The Trouble With Fire

by Fiona Kidman

  And he’s telling them that it’s been a busy day at work, and the nanny is saying, ‘Quietly girls, quietly, now mind your father’, and in the background one of the older girls, Sheila, he thinks, is at the piano playing something sweet and dreamy — ‘Für Elise’, perhaps, which is what young girls love to play when they are just getting the hang of music and their fingers are spreading across the keys beyond scales and nursery rhymes. A house full of women: five daughters, the sweet scent of their creamy freshly washed bodies and the nanny, who is still young herself, with dark hair and eyes, and a flair for fashionable clothes, even if her ankles are not her strong point. He has thought, in passing, of slapping her bottom, just to see what she would do. And, somewhere, somewhere in here beyond the noise and bustle of welcome there is Marge, his pretty English wife with her big blue adoring eyes.

  ‘Where is she?’ he asks the nanny. She looks at him and scowls and his spirits sink a little. He had forgotten that the nanny is given to moods. Marge has told him that she has been unlucky in love and that they should be kind to her when she is down. But sometimes he fears she is showing the disapproval Marge would never express, on his wife’s behalf. What has he done now?

  ‘Lying down,’ says the nanny.

  ‘Is she unwell?’

  ‘It’s the Irish in you,’ responds the woman, ‘all mad. You never stop to think, do you?’ The nanny is Scots Presbyterian. She had to think twice about taking on a job in this house, even if they were Protestants. Not the same kind of Protestants as her; the Irish never could be, she said at the time, which had made the prime minister laugh. Now it looks as if nobody is amused.

  Marge is coming towards him, her hair dishevelled, her cheeks flushed and damp, as if she has indeed been lying in bed, and crying at that. In her hands she clutches the Evening Post.

  ‘Gordon,’ she says, ‘how could you?’

  There pictured on the front page, him walking, hand in hand with Janie McCaw, out of the Thorndon Baths.

  COURTING

  PERFUME. IT WAS MARJORIE COLE’S scent that had attracted him from the beginning. She had been piteous on the first occasion he met her, a young woman from England who, against all her father’s advice and at only sixteen, had come to join her sister and brother-in-law in New Zealand. Her father was a doctor, a man of the world. The thought of this child going to the colonies seemed absurd when she could have a life of comfort at home. But her brother-in-law was sick and, as Marjorie had said to her father, ‘Whatever will Babs do among all those Maoris if poor Otter becomes worse?’ Her sister had written that they were going to take a small cottage near the sea at a place known as the Kaipara. The weather was good, orchards had been planted, the water teemed with fish. Somewhere Marjorie had read that the first settlers heard the sound of snapper fish crunching the shellfish on the shores of the harbour, and this information she read aloud to her father. The living would be easy.

  ‘What of these Maoris?’ her father asked.

  ‘Not many of them,’ Marjorie had replied, undaunted. ‘On the Kaipara they have mostly killed each other off.’

  Babs and Otter were waiting when her ship sailed into Auckland. The three of them set off with little delay for the Kaipara, travelling by train and ferry, to their home near the sea. Marjorie had become uncertain about their venture. On the voyage out, some people who came from the north had told her of the dangers of the Kaipara Harbour entrance, the people who had died. When the ferry rolled and pitched on the last stage of the trip, she thought she might die too.

  The small cottage proved to be nothing like an English cottage, more like a shed where a gardener might keep his tools, except a little larger, with a curtain dividing off what passed for a bedroom, a double bed on one side and a single bed for her on the other. The travellers had brought a leg of mutton in their provisions and, on that first night, Marjorie put it in the cold oven of the stove and tried to light a fire. Otter had retired to bed, while Babs mopped him down from a fever that had overtaken him on the journey.

  Outside, in the failing light, a man approached on horseback. Gordon Coates had ridden over from Ruatuna, the family home, when his sister had remarked on the newcomers arriving with their bags and a cabin trunk, heading for the cottage next door.

