All the Way to Summer

by Fiona Kidman

  She will have an affair in which she takes much pleasure, with a man who is a little but not ridiculously younger than she is. Desire rekindled cannot be that easily quenched. His skin feels like China roses against hers. He has skinny ribs and a faint foreign smell when she puts her arms around him. It will be her son’s idea that the man, a visiting scientist at the Maritime Institute, should visit her. ‘Please make him at home while he’s over there,’ he writes.

  Well, Sam.

  She will decide, after all, that being on her own is what suits her best. Memory is a fine thing she will say to her friends when they ask her. I am fine by myself.

  One night, when the scientist has gone, it occurs to Veronica that Maura is possibly long dead. She wouldn’t ask Drew McGuire, and he disappears from the school again not long after his sudden reappearance. She wonders, at intervals, why he had ever come back, like some dark mischief.

  Her head is full of old songs, words that won’t go away, what they sang in those young days: ‘Killing Me Softly’, ‘Heart of Glass’, ‘The Story of My Life’ … with that line about life starting and ending, with who? Someone … only her life isn’t going to start and end with anyone, or nobody in particular. She begins, very tentatively, to write some poems of her own. She starts:

  Once in a green time

  I began …

  The poems will take her far back inside memory. A short history of love or a long history of innocence? She writes on.

  She learns that her daughter is about to have a baby, and this interests her as much as love. Or, perhaps, love really is coming her way.

  Marvellous Eight

  When Natalie Soames became a television writer it seemed as if her whole life had changed. Of course, it had been changing for a long time, but up until then the changes had signalled not so much achievement itself but, rather, signs that she was moving closer to her goals. Then one day something happened; it felt like luck.

  For years she had asked her Little Theatre group in Mountwood to workshop her plays, but nobody was really interested in local plays, they said. Afterwards, she would say scornfully to reporters who asked her about her early beginnings that they were still into Noël Coward in the provinces. But then she and Monty moved to Wellington on transfer and she met a man at a dinner party given by one of her husband’s colleagues. They were civil engineers in a government department. The man said he knew someone who worked in an agency and was sure he could arrange an introduction. She didn’t believe it, things like that never happened to young women who had lived most of their lives in Flat Top Road, Mountwood. And even if she did get an introduction, she was sure that if nobody wanted to know in Mountwood, they would want to know even less in Wellington.

  But she was wrong. The first person the agency offered her work to was a television producer called Victor. Straight away he rang her up and asked her to come and see him.

  ‘It’s great,’ Victor said of her script, ‘it’s the coming thing, women’s voices.’

  ‘Is it?’ she asked politely. She was interested in Women’s Liberation but she wasn’t sure whether she was ready to be an expert.

  ‘Look, your work’s good. If you can just confront the issues more squarely, I’ll make you a household name.’ Victor leaned over the desk. He was a man with a high forehead and a mane of fair hair. His eyes were intense. It was said that he was shy with women. You won’t get the casting couch treatment from him, the agent had said reassuringly. ‘There are women out there who are suffering,’ Victor said. ‘You know it and I know it. Don’t you want to articulate on their behalf?’

  ‘I suppose so.’ If she sounded uncertain it was because, until then, it had always seemed wiser to write men as central characters in her plays. But she supposed he was right. Of course she had suffered, still did for that matter. Between them, she and Monty had suffered — over lack of money, broken nights with children, for the small grievances that living amongst the expanses of a new suburb inflicted on people, like loneliness and boredom, and not having a car when they needed it most. In what seemed like the end, they were suffering from not saying enough to one another.

  Victor was clearly waiting for more, so she said: ‘I didn’t think I was the only one to blame. Yes, of course I’ve taken a lot of male-orientated shit.’

  ‘You’re smart,’ said Victor. ‘By the way, I drink.’

  ‘So do I.’ It was true, though she had only recently found this out.

  ‘Come to the pub.’

