It was exhilarating to leave the bridge. It was like having freedom of movement back in a leg that has had the plaster removed. A sunny lightness extended all the way up Cashel Street to its colourful shops made out of shipping containers which were huddled around the old city retail establishment of Ballantynes.
Most of us were pretend shoppers, sticking our noses into the showroom, which accounts for me buying a Bavarian sausage in a roll that I didn't really have an appetite for from a woman at a wurst stand.
While she turned the sausage on the grill we talked about the earthquake. She and her husband, a gymnastics coach, were from Hungary. They had arrived just before the September 2010 earthquake. I said something about bad timing, but she was quick to say how much they liked it here. The broken city was now their home, and in spite of everything they had found a way of accommodating the disaster in their lives.
I wandered back to the car, drove past the airport, and carried on north, past the roadside tree stumps brutally cut almost to ground level. Sun-split and weathered, they continued to launch themselves at the sky, held back by roots that carried on in the only way they knew how.
I was on my way to explore the world of O.T., Owen Tibbott Evans.
I have a photograph of a wheat field. It could be Russia or the south of England. In fact, the picture was taken by a photographer from the New Zealand Department of Tourism in 1917. Stooks of wheat surround a horse-drawn cart on which sits a man in a hat and a dark suit. Using a zoom I can bring up the white of his collar, but then the face of my mother's father, the North Canterbury farmer, disappears into a haze.
I am his descendant, or more accurately, as I have come to think of it, I am a descendant of a moment of lust and desperate loneliness.
There is no reason to believe that the farmer's other descendants know anything about my mother. Or whether they will welcome the information I bring. They have their own well-tended history to consider, their own family myths to respect. There was that sign I saw in Bexley, one of the areas worst affected by liquefactionâsomeone had painted on their fence âWe still live here!'
No one likes to think of their life as spectacle.
On the other hand, fault lines do not think. They are indifferent to what has been built on the surface of the earth. Fault lines have their own history to consider. They are not random events, but contain their own inevitability.
It was just a matter of time before I would get in touch with the farmer's family.
Maud may have held the stone but she never cast it, and so O.T.'s family never found out about Betty.
O.T.'s grandson, Wylie Evans, was gobsmacked when he heard about Betty from John Harper, a local historian whom I had taken into my confidence. Harper then got in touch with me to say that the Evans family would like to meet me.
I followed up with an email to Wylie, and one year after the earthquake I found myself retracing Maud's footsteps from the scullery end of the original Evans homestead.
This is what happens to a house left on its own to fight the elements. The front roof hangs over the veranda like a bad toupee. Half the veranda has disappearedâinto firewood, no doubt. Two huge lateral branches from a bordering macrocarpa lean on the roof with the weight of a drinker's arm.
It is four o'clock at the tail-end of a lacklustre summer, and inside, the house is dark and dank. The tall windows with their old-fashioned pulleys cast just enough light. A torch would be handy because in the hall I have to balance myself on floor joists left exposed by missing floorboards. The floors in the other rooms are intact but covered in sheep shit and dirt. In each bedroom of peeling wallpaper is a fireplace.
Ruins such as this are commonplace on farms where the need to occupy the same site as the original dwelling is not as pressing as it is in the city or on a suburban street where one footprint must be instantly filled by another. So a house is abandoned to the status of an old tree stump or rusting car wreck.
I'm surprised and delighted at how much remains. School exercise books dating back to the 1920s that belonged to Gwendoline, daughter of O.T. and Maggie, lie on the floor. I brush the dirt off a small card from
The Book Society, 13 Grosvenor
Place, Hyde Park Corner, London SW1
. There are books by the score, disintegrating in boxes, some scattered over the floors. I pick up
King Solomon's Mines
by H. Rider Haggard. Inside the cover I find it inscribed: âTo Owen Tibbott Evans, Christmas 1896, from Father.' I hold in my hand a book once held by O.T., and his father, and feel an unexpected rush of pleasure.
In a dark cupboard I find three pharmacy bottles dispensed by E.P. Shier, Amberley, in 1923. The bottles have a milky residue, like milk of magnesia, with a labelled instruction to take four times daily. Milk of magnesia is excellent for heartburn, dilutes the fire. I know this from personal experience.
Then I pick up
The Boarding School Girl
and find inside the name of O.T., this six-foot-something, broad-shouldered stockman and stud master.
