Queen of beauty, p.1
Queen of Beauty, page 1
For my grandparents, Jane and Alf
Queen of Beauty
Paula Morris
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London, WC2R 0RL, England
First published by Penguin Group (NZ), 2002
Copyright © Paula Morris 2002
The right of Paula Morris to be identified as the author of this work in terms of section 96 of the Copyright Act 1994 is hereby asserted.
Digital conversion by Pindar NZ
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand.
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ISBN 9781742288338
Contents
Prologue
I At the Quadroon Ball
I (continued)
II Glasgow Street, 1969
III December
III (continued)
IV Whakatangi (1922)
V Where Sheep May Safely Graze
V (continued)
V (continued)
Acknowledgements
Prologue
Here’s the story.
A young man boarded the SS Kawau alone not long before noon, carrying a Gladstone bag and a small brown suitcase tied with thick string.
His parents stood high above him on the dock, waiting for the boat to pull away. His father waved once and gave a tired half-smile. His mother, shivering, pulled a woollen shawl tight around her shoulders, even though it was a only a few days before Christmas.
The boat dipped with the weight of passengers and supplies. He found a seat on one of the long benches facing out to sea and tucked his cases underneath. An old woman perched a small cage vibrating with its cargo, a jittery white chicken, on the bench next to him. Other travellers thronged the steamer’s low-slung deck, farmers returning home after the last market day of the year, families heading north for their annual holiday.
The steamer lurched away, the dock obscured by a thick black cloud trailing from the funnel. Although the day was fair, soupy waves churned around the boat as it ploughed its way into the deeper waters of the gulf, up a long curving coast of broad bays and high ridges. The young man slouched in his seat, eyes closed against the spray and the breeze, lulled into a half-sleep by the afternoon sun and the steamer’s low drone.
There was a shout from the stern.
‘Man overboard!’
The steamer, tilting in the swell, had tipped a passenger into the sea.
He rose from his seat, pushing his way to the railing. He could see a dark head rolling like a marble in the waves, almost swallowed by the boat’s wake. The steward, stout and bald, tugged at the buttons of a stiff serge uniform, preparing to jump in.
‘Throw the poor bugger a rope,’ someone called.
He stepped forward and touched the steward’s arm.
‘I’m trained in this,’ he said and, almost immediately, unseen arms around him peeled his jacket back and tugged at his shoes, pushing him towards the railing.
‘Give him room,’ roared the steward.
He clambered over the rails and dived from the narrow wooden ledge of the bobbing steamer. With carving strokes, he pushed his way through the water as though he were clearing bush. He swung his head to breathe, and glimpsed in the water a dark crown, tossed by lilting waves.
Hooking the heavy, limp body with one arm, he began the long swim towards the faraway shape of the steamer. His outstretched arm finally brushed the boat’s flanks, and a line of willing hands hauled both men on board. The steward wrapped the young man in a blanket, clapping his shoulder and barking congratulations; another man passed him a jolting sip of whiskey. By the time the boat turned into the small harbour of Errington, the man he’d saved was spluttering up sea water onto the planks of the lower deck.
When the steamer tied up at the wharf, the story of the rescue slipped quickly from deck to dock. People who had come only to load crates, collect goods or meet family members stayed to watch the doctor arrive and the wet hero disembark. His uncle, waiting in the crowd, lifted his bags onto the back of the wagon.
On a hill above the cove, a young woman and a boy, both on horseback, paused at the widest point of the path. They watched a man carried off the steamer on a makeshift stretcher and then a younger man in wet clothes climb off the boat and join the loitering crowd on the wharf. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to shake his hand.
They turned their horses towards the wharf, rapidly picking their way down the hill.
He was stepping up onto his uncle’s wagon when they rode by. He saw a young woman on a horse but it was hard to make out the precise edges of her form in the late afternoon sun. All he noticed that day was her broad brown face and the frizzy outline of her thick hair.
She saw a young white man with a sunken, pale face, blue eyes as clear as the shallows, his shirt and trousers and hair dripping with water.
She thought he looked a strange sight.
In newspaper accounts at the time, there was some disagreement about the specific details of the rescue. One report claimed that the drowning man was rising to the surface for the first time; another alleged that the drowning man had sunk three times and was insensible, and that the water was shark infested.
The following year, the Humane Society presented the young man with a silver medal for the rescue. The Royal Life Saving Association sent a long letter to apply for the medal on his behalf, explaining that he had risen from an operation only the week before the fateful trip on the SS Kawau. He was going away on holiday for health reasons that day – December 23, 1922. It was the eighth life, the letter stated, that he had saved.
This was the story that Virginia Seton told Margaret Dean O’Clare on a wet Friday afternoon in New Orleans, not long after New Year’s Day 1996.
