What Happen Then, Mr Bones?, page 1
What Happen Then, Mr Bones?
Charlotte Randall
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published by Penguin Group (NZ), 2004
Copyright © Charlotte Randall 2004
The right of Charlotte Randall to be identified as the author of this work in terms of section 96 of the Copyright Act 1994 is hereby asserted.
Digital conversion by Pindar NZ
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ISBN 9781742288390
For Jo
Note to the reader
It is important to realise from the beginning that the narrative is going backwards in time, section by section.
Character List
Part One: Petone, 2002
Joe Halifax
Susan Halifax
Valentina Halifax: Joe and Susan’s daughter
Dolores Kelly: Joe and Susan’s niece who lives with them
Ngaio Halifax: Joe’s mother (called Grandmother when we see her from Valentina’s perspective, and Mother-in-law from Susan’s perspective)
Jim Halifax: Joe’s father (also called Grandfather in Part One)
Mercia Kelly: Joe’s sister, and mother of Dolores
Bruce Kelly: Mercia’s husband
Uncle Monty: Montgomery Halifax, Jim’s brother
Part Two: Petone, Second World War
Frederick Montague: Ngaio’s father (called Poppa by the family in Part One)
Samuel Montague: Frederick/Poppa’s father (called Pater by the family in Part One; his wife is referred to as Mater)
Josiah Montague: Samuel’s father, who arrives in Petone in 1840
Part Three: London, 1838
James Montague: Josiah’s father with his first wife Annabelle (Josiah is raised by Annabelle’s parents)
Harvey Montague: Father of James
Violet and Charles Montague: Harvey’s parents (Charles Montague is called only Montague to distinguish him from his step-father)
Part Four: Oxford, England, 1651
Valentina Montague: Mother of Montague
Charles Montague: Montague’s step-father
Ivo: Fencing master at Oxford
1
Nobody could understand why the Indian hanged himself on that particular day, a day so perfect the stunned seabirds hung motionless in the air because there was not even the illusion of wind to lift them. It was the Greek neighbour who put the story round, ringing everybody she knew and many she didn’t quite, asking after their health and that of their children before revealing the scandal in her thick accent: ‘Did you hear early this morning the curry-seller hung up himself?’ When she had drawn out their gasps and ejaculations she added, ‘Yes, in the shed and his own children found him. Imagine you, his own children!’
It was such a beautiful day that it was difficult not to be lured down to the beach, past the dead man’s house where his widow wearing a white sari wept on the doorstep like a bride left at the altar. And where a throng of relatives was already converging bearing large platters covered in aluminium foil, from which escaped an effluvium of chilli that caused passers-by a searing headache. And there in the midst of the relatives was the Greek woman with her own special dishes for the dead — soaked wheat and the seeds of the pomegranate. But the passers-by carried on down to the enticing sea. It was so blue, so somnolent, just looking at it brought on a sigh. It even made you forget the rope, the rope that was still clinging to the beams because the Indian relatives had given up their struggle against the implacable knot.
The next day was cloudy, and an eve-of-destruction wind built up throughout the afternoon, and the gossip was that no matter what was or wasn’t wrong with the Indian’s life he should have read the weather forecast. He could have lived one more day, one more perfect day, and maybe that would have been enough to make him change his mind — life’s not so bad, there’s always this — and his gift to his children could have been ice creams instead of the abiding image of his skinny body twitching on the end of a rope. The Greek woman, dispensing her soothing honey and custard pie from house to house, put the story round that she’d found out about the suicide from one of the Indian’s sons. Vikram had called to visit her Dimitri after lunch the previous day and had nonchalantly mentioned his father was in the hospital. ‘Are you going to visit him?’ the Greek woman asked, not really interested. At the time she was up to her elbows in soapsuds.
‘I might,’ the boy replied.
‘What’s wrong with him?’ she pursued, not that she cared. He was a man with evil in his eyes.
‘He’s dead,’ Vikram said.
‘I got the shock of my life,’ the Greek woman told the neighbours. ‘Here, have you some more of this custard pie.’
All the dairies on the main street closed on the day of the funeral. There was a religious service somewhere, a cremation, perhaps a meal — who knows, only the Indians went. The widow wafted round the neighbourhood in her white sari for what seemed like years, but over fiery eggplant curry and olid feta cheese she confessed to the Greek woman that her arranged marriage had been a sham, her husband had been a no-good drunk, she’d never loved him, and did the Greek woman know of any nice Greek man who might want to warm her bed? The Greek woman was taken aback. She simply couldn’t imagine a Greek marrying an Indian: how could he eat, how could he go to church, how could he learn the language?
‘Leave intermarriage to those without the culture,’ she declared, culture for her being traditional foodstuffs, the Orthodox Church, the mother tongue, age-old song and dance — in short, the law of the Medes and Persians — and never the changing and complex flux of the society she lived in.
