Just for once, I imagined, he might have felt a bubble of frustration at the unfairness, at the arbitrary manner in which, once again, he had apparently been judged. Because I heard him stand and his voice on the soft wind. He was unable, just this once, to contain himself. ‘Kathleen Whittier Mostyn – you’re the most contrary woman I ever met,’ he yelled after me.
‘No one’s asking you to come,’ I shot back. To my shame, I didn’t even bother to turn my head.
A long time ago, back when my parents died and I was left in charge of the Silver Bay Hotel, plenty of people told me I should take the opportunity to modernise, install en-suite bathrooms and satellite television, as they had at Port Stephens and Byron Bay, that I should advertise more to spread the word about the beauty of our little stretch of coast. I paid them heed for all of two minutes – our lack of custom had long since ceased to worry me, as I suspect it had most of Silver Bay. We had watched our neighbours up and down the coast grow fat on their profits, but then have to live with the unexpected results of success: heavy traffic, drunken holidaymakers, an endless round of updating and installation. The loss of peace.
In Silver Bay I liked to think we had the balance about right – enough visitors to provide us with a living, not so many that anyone was likely to start getting ideas. For years now I had watched Silver Bay’s population rise and double during the summer peak, drifting down in the winter months. The growth of interest in whale-watching had caused the odd peak now and then, but in general it was steady business, likely neither to make us rich nor cause too many upsets. It was just us, the dolphins and the whales. And that suited most of us fine.
Silver Bay had never been particularly hospitable to strangers. When the first Europeans arrived in the late eighteenth century, it was dismissed at first as uninhabitable, its rocky outcrops, its bushland and shifting dunes too barren to support human life. (I guess back then the Aboriginals weren’t considered human enough.) The coastal shoals and sandbars put paid to too much interest, grounding and wrecking visiting ships until the first lighthouses were erected. Then, as ever, greed did what curiosity could not: the discovery of lucrative timber forests up and down our volcanic hills, and the vast beds of oysters below did for the bay’s solitude.
The trees were logged until the hillsides were near-barren. The oysters were harvested for lime and, later, for eating, until that was banned before they, too, were depleted. If I’m honest, when my father first landed here he was no better: he saw the seas leaping with gamefish – marlin and tuna, sharks and spearfish – and he saw profit in what nature had provided. An endless array of prizes on his doorstep. And so, on this last rocky outcrop of Silver Bay, our hotel was built with every last penny of his and Mr Newhaven’s savings.
Back then, my family lived in quarters completely separate from the rest of the Silver Bay Hotel. My mother didn’t like to be seen by guests in what she called ‘domestic mode’ – I think that meant without her hair done – while my father liked to know that there were limits on how much access my sister and I had to the world outside (not that that stopped Norah: she was off to England before she hit twenty-one). I always suspected they wanted to be sure that they could argue in private.
Since the west wing burnt down we – or, for the most part, I – had lived in what remains as if it were a private house and our guests boarders. They slept in the rooms off the main corridor, while we had the rooms on the other side of the stairs, and anyone was welcome to use the lounge. Only the kitchen was sacred, a rule we made when the girls first came to live with me a few years ago. They were complete opposites. When Liza was not outside with the crews, she spent all her time in the kitchen. She disliked casual conversation, and avoided the lounge and the dining room. She liked to have a closed door between her and the unexpected. Hannah, with the conviviality of youth, spent most of her time draped across the sofa in the lounge, Milly at her feet, watching television, reading or, more often now, on the telephone to her friends – goodness knows what they found to talk about having already spent six hours together at school.
‘Mum? Have you ever been to New Zealand?’ As she entered the kitchen, I saw a deep indent running down the side of her cheek from the binding of the sofa cushion where her face must have been resting on it.
Liza reached out absently to try to smooth it away. ‘No, sweetheart.’
‘I have,’ I said. I was darning an old pair of socks, which Liza told me was a waste of my energy when the supermarket sold them for a few dollars a pack. But I’m not the kind of person who can sit and do nothing. ‘I went to Lake Taupo a few years ago on a fishing trip.’
‘I don’t remember that,’ said Hannah.
I calculated. ‘Well . . . I suppose it was about twenty years ago, so that would be fourteen years before you came.’
Hannah looked at me with the blank incomprehension of a child who cannot imagine anything existing before they were born, let alone any period of time that long ago. I couldn’t blame her – I can just about remember being that age, when an evening without one’s friends seemed to stretch to the length of a prison sentence. Now whole years flash by.
‘Have you been to Wellington?’ She sat down at the table.
‘Yup. Got a lot of houses built into the hills round the harbour. Last time I went I couldn’t imagine how they stayed up there.’
‘Were they on stilts?’
‘Something like that. Foolish, though – I heard the whole town was built on a fault line. I wouldn’t want to be in a house on stilts when the earth moved.’
For a moment Hannah digested this.
‘Why do you ask, sweetheart?’ Liza patted her legs for the dog to jump up. Milly never had to be asked twice.
Hannah twisted a strand of hair in her fingers. ‘There’s a school trip. After Christmas. I was wondering if I could go.’ She looked from one of us to the other, as if she’d guessed what we would say. ‘It’s not that expensive. We’ll be staying in hostels – and you know what the teachers are like. We’d never be allowed to go anywhere without them.’ Her voice got a little quicker. ‘And it’s meant to be very educational. We’d be learning about Maori culture and volcanoes . . .’
It’s a terrible thing to watch the face of a child who knows she is asking the impossible.
‘I could help out with my savings if it costs too much.’