… screws a cuphook into the wall and gathers up the curtain. It’s cheap stuff, but pretty: white cotton with pink roses to conceal the corner cupboard.
It will do. Everything must do. Make do and mend, ever since the day the men arrived. She had seen them soon after the flash and sudden darkness, the thud and fall. Looked down from her place in the turret as they climbed the steps to the front door. She was vague, suspended in mid-air. She looked down in her half-dreaming state and thought they might be swaggers. There were lots of them that year, camped out on the riverbank netting for whitebait, then fanning out around the streets selling their catch door to door. But there was a car at the gate. Glossy black, like a hearse. So not swaggers.
Sybil was below in the garden, dabbing away at her easel in front of the walnut tree. From above, Violet could see the top of her head, bent closely, myopically, an inch from the canvas, a couple of cats writhing at her gaitered legs, one minus its back leg, the other wonky with a broken spine. The magpie perched on her shoulder. At times this house felt like a kind of desperate Noah’s Ark, one in which all the creatures had been broken: accidentally shot, maimed, run over, a leg lost in a trap, amputees and strays dumped over the front fence or deposited by the gate in an apple box. Rescue did not make them grateful: the cats were grotesque and short-tempered, given to scraping at the door jambs and ripping the wallpaper, while the magpie staged ferocious attacks, screeching on broken wings half airborne while you tried to peg out the washing.
Sybil was intent. She did not look up, while Violet went down to open her door to cold, hard fact.
One man stood a little way back, heavy and looming, eyes averted. The other was shorter and older but he was the boss. He did the talking.
‘Mrs Sinclair?’ he said, and she said yes, assuming another former associate of her husband, come to offer his condolences. But not a bit of it. Mr Conroy was here on business, a delicate matter. So she asked them in, where they took a seat either side of the inglenook and no thank you to a cup of tea.
She sat looking at them as Mr Conroy set her straight, laid it all on the table. There was something familiar about the heavy one, something she couldn’t quite put her finger …
‘Mick?’ she said. ‘It is you, isn’t it?’ And the heavy one looked up and saw her properly. ‘Mick Shean! How is Pat these days? How are your family?”
And he knew her, too. Violet Mulcahy, the girl his kid brother was always sweet on. The pretty one from next door on Hurley Street. Violet Mulcahy! Looking a bit rough, but then she’d had a shock and it was a long time since she was flying for home in the twilight on those long legs on hers, Pat in hot pursuit. So, what do you know!
Which made the simple purpose of this visit a little complicated. There was the debt, of course: that couldn’t be waived simply because of a brother’s affections, even if that brother was dead, took a knock to the head when hundreds of cops emerged from Colombo Street into the Square where the tram workers were singing ‘The Red Flag’ and chucking stones at the trams and the posh boys who were playing at being drivers. Then the cops poured in, and the specials, farmers and more posh boys with their new batons, and drove the singers into the corner by the post office, where Pat was hit. And then there was the headache that would not go away and the shaking, the twitching, the gathering confusion until he died, a year later, babbling, at their sister’s place in Kaiapoi.
Violet teared up at that, big blue eyes filled with grief at the thought of Pat babbling.
You couldn’t go forcing a woman like that from her home, could you? Clutching a bunch of fancy bonds worth less than the paper they were written on. You couldn’t drive her out simply because she married a fool. Made the wrong choice years ago when they were all young and stupid.
Violet could keep her house and she could pay off the debt, £2 a week. Seven hundred weeks, and never mind the interest, said Charlie, tugging on his gloves. Defender of the weak. Protector of the widow and the orphan.
Violet climbed the stairs to the turret to watch them leave. The handsome car glided soundlessly off along the street, turned onto the road by the river and headed toward the city. It was warm up there, the sun pouring through the narrow windows from every angle. A bumble bee had become trapped against the glass. It buzzed mightily, its heavy body fighting to get through, and the sweet waxy smell of its panic hung on the air. Below in the garden, Sybil continued to dab at her painting. The trees over by the river swayed a little. Everything was quiet. Sound muted.
And suddenly the door swung open. Caught on the easterly, it crashed against the wall, leaving a dent in a rimu Gothic window frame. Cold air from the wide ocean penetrated every crevice. The latest novel flapped on the floor beside the chaise longue, like something wounded on a road: His narrow, heavy-lidded eyes were green and strangely piercing. She sprang to her feet, flinging her broidery from her carelessly, and waved agitated little hands. ‘You speak of love, but you mean to disgrace me!’ The little glass, with its sweet honeyed froth disguising the bitterness of veronal, tipped on its side. And suddenly she was awake.
She was wide awake again. The long spell of being here, half sleeping, feeling the phantom weight, the curve of her son’s fragile skull filling the palm of her hand, the way he suckled then fell back, her milk dribbling on his chin and looked up in that sweet funny fashion, looked right at her, saw her as no one else had ever seen her. Her son. The weight of him against her breast. And then the way she had failed him, over and over. The snap of the strop. The way she had let him go. She reached for the honeyed drink, picked another silly fantasy of happy endings from the pile, dozed in the sun in her turret above it all.
But now she is suddenly awake. She can see the trees on the riverbank, the men sleeping rough beneath their branches. No knight is going to come riding, tirra lirra by the river. Knights fall from their horses. They are struck down in anger. They rot and burn and babble and there is no getting over this. The grief is a hard lump within her. Something she must simply …