The Luminaries (34 page)

‘You talk as if you were her keeper! Where were you this
afternoon,
when she was in danger?’ said Gascoigne—who was beginning to feel a little reckless. ‘And where were you when she turned up near-dead in the middle of the Christchurch-road?’

But this time Clinch did not cower beneath the accusation, as he had done before. Instead he seemed to harden. He looked back at Gascoigne with his jaw newly set. ‘I won’t be schooled about Anna,’ he said. ‘You don’t know what she is to me. I won’t be schooled.’

The two men stared at each other, as two fighting dogs across a pit—and then each expressed his recognition of the other, and
conceded
, tacitly, that he had met his match. For Gascoigne and Clinch were not so very dissimilar in temperament, and even in their
differences
, showed a harmony of sorts—with Gascoigne as the upper octave, the clearer, brighter sound, and Clinch as the bass-note, thrumming.

Edgar Clinch had something of a circular nature. He was both solicitous and self-doubting—attributes that, because they opposed one another, tended to engender in him a state of constant,
anxious
flux. He provided for those whom he loved only to demand their fullest approbation for his care—a demand which, in turn, shamed him, for he was sensitive to the nuances of his own actions, and doubtful of their worth; consequently, he retracted the demand, doubled his provision, and began again, only to find that his need for approbation had doubled also. In this way he remained perpetually in motion, as a woman is perpetually in motion,
harnessed
to the rhythms of the moon.

His relationship with Anna Wetherell had begun in just this way. When Anna had first arrived from Dunedin, Clinch had been all but overcome: she was the rarest and most troubled creature he had ever known, and he swore that he would not rest until she was beloved. He secured his best room for her, and pampered her in all
the ways that he was able, but he became very hurt when she did not notice the efforts he had made—and when she did not notice his hurt, he became angry. His anger was both unsustainable and unsustaining; it did not nourish him, as men are sometimes
nourished
by their own rage. Instead the emotion only diminished him, leaving him all the emptier—and, therefore, all the more ready to love.

When Anna first arrived in Hokitika she was with child, though her belly had not yet begun to wax, and her figure did not yet betray the secret of her condition. Clinch met her upon Gibson Quay, to which place she had been conveyed by lighter, the barque
Godspeed
having dropped its anchor some hundred yards or so
offshore.
The day was clear and bright with cold. The mouth of the river shone brilliantly; there was birdsong in the air. Even now Clinch felt that he could recollect every detail. He could see the wide halo of her bonnet, and the ends of her ribbons, flapping in the wind; he could see her ankle-boots, her buttoned gloves, her
reticule
. He could see the purple shimmer of her gown—which had been hired, as he later discovered, from the impresario Dick Mannering, to whom Anna would pay a daily rental until she could afford to make a purchase of her own. The garish colour did not suit her: it turned her complexion sallow, and drained the life from her eyes. Edgar Clinch thought her radiant. Beaming, he enclosed her thin hand in both of his own, and shook it vigorously. He
welcomed
her to Hokitika, offered her his elbow, and proposed a stroll, which she accepted. After directing the porters to have her trunk delivered to the Gridiron Hotel, Clinch threw out his chest and walked Anna Wetherell down Revell-street like a consort escorting a queen.

At that time Edgar Clinch had been in Hokitika less than a month. He did not yet know Dick Mannering, though he had heard the latter’s name; he had met Anna’s boat that afternoon quite without prearrangement with either the magnate or the whore. (Mannering had been detained in Dunedin, and would not arrive in Hokitika until the following week; in any case, he preferred to travel by steamship than by sail.) On fine days Clinch
often stood upon the spit and greeted the diggers as they disembarked onto the sand. He shook their hands, smiled, and invited each man to take his lodgings at the Gridiron Hotel—remarking, casually, that he could offer a handsomely discounted price, but only to those men who accepted it within the next half-hour.

During the short walk from Gibson Quay Clinch became very aware of the delicate pressure of Anna’s hand upon his elbow; by the time they reached the Gridiron’s front door, he found that he all but depended on it. He begged to treat the young woman to luncheon in the dining room; she accepted, prompting in his breast a paroxysm of redemptive feeling, as a result of which he offered her his very best, and very largest, room.

