12.

Akaroa,

13th September, 1841.

Chère Maman,

Yesterday a very important Englishman arrived on a ship named for the English queen. He lives in the north of these islands and carries the authority of his monarch, as Captain Lavaud carries the authority of ours. He is known as Governor Hobson.

Captain Lavaud was not here to receive him, although his ship is still anchored in the harbour. So concerned has the Captain been about our situation, that he chartered a small schooner to take him to the English settlement at Port Nicholson for flour and other provisions.

It is said that there he met Mr. Hobson, who agreed to transport the supplies to us in Akaroa. As soon as news of the purpose of Mr. Hobson’s visit spread, I bundled up my Jules and joined the other women outside M. Belligny’s storehouse to ensure we received our share. You cannot imagine the elbowing and jostling, Maman. It is so long since we have had wheat flour. I made bread this morning over the embers in the hearth and it smelt, and tasted, so good.

We hear unsettling rumours about our land. Mr. Hobson has proclaimed, it is said (so much is rumour, Maman), that all land claims are to be considered by an English commissioner. Why should this be so for the French on French soil? For the English, yes, perhaps. But for us, no. What is our government doing to protect our interests in this country? I asked Claude, and he said we must wait and see, and that there is no value in protesting until we know it is necessary. Just living requires all the energy we have. But it is hard to let it rest. What if we lost our homes, Maman? We do not have the fare to return to France. The Company is supposed to offer us that option after five years, but on the basis of their present performance, I can’t say I trust them.

And anyway, there are a number of years until then; a long time to be destitute. Every time we put a foot down firmly, the ground seems to shake.

I was wakened only the other night by a terrible shaking. The timbers over our heads groaned and rocked. I snatched Jules from his cradle and rushed outside lest our house collapse upon us. Claude was not home. He was camping in the forest with the felling gang, too far away to get home each night. So there we were, Jules and I, with our neighbours, in our nightwear, trembling with fear and cold, the ground moving under our feet, frightened to return to our homes, even when the shaking had died away. In the morning everything appeared the same as usual, except for a lantern that had crept to the edge of the table and fallen to the floor, shattered. They say this is something that commonly happens in this land and is nothing to worry about. But I can tell you, Maman, at the time it feels as though the hand of the Devil is at work.

Jules has been listless these last few days. It worries me. He feeds only a few sucks at a time and then awakes crying not long after. It is hard for his father when he is with us, since he must rise before dawn to go into the hills, where the tall, straight totara trees are to be found. We have started to plan for Jules’ christening, but more of that another time.

There is Jules whimpering again, Maman, so I must stop writing.

Love to you all,

Your Bibi

Sue’s heart beat faster than usual, like a child waiting for her birthday to dawn. Her mind pulsed with images. At night, the symmetrical frontage of Brigitte’s cottage was projected on the insides of her closed eyelids while, beside her, Ben breathed sonorously. The contrast between her own life and Brigitte’s dwelt in her thoughts through the day: as she changed the bed linen and dropped it into her electronically controlled washing machine; as she pressed the auto-ignite button on her gas hob; as she did the winter pruning and fed the cuttings into the electric shredder for composting. Comparing the ease and sophistication of her life with the hardships of Brigitte’s, little more than one hundred and sixty years ago. How Brigitte would be amazed by the world today, in particular by the changes wrought to the land, virgin bush and coastline, where she had arrived with nothing.

It had become increasingly easy for Sue to entwine her life with Brigitte’s, to bridge the generations. She felt humbled, in awe of Brigitte’s stoicism and achievements, and doubted she could have persevered under the same conditions: the mud, the cold and the hunger. She could hardly compare it with their occasional camping holidays. They had become soft, she thought, and their children even softer – they expect everything ready made, pre-packaged and now. The pioneering spirit had been bred out of them.

‘What was that message on the answerphone?’ asked Ben several days later.

Sue looked up, perplexed, from the pot she was stirring. ‘What message?’ She was in a hurry. She and Annie were going to the movies and Ben was late home. Again. He was getting as bad as Jason. ‘This is almost ready. Will you call the children?’

‘Last week. From someone called Russell.’ Ben did not move from his position, propped in the doorway.

Sue paused briefly, realising that in her haste to return Russell’s call she must have failed to erase his message. ‘You’ve waited till now to ask?’ She smiled. He is jealous, she thought, he is jealous. ‘Call the children, will you?’ She proceeded to dish the meal, plopping the food onto the plates in a sprightly manner.