They sat in the vast front parlour of the O’Clare mansion on Coliseum Street, huddled over the carved Tibetan chest that doubled as a coffee table. Rivulets of melted candle wax formed a lumpy ridge along its ornate spine, on which a glass pitcher dripping with condensation was precariously balanced. Virginia was careful to keep her glass near the flat edge of the table.
‘No names?’ asked Margaret.
Virginia shuffled the papers on her lap.
‘I didn’t think they were important.’
‘Neither is the date, for that matter,’ said Margaret, pouring herself another glass of pale iced tea. ‘Or the local colour. Very nicely done, though. “Lilting waves”.’
Virginia looked down at her damp shoe-tops. The toes had turned a darker shade of brown, as if they’d been dipped in mud.
‘OK. Turn the clock back a century,’ said Margaret. ‘Lose the parents on the dock. He can be a young planter, sailing down river from the Delta, coming to town for the ball. Doesn’t want to attract any attention to himself in case his father finds out. No, his mother. His widowed mother. His father recently died …’
‘Not in a duel?’
‘Why not? Defending the family’s honour, which was jeopardised by the son and his dangerous …’
‘Gambling?’
‘Reckless, licentious behaviour. But he’s sworn never to disappoint her or besmirch the family name again. He’s been sick with fever since the death of his father, but now he’s well. The city calls. The lure of the ball is too strong. He sails here incognito, planning just a brief sojourn. But then!’
‘Someone falls into the river.’
Margaret held one hand in the air like a policeman stopping traffic.
‘Fate overtakes him. Just as the boat draws near the town, a man tumbles from deck, carried away by the deadly current. The assembled slaves wail and point, begging our hero – what shall we call him – Alcée? Henri?’
‘Wasn’t there an Henri in Spanish Moss?’
‘Yes, yes, yes. Alcée it is, scion of the ancient line of … De Barre, say. Too much? He strips off his coat and dives into the waves, not thinking for a moment of his own safety, or of his sacred promise to his mother.’
‘Sacred promise?’
‘It doesn’t have to be sacred, I suppose. We’ll get to that later. The point is, the boat’s pulling in and a crowd forms to witness his herois
‘She was riding her horse over the hill. With her brother.’
‘So, we’ll have her standing on the levee, holding a lantern. We’ll lose the brother. Unless …’
‘Chaperone?’
‘Yes,’ said Margaret, clicking her fingers. ‘He tries to hurry her along. He doesn’t want her mixing with the riverside lowlife. He certainly doesn’t want her ogling this dissolute planter’s son. Her brother knows, you see, her true worth. He knows the value of that creamy skin and those almond eyes – though of course I won’t put it quite like that.’
‘No.’
‘And tonight, for the first time, her beauty will be revealed to the world at the Quadroon Ball. The brother wants her to go to the highest bidder, not fall for some good looking ne’er-do-well in a wet coat.’
‘But you want them to see each other? Him on the boat, her on the levee?’
‘Of course. That’s my inciting incident. The beautiful, headstrong quadroon. The conflicted young Creole. Attraction. Obstacles. Love. Misunderstandings. Separation. Reunion. Redemption. Tragedy. In that order: it’ll all be there. But not the saving the eight lives thing. That’s too much. There’s only so much heroism the reading public can take.’
‘Well,’ said Virginia, folding her typewritten sheets. ‘I’m glad you can use some of it.’
‘Why had he been sick, by the way? Your man, I mean. Influenza? Syphilis?’
‘I’m not sure. I only know some of the details. It’s a family story.’
‘Speaking of details – one more question, before you go.’ This was the usual way Margaret let Virginia know it was time to leave. ‘When the parents are there waving him off at the dock, what’s so strange about the mother feeling cold? Didn’t you say it was the day before Christmas?’
‘The story happened in New Zealand.’
‘And?’ Margaret still looked blank.
‘The seasons are reversed in the southern hemisphere.’
‘Oh,’ said Margaret. She wrinkled her broad white forehead.
‘Summertime,’ murmured Virginia, bending down to pick up her satchel.
‘Of course,’ Margaret said. She clinked a long spoon against the side of her glass. ‘Well, this is a good start. A promising beginning! You read very well, you know. It’s the accent.’
Virginia smiled, looking away.
‘We must think of this as a springboard,’ continued Margaret. ‘Remember, the thing that differentiates my work from that of less – shall we say – successful writers is my ability to subvert the conventions of the genre, or so I’ve been told. David Klein says that nobody can weave together the historical and the imagined so skilfully. No, subtly. Subtly was the word he used.’
Virginia nodded. She was familiar with the sayings of David Klein.
‘So it’s business as usual. Facts and dates and events to hang everything on. As I told you, I’d particularly like a real woman. Do you have anything else for me now, or shall I ring for your raincoat?’
Virginia promised to come back the following Tuesday, and walked to the hallway to wait for the maid.