Anna paid for her lodging with a promissory note from Dick Mannering, which Clinch, in his sudden flood of generosity, accepted without question. By the time it dawned upon him that she must be a member of the old profession, his affections had been securely, and irrevocably, bestowed. When Mannering arrived in Hokitika one week later, he introduced himself to Clinch as Anna’s employer, and thereafter negotiated an agreement under which the whore would receive, in exchange for a weekly fee, the benefits of protection, discreet surveillance, two meals a day, and a weekly bath. This last item was an expensive luxury, and one that would be rescinded (as Mannering confidentially explained) once the girl was well established in the town. Over the first few weeks of her employment, however, it was necessary to pander to her sense of opulence, and to satisfy her tastes.

Clinch was more than happy to fill the copper bathtub every Sunday, laborious though that duty was. He loved to glimpse Anna upon the landing, wet-haired and freshly clean; he loved to pass her in the dining room on Sunday evenings, and catch the milky scent of soap upon her skin. He loved to pour the spent bathwater, clouded with dirt, into the gutter at the edge of the road, and hope, as the white water seeped away, that Anna was looking down upon him from her window on the floor above.

Clinch’s efforts in love were always of a mothering sort, for it is a feature of human nature to give what we most wish to receive,
and it was a mother that Edgar Clinch most craved—his own having died in his infancy, and since then been resurrected as a goddess of shining virtue in his mind, a goddess whose face was as a blurred shape, seen through a window on a night of fog. There was an ill-fated aspect to all of his love’s labours, however, for they required of their object a delicacy of intuition that he himself did not possess. Edgar Clinch was a hopeless romantic, but in all the ordinary senses, he was an unsuccessful one: despite his daily
ministrations
, Anna Wetherell remained entirely ignorant of the fact that the hotelier loved her with the passion of a lonely and
desperate
heart. She was courteous to him, and kept her rooms in decent order, but she never solicited his company, and she restricted their conversation to the most trivial of themes. Needless to say, her indifference only warmed the coals of the man’s infatuation—and banked them higher, so that they burned longer, and with a redder light. When Mannering suggested, after a month, that the
extravagance
of Anna’s weekly bath ought to be discontinued, Clinch only ceased to itemise this service on Anna’s monthly bill. Every Sunday he set out the copper tub, and laid out the linens, and drew the water as before.

It seemed, in those first few months, that nothing at all could dampen Clinch’s adoration for Anna. He was not repelled by the fact of her profession, though it did distress him to know that she was so frequently in danger of harm. When he learned that she was an opium eater, and took the drug nearly every day, he was likewise only grieved and fearful, rather than repulsed. (He
reasoned
that the drug was very fashionable, and that he himself took laudanum whenever he could not sleep; why, what was the
difference
, between opium that had been turned into a tincture, and opium that had been burned into a smoke?) The sorrier aspects of Anna’s life, far from driving Clinch away, only caused him sadness, and as a consequence he longed for her happiness all the more.

When it became apparent that Anna was expecting another man’s child, however, Clinch’s sadness acquired an edge of alarm. He began to wonder whether he ought now to make his feelings known to her. Perhaps he should make an offer of marriage.
Perhaps, when the babe was born, he might adopt the little thing as his own, and care for it; perhaps they could become a family, of a kind.

Clinch was pondering this very question one midwinter
afternoon
when he heard a thud upon the hotel’s veranda, and a muted cry. He opened the sash window (he had been lighting the fires in the upstairs rooms) and peered down to see that Anna had
stumbled
on the short flight of stairs that led to the front door. As he watched, she lifted her arm, slowly, and began to cast about for the rail.

Clinch descended the stairs, crossed the foyer, and opened the door to admit her—in which time Anna had hauled herself upright and crossed the veranda. When Clinch stepped out, Anna, who had been upon the point of reaching for the latch herself, fell against him, and, to stop herself from falling, she reached up and wrapped her heavy arms around his neck. She turned her face into his collar, so that her nose and mouth were pressed against the skin of his throat; she seemed to sag against him. Clinch gave a murmur of surprise—and then he was very still. He felt that if he spoke, or moved too quickly, the moment might be shattered, and the whore might flee. He looked out, over her shoulder. It was a pale, bright Sunday afternoon, and the street was quiet. No one could see them. No one was watching. Clinch cupped Anna’s waist between his palms, and breathed, and breathed again—and then, in one swift movement, he folded Anna against him, lifted her up, and crushed his mouth against her cheek. He stayed there for a long moment, his lips against her jaw. Then he hoisted her higher, retreated back into the foyer, shut the door with the edge of his foot, turned the key in the lock, and carried her upstairs.

