Infidelities

by Kirsty Gunn

  It’s no wonder, when I think about it, that I stayed a child so long. There was the quiet talking of my parents, their ordered, oblong rooms, a life of universities and of books, with dainty cups and saucers laid out on a tray – set against that other louder, crying time in a place that had my mother’s past in it … Of course it keeps you young, newborn, kind of. With all around you people turning secrets into stories you might never get to tell. I had to wait for the summers to come so that I could learn anything at all, fit the pieces in and watch out for little details, learn from my grandmother in words I could overhear, about my family, my whenau, with language and with hearing names of this one or of that one, someone they called Wharakau or sometimes Dick. Who was he, anyhow? I tried to figure it. That man they both loved? What was his real name or where was he now? Not asking, though, like children never really do ask, the big questions, if they’re not knowing how the grown ups will act, how they’ll be, when the replies came through. But watching my Nanni’s face instead, when she and Queenie were talking in those sad crying times. Trying to understand. Trying to see.

  *

  That’s how I went on, from summer to summer, surrounded by yellow hills, the thwack-thwack of the distant train, the bleating of the sheep. There were the little new fronds growing right up to our front door, green as green. And we were together, my Nanni and me, just sitting or talking or playing, making food, all one kind of known and familiar life – so no need anyway, I told myself, to go asking about the other mixed-up questions. ‘No need, sweetie’ is what Queenie had told me, too, when I tried to ask her once about my mother, why my mother stayed away from her own mother the way she did. And why my Nanni lived so on her own, not really knowing anyone in the village where her own house was or seeing anyone but only Queenie when Quennie came in. Why she spoke the way she did, acted the way she did, so different from my mother, in that language of hers that only her dear Lady understood, half one thing, half another, those words of hers that somehow had a body to them that took you on its lap, took you in.

  Queenie would bring something, every week, when she came in and the nights she stayed on we’d all have it for some kind of a big tea. Sweetcorn or a pig’s leg. Pumpkins. Plums from the wild fruit trees that grew up behind her old house behind the marae. There they had an old mighty vegetable patch she kept talking about, set behind a manuka hedge to shelter it, and fed from all the old water from the wash house and the chickens that ran around there. That was a real garden, Nanni said. Real Maori kai there and none of your pakeha little taters and mealy fruits. We should all go there and see it for ourselves. Real gardens, food. With earth around it, rain come down. ‘My dream is one day I’ll take you,’ she said to me, ‘when you’re a big girl, and show you. When you’re grown up, okay. A visit of our own and Queenie and Pete, we’ll all go there together.’

  But the years passed, and not as many of them as I like to remember, and I never went, to that place that stayed so far away and was somewhere for stories. Instead Nanni gave Queenie other kinds of food for her to take back there, tins of milk and biscuits that came in sealed wrappers, jars of jam and pickle you bought in the shops. So who was to know that where Queenie came from even existed, if I couldn’t go there, or Nanni, but it was only Queenie who might belong? Who was to believe there was such a home where pigs ran around and then were killed, and people dug a hole in the ground and cooked them there with kumera and other vegetables, running crackling with the pig fat under hot, hot stones? Who was to believe that once upon a time a white girl had ever gone out there at all, met a Maori boy, and had a baby, fallen, fallen in love?

  Anyhow I had my Nanni’s garden, with the broccoli and beets and different kinds of lettuce, sweet potatoes, corn … She put them into stews. And she had up behind the ferny bank thick rose-bushes and beds of daisies, tall masts of bamboo keeping the flowers away from the bush, the gully and the scree. She had all this – so why go on and on about that other place, like it might hold meanings? Why talk on about it with Queenie whenever the two of them got together? Like it was a place she might enjoy better than where she lived? Like it was a place she might need?

  *

  When I found out for sure the answers, it wasn’t just the crying days that told me. Or overhearing Queenie say once about me that it may as well be I had no family, all because of ‘that mother of hers’ and Nanni saying ‘or my big heart’ … No, not even. It was the day when there were different kinds of tears, something not just crying but more than that, like wailing, calling, both of them together, Queenie putting her head back, I saw her do it and she closed her eyes.

  Because Queenie had got sick, and soon after she was to die – this I learned years after my parents had moved abroad and there was a summer I never saw my Nanni, and after that not any summer, not ever again. After Queenie had gone and Nanni wiped her face, she took me in and told me like a poem, like something my mother might have said, constructed in a certain kind of way that it might be remembered and I have remembered it, all the words: ‘How your mother’s like a tree,’ she said. ‘And she wants to make herself into a tall clipped shape and straight, straight, when she could be so beautiful if she could grow differently, see, let herself be more wild. Come out thick at the base with strong roots,’ Nanni said, ‘and wide …’

  ‘She lost herself,’ I’d heard Queenie tell Nanni, in the low lamplight, that same day of the sickness and the wailing and the different kinds of tears; they’d been talking about my mother and my mother’s father then. ‘My brother would have loved her, man, if he’d stayed alive. But she’s taken herself deep into the dry place, that daughter of yours. She doesn’t know now’, Queenie said, ‘who she is.’

