In this extract from Owen Marshall's new book The Larnachs, William Larnach's wife, Constance de Bathe Brandon, is in conversation with his son, Douglas.
"I need to be with you. It's as simple as that," said Dougie.
"I realised it when you went back to Wellington, and we no longer had so much time together. Although I was free of Father's interference, nothing seemed to matter here afterwards. No one could replace you, and everything seemed flat and humdrum.
"I couldn't even write to you as I wished. You must know how I feel.""There's love and love, Dougie," I said.
"No one else means as much to me. I miss you so much. When we can't talk often, life gets out of kilter somehow. So much of our lives is connected now, so much understood is between us. I need you. We need each other." His face was pale and his eyes insistent.
"We couldn't be closer friends," I said. Our life had been busy in Wellington, and the trips back had been few and hectic, but I had missed Dougie's company, and his declaration made me realise how much it meant to me.
"But we could," he said. "We could be closer, and we should." And he reached out, took my hand in both of his and kissed it.
People who do not know him well would form a completely wrong assessment of Dougie's nature from his appearance and manner in society. He is not as handsome as Donald - has his father's less regular features.
Unlike William, however, Dougie has a fine head of hair. To be honest, he looks more than his thirty-two years. The lasting effects of his injuries have no doubt contributed, but there is also a striving for dignity that disguises uncertainty.
Uncertainty arising from his experience at his English school, an awareness sometimes of alienation here, and living in the blaze of his father's personality and achievement.
Colleen told me once, with considerable satisfaction, that her friends think him pompous and ordinary. If that is so, and not merely an expression of her malice, it shows how little of the real Dougie they understand.
The true man revealed sat before me. We looked into each other's face and admitted how much we valued each other, how significant was the understanding we shared. "It's a damned predicament, isn't it," he said with an uneven laugh, "but I had to tell you. I'm not ashamed of it. I refuse to be."
"Why should you be? Love's always a tribute. It comes from admiration and respect."
"Damned if I know where it comes from, but I feel it," he said. "I hope you do too."
So there it was, his statement of love for me, and my welcome of it as a natural thing with no guilt attached. After all, we are family, and only seven years separate us. We are united by circumstance, by the need for support, by enjoyment in each other's company.
Nothing was said then of what the kiss at the top of the stairs conveyed, the pressure of Dougie's hands on my shoulders, the closeness of his body. Nothing was said, but a possibility was clear to both of us, and it vibrated so in the quiet room that when Jane came in with a question from Miss Falloon, I half expected her to become aware of it. "Tell her I will come myself presently," I said.
"You must have known," said Dougie when she had gone.
"You've been the only real friend to me in the family. The only one who gave thought to what it meant for me to marry William, to have regard for my feelings, not just your own."
"But it's my own feelings I'm talking about now."
"We have to be so careful, though, in everything we do. Careful not to deceive William, but still share what we're entitled to."
Even William seemed enlivened despite the earlier argument, and joined the banter, seeing no irony in laughing at the vanity of my family, while sitting in his great house some derided as a castle, and having commissioned a family sepulchre. William and Alfred presently have disagreements about mutual investments. This no doubt inclines William to welcome Dougie's fun.
When a man has declared love that is not repugnant, he seems quite different afterwards, seen and judged with emotions not extended to other men. The feelings may change, or ebb away, but he will never be seen in the same way again. For a woman, there is a transformation, and to be honest, part of that is a sense of power.
I think of Josiah's intent face so close to mine in the cloakroom, and another time beneath the dim archway of Mulvey's carriage cover, as he urged me to come to him secretly, of the bobbing Adam's apple of the vicar with aspirations beyond his station, and of William's somewhat contrived naturalness on the beach at Island Bay as he suggested marriage.
What woman is without a sense of theatre at such times, of an intense focus on herself from which everything else fades for the moment. And all immensely gratifying to one's self-estimation. That Tuesday, so ordinary in its start, became for Dougie and me the beginning of something greater than any friendship. It proved the sea change that altered the direction of our lives.
We have not dared yet to talk much of it together, for then complication and evasion, expectation and justification begin. When in this little village of The Camp, I have had only two consistent companions of my own station in life - William and Dougie. Both are unrelated to me by blood, and Dougie is closer to my age and less preoccupied with public matters.
After seeing the best and worst of both men, I have come to enjoy the trust and companionship of Dougie even more than what I share with his father. How difficult it is to admit that even to myself, but it is the truth, and if I evade it I betray my character.
I see, too, that I have been in danger of confining the inner me to my music. Dougie's avowal is an illumination that makes me realise how false my life had become, how tied to the material and mundane.
When I think back, perhaps there was an earlier clear sign of Dougie's feeling for me. There was the evening he told me he was no longer considering an engagement to Ellen Abbott. Dougie had made it plain to me that he was no longer serious about that match, or any other. At the time I thought he intended me to feel complimented that he would share such personal decisions with me; now I see that the intention was to show I was his choice.
The bond I have with Dougie makes most of the time spent with William barren in comparison. Less and less does William enquire about and support my life and needs; more and more he is concerned with maintaining his position as a man of influence and wealth.
He takes less interest in his Central Otago land, and even in his peninsula properties, except for the profits and rentals to be gained, which are below his expectations, and spends much of his time in the study writing his long letters to Seddon and parliamentary colleagues, or disagreeing with Basil Sievwright and business associates concerning what can be saved from his affairs.
Everything seems to be about the banks, and Ward's indebtedness, which threatens to bring the government down.
William has been a man of friends, yet now he talks mainly of enemies, and has found a new one in Mr Justice Williams, who is attempting to bar him from continuing as one of the liquidators of the Colonial Bank. It is all sad, selfish and boring. He and I now share few of the light-hearted and confiding moments we enjoyed immediately before our marriage and for some time afterwards.
