Drybread: A Novel Read online

  2

  Because Penny Maine-King's New Zealand lawyer was American, Theo assumed there was some connection between his origin and the years Penny had spent in California. 'Pure coincidence,' Zack Heywood told him. 'Absolutely. Mrs Maine-King came to me because the firm has experience in custody cases.'

  'But it must make it easier to get a handle on what's happened at the American end?'

  'Sure, sure. I worked in Richmond, Virginia, however, which is a long way from California. Family law varies dramatically from one state to another. Everything does, in fact. There's not the uniform jurisprudence you have here. It sure makes a difference what state you're in when it comes to what's against the law, and what sort of walloping you get if you're found guilty.'

  Theo didn't ask how a Virginian lawyer ended up in Christchurch, but, accustomed to the curiosity of others, Zack Heywood provided a quick resumé anyway. It was much what you would guess — a Kiwi girl on her big OE had been quite enough to bring Zack to a country he'd barely heard of, and to an income considerably reduced.

  Lawyers are unpopular as a breed, and the generalisation suited most of the individuals Theo had met. He'd come to Penny's lawyer expecting to find him greedy, conceited and assured — and found him able, good-natured and assured. He was well groomed and well dressed too, and Theo was conscious of his own scuffed, brown shoes and trousers that pouched a little at the knees. There were sharp creases on Zack's pink shirt, freshly ironed perhaps, or straight from the box.

  'I don't want to know where Mrs Maine-King is,' Zack said. 'I don't want to know if you know where she is. She's asked me to work with you and I'll do all I can.' He didn't have that much of an accent and didn't look much like an American, being small, olive-skinned and quite finely built. Maybe there were things of interest in that long Virginian past.

  Zack told Theo there were precedents for getting a stay in execution of a warrant, and then a rehearing, if the Family Court felt circumstances had materially changed. There would need to be some sign of compromise from both sides, though, he said; a reasonable chance of the parties working together. What they had to do was provide substantial reason for a rehearing. 'Are you in touch with Penny's husband?' Theo asked.

  'Through his attorney, yes,' said Zack.

  Theo told him Penny thought she'd have a better chance if she got sympathetic publicity: once she was back overseas, or if the boy were taken away, she reckoned she'd get done. Zack said the husband was pushing things vigorously from the States, and that the courts and police here had become quite active in custody disputes originating overseas. There were international agreements, he said, specifically the Hague Convention, and of course the father's anxiety to be considered.

  Theo felt a passing sense of guilt that the lawyer was more aware of the diffuse emotional impact than he was himself. But then again he was in it for the story wasn't he, irrespective of where the rights and wrongs lay. He hadn't warmed especially to Penny, yet it suited him to support her.

  'Have you known Penny Maine-King long?' Zack asked.

  'No, I've just been covering the story really.'

  'Having public opinion on her side is a plus for sure, but I'd go easy on making the Family Court a target if I were you. Doesn't pay to alienate those making the decisions.' 'Fair enough,' Theo said.

  'Anything I can help with I will. These cases have so much unhappiness.'

  'I've got a few things you could help me with, but we need to clear up who's paying for your time first, I suppose. You know what papers are like. My editor will allow bugger all for legal consultation.'

  'I think at this stage we just do what's necessary in the best interest of Mrs Maine-King,' Zack said. It had the ring of sentiments expressed by comfortable, professional people to whom money flows naturally, as if downhill.

  'But someone always pays in the end, don't they.' Theo was thinking of his own divorce, but the consequent surge of sadness, guilt, anger even, had little to do with fees.

  'If you want me to be mercenary, I can say that Erskine Maine-King is very well set up, and whatever the matrimonial outcome his wife will have a significant share.' Theo was glad for Penny that at least there was money somewhere. 'He's loaded,' said Zack Heywood, with sudden, colloquial indiscretion. 'But of course that, too, becomes a bargaining chip and leverage to get what he wants.'