Slowly, Ben pushed himself upright, a small frown playing across his forehead, then he turned into the hall. ‘He seemed to expect you’d know his number,’ he threw over his shoulder.

Sue gasped: did he really think she was playing the field in retaliation? She did not know whether to be pleased or irate. She wished he would stay and pursue the matter. Was he not willing to fight for her, as she was for him? What was love but the readiness to fight for the beloved?

Sue played with Ben’s question. But then, her mind moved to questions of her own. Why had she not told Ben about Russell? Why had she not told him of the cottage? She had not yet mentioned it to anyone, even Annie. The more she turned the questions over, the more confused she became, until, eventually, she set them aside. Something strange was happening to her. She no longer felt an add-on; she had a will of her own. She was not obliged to share everything, but could keep her news to herself if she wished; in fact, it was titillating to hold a secret safely within. She was experimenting.

Akaroa,

22nd February, 1842.

Ma chère Maman,

I keep thinking about you all and wondering how you have been faring through the cold of the winter. I eagerly await news. Do write to me, Maman. It seems a very long time since we last received mail from the ship, “Héroïne”, in November. I often imagine a letter, written in your hand, bobbing its way across the sea towards me. You would not believe how your words sustain me.

Young Jules is thriving in the warm summer weather. His legs are chubby and his skin so brown he is barely distinguishable from a native baby. I can hear your “tut” of disapproval. I know it is usual to keep infants well swaddled, but Jules seems to enjoy having his limbs free in the warmth of the sun. He gurgles contentedly and thrusts everything he holds into his mouth. He can even sit unsupported for a brief moment, before slowly slumping sideways and calling to be rescued.

Our crops have been successful this year, thank God. We have had good supplies of potatoes, beet, lettuce and corn. The cabbages and broad beans are coming on and the first wheat has been harvested. Our community can now call itself self-sufficient. We have been allocated a further plot of land by the Company, and Claude has been clearing it and preparing for next season’s planting. We think we will put it all down in grain.

Claude and I regularly attend mass with the Fathers, to thank God for His beneficence. But we are among the few. Even Claude sometimes needs a little encouragement, claiming there are other more urgent ways to spend his time. I find this sad, when all around us His presence is in evidence. It has come to such a pass that Father Comte is to leave our settlement at the next opportunity. Father Tripe alone will remain. Ah, well.

Whenever there are ships in port, I take a basket of produce down to the shore with Jules wrapped on my back native-style, his head peeking out over my shoulder. I am sure his smiles help me to get a good price from the ill-tempered sailors. Te Marama tells me how roughly some sailors treat the Maori women, especially when they have had too many tots of rum. But a few sailors have remained ashore and taken Maori women as their wives. Their children are very beautiful. This is a country where everything is new, even the ways. Perhaps strangely, perhaps not, our women look even more unfavourably upon the half-cast children than they do upon the natives. I try to persuade them we are all children in God’s eyes, but I merely generate frowns and pursed lips, especially amongst the older women.

I can hear Jules waking from his afternoon nap, so I must go to him, chère Maman. Give me news of my brothers and sisters. Perhaps when they are old enough, they, too, may wish to set off on an adventure to the opposite side of the globe. We would welcome them with open arms.

Love to you all,

Bibi

Jason’s light was on when Sue returned from the movies. It was later than she had intended. She and Annie had gone to The Strip afterwards and sat sipping wine, eating chocolate mousse cake and talking. Sue had decided to share her discoveries with Annie. There was no reason not to. The secret had felt warm and exciting inside her, but it felt equally good to share it with her friend.

‘But that’s amazing,’ said Annie. ‘Who would have thought the house would still be standing? Do you think she took pupils there?’

The two women were leaning forward across the small table, their heads almost touching, in order to hear over the music, the voices and the hard clatter of crockery.

Sue spread her hands. ‘Who knows? I’ve not come across any reference to where Brigitte taught or exactly when she started. By 1846, she had three children, the oldest three years. It wouldn’t leave much time for teaching.’ Sue lapsed into silence, turning her glass on the tabletop. She would give anything to know more about Brigitte. She felt that if she did, she would somehow know more about herself. It was a peculiar, shapeless thought that did not make logical sense, yet felt perfectly reasonable.

‘So what do you feel about all this?’ Annie asked, and Sue knew just what she meant.

