The Night Book (5 page)

He thought of Roza Hallwright’s tall, slim frame, her cloud of bright hair and the pale eyes in the exquisite, narrow face, and he felt that she was part of the luminous sheen that hung over everything. He toppled sideways and fell on the concrete floor, with the sense that he would find something new and strange and glittering, if only he would let go. 

After the dinner, which they’d left early, David took the last flight back to Wellington and Roza was driven home. She greeted Jung Ha, who’d stayed up to keep an eye on the children. She checked their rooms. Isabel — Izzy — Roza’s stepdaughter, who was ten, was lying half out of bed, tangled in the sheets, and when Roza moved her the girl sat up and stared at her with glazed eyes, then muttered something and lay down. The boy, Michael, who was thirteen, had fallen asleep over a computer game. Roza looked down at him. He had grown heavy and solid in the last year. She knew he missed his mother: he kept it to himself but it was always there, even after so long. Roza tried to take the computer game but he moved and held onto it, so she left him alone.

She went up to the bedroom and lay for a long time in the dark, watching the clouds cross the moon. The curtains blew gently in the breeze. The room was up on the second floor and she liked to leave the window open. Usually she enjoyed being alone, with no one to interrupt her thoughts, just freedom and silence, and outside the window in the long nights the sky and the moon and the vast rippling dark, but tonight she was anxious and wished David was here to distract her.

She felt as if she’d lain awake most of the night, but at dawn, when the sky was turning red and the light was beginning to angle in through the window, she went into a deep sleep.

In the dream she was walking through the back courtyard of the Catholic church where she used to be taken for Mass as a child. She saw Father Tapper, with his glass eye and his white face. He beckoned but she wouldn’t follow. He faded, shaking his head, and she turned away and walked into a long corridor in a shopping mall. It was empty and silent and full of bright, white light. The shops had been smashed and abandoned; windows were broken, furniture and planks lay about on the floor. She came to a place where pieces of wood and broken panes blocked the way, and as she began, carefully, to climb over the debris, avoiding the upended shards, she saw that there were insects everywhere — crawling creatures, beetles, scarabs with marvellously vivid bodies in iridescent blues, glittering greens, purples and reds, their carapaces shining in the light. She perched on top of the wreckage and the insects were all over the floor amid the shattered glass and the wicked points of the broken panes, and she marvelled at the beauty and the brightness and the luminous colours.

Silence, colour, sharpness and clearness, beauty and danger, all still and bright and exquisitely near …

The alarm clock woke her. A shaft of yellow sunlight fell across the bed. The master bedroom was spacious, full of light and decorated in shades of white, cream and beige that gave it an air of bland, designer luxury. She dozed for a moment, trying to preserve the atmosphere of the dream, its vividness fading now in the lemony morning light (those wicked colours and sharp points — had she relished them or had they made her afraid?), then was roused abruptly by the memory of the man she’d spoken to at the dinner the night before. Simon Lampton. Her body had flooded with nerves when he’d told her his
name; she was sure she had concealed it, but she remembered the way he’d looked at her so intently, as if trying to read her mind, the way their eyes had locked and she had turned away with effort. Was she imagining it, his interest? No, it must be in her mind; he couldn’t have realised how she’d steeled herself to talk and behave naturally. He couldn’t know the effect that his name had had on her.

She felt tension fizzing through her body; her skin prickled. Alarmed to feel so tense, frightened even, she became tenser still. In the shower she turned the water very hot and stood with her head bowed, breathing slowly. She had learned how to fight her storms of nerves; she emerged from the steam calmer but exhausted by the effort, and dressed wearily, padding down to the kitchen, where Jung Ha was sorting through piles of washed school kit.

Jung Ha made coffee and, when the children didn’t appear, Roza went upstairs to rouse them. Michael lay on his back in bed, staring at the ceiling and refusing to speak. The room smelled rank and sweaty; it was no longer a child’s bedroom but the lair of a remote, uncommunicative young man. It came to her that he no longer smiled.

Roza plaited Izzy’s hair and made a quick, bored, conscientious check of her homework. Michael was silent and irritable; Izzy chattered and played with the cat. She was a lean, energetic girl, always talking and thinking up schemes. Her brother looked down at his cereal with a disgusted expression. Outside in the courtyard the light played on the surface of the pool.