  He reminded her of Alec, or Al as he was mostly called, her lover back in Mountwood, but she didn’t sleep with Victor. In the year that followed, she was faithful to Al — or Monty. She could never quite decide which of them demanded her loyalty most. For that matter, Victor never asked. Instead, he introduced her to a director called Sonny Emmanuel, and commissioned her to write her first play for television. Sonny had dense dark hair, a beard and a myopic gaze behind his thick glasses. He was saving up to spend a year in a kibbutz, and maybe if he could make enough money he’d take his children too.

  Victor loved her play when it was written; everyone in the department was just enchanted, he told her. The play was about a woman who refused to be interviewed with her husband when he went for an important job and she ruined a dinner party with his prospective employers, thus bringing about the downfall of her marriage. I’m a woman in my own right, the character said, I am not a career wife. Her supportive women friends rejoiced as she looked at the pale dawn of her new freedom. Victor paid Natalie for the script, but there was a problem about production money with the men upstairs. The play made them nervous. ‘We’ll just have to work on their political education,’ Victor said. ‘Give it time, we’ll do it sooner or later.’

  Natalie wrote another play, about a sad love affair between a young woman visiting Wellington on a cruise ship and an ageing artist. Victor loved that too, but in the end there wasn’t enough money in the budget for that either. (Far too much OB, luvvie, Sonny told her, and it would ruin it if it were moved inside. Hadn’t Victor told her they could only afford three sets, two corners and four minutes of outside broadcast?) ‘I’m afraid it’s fallen over, Nat,’ Victor boomed over the phone. Still, she could write for their new series in the autumn; that would definitely put her on the map.

  He and Sonny were developing the series. The two of them, and various writers, thrashed out ideas in the back bar at De Brett’s against the smell of counter lunches. The series, to be called Marvellous Eight, was a comedy about a woman counsellor. Each writer was to write one of the eight episodes as a self-contained play, dealing with a day in the counsellor’s life.

  ‘I can’t write comedy,’ Natalie said. ‘Anyway, it’s sick laughing at counselling, you’re laughing at people’s problems.’

  ‘Exactly, humour’s just grinning at misery.’

  ‘Is that original?’

  ‘Of course it’s not. Neither’s television. Now write something and don’t take yourself so fucking seriously.’

  Eventually, she proposed an episode about a woman in her sixties who consulted the counsellor in the hope of finding out how to deal with her children. Her children, in their forties, went to the counsellor so they could work out how to deal with her. Her granddaughters, in their twenties (Natalie had an uneasy feeling that she was shortening the biological timeframe but Victor reckoned they could all just fit into it), were counselled on how to deal with everyone else. Their brother, a cross-dresser, was in training to be a counsellor too. Complications multiplied when the central character took him on as an assistant, unaware that she was counselling all his female relatives.

  ‘Black. Richly comic and very black,’ Victor said. ‘Whoever is it based on?’ They were in the pub.

  ‘It’s original,’ Natalie said. ‘Is that breaking the rules?’

  She could have sworn he was nonplussed. ‘Actually, what’s done’s done, but I thought you might have written about a marriage.’

  ‘I’ll tell you when mine gets
funny,’ she said. She could see now that they had been counting on her. ‘Get Sonny to write about his.’ She had heard that Sonny had a mistress and that by way of reproach his wife hurled pots and pans at him. She supposed that was why he was going to a kibbutz.

  ‘I can’t cope anymore,’ Sonny said, ‘somebody buy me another beer.’

  Mountwood sits, little changed since the summer that started in 1970 and ambled on into a late autumn in 1971. The town is built on a flat plain near the base of a mountain range. Wintry mornings are rigid with ice, summer afternoons simmer like hot honey beneath the sun. On clear nights that sun sets in a bitter bright-pink blaze behind the black hills. A river runs on the outskirts of town, and its edges have been landscaped into a park. The main street is flanked by clothing shops, delicatessens, and miniature department stores. It is dissected by smaller streets, including one that bulges in the middle to form a mall, though the locals call it a ‘mawl’, and indeed it has become a place where mawling and street violence can happen at any time.

