The Trouble With Fire

by Fiona Kidman

  ‘I reckon a space shuttle just flushed its toilet,’ says a young man who has been collecting up trolleys, and everyone laughs, breaking the tension. But Simon cannot move, riveted to the warm asphalt. Kate stands particularly close to his elbow, as if she might somehow protect him. She has a stocky build, more like that of her several aunts than her mother, who was tall and dark, rangy and loose-limbed. Kate’s sister, Janet, is like her, but she lives in Canada and Simon hasn’t seen her in a long time. Soon, he hopes, he will visit her and hold his grandson. He sees him in little electronic moving pictures on his computer screen almost every day, but that is not the same. He sighs. So many of his decisions now depend on Stephanie’s work. It may not suit her. She may feel offended if he goes off without her, but she may be too busy to go with him.

  ‘We should start the shopping,’ Kate says gently. ‘Remember, you have the boys to pick up at three, and we promised Stephanie we’d make an early dinner so she can get away to her meeting.’

  ‘She’ll probably work through and we’ll end up eating without her,’ he says, and immediately regrets this seeming betrayal.

  ‘We were going to start shopping for the lunch, too,’ says Kate, as if she hasn’t heard.

  On Sunday it will be his birthday — his sixty-second — and there is to be a lunch party. The guests will all be his friends. Although he has lived in Wellington with Stephanie for three years now, they have never had a party where the guests were not her friends. She is the director of the international section of a bank and knows a great many people with money. Because of her work, she entertains managing directors of insurance companies and property developers, investors from city and country, and she finds it very helpful that Simon is from what she terms the rural sector, because there is always someone for these out-of-towners to talk to. She knows actors, a handful of writers and several film-makers. Not all of these people are rich, but knowing them appeals to those who are.

  The suggestion for the gathering had been Kate’s. We should do something special, she emailed when she knew she would be visiting. She lives in Australia — not as far away as Janet, but still he doesn’t see her very often. Kate is a lawyer, independent and single. She has had some relationships but does not want to be committed to anyone, she says. Not until she meets the right person.

  It grieves him that what she might really be saying is that even meeting the right person does not mean that love lasts for all time, or that you are certain to live happily ever after. That you may be abandoned when you least expect it.

  Kate knows too much for her own good, Simon has told himself more than once. There are things he should discuss with her, but he puts it off. He promises himself that when he and the two girls are next together he will, but he can’t see when that might be.

  ‘You should have some friends over,’ Stephanie said, when the subject of the birthday came up, and he agreed that yes, it would be nice, provided his birthday was not announced. What he would have liked more than anything was to go to a good restaurant with Stephanie and Kate, and let the day unfold around them. Except that Kate and Stephanie cannot be relied on to get along, and then there are Stephanie’s boys to consider, and so he let it go, falling in with the plan. Drawing up a list of friends, though, turned out more difficult than he expected. The truth is, he does not know many people well. His days stretch unpeopled before him, one after another, until he picks up his wife’s children from school, and eventually she comes home to him.

  When he first sees the strange blue rainbow he feels dizzy beneath the fragmented light, puts his hand on the bonnet of his silver Mercedes.

  He feels as if something is passing through him — knowledge, perhaps. He hopes Kate hasn’t noticed, but he believes he has not faltered, that what has taken place has not occupied more than seconds.

  Inside the cool interior of New World it is still possible to see the blue blaze of light through the tall windows, causing shoppers to look up as word travels. Kate and Simon buy polystyrene containers of strong black coffee to sip as they move sturdily around the supermarket choosing good cheeses and wine. He notices how Kate smiles at the checkout attendants and addresses them by the names on their lapel badges. As if they were in the country. As Aileen would have done. So, in this way, she is like her mother.

