The Trouble With Fire

by Fiona Kidman

  She propped herself up on her elbow and looked down at him, her big rusty-coloured nipple brushing the side of his face. ‘I’d do anything for you,’ she said.

  This didn’t, however, include coming to live in Matamata, as he soon discovered. ‘I have my work in Wellington, and my friends,’ she said.

  There would come a time, she went on, when they would need more than each other. That was the way of marriage. And didn’t he love the city? There was so much for him to do there. Was it not, she asked him directly, time to move on?

  Perhaps, he thought at the time, she had seen ghosts that he believed had disappeared with her presence in the house. The crooked shrubs. The old-fashioned kitchen. The bed with the same colonial-style headboard that had stood there since his marriage.

  He does go to the movie at the Rialto, to a late-morning session. He is one of only two people in the theatre. At the counter, on an impulse, he buys a glass of wine, an odd thing to do at this time of day, but the whole secretive excursion feels strange.

  The movie is about a beautiful reformed drug addict who had been a champion swimmer before she got hooked. When she is persuaded to get involved in one last deal that goes terribly wrong, and people die all around her, she goes to a beach and swims out to sea. Before she leaves on this last journey, she ducks under the water and waggles her hands jauntily above the waves, then swims out strongly without a backward glance towards the open water.

  The storyline is so bleak that once or twice Simon thinks about walking out. His wine stands at his elbow untouched. He is still working out why Kate had been so disturbed at the thought of him coming to the movie when the ending comes upon him unexpectedly. When it hits him, he drinks the wine straight down.

  So Kate has known all along. He supposes that Janet must, too, that they have talked about it over the years. That they may well have read the coroner’s report, that people have talked to them. Isabel might have mentioned their mother’s illness, assuming that at least they knew this. As indeed they should have, but if he told them that, then one thing would surely have led to another. Why had he let her go swimming alone? Hadn’t he cared?

  Does it matter how they know? They do. They know the story of the rolling surf carrying her away is a big fat lie.

  Aileen didn’t even wave.

  About leaving. It’s about leaving and being left, Simon thinks. The gap in between is so wide that you cannot see from one side to the other. Sometimes it is hard to remember what Aileen looked like. When she first had her dizzy spells she thought it was hormones. ‘I’ve got another of these damn headaches,’ she’d say, and take an aspirin. It was the year of the Springbok tour riots and the start of the Roger Gascoigne wink on television, but she didn’t watch anything — the light hurt her eyes. She decided she needed glasses. The optician in Hamilton was newly qualified and looked past the matter of her blurred vision. He thought she should see a specialist. This was how she came to learn that she had multiple sclerosis.

  After the diagnosis he suggested they leave the farm. Already they were talking about ramps up to the house for when she needed a wheelchair. That was not what she wanted, Aileen said — the new pills she was taking would be sure to help. Yet she seemed to withdraw from him, as if, more often than not, she found him a stranger. This, the doctors explained, was part of the illness; mood and personality changes could be expected as parts of the brain began to close down.

  But still there were times when the illness appeared to recede, and for a few days at a time she was the old Aileen, laughing, playing with the children, nuzzling him when she caught him unawares. During those times she would always suggest a visit to her parents at the Mount. The Mount was still the place she called home, even though it was built up with new houses and the drifting sandbanks had been tamed.

  On one of these afternoons she said she wanted to go the beach for a little while, just her and Simon, and could her parents please mind the girls. In the car she sat quietly — not withdrawn, the way he was becoming used to, but seemingly content, as if just sitting there beside him was enough. It was a still, sunny day. She was wearing shorts and a halter-necked top, which pleased him because she wasn’t disguising her body the way she mostly had since she got sick.

  That was how she left him, before he understood what was happening, before he could catch up with her in the water, clothed as he was. She stumbled slightly as she got to the edge, but when she entered the water she launched herself in, her arms slicing cleanly through the waves. By the time he rushed in, helpless from the start, then back to the sand to alert the lifeguards that she was missing, she had swum beyond their reach.

