Magpie Hall Read online

  For Peter

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Rosemary

  Henry

  Rosemary

  Henry

  Rosemary

  Henry

  Rosemary

  Henry

  Dora

  Rosemary

  Henry

  Dora

  Rosemary

  Dora

  Rosemary

  Henry

  Dora

  Rosemary

  Henry

  Rosemary

  Acknowledgements

  The Sound of Butterflies

  About the Author

  Copyright

  One for sorrow,

  Two for joy,

  Three a letter,

  Four a boy.

  Five for silver,

  Six for gold,

  Seven a secret never to be told.

  The Magpie Song (Anon)

  There were two rumours surrounding my great-great-grandfather Henry Summers: one, that his cabinet of curiosities drove him mad; and two, that he murdered his first wife. I don’t know if either of these is true — all I know is that the cabinet went missing soon after Henry’s death, and the woman’s body was never found.

  After the Canterbury earthquake of 1888, he bought a damaged country estate among the South Island’s farming gentry. When he had finished rebuilding the house, it was unnecessarily grand, with arched leadlight windows, turrets and a tower, a miniature Gothic castle transplanted to the New Zealand landscape. Henry named the estate Magpie Hall and the magpies were there still, perching on its chimneys, keeping guard. After his wife Dora supposedly drowned in the river, he went on to remarry, and her disappearance became a stain on the family history that faded over time.

  Growing up, this was as much as I knew about Henry and Dora. Later, all I had to build their story were the clues the house gave up, some vague memories and a letter from my grandfather.

  In Gothic romance novels there is always an imposing country house, and quite often a young, naive heroine — frequently orphaned — haunted by the ghost, literal or otherwise, of a woman who has gone before her. There are letters, libraries and attics, someone imprisoned somewhere. Always a mystery of some sort, and often two potential lovers: one fair and intellectual, the other earthy and brooding, with wounds that only a woman, the right woman, can heal. Sometimes there is a fire, a great cleansing inferno from which the heroine emerges with her hero, rejuvenated, the past behind them and a perfect future ahead.

  I know this because I have been immersed in the stuff of Victorian novels for too long now, writing my interminable thesis. I suppose by coming to Magpie Hall to claim my inheritance I thought I would be inspired; instead all I found was the distraction of my own family’s ghosts, and of my own failings, the very ones I had gone there to escape.

  I drove inland for two hours through the rain in my beaten up Subaru, over plains and deadly straight roads until the land began to undulate and the hills were broken apart by limestone cliffs. In the back seat, the scraggy bones of my thesis — pages and pages of desultory notes, false starts and ramblings — languished in boxes, along with piles of novels and academic texts and my ancient laptop and printer. I don’t know when my love for Victorian novels had turned into a burden.

  Hugh, my supervisor, had helped me to carry everything to the car, protesting, but I had to get out before I suffocated. The university was making cuts and the long arteries of the English department corridors were empty. When I sat in my cramped office, I heard doors slam and padding footsteps, but if I stuck my head out there was nobody to be seen. The cuts had made the staff nervous and they shrank inside their offices. Sometimes I would hear the murmur of conversation — once even sobs breaking through the yellow walls — but I filled my floor-to-ceiling shelves with books from the library to insulate myself from the sounds of people’s careers foundering and crumbling. It was no wonder they took solace in each other’s arms.

  Hugh was one of the lucky ones — for now. When I told him I was leaving, he tried to embrace me and I let him, holding myself rigid against his fleshy chest.

  ‘Christ,’ he said. ‘What about me? God, you smell amazing.’ He took a deep whiff of my hair. ‘You are amazing.’ Clinging like a rat in a flood.

  ‘I’m sure you’ll cope.’ I pulled away, then patted his arm, aware of how stiff I was, how maternal the gesture. ‘You’ll have Gloria.’ My patience dropped away then. ‘Count yourself lucky. At least you’ve got a job.’

  Rumbling, grudging laughter. ‘Teaching snot-nosed little bastards who just want a few easy credits for their commerce degrees. Lucky me.’

