All the Way to Summer

by Fiona Kidman

  Lewis is absorbed in the children from the moment he enters the house. The girls are called Hilary and Aretha. They clutch his legs and demand rides on his back. On a command from her mother, five-year-old Hilary scurries away to bed, but Aretha, two years younger, won’t leave. She is still coiled around Lewis’s neck when Georgie begins serving dinner.

  ‘She must go to bed. I’d already put them down for the night.’

  ‘Well, there you go, darling child. Mummy says it’s time for bed. We’ll just have to take you along.’ Veronica sees how he is inflamed with love for these girls, all his coolness deserting him.

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ she offers. ‘I’ll say goodnight to Hilary.’

  From where she is perched on the edge of Hilary’s bed, she watches Lewis tuck Aretha into bed, putting her Raggedy Ann down beside her. Lewis would die if anything happened to these kids, she thinks, and shivers.

  ‘Say it, Daddy, say it,’ says Aretha. ‘The thank you God song.’

  ‘For a lovely day,’ he murmurs, ‘and what was the other thing I had to say?’

  ‘Now I remember, it’s Go-od bless me,’ the girls sing along with Lewis.

  ‘Sometimes I worry,’ he says, as they return to the dining room. ‘I think that I’ll be too old to be any use to them when they grow up and I won’t have long enough to find out what happens next in their lives. At other times I’m all selfishness and grateful they didn’t come earlier. Whatever would Georgie and I be doing with ourselves?’

  As she opens the door, Veronica is about to say, ‘Pretty much the same as all of us,’ but when she sees Georgie and Miles standing side by side, she hesitates and says nothing, momentarily blocking Lewis’s entrance into the room. Miles holds a tureen of soup and Georgie has been lifting a ladle from it. It is nothing, Veronica tells herself. A helpful domestic gesture. But their fingers touch.

  The meal is simple and to the point: light spinach soup, Basque chicken with a hint of chillies offsetting the peppers and olives, French bread, a fresh green salad, cheeses.

  While they are eating, the storm that has threatened all afternoon breaks. Lightning strikes and thunder rolls outside, torrential rain falls straight and flat like an Asian monsoon. The power goes out, and Georgie and Lewis fetch candles, Georgie cursing that the chicken is cooling as they continue their meal in the flickering half dark. They take extra helpings of salad, although Veronica finds it a trifle bitter for her taste. So does Lewis, who says so.

  ‘It’s got mustard leaves in it,’ says Georgie, defending her territory.

  ‘A minimalist salad,’ says Miles.

  ‘Thank you, Miles.’

  ‘An intellectual salad,’ says Lewis gloomily. There is another flash of lightning, in which, for an instant, his face is bunched and old.

  The moment passes. Instead of art, they lapse into desultory conversation, telling of storms and catastrophes. Miles begins a story about an old woman next to his house (when he still had one, he said, when he was still a married man), who climbed an apple tree in the rain and disappeared. Like Jack climbing the beanstalk and out through a hole in the sky.

  Their meal is ending with floating islands, œufs à la neige. Almost too rich, Veronica notes, a touch of bravado, perhaps.

  ‘She got stuck in the tree?’ Georgie asks, perplexed.

  ‘She dissolved in the rain?’ Veronica enters the spirit.

  ‘Fell out of the tree like a ripe apple. As it happened, she’d fallen on my side of the fence — under the hydrangea bush, there all the time.’

  ‘Myocardial arrest,’ says Lewis, his tone short. ‘I’m going to check that the girls haven’t woken up.’

  Georgie is still laughing as Lewis leaves the room, her face flushed from wine, her manner careless. She’s in love with this man, Veronica sees, observing Georgie’s gaze resting on Miles. She knows the way Georgie looks when she is falling in love; she has seen it before, helpless and wide-eyed, a flaring around the nostrils as if she is smelling incense, as she looked when Lewis had knelt at Maura’s side in the hairdresser’s salon. This cannot be, this terrible wounding of Lewis that is unfolding.

  Earlier, she had decided that her modest collection of art wasn’t worth discussing with Miles, but now she changes her mind.

