Traces of Red, page 18
As there had been with Ian Bailey’s account when I phoned – that is, in the few minutes he allowed me before he hung up. Ian Bailey was now a stockbroker in Christchurch, successful, going by his address in Merivale. He had only a vague recollection of Angela Bligh. That girl who worked in the shop? A relationship? Of course not. The accident was long forgotten and all in the past. Connor Bligh? There was a pause.
‘He went to Palmerston North Boys High when you were there. Do you remember him at all?’
Click.
So who should I believe?
Eventually I stopped in Levin for a coffee. It was warm enough to sit outside at a table on the pavement and I idly watched people walking past me. When I was little I’d been convinced Levin was Live-in, which I thought perfect for a little town. I’d chant Live-in, Live-in as we drove through and it got right up David’s nose. It’s Lev-in. Mum, tell her to stop it. It’s Lev-in. I’d put my fingers in my ears and keep right on.
He was older and always thought he knew so much more than I did. Maybe he still did. As kids, we fought over almost everything. Not that we weren’t intensely close. Our relationship has mellowed. Now we rarely disagree. I daresay the majority of brothers and sisters meet once a year for Christmas with Mum and Dad – only the once, thank god – but I couldn’t imagine being without David. I couldn’t possibly imagine him not being on the other end of the phone to listen and offer his careful, rational thinking on whatever concerned me. David was my best friend. Even when I was a kid and hated him he was my best friend. I’d had to remind myself of that quite a bit lately – his caution and advice had pissed me off more than once. I had a reputation in the family of always leaping in, as Mum put it, boots, mouth and all.
David was my best friend. As Angela had been Connor’s. That was a large part of why I had begun to believe in Connor. He couldn’t have killed Angela and Rowan and Sam because it would be like me slaughtering Anna and David and Lily and Ted, whom I loved more than anything or anyone.
But, again, was I losing objectivity? Was their relationship like mine and David’s? Wasn’t, in fact, their particular situation entirely different?
I considered those differences as I drove on. There’s eighteen months between David and me whereas Angela was much older and looked after Connor. For all intents and purposes, she became his mother. David and I had parents who loved us, we were cared for and protected, we always had friends.
That isolation Connor and Angela experienced together, that sense of us against the rest of the world. While that situation changed as they got older and shaped their separate lives, wasn’t it likely that the intense closeness would have remained? But, again, didn’t it come down to whether or not I could trust what Connor told me?
Did he exaggerate the closeness? Or was that closeness too extreme? Was it so close there wasn’t room for either of them to breathe or move? So close that when, inevitably, something disturbed it the consequences were monstrous?
But Angela had married years ago, she had children, the affection she’d once had solely for Connor would have changed, would have become inclusive of her family. And Connor had lived with them for years – perfectly amicably, going by what he said. Okay, that’s what he said, but if it hadn’t been amicable wouldn’t Angela and Rowan have insisted he move out?
He’d have got used to sharing Angela; he said he liked Rowan and was fond of the kids in his own way. Connor had his own very separate life and interests and by the time Angela died he was living happily in his own home.
It wasn’t me.
This drug thing? Could it have had anything to do with the murders?
There would be enormous consequences for major drug companies. It would cause havoc. I had threats.
Enormous consequences? How enormous? Would there be millions of dollars at stake? Billions? Enough to kill for?
But why kill his family? Why not just kill him?
Because killing him would have been too obvious? Because this way they could get rid of him without anything ever coming out about what he was doing? Or had they, in fact, meant to warn him by threatening Angela, and to frighten him enough to shut him up? Maybe they’d not intended killing anybody but things got out of control.
If, on the remote chance that it did have anything to do with what happened, I wouldn’t want you involved, that’s all.
Could I be in danger?
I couldn’t help but glance into my rear-vision mirror at the blue Mazda following behind me. How long had it been there? I slowed and the space between us got smaller until finally it pulled out and passed me.