  Since then he has heard of other people doing it — young men and boys more often than girls. There was a boy who took off his clothes and folded them neatly in front of a waterside restaurant in Wellington, then swam past the windows, where a diner looking up from his Cajun fish and salad had seen him heading away. He had disappeared long before the man could convince anyone of what was happening. How could it be? people said. But Simon knew it was easy. None of these incidents had ever been mentioned to him by the girls. He had no reason to think they would know.

  When Simon had been married to Stephanie for two years, and not long after he had seen this movie, he said to her, ‘Did you mean what you said about the baby?’ Around that time he felt as if he was falling in love with her in a way that was deeper, stronger than before. Life might not be perfect, not just as he had imagined it, but he was fortunate and he thought he might not have given happiness the chance that he should — he had held onto a past that should have been over. When he held her, he felt tender and virile and younger than he was. It was a silly time to ask. They were stripping paint off the beautiful wooden doors of the house they were restoring in Kelburn. ‘How could they have painted over this wood?’ Stephanie said, grimacing. ‘Oh my God, they’ve had varnish on them too.’

  ‘Well, would you?’ he said, knowing she had heard him.

  ‘Darling,’ she said in a half-mocking, vaguely amused voice, ‘I work.’

  ‘But you don’t have to,’ he said.

  ‘I have children already.’

  ‘I know, and they’re great,’ he began enthusiastically. But he couldn’t go on with this.

  After a moment of silence she put the paint stripper down carefully on a cloth. Her tone was unfriendly. ‘Actually, I have to work tomorrow,’ she said. ‘In case you’d forgotten. I need to prepare.’

  ON THE DAY OF THE lunch he has managed to assemble their kitchen designer, whom he has got to know quite well, and his wife who is a painter; also the son of one of his old Matamata farming friends, who is a graphic designer, and his girlfriend, an occupational therapist. Although the man is younger than Kate at least they will know families in common, and the language of where they have come from. Then there is an older couple whom he met some years ago when fog closed the airport and they were stuck there together for hours. They are members of a chamber music society and have invited him to one or two concerts. The husband is a retired accountant and his wife teaches French. Altogether there are nine of them. He has sought to include some of Stephanie’s friends but she has shrugged these suggestions aside. ‘What about Phil?’ he asks.

  ‘I think he’s tied up,’ she says, as if Phil is a prisoner somewhere.

  Stephanie has made a very large but also very light salad, and there is bread. Afterwards there will be dessert and cheeses. Simon feels that it is not enough, although this is the way well-to-do Wellington people eat at Sunday lunch. Light. He would have preferred a dinner but Stephanie thought lunch would be best. He thinks wistfully of the pot-luck dinners he and Aileen used to enjoy with their neighbours, remembers the dishes steaming in the frosty night air, the surprises inside (although everyone would have agreed in advance whether they were bringing mains or dessert). Nowadays he remembers Aileen more often, or at least their lives together. She is not the stranger to memory that she was. He tells himself this is
healthy, that a sense of perspective has been achieved, that Little Fish and her wiggling fingers have freed him. Aileen would have said he’d ‘stopped bottling things up’. These are private reflections but he is sure he is ‘on the right track’.

  The group talks in a desultory way, trying to establish links. Simon thinks the kitchen designer and the younger couple are wondering whether the salad is the first course. Stephanie attends to serving the guests, waving away offers of help, while Kate talks to everyone in turn. She draws them into talking about travel and places they have been, which takes quite a while. When that topic is exhausted, they move on — more guarded, because they don’t know each other — to George Bush and the war in Iraq, and then the conversation drifts towards the weather, the odd cold summer they are experiencing, and that leads on to the blue blast of colour that lit up the sky earlier in the week. Everyone has a story about where they were and what they saw. The woman who is a painter is able to explain the phenomenon. It was, she says, a circumhorizontal arc, rare although not exceptional. The effect was created by light passing through wispy, high-altitude cirrus clouds that contain fine ice crystals. There is more to this, which the painter explains at some length. She is a middle-aged woman with heavy reddish-coloured hair that she pushes back behind her ears. Her fingernails have yellow and red paint beneath them. ‘The arc is similar to a rainbow,’ she says, ‘but the ice crystals are shaped like thick plates with their faces parallel to the ground. When the light passes on the vertical side, it refracts from the bottom, and bends, like light through a prism.’ Simon likes the warm, no-nonsense look of her, and the way she has stored up this knowledge. It is at this stage that Stephanie gets up and leaves the table.