  MATAMATA SITS ON HIGHWAY 27, between the Waikato and the Bay of Plenty. There is a long main street, with trees shading the footpaths of all the usual stores, although the chain stores are edging out the little familiar shops of the past, as well as antique shops that sell very good silver. When you say Matamata these days most people think hobbits, and cameramen with rings in their ears, and girls with studs in their tongues bearing clapper boards. Peter Jackson filmed parts of The Lord of the Rings there. In his wake, tourists have come to view the green rolling landscape, searching for signs of magic. Simon and Aileen farmed five kilometres or so off the main highway, down a gravel road. When they were first married, everyone knew everyone, on their weekly visits to town. Much of that has changed.

  Simon wasn’t meant to be the farmer. His brother Eddie never wanted anything but the farm, and Simon only ever wanted to leave it. But Eddie was a cocky sort of kid. He took the tractor down to the willow paddock one day when his father had told him the slope was too muddy. When it rolled, Eddie went under and that was that.

  There would be nobody, his father said, nobody to take the farm on. He said it over and over, until his wife begged him to stop. Then Simon said he would stay.

  He never understood why he said this; he was due to begin an arts degree at the end of that summer. But Simon told his father that he would stay, and when he did, it seemed like the right thing. He stopped reading so much, and went to dances at the hall, and drove his Vauxhall too fast on the long straight Waikato roads, drank more than he should, and milked cows morning and night. Then Aileen arrived in town to take over as the dental nurse at the school, and he fell for her at one of the pipe band dances, which he always thought were a bit weird because some of the guys still turned up in their kilts, but they were a good place for a laugh.

  Aileen had a special languid way of dancing, and ink-black hair that floated on her shoulders. Her family had a citrus orchard over near the Mount. They were plain, humorous folk, a little religious but not overly so. Simon thought he might die of happiness in her arms the first time she let him kiss her. His parents were ready to move into town by then, so the house was theirs for the taking. He knew he was Aileen’s first when they got married.

  YOU WOULD EXPECT STEPHANIE and Kate to get on but they don’t. They have Australia in common, because that is where Stephanie comes from. When Kate stays she helps with Stephanie’s boys, Terence and Jonathan. She plays Monopoly and Scrabble with them, though they are not very secretly bored by these attempts to distract them from computer games. Board games are what Kate played with her Aunt Isabel when she was a child — that is the extent of her experience with children. Still she persists with her stepbrothers (not that she ever refers to their mother as her stepmother). Terence has under-eleven cricket practice after school, and Kate picks him up and goes to watch him play. Last year when she visited she took the oranges for half-time to the Saturday morning soccer game. ‘The boys’ friends think I’m their grandfather,’ Simon had told her. Perhaps she had seen how tired he was.

  ‘I don’t have to stay with you, you know,’ she said to Simon more than once. Her visits were always connected with business, not just to see him. But on this point he was adamant. He wasn’t having his daughter staying in a hotel in the same town. Country again, he knew that. This irritated Stephanie.

  ‘Those girls rule your life,’ she said during Kate’s last visit, and the whole thing blew up to a shouting match before he understood what was happening. Stephanie had come in from work very late, as she often did. She had a colleague called Phil who, she had explained from the outset, was not just competent but a good friend. True, he was a needy person — a man who had never marr
ied, with emotional uncertainties about his life — but she couldn’t afford to lose him. She was so busy, always so busy at work, and he really was her right-hand man, so when he crashed she had to, you know, help him work through his problems, his relationships with his fellow workers. Besides, as she kept emphasising, he was a friend.

  Simon had met Phil several times, mostly at gatherings of Stephanie’s work friends. He understood right away that Phil was not in any sense a threat. He was one of those neutral middle-aged men, wearing a cravat with his shirt at the weekend, and well-cut slacks, Italian loafers (although Simon himself dresses rather like that these days, now that his wife has taken his clothes in hand). Watching Phil talk to Stephanie, Simon had no sense of chemistry between them. So it wasn’t that. Only, friendship can be a worry. It occurs to him now and then that people might abandon love before friendship, that one might be a substitute for the other, at least in this ambivalent political city.