Two women eating ice creams, a baby strapped into a car-seat in the back.
Get a grip.
Ruthless corporations. Murderous corporations. It all seemed laughable driving along that almost empty stretch of road, cows in the paddocks behind wire fences on each side of me, the blue sky up ahead. But what if? What if?
ANGELA LEFT BAILEY’S and began work at Petal. She was the only applicant despite the training opportunities for creative floral design that were offered and despite the position promising quite a substantial increase over the wages she’d had at Bailey’s.
I understood that the most likely reason for nobody else applying was the owner. Tony Wallace. ‘Creepy’ was the term generally applied to Tony, uttered in a half-whisper along with exaggerated shudders. Parents wouldn’t have wanted their daughters working for him, though I couldn’t imagine why not. Any girl would have been a great deal safer with Tony than with any other Foxton businessman. He’d returned to Foxton after years away and had scandalised the town – ‘I always knew he was that way.’
I realised later how much he relished scandalising the town. In ordinary circumstances – at home or in his office behind the shop – his mannerisms and way of speaking could only be described as commonplace. But I remember watching as he minced along the main street dressed in his long black coat, beret and the white silk scarf with the long fringing, and whenever we heard the shop-bell – it was small and silver with one tiny pink petal painted on the side and it tinkled rather than clanged – he’d wink at us as he drew himself up and disappeared behind the door. Entrance upstage centre. Showtime.
We listened from behind the door. His voice flew upwards, hovered around a fruity falsetto. You simply must just gaze for one moment, dear heart, at these darling anemones. We heard the stiff, mortified replies.
Yes, he delighted in scandalising the town and he was entirely able to do just that. When it came to flowers he was an artist and the townspeople needed him for their weddings and their funerals and their anniversaries. Besides, if the gossip was true, he had a stack of money. According to local lore he’d been an only child and his parents had left him heaps. He was clever, working and travelling everywhere, it seemed, before he settled back in the house he’d grown up in. His bouquets – if they could be called bouquets – were exquisite configurations of colour and shape, of flowers, leaves, branches of berries wired and blended with beading and vivid scraps of fabric. I believe the shop was no more than a diversion for him. I believe also that he’d had a gruelling time growing up in Foxton. Coming back and flaunting who he was so openly was his way of settling scores.
But he was not the artificial and shallow man the town jeered and peered at. He was physically tough and, intellectually, well, I have never met anyone with such an agile mind. Every day he ran along the beach, his lanky, spare body bounding across the sand. He swam in the sea from the beginning of spring through till winter. And he read. He read and read and read. He could talk about anything.
He became Angela’s new mentor. It was Tony, in fact, who set Angela on the right track. He was cruelly critical of the Eve Bailey look – the checked shirts, the denim skirts. Angela, my love, why do you persist in wearing garments which make you look like a dowager? And the face cream. Especially the face cream. He did a very nice rendition of Kate Bush, ‘Heathcliff, it’s mee-ah, Kathee-ah,’ bursting out with it whenever Angela came green-tinged through the door and, in the end, her face returned to its slightly ruddy, less ghoul-like former state.
Angela took it all in her stride – she was not one for grudges. She was also a very good mimic and did Tony Wallace perfectly, her hands on her hips, eyebrows raised, voice dripping outrage. ‘Angela, if you don’t take that nasty scarf off this minute I’m simply going to have to rip it from your neck.’ And ‘My dearest love, what were you thinking when you dressed that poor little body of yours this morning?’
I’d be bent double laughing. Angela and I laughed a lot in those days. I was relieved I no longer listened as Angela cried through the nights. Just as I was relieved to get no more of the Baileys. Tony was much more interesting and Angela came to love him. We both came to love Tony.
The scarves and the skirts were discarded, the blonde ‘tips’ snipped away and a new Angela emerged. A streamlined Angela in neat jeans and jackets, natty little caps and with her hair glossy-dark, cut short and snappy. Her voice changed, she moved less awkwardly. As I said, Angela was a mimic.
