The Night Book (11 page)

‘I wouldn’t have one.’

She teased, ‘All that time down in Wellington by yourself, opening your lonely tins of beans.’

‘I’ll keep flying back. To you,’ he said. ‘I love you. I know you wouldn’t do anything to jeopardise … to damage us. Everybody feels that.’

Roza looked at him. ‘Us. Everybody. Are you talking about our marriage or the party?’

‘About us. Obviously I love you. I trust you.’

She thought, that word: obviously. She had heard it more often, as the campaign had got underway.

‘You trust me,’ she repeated. ‘You and “everybody”.’

He said quietly, ‘Do you have any idea what I’m about to do, any idea of the pressure? It’s not just me or us any more. It
is
everybody.’

‘But … you make it sound as if people have been talking about me, weighing me up.’

‘No.’

‘Like I’m some sort of problem.’

‘You’re not a problem. I just have to think of the big picture now, that’s all. I have to think of the whole team.’

‘The whole team.’

He was suddenly angry. ‘You can hide away, isolate yourself. I’m the one who has to front up. Of course I think in terms of the team. And risks. I’ll tell you what else,
risk
is what I’m good at. Why do you think we’ve got so much money? Why do you think you live in such a big house? Because I know how to take risks.’

She sat up and pushed him away. ‘So I’m a calculated risk? Is that what I always was? Lots of inherited money, looks good …stacked up against problem with the booze. Did you weigh it all up, when we met? The money was the hook, I suppose. You didn’t have much. Part of the reason
you
live in this big house is because of the start I gave you, with the money.’

She had never said anything like this before. His eyes filled with such intensity she thought he might hit her. She moved abruptly and he flinched; for a second they were motionless, eyes locked.

He said quietly, ‘I have never needed your money. All this,’ he waved his arm in the air, ‘all this was made by me.’

There was a sound in the hall, a tiny metallic ping and a thrumming noise, as if something had brushed along the metal rungs of the heater. She saw his expression change, as he listened. They waited. Silence. He dropped his head and then cast her a black, sideways look.

Roza put her hands up to her face. ‘Oh, don’t look at me like that.’

‘Your money was nothing compared to what I’ve made. Nothing.’

‘Okay. Okay.’

She sat on the edge of the bed, her feet together on the floor, inspecting her fingernails, thinking. David crossed to the bedroom door, unlocked it and looked out. He came and sat next to her, put his arms around her and held her very tight.

‘We’ve got to stick together. You’re what I care about most.’

‘Yes.’

‘We need each other.’

‘Yes,’ Roza said.

They began to pull off each other’s clothes.

Later he went to the bathroom and turned on the shower. Roza listened then got up and opened his briefcase. She drew out a manila folder full of pages.

When did he take Michael to a movie in a Crown car? And surely Michael wouldn’t express himself in this way: it made him sound like a much younger child. But of course it wasn’t true; someone had
written it for him, to portray him as a well-rounded, decent family man. It was corny but he would deliver it well in speeches, with warmth and conviction. A small story, to fit into the larger. It wasn’t on the scale of John Howard’s lies about refugees throwing children off boats. It made no wild claims …

She put the folder back in the bag and walked into the bathroom, looking at the shape of him through the dimpled glass. A swathe of mist hung at middle height, grey air. He turned and started slightly, dropping the bottle of shampoo.

He called, through the glass, ‘Roza?’

Simon knotted his tie. In the next room Karen and Claire were having a low-level scrap, and above the sound of their voices the wind whined over the roof and shook the trees. He had driven home through a wind tunnel of flying twigs. There was a monster weather system out in the Tasman Sea, the radio had told him, and it was scheduled to move our way. It was the fourth big storm of the winter. Was this the new weather? The idea of climate change made him so anxious (because of the children) that he screened it out. When the kids were in the room he switched channels to avoid items about melting ice caps and mass extinctions. He worried especially about Claire, that she would get depressed. The news about the planet was always bad and it always told him that Claire should be depressed, or at least worried. Many in the party, including Karen, thought climate change was a Green conspiracy and a hoax. Simon hoped it was a hoax, he prayed it was. But he didn’t feel so secure that he could watch the stories and blandly scoff, as Karen and Trish and Graeme did.

