A Needle in the Heart (16 page)

And slowly answer’d Arthur from the barge:

‘The old order changeth, yielding place to new,

And God fulfils himself in many ways,

Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.’

His voice rises with a sweet melancholy, caressing the words, as if they are filled with special meaning for him.

She has noticed that her children don’t seem to be taught this poem at school. Perhaps she was, she can’t remember, but then so many things were a blur to her when she went to high school. She knows that she has come to think of it as Lester’s anthem, what he believed in.

She remembers the way Lester took her hand and led her to the bus every day when she first started school.

What was it about Adam that reminded her of Lester that summer he was seeing Victoria? Dan would have been so angry with her, with both of them, had he known what was happening. He would have been angry with Victoria for her wilful misbehaviour, and with Patricia for letting it happen and not telling him. Adam was known as a wild child in the town by the time he was fifteen. He drank too much, and fought and drove cars fast before he had a licence. He had a fine slender ascetic quality about his looks, not like his younger brothers and sisters, who were black-eyed and heavy like their mother, though he was supposed to have been Dick Miller’s boy.

And yet, when Victoria comes home with flowers in her hair, something silences her objections. One night, Victoria stays up and plays
Under Milkwood
on a scratchy vinyl record, three times all the way through. Somewhere round three o’clock in the morning, Patricia gets out of bed to fetch a glass of water and hears Victoria talking fast and low on the phone, and knows it’s Adam. Her midnight cowboy, Patricia thinks, her heart bunched up with fear.

‘Adam won’t stay in Ramparts,’ Victoria tells her. ‘He’s just getting some money together, and then he’ll be out of it.’

‘What will he do?’ Patricia asks.

‘Do? Oh, that’s all you think of, isn’t it? What people will
do
? As if it matters.’

Then, when Victoria went back for her last year at school, he’d pranged a car up on the bridge across the river. A young architect’s son who had started hanging out with him was killed and Adam has a permanent head injury, so that she is grateful Victoria isn’t more deeply involved with him, that the time for them to go off together hadn’t arrived. Though she thinks Victoria might have given her virginity to Adam (she says given to herself, rather than lost, because she wants to think of her daughter as a woman like herself, who has known only virtue) and what greater involvement does a woman have with a man: he must surely be the one you never forget. It’s hard to be certain, because Dan has been the only man in her life, but this is what she imagines.

Victoria is engaged to marry a town planner from Wellington, and Patricia, who has been helping Dan lay new lawns for the wedding, hopes that that particular incident and time in Victoria’s life are far behind her. She thinks that it is her role to protect her children from pain and loss and disfigurement. She has saved Victoria from her father’s wrath and the knowledge of Adam’s stain. The idea of Adam being like Lester hasn’t gone away. If anything, his injury has
reinforced
that view. And yet, when she thinks about Adam, she knows it is more than that, it is about words and about love; she finds herself wondering whether Lester ever knew what it was like to be touched by a lover, whether his clumsy left hand ever stroked a girl’s hair.

When Os Cooper gets too strange and wandery in the head to stay on the farm, a lawyer tells Patricia and Dan that it’s so run down it’s in no fit state to lease to anyone. They would be better to put it on the market. Patricia reminds him that her father still owns the farm and that her brother Lester is entitled to his share.

‘Your brother’s share is going to cause problems,’ says the lawyer, who is called Matthew Templeton. A man with a soft mop of girlish grey curls and a strong Roman nose, he lifts one side of his face
when he smiles while the other seems to stay quite still. His voice is laid back and slightly sardonic, his passion, Celtic music. He is the owner of one of the lifestyle blocks but he likes Ramparts so much that he comes there more often than many of the absentee owners. He has set up a two-day-a-week branch in the town that is doing better business than the old established family firm that has been in Ramparts for seventy years. The waiting room of his office has been remodelled to be light and airy and open, with potted palms in the foyer. A stunning Gretchen Albrecht painting hangs in the entrance way, an abstract with a strong sensual curve. Patricia, for perhaps the first time in her life, feels more than curiosity when she looks at this man and compares him with her husband, a stirring of something very like longing. He insists they call him Matthew.