‘More whole,’ she said. ‘Part of something bigger than myself. Somehow it starts to put the present into context, into perspective. I know it’s only part of my heritage, but it is a part that is right here and that has been submerged for generations.’ Sue gazed down into her wine; it magnified the fingers holding the stem. ‘This is going to sound really strange: it somehow makes this thing between Ben and me seem less important.’ Her voice ended on an upward note, questioning, willing Annie to understand. Annie nodded. Sue’s shoulders relaxed and she smiled in gratitude. ‘I don’t mean that I don’t care or that I don’t want to make things better. But I know now that I don’t want to make things the same as they were. They will have to be different. I’m not making much sense, am I?’

‘Perfect sense. I’m with you all the way.’ Annie pressed the last few crumbs of cake onto her fork and sucked it appreciatively. ‘That was damned good cake,’ she said.

More and more, Sue reflected on the drive home, she was seeking and enjoying conversation and companionship outside the home rather than within. She wondered if this was normal. It was certainly not what she had expected. She had always imagined that, as the children got older, she would have more in common with them, not less. Instead, the members of her family were living in four different worlds whose orbits overlapped only occasionally. And, lately, they were as likely as not to collide when they did. She must be doing something wrong. Yet she tried so hard.

She had long held an ideal of “a happy family”, and had forsaken a career to that end. Nothing could be more important, and she needed to make as good a fist of it as her own parents, better even – she would not abandon her children as her mother had. Breath caught in her throat – even now a tsunami of guilt threatened when an undercurrent of resentment surfaced against her mother for dying.

After her mother’s death, Sue had tried to maintain the happy-family myth by taking the full mantle onto her adolescent shoulders. No one had ever acknowledged it; perhaps they were so steeped in their own grief they had never noticed. But it was what her mother would have wanted, expected, Sue was sure, and in a way that she could not have explained then, it had kept her mother with her.

Childhood had been happy for Sue – before her mother became ill. Her parents had never fought the way some of her friends recounted. She could still see her mother gently chiding her dad and the little lines that formed at the corners of his eyes when he turned in mock hurt to the girls for their support. She recalled coming home from playing at a friend’s house as a five-year-old and telling her mother, ‘Sonia’s mummy and daddy quarrelled each other!’ She remembered how she and her friends would giggle surreptitiously to see two such old people holding hands, or sneaking a kiss when they thought no one was watching.

What about later? Layer after layer Sue peeled back, until she could see her mother sitting on her bed, bending over her, listening to the excited account of her first school social. She had wanted her mother to know exactly how she felt. And her mother had wanted to share her daughter’s excitement. They had been good friends – right up to the end.

But might she be glamorising the past? It was easy to do. The memory has a habit of playing tricks, of remembering things the way it thinks you would have liked them to be. Her childhood could not have been all sweetness and light. Sue could only speculate how it might have been if her mother had not become ill. Perhaps the shadow of her impending death had changed things – that deep but closeted awareness of impermanence, of time running out, that had been Sue’s constant companion, the fearful blight that dared not be thought about, in case that made it happen.

Sue tapped on Jason’s door and opened it quietly, without waiting. Jason was, as usual, on his bed. There was a rapid scuffling and pulling up of the bedcover as she entered. Sue thought better than to enquire what he was hiding. At least it couldn’t be a cigarette or a joint, or the bed clothes would be smouldering. Besides, she could smell nothing other than stale, adolescent male. ‘Still up?’

Jason shrugged.

‘How’s it going, Jase?’ He shrugged again.

‘Something in your mouth you don’t want me to know about? Chewing chuddy in bed? Got a tongue ring?’ Sue asked, in a clumsy attempt to keep things light-hearted.

Jason shrugged a third time, with a decidedly irritated expression.

‘Mum –’

‘Ha! It can talk. I knew it.’

‘You’ve been drinking.’ Jason gave a dismissive harrumph and turned to the wall.

Sue straightened her back and held her head high, balancing with care on the balls of both feet and her stiletto heels. ‘Well … I’m off to bed. See you in the morning.’ She closed his door gently. ‘Not exactly a successful encounter, Sue,’ she admonished. ‘But about par for the course these days. I’m clueless about boys – of any age,’ she decided.

Akaroa,

14th July, 1842.

Ma chère Maman,

See! I have not altogether forgotten my homeland, even though I am so far away. I imagine Papa celebrating in his usual fashion. Do you remember the time I had to help you to put him to bed after a long evening with his brother citizens? He is so patriotic!

Claude, too, drank a toast to Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité with the other men this evening. We have not yet had a sufficient crop of grapes to make our own wine, but we contributed a basketful to M. Chevron and received a jug in return. I did not sample it, as young Jules is still at the breast, but Claude said it was passable good – good enough to make him dance a jig with Emeri (whose beard is steadily growing!).