The stories about the planet definitely disturbed him more than anything. But here he was, knotting his tie, and off to an evening for party donors at Trish’s house (the Hallwrights were expected; Karen
was beside herself). The people there would not care to discuss the end of the world; they would talk about growth and prosperity and the need to get ahead. And fundraising, and golf.

Simon inspected his face. Dark loops under the eyes, a new furrow in the middle of the forehead. His expression was open but slightly too intense, evidence, perhaps, of something hidden, the face of a man who wants to be seen as good.

The mirror reflected the hall and the door to Marcus’s room, and beyond that the bright aquarium, the water whirling in the current from the aerating pump. Simon paused: he could see something floating in the current. It sailed across the top of the tank, slipped down to the bottom, whirled up again into the scatter of bubbles, crossed the surface again.

He crossed the hall. The tank was a square of light, casting a white glow over the bed, over the tangle of model airplanes and school books on the desk, and the lurid posters and the footballs and bits of school uniform strewn on the floor. The blinds were open; the trees outside were being violently battered and stripped by the wind. The window frames rattled. He peered into the tank. The floating thing was a fish. He watched it limply borne by the current, its mouth open in an O of surprise, its scales already dull and slimy-looking. Turning and turning in the current, dragged down to the stones, its tail loose and feathery, the round dead eye no longer shiny but matte and grey, it snagged on a plant and hung in the fronds, upside down. The other fish came near, nudging it, until it broke free and drifted on.

In another room Claire said, ‘Mum, do you have any idea how stupid that sounds.’ There was a bang.

Claire said, ‘God. Calm down.’

Simon looked at the dead thing, struck by the absolute annihilation of structure. Before, it had been densely packed, flipping
and turning, tight with life; now it just whirled, like a piece of cloth, as if it had never had any bones. He turned off the pump and the fish sank sadly down through the weeds, the others darting above it as it bobbed and lolled, coming to rest at an angle that looked somehow louche and obscene. Simon moved the net clumsily; he managed to squash the tiny corpse against a rock, and brought it up, wincing. The sodden little puddle of orange slime lay in the bottom of the mesh. He peered into the tank, his great anxious moon of a face distorted by the glass. The other fish turned and flipped their tails, rising in the stream of bubbles.

He carried the dripping net from the room and trudged down to Marcus.

‘There’s been a bit of a tragedy, old chap. One of the fish has died. Backwards, is it. Or possibly Forwards.’

Marcus got up briskly and looked into the net.

Elke clapped her hands. ‘We’ll have a funeral.’

‘What, now?’ said Barbara, who had arrived to babysit, which really meant, now that Claire and Elke were both old enough to mind Marcus, that she was there to stop them killing one another.

‘Yeah. Out in the garden.’

‘There’s a storm,’ Barbara pointed out flatly.

Claire said, ‘Even better. Atmosphere.’

Barbara looked at Claire and sniffed.

‘I’ll make you a gravestone,’ Elke said, and slung her arm around Marcus’s shoulder. She said, ‘Here, Dad. Give us the deb body.’

Simon handed her the net and went back upstairs.

Karen was smoothing down the ruffles of a new outfit. She was all in black, as tightly wrapped as a parcel from the waist up, and then the long skirt with its layers of flounce and gauze and ruche. She sat down, pulling on her long black high-heeled boots, and he looked into the swell of her brown cleavage, packed in and fringed
with black lace, and felt something rise in him, a strange kind of longing that was close to pity — but for whom? — and he knelt down beside her, helping her to zip up one boot and then the other while she sat back and watched him with a distant, ironic air. There was a flash of lightning, followed by the long rumble and crack of thunder. He rocked back on his heels and straightened up painfully. Oh, the creaking knees. He stood bent and looking sideways at her, his hands on his thighs.

