by Fiona Kidman
‘It’s just a cook book,’ says Bethany.
‘I’ve heard it’s going like hot cakes.’ The woman chuckles at her own joke, and Bethany laughs too. She is being put at her ease, she supposes, and is grateful.
‘Working on another?’
‘Yes,’ says Bethany, ‘I’ll start another book quite soon, when the tour for this one is over.’
A face looks back at her, not her own, a mask of dark eye shadow and rouge camouflaging her expression. Who knows what is true? She feels free of the need to account for or explain herself. It is there in the work, as long as the quantities are right and the instructions make sense. Sometimes she sees a long, straight darkness alongside her, the kind of darkness that swallows the light, but at other times she sees glimpses of such pure ecstatic colour that she knows she hasn’t imagined her life up until this time.
She holds her face very still, not wanting to disturb her china doll complexion. She could grow to like this, her nakedness covered at last.
A DANGEROUS BOY 1
TODAY IS ONE of those days when Stephen seems alien, towering above Bethany, arms folded, sunglasses pushed up on his head, or perhaps she is just getting shorter. Her son looks older than his years, a fan of lines between his eyes. Short back and sides emphasise the bullet shape of his head. A light strip of moustache decorates his upper lip.
‘Great day out there,’ she remarks, one of those inconsequential opening gambits she keeps in reserve for Stephen’s moods. She senses his disapproval, which is permanent now that her face appears in newspapers above her cookery column. You can pretend we’re not related, she has said more than once. He glowers in return.
‘Praise the Lord,’ he says, in response to her enthusing over the weather. Perhaps, secretly, he would like her to resume her maiden name. Fat chance. She has been Bethany Dixon for a very long time.
‘Well, if you like.’ Even as she speaks, she wishes she’d bitten her tongue. It’s not just me, she comforts herself, after exchanges like this. Stephen needs to disapprove of almost anybody in order to justify his own existence.
‘Don’t sigh,’ she says, hoping to appease him. ‘It just takes some getting used to.’
By this she means that Stephen and Molly’s in your face Christianity is not what she had expected of either of them. But there it is, they are saved and born again, her son, and his wife who, as it happens, is the daughter of her late second husband, Matt. They are rescued by God. From what, Bethany is uncertain — maybe her, though she thinks it is just the mundane routine of lives that seemed to be going nowhere. But, Stephen would tell her stubbornly, if she was foolish enough to open up the subject, his life is now complete. God has made it so.
‘I suppose you’re going to be busy over Queen’s Birthday,’ he says.
‘Did you want help with the children?’ Bethany makes her voice non-committal. Stephen’s stepdaughter, Zoe, gazes up at Bethany, whom she calls Bethy-Nan, adoration in her small freckled face. She loved Bethany from long before the surprising marriage of her mother and Stephen. She sits carefully wrapping pikelets in plastic wrap at the end of Bethany’s golden yellow table, a shy, short-sighted girl, dressed in a too frilly gingham dress.
Bethany leans over to help Zoe with her task; they have spent the last hour cooking so the child can take a gift home to Molly. All the same, she is distracted, what with balancing Zoe on the stool, and making sure that the batter hits the pan instead of going all over the stove top, and answering her persistent four-year-old questions. Once Stephen has taken Zoe home, she has work to get on with, new dishes to test in readiness for tomorrow’s photo shoot. Her kitchen sparkles, freshly renovated and painted in luscious fruity colours; she knows Stephen thinks them outrageous.
As he hesitates, she sees it is more than her colour scheme that troubles him, it is the different position and size of everything that he finds disturbing. He reaches out with a half-puzzled look, as if he can’t find his way, now that this room of his childhood has so altered in its dimensions.
Since their marriage, Molly and Stephen have had two more girls together, in quick succession. Grandmotherhood seems to have overtaken Bethany more suddenly than she had anticipated. She knows it is not a condition upon which children seek the advice of their parents, but, all the same, three girls sometimes feels like a lot.
And that is not all.