  It was never enough. Nothing was ever enough. Not enough to have a wife — a younger woman, devoted to him in every way — two children, a decent, if not secure, job. He had to have me as well. Not instead of his family, although he had given me hope at the beginning, but as well as. He had once talked about taking me back to Wales, where we would live in a cottage in the hills for a year and both finish our projects — my thesis and the tome he had been scratching at for ten years, too scared to complete it because then it would be real, out in the world and open to criticism. Hugh didn’t do criticism, unless it was directed by him at others.

  Like the fool I was, I believed him.

  I tried not to think of his wife as we fucked, usually at the flat that I shared with a burlesque dancer above a tattoo parlour, twice on the floor of his office. I once saw Hugh’s wife visiting him with their youngest child, a brown-jerseyed boy just old enough to walk in erratic steps. She had smiled at me as she held the boy’s hand while he wobbled past, and something inside me had crumpled. She looked harassed, with red cheeks, hair falling from her loose pony-tail, but she still had the energy to smile at a stranger standing in the corridor gaping at her.

  That was the first time I left Hugh, but he had begged me to come back, shown up on my doorstep with a bottle of single malt and some collapsing tulips. He would leave her, he said, when the children were older. She’d be fine: he’d set her up; she could have the house. He’d never liked it anyway. We could still go away, just not immediately.

  That was when I first began to really hate myself, just before my grandfather died, and I didn’t want to admit what a bastard Hugh was.

  Death has a way of forcing your hand and now I was leaving. I was leaving Hugh; I was leaving the claustrophobic walls of the English department and all its distractions. As we walked through the downstairs lobby, laden with the books and notes, russet leaves swirled about our feet, brought inside by the current of students as they hurried through the doors.

  I let Hugh finish putting the boxes in the car, then I climbed in without a word and drove away. I watched him in the rear-view mirror as I left. His hand was raised as if he were waiting for me to wave back. He stood like that until I turned the corner and headed south.

  The house was shuttered against the coming winter, and the spectre of my grandfather stood on the front step to greet me before dissolving into the shadows. I had left the rain behind, and the weak autumn light descended from the clouds and bounced off the cliffs to the north, playing tricks. The stillness frightened me. I had been coming here most of my life and my arrival was always accompanied by movement and sound: Grandpa waving, one of the dogs wriggling its hips and coming over to sniff and bark hello, always at least one chicken out of its coop, scratching and nudging the earth with a crowing rooster not far behind. The bustle always diverted me from what I felt now — a slight panic, a creeping awareness of the places on the farm I had managed to avoid for twenty years staring at my back, willing me to turn and face them.
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  The looming presence of the house was exaggerated by the great shadows it cast with the sun behind its turrets and chimneys. Long spikes stretched across the paddocks. The flowers had retreated for the autumn and the ivy that climbed the grey stone walls had been reduced to a tangle. Rotten autumn leaves gathered on the ground in damp clumps and even the macrocarpas that lined the nearby paddocks seemed to have moved closer.

  A single magpie perched on the nearest chimney. It leaned towards me, leering. I stood on the gravel and stared at it a while before turning away to unpack my books and bags from the back seat. I had a fresh tattoo on the inside of my left wrist, and it ached with the effort of carrying the weight in my arms. When I kicked the car door closed, the sound was like an explosion in the late afternoon air and the magpie beat its wings, protesting.

  Grandpa’s old gumboots were stationed at the front door, abandoned sentries. I put down my books to fumble inside one of the boots for the key, still in the same place it had always been.

  It was colder in the panelled entrance hall than it was outside. It would have been a formal room once, but now it was filled with the debris of farm life: more gumboots, the humped backs of coats hanging three on each hook, umbrellas and the remnants of firewood. An axe was propped in the corner. A bucket and mop fell over as I brushed past. Stepping into the living room — opening the curtains, flicking at the dust that floated and settled again — I was overwhelmed by the smell of dog hair and mildew, and the perpetual odour of coal dust from the fire that burned all year round. Beneath that was the smell of beeswax from the solid mahogany and oak furniture. The heavy velvet drapes, now loosened from the windows, let in the thin light; the flocked wallpaper was peeling in places, and the thick dark carpet muffled everything. The only sound came from the ticking grandfather clock, which was odd. Somebody had been in to wind it.

