… their salvation.
They had been living at her place, a compact Heartwood crammed onto a subdivided section in St Albans: Stephie and Ben and Paul, and on alternating weekends Paul’s son and two tall fair and haughty daughters. The house was resolutely plain, three tiny bedrooms, narrow galley kitchen, living/dining, single bathroom containing the only toilet.
When Stephie bought it, it had fitted her exactly. Then, she had wanted nothing but to curl up in the smallest of spaces, and stop. Stop thinking. Stop talking. Stop listening to the commiserations of others, however well-meaning. Stop breathing. Step away from time, from the split second when the snow cracked under his feet. He gave a tiny gasp, his mate said, and that was it. No scream. Nothing. Gone. His body had never been recovered. It lies there still, amid inaccessible ice and jagged rock below a peak in the Darrans. And if Stephie had to hear another person say, ‘Well, I suppose that’s how Kurt would have wanted it,’ she thought she would scream. Scream and never stop.
She spent that first year curled in a corner of the big empty bed with her face pressed hard against a woollen jersey that retained the musky scent of him, fading month by month. The street light aslant over the covers, she could sometimes fall into a fitful sleep while keeping an ear out for the slightest whimper from Ben’s cot. His big boy cot, with one side removed because he kept climbing, too, up and over the rails. She surrounded his bed with pillows so that her son might fall, if he fell, onto the softest of goosedown.
One day, years later, when Ben was eleven, he did indeed fall, from a flying fox on a school trip, and she had the phone call. The one that makes everything stop. Your breath. Your heart. She had been photographing a garden west of the city, a dauntingly labour-intensive creation of elms and oaks and woodland paths winding round a lake cut from the dry plains. Her head was down, lining up a shot of a summerhouse clad in rosy Albertine when the owner came running and everything stopped.
Ben was sitting up on an emergency room bed, arm already in plaster cast and sling and white as a hospital pillow. ‘Hello, mate,’ said a doctor, swishing aside the curtain and consulting his clipboard. ‘Fallen off your motorbike, eh?’ She registered curly hair, big hands. ‘Or did you trip doing ballet?’ Ben’s wan face cleared. He smiled. The big bear doctor’s hands were square, but very clean, with nails neatly trimmed, a gold band on the ring finger.
And two weeks later, there he was again, opening the door to a house on Scarborough. She was photographing a major feature for NZ Interiors. The house clung to the cliff face, a miracle of multilevel engineering. The ocean gleamed through vast windows, all the way to the white tips of the Kaikouras, and light streamed into an interior so pristine that it seemed impossible anyone could actually be living here. Light bounced from pale floors, glazed tiles, the only ornament three silver balls on a glass-topped coffee table alongside a metre-high chrome cylinder containing an arrangement of twigs. All purchasable from Objets, Diane’s little design store on Victoria Street. It was beautiful, it was stunning, and it was going to be a complete bugger to shoot with the correct light levels. ‘Come in!’ said the bear, extending a paw, as she wished devoutly for a duller day. Amid all this glamour, he was the one anomaly: unshaven in saggy jeans and scruffy Springsteen T-shirt, unlike his wife, Diane, who was whippet-thin in snowy white to match the settee, a fine golden chain about her burnished neck.
‘Welcome!’ she was saying, ‘to our little seaside bach!’, white teeth smiling, though later, from the kitchen as they fetched coffee, there was a barely audible, ‘For God’s sake, Paul, go and get changed. I’ve put some things out on the bed. The least you could do is try to make an effort!’ He reappeared as Diane was describing the lap pool she hoped one day to see constructed on the level below the deck, an infinity pool, carved from the cliff — it would be amazing! He was combed and shaven in pressed chinos and a pale linen shirt, like a dog that has been groomed professionally and feels its inner wolf to be deeply compromised. Stephie photographed them seated side by side on the impossibly stylish, impossibly uncomfortable low-backed settee. Paul’s arm was placed awkwardly about his wife’s narrow shoulders. Her ankles were elegantly crossed.
‘I wanted to say thanks,’ said Stephie, as she was packing to leave. ‘For being so nice to my son.’ His face took on that faintly haunted look of people who deal with a lot of strangers whom they will not necessarily recognise again. ‘Broken arm, two weeks ago? Sorry — this must happen to you all the time, but I just wanted to say thank you. You were great.’ Diane moved a little aside. Clearly this was something that happened often enough to be irritating.