  ‘I’m thinking about getting some new pictures,’ she says. ‘I’d love to look at your catalogues. Have you brought any with you?’

  ‘Of course,’ Miles says, switching his gaze away from Georgie. Veronica sees that he understands what Georgie has not, that their looks have been intercepted and translated.

  Georgie is abrupt. ‘It’s getting late. Why don’t you talk about it tomorrow?’

  ‘I’d love to,’ they chime almost simultaneously.

  ‘After we’ve brought you breakfast in bed. We like to spoil her,’ Georgie tells Miles, as if Veronica needs cosseting.

  So Miles and Veronica spend Saturday looking at catalogues and transparencies, in between playing snakes and ladders with the children, waiting for the rain to clear. A drizzle persists, and it is very cold outside. Veronica looks with an appraising eye at Hoteres and Woollastons, an Albrecht that she likes very much, a Spencer Bower that she hovers over, and a host of dazzling others, all artists whom Miles seems to have known in person, to hear him talk; he is full of anecdotes. She puts yellow stickers on pictures she would like to view. She finds one that interests her in particular by an artist she has never heard of, a mysterious upward movement that suggests dancing.

  ‘Influenced by the poem sequence Ginger Modern, when it was set to music.’

  Veronica draws a sharp breath.

  ‘You know it? A work of genius.’

  Georgie is within earshot. She has made a point of not moving out of range all day. Veronica decides not to lie. ‘My husband wrote that. Former husband, that is.’

  ‘You were married to Colin?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He looks at her with new eyes. ‘I knew there was a traumatic divorce.’

  ‘Not really, just a divorce.’

  ‘But it was. Colin never wrote like that again. I met him afterwards, after you. He told me about it. In the end he gave up. Well, I suppose you know all of that.’

  Georgie turns away, as if busying herself with another task.

  ‘It depends on whose version you’ve heard. Colin didn’t stop writing on account of me.’

  ‘How can you be sure of that?’

  ‘I’m not a hostage to Colin’s fortune. He stopped writing poems before we parted. He’d turned to journalism.’

  ‘What about Ginger Modern? One of the great love poems?’

  ‘An early sequence. He often read from it.’

  ‘So when the poems stopped, you left?’

  ‘You make it sound very obvious.’

  ‘Why are you so fucking calm about this?’ Freya had demanded of her mother after the divorce. ‘Don’t you care?’

  Veronica doesn’t know. She blames herself for all manner of things — like Freya’s boyfriends who come and go, about the physical distance Sam put between them, about her own condition of stasis. She is not sure how any of it has come about, that sudden walk, her refusal to look back. She knows that for most of the time she is content, a woman who has surrounded herself with small treasures and a workload that doesn’t leave time for reflection. It is only when she comes here that she is seized by an old restlessness and wonders if she should stop coming.

  But, once or twice, she has flicked through old family photographs: Colin, herself and the children, in which she is startled to see herself, body turned slightly away from Colin. That’s why history is history, she thinks, we don’t see what’s happening at the time.

  ‘Perhaps I’m being impertinent,’ Miles is saying, ‘but Colin mentioned that there was a great love in his past who’d deserted him. It sounded tragic.’

  ‘Oh, love,’ she says, in much the same way he had dismissed Georgie’s spiritual journey.

  ‘I just assumed. A thou
sand apologies, Veronica.’

  ‘Accepted.’ She feels something closing around her, that old flannelly, bat-wings-in-her-hair sensation.

  ‘All the same, you liked that painting,’ he persists.

  ‘A coincidence. I’ll look at the rest later,’ she says, pushing away his catalogue and yawning. It’s not feigned, Veronica really does feel exhausted. Miles puts the catalogue to one side, vexed.

  ‘You two getting along all right?’ Lewis asks in passing. He has Aretha on his shoulders and Hilary by the hand. The weather is clearing. ‘Who’s coming for a walk?’

  ‘All of us,’ says Georgie, looking firmly at Miles and Veronica on the sofa.

  So they walk, all six of them, through the gathering evening light. The clouds are that dark amber and gold that often follows thunderstorms. The estuary stretches beside them as their boots make rough tracks in the grass. A group of black wading birds, white ruffles under their tails, are slipping the long orange straws of their beaks in and out of the water, as if sipping.