‘I can’t assume Lester’s dead,’ Patricia says quickly. She tells him then what Christmas means to her. Among all the shopping and wrapping and cooking and carol concerts and the children coming home with their friends, there is the advertisement in the newspaper that the Sallies put there every year. Anyone knowing the
whereabouts
of Lester Nelson Cooper, please contact this number. His birth details, his last known place of abode. In Australia, people will be reading the same notice, hungry to make a connection, to become involved in the drama of someone else’s family. She doesn’t add the bits about collecting Os from the farm, and Dan’s mother from the rest home where Os is headed, and how they bicker and argue and the children roll their eyes while they drop food beside their plates. Nor does she say, in front of Dan, that there is a moment when he toasts them all, saying, ‘To our family’, and she thinks that there are two sides to families: the side you saw, apparently whole and complete, gathered around the Christmas table, and families like hers, lost and disintegrated. A moment of despair.

‘I think we can take care of that,’ says Matthew smoothly. ‘There’s an act to cover situations like this. It’s called the Protection of Personal and Property Rights Act.’ He has thought this through long before they came; already he has negotiated with their old reluctant lawyer, regarding the contents of Os’s will. ‘You’ll need to apply to the court
for a property manager to act on your father’s behalf and get the court to approve a new will. Presumably, as no one can find Lester, he’ll be excluded.’

‘Meaning Lester doesn’t exist?’ Patricia says, in a small voice.

Matthew gives her a keen sad look. ‘From what you’ve told me, it seems he might not. I think you have to proceed on the assumption that he’s dead. If you’re wrong and he turns up, he can always make a claim which you can settle between you.’

‘I see,’ says Patricia. ‘Yes, I do see what you mean.’

Ethel Miller doesn’t guess her life is going to change when she walks up to the Lotto counter one Monday morning. She’s called in to the supermarket for some tins of cat food and a loaf of bread and is on her way out when she realises she hadn’t checked her weekly Lotto ticket last Saturday night because it was her daughter’s twenty-first birthday. There’d been a few drinks and quite a crowd, even her ex-husband Dick had come over and been friendly, or at least about seven on a scale of one to ten, until he’d had one too many, but that was him all over. The ticket is in her handbag so she stops at the counter and has the attendant run it through the machine.

‘Mrs Miller, you’d better sit down,’ says the young woman.

There isn’t anything to sit down on, so Ethel grabs the edge of the counter and feels a prickling sensation all over her body. Just like that, the lighted numbers flashing up on the little screen, she is a
millionaire
. Nearly twice over. She can have whatever she likes.

Not that it’s that simple. There are some things that money can’t buy. Like putting her damaged son Adam back together again. At first she considers leaving Ramparts. As other people go there to get away from it all, Ethel thinks that she could leave all the old grief behind her if she leaves. But her sisters are here, and her children have started to settle around the town, and in the end she thinks it would be as well if she did too, for once and for all, with a touch of style. It hasn’t taken people long to work out the change in her fortunes, from the day she turned up in a dark green Mercedes, the car of her dreams, and one or two people might put two and two together on that score
as well, although perhaps there’s not that many who would remember. The old tractor shop has been pulled down and there’s a liquor store going in there now.

In the end, Ethel settles on buying the motel on the edge of town when it comes up for sale. It’s a bit seedy but she’s got some capital left for improvements and it will provide regular work for Adam, whom she can employ and keep an eye on. The motel was called Golden Glow, a remnant of the late seventies when it was built, but she renames it Summer Lodge. Adam says, reasonably enough, that people might think it’s only open in the summer, but she says she likes the ring of it. She has turned into a lucky woman and it has a lucky sound.

