Conny and Father will be spending much of their time in Wellington now that he’s been re-elected. I have very mixed feelings at the prospect. I’ll have greater freedom and authority here, but it means Conny will be absent for many weeks at a time. Her duty and her family are in Wellington, a journey of days away. She’s made a great fist of it here, despite knowing very few people at first, and being snubbed by Alice and Colleen. Not only has she established her own presence in the city despite a degree of gossip that was bound to follow the marriage, but she’s asserted herself at The Camp.
The passing of the Electoral Act last year made her more excited than I’ve ever seen her before, and even Father’s failure to secure the Wakatipu seat at the election soon after did little to dampen her sense of victory. How wonderful, she said, that in this our small colony has led the world. It’s impossible not to be glad with her, though in my experience few women have the common sense and knowledge to use a vote wisely, and she does go on so. Those reservations I keep to myself, of course. On Monday, during the buggy ride into town to meet Father, I enjoyed provoking her by suggesting a whole range of matters most inappropriate for women to express opinions on, yet she had a quick answer almost every time. I like it that she’s not prim and proper when we’re together.
Conny and Bessie Hocken organised a luncheon to celebrate the granting of the franchise. Thirty-three leading ladies, and no men allowed, not even as waiters. There were toasts and anecdotes from the long battle. I imagine that a good many politicians and civic leaders who had opposed them would have felt their ears redden and wonder why. Conny said it was great fun, and the talking point of the town for days. No doubt Henry Fish and his supporters regard it as the first sign of women’s general insurrection.
Conny has found her proper level in Dunedin and is sought for her own company as well as being Mrs Larnach. She is unimpressed by dull, conventional people, whatever their position and influence. Mrs R. McGeadon, a long-standing hostess and patron of the arts, who claims distant kinship with Gladstone, tried to put her down at several starchy gatherings, but came off second best in the joust, and Conny’s reference to her as Armageddon is now a favourite witticism in town. The two have engaged in several skirmishes in the campaign for social supremacy since Conny’s initial disagreement with Mrs McGeadon’s pronouncement that a woman should on no account be seen in public without both hat and gloves. I teased Conny by saying that I’d heard the two of them crossed the street rather than meet, but she said the significant thing was which of them chose to cross.
Conny’s friends have talents and progressive views. Bessie Hocken has become her closest ally, but Ethel Morley is often a companion also. I particularly enjoy it when Ethel visits, for she is quite beautiful. A great pity she is married, Robert says, and admits she’s the woman he most often imagines naked. I have done so myself when in her company and finding the conversation of others boring. Although Robert lacks deceit and malice, he likes to be louche when with male friends. Women’s flesh is heavier than ours, he insists. Most recently he made me laugh by describing his mother and father in pious discussion at Sunday lunch about the vicar’s sermon regarding the sanctity of marriage. ‘What a lot of cant is talked about it,’ he told me. ‘A man’s vision of marriage is to wake each morning with his wife’s hand on his cock. God knows what a woman’s is.’
Conny and I have become great friends, and partly to keep her good opinion I’ve broken off my unofficial engagement to Ellen. Not that Conny ever made an open criticism of her, but I admitted to myself that I’d no intention of marrying, and became increasingly uneasy, for I knew Ellen’s hopes. Her family are decent enough folk, although the father mangles the Queen’s English, and the mother’s a snob. I suspect I’m not Ellen’s first lover. There were hints from her mother about the formality of engagement, and it became clear that some declaration had to be made, or the friendship retrenched.
Ellen cried when I told her I didn’t wish to marry. I’d rather she’d been angry, though I’d made no promise. She wept and said she’d thought I loved her. The sadness was worse than any accusation. We were standing on the walking track above the sea at St Kilda, with others of our party not far away. I hadn’t meant the matter to come up in such circumstances, but she asked me if I wished to come with her family the next weekend to visit relatives at Palmerston, and in declining I found the conversation moved on willy-nilly to our future generally. We reached a point at which I was forced to contemplate an outright lie, or confess I had no intention of marrying her. So we finished standing awkwardly above the pale sand with its tidal patterns, close to dark green lemonwood scrub shaped by the sea wind, with Ellen trying to hold back tears, and me making some foolish comment about the small island just offshore, as the others joined us. I never feel satisfaction in inflicting hurt on anyone, and her white face turned away, and shaky hands, almost overwhelmed me, but I knew that if I comforted her then, the same situation would have to be faced in the future.