  Slipping and sipping. Colin would have liked that. For an instant, Veronica is wistful.

  Georgie walks beside Miles, talking animatedly as they slowly draw ahead. The others follow with the children, stumbling as they ford a swampy piece of marshland. The fingers of wind on their cheeks keep them moving. Lewis looks ahead at the two heads bent in conversation. He is not a stupid man, Veronica thinks, he will understand soon enough if he doesn’t already. She feels a rush of pity, or something more, for him.

  ‘We should catch up with the others,’ she says.

  But by now Miles and Georgie are far ahead, having reached a ridge where they stand silhouetted against the evening sky, their figures like dark puppets on the horizon.

  ‘I think the children have just about had enough,’ Lewis says. Hilary has been complaining about water in her gumboots. ‘Will you tell Georgie, I’m turning back?’

  Georgie is startled by Veronica’s appearance by her side. Miles is less surprised, as if he had been half expecting her to turn up.

  ‘I suppose I’ll have to go too,’ Georgie pouts when Veronica explains about the children.

  ‘Perhaps Miles and I can walk on a bit further,’ Veronica ventures.

  Even Georgie, in this lovelorn girlish way that has overtaken her, understands that for the moment enough is too much. She turns on her heel and stalks off across the paddock. Calling to her family, then breaking into a run and scooping up Hilary to piggyback her, just as Lewis has Aretha on his back. They look like a perfect, laughing, happy family. Veronica feels her heart breaking. Perhaps they will escape this time, but there will be another and another, she supposes, now that Georgie is no longer content.

  Miles pockets her hand, almost absent-mindedly, linking his fingers through hers before she can pull away. There is something comforting about the lacy intimacy of their fingers curled up there together … like dancing with the man who had danced with the woman who’d danced with a man …

  ‘You’re not as I might have expected you — had I ever anticipated meeting you,’ Miles remarks as they walk on.

  ‘So, what would you have expected?’

  ‘Someone harder.’

  ‘Oh, I’m hard all right.’

  ‘No, you’re not. You like rescuing people. As long as it’s not yourself.’

  ‘That’s presumptuous. Some people shouldn’t have to be rescued.’

  ‘Ah, Georgie. I was wondering when we would come to the lecture. Colin said you were a school teacher. A pretty good one, he said.’

  ‘I don’t want to hear any more of what Colin thinks of me.’

  ‘Faith is the leap you ask me to take into the darkness …’ he recites, changing tack.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ she says, ‘Ginger Modern. I know it.’

  ‘Well, of course you do. Oh, my God, the scent of those illicit wild flowers in summer, it’s all there, so sensual, the lovers drowning in that perfume. The sense of something coming to an end. But of course it must have only been a beginning for you.’

  ‘It was a long time ago.’

  ‘Love, there is always a price …’

  ‘Yes,’ she says again, her voice sharper than she intends. She brushes her hair from her face.

  ‘He did write it for you, didn’t he?’

  ‘You’re the one who understands the poem.’ A desperate unease has gripped her.

  ‘So who did he write it for, Veronica?’

  ‘Oh, who knows? I mean poems are glorious fabrications; in much the same way as art.’ This trips off her tongue, sounding worldly and wise.

  ‘Or history?’

  She hesitates, ‘Does Lewis know that you know Colin?’

  ‘Colin’s never come up in conversation. Should I tell him?’

  ‘Probably not.’

  ‘So where does Lewis fit in?’ Miles asks, his tone casual.

  ‘Nowhere. I just wondered.’

  Only she has said it first. Lewis. Lewis.

  Lewis and Colin, and the wild scents of a summer past.

  Colin and Drew.

  ‘Lewis was our oldest friend,’ she says stiffly. ‘He and I have always taken care of each other.’

  ‘I see.’

  And for a startled, awful moment, Veronica realises that he does see, and so, at last, does she. Lewis and Colin had never left each other, at least not until Drew came along.

  ‘Everyone wants to look after Lewis by the sound of it,’ Miles says.