  ‘Everything all right?’ he called out to the girl standing distractedly in the doorway, running a hand through the waves of her hair.

  It was so clear that nothing was right that he dismounted and walked over to her. She put her face down so he couldn’t see the tears. He put his finger under her chin. She had the bluest eyes of any girl he had ever met. Even though she was in such a dishevelled state, he detected rose water, mixed with the girl’s own fresh scent. He had waited for this moment all his life.

  Only she was little more than a child. He could see it wouldn’t do.

  Later, when Otter had died, and Babs remarried and gone to Australia, he found Marjorie working behind the perfume counter at Kirkcaldie & Stains, the big department store in Wellington. No, that isn’t quite how it happened. Babs had written him a note to say her sister had gone to the capital. She didn’t want to impose on him, and she knew he had affairs of state to attend, but Marjorie was still a young girl. Perhaps he could look in on her at work. This was before he became prime minister, although such was the force of his delivery in the House, and the changes he had brought about for the poor, that everyone knew of him. He was just about to go to war. When he entered the shop, the doorman tipped his hat to him. The graceful notes of a piano being played on the second floor floated down the stairs. Ladies were making their way to the tearooms where he knew, from past visits, there would be tiered stands of cakes and scones and tiny cucumber sandwiches.

  The perfume gathered from many gardens now assailed him. Marjorie was absorbed in her task of dabbing scent on the wrist of a customer. When she looked up, she smiled with her pretty rosy mouth, as if she already knew he was there. An elegantly draped dress fell from her bustline. The hands that worked their way over the elderly wrist she supported were soft and white, with small shell-shaped nails. He wanted to hold her in his arms. He wanted her to lie in his bed with him. He thought, This is love. Although he had taken women in his arms many times and they had told him they loved him, he had yet to tell a woman he loved her. He thought his heart a cold stone, but now it was not. For a moment he had to steady himself, so dizzy did he feel with emotion, not to mention the persistent drift of jasmine and lavender that suffused the air.

  Because he was who he was — Mr Coates — the supervisor of the counter agreed, without even raising her eyebrow, that Miss Cole might take an early lunch with her gentleman caller.

  ‘We’re apart in years,’ Marjorie said, when he blurted out his confession of love. They were not even properly seated.

  ‘Not enough to matter, surely,’ he said. ‘A dozen or so years. It’s neither here nor there.’ He had spoken to an attendant as they entered the tearoom and now, as if by magic, the woman appeared bearing tea and one of the laden silver stands.

  ‘You hardly know me,’ she said, as she bit into a cucumber sandwich, shunning the scones with their jam and cream.

  ‘Of course I do,’ he said. ‘You think I didn’t watch out for you up north?’

  ‘I heard you had others to watch out for.’

  His face flushed then. ‘There’s always idle gossip in small towns.’

  ‘Is it not true then?’

  ‘It’s in the past,’ he said, after a pause. ‘Whatever it was, it’s long ago gone. I would have married by now, were it not the case.’

  ‘You’re certain of that?’

  ‘I’m bound to the Maori cause in politics,’ he said gruffly.

  ‘But not in your heart?’

  ‘Of course it’s in my heart. One cannot stand by and watch injustice. I owe an allegiance.’

  ‘To whom, Mr Coates? Who do you owe?’

  ‘The people,’ he replied. ‘You’ve seen the Kaipara. I owe the people of the
Kaipara.’

  Her fingers pleated the sharp edges of the linen cloth in her lap. ‘Our home will be there?’

  ‘Eventually,’ he said. He spread his hand over hers, sensing her capitulation. ‘But for now you will stay here, and, God willing that I should return from this war, one day, I promise you, you’ll live in the prime minister’s house.’

  For her wedding gift, the following week, he bought a dressing-table set of amberina perfume bottles, the glass full of reflected yellowish fire. He would have her, and have her, before he sailed. He would leave her with a daughter, but then Gordon Coates often did that to a woman. He would come back to her, a hero, and the daughters would keep arriving.