On a wire spike I find a year's worth of invoices for 1938. I peel off each one, hoping to find something private scribbled in the margins, or a letter that somehow has become muddled up with the bills. But the wire turns up only invoices. Still, something of the man and how he lived is revealed in what he's paid for in the course of the year: bills from Meat and Wool in Marion Street, which is the street abutting Ghuznee with the music store on the corner across the road from the shoe factory, an invoice from the Little Company of Mary Hospital in Bealey Avenue, Christchurch âfor Miss Evans, Rm 23', an invoice from Blackburn Motors in Christchurch, distributors for Buick, for an oil and grease and a pint of shock absorber oil, a receipt for £10 from the New Zealand National Party (to be expected), fees to the Canterbury Park Trotting Club, the Timaru Trotting Club, the Oamaru Trotting Club, invoices for the transport of horses to these meetings (I've since learnt that O.T. won the New Brighton Cup with a horse called Beckleigh). I pull another fistful of invoices off the wire. There's one from Whitcombe & Tombs booksellers, and, devastating for any father to receive, an invoice from Shaw and Sons in Rangiora to cover the funeral expenses for his daughter, Gwendoline, which is unceremoniously followed up with bills from baling and chaff-cutting contractors, hardware merchants, ironmongers, regular invoices from a florist in Christchurch and D.H. Fisher âTerms Monthly Storekeeper Hawarden', often for the same items: sixteen eggs, cheese, matches, twine.
I wonder which room Maud slept in. Very likely the one nearest the scullery. But perhaps notâI have just learnt about the existence of fourteen-year-old illegitimate May sent âinto service' at Taruna at the same time that Maud lived here. May's bedroom would have been the one nearest the service end of the house, in which case, I decide, Maud must have taken the bedroom directly behind O.T.'s. Great swathes of peeling wallpaper hang down like bats' wings from a pink-flower frieze. Its delicacy has survived the general dereliction of the room.
Hawthorne invoked an onion to describe seduction as a kind of unravelling.
You may strip off the outer ones without doing much mischief perhaps none at all; but you keep taking one after another, in expectation of coming to the inner nucleusâ¦It proves however, there is no nucleus, that chastity is diffused through a whole series of coats, is lessened with the removal of each, and vanishes with the final one which you supposed would introduce you to the hidden pearl.
Add to that the creaking silence of the house, and a gathering sense that the world has forgotten Maud and O.T. And the casual thought that comes and goes, first as a shameful surprise, and then not at all, but familiar, and then a wish, and then a frustration, and then a need that cannot be suppressed any longer.
Is that what happened? Who would know? Who would possibly know? The trees? The night looking in the windows? The dying embers in grate? The furious stars blinking impotently in the window? The world that might tell is mute. But if we know anything at all about the human condition, then we do know.
My mother was born in December, so she was probably conceived in the early autumnal days of March. The scorching firebrand light dying in the sky. Night air tangy with old fruit lying beneath the trees in the paddock on the south side of the homestead. How strange it was, how extraordinary, to stand in the room where my mother was conceived, and to breathe in the sooted air of this old ruin where the conditions of my childhoodâabsence, silence, repudiation of the pastâwere cast.
Scratching around in the dark and dirt on the floor of May's room I find novels belonging to her, as well as an exercise book filled with poems by Gwendoline who, I'm told, loved to write and ride horses. Gwendoline died at the age of twenty, officially of leukaemia, but Margaret Evans, Wylie's sister, suspects hydatids was the cause of death. On the floor by a pair of ancient waders I find a volume of
Sacred Songs and Solos
with Gwendoline's name inscribed, and a novel,
Stella's Fortune
by Charles Garvice, enormously popular in its day, with May's name handwritten inside, Mary Olive Kinley.
Apparently May had no other family. Wylie Evans isn't sure where she hailed fromâChristchurch, he believes, or possibly Rangiora. All that is reliably known about May is that she was illegitimate. On that fact alone May's persona rests.
In Wylie's recollection, May was always there, working in the background, almost one of the family. After Maggie died, May stayed on, not that there was anywhere else to go. She had grown into Taruna and Taruna into her.
Apparently there was no one else in May's life. She never married. No one came calling, and O.T. always made sure she stayed inside the house whenever a swaggie came in the gate. I'm told he didn't like women to be left alone in the house.
Shearing gangs came and went. The shearing sheds are up the back of the farmhouse. A shearer might have stood in the shade of the shed towelling the sweat off himself and seen May hang out the washing or picking fruit, moving through the shadowed and lit patches beneath the trees surrounding the house. But no one can recall such a scene. Wylie remembers May shouting up the hall for his grandfather to shift his bones before the porridge grew cold.
I wonder about Mayâthe facts of her life recall that basic need to love and to be loved. She'd been flung out and taken in, like a dog from the SPCA.
May is in Christchurch with Maggie and her new baby Geoffrey, when Maud moves in to Taruna as housekeeper. After Maggie dies, in 1943, May moves into the armchair by the fire and sits into the evening with the farmer. Perhaps O.T. cannot think of May in any other way than as âservice', or even as âillegitimate', in which case he has saved her. She is forever the fourteen-year-old who arrived out of the blue. I imagine he felt an affection, even a love for this woman who will never leave the property.
On her birthday he will have a present for her. He will rest a hand on her shoulder, plant a chaste kiss on her cheek. It may cross his mind that he has been here before. There was Maud, and he nearly paid dearly for that, worrying himself silly that word would get out.