as Christie had grown older she had not been told of the strange woman she had once lived with, and that gradually the girl would have forgotten that she existed.

S
ome would say
you’re
afraid
to
fly
out
the
window,
my
feathered
friend,
but
I
know
better.
You
will
when
you’re
ready,
I
know.
You’ve
been
taking
your
time,
getting
your
strength
together.
How
long’s
it
been?
A
week?
Well,
it
doesn’t
matter.
You’re
an
easy
kind
of
guest.
Undemanding,
like
the
better
ones
have
been.
A
touch
to
eat,
a
bit
of
warmth
up
near
the
rafters,
and
a
sit
in
the
sun
over
there
on
the
ledge.
You
know
now
that
I’m
not
going
to
hurt
you,
don’t
you?

I
wonder,
will
those
lads
come
back?
Rough
louts,
little
bird,
as
McLeod
would
say.
McLeod?
What
do
I
know
of
McLeod,
bird?
Sometimes
it
is
as
if
I
knew
them
all.
All
the
old
people.
It
is
difficult
to
remember
which
were
the
real
ones
and
which
were
the
dreams.
They
are
all
voices
in
my
head,
running
into
one
another.

I
am
not
afraid
of
the
dark.

Lately she had been dreaming that McLeod still watched her. It felt as if he had always been there, as if nothing in her life was not predestined by him. He was like a watchful father who had outlived his children. She had to remind herself when she woke that he was not even of her lifetime.

Yet it was McLeod who had ordained her life. She would have liked to make a statement about it, as Isabella had done, but she supposed that her life was her own statement. She would have liked to fill in the journal where Isabella had left off, but although she could still read she doubted her ability to write intelligibly any more. She was surprised that her deliveries from the shop arrived more or less according to order. What would her life have been if she had been an educated woman?

For in her head she was telling it. She was telling it how it was.

And what did it amount to? The sum total of her mother’s life, and
her
mother’s before that, and so on back through time, what they had all been — was this the sum total of her own life? And what had become of her? It was because of all of them, not just herself, that she lived alone in a narrow crumbling house with a pointed roof in a sunlit landscape.

She would have liked to have known, more exactly, what it all meant, but the years had passed and there had only been one further clue. It was a badly printed snapshot which faded almost immediately to the colour of the newspapers around it when she pinned it above her bed. The photograph was of a young woman wearing a
broad-brimmed
hat that framed her dark face. She held the arm of a fair man wearing a good suit. A note had come with it, delivered with the groceries, for Maria had no letterbox.

The note read: ‘Miss McClure, you were kind to my niece, Christie, a long time back. I thought you might like to see this wedding picture of her and Billie Munroe. I don’t know that his family were too pleased but they got married anyway, and now they are off to Australia for the time being, so must hope things work out for the best. She never did settle much with her own family, for which we were sorry, nor with her father’s, but that’s the way things go. This war is not much good is it, hard times for all of us. I hope you are keeping well. Sincerely, from Ripeka.’

Often in her dreams she would be talking to the dark young woman. She would be sitting on Maria’s doorstep and they would be shelling peas into a pot together, chatting over a cup of tea, or digging the garden. Then it would take several minutes after she woke up to convince herself that it was a dream. If it had been true she knew she could have told the dark young woman everything that was on her mind, that together they would have worked things out.

As it was, she had her blurred face on the wall. Of course she had never really lost sight of it, but this image she could really touch, like an icon.

The garden no longer existed. The weeds had taken over until it looked like part of the paddock; the japonica bush was strung with long strands of moss and parts of it had died. But then she no longer foraged for food outside. Mostly these days she ate baked beans out of tins. She had learned of baked beans when new power poles went through to North River.

Two of the men who were installing the poles turned up on her doorstep one day. They had come to dig a new pit for her dunny, they said. They laughed when she asked what a dunny was, and blushed when they had to explain. She was pleased but puzzled. The long drop from the toilet seat to the earth at the back door had been getting shorter, and she had been worrying about how she could dig
a new one as deep. It would have been easier when she was younger.

‘Who sent you?’ she asked, when they had been working for an hour or so.

They shrugged. ‘The boss told us to do it.’

‘Who told the boss?’

They did not reply, but kept on digging. It was easier to accept than to pursue the matter. It was the same with wood which arrived unannounced in piles at her gate. She was grateful for that too, for it became harder to find any as the paddocks were cleared right back leaving shining grass where once there had been branches and the remains of the bush.

At lunchtime the man asked if they could heat their beans. She offered to make scones which they accepted but they still wanted their beans, would be grateful if she could do it for them, in fact. When they found her deciphering the instructions on the can they became nervous, as if she might cast a spell on them. One got a tin opener from his truck and showed her how to use it. When they had gone she scraped a tentative finger around the empty tin and licked it; the taste was delicious.

They hurried through their work and finished that afternoon. Although they waved when they were working at the roadside on other days, they did not come back to the house. One day, seeing a ball of fire rising skywards in the direction of the village, she hurried down to the road to ask them if the burn-offs were beginning again. They looked at each other and studied the blaze.

‘Looks like someone’s place might have gone up,’ one of them said.

They threw their shovels on the back of their truck and left with a great flourish of tyres. They did not return until the next morning, when one of them called out to her as she stood outside shaking mats.

‘It was the house that that old fellow McLeod used to live in,’ he said. ‘Went up like tinder. Nobody in it.’