  As soon as he is able, without seeming to be concerned, Simon follows her through to the kitchen. Her car keys are in one hand, her cellphone in the other.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I had a text message. Didn’t you hear my phone? No, I suppose you wouldn’t with all that talk. Congratulations, it seems to be going well.’ She glances at the phone in her hand. ‘Phil is having a crisis,’ she says. ‘He really needs me.’

  ‘Phil? You’re not at work now. Nothing can be that bad.’

  ‘Life and death,’ she says cryptically.

  He doesn’t say that she has gone. Kate raises her eyebrows in enquiry and he shakes his head, in a way that only she can read.

  ‘Kate and I will do coffee,’ he says during a break in the conversation. The guests drift into the sitting room. The designer and his girlfriend say they will have to go soon. Simon can tell from their faint tobacco smell that they are in need of a cigarette. Everyone else seems content to talk and enjoy the view of the garden through the French doors. Like the garden at Matamata, it is full of lavender, and a variety of roses just finishing their spring flowering. Soon enough, the guests will discover that there is no hostess to farewell.

  He knows she will come back this time. And other times, until there is a last time. She will not leave him for Phil. Or perhaps for anyone. It is more likely she will leave and come back some day and tell him to leave, and then she can get on with her work. She will be free of him wrestling with things that happened long ago, even though he has never told her exactly what they were.

  He does not blame her, at least not yet, not while he is handing around Turkish sweets with the coffee. It is not as if he did not know. Just the other day, when the light passed through the sky, he knew something was up. That he had learnt to read the signs of leaving. He has seen them in himself.

  Silks

  When I think of love, and how things began for us, I think of a house by a lake, and us lying in bed with our skin like twin silks sliding together. I remember the Venetian blind, and the slats of light that shone through, moonlight but also sunlight, because that was the way it was, we were in that bed night and day. That was the time, too, or thereabouts, when I began a kind of worship for a writer who lived by lakes, and made love with a man in a room where the slatted blind made stripes on the soft and shining light of his back.

  The writer, a Frenchwoman called Marguerite Duras, was born in Vietnam, a girl who made love with a man of another colour, a woman who lived outside the pale. That was like me, only I married the man I was in love with, when I was young. Who knew whether it would last? That was the question they all asked, the good Presbyterian men and women who were my aunts and uncles, on the day that I married. We married, my husband and I, in a church with thatched walls, while a thunderstorm broke overhead and the rain poured down, and nobody could hear the promises we made.

  As I say, I was very young. My waist was twenty-two inches in circumference. I had thick dark hair. The art of love came easily to me. I worked in a library, and read French writers, and Duras was another love, a passion that went hand in hand with the discoveries of the flesh that I was making. In my lunch-hours I rushed home. My husband would be there before me. We would make love and go back to work. It was an exhausting life.

  Duras led us to Hanoi, but this was many years later. Close to fifty, in fact. We could look back and say fifty years of married drama and laugh, but it held the ring of truth and remembered fires, the silky fire of sex, the fiery nights when we broke things, a couple of black ragers in our worst moments.

