Dark Mirror. Daphne Clair

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СКАЧАТЬ luck, then.’

      It wasn’t in the musical box on the dressing-table, nor on any of the cluttered shelves. Knowing her daughter’s habits, she eventually found the tiny brass key hanging on a nail inside the wardrobe. About to place it safely in her handbag, she paused, looking at the diary that it fitted. No, she said to herself firmly. Being Tansy’s mother didn’t give her the right to violate her privacy.

      * * *

      By the time the Toyota breasted the Brynderwyn hills and began the long descent towards the township of Waipu and the long stretch of road running by the sea at Ruakaka, Tansy was beginning to lose some of her extreme pallor.

      They’d been travelling for over an hour and a half and she’d scarcely spoken two words, but now she stirred in her seat and said, ‘It seems ages since I was home.’

      It had been a weekend two months ago. Fler said, ‘It seems a long time to me, too.’

      In the blue distance the jagged uneven peaks of Manaia rose from the glitter of the sea. According to Maori legend the tall, commanding rocks standing stark against the sky at the summit were the petrified figures of the chief Manaia and his family. Lower and closer, the striped towers of the oil refinery at Marsden Point stood near the shore, an equally impressive modern echo.

      Fler didn’t stop at Whangarei, the small northern city cradled between bush-covered hills and a tranquil harbour, but continued north along the Tutukaka Coast road that wound through softly folded farmlands latticed with stone walls, and sometimes narrowed between stands of trees or to accommodate a short bridge over a shallow stream.

      Then they were down near the sea again, driving alongside a sandy stretch of coastline, climbing once more before turning down the twisting road that led to Manaaki, the big old house overlooking the sea at Hurumoana. Glancing at Tansy, Fler was sure that the girl looked more relaxed already, her eyes brighter and her shoulders less hunched.

      ‘Nearly home,’ Fler said.

      Oh, God, she prayed, let her be all right. Please let everything be all right.

      * * *

      Fortunately the guest house had few visitors at this time of the year. Most of the rooms were empty, and in the neighbouring bay the motor camp with its rows of cabins was almost deserted. The sea thundered into the gap between the rocks below the house, pulling at long strings of brown seaweed that looked like dark hair streaming in the water, and turning over the fine pebbly shingle below the crescent of white sand on the tiny enclosed beach. A salty winter wind flattened the manuka growing at the edge of the cliffs and set the brittle sword-leaved flax rattling and bending before it.

      Tansy settled into her old room and spent the first few days listlessly sitting on the window seat facing the garden, gazing out through the glass, an unread book or her open diary in her lap. Sometimes she pulled on a jacket and went down the cliff path to the beach, scuffing among the small grey pebbles and broken shells along the strip of sand and then sitting on the rocks to watch the foam-flecked water hurtle by.

      Fler would stand at the lounge window, her heart thudding, until Tansy got up and slowly made her way over the rocks to the sand again, to climb the path to the house.

      ‘Don’t you worry, she’s not going to throw herself in the sea.’ Rae Topia put a comforting brown hand on Fler’s shoulder. She was the only full-time staff member that Fler kept on through the winter months, and over five years she’d become a friend as well as an employee.

      Fler turned from her contemplation of the rocks and the raging water. Tansy was on her way up now, hidden by the steep drop of the cliff. ‘I can’t help worrying.’

      Rae’s brown eyes were sympathetic, her comfortable figure somehow reassuring in its motherly bulk. ‘She’ll come right. You wait.’

      Within a few weeks it seemed that Rae’s prediction was coming true. Tansy’s appetite improved, her cheeks began to fill out a little and take on their normal soft-rose colour, and she even laughed sometimes. One night she came into Fler’s room before her mother turned out the light, sat on the bed and said, ‘Mum, I’m sorry I worried you like that. It was a dumb thing to do.’

      ‘Yes, it was,’ Fler told her frankly. ‘Honestly, sweetheart, no man is worth it, believe me!’

      Tansy shook her head. ‘I s’pose not,’ she said, looking down. ‘I promise I’ll never, ever do that again. But...I don’t know how I can live without him!’

      Fler’s heart sank. She opened her arms, and Tansy threw herself into them and sobbed her heart out.

      * * *

      When Tansy said she was going to return to Auckland and her studies after the holiday, Fler was torn between fear and relief. The thought of Tansy dropping out of university was dismaying, but going back meant she’d be within Kyle Ranburn’s orbit again. Was Tansy ready for that? His name hadn’t been mentioned between them since that night she’d cried in her mother’s arms.

      But even if Tansy was still carrying a torch, he’d made it brutally clear that he was no longer interested. If he ever had been.

      He’d said it was all one-sided on Tansy’s part. Yet he’d admitted to taking her out ‘a couple of times’. That was probably downplaying it. So it hadn’t all been on Tansy’s side at the beginning. Not for the first time, Fler felt a swift rush of impotent anger with the man who’d carelessly, selfishly almost ruined her daughter’s life. Tansy, brought up in the north where life was slower and kinder and less sophisticated than in Auckland, must have been a pushover for an unscrupulous older man.

      The night before Tansy was to leave again, Fler resisted the temptation to persuade her to stay or to extract impossible promises to phone every day, to let her mother know immediately of the slightest problem, to look after herself and please not pine after a worthless man who didn’t want her anyway.

      Instead, as they leaned side by side on the wide rail of the veranda, both dressed in jeans and woollens after a walk on the windblown beach, she looked out at the sunlight dying on the sea and said, ‘Let me know if you need me, darling. You know I’ll always come.’

      Tansy turned and gave her a hug. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’

      Fler thought that was all she was going to say, but she leaned back against the rail and, with her head bent, said almost inaudibly, ‘You think I’m an idiot, don’t you?’

      ‘Of course not!’

      ‘Well, I s’pose I am,’ Tansy muttered. ‘But...you don’t understand what it’s like!’

      Fler debated inwardly for a second. ‘I have been in love, you know,’ she said mildly.

      ‘Not like this!’

      The intensity of the statement startled Fler. But she supposed at eighteen she’d been equally intense, and just as convinced that no one else had ever felt as deeply as she did. Banishing a natural impatience at the arrogance of youth, she said, ‘I suppose everyone’s experience of love is unique. Especially first love.’

      ‘Was Daddy your first love?’

      ‘Well...yes.’ The couple of crushes she’d had in early puberty didn’t count.

      ‘And СКАЧАТЬ