‘McLeod’s? What about his things? His furniture?’

‘Ah, gone long ago. Nothing there, just junk, paper, that kinda stuff. Place was falling down, it’s better gone.’ He picked up his shovel, spat on his hands and rubbed them together, and began to dig.

Once Maria walked towards the sea by the old route past where Hoana and Toma’s cottage had stood. It was gone now, and there
were definite changes in the landscape. The paddocks were much smoother, so neatly tailored, so sewn up with fences that she felt disorientated and hurried home.

More cars passed, machines flew overhead, women changed in their appearance several times over, men began wearing uniforms soon after the letter from Ripeka had arrived, and then they stopped wearing them altogether.

When she estimated that a little more than half the century had passed there was a large gathering in the village. So many cars passed, raising such clouds of dust, and the sound of the pipes was so insistent, that she went up to the hillock, supporting herself on a stick which had belonged to Isabella, and looked out towards the village centre. It was difficult to see much, but it appeared that there was a great celebration in progress amongst a field of tartan.

She thought back with care and reopened Isabella’s journal that night. It was as she had remembered. The community had been there for a hundred years. A century had passed since the first of the six ships sailed from Nova Scotia to New Zealand, and land had been taken up at Waipu. It must be 1952 or thereabouts. She sat and poked pine cones onto the fire. It spluttered and hissed, flared up, illuminating the dark room. She did not need an open fire, for the evening was warm. But lately she had been feeling the cold. And it was company. Now who ever would have thought of her needing company?

‘I am made of sterner stuff,’ she said aloud. A tin of beans was open and she had put bread on to toast. She stared into the fire and the toast burned. She crumbled it in her fingers. The birds would eat it. They knew a feast when they found it. They would seek her out.

The children came a second time, again towards evening. She heard their voices, the long chanting refrain.

Ma-
ri
-a. Ma-
ri
-a.

I will stay inside here, I will not be drawn.

Ma-
ri
-a.

Outside, the sky the colour of anemones, a great bowl of purple and pink dusk. The air so clear. You could smell the sea tonight, the tang of salt and a lone gull, out late, wheeling back towards the water
that stretched from Bream Head to Bream Tail. High Brynderwyn in the distance. Beyond the hillock, the flat plains of the Braigh where the best farms lay. The confluence of the rivers racing into the valleys. You could somehow draw it together in your hand, it was all so close. The beating heart of the people. If you placed your ear to the ground you could surely hear them.

Ma-ri
a
. The changing of emphasis, more urgency in their cry. A smash, a tinkle, as if the glass were falling out of the window, piece by piece.

They will not frighten me, they are only children.

There were three of them. They were not expecting her when she appeared on her stick in the doorway. Two were half way down what remained of the path. Their faces were raised towards her upper windows, their expressions mischievous, laughing. They looked so lively and full of enjoyment she could have laughed with them for a moment, if it had not been for the thought of cold air swirling up her stairs in the night.

The third boy was beside the door.

‘Go on, Ross,’ cried the taller of the two in the pathway It was clear that he was the one who had to prove himself.

He stood transfixed with the door swung open, as if his feet would not shift for him. Maria reached out and caught him by the wrist. He shrieked and struggled in her grip. The laughter of his companions ebbed away.

‘C’mon, Ross, let’s go. She’s only an old woman, don’t be a weakling.’

The two of them were running, their tanned legs twinkling in the evening light as they raced away.

Maria knew she could not hold the boy and dropped his arm, expecting him to follow. Instead, he stood looking at her. He was different from the other two. Whereas they had been sandy-haired, fair-skinned boys, Ross had a nuggety copper face and an upturned nose. His mouth was wide and full and, just discernible across the bridge of his nose was a thick row of freckles. His eyes were brown, and very large and dark at their centre.

‘Well, off you go. Aren’t you going with your friends?’

He took two steps away from her. ‘So you’re the witch?’

‘Who did you think I was? Are you new around here?’

He nodded. ‘Are you really a witch?’

She saw that he had wide-spread teeth, very white in his brown face. It was difficult to tell his race.

‘What do you think?’ For what could she tell this strange child on her doorstep? It felt like the beginning of another story.

She put her hand to her face and touched its downiness, the hair that had grown there in the last year or so. It was too late. He was only a curious child.

‘What is your name?’ she said, certain that he would disappear at any moment. He looked quickly at the broken window.

‘I’ll fix it up, miss. Don’t tell my father.’ His voice was frightened.

‘Fix it? Well, that will do. I don’t want to get you into trouble. What did you say your name was?’

‘Ross Munroe, miss. I just come here about two weeks back.’ He had an odd, twanging accent.

‘Munroe, eh?’ For a moment it did not register, but when it did, the shock was so powerful that her heart hurt. ‘Where have you come from?’

His answer was lost in the rushing sound in her ears. She thought, dimly, that he may have said Australia, but she couldn’t be sure. ‘What is your mother’s name?’ she whispered.

‘Jane, miss.’ He was not looking at her, stubbing his toe backwards and forwards along the path and clearly wishing that he had followed his companions. She steadied herself. ‘I see. Well. You’d better go along, hadn’t you.’

‘Yes, miss. Miss, my dad said I wasn’t to hang round here. When he come back here to live, that’s what he said.’

He turned, hesitant. ‘Miss, she’s my stepmother. My first mum died when I was real little. I don’t remember her.’