I
At the Quadroon Ball
Arthur got Virginia the job; he knew everybody. Or his mother knew everybody, he said, everybody who was anybody – and, in a town this size, that wasn’t many people. So he called his mother, which was a rare event. A cause for celebration, she said, in her droll, over-loud voice, the one that irritated him the most. I need to find something for a little friend of Arthur’s, she told everybody; she’s new in town, doesn’t know a soul. She’s from overseas. You’ll just love her accent.
Arthur’s mother called all her friends and told them how Virginia was the star of her class at Tulane, how she was desperate to stay in New Orleans, that she was just the cutest, smartest little thing and that if Arthur was asking, well, it must be serious, and no, she’d never met her exactly, but she was sure that Virginia would work out just fine in any role, in any capacity, as long as it was under the table, because of the visa problem (you know), except Arthur’s mother didn’t say ‘Virginia’, not in so many words, because she couldn’t remember her name.
Or Arthur hadn’t told her. He was such a strange, secretive boy, she said. A disappointment, said her friends, not to her face.
Jake had a car, but his licence had been suspended for nine months and he didn’t want to risk driving and getting in real trouble next time. He let Virginia and Bridget borrow it whenever they liked, as long as one of them drove him uptown during the week. This usually meant Virginia, who was easy-going and didn’t mind, because Bridget had a job – a real job, giving tours of the French Quarter. It didn’t even feel like work, she said; it was more like acting. Frank Guidry, the owner of the tour company, made all his employees speak in Southern accents for the purposes, he said, of verisimilitude. Big corporations didn’t pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to hold conventions in New Orleans so that some little blonde from New Jersey could point out the House of the Rising Sun in her squeaky nasal Yankee accent. They wanted the real thing: strings of Mardi Gras beads and sickly Hurricanes in a take-out cup, and pretty little belles with big smiles and no attitude.
Everyone went to New York or Los Angeles to act, Bridget said, when they could find plenty of work right here on the corners of the Quarter, fiddle-dee-deeing their way up and down Royal Street every day in front of an appreciative audience.
Bridget even had a stage name. She’d been allowed to choose it herself, with one proviso: she couldn’t sound like a drag queen. No Scarlett de Ville or Blanche Fortuna; no one bought that crap anymore, said Frank Guidry.
This had been quite a disappointment, for a while, stumping everybody.
But then Arthur, as usual, came up with a brilliant idea, and even Frank Guidry couldn’t question it, because Arthur was an Ormond and his mother had been a Chesny and his grandmother had been a Smithson, as everybody knew. Arthur said that Bridget should be Buck, short for Buchanan, after some genuine, famous Richmond belle, because anyone who was anyone had a family name as a first name, the more masculine-sounding the better, and that she could keep her last name, Jackson, because it was more Fort Sumter than Fort Lee.
It was a talking point, agreed Bridget, and although she got tired of saying no, not Buck Rogers, at the start of every tour, it was a way of explaining Southern traditions and making everybody feel like they were getting the real thing, even though their beads were plastic, and their Hurricane cup was plastic, and Bridget’s smile was more false than Arthur’s mother’s new breasts, although they had to take Arthur’s word on that one: Jake and Virginia and Bridget had never met any of Arthur’s family in the five years they’d all been friends, and thought they probably never would.
Virginia had work to do, too, but no place to go. She had her haunts – the libraries at Tulane and Loyola, the bookstores on Magazine Street and Maple Street, and Arthur’s, of course. But she spent the greater part of her days by herself, mostly sitting downstairs at the neat oval table they were supposed to eat dinner around, surrounded by the tools of her trade. A yellow legal pad, pages doubled under, a pen wedged in its ridge; at high noon, a spiral notebook, closed, with inky scribble on its cover. Further away, but still within reach, a stack of library books (borrowed with Jake’s card) nudged sparsely filled manila folders spread in an irregular fan. Here and there, randomly scattered, lay paper clips, index cards, a red ballpoint pen, a chubby lime-green highlighter and a few peeling Post-it notes slapped onto the table’s murky brown veneer. Like a moderately organised school girl, Virginia thought, glad the others didn’t mind her mess. At kicking distance, under the table, sat a box of old files: the remnants of research for her MA thesis (Edward Douglass White, the Boston Club, 1874; she’d been talked into it) and notes for Margaret Dean O’Clare’s last two novels.
When they first started working together, Margaret (Call me MD, she said, halfway through book number one) had told Virginia what she expected. When a book was in its early stages (Margaret, childless, called it the first trimester), Virginia would serve as hunter and gatherer, unearthing names and dates and maps and photographs. She was to find pieces of history, summarised in a paragraph or two, for Margaret to pick from, like cards in a deck. Then she was to wait for orders: more on this war, that house, those floods. Not too much – the answer to the question could never be too long. You are to serve as my reference book, Margaret told her. You uncover, understand, compute, communicate; I create. That was their arrangement.