‘One of the fish has died,’ he said.

She crossed to the mirror, took up a small brush and began dabbing her cheeks.

‘Maybe overfeeding. It can’t be underfeeding.’

She looked closely at the small brush, blew on it and said, ‘Trish rang. She sounded so confident. If it was me, I’d be panicking by now.’

‘Trish is not one to panic.’

‘She’s amazing, isn’t she.’

‘Yes, I’m constantly amazed by Trish.’ He went to the door.

She made a tsking sound. ‘Oh, you. Are you ready? Leave the aquarium, we’ve got to go.’

‘I’m ready.’

She turned, picked a hair off the tiny brush and said consideringly, ‘I’m surprised one’s died. The amount of time you spend on them. They’re the most looked after fish in the world.’

She looked straight at him and he was surprised to see a flicker of cold laughter in her eyes. That his Karen should want to hurt him, yes, it was unexpected. Simon glanced away, wondering what he had done or not done to deserve the little barb, the coolly scathing tone, but perhaps she didn’t mean to prod him where he was tender, and of course it was ridiculous to care about the aquarium, to care so much, to feel a kind of mortification at the sight of the little corpse,
as if it were one of his patients, dead on the table after some terrible botch. Perhaps too, she didn’t realise that her gentle ribbing about his devotion to the fish made it obscurely embarrassing now that one of the little bastards had died on him so soon. He had never had a hobby, and here he was, already failing. For God’s sake, he thought. It’s a goldfish. He took his patients’ lives in his hands every day, and didn’t fail — touch wood, God forbid.

He allowed a little silence to play out, to show that he’d registered her tone, and then left the room, for one last quick stocktake of the tank.

Before they left, Claire drew Simon to the window. ‘Look.’

Out in the garden, with the rain falling in curtains around them, Elke and Marcus stood under umbrellas. Marcus shone a torch that lit up their dreamy, absorbed faces and Elke, the stalk of her umbrella held in the crook of her arm and resting on her shoulder, carried a small box in her hands. She was talking and Marcus was listening. The rain blew across the torchlight. Simon thought of the children’s secret lives. How Marcus punished Elke because she wouldn’t play games, how she had jilted him and how he tormented her, trying to win her back, and he wondered what it had meant for Marcus having this strange, compelling girl suddenly planted in his family life. It must have been as disturbing for him as it had been for all of them, but Marcus had never wished Elke gone as Claire had; instead he had followed her, yearned after her, and all their fights and teasing and childish violence was an intense battle that came close to being love.

Marcus was transfixed — what was she saying? She gestured, and he leaned in and laid his hand on the box. Elke had a flair for ritual and drama. She was not rational like Simon and Claire, not grounded like Karen; she was all instinct, secret, feral, self-contained.

‘They’ll catch their deaths out there,’ Barbara said. Simon and
Claire turned and looked at her in silence, and she withdrew with a sniff, sensing the rebuke that hung in the air, father and daughter turning up their noses — and what unfortunately similar noses they were, Simon thought. Worse luck Claire. Barbara was obviously wishing Simon and Karen would go, so she could bustle the difficult girl back to her homework and spend some cosy time with the younger ones.

There was something wistful and soft in Claire’s expression as she bent over her textbooks. She acknowledged Elke’s power and charisma; she always had. Marcus, and Karen of course, would always side with Elke against Claire. Claire could not alter this. Elke would always be more beautiful, and Claire couldn’t do anything about that either. But perhaps my love will keep her here, Simon thought. Otherwise she might fly away and never come back, his clever, angry girl. She knows I understand. That I see what she sees, and maybe that is enough. 