Anna’s bath had been set out in the room opposite the landing, and iron pots of water were waiting, covered, on the ledge beside the fire. Clinch, still with Anna in his arms, lowered himself down upon the sofa next to the bath. His heart was beating very fast. He drew back, to look at her. Her eyes were closed; her limbs were loose and syrupy.

Many months had passed since Anna had returned the rented
purple dress to Dick Mannering, having purchased, in place of it, several dresses that were better suited to her frame. Today, however, she was not wearing the bustled orange gown with which she
habitually
advertised her trade—for the whores in Hokitika wore bright colours when they were working, and muted tones when they were not. She was dressed, instead, in a cream-coloured muslin frock, the bust of which was cut in the style of a riding jacket, and buttoned to her throat. Around her shoulders she wore a blue three-cornered shawl. From these clues, and from the fact that she was all but insensible from the effects of opium, Edgar Clinch deduced that she had just been in Chinatown: when she travelled to that place, she travelled incognito, in her dull-coloured clothes.

With shaking fingers Clinch eased the shawl from Anna’s shoulders and let it fall upon the floor. He then untied the bow at the back of her dress and loosed the strings of her corset, moving slowly and in stages. His fingers found her covered buttons, one by one, and unhooked the loops that secured them. She was compliant in his arms, and when he moved to ease the dress off her shoulders, she lifted her arms like a very small child. Next he detached her crinoline, and lifted her out of the uppermost hoop, so that the frame fell away, hitting the floor in a rattle of buckles and wood. He eased her down upon the sofa again—she was now undressed to her slip—and folded her shawl over her body. Then he stood, and began to fill the bath. She lay with her cheek against the back of her hand, her breast rising and falling with the fitful breath of sleep. When the water was ready Clinch returned to her, murmuring phrases of reassurance; he drew her slip over her head, gathered her naked body up, knelt, and lowered her into the tub.

Anna made a cooing noise when her body touched the water, but she did not open her eyes. Clinch arranged her so that the copper lip of the tub sat snug against the nape of her neck, ensuring that she could not slither down, and drown herself. He smoothed her hair from her cheek, and ran his thumb around her jaw. He had wet his sleeves up to the shoulders, in lowering her into the water; now he stood back, and held his dripping sleeves apart from his body, and looked down at her. He felt very lonely and very contented at once.

After a moment the hotelier knelt and picked up the muslin dress from the ground, meaning to shake it straight, and fold it over the back of the sofa. The dress was heavier than he would have imagined—why, it was only muslin and thread, now that the crinoline had been detached, and the bloomers and petticoats
discarded
! Why was the thing so very burdensome? He pinched the fabric, and as he did so, felt something strange beneath his hands. He turned the dress over—what was that, some kind of weight, spaced along the seam? It felt like a row of stones. He eased his finger beneath a thread and felt it snap, then wormed his finger and thumb into the tunnel of the hem. Perhaps it had been stuffed with something. He withdrew, to his astonishment, a pinch of pure gold.

Anna was still sleeping, her cheek against the lip of the bath. Clinch, his heartbeat racing, felt along the seams of the gown, and up the flounces to the bust. There were ounces and ounces—
perhaps
pounds—concealed within the fabric. And all of it pure! What had Anna been doing in Chinatown, to return half-addled with opium, her dress stitched up with ore? She must be trafficking the stuff somewhere—smuggling it, by the looks of things. Taking it
into
Chinatown? That did not make sense. She must be taking it
out
. In exchange for opium, perhaps! Clinch’s mind was moving very fast. He recalled now that concealing gold in the lining of one’s clothing was a common method of evading duty at the customhouse, though it was a risky business, for if one were caught, one faced heavy fines, and even time in gaol. But Anna herself was not a digger—she was a woman, for heaven’s sake!—and the gold could not be hers. Someone must have trusted Anna enough to hide this gold in her clothing. And Anna must have trusted that man enough to bear the risk on his behalf.