Message from the Past

PROLOGUE

I don’t really expect anyone to believe this is a true story – it’s too fantastic! I see-sawed for months before I finally decided to write it, but I started dreaming again so Giorgio persuaded me it was time to write it down and get it out of my system, then maybe all my ghosts would be laid to rest at last.

It’s hard to know where to start – there are so many interweaving ends, but perhaps the best place is right back at the beginning when I first remember having ‘The Dream’, which will give you a little of my background.

My parents moved around the dairying districts of the North Island of New Zealand, from farm to farm each season, as contract milkers, then as sharemilkers, and finally they saved up enough to buy their own farm. I had an older brother, Tom, and we were used to moving from place to place like gypsies, making new friends, settling in to new schools, and then moving on again.

Tom drowned when he was twelve. He suffered from occasional epileptic fits, and one day when we were playing by the river he had a fit and fell in. I was only ten but still remember the terrifying helplessness as I watched him swept away and struggled to run for help. I still feel guilty about it, as we knew we were not supposed to play near the river.

Four years later my mother died suddenly, leaving me, at fourteen, to look after Dad for the next few years. As a result, Dad and I are very close, but I didn’t feel jealous when he met Tina and eventually married her. I loved her, and was happy for Dad to have someone of his own. I left home to give them a chance to be alone together, and moved to the nearest town, where I boarded with family friends, and got a job in the local supermarket by day, and another at the movie theatre by night. In this way I saved up enough money to buy an old typewriter on which to begin the writing career that had always been my ambition, and later bought a little car to travel about in. Then I started traveling around in my spare time, looking at houses in older settled areas, trying to find the house in my dream.

So I still haven’t explained about the dream, have I? It’s quite an important part of the story, so I guess I’d better, although you will think I’m dotty!

The Dream has been with me, in one form or another, all my life, I think. Sometimes I am inside, sometimes outside, always looking on. There is a house in the two-up, two-down style, built of fresh-cut stone. It is surrounded by native bush, except for a rough lawn and garden area cleared all around it. With the house there is a woman. I see her in detail, right down to the lace on her Victorian dress collar, but I never see her face clearly – it’s just an oval pink blur. Her hair is styled as I have seen on women in Victorian photographs, with a little lace cap. She wears an unusual brooch – twisted silver filigree with amethysts around the edge of a beautifully detailed, flower-painted oval porcelain centerpiece.

She is always busy – in my dream I watch her washing, hanging out clothes, gardening, preserving, ironing, sweeping, baking – all the hundreds of little chores of a busy housewife, all in the mode of over a hundred years ago. The indoor chores all take place in a long room that seems to take up the whole width of the house – a kitchen and living room combined. There is an open fireplace at one end with a swee - a metal swinging arm to hold a large pot, and a camp oven for baking. I know every inch of the stone paved floor, and the cracks in the ceiling that I see as my lady sits in a large old armchair by the fireplace and gazes upwards as she awaits her family in the evenings. There are other figures occasionally, but they are misty and indistinct, so much so that I don’t know if they are male or female, child or adult.

So, that is my dream, and sometimes I experience it several nights in a row, and other times I do not have it for months at a time. By the time I left home, I had become convinced that the house in my dream was real, because it was so real and detailed in my dream. I found myself unconsciously looking out for it everywhere I went, even though commonsense told me it was impossible. Even if it had really existed at some time, it was either demolished by now, or built around by some town or city that had grown around it since it was built.

I don’t know why it was so important to me to find the house, unless it was to give me a sense of belonging somewhere, a heritage. You see I knew almost nothing about my ancestors on either side of my family. My mother was the only surviving child of European refugees who had come here after two years in a displaced persons camp after the war. Her mother had died on the ship on the way here, and her father, after years of living in fear, never talked about the past at all.

My father had a brother who never married and whom we had never met, and a sister who lived in Australia. All we knew about his family was that his mother’s family had refused to have any more to do with her because she eloped to marry my grandfather, who, apparently, was a wild merchant sailor when she met him. He had come from Queensland in Australia, and was a nobody, having been sent away to work for a drover when he was ten years old, because he was the eldest son, and his family was large and very poor. He lost touch with his family and never found any of them again, and he and my grandmother came to New Zealand from Australia to start a new life together. Thus, I am singularly bereft of relations and used to feel left out when my friends talked about grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins. I felt as if I belonged nowhere, and it was uncomfortable to be so rootless, without an anchor of family history behind me.

After a year or two in the small local town, I decided I was ready for bigger things, and moved on to Auckland, where I lived in a hostel and continued my writing, which was beginning to bring in a little extra pocket money, and worked in a large department store. I also attended evening classes at the university to train in Journalism, and kept trying to get work with one of the newspapers or magazines. It was while doing these classes that I first met Peter. He was the first real love of my life, although I had dated boys ever since leaving school. I was under no illusions about my attractiveness to males – I was a bit too tall and gangly, my face was too long, and although I had rather large, dark hazel green eyes which I considered my best feature, and long auburn hair that rippled down past my shoulders, I still didn’t think I had what it takes to catch a man’s interest. Peter was the first one I ever fell for, and I fell hard.

He was tall and thin, with dark curly hair, one wave of which fell romantically over his forehead. His eyes were dark and burned with fervor over whatever happened to be the ‘in’ subject at the time. He was as I imagined people meant when they talked about ‘Byronic’ looks, and I was very flattered when he came directly to me in the coffee shop after class, and turned those burning eyes on me.