  ‘And now I’m losing you, my Lovely Lady,’ my Nanni said to Queenie in reply. ‘You’re leaving me. My last one left. All the tangis, they get started now.’

  They hadn’t known that I was there, that I had seen. I crept to the door and saw it all, heard it all, what they were saying. Saw Queenie take my Nanni in her arms. ‘Honey, honey,’ she said and she stroked her hair. ‘You speak of this with me when you come out to the marae, eh? To say goodbye. When the little one’s gone back to the city. I take you out there and remind you, honey, where you belong, where you and my brother always belonged …’

  And they both were crying again then, for old days, old times, long ago and something sweet in it, something loved and lost, forever gone, crying, remembering, and wanting that time back, the person who gave you that time, grieving but having someone there to hold you in your grief, take you to their arms, go Aueee in a soft voice, keep you comforted so the spirits of your ancestors can come and give their comfort to you, take the sadness away.

  The word for it is tangi, like Nanni said before, for sadness and for mourning, grief and loss. The summer I saw Queenie for the last time was when I found out why my Nanni loved her so. When I saw those tears, heard the kind of crying, saw the women sitting there … Sitting tangi for all they’d lost and were to lose, and remembering, remembering … Queenie the last part of her husband my dear Nanni had left.

  And still there was my mother, sitting straight and unmoving in the front seat of the car, at the end of that summer, driving me away … What was she thinking, that she could remain that way, just so? Just sitting, just looking straight ahead at the road, her hands in position on the wheel? I wouldn’t be writing any of this down now, I guess, if ever I knew what was going on in that one’s head. And neither would it be a story then, would it? If I had it all in my mind from the beginning? I’d have nothing to find out, then, would I? In the writing? Have no need to tell?

  *

  For I am pale, my mother the dark one. Newborn, see? Like I might always stay too young to fully know. Newborn on account of those fronds, tiny curled-up toes and fingers, their new green. Newborn, like I was once and my mother and her mother before her, all of us, arrived curled up that way and closed into ourselves with the secrets of our birth like so many ferns kept huddl
ed close together on that bank leading up to my grandmother’s wooden house.

  I guess in the end what made me understand the two places in my life was learning how I might live between them, that it might be okay to go from city to the country and back again, from the dark to light and the light to dark. From sentences all long with vowels and commas to other ways of being, other words … It might all of it be easy and okay.

  Because now I know it’s not so much as finding out the secrets, girl, as understanding where the words come from that makes a person who they are. And when I think about Queenie and my Nanni together … Well, something of that understanding started to make sense to me then, I guess. Something old, old, coming out of those two women’s mouths and bellies and nothing in like it newborn. The way they spoke together on the step, the way they squeezed each other, or poked their fingers into each other’s bellies and laughed … It was like watching whole bodies speaking, the old white woman and her Maori friend. Like all the understanding you might need coming deep, deep out of their real selves like the ferns right up at the back of the bank give up their seeds for new growth and everyone knew they’d been there a hundred years.

  So, yeah.

  Because a long time ago, sure, all this might have been another world.

  But the story told by now, I guess, and listen to me now, you. How I sound.

  Not so new, eh? After all?

  *

  Memorial

  Not that she would ever put it this way, let alone turn it into something that might read like a story, but the fact is, when she starts thinking around the two events that seemed to mark the beginning and the end of her marriage, what she sees is one statue at one side and another at the other. Like bookends, is what the image is. And her life with Karl, those thirteen years in between when she was with him, they’re like titles of books facing out of the shelf but she hadn’t read any of them. All that time she’d never even looked inside.

  And the statues were identical. Is how she remembers it, anyway. The same dead poet up on his box in the middle of a hot winter’s day surrounded by foreign birdsong and strange trees as the one on the grey hill in the Borders that last weekend, after Karl had told her about his affair and how long it had been going on. He was still seeing her, he’d said, the woman he was involved with, but couldn’t they make a go of things anyway? Because they were best friends, after all, him and her, they’d been like that since they met. And they liked doing the same things, didn’t they, and wasn’t that the most important part of marriage? To have interests in common? Isn’t that what, Karl had said, kept people together in the end?

  Like walking. That was how they’d met, at the University Rambling Club, and so quickly fell into the routine of going out to the hills in the weekends, coming back late or sometimes taking a tent with them in the summer months and staying out overnight. There was that exhaustion of lying down in their sleeping bags at the end of a long day and she can see now how that could have easily felt like deep contentment, happiness even. No wonder then he’d quickly called it love, Karl had, and she’d believed him. She’d ended up believing it for a long time.