  On the evening his wife and daughter quarrelled, Stephanie had come in looking flushed, as if she had had a glass of wine, or perhaps two. She was wearing a brown coat like a cape and knee-high brown boots with heels. Stephanie is a small, fair woman, almost fragile in her appearance, and the way she was behaving was out of character, didn’t suit her at all. Kate and Simon had made dinner and when the boys became fretful with hunger fed them and sent them off to bed.

  ‘Phil had another crisis,’ Stephanie said, as if that explained everything. ‘I hurried home to see the children. Now you’ve sent them packing.’

  ‘No,’ Kate told her, ‘their eyes were hanging out of their heads and Terence has a maths test in the morning.’

  ‘You seem to know more about my children than I do. I like to see them in the evenings.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Simon said. ‘They’re still awake — why don’t you go in while Kate and I serve the dinner?’

  But that didn’t suit Stephanie either. She cast off her shoes, and let her bag fall on the floor as she dropped into a chair.

  ‘It’s all work, work, work,’ she said. ‘You don’t understand what it’s like. The pressure.’ She put her hands up to her face.

  ‘What can I do?’ Simon said, kneeling beside her. ‘Please, let me help.’

  Kate walked into the kitchen. Beyond the divider, they heard plates being pushed gently from one rack to another in the oven.

  ‘We need to get out more. You and I.’

  ‘Perhaps we do,’ he said. ‘Why don’t we go out tomorrow while Kate’s still here? She could stay with the boys. What would you like to do?’

  Stephanie decided they should see a movie. Someone had recommended Little Fish at the Rialto. As she spoke the title, Kate came out of the kitchen bearing a plate in each hand and put them on the table.

  ‘No, Dad,’ she said. ‘No, you don’t want to see that movie.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Never mind why not. You just don’t want to see it.’

  ‘Have you?’

  Kate turned her face away. ‘Just believe me.’

  There was something dangerous in the air that he didn’t understand, some secret hanging between them. He wanted to make her tell him but Kate’s face closed and then Stephanie was shouting at them both, about how Kate ought to mind her own business.

  Later, after Kate had gone, Stephanie said, ‘So what was that all about?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I truly don’t.’ He could see, then, how it must have looked to Stephanie — that she was being excluded from something private between him and his daughter, perhaps something about her. When she understood that it wasn’t like that, Stephanie had flowers delivered to Kate in Melbourne. Please try again, Simon emailed. It will be all right.

  After Aileen died, her sister Isabel came to live near Simon’s farm so she could take care of the children. She was one of the plainer of Aileen’s sisters, big bosomed, with a right eye that wandered slightly inwards when she stared at you. Not that that should have made a difference, but there was something about her that announced her as less likely to marry than her sisters. At first she lived in the town and drove out every morning, but then a sharemilker’s house came vacant at the farm along the road, when the owners switched to beef and sheep, so she moved in there; it was almost like having her living at the house. The only thing Simon and Isabel ever disagreed on was about the girls going swimming. They were not allowed to go to the swimming hole at the river where Simon had swum with his brother and sister. Nor were they allowed to go on picnics with families who were going swimming. Isabel said it wasn’t natural, he was denying them an ordinary enough pleasure. But when she saw that he was obstinate she said nothing more.

  Even if she didn’t seem the marrying kind, people began to expect that Isabel and Simon would marry, and for a while he thought they might too. It made perfect sense. The girls regarded her much as they would a mother, although Isabel never let the memory of Aileen disappear. But his life was changing. He had become a farmer who read, as he did when a boy at school. He joined the library committee and became involved in local affairs. Someone said he would make a good mayor — a well-known and well-liked man, even if he kept his distance. They understood that, too. Many of the people in the town had Scots ancestry. Tragedy is tragedy but a man’s own business. The local farmers asked him to join him in their advocacy with the Dairy Board, which he did for some years until the big corporations moved in and changed everything. These interests took him away from the town, to Auckland and to Wellington.