  LAND

  NEWS TRAVELS FAST IN THE north. It was always so. On the Kaipara one morning, a flight of fantails flickered round the doorway of the whare of Te Mate Manukau, and then, although he and his wife tried their best to stop it entering, one flew inside. Te Mate Manukau said to his wife, with bitterness, there is trouble in the south.

  The land above the Ruawai plain seaward of the hill, Ngati Whatua land, once belonged to the chief — but when his daughter gave birth to the first of her children, he gave it to the man who would be his son-in-law. That was what he believed. The chief continued to believe this when more children were born. He was proud that the man would marry his daughter. The man himself was a chief, a prince among men. Or so he considered then.

  He no longer believes that the marriage will take place, although sometimes a lingering hope stirs within him. The fantail entering his house is not a good sign and, since he gave over the land, his thoughts always turn in that direction and how he has come to lose that which was precious to him. The man who would have wed his daughter has changed his mind, had more children already by another woman, and left them behind too, one of them already dead.

  His thoughts fly to his grandchildren, but he can see them at play, not far away. It is simply the death of hope, he thinks then. It is a knowledge being borne to him that what he most desires will never happen.

  In the distance, he sees his daughter and, from the way she stands, he sees that she knows something already. Soon enough, he will find out the details for himself. He watches her walk across the paddock, head bowed. When she reaches the river he calls sharply to her mother.

  Her eyes travel the path their daughter has taken. They take in her stance at the edge of the water, up to her knees in the mud, the mangroves closing around her, despair in every line of her body.

  ‘Stop her,’ Te Mate commands his wife. His wife can run faster than he can with his stick.

  ‘She’ll come back.’

  Te Mate is gathering himself, urging his wife on.

  ‘In a minute she will be all right,’ she says.

  ‘How can you say that?’

  ‘She knows he is gone. She knew long ago. Don’t startle her.’

  So it is as he thought, although nobody has told them; it is about the man.

  After a time that seems to go on forever, although really it is just a minute or two, their daughter straightens herself, returns the way she went, wiping a mud-stained sleeve across her face. The oldest of her girls runs towards her, pulls at her hand.

  Aroha, my darling, my darling, be happy.

  It is true, she has thought of slipping into the river, letting it sweep her along out through the mouth of the Kaipara. Of course, her father had been angry. He had given the land. Beautiful land, still clad in bush, tall trees, dark furled ferns, a stand of totara.

  But what good had his rages done? Gordon wouldn’t change his ways. He didn’t for her, nor for Annie Ngapo, with whom he has also had children. At the store this morning, the ferryman told her: he is married, it is in the newspaper. The Pakeha girl with a face like whey who stayed here a little while, you know the one I mean? And she knew straight away that it was true, and what she had been told did not surprise her. She had always sensed the ambition in his barrel chest, the one that covered hers so many times, her nipples brushing against his skin. They have known each other since they were children. Through and through. The smell of each other when they lay together. Mussels and eels, whisky and tobacco, their dark mingled musk close to the earth. She could hear the sound of him thinking, in the stillest moment.

  So that, when he asked her, that last time they were together, ‘What is it that you want?’, she had known that he trusted her not to tell him the truth, not to say the words that would have kept him. It was in her power to tear his heart apart, but she didn’t. What use was half a heart to her? She didn’t say, ‘Just you, just you for always’, because that would have been to hold him when he wanted to be set free.

  Instead she said, ‘My darling, my darling, be happy.’ And another baby stirring in her womb.

  POSTSCRIPT

  LONG AFTER, YEARS AND YEARS on, when the old people are gone, Gordon will come back to the Kaipara, his power faded, the dances and parties over, and also the money, of which there was never as much as one might have thought. He will want to give the land back. When the people say, No, it is too late, it cannot be put right now, he will suggest that one of his daughters marry into the family, so that they will be linked with the land. The daughter herself will seem not to be against this.

  But her mother is English. It will not do, she will say.