‘Are you expecting Abbie?’ asks Stephen, reading her thoughts. She hears the resentment in his voice. Abbie has a son, of whom Bethany sees little. It is true, it is they she has been more than half-hoping might visit over the long weekend.
‘They could turn up,’ Bethany says.
‘Well, that would work in well.’ Stephen’s voice now oozes satisfaction. ‘I want us to get together as a family.’
‘Oh.’ Nonplussed. ‘Like how?’ There was a time when Bethany could conceive what a family might mean, but that was long ago. The convolutions of what might pass as a family tree have escaped her. Although she does tell people, reporters in particular, searching for meaning among the trappings of her recent success, that family is important to her. By this, she means the people who relate to her within the odd network of marriages and partnerships of the past. Some are still contained in the fabric of her life, others, like Abbie’s father, don’t want to know, still more are missing, lost or gone into limbo.
But it occurs to her that, for Stephen, they might not be gone, they might have been returned to him by God. For a moment she is envious of what seems to her a simple faith. At intervals in her life, she has sat in a draughty brick church in the centre of town, and waited for the knowledge of God to fill her soul, but she doesn’t think that has happened yet, even though something has entered her spirit which wasn’t there before.
‘It’s coming up twenty years.’
‘Since what?’ Bethany, in something of a hurry, wipes down the taps. But she knows, even as she asks. Stopping her work, she puts her hands on the bench and leans against it.
Whatever sharp retort Stephen has prepared he abandons, seeing her distress.
‘Since Ritchie,’ she says, before he can reply. ‘Since Ritchie.’
‘I’ve asked my father to come.’
‘You’ve done what?’
‘I’m allowed to ask my father, you know. I don’t need permission any more.’ Back on the defensive.
‘I know that, Stephen. What did he say?’
‘He said it depended on you.’
‘It seems it’s all decided then.’
‘Didn’t you get his letter? He said he’d written. I told him, I said she’s always so busy these days, she probably won’t have the time to answer.’ On this note, Stephen gathers up Zoe.
‘To do what?’
‘I thought we should put up a headstone,’ he says, walking towards the door.
Her hand flies to her mouth, as if to stop herself speaking, but she has nothing to say anyway. She sees Ritchie’s grave in her mind’s eye, set in a corner of the town cemetery, marked with a simple wooden cross. Twice a year she visits him, at Christmas and on the anniversary of his death. She tells nobody of this, although she has sometimes wondered if she is selfish, keeping her feelings to herself. She assumes the children no longer grieve for their brother in the way that she does; Abbie doesn’t even remember him. Why inflict her loss upon them and demand their observance of what is, after all, rituals she has invented for herself? Happy Christmas, son, she says, watching the summer sun flaring above the electric blue skyline of the hills. As if time has stood still, she thinks each year of the gift she might have brought for a twelve-year-old. Goodbye Ritchie, she murmurs, later, when the year is turning to winter. Often her words are whirled away in the wind.
‘A plaque for Ritchie,’ Stephen says. ‘So he won’t be forgotten.’
‘ANOTHER VERSION OF how we met,’ says Bethany, making light of her son’s marriage to Sam’s niece, when she is explaining how it all came about. She feels she owes Sam an explanation. For the
past year he has stayed in New Zealand to help Molly and her brothers sort out their estate. He is their executor, as it turns out, even though he hadn’t seen Matt for twenty years. What the heck, this is my town, the place where I grew up. He has one son in Italy, the other married in Vancouver, the opposite side of Canada from where he lives now. His wife is dead. I can do without snow and ice for a year, he told them.
‘You’d think Stephen and Molly would have got to know each other, all those years they lived in the same house as brother and sister,’ Bethany mused. Well, I suppose they did know each other’s ways but if they did, they didn’t let on. They all but ignored each other.’
‘So they didn’t find God at the same time?’
‘Gracious no. It was Stephen’s idea. I ask myself sometimes where I got Stephen from!’ Communicating her distance, how little she is in sympathy with her son.
