When Donald came home in the wee hours reeking of whisky and tobacco, Katherine pulled the eiderdown over her face and feigned sleep.
‘Met a fascinating gentleman tonight,’ he said, his words slurred and slow. Katherine pictured a giant snail, with Donald’s waxed moustache, sliming across the room. But snails do not lurch drunkenly into bed, she thought. I’m being unkind to snails.
‘. . . Terry’s a splendid specimen of a man,’ he said. ‘And don’t you get any funny ideas about it . . . We had a few drinks with . . .’
A few?
Donald rattled off names of prominent Members of Parliament, as he called them.
Katherine waited, but before he could say more he had slumped over the bed, letting out loud, immelodious snores.
Katherine smiled. Did Donald know that word? Had he found it in his dictionary? Now, such words came to her only in his absence. Immelodious. The sound of birdsong, even more beautiful than melodious. The sound of contradiction. Like waking in the night and seeing for the first time. Like falling out of love.
For days Donald couldn’t speak of anything but Lionel Terry. Terry, graduate of Eton and Oxford. Terry, descendant of Napoleon Bonaparte. Terry in the Transvaal fighting the savage Matabeles. Terry, friend of Cecil Rhodes and Paul Kruger. Terry the poet and painter. How could Donald remember? Hadn’t he been drunk? Was he having lunch with the splendid specimen every other day? (And wasn’t that the word you used to describe dead things? Things you collected and pinned under glass?) Katherine swept around Donald’s feet with the hearth brush, making him move one foot, then the other. She swept in front of the fireplace and then came back again – and again – imitating the perversions of a small, obstinate fly, but nothing could dampen Donald’s enthusiasm.
‘He walked all the way from Mangonui to Wellington carrying just a walking stick and a knapsack. Bet you a shilling you have no idea where Mangonui is, eh. Kate, he pretty much walked the entire length of the North Island!’
Katherine swallowed. He hadn’t called her Kate for years.
‘Damned fine poet, too,’ Donald continued. ‘Gave me one of his tracts.’ He waved it at her, but she excused herself to empty the dustpan.
‘Yes indeed, a fine example of a British gentleman,’ he was saying as she left the room.
Katherine had a suspicion of British gentlemen. They had the right accent and excellent manners, which concealed any number of vices. Good riddance to bad rubbish, she thought as she watched coal dust and ash fall into the bin in a small cloud.
‘I’ve invited him for dinner Sunday,’ Donald called from the parlour.
Katherine examined Mr Terry upon his arrival. He was at least six foot five. Athletic. Handsome. He stood very erect – obviously a man with military experience. She had to admit, reluctantly, that he did appear a splendid specimen of a man, though his abundant hair had turned prematurely grey.
‘Mrs McKechnie,’ he said, ‘a pleasure.’ He smiled. ‘Is that roast mutton I smell cooking? I’m sure you are an excellent cook, Mrs McKechnie, but regretfully I do not eat meat. Our carnivorous tendencies are an unhealthy obsession and play havoc with our constitutions.’
Katherine was at a loss for words. She had never heard of anyone who did not eat meat. All she could do was summon the children to set the table.
Terry ruffled Robbie’s hair. ‘Let the boy join us in the parlour,’ he said.
From the kitchen, Katherine could hear their outbursts of laughter. Edie sniffed.
‘Blow your nose, Edie. It does a young lady no favours to sniff like a dog.’ Katherine bit her lip. She could hear her own mother’s voice – the same words, the exact same tone. My sakes, she didn’t want to be like her mother!
She watched Edie wipe her eyes and blow into an embroidered handkerchief. She put her hand lightly on her daughter’s shoulder.
‘If you hurry and set the table, then you can call them straight in for dinner.’
‘Mrs McKechnie,’ Terry said as he entered the dining room, ‘where may I ask do you buy your vegetables? From an honest Briton or do you buy them from the heathen?
Katherine stepped back, for Terry towered above her. ‘The Chinaman’s fruit and vegetables are cheaper,’ she said, ‘and fresher.’
Terry smiled. His upper lip twitched. He looked her in the eye and then, as if the leading man in some theatrical production, he began to recite, his voice resonant, deliberate, his bearing, his hands somehow embellishing each word:
See, advancing, grim, relentless, as a scourge sent forth from hell,
Comes the blighting curse of Mammon, in the white man’s land to dwell;
Mongol, Ethiop, nameless horror, human brute from many a clime,
Vomited from earth’s dark pest holes; bred of plague, diseases, and crime.