  That summer, Natalie and Monty, and Sasha and Jeff, and Dulcie and Al all lived in Mountwood. Some of them were due to leave and some of them are still there and may stay forever. The Flat Top Road subdivision where they all lived had once been farmland. Their quarter-acre sections sat side by side in neat rows. Fast-growing silver-dollar gum trees cast a gentle sheen over the landscape. The gardens bloomed with fruit and vegetables. The women acquired colonial dressers and brought out their grandmothers’ china that their mothers had hidden, took contraceptive pills instead of using diaphragms, joined reading circles to counter the effects of television. The men shared transport to work so that the wives could do car pools for kindergarten runs, and Monty and some of the others dug pits in their garages so that they could work under their cars to save money. Natalie can still see Monty’s sandy freckled face, frowning and puzzling over a handful of wheel nuts, his spiky hair growing in bunches down his cheeks; like most of the men they knew, he wore sideburns. When he looked up, catching her eye or watching the children, something gleeful flashed behind his eyes.

  Over time, the residents of Flat Top Road had begun to prosper. A crowd of them celebrated New Year’s Eve together. Dulcie and Al were there. They were older than most of the couples, their children already in high school. It was the first time Natalie had met them properly. Dulcie cornered her to talk about a craft circle she was starting and looked disappointed when Natalie said she wrote.

  ‘That would be difficult to exhibit,’ Dulcie said, before moving on.

  Behind his wife, Al raised one amused eyebrow.

  Later that night, they all danced to The Beatles. None of them would remember afterwards just who danced with whom, but for the rest of the summer they said it was funny the way the heat was getting to them that year. In the winter, Natalie and Sasha began to talk of change. They decided that Mountwood needed livening up. Frequently, they dressed in home-tailored suits and wide-brimmed hats, like other people wore to weddings, and had coffee in the mall tearooms. Sasha said she was going to leave, but Natalie didn’t believe her. Jeff was an aerial top-dresser and seemed too rich to leave. Sasha said she was descended from gypsies, and maybe it was true: certainly she was very dark and she had emigrated from England when she was barely twenty, apparently on a whim.

  Sasha and Jeff knew Dulcie and Al better than the others did. In an idle lull over coffee, Natalie asked Sasha more about them. Al, she learned, worked as a photographer on the local newspaper, a small daily constantly threatened by takeover. His private passion was growing ferns; he had founded a magazine on the subject, and soon, supported by the conservation movement, he hoped it would become his livelihood. Natalie suggested they all get together again, but Sasha said Dulcie was a bit too brisk for her taste, and Natalie had to agree. Perhaps next summer, Sasha had murmured.

  One morning, Natalie rang to arrange a rendezvous, and Jeff answered, sounding bleak and distant when she asked to speak to Sasha. ‘Don’t be a hypocrite, Natalie. You know she’s gone.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, where is she?’

  ‘You know,’ he said again. ‘You really are a bitch, ringing up to gloat.’

  But she didn’t know. Sasha hadn’t told her.

  ‘I thought I knew her,’ Natalie told Al, a couple of weeks later. ‘Did you know she’s living in Auckland?’ They had met outside in the car park of the school where Al conducted a night class in horticulture and Natalie attended a creative-writing course run by an English teacher. In private, she thought that she knew more than the teacher. He insisted that her work would never succeed because she had too many characters. Shakespeare had hundreds of characters, she countered. You want me to write to a formula? Life is full of people, that’s what it’s like, she told him.

  ‘Would you like some coffee?’ Al asked, and she thought, why not, well, why not? She couldn’t think of anywhere that would be open for coffee at that hour, but still she thought, why not? Her car looked abandoned as they drove off.

  ‘Sasha had a lover all the time,’ she told Al wonderingly, as they drove through Mountwood’s vacant streets. ‘He came down from Auckland and visited her in the afternoons.’

  Al shook his head, considering Sasha’s defection. Already he had turned the car towards the river.

  ‘I married young, there’s never been anyone else since I married Dulcie. Twenty faithful years,’ he marvelled to Natalie. She didn’t care about his past. He had heavy eyebrows and deeply recessed blue eyes flecked with green. His nose was over-large, his mouth wide and faintly feminine. On field trips hunting for ferns, his arms had turned brown; the backs of his fingers looked like Dutch rusks in a packet.