He stands at the window, looking down. She’s in the courtyard by the pool, dressed to go out, and he watches as she puts out her hand to steady herself, bends down and fixes a strap on her shoe. The pool water glows, bright chemical blue. He leans his face against the glass, thinking about his first wife. Becky was small and pretty and curvy, she was short-sighted and wore contact lenses she was always losing, she was never silent for long, not until she was dying, and then he sat with her for hours, just waiting, and the only sounds she made were sighs, a ragged drawing in of breath. There were no last words, just laboured breathing and at the end a strange noise that sounded like a laugh, and then the realisation that she’d died and the panic and confusion, the children brought in, tiny and stricken, and at that point something closed over in him, was sealed.

He did not look back. He surrounded himself with beautiful things. Freed from the upheaval and horror of the death, he threw himself into what he did best. By the end of a year of grieving he had more money than any of his circle, was on his way to political power, had never faltered, never stopped, never questioned or railed against fate, had just driven on through. The black space stayed inside him, but he only looked forward, and survived and prospered. He met Roza.

Roza sometimes looks at him with a laughing expression. He knows what she’s doing: mentally correcting his grammar. Wincing humorously over some misused word. He never acknowledges this; he ignores the twinkle in her eye, just pays her back with silence, the cold shoulder; he keeps the balance, never talks about Becky with Roza, never lets her in. He holds the memory of Becky over her like a weapon, a secret bond he shares with the children. He keeps the barrier there; he has to. Because Roza is potentially unmanageable.

Becky used to look up to him. She cheered him on, was reverent about the party and his political ideas. Everyone remembers her fondly — such a good-natured and open woman, self-deprecating and charming, popular with men and women. She was gorgeous, his first love. He lets Roza know this and doesn’t let Roza know that he loves her far more than he ever loved Becky; that his love for Roza is sometimes mixed with fear, that he senses qualities in her that he can’t contain.

She’s still down there, sitting in a deckchair by the pool, as he limps through the quiet rooms. In the bedroom he checks his tie and combs his hair, then looks through her things. In a bottom drawer there’s a manuscript hidden under some clothes. The name on it makes him frown: Ray Marden. Going through her bottles of pills, he notes the labels, checks a pile of her printed emails alert to anything unusual, lifts a T-shirt and smells soap and fabric softener. He tidies as he goes, and in his mind’s eye he imagines Roza pregnant, carrying his child. Looking at himself in the mirror he smiles, the eyes hard.

Then the final smoothing down of her clothes, the closing of the drawers, the removal of all trace of his inspection. He loves things, to own them, to straighten and order them. When he was a child he spent years sleeping on a couch in a sunporch where there was barely room for anything. He was the add-on child, sent to Tokoroa, taken in by relatives he barely knew. He shared the sunporch with
two cousins and they kept their few books, toys and treasures under the bed. They all wore one another’s clothes — it was first up best dressed. They hardly ever bathed and they all stank. His uncle used to chase the kids with a wooden spoon but could never catch them, he was so wheezy and broken down with heart disease. The day Uncle died they were all fetched out of school, David’s cousins wailing in the back of the van, their faces covered with snot and tears, some aunt or second cousin grimly piloting the old bomb along the back roads, and when his aunt ran out in the rain to meet them, red in the face, blinded with tears, he realised how alone he was, standing to one side, dry-eyed and silent, watching them in their grief.

He goes downstairs, passing through the kitchen where Jung Ha is cooking and supervising homework and the dog is waiting for its dinner, through to his study where he shuts the door and rings Dianne, checking items from his mental list, putting things in order. He trusts Dianne with most things, but doesn’t mention Ray Marden; he will look into the question of the manuscript in Roza’s drawer himself.

She’s still sitting out in the courtyard, eyes closed, her face turned up to the sky, and he joins her out there, squinting into the watery rings of light. She opens her eyes, startled — no, he thinks, pretending to be startled — and studies his face and smiles, reaching for his hand.

‘What are you thinking about?’ she asks.

‘Nothing,’ he says.