I wonder what the town made of the friendship which developed among us. I used to stop off in Foxton after school and drink tea with Angela and Tony. She and I eventually became constant visitors at his house. Initially we were invited ‘to see the garden’. I’d ridden my bike by his house on the outskirts of town, staring in at it, long before I knew him. The solid mass of red brick rising out of the earth and lashed down by the Virginia creeper which swarmed up over the walls was unusually stately for Foxton.
Angela came home and told me, ‘Tony’s invited us to see his garden. He said he’d have a bite for us to eat as well.’ She looked shocked. Being asked to visit, let alone eat, at somebody’s home was, for us, a momentous occasion. We’d never been invited anywhere before.
I both wanted and didn’t want to go. At first I came down on the side of refusing. Brief meetings and talks with Tony in the shop were one thing, visiting him in his home quite another. What would we do? How should we behave? Why would he want us? Nobody had ever before asked us to look at a garden. We didn’t know about gardens. Our own garden was a scraggy geranium beside the back door planted perhaps by some long-ago former owner, or even our mother. What comments could we possibly make about Tony’s garden without appearing dim-witted?
But Angela said we should go. She said Tony was so nice to her, he was already showing her how to do flowers. She wouldn’t want to hurt his feelings.
I was slow to agree. You see, for me, visiting Tony Wallace’s house seemed a trial of epic proportions. Tony was sharp and eloquent. Damn it, what I wanted was for him to accept, even respect me. With the danger of sounding self-pitying, he was the only adult who’d ever demonstrated the remotest interest in me. My mother left, the old man loathed me, teachers gave me a wide berth.
Somehow I had to face up to and pass this test and so I took books out from the library and read up on gardens. By the time Angela and I visited Tony’s garden I was determined that I would be able to recognise and name a wide variety of plants and comment on them knowledgeably. Rather than imagining myself superior because of my intellect, in fact I was (and have remained, though to a lesser extent) intensely fearful and nervous of other people. I’d learned, to a certain point, to hide that at school. Though the collision with Ian and his mob had reminded me of my vulnerability, in the end that had been brief and remained between them and me. Things had now returned to how they had been, my prowess in guitar and volleyball earning my acceptance. Still, I never lost my awareness of how awkward and inept I had felt in my dealings with other children at Sunshine Beach Primary. I knew if I was to earn Tony’s approval, I must be properly prepared.
And so Angela and I arrived on time and thoroughly scrubbed up. The house was so grand, the garden so utterly beautiful, brimming as it was with daffodils and roses and tulips. The trees edging the drive were slim and leafy and graceful, there was a bank of deep red rhododendrons, a thick, heavy-trunked walnut tree, a lush lawn. The morning was warm and the air seemed different once we were inside the gate; still, heavy and silent.
We walked up the wide concrete steps and onto the veranda. Angela tentatively knocked at the door. We waited in silence.
‘You must have the day wrong,’ I said, furious with Angela for bringing me here, for getting it wrong, for introducing me to a place where I felt so awkward but that I longed to be a part of.
And then Tony appeared from around the side of the house. I thought as he stood below the veranda looking up at us that he was like a character from the Somerset Maugham stories we’d studied at school. In his panama hat, blindingly white shirt and pale, loose trousers he was an English gentleman attired suitably for the blazing heat of the tropics. He was a lot older than me, but when he appeared like that, his clothing somehow both loosely draped and snugly tucked around his long, elegant frame, his slim hands and slightly tanned face and those intensely intelligent, dark blue eyes which glinted with humour and just a scrap of malice, I understood how it could be possible to fall in love with a man.
I was dressed in the black pants I wore for the band and my best polyester shirt and I understood also, as I looked at him, how clothes can transform you into someone you may like to be. From that day I haunted op shops. Linen shirts, waistcoats, a flapping black Burberry. I grew my hair. I imagined I looked mysterious and soulful.