  Even that day when they were out in the Borders, after he’d told her about the woman he’d met who worked at the library and about all the time they’d had together and that he couldn’t keep it secret any longer because he wasn’t that kind of man … Elisabeth had not exactly realised at the minute of his confession that she would leave him as a result of it. For there it was still between them, the pleasure of the landscape, the miles they’d already come. She’d looked around her, from her place on the hill, taking in the lovely silence and the quality of the air, and yes the words Karl had said were there, but so too was the knowledge of the thermos in his rucksack, the delicious sandwiches she’d made that morning in hers … And nothing else had seemed as real as that, had it? The routine of their life together, it’s childless, contented pleasures? She’d even said to him, hadn’t she, as they’d stopped on the side of that hill and she’d looked all around her at the great bare expanse of wintry brown and grey … ‘I think I understand what you mean …’

  But then they’d walked on, and that’s when she’d seen that the mark on the landscape which she’d noticed when they stopped and had thought was some kind of cairn or obelisk, was actually the statue of Robert Burns, and the same one – the other a copy of this perhaps – as the statue she’d seen all those years ago, on that holiday when Karl had asked her to marry him.

  *

  That holiday. You could say it had been like another part of their friendship too. It was the summer after they’d both graduated and they’d booked plane tickets straight away, making lists of what they’d need to take, walks they’d plan, with Karl organising every little detail. He’d made sure he could find the cheapest deal for one of those long-haul flights where you stop off everywhere in the world – the US and India. The Far East and Australia all the way to New Zealand and then home. He’d said it would be their big adventure, ‘OE’ they called it ‘down under’, meaning ‘Overseas Experience’ – like all the kids from New Zealand and Australia came through to Scotland for a year. Only this would be them having the adventure, leaving one side of the world for another, with nothing but their backpacks and their walking gear, all the money they’d saved, and, somewhere tucked into the corner of one of Karl’s pockets, a tiny diamond ring.

  Karl had told her, when they’d got home again, that he’d always planned for it to be in New Zealand when he would ask her to marry him, as far away as they could be so that, as he put it, ‘There’d be no going back.’ Only look at him, Elisabeth had thought that day in the Borders as they’d got closer to the statue and she realised it was the same one: He had gone back on his word after all. He’d gone right back. Though perhaps, she thinks now, in another way, he’d only gone back to being the same twenty-two-year-old he’d been when he’d said it was her he wanted to be with all the time, sleeping with a young woman every night and waking holding her tightly in his arms like he was afraid she’d disengage herself from him in the dark, that she’d quietly ease out one shoulder and arm from the circle of his embrace and get away before he saw her go out the door … Only that young woman was no longer Elisabeth. It was someone else.

  And that was when, when she’d come upon that statue, something stirred in her then. But not because of him. Not the sight of the dead poet up there on his plinth or whatever it was called, with the dates of his birth and his death and some half-worn-out bits of his poems beneath his iron feet … It was something else, the memory of another day with another statue, long ago, and of a sensation that she’d had then in the pit of her belly, ever since Karl had given her the ring, like a little nub of hardness. Like she’d swallowed the ring, been made to swallow it. That Karl had not just put it in on her finger like he’d done on some beach somewhere in the North Island but had tilted back her head and poked it right down her throat like she was an animal and it was a pill … That’s what she’d been thinking about the morning of the other statue. How being married felt like something she’d had to swallow. Though he’d asked her in a perfectly ordinary way and she’d said yes and now here they were in a different part of the country anyway and having had a row about directions because she’d been driving the hire car while he’d slept with the map on his knee and she hadn’t woken him to ask him which way when the road had taken a fork around the base of that big mountain, what was it called, where they were supposed to be joining a walk that was setting off the following week … It sat with her as she’d driven, Karl quietly snoring beside her, continued to sit with her, the feeling of the little nub of Karl’s will, sitting there in the pit of her and not dissolving.

  He’d been cross when he woke because he liked to be in charge of that sort of thing, reading the map, giving instructions. Yet all the time while he’d been asleep she had loved it, just driving along the road and deciding which way to go as the signposts came up and choosing one way or anoth
er on the spur of the moment. She’d seen a sign that had in brackets under it (‘Secret Lake’) written up like that, like the title of a poem or a story, with speech marks around it as though it were someone’s private, special name for a place, and it had a little picture beside it, a silhouette of a little figure and there in smaller writing underneath were the words ‘Memorial to Robert Burns: ¾ mile’ and an arrow. And she’d followed that.

  They’d studied him in school of course, and Karl would have known a few of the poems by heart, no doubt, would have liked them too. But he hadn’t been keen on the walk from the beginning. Waking like that to suddenly find himself somewhere that hadn’t been planned for, wasn’t in their itinerary, and yet there they were drawing up beside a picnic table and big municipal rubbish bin in a little car park dug out of the side of the road, with a board set up that gave walking directions to the lake and times it would take and the drawing of Burns and information all about him, and why he was Scotland’s ‘Most Loved Poet’.

  Karl had stayed bad tempered while they pulled on their boots and jackets – jackets even though the winters were so mild there it was like summer at home, and people kept talking about the cold and sudden changes of weather but all Elisabeth could see was bright pacific blue sky all around her and the kind of sun that would make you brown if you lay in it and put suncream on. Not a winter at all. Even so, she did what he said, put her jacket on and they got ready in their usual way – and three quarters of a mile was nothing, she’d joked to Karl to cheer him up, they’d be in and out before he would notice they’d been gone.