  It was not the first time we had been to Vietnam. We were no strangers to the East, but we hadn’t been to Hanoi. I had followed Duras around the world, stalked her ghost: to Saigon (which is how I think of Ho Chi Minh City, because Saigon sounds wilder, tougher, more glamorous, I suppose); to Cholon, where she had spent her afternoons in the bed of her Chinese lover when she was supposed to be at school; and along the Mekong River in a flat-bottomed barge, in search of her house (which we never found), to Neauphle-le-Château, the French town where her house stands abandoned beside the still dark pool that is another reflection of what I call my inner life. I had leant my face against her windowpane, looked at the scuff marks her feet had made on the skirting boards of her kitchen. And I had been to her plain grave in Paris, marked with the stark initials: M.D. Just that. But I had not been to Hanoi where, for a brief time, her widowed mother ran a boarding house beside a lake. My own mother had worked in a boarding house. You will see how it comes together, her life and mine, though sometimes this interest can be misunderstood. Are you an alcoholic? I was once asked by a journalist. Of course I said no, because I am a woman of good reputation, and live in a small country. I had written an account of my life and the journalist thought it incomplete. They always want to know more than you want to tell them. They want a scandal, of course. Duras was an alcoholic. She drank herself into comas. I have never done that. For a time, I drank too much. That isn’t the same thing at all.

  MY HUSBAND MET ME IN Bangkok airport. He had been to Phnom Penh, where he worked as a volunteer for one of the aid organisations. As he has grown older he has become more and more interested in saving the world. He does good works and changes lives. I can’t be like him. I find it hard to visit slums, to work alongside the halt and lame, without assuming the zealous smile of a person offering charity. The heat gets to me, and the begging for money, and the children for whom good works will never be enough, the despairing women. And, if I’m honest, I find it hard to get along with the aid workers, who seem to me either rampantly Christian or else escapees from some other reality, jittery with cheap alcohol and casual sex, blazing-eyed and reckless. They’re not all like that, but enough are to make me wary. The more time I spend with them, the more determinedly ordinary I become. Judgemental in my way, as the aunts and uncles at my shoulder, a prim elderly woman with frangipani stuck awkwardly behind my ear. My husband doesn’t look out of place. He seems part of the landscape. He sits on the side of filthy streets and eats what’s offered to him while he talks to the people who live there.

  As soon as I saw him at the airport, I thought, He doesn’t look well, something’s not right. He was pale, and wandering in his speech. Although we had planned our mee
ting carefully, he had confused the times and gone to wait at the airport many hours before my plane from Auckland was due in Bangkok. My luggage was the last off the carousel, and by the time I came through the gates he was hysterical about my whereabouts and security guards had to restrain him from rushing through the incoming passengers to find me. But when he did see me, he didn’t seem pleased, almost as if I was a stranger.

  We prepared to board the plane for Hanoi, although, even as we did so, I thought it was a terrible idea. If there was something wrong, perhaps we should stay in Bangkok. We passed through check-in and relinquished our luggage and it was too late to turn back. My husband asked me to find a chair so he could take a rest on the way to the gate lounge. I said, ‘Do you think you’re well enough to go on this flight?’

  He said that of course he was, which is what I should have expected. He doesn’t give in easily. Before he left Phnom Penh some friends had taken him to a noodle shop to eat lunch. It was dirty, he said, but he didn’t want to offend them. He may blend into the landscape, but he tries to be careful, particularly as he had come home to me once before with an illness that had developed in the tropics and took him close to death. Perhaps, he thought, he had eaten something at the noodle shop. Whatever it was, it would soon pass.

  We arrived at night and the airport was utter chaos: hundreds jostling together, some coming, others going, taxi drivers looking for work, pushing people out of their way. Our driver found us, the board bearing our names held high above the heads of the crowd, and some time later we were being driven towards Hanoi, or so far as I knew. The roads fell quiet and a dark countryside rolled alongside us. We crossed a river and a bridge that seemed to stretch into infinity; I sensed the water beneath us.

  ‘I think we’re crossing the Red River,’ I said, expecting my husband to be excited. He had wanted to see this river, which is also known as Mother River, for such a long time. ‘This must be Thǎng Long Bridge.’ He had done so much research, knew all the facts and figures about this extraordinary feat of engineering, and about the two villages that lay beneath its spans. He didn’t answer me, and I felt irritated. I thought he could have made a little effort.