by Fiona Kidman
Many nights now, he lay awake in the dark and imagined Roy’s eyes following him. What he did know was that he needed to get away from the house, to find another place where he could sleep at nights.
He arrived early at the lawyer’s office on the day that the sale of his and what was still Patricia’s house was to be signed. Patricia was there already, for once unaccompanied by Seymour.
They sat on opposite couches, thumbing through magazines. By then, he had changed his job, taken a sideways shift to another department. His appearance was different. The day he had decided to sell the house, he had looked in the mirror and judged his appearance shabby and middle-aged, and saw that that his moustache didn’t suit him. At the barber’s, he instructed the attendant to shave him and cut his lank greying hair very short; as the hair fell away he was left with ginger stubble around the shiny dome of his head. His new image took him aback, the loose flesh under his chin revealed, the grey pouches beneath his eyes more noticeable. But he felt tidy and changed.
If Patricia noticed, she didn’t say so and he wasn’t inclined to make conversation. But, in the end, the silence unnerved him. ‘So how is it?’ he said. ‘With you and Seymour?’ The words just slipped out.
She raised her head, putting her finger in the magazine to mark her place. She was reading Vanity Fair. After a silence, she smiled. ‘Much the same as it was with you. Without the sex.’ He read her expression as one of relief.
He nearly said, ‘Well, why bother being married at all?’ but stopped himself in time. The answer, he supposed, would be that their marriage had failed because it was all about sex, and he should know there was more to it than that. This would be neither true nor fair, but it would keep him in the wrong.
Colin thought, instead, that marriage was what kept them safe, Patricia and Seymour. Besides, power was a pretty strong aphrodisiac.
HIS NEW HOME WAS AN apartment in an art deco building on Oriental Parade. The façade had curved corners, and so did his sitting room, although the rest of the rooms were regular and square. He liked its plainness, its proximity to the sea. Most of all, he liked that in these rooms, which he had decorated and furnished with simplicity, he could shut the door on his days at work, and on the past. Some evenings he sat in total silence while the sun slid over the waters of the bay, and the moon rose. On other nights he played classical music, about which he knew very little, although he was learning. He listened often to Sibelius’s soaring turbulent notes, before they sank into peacefulness. In the music he felt his own life passing by, reliving its roller-coaster ride.
He had been living alone for some years when Eleanor tracked him down. It was 1985. Already, he was a grandfather. His children did visit occasionally, to present their offspring to his not unwilling arms. His grief, if not over, was in abeyance, a shadow that crouched in the corners some nights, ready to spring, but he believed he had discovered the strength to quell it.
‘You said to me once that if there was anything you could do, you’d help me,’ Eleanor said, when she rang. ‘I never thought I’d ask, but something’s come up, and, I thought, Well, I can but try.’
They met in a café near the waterfront. Eleanor was wearing a plain dress made from a silky pink and grey fabric that gave her dark hair and fair skin a soft look. She was still curvaceous, in the way that he remembered from their first meeting. It all seemed such a long time ago. He guessed that she was still quite young, perhaps thirty-five. She still wore an air of slight melancholy, and he wondered if this was her natural disposition. After Roy’s death, of course, her sadness was to be expected, but by now he would have hoped her to be recovered.
When they had ordered coffee, a flat white for him and a long black for her, he said, ‘So are you still doing those exquisite miniatures?’
‘That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I’d like to have an exhibition, but I can’t find any gallery space in town.’
‘Really? But that’s ridiculous. There must be plenty of galleries.’
She explained to him then that the galleries were very tightly held. There were privately owned ones, of course, but the public spaces were controlled by a group of people who decided what would be seen. ‘Really, it’s a case of who you know,’ she said.
‘Closed shop?’ he said.
She shifted uncomfortably. ‘I don’t like to say this, but the committee exhibits their friends’ work. Watercolours, miniatures like mine, aren’t held in very high regard. I don’t fit in the image, whatever the medium. I’m not modern. If you know what I mean.’