  In cities, he visited art galleries and saw movies and went to classical music concerts. He met women whom he could invite out to dinner and, when he had known them for a time, take them to bed. Each time it felt traitorous, although who he was betraying it was hard to say. Aileen’s parents called sex ‘nookie’, and he and Aileen used to say that, too, when they were being playful and silly. ‘Let’s have nookie,’ they said to each other. ‘You want nookie?’ It was hard to get out of the habit of calling it that in his head. Nookie: he wanted it all the time.

  He invited one of the women he met home for a weekend. There was no reason why he shouldn’t, he told himself, driving guiltily past Isabel’s house, half hoping she wouldn’t find out, knowing perfectly well that the girls would tell her first thing on Monday. In the end he couldn’t bring himself to ask the woman to his bed while his children were there.

  A few weeks after this, Isabel told him she had accepted a proposal of marriage from a man who did bridge-building in the district. He would live with her in the sharemilker’s house, and nothing about their arrangement would change. By this time, in fact, Janet was nearly through high school, and almost everything was changing. Soon the girls would be gone. He would begin to see less and less of Aileen and Isabel’s family at the Mount. Isabel and her new husband would move away, and when they did he would rent the place for help on his own farm, because he didn’t want to milk cows any more.

  He found himself settling into a routine of farming, reading, travelling to visit the girls wherever they happened to live, occasionally seeing women. After a time he seemed to need to do this less and less. The rituals of courting were uncertain and the publicity about STDs made him afraid; he was embarrassed to use condoms with women who were too old to have children, and frightened they wouldn’t protect him with younger women who were hungrier and took it for granted that dinner meant sex. One day he was startled to realise that a quarter of a century had slipped by since Aileen died.

  But just now and then he would hanker for live music and some company — something to break the dark circle of silence that enveloped the farmhouse in the dead of night. When the arts festival was on in Wellington that year, Simon found himself waiting for a concert to begin in the Michael Fowler Centre, and the appearance of the visiting conductor, a flamboyant Russian. Beside him sat a small blonde woman with a pert nose. The seat next to her was empty.

  ‘My friend couldn’t come,’ she said, before the performance began, as if n
eeding to explain why she was on her own. ‘It seemed silly not to come when I already had the ticket.’ She had a faint twang in her accent, so slight he couldn’t immediately place it. I’ve been out of things for too long, he told himself. The woman’s short hair curled at the nape of her neck. She was wearing a tight-fitting dark sweater with a scooped neckline and large amber beads with an antique design. When she looked up at him, her eyes seemed serious and steady.

  As the musicians appeared on the stage Simon tried to find something to say before the hush for the performance began, but his voice came out cracked and raw. She leant in towards him, her fingers to her lips. ‘I’m Australian,’ she whispered, as if that explained everything. She had a soft hot scent on her breath.

  During her first visits to the farm, Stephanie tended his garden lovingly. She found shrubs that Aileen had planted long ago covered by weeds on crumbling banks, but still going strong — misshapen camellias and rhododendrons, which she pruned and nursed, so that in the spring he saw them flowering again, and it was Stephanie he thought of, not Aileen. She planted a row of lavender along the front path, and wore big shady hats while she weeded with her slim brown fingers. Usually she flew up to Hamilton and he met her at the airport. Occasionally she brought her sons, but back in Wellington she had a housekeeper who would stay over. Once, their father, who had gone back to Australia after his and Stephanie’s divorce, came from Sydney and stayed with the boys. Simon didn’t know if he was aware of where she was, or whether he cared.

  In the big empty red brick house he was free to do whatever pleased them both. One night she whispered in his ear, ‘I could have a baby with you.’

  At first he was astonished by the idea, but from the way his cock lurched back into the fray he knew the idea pleased him. ‘Would you?’ he found himself saying later on, even though he knew he was near enough to being an old man. Stephanie herself was past forty.