  The Trouble with Fire

  When his baby’s stools turned to water, Frederick told his wife they must go to the hills. The town, although pretty, was no longer safe. It boasted gas lamps and paved streets in its centre, and drinking fountains and churches where they might pray to God that their child would be delivered from his illness, but nothing would do except that they take him to the clean air of the mountains. They were living in a boarding house with all manner of guests just off the ships. If it was too late to save the boy from the spread of disease, it was surely not too late for a cure.

  Annie demurred at first, for the house was not ready. ‘I can bear any discomfort,’ she said, ‘but surely the baby won’t survive the elements if we don’t have shelter.’ Already she had seen the construction of the house, its floor resting close to the ground on foundations of stones piled one on top of the other. ‘I’m afraid of the wind,’ she said, ‘the nor’wester might blow us away. I can see myself putting rocks in the baby’s cradle or he’ll vanish.’

  But Frederick knew that it was the hot nor’wester that brought flies to town, where the drainage was still in its planning stages. At this time of year, you could feel the wind hovering beneath overcast skies, creating a heat that drove people close to a feeling of madness that the gale, when it did arrive, failed to ease. Annie said she felt the wind not just in her nose and eyes but even beneath her fingernails. Although it was not her husband’s practice to tend the baby, servants were hard to come by in the new colony, and in the close confines of the rooms they shared, it was difficult not to see what was happening. He had noted the trail of mucus and a shadow of blood in the baby’s stools as if, at each breath he drew, something — a membrane, a tiny vein perhaps — ruptured within him. The smell was enough to make him want to vomit, too, a rank sickly sweet odour such as he had noted in ports where families lived in one-room shacks and burned incense to mask the rot in their bodies. The baby’s thin penetrating screams both infuriated Frederick and filled him with grief. He felt his own large body contract as if bearing his son’s suffering. He put impotent fists to his eyes.

  ‘Haven’t either of your boys had an illness?’ he asked his wife. A moment of anguish flickered over her face. At once, and too late, he remembered that one of her children had not drawn breath at all. But the others back in England were sturdy. When he had spoken, he was hoping she might have had some experience, some memory of what to do that would rescue the baby. Although this was the fourth son she had borne, it was his first child. He couldn’t believe how much he loved him, how much he saw his own image in the face of the boy, who at birth had appeared so healthy, with long limbs that would g
row to be like his, and an unexpected mat of dark hair he was sure was the colour of his own.

  Annie rang a bell and a girl no more than sixteen, wearing a white apron over a dark dress, appeared and took the baby from her arms. They had rented an extra room for her after Annie’s lying in. Herself the second child in a family of eleven, and already promised to marry in the spring, the girl handled the baby more easily than his mother. All the same, her lip was sticky with sweat, her hands coarse and slippery. There was nowhere to escape the oppressive heat that threatened still more wind.

  ‘Come here, Frederick,’ Annie said, when the door was closed. He dropped to his knees, burying his face against her, feeling her arms around him. She caressed his hair and stroked the side of his face.

  ‘My wife,’ he said, ‘my dear wife.’

  ‘I’ll do whatever you say is for the best,’ she said. ‘We have to be brave or we’ll never come through this.’

  He promised then to find her a better place to stay. Some people he knew would welcome a titled lady into their home. Meanwhile, he would go to the house in the hills and quickly make some rooms ready for their arrival. In his absence, she could walk by the Avon, a river that meandered through the stately garden at Ilam, smell the sweet honey-like scent of the red flaxes in bloom, eat fruit picked fresh from the orchard, read and play croquet, just as if she was at home.

  ‘Thank you, dearest Frederick,’ she said. When he released her, straight away she called the maid back and ordered their travelling cases prepared.

  In the night the hounding wind rose to a gale, slamming through the sky, shrieking at the eaves of the boarding house. The walls seemed to bend in on them, the rush and howl drowning out the infant’s crying. Annie turned to him in the bed. ‘It will be all right, my love,’ she murmured, ‘all right.’ Comforting him again. In the morning they left the boarding house.