It was Stephen who found God first. In fact, he introduced Molly to the Lord, one wet weekend when she was down and out as far as she could go. Her boyfriend had walked out on her. At the time, Bethany had recently left Matt and returned to her old home, while Molly and Zoe were living in a shabby state house on the far side of town. Molly brought Zoe over to be looked after for the weekend.
Bethany remembers how she tried hard not to look resigned, for all she liked Zoe. Stephen was visiting, looking darkly around the old house, as if she had gone mad. He knew where her husband was right then, he intimated, and he thought it served his mother right. The sanctity of marriage was something she had never appreciated. To some extent this was lost on Bethany, who didn’t know what Matt was up to herself. Stephen had come to tell her he was saved, but Molly was there.
I might be out for a while, Molly told them, as if she were Captain Oates going out into the storm.
She was gone for two and a half days.
They heard where she was over the local radio station: fifty people had their hands on a car in a local car sales showroom; the last one with a hand on the car would win it. Molly was there, vowing to stick it out to the end. They knew this because the reporter picked on her to say a few words when the media came down to view the spectacle.
‘I’m a single mum,’ Molly said into the microphone. ‘This is a chance to do something for myself.’
‘I’ve got to go to work tomorrow,’ Bethany cried, when she heard this. ‘How long is she going to be there for?’ This was before Bethany was a famous writer of cookery books.
Stephen was still trying to tell her about salvation; he had been hinting all afternoon that she should repent. ‘You’ll have to do something about it, Stephen,’ she told him.
‘What am I supposed to do?’
‘Make sure she’s all right.’ Zoe had cried all afternoon, one of their less auspicious days together. ‘I think it would be a very Christian thing to do.’ She is always ashamed of herself when she makes cracks like that. Then and now, it’s too easy, but she doesn’t seem able to stop herself.
For once, Stephen took her point, though he did mention he had work of his own to do. Stephen has become a land agent, doing better than Bethany had expected. He sells low-cost housing to the hard up. They trust me, he explains, his eyes earnest.
Molly didn’t look herself at all. She had taken to wearing heavy make-up, short ragged skirts and jerseys that she pulled nervously over her tattooed fingers, holding the sleeves bunched down in her hands. When he found her, she was wearing tracksuit pants and sneakers. He saw that she must have changed, like someone taking part in a race. A fierce, concentrated determination illuminated her scrubbed face.
‘She can’t stay here,’ he said to the organiser.
‘Who says?’
‘She has to go home and look after her baby.’
‘Can’t you take care of the kids?’ the man said, smirking at him in a way Stephen found offensive. ‘You’ll have to carry her away if you’re going to get her off that car. You can tell she’s a goer.’
On the second morning, when the numbers had already dropped to ten, Bethany rang and asked Matt if he would buy Molly a car. Just a little car, something she could get around in.
‘But he didn’t? Oh, the asshole.’ Sam is outraged. Bethany wants to correct his pronunciation — we still say arsehole over here — but thinks better of it.
‘Well, he wasn’t very helpful. Still, I guess he had a point.’
‘Why, what did he say?’
‘Oh, you know, something like do I have to give her something every time she makes an exhibition of herself? Well, back then she was kind of outrageous, one way or another.’
‘But this was different.’
Bethany shrugs. ‘He wasn’t to know that. Molly loved Matt, you know.’ Indeed, as she might have reminded him it was Molly who placed a notice after his death which said: ‘My dad is now a big diamond in the sky. God only takes the best.’ Why should anyone be surprised at her wholehearted embrace of Stephen’s offer of the Lord?
And Stephen did look after her. He took a day off work on the Monday so he could take food, and wipe her face. When she took a toilet break her hand was red and sore and her wrist swollen up.
‘Stick with it, Moll,’ he found himself saying. Dear God, he prayed, please let Molly win.
And then it had been all over in a matter of seconds. On the third day, a woman had come in to look at the last two survivors, Molly and a man, and her child had cried. Molly turned sharply, her hand disconnected for an instant from the car, before she registered that it wasn’t Zoe.
‘God didn’t mean it to happen,’ Stephen said.
‘They shoot horses, don’t they?’ a woman in the crowd said. Just like the movies.