When Patricia clears the farmhouse out, in the wake of Os’s
departure
, her daughter Victoria offers to help. They leave Lester’s room until last. They have never been inside it since he left. It is clear that Patricia’s mother must have been in at some stage before she died, because everything is neat and orderly. And yet the room is frozen in time, as if, while tidying up, Vonnie had been loathe to give the impression that she had disturbed his belongings. Patricia realises that the secret side of Lester’s life, the part she never knew after he went to Auckland, had actually begun before he left home. There are Rolling Stones and Beatles posters stuck on the walls, a copy of a magazine called
Rip It Up
, a collection of Leonard Cohen’s poems lying on the bed with a hen feather marking the place at ‘Suzanne Takes You Down’. Some lines have been marked with a red pen squiggle in the margin. They’re about Jesus being a sailor, walking on water, watching drowning men from a lonely tower, and thinking that all men will be sailors when they’re freed by the sea.

‘Morbid,’ says Victoria, with a shudder. As well, there are several exercise books with L
IFE
S
UX
written inside the covers, like a mantra, and S
HIT
H
APPENS
Y
EAH
M
AN
on another one. ‘Did people really say stuff like this?’

‘It was a long time ago.’

‘Kind of historic. Did you ever think,’ Victoria asks her mother, ‘that your brother might have killed himself?’

‘Yes,’ says Patricia. ‘D’you think I’m stupid?’

‘No, Mum,’ says Victoria. Patricia sees how much, now, her daughter wants her life to be normal and wholesome, how this proximity to her vanished uncle, who seems like a family ghost, is unsettling her. ‘I wonder sometimes if you’ve got much imagination, that’s all,’ she says finally.

‘Probably not,’ says Patricia mildly. Her imagination has always been her own business, especially when it comes to thinking about Lester. It’s best, perhaps, if Victoria is like her — or, at least, thinks she is.

An elderly man, a retired electrician, and his wife who used to help him in the shop, stay at Ethel’s Summer Lodge. The couple, Lou and Shirley Mackintosh, have taken up conservation as an interest. They travel round the countryside staying at inexpensive motels and studying local rivers. They are looking for rubbish, of which there is a great deal. They have read about a young man in America who spends his whole life cleaning out rivers of all the filth and degradation that clog waterways, and though they are past diving and going down beneath the surface themselves, they feel they have a mission in life.

Their method is simple. To begin with, they investigate the banks of rivers, collecting all the rubbish they can find. They stack it in pile number one. Then, armed with rakes and buckets, they patrol the edges of the rivers, as far as they can reach, hooking out their prey and stacking it on the second pile. They find all sort of things, besides condoms and old farm machinery. They find eggbeaters and electrical appliances, lots of old toasters and electric frying pans and hair dryers — naturally, Lou has a very good nose for these — and broken china, just occasionally some rare whole piece that’s been abandoned to the waters, and tyre wrenches and complete bicycles and buckets and, of course, lots of plastic, which is the stuff they are passionately seeking and railing against. When all this mess has been piled up, they call in the local newspaper and get them to do a story that will arouse public conscience. It works every time. The great clean-up begins.

They are a little disappointed by Ethel Miller’s place. They had
thought they would be getting more for less at a lodge, as it’s
advertised
, but it’s just an ordinary block-walled unit like most that they stay in, and there is a strange young man who whacks the door with the newspaper when he delivers it, instead of sliding past and leaving it without a whisper, as is the way of most motel proprietors. Still, it’s clean and roomy, and the air is fresh and from their room they can see right down to the river that runs through Ramparts.

What they find in the river, among the general debris, is a hook, one of those old-fashioned ones that hand amputees used to wear, before modern prosthetics became available.

It was worth winning Lotto just to see Kaye Swanson walk into her motel, and come face to face with mine hostess, as Ethel describes herself on the swinging sign with her name emblazoned on it.

‘What did she say when she rang?’ Ethel asks Adam when she sees the reservations book.

‘She just asked if she could have a room.’

‘For how long?’

‘One night. Thursday.’

‘So she didn’t ask who was in charge, nothing like that? Come on, Adam, think.’ It bothers her how she wants to shake the boy
sometimes
when he gets that vacant look in his eye. Not that she could shake him, he’s too big and he’s twenty-six years old now.