I take from your example, Maman – a wife cannot begrudge her husband a little refreshment with his friends now and then, especially when he is a hard worker and a good provider. But, to be truthful, I do not look forward to the day when we have a more copious supply of wine in our stores. For, although Claude is very outspoken about the drunkenness of others, he does not recognise it in himself. He contains himself in company, but within the home, he becomes quite a different person. Last evening, his shouting woke the baby, making him squall. The noise was quite terrible and I had to wrap Jules in my shawl and walk with him outside to calm him, which does his chest no good in the middle of winter.

I don’t mean to be a worry, Maman, but I feel lighter when I confide in you. By the time you receive my letter, it will probably no longer be a problem. Please, do not tell Papa. Or M. and Mme. Dujardin. Claude is such a good man.

I cannot write more now. I had little sleep last night.

Love to you all,

Bibi

‘What did you have under the blankets last night?’ Sue asked Jason next morning.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Last night. When I came in. All that scuffling and hiding.’ Sue mimed Jason’s secretive actions.

‘I dunno,’ he shrugged. ‘Nothing.’

‘Not nothing. Mothers always know.’ She jostled her son lovingly. Although Jason shrugged her off, he did so with a sheepish grin. ‘Go on. Tell,’ Sue said, relieved.

‘Nothing much. Only a Nintendo.’

‘No wonder you were hiding it. You know Dad wouldn’t approve. Where did it come from?’

Jason shrugged again. Sue wondered at his reluctance, what he might be hiding.

‘Someone gave it to me. Just a boy at school. No one you know.’ He squeaked the toe of his sneaker down the leg of the kitchen table.

Sue grimaced, her skin tingling. ‘Don’t do that.’ Then she added, ‘Kids don’t give that sort of thing away.’

‘This one does. He’s got a new one. He’s got everything.’

Sue heard the envy in her son’s voice. ‘Well, you better not let your father see it, or he’ll make you give it back.’ Sue was surprised to hear herself colluding with Jason against Ben.

‘No, no. I can’t give it back.’ Sue gave her son a quizzical glance. ‘Ah, I would … It would … hurt his feelings.’ Jason averted his eyes.

Sue looked thoughtfully at her son – she had an uneasy feeling – but let the matter rest. It had been a lighter interchange than many they had had recently. Something to be encouraged. She continued making his school lunch and questioned no further. When Ben came into the kitchen, she announced, ‘Aroha’s invited us to dinner before we go overseas.’

‘Watch it, son,’ Ben warned, as Jason pushed past him in the doorway. He stopped beside Sue. ‘What was that?’

‘Aroha. She rang before you got in last night.’

‘Dinner?’

‘Yes.’ Sue could not read the expression on Ben’s face. ‘What is it?’

‘Nothing.’ Like father, like son.

‘You don’t sound very keen. You usually enjoy their company.’

Ben shrugged. Sue sealed the sandwiches in plastic wrap, picked an apple and banana from the fruit bowl. ‘Your lunch is ready, Jase,’ she called. Turning to Ben, she said, ‘So, that okay with you?’

‘What?’ Ben could be so exasperating; Sue wondered whether it came spontaneously or if he had to work at it.

‘Dinner with Aroha and Hemi,’ she repeated, enunciating each word precisely.

‘If you want.’

‘If we both want,’ said Sue. She was leaning against the bench, her arms folded. Ben shrugged. ‘You don’t want to?’ Suddenly she decided she was not taking any more of this nonsense. ‘Well, I do.’ Her voice was firm. They always enjoyed themselves with Hemi and Aroha; she wanted to go; they would go.

As the departure date for their trip to London drew closer, Sue spent what little spare time she had with the microfiches. She had not expected it to be so painstaking. She thought the birth records the most reliable way of making connections and persevered with this line of research. While she was successful in identifying the children of Marie Suzanne and Catherine Marie and, eventually, their grandchildren, she could find none for Jules Etienne. Her curiosity was aroused. Either he had not married or had had no children.

But the descendents of Marie and Catherine did not lead Sue to her father. So she decided to work backwards. She knew her father’s birth date, but, beyond that, it was a matter of patiently reviewing records, one after another. She started by taking her grandparents’ details from her father’s birth certificate. Her father was an only child, born shortly before his father left for Italy in the Second World War. She found her Nana Austin’s first name had been Ngaire, and she had Dujardin as a middle name. Through the retention of this family name, she would track the lineage.

The two ends of the path had not met, but the gap was narrowing.