He did know. Politics was like that now. The new economic era. Who was in and who wasn’t. He was feeling it, too. All the same he was puzzled. ‘I don’t see where I come into this,’ he said.
‘The committee. Patricia’s on it. I wondered if you and she … well, I’m sorry.’ Her face was crimson. ‘I thought you might be able to talk to her. I think I’ve made a mistake.’
‘I could probably talk to her,’ he said. ‘It’s not impossible.’ He wasn’t sure if what Eleanor said was strictly true. He could think of a number of places where exhibitions were held, and he was sure Eleanor’s work wouldn’t take up much space. For a fleeting moment, he wondered if she had simply wanted to see him again, but dismissed it just as quickly. If that were true, she would have been in touch long ago. More likely, she really did lack the confidence to approach the right people. Patricia would be hard for someone like Eleanor to deal with. Nowadays she ran all sorts of things, and sat on arts committees. She had her name in the papers not just as a photographer, but also as an administrator. Privately, Colin thought the quality of her work had diminished. Seymour was never far away in these reports, for he had become a philanthropist, giving away money. As a couple, they looked rich and formidable. In her last newspaper picture, Patricia was imposing, her shoulder-length hair swept to one side; wearing a slim black dress, she was talking to an artist. She held a wine glass in one hand, and gestured with the other. She had power, no doubt about that.
‘I do see her now and then,’ he said slowly, although this was increasingly rare. There had been a baptism ceremony for one of the grandchildren the previous year, which he found odd, given that marriage had been dismissed by his children as too old hat for words. ‘Would you like me to arrange a meeting?’ He knew this was impulsive, even rash.
‘I’M REALLY PLEASED COLIN’S MET someone at last,’ was the first thing Patricia said. She was wearing a loose T-shirt, tight jeans and high heels. At fifty-five, she looked much younger. She twirled the ends of her hair in her fingers while they ordered, at the same café on the Parade.
Eleanor blushed again. ‘I’ve known Colin for a long time.’
‘Really,’ Patricia said to him. ‘You old dark horse.’ For a moment she looked offended.
And then Eleanor rushed to explain, her eyes filling with tears, stumbling over her words, about the way her brother had died, and how Colin had come to see her.
‘Pretty awful,’ Patricia said crisply. Her fingers drummed on the tabletop. ‘I’m sorry, I should be getting along.’ Even though their orders hadn’t arrived.
‘I’ll walk you to your car,’ said Colin, signalling to Eleanor to wait for him. Already Patricia had picked the car keys out of her handbag and was standing up.
‘It wouldn’t have hurt you to talk to her,’ he said, when they had walked a little way.
‘I don’t know that she’s right for you,’ Patricia said.
‘That’s really none of your business. I wouldn’t have picked Seymour for you, as a matter of fact.’
‘Payback time?’
‘No, Pattie. What’s really eating you?’
‘Nothing’s eating me, Colin. Stop following me, I don’t like it.’
And then he remembered. ‘Was it about the body?’
They were nearly at her car: he could see the smart open-topped MG sparkling in the sun. He knew he couldn’t lay hands on her, physically restrain her, yet his words had some effect t
hat halted her. She stood shaking beside the car, holding onto the door.
‘It must have been horrible,’ she said. ‘The boy dying. The worst thing. I wasn’t very kind to you then.’
‘It wasn’t the worst thing. It should have been, but it wasn’t.’
‘I’m sorry I couldn’t stay and talk to your friend. I just couldn’t.’
‘So there was a body on the farm?’
Patricia pulled her sunglasses out of her bag. ‘A skeleton. I told you, it was just old bones.’
‘But they were a secret?’
‘I was afraid of my stepfather. Les. He had a nasty streak in him. He belted the hell out of Mamie. I’d have got the same.’
‘Do you know whose bones they were?’
‘No.’
‘Did he?’
‘A woman disappeared on that farm.’ She was still shaking. ‘It was before my time there.’
‘My God. Who was she?’
‘I don’t know.’ She had begun pulling herself together. ‘Why don’t you ask him? I know where you can find him.’
