Inheritance (28 page)

Carl looked over to me for help, his face a mask of dismay. I was fearful myself, surrounded by those dark shapes. A dead opossum swung inside a tube just above my head. Sound effects of bubbling and groaning murmured in the background. It would seem Carl had created the perfect scene for an assault. I thought for one quick moment that he had done just that; the whole scene another sinister gimmick. Carl’s anguished look put me right. This was real.

I used my voice as a weapon. ‘Excuse me,’ I boomed at full throttle, ’the lady does not want your attentions, sir.’

The roar echoed off the damp walls – surprisingly effective. The man reacted violently, jumped back as if he’d touched an electric wire. His nerves must have been stretched to breaking. I strode forward, trying to look confident and in charge. ‘Get her upstairs,’ I whispered to Carl, ‘and call the police. This man is mad.’

Carl hesitated, looking from me to the man. I thought he was suitably worried about me, but it turned out he feared the man might destroy his installation! I shoved
Francesca in the right direction and the boy stumbled up behind her.

‘I’ll be back in a moment!’ he shouted from the top of the steps, ‘Don’t leave him alone!’

I stood facing the madman, blocking his way for a moment, intending to follow immediately; not worried, to be honest, about protecting the work.

We recognised each other at the same moment. He had lunged forward and sideways, trying to side-step my useful bulk, but, instead, crashing into a great copper pipe which boomed like a gong. Surrounded by clashing echoes we stood face to face. His look was one of hectic triumph. I suppose mine was quite the opposite.

‘Yes,’ he whispered, his face pale and glistening in the dim light, the sound effects moaning and hissing an accompaniment. ‘Yes. So I am right all along. Well then, Elena, Jeanie’s friend.’

I said nothing, trying to think what my reaction should be. Where it would all lead.

‘She’s my daughter, isn’t she?’ he whispered. ‘You and Jeanie have hidden her from me all these years. My own daughter.’

‘Stuart,’ I said as firmly as I could, praying that someone would come to rescue me from this quagmire, ‘she is not your daughter. Believe me. Not. Your. Daughter.’

‘How can you know that?’ He smiled his disbelief, a grimace which betrayed his uncertainty.

I tried to keep my voice level, to pierce the armour of his self-delusion. ‘That girl is in no way related to you. I know absolutely who her father is. Absolutely. You must stop pursuing Ann Hope and her daughter. You have no claim. Do you understand?
You are not the father
.’

‘I could be!’ His voice became truculent, his eyes intense. ‘You don’t know, you stupid cow, what went on between me and my wife.’

‘She is not your wife.’ But it was clear that I was making no impression; simply provoking his madness.

‘Get out of my way!’ he shouted suddenly. ‘You are keeping me from my daughter!’ He shoved at me hard. I fell against some piece of metal and again the gong sounded, clanging louder this time. Goodness knows what I destroyed.

He ran past me and up the steps into the arms of someone – a tutor maybe, or passer-by. I heard him protesting innocence, a case of mistaken identity, his voice suddenly calm and rational, the wretch.

‘I do apologise,’ he said. ‘I thought she was my daughter, you see. I’ve been searching for her mother, and thought I had found a link.’ A self-deprecating little laugh. I could have throttled the man, but was still struggling to disentangle myself from unmentionable bits and pieces.

Francesca’s uncertain voice echoed down the stairwell. ‘But you’re not … My father is Italian …’

With relief I heard a voice of authority. Carl must have raised a policeman. By then I had made it up those damn steps. My arm was hurting like hell, broken I suspected.

‘No, no,’ said Francesca, ‘it’s alright now. No I don’t want to lay a charge. All a mistake.’

‘Well I do,’ I said firmly. ‘This man has assaulted me.’

Stuart Roper shot me the most malignant look. In the ordinary daylight he seemed smaller, scruffier. His coat was stained. He needed a haircut. The policeman led him
away. I could hear him patiently protesting innocence until he was out of earshot.

I rang Jeanie from hospital. The injury was not too serious; a clean break of the fibula. But I certainly made the most of it to the police. They said Stuart had some kind of record and were holding him while they checked.

Jeanie (I wasn’t going to call her Ann any more; she needed to acknowledge the truth now and so did my brother – for Francesca’s sake if not their own) listened to my story in silence. Left the silence hanging after I’d finished.

‘You knew about Stuart, didn’t you?’ I guessed.

Silence.

‘You have to tell Francesca, Jeanie. That wretched man is claiming to be her father. He could put doubts in her mind.’

Silence.

‘Jeanie, you’ve become too tied up in the lie. It’s damaging your life and it could damage Francesca’s. Surely it would be safer for her to know about her Samoan heritage?’

A groan down the line.

‘He’ll come back you know. If they let him out he’ll come back. I’ll do what I can, but the man is mad. Delusional. And able to disguise it. He is a danger to you and your daughter.’

I needed to be with her, to help her cut the ropes she had bound around herself, but I couldn’t drive and I had
meetings scheduled in Wellington. And the matter of Teo.

‘This is what I plan to do,’ I told her. ‘Teo is in the country with his wife. She’s ill and is having tests. I’m going to talk to him.’

‘It’s no use,’ Jeanie said in a flat voice. ‘That would be no use.’

She was so negative! My friend had disappeared down some black hole of despair.

I tried to jolly her along. Teo was not a monster, I said. If he knew there was a threat to Francesca, he could surely be persuaded to make some kind of acknowledgement.

‘He wouldn’t,’ said Jeanie, her voice hardly audible. But did I detect a glimmer of hope?

‘Let me try at least,’ I said.

‘Alright,’ she whispered. ‘Thanks Elena.’ There was a pause and I heard that sort of sob, or groan again. ‘It’s all a big mess,’ she said. ‘Sorry to be so useless.’