  They talked for another few minutes, and Theo made notes. Zack was easy to like, and they agreed on how best to co-operate for Penny's benefit. Yet Theo felt how close to indecency was discussion by strangers of the relationship of a husband, a wife and a child. He knew the sense of bewildered violation when things most personal were bandied about with routine matter-of-factness by people who understood nothing of the marriage they dissected. Now it was Penny and Erskine Maine-King's turn, and a Kiwi newspaperman and a lawyer from Virginia sat in a Christchurch office with a view of a one-block grass square, Easter bunned with crossed asphalt walking paths, and talked of infidelity, incompatibility and unreasonable expectations; applied their complacent rationality to things so intimate at inception that neither marriage partner ever imagined they could go beyond their own knowledge.

  As he returned to work, Theo resolved that not everything would appear in the articles. Enough in his view for a balanced understanding, the arousal of sympathy, but stopping short of the titillation in which the magazines specialised. Both the editor and the chief reporter were keen on the story being kept alive. 'Pump it up, pump it up,' said the editor, shoving clumps of paper about on his desk in a minor agitation of journalistic enthusiasm. 'It's good that she's gone to earth somewhere in the South Island, and that she's talking exclusively to us.' It was always 'us' in such circumstances. 'How does she get in touch? Do you go somewhere?'

  'No, she sends a note, or phones,' Theo said. It was a half lie.

  'Well, pump it up as long as we don't incur any legal difficulties, or significant expense. She's not asking for money, is she?' Costs were a constant concern. His eyebrows fluctuated in apprehension when he considered any chance of financial liability. 'Is she?' The editor's abilities were almost certainly the equal of Zack Heywood's, but journalism lacks the strong self-regulatory codes that provide lawyers with the confidence of affluence.

  Theo reassured his boss, but what was Penny asking for? Theo assumed she wanted to have her child to herself, to protect him, to keep him from a man she was no longer in love with. But what qualities, apart from being unlovable after once being lovable, made Erskine Maine- King unfit to have access to his only child? When Stella and Theo divorced, they had comforted themselves with the thought there were no others close to be hurt. No kids to go through the uncomprehending misery of the breakup, no subtle continuation of warfare waged through the next generation, no complication if either partner found someone else — as Stella had.

  Theo knew the editor was still talking — he recognised the rise and fall of heavy, almost ginger eyebrows, the self-affirming nodding, the extension occasionally of his left palm uppermost, as if like a conjuror he wished to show he had nothing to hide — but he heard nothing his superior said. The backdrop of the untidy office was replaced by a view of bare hills in perfect perspective. Where had they come from, those dry hills? Were they the foothills of his North Canterbury boyhood, or were they the steep slopes he'd seen behind Drybread as he drove to the gully where Penny Maine-King was holed up?

  'Anyway,' said the editor, breaking through suddenly again, and proffering another palm against trickery, 'you'll know how to go about it in the best way. I'm certain of that.'

  'Okay, sure, thanks,' said Theo.

  3

  A plain clothes detective sought Theo out not long after his second article. He came to the newspaper, and Anna suggested her office for the interview. 'Better than sitting at your desk in the open reporters' room,' she said to Theo.

  'And I can stay if you like. I can be your sort of whanau representative.'

  'Why not.' The gesture was well meant enough, even
if motivated by curiosity, and concern for the paper's interests.

  The detective was young, blond and of only middling height. What happened to the old rule of having big guys in the police? Maybe brains were becoming more of a factor in selection; maybe there were just fewer to choose from. Anna stayed at her desk, and Paul Talleon, the detective, and Theo sat together on the other side. The interview was humdrum rather than inquisitorial. The detective retold what they all knew: that there was a court warrant for the child to be sent back to California, and that if journalists, or anybody else, connived in her evasion they could be committing an offence.

  'I'm just reporting the story from her point of view,' Theo told him. 'I think she just wants more time to find out what will happen if she goes back.'

  'Do you know where she's staying?' asked the detective.

  'No,' Theo lied.

  'What's the method of contact then?'

  'She rings me, or sends a note here.'

  'If you know where she is, you're obliged to tell us. You realise that?'