Women instinctively close ranks in such times. As we made our way back to the carriages they clustered around Ellen in support, glancing back disapprovingly at we men. It was assumed, I suppose, that I’d been cruel, and perhaps Ellen lessened her unhappiness afterwards by sharing it with her friends. The thing was clumsily done, I know, and I regret that, but it was unpremeditated and I was caught up in the sorry whirl of it. I’ve not seen her alone since and have spoken only superficially. However, her suffering is apparently over, for she’s often in the company of other fellows.
The good thing is that there’s no slur, or gossip, attached to her, as far as I know. My fear was that she might become pregnant, despite precautions I disliked, and I’d be compelled to marry. It was almost entirely physical satisfaction that drew me to her. She’s attractive, in reasonable society, and prepared to indulge me fully, but I felt more and more uncomfortable about taking advantage of her. To be a cad isn’t my nature, and I’ve never discussed Ellen in a loose way with other men. Unlike some here, I don’t see love as some sort of game, and Ellen is the only woman of standing I’ve been long with. Robert says it’s far better not to get involved with girls of respectable family, but my few experiences with women of other backgrounds have generally been both sordid and disappointing. I sometimes go with Robert, Hugo Isaac and others to what used to be the Vauxhall Gardens above Andersons Bay. Women are easy to find there, but there’s a soullessness to such liaisons and I’m always in danger of being recognised wherever I take them. It’s usually only after rioting with the others that the need for a woman overcomes me, and I drink less, and less often, now. A man’s needs are best satisfied with a woman he loves, surely, yet those needs can be urgent.
I feel The Camp is truly home for me, and although Father still talks occasionally of my taking up some profession — making something of myself, he says — this is where I belong. Melbourne’s just a few hazy vignettes of infancy; the good times were here as a boy with the building of The Camp and all of us happy. Then there seemed nothing Father couldn’t do, and all was on the up. The later trip across America and on to England and Uncle Donald’s was high excitement, though it ended for me in a sort of muted misery.
All photographs have an element of sadness because their time is over, and some are doubly sad because of feelings they evoke. Recently I came across one of Tolden House, Adams School — ranks of us with keen faces and arms folded, all united in an apparent camaraderie. At the end of 1879, Father and Mother returned to the colony with little Gladys, and the rest of us were divided and left. Donny went grandly to Oxford, my sisters remained with Miss Visick their tutor, and I was stuck in the Adams boarding school at St Leonard’s on Sea. The only times we children reunited were at uncle Donald’s.
My boarding school life is recalled like a time of sickness: an illness from which I could see no recovery. There are certain foods I can’t eat, smells that disgust, and sounds that deaden my spirit, and all because through them my school days rise up again. Even bells bring only the memory of rigid servitude and loneliness. Is there any institution more unbendingly conventional than an English boarding school, more driven by nonsensical conformity? I’ve dreams still in which I revisit that unhappiness: the dreary life in which there was no-one who loved me.
Not one other boy came from New Zealand, or Australia, and I was marked and ridiculed from the first as an outsider. There were quite a few Raj boys whose parents were in the military, or the Indian bureaucracy. Some others had been despatched to board there by guardians, and even more by fathers who wanted their sons to have a public school education, but neither their pockets, nor their influence, stretched to Rugby, Winchester, or Harrow. St Leonard’s on Sea I suppose was no worse than most second rate schools, and thankfully out of term time I wasn’t forced to attend the dingy exam-crammers that were a feature of the town, and staffed largely by the same grey teachers of the school.
The rote lessons seemed to have no connection with my past, or future, and the teachers fawned on boys whose parents were of the slightest consequence. They would have been amazed to see The Camp, the many thousands of Larnach acres in Central Otago. At the height of its success, the firm of Guthrie & Larnach had more than a thousand workers and owned fourteen ships, I could say nothing of that, or else be fiendishly ragged as a skite. The stupid boy whose father owned three apothecary shops was more important. I was just a colonial brat as far as the masters there were concerned. At least in class I was safe from the theatre of cruelty that existed so often on the playing fields and within the dorms. How I envied the day boys, who could leave the place behind and go home to family.
