Soon by Charlotte Grimshaw Page A

a deeper unease between David and his deputy. As lazily apolitical as he was these days, Simon had noticed a personal chill between the two, and he supposed the Cock was straining to rein in his ambition.
    But David had it over the Cock. The PM was not only popular; he was the most psychologically acute and manipulative person Simon had ever met. After an evening with him, Simon sometimes felt exhausted and drained. David expected certain responses and this required an adjustment in Simon’s conduct — only a minor deviation from his natural manner, but maintaining it made him tired and hollow. And yet he went on conforming; they all did, as if mesmerised. Only Claire hadn’t responded to the demands of David’s court; she had rebelled, and been excommunicated.
    The Cock was subtly challenging, but the Cock wasn’t quite sure of himself and he was distracted — he couldn’t keep his eyes off David’s women.
    Simon frowned. ‘David’s women.’ But Elke wasn’t David’s.
    He tried to look at it in a detached way. These days he grappled with the private sense that since Elke was his daughter and Roza was her mother, he and Roza belonged together. But then there was David: Roza was his wife and the mother of his son, and his wife’s daughter resembled his son. Ergo, David felt that Roza was his, and Elke was his . . .
    Did he hate David?
    The idea gave him a jolt. Everyone remarked on how attached David had got to him, how David always wanted Simon around, insisting he be present on expeditions and at functions, how he reserved a seat for Simon next to him, had a trick of drawing him aside for private conversations, leaving others awkwardly looking on. The court was jealous and suspicious, but Simon was spared its worst machinations by the fact that he wasn’t a politician. With the exception of the Cock, who kept a cool distance, David’s staff and friends made sure to ingratiate themselves with the Lamptons. Until recently Simon had been ‘family’, but now they’d started calling him David’s best friend.
    Admit it, he did enjoy the obsequiousness of the staff and the way David’s circle deferred to him. He and David (like Roza’s Mr Bast!) had both grown up poor. David had been an orphan, farmed out to relatives in Tokoroa. Simon and his brother Ford were the sons of crazy, drunk taxi-driver Aaron Harris, from whose South Auckland house the family had fled in terror. Their mother had struck it lucky in the end, marrying Warren Lampton, their stepfather, a good man. But the rented house where Simon had visited Mereana had been no shabbier than the dump they’d lived in with Aaron.
    He and David and Ford had dragged themselves into the middle class, although David still sounded like a yob, always getting his words wrong. The Cock was a mandarin, with his private-school education and his university degrees; he was smoothly fluent. But David’s inarticulacy made him popular.
    Simon watched the birds dancing this way and that around the bird table, like bossy women with large, fanned skirts — women at a Trish Ellison fundraiser. In what spirit did David stare at Elke? Was his attention ‘fatherly’? You could never tell what was in David’s mind. But Simon kept part of himself hidden too. One necessary precaution: making sure David never suspected how deeply he felt about Roza . . .
    After dozing he woke feeling sharper.
    He pushed play and watched episode two of The Present , set on a beach (pohutukawa, white sand, heat haze over dunes). The story, about people living in the Far North, starred a young woman with long hair and green eyes. She was lively, slim and dark-skinned, and had a way of looking at you sideways which gave her a sly, ironic air. Simon sat very still. It was a portrait of Mereana.
    For years he had wished her dead. ‘Why do you look at the funeral notices?’ Karen would say.