  'As a journalist I have to protect my contacts.'

  'That's right,' said Anna firmly. 'That's journalistic ethics.'

  'Not the law, though,' said the short detective mildly. 'Full co-operation is expected.'

  'I'll bear it in mind,' Theo said, 'but actually on the specific matter of this confidentiality the law's ambiguous.' He had done some checking of his own with Zack Heywood.

  'We're always aware of our obligations to all parties in such a sensitive and difficult issue,' said Anna.

  She was a very tall, rangy woman, and the competitiveness she had shown as a provincial netball player had carried over into her journalistic ambitions. The editor had several times praised her team ethic to Theo, perhaps as a spur to his cultivation of the same virtue. 'We'd like you to feel free to keep in touch, Paul,' she said. 'We'd appreciate word of any developments at your end so that our reporting is balanced.' Her eyebrows were so fair as to be invisible, and her whole face had a peeled look — pale lipstick was her only make-up. She wore flat, black shoes on her competent feet. Rumour among the reporters claimed that she'd had a torrid affair with a city councillor when her round was local bodies, but the humour may well have originated from professional jealousy, and Theo couldn't imagine her inquisitive face buried long in a pillow.

  He went down in the lift to street level with the detective. It gave him the chance to ask some questions without Anna's presence. How vigorously were the police looking for Penny? What did he know about her husband in California? What information had been before the court there? 'I don't think there are any real baddies in this case,' was Paul Talleon's final comment, 'but the law's the law, isn't it?'

  On his way back to his desk Theo poked his head into Anna's office and thanked her for the help. 'Good story.

  Stick with it,' she said, having clearly enjoyed the mild joust with the detective.

  'You think I should pump it up?' he said. Anna grinned, but was too loyal to make a comment.

  As a senior journalist, Theo had one of the two best desks in the large reporters' room — at the window, with a view of a tin can alley and the backs of a beauty parlour and a pet shop. He sat down at the other desk, which belonged to Nicholas, who had the largely nominal title of deputy chief reporter.

  'So when do you go to prison?' Nicholas said.

  'When Anna ceases to protect me from the police.'

  'Have you been to see this Maine-King woman again?'

  'No,' Theo said.

  'What's she like?'

  'Small tits, assertive, preoccupied with herself and the kid as you'd expect.'

  'Why would you expect her to have small tits?' said Nicholas.

  'Actually she does have bloody nice legs.'

  'Just don't end up screwing her,' said Nicholas. 'You screw her and you're done for, drawn into the whole mess — you become some man she can take it all out on. Screwing is how women attach themselves and create obligation.'

  'It's wonderful the way you find the romantic element in everything, Nick,' Theo told him.

  At his own desk Theo checked emails. Most were spam from such computer-generated creations as Warbles P.

  Burents, Judith Fhlth, Terrell Sozlly, Tib Uimeuzzc and Guilermo Shinholster. Two messages related to a story he was doing on the possibility of a new wave of boat people from Indonesia and the Philippines, so he settled to do some work on that. The Maine-King custody matter could peter out just as quickly as it had arisen. It didn't pay, he knew, to have any role other than commentator: the real parties would act quite according to their interests.

  What disturbed Theo most, of course, about Penny's story was that it reminded him of his own failed marriage, despite almost all the details being quite different: no court drama, no publicity, no ongoing contest or vilification. At the core, though, was surely the same pain that love and commitment had failed, the same bewildered anger, the same barely acknowledged guilt.

  Theo worked on the boat people story, avoiding the sensationalism that was its obvious temptation, and exchanged nonsense with Nicholas from time to time. Birds perched, bickered and fouled on the guttering of the building opposite. Nicholas said he was developing a universal theory of incompatibility in life, and that the behaviour of birds was evidence of it: When you painted a house white, they shat dark on it, when you painted it dark, they shat white on it. 'Everything conspires against you,' he said. 'All the forces active in nature are ultimately malicious.'

  Theo told him his theory was just a subset of Murphy's Law.