My companions were oddities like myself, and we drew together not by attraction, but because of exclusion by the mob. I made only one staunch friend. Jeremy Pointer, my Housemaster’s son, and shunned by most because his father was detested. I detested him too, but recognised from my own unhappiness the injustice of Jeremy being blamed for his father’s ridiculousness. Pig Pointer was disdained even by his fellow teachers, but Jeremy had a blind loyalty that caused him to rise to every insult made. I admired that loyalty even though I saw the persecution he suffered because of it.
Jeremy was in another House, but often on half days we would go down to the shore, and for a few hours imagine our lives different. We would buy beer at the old Horse and Groom pub, and drink it by the stone steps while we watched the shop girls. We would take a dinghy out, or walk up to the common used by the school for the annual cross country run, and sit amongst the cover to smoke our pipes, and light fires that in the summer came near to disaster. We would talk about everything except the school, and yet that hung over us, was always the inevitable return.
I’ve happily forgotten the other boys I knew at St Leonard’s, even those I then claimed as friends, and those known as enemies, but I wonder sometimes what’s happened to Jeremy Pointer, and imagine what relief he must have found it to leave school and go into a world where his father was unknown, and no longer an encumbrance. No matter how much of a ragging he got, he always stood up for his useless father, perhaps because his mother was dead, but more I think from stubborn allegiance. And he and I never talked about his persecution, as if ignoring it denied its existence. I wish just once I’d told him I admired his unflinching and misplaced fealty.
He was mad on conjuring and tricks of magic, bought books on it, and practised with cards and small, false bottomed caskets purchased from advertisements. In every school concert he came on to universal derision, the only applause when inevitably something went wrong. What strange courage he had. In war I imagine he’d be marked out by some great feat of heroism, and die in the execution of it. When we left the school, he and I pledged to remain friends, and he wrote a few letters to which I made no reply, not because I didn’t value him, but that his comradeship was borne down by my greater resolve to leave everything of St Leonard’s behind me. In his last letter he said he intended to become an artist, and that he’d met a girl whose father was a museum curator with a famous collection of butterflies.
The single person I see fondly in recollections of St Leonard’s is Jeremy Pointer. His long face and flat, dark hair: his failures as a magician, and his absolute loyalty as a son, and friend to me. All that’s long gone, but memory is beyond conscious control. We can’t choose our past, or ever quite bury it.
I received the news of my own mother’s death while still at school. It was a wretched winter day, and I was in sick bay because of a flare up after my riding accident. Pig Pointer came, and in front of the only other boy there, a junior I despised called Davidson, told me he’d had a cablegram with the news. ‘Letters will follow, lad,’ he said, standing as usual with his legs well apart and his great flaccid, downy cheeks catching the dim light. ‘I’m sorry to be the bearer of such bad tidings. I’ll tell matron you’ll be better in here for the night,’ and then he went. I turned away from the other boy so he couldn’t see my face. The beds were of thin, knobbed iron, the bare wooden walls pale and scratched like a zoo pen, and the sky as grey as the blanket under which I lay.
I was determined not to cry in the presence of the other boy, and lay in a quaking misery waiting for darkness. I could hear boys shouting and laughing on High Field as if nothing in the world had changed, and later matron brought in shepherd’s pie and a dark custard stuff we called Mississippi mud. I couldn’t stomach either, and Davidson had the cheek to ask if he could have the tray. ‘I’m fair starved,’ he said, having hogged everything of his own.
So little of my time at St Leonard’s gave me pleasure, or even placid monotony, yet I know Father thought he was doing well by me. His welcome letters would come addressed to ‘My Darling Son’ and in typical schoolboy fashion, in return I would only hint at unhappiness. He thought everyone like himself, possessed of presence and the ability to impose on any situation. He never understood how much out of place I felt, though after Mother’s death I spoke strongly about wishing to return. Donny’s extravagance and hasty marriage may have influenced Father’s final agreement, so in that at least I have some reason to thank my brother.
Brambletye was my refuge while in England. Uncle Donald and aunt Jane were ever hospitable, and the cousins carefree companions. William, the eldest son, was sixteen years older than me, yet he too was supportive and generous. I was saddened when he died suddenly at only thirty four. James, next in line, was the horseman Donny and I aspired to be. Sydney and Herbert were closer to my age, and although still senior were both friendly. In that family existed an amiable cheerfulness and encouragement quite lacking in my school life.