‘For the fish, the water’s culture,’ the Indian woman murmured. ‘The rest is only window-dressing.’
Politely leaving aside the confusing imagery of a fishbowl with window-dressing, we agree with the Indian woman, and so in turn does Joe Montague Halifax. Indeed, he had said to his wife at the time, ‘It just goes to show there are morons and bright sparks in every ethnic group.’
Yes, sitting here in his car in his own driveway on this breezy April day, Joe Halifax remembers every detail of this particular conversation — how long ago was it, two years, maybe three? Two to three years since the Indian died, since his widow remarried, since the Greek woman got sick of the weather and moved away, since the Indian children were given counselling and started to say their father had died in the hospital, although in the clouds of their eyes his body still twitches. Two to three years of apparently perfect health, imperfect happiness, mixed weather, up-and-down investments, thinning hair, thickening midriff, gradual but relentless progression towards bifocals, expensively arrested tooth decay and a slight but nevertheless anxiety-provoking loss of erectile function. Now this is his day. Not as splendid as the Indian’s, it must be agreed, but certainly good enough. This is the day Joe discovers that in the onrush of calamity the semicircle of perfect sea at the end of the street makes not a whit of difference.
Susan Anne Halifax née Clarke, coffee hair, hazel eyes, tanned skin, is down on her knees in the garden, is just pulling a viper of convolvulus off the koromiko when she hears her husband’s car come up the driveway. That’s strange, she thinks, what’s he doing home, he only left an hour ago, perhaps he forgot his wallet. She tugs at the tendril which maliciously snaps in her grasp, forcing her to grub about in the stony soil for the end that’s escaped her. She hears the car door slam, hears her husband’s urgent step on the gravel driveway, hears him open the garage door and then close it — obviously whatever he has forgotten resides in there. She is just thinking about going to speak to him when an ear-shattering noise assaults her — a noise that reaches her viscera before her ears, terrorises her deepest flesh, her most protected organs.
‘An inoperable malignancy,’ the doctor confirms to the assembled relatives. ‘Yes, I told the deceased last week. He must have come straight home from the clinic that same morning and …’ He trails off, leaving each family member to complete the sentence in his or her own way: done the most courageous thing, taken the
Well, Susan Halifax can’t help but think, if you’re always begging for negatives, sooner or later you will be felled by the false positive, by mistaken identity, by a mix-up in the records. If you go on your knees begging to be spared, sooner or later you will hear the death sentence, it doesn’t matter whom you pray to, God or Gaia or the doctors or the void.
There’s a chapel service with a closed casket, a smokeless cremation behind red velvet curtains: no one knows if the corpse sits up with its ruined head on fire. Afterwards there’s afternoon tea with little alcohol because everyone has to drive themselves home, then the grieving widow puts on a white dress, nicely cut, and flies to Rome where her only daughter Valentina lives with a refugee from Sarajevo.
The semicircle of sea at the end of the street changes its colour and apparent texture according to the weather, although no one from the Halifax family now looks at it. Unregarded, it outlasts the bullet and the rope, remains a diversion to the lethe-sippers and lotus-eaters who stand on the shore a year, two, twenty, from their own demise, all of them oblivious to the lament for past and home which is still carried on the wind and is as particulate and abrasive as the wind-blown sand.
Susan Halifax cries on Valentina’s wedding day, thinks, But darling you’re just a baby. But darling isn’t a baby, she’s seventeen and been kissed aplenty by an Italian financier who has come here for the sailing. And anyway, Valentina looks far older than seventeen — nineteen perhaps, in her pearled décolleté wedding dress — and then Susan cries even more. ‘Darling, you are so beautiful,’ she weeps.
Too beautiful in fact. You leave a trail of smashed hearts in your wake. Even the old Chinese man in the fruit shop has shed a few tears of hopelessness. Not that he ever had any hope, but in all these years he hasn’t been forced to experience the singular pangs of the lack of it. And richer, younger, fitter and better-looking eligibles are also weeping in private, some of whom had believed they had a smidgeon of hope until they laid eyes on this handsome rich confident Italian, this cocksure dago, this money-spewing son of a bitch, this cradle-snatching son of a mafia-mobster pizza-peasant.
After the marriage ceremony, Susan keeps on crying because Valentina will be going to live in the eternal city after her Tahitian honeymoon. Eat your hearts out, all you clothes-horses of the Via Condotti, you will never have seen anything like Valentina: her long blonde ringlets and Monroe eyes and devastating cleavage are going to explode like a bomb in your elegant streets. And wait till she learns your language: her razor wit and beguiling linguistic eccentricity are going to annihilate all your bloodied and shredded remnants.