That was better. I promised to keep in touch, and to try to see Teo in the next day or two.

‘We’ll sort it out,’ I said. ‘Remember the Women’s Committee play? We can manage anything together!’

She laughed a little at that I think.

‘What can Stuart really do?’ I asked. ‘If he comes around again with that paternity nonsense, you can always get a DNA test you know. That’d soon settle matters. Francesca has a Samoan father. I’d stake my reputation on it.’

She made a sort of gasp, which I hoped was laughter.

Poor old Jeanie. She’d been on her own too long. Time for my brother to take responsibility.

We walked in a little garden in the grounds of the clinic where Ma‘atoe was having treatment. The tests had proved positive. Teo looked drawn. He was fond of his wife. She was having a bad time, he said. The chemo affected her will to fight the disease, he said. It was worse for her, he thought, than for many of the palagi patients. I questioned him about the prognosis. It wasn’t good. She had let the lump go too long. And there were secondary tumours already appearing in other parts of her body.

‘She wants to come home,’ he said. ‘I doubt the treatment can do anything more than prolong her discomfort. Could you speak to the doctors?’

I promised to do that. Teo also wanted to know whether I had accepted the position in Apia. ‘If you were back home,’ he said, ’you could oversee matters. It would be a comfort to have family involved. She would like that, I know.’

I felt ashamed. I had always found it difficult to relate to Ma‘atoe. Though we had grown up in neighbouring villages and were both wedded to a love of Samoa, we lived, I suppose, at opposite extremes of fa‘asamoa. She believed too blindly in the rightness of the old ways, the missionary teachings; I perhaps wanted to rush change too quickly. We could have found common ground, no doubt, but I hadn’t tried very hard, and possibly neither had she. And now she was dying. Ma‘atoe had raised her children strictly but I had to admit they were turning out to be beautiful, well-grounded kids. Perhaps I resented too much her insistence that I should not introduce them
to what she called my ‘palagi ways’.

If I could help her now, I should. I told Teo so.

He nodded rather gravely and smiled. Teo has become grave. What a contrast from the pushy, iconoclastic youth who returned with me to Samoa twenty odd years ago! He’s only forty for heaven’s sake but he speaks now like an elder, emphatically, and, when speaking English, with a strong island accent and idiom! He used to be so proud of his perfect New Zealand vowels! But he is, at least, forward thinking, and will influence the Fono in good ways I believe. Ma‘atoe has not managed to convert him completely!

We talked for a bit. He was full of enthusiasm for the Independence celebrations a month or two earlier. Our village had a very strong group of young fautasi oarsmen this year – two of the boys Teo’s sons. Our team won for the first time. The rowers, trained under Teo’s tutelage, streaked ahead of the opposition from the first shot of the pistol. The desire to watch them win had been the reason, he said sadly, that his wife had delayed coming for tests. She had jumped up and down on the shore as the boats raced towards the reef and shot through the gap, shouting and dancing with the other women from the village. It was her duty, she said, to remain and prepare the welcome feast. The truth was that she loved watching the fautasi race. The excitement of it. And now this dreadful time away from her family and her nu‘u.

‘I’ll talk to the doctors,’ I said. ‘Perhaps she can come home.’

‘Take the job,’ Teo said again, speaking with some force. ‘We need people like you, Elena. I hate to see our young
flocking to the bright lights overseas. Come back.’

We sat on a bench under a young oak tree, its branches still bare. The rose bushes in the little plot beside us were beginning to put out tentative shoots. A small clump of spring daffodils were the only splash of colour. Elsewhere, the soil was bare. There’d been a frost. I thought of the riot of colour, the lush insistent growth tumbling over everything back in our village. Perhaps I would go back.

But first Jeanie and Francesca.

I took Teo’s hand. He returned the pressure, smiled and would have spoken, but I held up my plaster cast to still his words. ‘You remember Stuart Roper, Jeanie’s husband in Samoa.’ This was not a question; I knew he would remember Stuart. ‘He did this to me. Down in Dunedin. Last week.’

Teo looked at me warily. Last time we had spoken of Jeanie, he had walked away. I was determined he would not do so again. I gripped his hand.

‘Listen, Teo. That Stuart is not well at all. Seriously unhinged, I would say. Remember how he stalked Jeanie back then; before she disappeared?’

Teo nodded. All attention now.

‘Well he’s at it again. He’s discovered her somehow, and her daughter, Francesca.’

‘Francesca,’ he repeated, ‘An odd name.’ He was looking away, pretending a lack of interest, but I felt his hand stiffen under mine.

‘Odd, yes, for one with Samoan blood,’ I said. ‘She’s been brought up to think her dark looks are Italian.’

‘Samoan? Are you sure?’ he looked at me now. ‘How old is she, then?’

‘About the right age for you to be the father,’ I said. Then told him the story of Stuart stalking Francesca; accosting her and claiming to be her father.

Teo exclaimed and walked away a little. I prepared to follow – he wasn’t going to wriggle out this time – but he came back to me; sat again.

‘He claims to be her father?’

‘Yes, but you see, he can’t be, Teo. Her Samoan heritage is clear to me. It would be to you too.’

‘Jeanie had a bit of a Chinese look.’

‘Not Chinese. Samoan. I see a likeness, now and then, to your own children, Teo.’

He flinched, but I pressed on. I pointed out that if I could see it, others would in time. That Stuart was a very unstable man who thought that the child might be his; thought that Jeanie had run away, changed her name, because she didn’t want to share the child. I had been thinking about it all and could see how his mind worked. I had been away from Samoa when Jeanie disappeared but the gossip was still around when I returned. Stuart had refused to believe that she wanted a divorce; had insisted that they were still married. Francesca’s age could make him think he was the father.