Father would like The Camp to be a sort of colonial Brambletye, but it doesn’t fit as comfortably in its surroundings, or in the minds of Dunedin people. The Sussex estate wasn’t quite a heaven, but certainly a haven, and St Leonard’s almost a hell. At Brambletye no-one quizzed me, or mocked my speech. People there didn’t take pleasure in the humiliation of others.
My Sussex cousins were a champion, outdoors band, seeming to show no reflection of their quiet and polite parents. Privilege and indulgence were their right. The house is not more than twenty-five years old or so, and famed for its frescoed ceilings, wall papers and furniture. Uncle Donald has a magnificent conservatory for his collection of rare plants, and it’s the custom for all visitors to scratch their names on the large glass door. My signature is there among all the others, and I hope some day to return to underscore it, and relive the pleasure I received there. The family also owned a fine home in London’s Palace Gardens.
Odd misfortune then that it was at Brambletye I had the fall from the hunter, Mercury, that almost killed me. I suffer from the effects still, and yet the moment of it is hidden from me. The mind’s way to protect itself perhaps. I remember a long chase across a flat past a spinney, being shouldered by another horse at a low hedge, and then lying on my back, a clear sky above and a damnable pain in my leg. And the smell of sweat not my own, for someone had put a jacket under my head. Concussion that reoccurred for many months, fractured cheek bone, broken bones in the left arm and leg. Even the convalescence from all of that could not save me from the return to boarding school at last. I would’ve chosen a second tumble if it could have kept me permanently at Brambletye.
I have vivid memories of the place, some inconsequential, but almost all happy. Once, coming back from swimming in the bridge pool, Herbert and I found spawning frogs in a warm pond. Dozens of pairs on the weedy surface, each male clamped on the back of its mate with forelegs tight about her throat. So strong was their urge that they took no notice of us, and we scooped up many into our towels, just because we could. What variety of slick green they had, from the faintest glass blush to deepest emerald.
Another time he and I were part of the search party for the local idiot who had become drunk on cider and begun beating sheep and cows with a paling. We found him asleep in the big meadow with straw in his boots, blood on his hands and no trousers. His cock was small, but it was my first realisation of how hairy are a full adult’s genitals. When he was woken, he laughed and sang in front of us all. His old mother came and took him away like a child. How different he must have found the world.
Although Father put me at the school, I never doubted he felt it for the best. I received many letters from him while I was recovering from the accident, and he welcomed me warmly on my return to New Zealand, despite our differences. Some years later, when I had to have further corrective surgery in Dunedin, he came all the way from Wellington to be with me. When Basil Sievwright, Henry Driver and others came with business they said was urgent, Father turned them away and sat with me for hours, talking of Mother, Aunt Mary and the days he, Donny and I spent on the peninsula while The Camp was being built. Soon after, he made a sortie to Australia in an attempt to bolster his businesses, but that was another financial disaster for him, and he narrowly avoided being dragged down by Melbourne swindlers. He was very low when he returned and, with Mary not long dead, he found The Camp the sad place it remained for him until Conny made it home again.
Father isn’t a confessional man: he believes in fortitude, trusting that energy and hard work will enable him to succeed. But yesterday, on what may well turn out to be the last trip to town before he and Conny leave for Wellington, he spoke more openly about his feelings than he has for a long time. The day was blustery, and he complained of the new horse as we passed his failed Dandy Dinmont hotel at Waverley, which I knew better than to refer to.
‘Fat and out of condition,’ he said. ‘I’ll talk with Boylan. Just a nag compared with Stockings, or Traveller.’
‘Horses don’t last for ever,’ I said. Father had a tartan blanket for his knees and wore a tam-o’-shanter. I knew some in Dunedin laughed behind his back at his devotion to Scottish custom and dress, but he had a vision of himself as laird, despite, or perhaps because of, those relatively humble Larnachs of Wick from whom he came.
‘I’ve no great stomach for more of Parliament, Dougie, but Seddon and Ward have been very pressing and the affairs of both the Bank of New Zealand and the Colonial Bank are dire. The government will have to intervene or all will be brought down. Ward’s heading for bankruptcy. Seddon doesn’t understand money and says he relies on my advice. But it’ll be no picnic for any of us.’
‘Surely the government will have to support the banks? Otherwise the colony will be just a shambles.’
‘But everyone wants to call in their money,’ he said. ‘People want it under their beds so they can sleep soundly on it. No one wants to lend.’