  ‘Why do you say that?’ Her voice is still rigid in her throat.

  ‘Georgie once told me that she’d saved Lewis’s bacon. He’d been jilted. Well, I expect you know all of that.’

  ‘Of course,’ she whispers.

  Colin and Drew. Not Lewis and Colin anymore. Not even Lewis and Colin and Veronica. Somewhere along the way, had she been the price love had to pay? Why had none of this ever occurred to her?

  ‘He owes me, was the way Georgie put it.’ Miles, cutting an elegant figure slouching across the paddock beside her, looks straight ahead as he tells her this.

  Georgie. Even Georgie knew what she had failed to see. Worse, Georgie has always known everything, from the moment sad Maura wept in the chair of the salon and told her all. Tough little Georgie, coming out of nowhere, full of knowledge. She had known what she was letting herself in for.

  Miles speaks kindly, suddenly contrite. ‘Some woman Lewis knew I suppose, perhaps she was married, something like that.’

  ‘Yes, something like that. I should go back.’ She is thinking, I’ll go home tonight. I’ll be ill. Or say that Freya needs me, someone will have to take me back.

  ‘I’d like to see you next time I’m in town,’ Miles is saying, while the cold air floods her hot face.

  They have come to a thicket of pine trees along the knoll and, without Veronica noticing, moved inside a canopy of branches. ‘I’d like to make love to you,’ he says.

  ‘No,’ she says, frightened.

  ‘It might be nice. For both of us.’ They stand close together, their breaths foggy in each other’s faces. He leans in to kiss her.

  ‘Stop, please stop.’ Her legs are trembling, even as she returns his kiss. She sees he has brought her here, certain of where he was going. He will have been here before with Georgie; perhaps even this afternoon he had expected Veronica and Lewis to turn back together.

  ‘Take off your coat, he says against her ear, his fingers urgent at her buttons. Veronica feels herself already undone. She has been ambushed again. But an old hot remembered flame of desire is licking curiously between her legs. He’ll do, she thinks. Like sharing a changing ball, those lollies kids sucked and passed from one to another at school. His silky prick is lying in her hand.

  Undressing is a problem in the misty air, trousers that stick to her skin, knickers caught ungracefully round her ankles; he lowers her to the ground quickly so that her white thighs are not visible to him in the waning mauve light. They have done nothing, nothing at all, when he says there is
something wrong, something not right. The smell, he says.

  Like rotting flesh. They’re not on their own.

  This, they discover when they draw apart. A human arm lying close to them. Just one discarded arm, not a whole body. Probably a man’s, judging by the hairiness and thick spatulate shape of the fingers. It’s impossible to tell how it comes to be there, or how it was detached from the rest of itself, if that is how a body might be described in its entirety, although Veronica thinks there is a hint of surgical gauze.

  As they restore their clothes, they rehearse this description for Lewis and Georgie. They don’t know each other well enough to trust the other one with their lies. ‘We were walking under the pine trees,’ they will say. Why under the pine trees? And Georgie will know, but won’t be able to say. Lewis will guess and will say, at least to Georgie.

  All this and more is about to follow.

  Rats in the dunny.

  In the distance, the house stands alone, shimmering with light and the smoke of wood fire, like a comet’s tail. Veronica will stand outside the circle of light as Lewis and Georgie, appalled, draw close to each other.

  Later, Georgie will leave Lewis for a time, the children will be miserable, and she will go back to him. Lewis will buy a house in town so that she can have more life of her own; for a short time he will be seen at long lunches with other women, as if to make a point, but none of them will be Veronica.

  Veronica thinks she will miss Lewis and Georgie, but she doesn’t. At least, not much, after the initial pain of them all going their own way, and they are reduced to sending Christmas emails of good cheer to each other once a year. Some cold words have been exchanged. Lewis had turned away when she confronted him. Don’t come the ingénue, Veronica, he’d said. Some people choose to be blind.

  Lewis, her Lewis. Is she a woman who has never truly known love? she will ask herself. And it will come to her, the three of them, her and Colin and Lewis, the time when they were all in love with one another. They might have gone on forever, their magic circle unbroken.