  'Murphy's Law is the clockspring of the universe,' said Nicholas, 'and immutable. It proved itself again just this morning.' He pushed his glasses up onto his forehead and turned away from his computer screen, stimulated by the recollection. 'I was trying to pull the hose across to the wall, and it twisted itself so that the metal mount fell and smashed the big, blue ceramic pot that my mother gave us. Hoses are real bastards of things. You can't let them get away with it.'

  At the back of Theo's mind a memory was spooling unbidden — Stella and he with their lawyer, in the house they had decided to sell.

  The silver birches had been stark, June etchings, but the plum tree behind still had a few caramel leaves at the ends of its most slender branches, and as the wind blew, the remaining leaves were strung out and flipped urgently like lures trolling in swift, cold water. Theo half expected the passing magpie to swoop in flight, to be hooked, to be drawn up through the heavy wind to some surface unknown.

  'Well, you'll be satisfied now,' Stella said. 'It's a funny business in many ways.' She wore her observed expression: half humorous, half cautious. I know you're looking at me, her face surely said, but you don't know what I think. True.

  After twelve years of marriage, true. Theo wondered what her face was like when she was alone; if it was the same as he could observe when she was asleep.

  'I'm glad we came. Thanks, I appreciate it.' As he spoke came the immediate conviction that the visit would achieve nothing. It came like a gust from deep within, and passed through chest, neck, face, causing barely a tremor, hissed from his eyes as the clean nothingness that made streamers of the tufted plum leaves. How often could such spirit keep passing away.

  'If he mentioned matrimonial home once, he mentioned it a hundred times,' Stella continued. 'I said all along I was willing for the house to be sold. But that's what lawyers are like.'

  'I suppose they have to deal with a lot of upset and unreasonable people. They want to make sure there aren't any comebacks.'

  'No comebacks?' she said. They were standing on the brick barbecue area that was never used much. It was too shaded, and they weren't a barbecue sort of couple anyway.

  'You've made it easier to sort it all out. I want to say that, whatever else happens.'

  'Why should we hurt each other any more?' Stella said.

  'Why should we be any more hurt or ashamed or angry than we have to be. We don't hate each other, do we?'
r />   'No,' he said.

  'We had a nice home. We had some good times,' she said. 'Maybe we were just disappointed.'

  'Maybe.'

  'We don't hate each other, but we're disappointed, aren't we. Isn't that it?'

  'Everyone has disappointment,' Theo replied.

  'Yes, but I'd hoped for less of it,' Stella said with flat finality.

  Everything around them spoke of common ground and a mutual past. Even the lawyer just departed had become an acquaintance, almost a friend, over the years of marriage. Theo had noticed his slight embarrassment as he gave advice, as he pointed out he couldn't act for both of them and that if things went ahead, each of them should be independently represented.

  The barbecue area was the last of their major do-it-yourself projects: after that they had been able to afford tradespeople. Standing in the cold tide of winter wind, Theo had perfectly recollected the construction over a long summer. They spent hours in weekends and evenings after work, chipping mortar from the stack of used bricks, digging out the lawn to a fastidious level surface, finally laying each brick in the base of sand. How often they discussed the positioning of the barbecue itself — he'd placed tiny home-made pennants to gauge the prevailing wind. The sense of achievement in the construction was greater than the pleasure of subsequent use. Perhaps they weren't informal enough as a couple, perhaps the pennants hadn't been a true augury of smoke drift, maybe they just couldn't be bothered. The lawyer had liked it though, particularly the low brick wall that could be used to sit on.

  Neither of them had been to the house for several weeks. They made coffee and Stella took a fan heater into the sunroom, which was small and easiest to heat, even in winter. The house had the bone coldness that came from being unlived in.

  'I was in Auckland last week, and it rained every day,' Theo told her.

  'Did you see Graham and Yvonne?'

  'It didn't work out, but I gave them a ring.' He knew she was wondering how much he was telling their friends. Both of them shied away from a discussion that would result in some agreed new way for friends to view them. 'They send their love,' he said. 'I didn't want to get into any stuff about us on the phone.'