  Staying at Magpie Hall had always been the opposite experience to life in my parents’ house; here, we didn’t have to worry about tracking dirt inside or leaving grubby fingerprints on anything. My mother couldn’t cope with the dust and the cobwebs, the clutter of books and ephemera. She always looked relieved to drop her children at the door and leave us for the holidays with a kiss on the cheek, getting back to her crisp house in the city.

  ‘It’s all the eyes,’ she told me once, because presiding over everything, along the top of a bookcase that ran the length of the room, shapes reared up: a magpie, frozen mid-crow; a cockatoo, crest arching in the gloom. A goat’s head, the only remains of a failed business venture. Grandpa’s old friends, and now mine. I made a clicking sound with my tongue, half expecting them to move, to cock their heads with curiosity, but they stayed there, staring out through shiny bead eyes. In the corner of the room, perched on a thin branch with its body tilted to the light and beak extending in an arc, was Grandpa’s prize, the huia. Its iridescent black feathers were gathering dust, nobody to protect it.

  Before I could do anything else, I needed to rescue it. I dragged a chair from the darkened dining room and stood on it. I felt wobbling and frail, up on my toes, fingers stretched until they ached. But then I had the bird in my hands, in my arms, and was dropping to the floor like a cat. I blew on the feathers, causing dust and desiccated insect carcasses from the neighbouring spider’s web to spray outwards and fall. I placed the bird on the side table, where I would see to it later, and went to look at my inheritance.

  Magpie Hall was to be renovated. Carpet ripped up and floors polished; walls knocked down for open-plan living and indoor-outdoor flow; wallpaper torn off and walls relined and painted fresh modern colours. I had seen the plans.

  I don’t think Grandpa would have liked it. He had left the house and farm to his three children — my father and his brother and sister — and, oddly, to my brother. I think Grandpa had notions that Charlie, as the eldest son of the eldest son, would take over the family business that my father had shunned, that he would take a wife and pass the farm to the next generation of Summers. But my brother was firmly attached to the city life, with a promising career as a doctor ahead of him. Better for Grandpa if he had left it to me. At least I wouldn’t be gutting the house. I would have kept it just the way it was.

  But I had no say. I was invited to the family dinner following the reading of the will, and they barely discussed the matter. They knew what they wanted — my parents and aunt and uncle — and only Charlie sat still in the corner, pale, clutching a beer. He felt guilty, I know, that he had inherited so much when his sister and cousins hadn’t. After a few more drinks, Charlie had stood, swaying slightly, and said, ‘What if I want to be a farmer?’ and the rest of the family had laughed him down. But I knew he hadn’t meant it as a joke, not in that moment. For one tiny second, I think my brother had imagined a different life for himself.

  Around my parents’ huge dining table it was decided that they would subdivide the farm — after it had been in the family for generations — and sell it, and that they would keep the house. It would be turned into a bed and breakfast hotel, to earn its keep. My family has never been poor. At the time I didn’t understand why any of them needed any more money than they already had, but I kept the thought to myself. Perhaps, too, they had other reasons. Although my father and his siblings had grown up happily on the farm, things had happened there since that they would prefer to forget. We all would. I just didn’t think that punishing the house was the way to go about it.

  As I walked through those dusty rooms, down the corridor lined with old watercolour landscapes and still lifes, I knew that this would be my last chance to know the house as it was; that soon my family heritage would be watered down, perhaps washed away, forever.