‘But there’s the ultimate value of property, isn’t there?’ I said. ‘You can’t gainsay that. You can touch it and walk over it, build on it and, if the worst comes to the worst, you can eat off it.’
‘Damn rabbits, though, and poor prices.’ He urged the horse to a brisk trot. ‘The money for development has dried up. Everything’s ready cash, and I’m as stretched as the next man. Confidence is going, and that’s what drives business and growth. It’s a mean hoarder’s world at the moment. No one’s safe. It’s look to yourself and damn the next fellow.’
Father would rather spend all his time in Otago. He’s joining Richard Seddon not just from a sense of duty but because he hopes for the elusive knighthood. As his financial difficulties increase, so does his vanity.
Robert says it’s the same story with everyone: businesses are finding everyone slow to pay. ‘It’s squirm time,’ he says. When he spent two nights with us last week we took the guns out twice and walked a long way, shooting gulls and even an albatross, for fun, and pigeons for the pot. Our game bags were a good load on our way back to The Camp. We also rode and raced along the bay tracks and clambered over the boat wreck at Portobello. He’s a carefree friend and we can have a grand blowout together, yet in the house he plays the gentleman for Father and Conny, while privately keeping the maids atwitter. As the two of us drank together until late, he told me of a governess he has conquered in Belleknowes. An absolute succubus, he told me with delight, who names his body parts in three languages. He finds life alternately a great lark and a bitter constriction. His company is a relief from the routines of The Camp, but strangely I now find more satisfaction in talking with Conny.
Perhaps it seems ridiculous that, as a man in the prime of life, my favourite woman companion is my father’s wife. But it’s so, and why should I be ashamed of it? Conny and I find so much in each other’s company, and Father likes the three of us being together: he’s buoyed up by our talk. She would have me educated in music, and as keen a reader as herself of Austen, Eliot, Oliphant and Dickens, whereas my natural inclination is for Conan Doyle and Scott. And more than any reading, I enjoy being out and about.
For my part, I persuade her to walk more, to enjoy the natural world. She’ll never make a farmer, but she’s increasingly interested in the grounds of The Camp and the wilderness of the peninsula. She encouraged Father to extend the glasshouses and to plant colourful flowers on the lower garden rather than native shrubs.
The growth of understanding isn’t just on my side. Tuesday was hot and cloudless, and after working with others to repair stalls in the stables, I walked out to the front gardens with my shirt loose and the sleeves rolled up. I was standing by the wishing well to catch the breeze from the sea when Conny and one of the gardeners came past with their baskets of cut flowers. She complained of the heat. ‘Of course you’re hot, being all togged up,’ I said. ‘You’ve no idea of the pleasure there is in the cooling feel of the wind on your skin. Watch sometime as a lathered horse turns into it for relief.’
‘The comparison isn’t a compliment,’ she said, with a quick smile.
‘I mean that you haven’t had the simple and natural satisfaction of the wind on your body when you work.’
‘I suppose you’re right,’ she said. ‘It’s a funny thing, but I’ve never thought of it before. I do believe that women must be allowed garments that give freedom to play sport, cycle or climb if they wish.’
Conny has made me aware of a society of modern women unknown to me before. She, and her friends such as Bessie and Ethel, have a quality of understanding and conversation that is the equal of any man’s. What a gulf between her enlightenment and accomplishments, and poor Ellen Abbott, whose prattle is difficult to concentrate on once she’s been bedded.
When Father and Conny leave I will be sole master here again. I’ve had good discussions with Father about my plans for the estate. Now that his investments are returning less, he’s particularly concerned that the peninsula property more than pays its way, and from the profits will come my return for overall supervision.
In the grand times a great many staff were employed to maintain enterprises that were appropriate for a manor house but contributed little to funds: rather the reverse. The vineries, hothouses and fernery are largely indulgence, yet popular, but I see no need for peacocks and guinea fowl to roam the grounds. We’ve also dispensed with the cock-fighting pit, the llamas and monkeys of my childhood, and a boy whose occupation was to individually wrap coal pieces in tissue for the bedroom fires. There are far too many dogs. The Newfoundland is Father’s favourite breed, but he has reluctantly agreed to a reduction in the pack. I hope to sell a good number: like almost all of our animals, they are true bloodstock.