We became a twosome, going everywhere together, talking about the world and the things we would change in it when we were rich and famous. Peter was an artist and his ambition was to go to Paris and paint a masterpiece. Not being very artistic myself, and being blinded by first love, I was sure he would make his fame and fortune and I encouraged his wildest dreams and hung adoringly on his every word.

Of course, being an artist, he could not work at a regular job because it might get in the way of inspiration – he had to be free to ‘answer the call of his muse’ whenever it came. In the meantime, he lived very well off his dole money and my ‘loans’. He could eat enough for three people and it was just as well my freelance writing was becoming more and more prolific and well known, as it never occurred to me to ask for any cash assistance towards his meals.

This went on for about four years – I’m a slow learner, okay? – then I had my first novel accepted. It was almost unbelievable! I was so excited about it, and when it became a modest best seller and went into second and then third editions it was like a fairytale come true. Peter was a little put out that I had achieved this fame before him, but when he discovered just how much money I was making from it, he suggested we should get married at once and find ourselves a quiet, out-of-the-way place to live where he could paint in peace, and I could write my next novel, and we would be undisturbed by people. He talked largely of needing to be alone, to commune with nature, to be close to the grass roots of life, with all sham and unnecessary luxuries weeded out to leave the way clear for inspiration. Joyfully, I fell in with this plan, except that some ancient instinct I did not know I possessed made me stipulate that we find our home first and then get married. Peter agreed and for the next few months we spent every spare minute touring the countryside looking at houses, seaside cottages, bush clad sections, far away from the cities and crowds.

It seemed nothing was right. We talked to land agents and they showed us whatever they had that was even remotely near what we requested, but Peter shook his head over them all. This one was too small, that one did not have a room he could use as a studio, this one did but the light was all wrong, the next one had a little country school across the paddock from it, and how could we concentrate with kids yelling around us all day.

At last I exploded in exasperation and asked him if he really wanted to find such an awkward place or was he just being difficult. He soothed me and charmed me and calmed me down, convincing me he really did love me and want to marry me, but the first home we shared must be just right because our fame would begin there. I convinced myself that he was right and I was being unreasonable, but I think the gilt was beginning to wear off the gingerbread at last. I was beginning to see through the charm and the pose and not liking what I saw very much.

The final act in this part of my story came a few weeks after this argument. Over this time I had found myself sitting back, looking and listening critically, really beginning to see Peter as he was, and not as my foolish infatuation had made him out to be. We drove south to Te Kuiti in the King Country on a Saturday to attend the wedding of a friend of mine. Her family pressed us to stay over and while there we got talking with a neighbor who was a land agent. On hearing Peter’s usual spiel about the type of property we were looking for, he pursed his lips and looked thoughtful. It turned out he had on his books, a property out through the hills near the west coast. It had not been lived in for some time and needed quite a bit of fixing up, but it was going cheap as the owner lived in Wellington and did not want it – he had inherited it from an old uncle. The upshot of this was that he drove us out to see the house on the Sunday morning.

We traveled for miles over winding, twisting little hill country back roads until eventually we glimpsed the sea in the distance. We turned off in the middle of a little settlement called Te Rimu, at the bottom of a long winding hill road. Te Rimu consisted of a shop-cum-Post Office, a service station, a hall and sale yards and a country pub, with a few cottages scattered about. For another few minutes we rumbled over a narrow gravel road into alternating pastureland and bush. Then suddenly we turned off and bumped over a long-unused track through overhanging bush. We rounded a corner and pulled up by a lichen-covered gate and all climbed out of the car, and there it was!

I turned hot and cold and there was a rushing in my ears and I thought I was going to faint. This was it! My house! The house in my dream! Oh, shabby and over grown and uncared for, yes, but still, the house! I knew it was! Not just a house like it, but really the one! I knew the color of the rose, now growing wild over the fence beside the gate; I knew which fruit trees, now clothed in summer green and all gnarled and twisted with age, was peach and which was nectarine. In a daze I followed Peter and the agent up the overgrown path to the door, half-listening to the man explaining that there was about an acre of land, all bush-covered, leading down to the tidal river, which flowed by on its way to the sea a mile away. The old man who had been the last owner, was the son of people who had farmed the area for years, but the farm had gradually been sold off until only this little area around the house remained.

With a struggle he forced the warped old door open, and we stepped into the long room I knew so well. The table was different, of course, the stone floor was now covered with linoleum, there was a coal range in the fireplace, and cupboards and a sink bench, but in the essentials it was the same room. Full of wonder, I moved across the room to the stove and there in the bricks I could see the end of the iron bar on which the swee had pivoted. Slowly, I tilted my head back, and the same cracks were in the timbered ceiling, wider now with age, and painted over with years of enamel paint, but still there. I became aware that the men were speaking to me.

I say, Miss, are you all right? the agent asked anxiously. You’ve gone white as a sheet. Maybe you’d better sit down. I think this old chair is okay. Gratefully, I sat and looked about me. It was mine! It had to be! I did not care about the dirt and dust and inconvenience or anything else: I had to have it!

I said so.

Peter was stunned. But … but we haven’t seen it all yet! I … I mean … it might be ready to fall down around our ears! The roof probably leaks like a sieve! You can’t decide just like that!

I can, I stated flatly, "… and I have. This is what I want. This is my house. I’ll take it."

We toured the rest of the house, and although it was