Joe Halifax counts the tiers (four) and the handmade sugar-paste rosebuds and ribbons (fifty) on the wedding cake, counts the number of guests weeping (twenty-seven) as a radiant Valentina makes the first incision. With this swamp of tears everyone should have worn gumboots. He counts the number of times the frolicsome groom pinches the bridesmaids’ backsides (eleven), and the number of times Valentina turns reproving eyes upon her wayward husband (thirteen). He thinks, That fool is making a big mistake if he assumes it’s marshmallow inside the wedding dress. More like white chocolate. She’ll turn rock-hard in the wrong temperature. Better keep up the Latin warmth, buddy, if you want the centre soft.
But Joe doesn’t worry overly. Valentina will have Giancarlo where she wants him. If he doesn’t stay put, she’ll click her fingers and all the mastiffs will come running. Do my dirty business, she’ll plead, blowing her warm sugary promising breath on her newly polished nails. And when she raises her eyelids, revealing those infusible eyes of tropical blue, they’ll all fight to the death to be her protector — everybody does, because Valentina is one of the world’s natural wonders. Then the guests are laughing through their tears and throwing rice (what’s this nonsense?) and confetti (banned) and white rose petals (chic, apparently) on the ecstatic couple as they climb into the limousine. In the big back seat Giancarlo is quite engulfed by the spreading waves of the wedding dress, the gushing waterfall of the veil. He’ll find out what a pinch is worth when he’s treading water for life.
In emails home, Valentina writes excitedly about the shopping and her weekends in Florence and Venice, then more soberly about the opulent churches, then angrily about the fleshless gypsies, the shoeless beggars and ecclesiastical heartlessness. Then she stops writing. Susan Halifax cries into her pillow every night. How can there be a world in which your only child grows up and doesn’t love Italy, in which your only child grows up and leaves you?
Joe Halifax pores over the newspapers for details of Italian earthquakes and floods, for NATO manoeuvres and car bombings, for anything that might have robbed him permanently of his perversely silent daughter, of the grandchildren he’d expected her to bring home to him. When he thinks about these grandchildren, he feels there is nothing left to him but the hope of them. How did a man who only wanted one child, and even then had to be tricked into the reality by his scheming wife, end up so sentimental?
Made practical by grief, Susan Halifax packs a suitcase and goes to search for her baby, finds her in a dark slab of flats near the railway station, and weeps, ‘What are you doing, darling, what happened to your beautiful life?’ But darling turns away. Her beautiful life has been an illusion apparently, although isn’t it this illusion that the angry man drinking slivovitz at the table most covets? More than the blonde ringlets now shorn off, more than the splendid breasts now hidden beneath a faded shift, he covets Valentina’s miraculous life like Count Dracula covets blood.
Susan puts her hand over her horrified mouth at this confrontation with what she has always most feared: the annexation of Valentina’s guilt-softened heart by predatory low-life. The latter will make its parasitical home in the former, laying waste to simple goodness, and as the years go by will berate Valentina bitterly, endlessly, mercilessly, because he himself is not cream and has not risen effortlessly to the top. This is where the crimes against the innocents eternally repeat themselves: in the hearts of the loving who are espoused to the wronged and vengeful.
Later, amidst wall-to-wall marble and Venetian vases of imported roses, Giancarlo weeps on his mother-in-law’s ample breast, vows tearfully to get Valentina back, promises Susan dark bilingual grandsons and blonde obedient granddaughters. ‘There there,’ Susan croons, stroking his balding head, ‘of course you will.’ But less about the feminine obedience, she thinks, and shouldn’t you should learn a little more about genetics?
Still reeling from the shock of her daughter’s pale skin, her chapped lips and raw hands, not to mention the combined effects of jetlag, gin and too many sunrises, of the omnipresent fear of terrorists and blood clots, Susan Halifax bursts into foolish tears in the taxi that collects her from the airport. The taxi driver takes her home through torrential and familiar rain — this is not the fine moist mist that poetically dampens the afterlife of the geographically arid, this is rain for the brave. Upon reaching her destination the driver squeezes her hand in a clumsy gesture of comfort, and Susan’s final, particularly lonesome, peculiarly dislocating agony is born in an instant. It’s not that the taxi driver hazards sweeping her off her feet. No, for a time he toys with her as one does with an old dog — fondly but distractedly.
Indeed if the truth be known, which it always will be in time, the man is not really interested in her at all. He is only interested in her pittance of money, which she wastes wantonly on taxi trips just to see him, and in her pain, because it makes him feel strong and masculine to hurt her. Before long he sells up and moves away, though of course his car still cruises the streets like a shark searching out prey. But Susan won’t be taken in. She has given up victimhood. By implication she has also given up on people — people outside the family, that is, because the family lasts, doesn’t it? In spite of everything, the family always remains.