We need to concentrate on the excellent Alderney herd that’s been built up, and the potatoes and oats that do well here. As Dunedin grows so will the demand for dairy products, vegetables and meat. Despite present conditions I agree with Father that the success of refrigerated cargoes opens excellent prospects for the colony. He was the managing director of the refrigeration company that sent the first frozen lamb to England, and still takes pleasure in telling how he stood at the high observation window of The Camp to watch the Dunedin sail from Port Chalmers. His vigour and enterprise have benefited so many, yet those gains tend to be forgotten in the present criticism many make of him. The ingratitude is, I think, one reason his interest and enthusiasm for further innovation are waning.
I’m all for clearing more of the land, and wire-fencing paddocks rather than building stone walls, though I’m pleased that we have these on all the boundaries of our property. Before Father’s marriage to Conny, there was a large fire on an adjacent property, which did a good deal of damage to ours, and Father’s relationship with the neighbour has been frosty since.
I believe there are too many people employed for the household and not enough on the farms. What need have I for a full complement of inside servants when I’m the only family member here most of the time? There are plenty of local men and women who can do part-time work when required. I’ve had all this out with Father and he sees the sense of it. I’ve started to use the stratagem with him that I notice Conny employs successfully — introduce proposals in such a way that he comes to see them as of his own devising. Patrick Sexton is a sound overseer and we work well together. I’ve a plan that will ensure progress while still maintaining the visible lifestyle so essential to William Larnach.
It’s what I’ve looked forward to, yet now I think I would rather play second fiddle, as ever, to Father and still have Conny at The Camp. At first I thought her rather too sharp in her judgements to be ideal company, and too fine in proportions to be admirable as a woman, but my opinion has changed on both counts.
She and her family have had little to do with open country and farming, but she shows a comradely interest in what is done here on the properties and what Father and I hope to achieve. On Tuesday there was a blue vellum sky and hardly a breeze. Conny came out with me to see the Clydesdales sledging timber from the cut below Fork Ridge. She marvelled at their size and strength, but wasn’t fearful, going right up to stroke them, and wasn’t repulsed by the froth of sweat they’d worked up. She was interested when I explained how calm and affectionate they are, and that size and strength in an animal don’t necessarily mean an aggressive disposition. ‘The runts in species are often worst,’ I told her. ‘I’ve been bitten and kicked more by damn ponies than any larger breed, and lap dogs have the temperament of frustrated spinsters.’
‘You want an argument, I know,’ she said, ‘but I’ll not rise to it’, and she smiled. ‘The horse is a fine animal.’ She bent down to stir the feathering on a hoof. And when she was standing by its head again, she touched the great, flat jaw, the white blaze and tousled forelock, and said, ‘What beautiful eyes it has.’ That perception pleased me, for indeed horses have beautiful eyes.
One of the men was cheeky enough to ask her if she wanted to get on its back, but she said she wasn’t dressed for that. When the horses and men were back to work, Conny and I sat on the stone stile and talked. She said she’d been told by a tradesman that both Father and I were known to get hot at any cruelty to animals, which she regarded as a compliment to us both. She wore a large-brimmed sunhat, so sometimes her face was lost to me. She has the ability to draw people out, does Conny, and I found somehow the conversation came round to my school days at St Leonard’s and my deep unhappiness there. Never before have I spoken honestly about those years, but Conny was sympathetic and interested, her own education having been so different. When I told her of the desolation and loneliness I felt when Mother died, she took my hand and we sat there for a time without speaking, watching the great horses come down the gully, and admiring the skill with which men and Clydesdales managed the logs that constantly threatened to crush them.
When we are together she is perceptive, as well as quick, in conversation, and encouraging of my opinions. We allow few barriers of gender in our talks; we are just as two people, equal and attentive. Yet, yet, I’m increasingly aware of the swell of her breast, the pale base of her smooth neck, the brown hair glossy above her ears, the fragrance that is part perfume and part herself — and sometimes, when we’re alone, there seems to pass a sort of frisson between us, so that everything I see has a momentary shimmer. Conny, I feel, is equally aware of it, but neither of us makes acknowledgement. Just to be in her company is pleasure, and there’s no awkwardness in any silence that we share. Somehow when she’s with me everything seems complete.
Often I think of the spontaneous kiss I gave her at the lion steps on her return from Lawrence, the jolt it gave me, the look that passed between us, although we’ve not referred to it again. We’re the closest of friends, without guilt. We’re family, after all.