Roza put down her cup. ‘Jung Ha? What’s wrong with this coffee?’

Jung Ha wasn’t having it. ‘Nothing!’

‘It tastes sort of …’

‘Nothing wrong!’

Roza was still tense with the thought of Simon Lampton, her nerves twisted tighter by the bright light, and Michael’s scowl. She
tipped her cup down the sink and said, ‘It’s bloody awful for some reason.’

Michael said to Roza, ‘I need thirty dollars.’

‘What for?’

‘School stuff.’

He met her eye. She felt the antagonism coming off him.

‘What school stuff?’ she said.

He shrugged. ‘Forget it.’

She said steadily, ‘If you need it I’ll give it to you, but I want to know what you’re going to do with it.’

‘I’ll get it off Dad.’

‘He’s in Wellington. As you know. What’s it for?’

He muttered, ‘It’s Dad’s money.’

Roza rounded on him. ‘David makes most of the money, yes. Is that relevant? I work too. And he and I are …’ She stopped. She’d been going to say ‘married.’

She was dismayed. Michael had always shied away from her attempts to mother him, and she’d thought she should give him space, not crowd him; now he was becoming a force, and she realised they’d never made friends, not properly.

‘Forget it,’ he said again.

‘Do you need the bloody money for school or not?’

He faced her, calm and insolent. ‘I told you I do.’

She took the money out of her purse and thrust it at him.

‘Jeez. Relax,’ he said.

She controlled her anger. ‘Good bye Mike.’

She hugged Izzy and walked them out to the car. A gardener’s truck pulled in, and two men started unloading tools and mowers. Jung Ha got the kids in the car, telling them off in her good-natured, hectoring way, and they drove away to school.

Roza walked along the path towards the pool. It was a bright,
hard day with a blue sky, so clear that the creeper on the garden wall shone with points of light. She looked up at the house. She and David had bought three sections and demolished the old weatherboard bungalows on them. The Hallwright house, surrounded by high, creeper-covered walls, faced onto the street and had a view over the suburb to the sea from the back. It was a square, solid concrete mansion, with a grand front door, landscaped gardens, a large swimming pool and several outbuildings. It was only four years old and still had a raw quality. The architect had aimed for something grand and imposing, but its brash newness gave it a slightly fake, arid appearance. There were patches of bare wall where the creeper hadn’t yet taken and parts of the garden that were still being landscaped, and looked sparse and barren.

They had hired an interior designer, since neither Roza nor David had much interest in choosing furniture, and the result was luxurious, but impersonal. Roza loved the house, its colour-co-ordinated interior, its vast, light spaces. It was a barrier against everything that had happened before she met David. It was her security, her retreat, and its ostentation affirmed to her that she was safe, rich and respectable. She was indulgent about its crass aspects, because these seemed refreshingly innocent. She was done with jaded things.

David just thought the house was classy. He was enormously proud of it. It was proof that he had reached the highest pinnacle — he had landed, in his own estimation, at the top. And its grandness and newness, its lack of history represented something, Roza thought, an idea, mostly unspoken, that she and David shared: that they had both made good, had
arrived
here, after trials and troubles in their former lives.

Since David had been elected leader of the National Party the mansion had become a fortress. Security cameras monitored all
points of the grounds, gates and driveways; panic buttons had been installed inside, and a private security firm was always on call.

David worked in Wellington for much of the week, and Roza lived here with her stepchildren, Jung Ha, the cat and the dog. She went to her publishing job each day, finishing at four so as to be there for the children after school. David came home at weekends and on some nights during the week. Life had gone on peacefully like this for four years.

But soon, David would most likely win the election and Roza Hallwright would be the prime minister’s wife. Everyone said her life would be utterly changed. And yet, she privately wondered, did it have to change? Couldn’t it go on just as it had before? David would be away more often, she would have to go with him on overseas trips, but there were no plans for them to move into the residence in Wellington. She didn’t see why she couldn’t try to have the same life she’d been leading.

She stood in the courtyard, looking at the pool. There were insects floating on the surface, reminding her of last night’s dream, which would have been triggered, she knew, by her encounter with Simon Lampton. There’d been that suggestion of the past in the dream: the blurred vision of the old priest, Father Tapper. The danger of secrets.