‘Then in he comes,’ Bethany relates, ‘all full of fire and puts it to me. So, he wants to know, am I allowed to marry Molly? I mean is she my sister or what?’
‘Like second prize,’ says Sam.
‘He wouldn’t see it that way,’ says Bethany, inexplicably wounded. When it comes to the point, she will defend Stephen from a stranger’s attack.
NOW THAT BETHANY Dixon’s unordinary life has begun, people write letters to her, in the wake of her Cooking with Bethany newspaper columns and programmes on radio.
‘The other day at a smart restaurant I ordered potato rosti with smoked salmon,’ one man writes. ‘For my money (which was a hell of a lot), it looked like Mock Whitebait Fritter that my Mum used to make, grated potatoes and stuff. What’s different? Yours, Alf Trotter.’
‘Dear Alf,’ writes Bethany, ‘very little is different, I suspect, although your Mum probably didn’t put garlic in hers, the way most people do nowadays, and rosti sounds more interesting than mock anything, doesn’t it? The wonderful thing about food is that we can adapt the best ingredients and recipes to suit our changing tastes. I am enclosing a copy of the recipe I use, which has a gingery flavour you might like to try. Thanks for your interest in the column.’
‘Bethany, I’ve been looking everywhere for a really good tomato soup to preserve. My friend used to give me a jar of hers every year and she always promised me the recipe but now she’s dead, and I think she’s taken her secret to the grave. Sincerely, Doreen.’
‘Dear Bethany, you don’t mind if I call you that? You feel like a friend. Did you ever come across a recipe for cider and chicken casserole? Rosie.’
Yes, she writes. And yes again. And ‘Thank you,’ writes back Doreen, ‘you’re a genius, I’m sure that’s the same recipe my friend used, I’ve copied it off to all my daughters. Lots of love and blessings.’
‘Thanks,’ writes Rosie, and sends her a book to sign, no return postage supplied.
At nights she lies awake and worries about this pile of letters that flood through her letterbox. She wakes up with a start, wondering whether she has included all the ingredients and supplied the correct amounts.
Small wonder that Bethany has slid Peter’s letter to the bottom of a pile of unopened mail. His bears a computer-generated sticky label, even though they haven’t
corresponded in years. She guesses he keeps her on file, and that this shouldn’t surprise her.
‘Peter?’ She tests his name on her tongue across the years and the distance. ‘I didn’t expect to get put straight through, I thought I’d get your secretary.’ There is a temporary silence on the other end of the line. Once she would have apologised, said, sorry I didn’t open your letter, tried to explain.
‘Bethany, it’s so good to hear you.’
‘Really?’
‘I thought you’d have consigned my letter to the dustbin. What a cheek, you’d have said. Or perhaps that’s what you’re going to say anyway.’
‘No,’ says Bethany, gripping the phone, her knuckles taut. ‘I wouldn’t say that.’
‘After all these years.’
‘Fourteen, fifteen?’
‘About that. Will I know you?’
‘My hair’s nearly grey all over. So you are going to come?’
‘If it’s all right with you, I’d really like to. Bethany, I’m kidding you, I’ll always know you.’ He pauses, as if embarrassed that he has allowed himself such an intimate tone. She can tell she has caught him off guard. He laughs more easily. ‘Anyway, I’ve seen your pictures. A syndicated column in Australia. My gosh.’
‘You’ve seen that?’
‘Of course. Val pushes it under my nose at breakfast time. And an article about you in the Bulletin. I was flying to Melbourne the other day, and I took a magazine. Opened it up. “New Zealand cook serves up the right stuff. The Mrs Beeton of the South Pacific.” Look, I said to the bloke in the next seat, there’s my ex.’
‘Oh Pete, stop it.’ Laughing too, catching herself. Pete. Well, well.
‘You’ve had the kitchen remodelled.’
‘The newspapers, they will insist on taking photographs of me. Sam said nobody could take a decent picture in the old one. It was so narrow, if you remember.’
‘Sam?’
‘A friend. Well, my brother-in-law actually.’