‘Good,’ said the bear. ‘Danny, was it?’
‘Ben,’ she said.
Diane was still on Scarborough, still selling her objets, still playing tennis twice a week, still largely financed by Paul, who remained, at heart, the altar boy who had abandoned wife and three children, committed the sin of adultery and was therefore required to make restitution for the rest of his life, and possibly later, should purgatory turn out to be true after all.
The house on Savage Street was a solution when those weekends in the Heartwood became intolerable: four kids slamming about the tiny kitchen making cheese toast, banging on the single bathroom door. ‘Hey! Bendy! I’m busting! Hurry up!’ Four kids arguing over Nintendo, over who got to control the console, over who would direct little pixilated Mario as he hopped through the Mushroom Kingdom, bouncing from enemy to enemy and tossing fireballs. Four kids arguing over whose turn it was to choose the video. Four kids alert to any hint of affection between their respective parents.
Stephie dreaded those weekends when she slipped into bed beside Paul, both of them whispering lest they draw the ironic thump on the flimsy wall that separated their room from the one next door, occupied by one of the two fair daughters.
‘Ugggh, gross,’ they said, should Paul so much as kiss her chastely on the cheek.
She loved Paul, but his children were a nightmare. The son was withdrawn. Asperger’s, perhaps. Or, as Ben said, just plain weird. While the daughters had simply loathed her on sight. They barely acknowledged her presence, insisted on endless reminiscence with their father about events from which she was excluded, people she didn’t know. That holiday in Fiji, the time Nick fell in the harbour off the Zimmermans’ (who?) yacht, the good times when they had been a proper family, before she had entered the scene and ruined the idyll.
Paul seemed blissfully unaware. The only difficulty he could see was lack of space. The house on Savage Street would make everything possible.
He came across it one afternoon when he was out running along the riverbank. Stephie had no affection for old houses, having been raised in a villa on the Taieri where a chilly draught flowed constantly from front door to back and damp seeped through thin walls. But Paul was a romantic. He liked the turret: some lingering memory of childhood and a picture in a book of a knight riding forth through a green forest on a noble quest. He liked the inglenook in the living room, and the high ceilings, he liked the trees and the garden and the riverbank for his morning run, he liked the closeness to the hospital for those times when he was on call. In this house, there would be room for all of them to spread out.
And they could afford it. He, with whatever was left over from maintaining the illusion of domestic continuity on Scarborough Hill, she with the money she had withdrawn from the share club, just in time, before the crash.
It was not prudence or foresight that had saved her. She had joined the club on the recommendation of her sister, Alice, who worked for a bank and knew what she was doing when it came to money.
‘Go on!’ she’d said. ‘Make some decent money for once! If not for yourself, for Ben: for his education, for his future.’
Alice had borrowed against her house to join a group in Mount Eden that included some very savvy individuals: an accountant, a lawyer, a builder, and some people like herself with a sense of adventure and a bit of money to invest. Their first purchase had been shares in Neptune, which went from $20 to $150 in a matter of months.
‘You see?’ she said. ‘It’s easy! You’re always so cautious.’
‘No, I’m not,’ said Stephie. Though it was true. She was. (She knew, of course, that you could take a risk, and that you could fall. Without so much as a sound …)
She joined Alice’s club. Each month she sent off her contribution, each month she received the financial statement and the report of the club’s meetings, each month she read the confident advice of the professional manager they had appointed to direct their affairs.
And then there was Paul. Then there was the house …
That spring, the US sent a missile into an Iranian oil tanker and a great storm bore down on southern England, tearing trees out by the stumps and closing the London exchange and one damp day, Wall Street crashed. Black Monday or, if you lived in New Zealand, on the other side of the timeline, Black Tuesday. The biggest one-day dive in history, taking all the tiny investors down into chaos.
But not Stephie. She had got out only a few weeks before. She had got out just in time. When the crash came, her savings lay invested in weatherboard and corrugated iron, in high ceilings and french doors and an inglenook fireplace. In a turret and a bay window.
And a year later, here she was, living with Paul and safe as …