  ‘You make me feel very young,’ he murmured when he had kissed her. He reached for the ignition, the adventure over.

  ‘Wait,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t want anyone getting hurt,’ he said when she slid her hand along the inside of his thigh. ‘I don’t want any more marriages going under,’ he said, like a drowning man.

  Then, ‘Somebody will see us,’ he said, as if it were she who had driven the car there.

  ‘Not like this,’ Natalie said, putting her head into his lap.

  Nobody had done that to him before.

  ‘I have decided to risk all,’ Natalie wrote to Sasha. ‘I’m in love with him, and now that the new bridge over the river is finished, Monty has been transferred to Wellington. It doesn’t make much difference what I do here. Soon we’re going away. What the hell, I’m sure Al will follow me.’

  What she didn’t describe was the relief it was to leave Mountwood. They had become reckless and foolish, hunting each other out in broad daylight, meeting by the river in lunch hours, at dusk, or on stupid pretexts such as dropping off library books in the middle of the afternoon. When she went home, her mouth was bruised and her clothes stained. Her eyes slid away from Monty’s. Most people knew whose cars went where and why. Natalie tried to remind herself that Al did it too, with her, she didn’t do it all on her own. In spite of her brave words, it was sapping her energy, the guilt, the arrangements, the excuses, the sheer organisation of it all.

  Marvellous Eight is filmed in an Auckland studio that has been converted from a warehouse building. Natalie travels along as part of the team, observing the making of a play, although they have said there might be on-the-spot rewrites. She stays with Sasha, who nowadays lives in a glamorous apartment, part of her settlement from Jeff. That, in itself, suggests a command of her situation that has escaped other friends who have packed up and quit.

  Natalie has recently left Monty and she barely makes ends meet. Monty won’t give her a thing, he says, and he even wants the children. It is 1974, and men hardly ever get custody, although sometimes Natalie has the impression that her long-suffering mother thinks it wouldn’t be a bad idea if they did go to live with him. She is looking after them in Wellington right now.

  Certainly, Natalie does not laugh at what she has done. She drinks copious amounts
of wine in the evenings and wakes, crying, from deep sleeps. Monty had rung the night before while she and Sasha were having dinner. Her mother had the phone number to ring in case of emergencies, if the children needed her. No doubt she and Monty were in league with each other. ‘Come home,’ he had said. ‘Just come home, everything’ll be all right.’

  ‘How can I?’ she replied, ‘I’ve got work to do. I have to be here all week.’

  ‘I know. I mean, when you’re finished there, come home.’

  They have conducted the conversation as if they were still married, and she is just away for a few days.

  But Natalie is not ready to go home yet. She doesn’t believe she ever will be.

  While she is at Sasha’s, she sleeps in the spare room where Sasha’s son sometimes stays, between boarding school and visiting his father in Mountwood. Sasha’s bedroom takes up nearly the top floor of the apartment, and she can see Rangitoto from her window. She shares her king-sized bed from time to time with her new lover. Jewellery, real and paste, tumbles in artful confusion out of a jewellery box onto the dressing table; the scents of frangipani and sweet-pea oils float through the rooms. When Natalie takes a bath, she has first to remove scarlet and citric-yellow glass pebbles from its bottom and lay them around the edge; it is easier to take a shower, but she takes baths because they soothe her and, besides, she has many preparations to make. Lying in the bath, she counts the pebbles: ‘He’ll meet me, he’ll meet me not.’ She shaves her legs and under her armpits. When she is dry she smooths lotion all over her skin.

  She has arranged to meet Al and stay in a hotel with him for two nights. Today she is moving on from Sasha’s place. It has taken weeks to plan. Natalie’s anxiety stems not so much from what she is doing but the thought that he will not come, will not be able to get away from Dulcie. It should be easy for him to come to Auckland, but he is such a bad liar she is sure he will mess up his excuses. She harbours, too, a niggling fear that she might get caught. True, she has left Monty, but in the end she would prefer not to be caught out in adultery. The thought of losing her children haunts her. When she has been drinking with Sonny and Victor, she imagines terrible things befalling them.