‘Pattie?’
‘He’s in hell, where he belongs. Of course I don’t know. I’m glad Les is dead. I told you, hon, you’d have kept it secret too if you were me. It kept me out of trouble. Now I do have to go.’
THERE WERE GALLERIES TO BE had, of course. What Eleanor really meant was that she wanted an exhibition space where there would be an opening night and champagne, and critics, and a crowd full of people like Patricia, with their quick talk and sharp lines. When he offered to help, she settled for something more modest. It was a beginning, as he said. The critics stayed away, but the pictures sold. When the last of them had gone, she said she wished she had kept them, in a way, because part of her life had disappeared with them. So he knew it was true: she was melancholic, and it would be his cause, his task in life, to keep her demons at bay, as far as possible.
After they had been married for a time, she wondered if they might have children. Colin thought not. He encouraged her to keep on with her painting. Some nights he lay awake and listened to her weep for her brother, and tried not to complain.
Under Water
That summer, the temperatures soared day after day, and even the Norfolk pines along the esplanade seemed ready to wilt. The sky was golden, but that was to be expected in this town; it was what the tourist brochures promised. Yellow light spilled across the beach, through the pretty town with its glamorous art deco buildings in the main street, over the tall trees, the giant spreading palms; the scent of flowers was abundant and people sat under umbrellas drinking wine beside the sea. Like a mini-Riviera, idyllic really, if you looked at it like this, but what was the sum of it? Jemima was trying to work out the meaning of poetry that summer, but it wouldn’t come to her. She had read a lot recently about the aesthetics of poetry, delving back to the centuries before Christ, the time of Gilgamesh. She tried different forms in her own work, and struggled over villanelles and sestets because her online poetry instructor said that if she mastered different forms then her open form would develop a more poetic sense.
What Jemima was really looking for, she supposed, was the meaning of life. A life. Her mother’s life and her own. The fact that she was a poet, or someone who aspired to be one, was merely incidental. She thought she had come close to understanding some important truth when she and her mother had taken a trip to the gannet colony a year or so earlier, near her hometown of Napier. It was one of many trips, but her mother said it would be her last. When Jemima was a child, it was an annual family ritual, insisted upon by her father.
JEMIMA HAD BEEN MARRIED TO a playwright called Nick, who was a celebrity because of his hard dark theatre and also because he had grown up in the wild Chatham Islands and was expected to be a fisherman, not a writer. (And there was the matter of his looks. It was regarded as tactless to mention them, as if talent were not enough, but there was no doubt that they helped.) Nick had trained first as an actor and sometimes performed in his own works. They had met some years before when she was given tickets to the first night for one of his shows. She had written the advertising copy for the play and, somehow, because the theatre was short staffed at the time, she had finished up doing the programme notes as a favour. The play, ‘a stark metaphor for the lives of men who lived by the force of water’, was about fishermen who had drowned in the Chathams, and there were many. At the end of the play someone suggested she go on to the opening night party, and she had found herself face to face with Nick. She hadn’t been to much theatre and found herself at a loss for words. My programme, she had said, offering it to him, perhaps you could sign it? There couldn’t be a more gauche opening gambit, she knew, but there it was. She explained that she had written the notes. His eyes travelled over her swiftly as he took her pen and wrote: Roses are red, violets are blue, my heart pants 4 U. Beside this silly message, he had written his phone number and a question mark.
‘Touché,’ she said, wishing she could flee. ‘I really loved the play.’
‘Your notes are very good,’ he said, ‘especially as you hadn’t been to rehearsal to know what was in it.’
‘I did read it,’ she said.
‘Go on,’ he said, tapping the programme where he had written his phone number. ‘Swap.’
So she wrote her number on the other side of the leaflet and he tore it in half, folding his piece carefully before placing it in the inside pocket of his brown suede jacket.
Six years after this encounter, he left her for a blonde Canadian girl with a ponytail who was working in a Dunedin bar he met her in while on tour.