  Although some of the antique furniture would remain, for ‘character’, everything else would be cleared out or stored in the attic. The first to go would be the stuffed animals — the ‘menagerie room’ we called the study where most of the animals were kept, and where Grandpa practised his taxidermy. But it wasn’t just Grandpa’s collection — the birds and the stoats and the stag trophies he had spent his spare hours bent over — it was also Great-great-grandfather Henry’s collection, which meant there were some rare and very old specimens, of both exotic and native birds and animals, including the huia. My family would have liked to donate it all to a museum, or, even better, to sell it to private collectors, but here at least I had some say. For Grandpa had left the entire collection to the only family member who had taken any interest in the art of taxidermy: me.

  I was ten years old. Charlie, two years younger, stood over the magpie, pinging the rubber band of his slingshot. He hid the weapon behind his back when he heard me approach.

  ‘What did you do?’ I asked. Blood grazed the bird’s eye, but other than that it had no visible marks. I knelt down beside it.

  ‘Nothing. It was an accident. Stupid bird.’ He ran off, laughing, his skinny legs windscreen wipers in the long grass. He turned once to yell, ‘Stick it up your arse!’

  I lay down on my stomach and pushed my face towards the magpie, looking for any sign of life. I touched it, picked up the body in the cup of my hands. It was warm, soft; its head flopped lazily.

  ‘There birdie, poor birdie.’

  I pulled it into my chest and kissed it, wanting to comfort it somehow. The close proximity to real death thrilled me. It was the most elegant creature I had ever seen. I wanted to hold it forever.

  I knew just what to do with it.

  Grandpa was in his taxidermy room, tidying up.

  ‘Now, what’s this you’ve brought me?’ Taking the bird from me, seeing the look of concern on my face and handling it with more gravity than he needed. ‘Yes, yes,’ he said. ‘A fine specimen of Gymnorhina tibicen hypoleuca. Not a native, mind. Introduced in the 1860s to control the insects that were destroying the crops. Did you know that?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘And now they’re here to stay. Like old friends. Let’s see what we can do for this one, eh?’

  We kids
had once been attacked by magpies. They had swooped and dived at us as we walked through the eastern paddock to the river for a swim, and a beak grazed my hair before I put my hands over my head and ran, screaming, back to the house.

  Grandpa taught us how to deal with the birds. He broke two thin branches off a tree and showed us how to walk tall, sticks erect above us. He found four ice-cream containers and some pens. We drew psychedelic eyes on the bottoms and set off for the river, all of us, marching like tin-pot generals with the containers on our heads, their eyes hypnotising the magpies above and keeping them at bay. We named the pool at the other side of the paddock the Magpie Pool. Charlie proclaimed himself King of the Magpies after that, but I was not at all surprised that one of his missiles had found its mark.

  Henry Summers must have loved those magpies to name the house after them; or maybe they were such an integral part of the landscape they were unavoidable.

  I felt bereft when Grandpa took the bird from me and laid it out on the table. I sighed, and he looked up and saw my face. He moved aside then, reached for my hand and pulled me to him. ‘Do you want to do it? Do you want to bring the bird back to life?’ I nodded, of course, but I was scared of the scalpels that lay on his workbench, of what they might do to the bird, so perfect in its death.

  Grandpa made an incision from the magpie’s throat to its tail (‘Airway to arsehole,’ he said) and after he had gently peeled back the skin, he let me squeeze the secateurs that cut through the leg and wing bones at the shoulder and hip, and finally the neckbone. The bird had merely shrugged off its coat and now lay naked beside it.

  Together we mounted it. The magpie became our project for the rest of my holiday there as we scooped out the contents of the skull with a brainspoon, dried the skin with salt, checking up on it daily until it was ready, fashioned the body from clay and sawdust, chose glass bead eyes and sewed and glued and slowly watched it take shape. We positioned it with wings outstretched, full of life, defiant. We sat on the high stools at the workbench, shoulder to shoulder, bent over the bird. Grandpa’s great knobbly hands, with their brown-acorn knuckles, enclosed mine so often as we worked that I came to know their smell and texture as well as I knew my own small pale hands, which were like rabbit paws next to his.