We wandered about the garden, we sat under the walnut tree and drank bubbles, we ate smelly cheeses and grapes and bread with a crust half an inch thick. We went inside and I pretended not to stare at the paintings and the rugs and the books and we listened to music. We returned home wordlessly.
Was he merely amused by two raw kids? Did he have some vague intention of seducing me? I don’t believe either to be true and he was far too tough and worldly to take on a couple of young locals who needed the rough edges sandpapered away. Somehow he became fond of us. It was Angela first. With Tony, she opened up and allowed him to see what I’d always known about her. In different circumstances Angela could have been a successful actor, I have no doubt about it. She could pick up the sounds and nuances of any accent, her face expressive as she acted out her characters.
Tony would listen, a gleam of evil joy in his eyes as Angela related stories of their various customers. At first I was silent around him; I was wary of talking much to anyone other than Angela because of my dread of ridicule. Then Tony found out my shameful secret. He casually asked me what I was reading and I told him. He said he hadn’t realised the book was available in an English translation and, without thinking, I answered it wasn’t yet.
He looked slightly incredulous. ‘I hadn’t realised Russian was taught in New Zealand secondary schools.’
‘Con teaches himself,’ Angela said. ‘He knows heaps of languages.’
‘No I don’t.’ I felt my face burning.
‘Yes you do,’ Angela said. ‘You know Japanese and French and Spanish and German as well.’
‘You teach yourself?’ Tony said staring at me.
I shrugged. ‘I’m doing French and Japanese at school.’.
‘Con’s clever,’ Angela said.
Tony was still staring. ‘You taught yourself Russian, Spanish and German? How did you do that?’
‘Books. Tapes from the library.’
‘You must be clever, Connor. Very clever indeed.’
From Tony I learned about music; I was particularly interested in the violin since Einstein had played the violin with reasonable proficiency. Tony always spoke to me as with an equal and he listened attentively to my answers. Apart from Angela, he was the only one who ever had.
It was just over a year later. The beginning of a summer. More grapes, cheese and crusty bread. More bubbles. I’d finished my last exams and just left school so the bubbles were superior and there were lots of them.
It was one of those days when the sun is so bright everything seems to come into a sharper focus. The roses and trees radiated light and the grass was as brilliant and soft as a sage-green pincushion. Tony brought out cushions and spread a striped cotton blanket beneath the walnut tree. He had Elgar’s Cello Concerto with Jacqueline du Pré playing on the stereo and it poured out from the French doors he’d left open in the living room.
Da da-da da. Da da-da da.
He sang it and I picked up a stick and conducted and Angela giggled.
‘Poor Jackie,’ he said. ‘She was in her heyday then.’
Yes she was in her heyday. When that was recorded she was married to Barenboim and he was conducting her. She didn’t know what was coming but you never do, do you? I suppose I should have felt sorry for her, beautiful, brilliant and doomed as she was but I couldn’t, not that day with the heat and that music and all those bubbles leaping around in my head.
We giggled more, talked more nonsense then lay back drowsy on the cushions. Angela and Tony slept. I lay between them. The stereo stopped and I heard the sluggish drone of bees in the lavender bushes. For that short-lived instant I lay between them motionless, silent, not thinking at all but simply feeling happy. Clouds began to form and shift across the sky directly above me. Light leaking through the foliage of the tree above us created moving shadow-images. I held up my hands, stretched my fingers and watched the shifting patterns on my skin. I listened to the soft breathing and the bees and the papery sound of leaves moving in the slight, tugging wind.
Foxton is one of those little towns which used to be the hub of the rural settlement for miles around. You can still see the old signs above the buildings along the main street for the drapery, the shoe shop, ladies’ wear, the butcher’s shop. Sadlers established 1899, the Municipal Chambers, Foxton Hotel. Now there’s a supermarket and a lot of empty shops with gaping windows.