She remembered last Saturday: she and David had been lying here in deckchairs in the late afternoon sun.

She’d told him, ‘I don’t want to move from here.’

‘You don’t like change,’ he’d said.

She had leaned back and stared up at the patterns made by the branches. ‘Change isn’t good for me.’

‘It’s all right. I want you here. This is where you belong. With the family. In the bunker.’

‘Am I just the nanny?’

He’d caught hold of her hand. ‘Don’t say that. Jung Ha’s the
nanny. You I can’t live without. You know that.’

She didn’t answer.

‘Tell me you’ll never leave me.’ He was squeezing her hand.

‘Let go. You’re hurting me. What’s wrong with you?’

Looking into his lean face, the penetrating eyes, she’d got the sense of the hard man, who’d been hurt as a child, who’d lost both his parents and grown up poor, who’d lived with relatives who were dutiful but cold, and who had buried all his pain somewhere and lived on the surface of it, a thin crust with rage underneath.

He was clutching her satirically; he always made a show of parody when he was serious.

‘I love you,’ he’d said. ‘Never change.’

She’d looked up and seen Michael at the window, watching.

Now she thought, I say I don’t like politics, but really I don’t like
his
politics. But I don’t care enough for it to matter.

She remembered what he’d said next. ‘I want us to have a baby.’ She’d looked at him without expression. He’d said, ‘It would make me happy, and you too. I know it’s what you want. And you’ll be all right,’ he’d added.

‘Yes,’ was all she’d said in reply.

People had often told Roza: ‘Live one day one at a time’. And she had done just that. She’d become expert at living in the here and now, had come to relish it, to enjoy each day, mindful of what she had. But now something much larger was being asked of her. To adjust to a life under the public eye, to consider having a baby; to plan for great things that lay ahead. It was this contemplation of the future that made Roza frightened, and that caused her to turn her mind to the past. And then there was the question of Simon Lampton.

David had grown up poor and she had grown up rich. Her father, Antonin Danielewicz, was a businessman who’d owned interests
in more companies than Roza could name. He was a humourless man, religious and authoritarian. When Roza was disobedient he’d smacked her on the legs with a belt. Roza had been an obedient girl until she was fifteen, when she’d woken up to the idea of rebellion. She’d met a boy called Myron Jannides, who had dropped out of school, and together they’d launched into freedom. She was expelled, went to another school, and was expelled from there. Her parents were beside themselves; there were ugly scenes, recriminations. She accused them of repressing her, of forcing their Catholicism down her throat. She told them they were both cold, that all they cared about were money and God, and that Father Tapper had groped her and her friends in the back courtyard after Mass. This was a lie, but it was also an approximation of the truth: she’d felt that Father Tapper had played obscene games with her mind. He had made everything innocent and good seem dirty.

When she was still a teenager her father had died of a stroke, and her mother had accused her of killing him by breaking his heart. She’d left home, and drifted away from contact with her mother. After that, what she thought of as the dark days began. She’d had no idea of self-preservation. She knew now how innocent fun could turn ugly, how it could hurt you if you weren’t careful. By the time she was twenty, she was an alcoholic, and her days and nights were a giddy mix of euphoria and terror, laughter and shame.

She remembered the crisis, the lowest point: one morning, sitting on the back steps of her rented flat. She had just been fired from her job. The landlord would be looking for rent, and she had no money and nowhere to go. She sat looking at the light shining on the leaves and the birds swooping between the trees, and she seemed to be looking at the end of her life. Her hands shook. She was too thin. She couldn’t lie straight at night, because she felt that knives would come up through the mattress. She slept curled up in a ball with her
hands jammed between her legs, and had nightmares that people were cutting her there. There was a black space inside her. She had lost part of herself and she was afraid all the time.

That morning all those years ago the sun had come up, brash and hot, over the shining garden, and she’d sat dreaming on the concrete step, considering this new feeling: she had reached the end, and let go. She wouldn’t try to live any more, but would simply wait for it all to fall in. No more hiding and hustling, no more secretive addict’s bargains. The rent would fall due, the landlord would come; she would be thrown out in the street. It was finished; she couldn’t go on any more. It was a strange, sensual feeling.