Swathed in rags and noisome odours, gaunt and fleshless, dwarfed of limb,
Visages like the grisly jackal seeking dead midst shadows dim;
See the horde of drug besotten, sin begotten, fiends of filth,
Swarming o’er thy nation’s bulwarks; pillaging thy nation’s wealth.
He pulled tracts from his suit pocket and handed them to the children. Katherine saw the brightness, the flush of excitement on Robbie’s face, the fascination and uncertainty of Edie.
Suddenly, inexplicably, she wished the bowl of carrots in her hands were not chopped and boiled, but still whole and raw, sharpened, hardened like arrows. For one long moment she imagined tipping a water-filled pot of them; imagined Terry’s astonished expression as he lay soaked and pinned to the floor, half a dozen carrots passing through his chest and into the floorboards. She could hear the tinny, frenzied piano accompaniment, the quick, jerky black and white motion of his neck, his arms, his legs, as he tried to pick himself up. She almost laughed, nervously, astonished at her ludicrous imagination. Instead she placed the bowl on the table and showed Terry to his seat while Donald carved the mutton.
Terry asked Robbie to pass a tract to his mother. Katherine pressed her lips into a thin smile. No one noticed. Terry had the poetic gift. He and Donald had enough conversation in them for the whole family.
‘We cannot eradicate the natural hatred between races with civilisation,’ Terry was saying as Katherine passed vegetables around the table. ‘We have to end this insane practice of importing alien races . . . No, thank you. I’m sure you are a fine cook, Mrs McKechnie, but I do not eat food contaminated by Chinamen . . . This employment of alien labour is a criminal injustice to the British workman. It’s the chief cause of poverty, crime, degeneracy and disease throughout the Empire . . .’
Donald raised his glass. ‘Hear, hear!’
‘Robbie,’ Terry continued, ‘where do leprosy and bubonic plague come from?’
When Robbie could not answer, Terry said, ‘Why, from the filthy heathen, son. The Mongols and black savages . . .’
Katherine gritted her teeth. Robbie was not Terry’s son. But Donald smiled, nodded, patted Robbie on the back.
Terry spread butter on a slice of Katherine’s home-baked bread. He turned to Donald. ‘The presence of Asiatics in this country jeopardises the rights of our fellow Britons. We have to take drastic measures before it’s too late . . .’
Terry chewed on his bread. ‘A wholesome loaf, Mrs McKechnie.’
To Donald he said, ‘As for the Maoris, there has never in the history of the world been a case of two races living together in the same country without the deterioration and decay of one or the other. The weakest race is always doomed . . .’
Katherine tried to consider at least some of Terry’s words. After all, didn’t the politicians say precisely this – that the Maoris required protection, that they were in danger of extinction?
Terry reached for another slice of bread. ‘The Maoris are now in such a state of moral, mental and physical degeneration that without complete and utter separation, their race will be beyond salvation. I see no practical solution but to exchange all lands in Maori possession for islands such as Stewart and the Chathams . . .’
Katherine wondered how much land was still in Maori possession. And how many Maoris were there left to be crammed onto the islands?
‘An interesting proposition,’ Donald said. ‘But how to achieve the desired result – now that’s the challenge.’
Terry swallowed. ‘McKechnie, my man, nothing worth its salt comes without hard work and sacrifice . . . As for race-adulterers, they should be transferred to outlying islands also. Mark my words . . .’
Race-adulterers? Katherine had never even considered the mixing of races, but to use the term adultery seemed absurd. She accepted Terry’s exhortation and drew a thick black line through every one of his words.
‘My petitions to members of Parliament, the Commissioner of Customs, the Minister of Native Affairs, etcetera, etcetera, have been to no avail,’ Terry was saying.
He declined the roast mutton, the vegetables, even Katherine’s bread and butter pudding. He did not eat foreign foods. Sugar, he said. He did not even drink tea. Katherine went to the meat safe to fetch him milk. She didn’t know whether to be alarmed or to be sorry for the man.
Early the next morning before anyone else rose, Katherine searched for the tracts. She knew Donald had his, but hadn’t Terry left another three? Where were they all? She found two and fed them, deliciously, to the coal range, filled the kettle and set it on top. How she would savour her porridge this morning, her sweet, milky tea.