Jemima’s father, Neil Hutchings, wanted to break his neck, but then he thought Jemima was foolish to have made such a reckless mistake in the beginning. She knew the reproach in his voice wasn’t intentional. He and her mother, Ruth, had been steadfast. That was the word he used. Steadfast. Whether the weather be wet or whether the weather be cold, he would say, we weather the weather together, whatever the weather may be.
JEMIMA AND HER OLDER BROTHERS knew all her father’s family. Neil was a surveyor who had grown up in town, but his working life had been spent in the countryside, making charts of landscape, measuring the surface of the earth point to point, determining its boundaries. There were eight children in his family, people who stayed close to one another and remained with their partners in these shifting times.
His children knew their grandparents, and all their aunts and uncles, and their first cousins numbered nearly forty. Because there were so many of them, Jemima never really stopped to ask her mother much about her family or why they didn’t visit their other grandmother, whose name was Mamie. By the time she had given the matter more than a passing thought, Mamie had died, and so, too, her husband, Les Mullens. Jemima did understand that he was Ruth’s stepfather, but the only father Ruth had known. Now that she was older, there were things she did want to know, but her mother brushed her questions aside.
Because of his job, Neil owned a Land Rover, and had access to the long Cape Kidnappers peninsula that had to be travelled in order to see the gannets. Sometimes the cousins would accompany them, although the journey was one of such special quality, so important, that he didn’t like the chatter that erupted when there were several children together. He didn’t care to be there when tourists arrived on trailers pulled by tractors. Jemima supposed that this, for Neil, was a kind of spirituality. He never entered a church. But she knew how he loved the big white gannets with their gold and ebony crown, thousands upon thousands of them, living side by side, nesting on the bare pale sandstone rock. Just sit and watch, he would say, and you’ll learn all you need to know about love. They would watch the birds diving into the sea from a great height, sudden bolts of white-feathered light flashing through the sky. As the birds hit the water, they emerged with silver fish in their mouths. Then came an ungainly walk to the nest, delivering the fish to the family, followed by the twining of necks that went on between couples.
He b
elieved that before you married, it was important to get to know another person, to court them, the way he had courted her mother, Ruth Mullens, as she was then.
IT WAS HARD TO TELL whether Ruth’s marriage was perfect, however Neil saw it, because Ruth was such a very quiet person. Yet Jemima believed it was enough. Ruth loved her children with an intensity that sometimes seemed fierce, and plants and books and birds, in roughly that order. These were the elements of her life. The house where Ruth and Neil lived from the time when they were married, and where Jemima and her brothers had grown up, was on a rise overlooking the sea. It was an ample open house, with French doors opening onto wide verandahs, and a garden like an artist’s palette that Ruth had created. My Giverny, she called it, even though she had never been to France, but it did have water features and a small lake. There wasn’t really a time before this house, Ruth used to say, when asked about her early life. She had gone to library school, and started driving the Country Library Service van early on, and that was that. On the whole, she liked the people in the country who invited her for meals. Some places were strange, as she later described them, but then she knew about strange places. That was as much as she said, really, about where she had come from. When pressed, she said vaguely that she had sisters, Patricia and Blanche, but they had drifted apart. Once Jemima’s Aunt Blanche had come to visit. She was still a small child at the time, and she remembered that Blanche had a bagful of sweets, and spoke with a slight stammer, as if afflicted by a shyness even greater than Ruth’s. The sisters had embraced when they parted and promised to keep in touch.
It was while delivering books to the town library that Ruth met Neil. Every three months, new books would be brought to the library and exchanged for the last lot. Neil enjoyed reading, particularly travel and adventure. He would go to meet the van, and it came to be expected that he would be at the library on the appointed day, four times a year. After a time, Ruth had taken to choosing special books for him, and putting them aside so he could read them first. This was against the rules, but she did it anyway. This went on for five years before he proposed to the quiet girl, with her strong broad hands on the wheel of the big van, and the strawberry birthmark on her neck that flared up when she was shy, which was often. She referred to it sometimes as her ‘disfigurement’ but nobody in the family seemed to notice it. It was part of who she was.