All the Way to Summer

by Fiona Kidman

  ‘Well, really, I do beg your pardon,’ said the mother-inlaw, snorting. She had a lined face like a small old berry, very pale and dusty with powder.

  ‘I’ll put your cakes away,’ Flo said. She clattered tins as she got them out of a kitchen cupboard and banged the lids as she shut them. She draped a clean tea towel over the enamel casserole dish she had stood on the bench. From the way her lips were pressed together it was clear Flo wasn’t planning any more conversation.

  ‘You’re so kind to me,’ her mother-in-law said in an exaggerated way. ‘What’s in the casserole today?’ You could tell the way she really wanted to know: an old greedy expression glanced across her face.

  ‘Chicken.’

  ‘You sure you haven’t put liquor in it? I thought I tasted liquor in the last one you brought.’

  ‘I wouldn’t waste booze on you.’

  ‘I thought I smelled it. I go to church you know,’ she said, turning to me.

  I nodded without speaking, thinking that anything I said would be wrong.

  ‘A pity you don’t have a Frigidaire,’ Flo snapped. ‘This food won’t last five minutes in the heat.

  ‘Oh, well, who’s a spoilt girl? We know you have the best of everything.’

  ‘Theo’d buy you one in a flash,’ said Flo. ‘You know you only have to snap your fingers and you can have what you like.’

  ‘I’m too old to be filling up the house with expensive contraptions like that. Tell that girl to help you more.’

  ‘We’re getting out of here,’ Flo said ominously. She snatched up her bag and pulled her cardigan off the back of the chair.

  ‘Feathers and paint make a little girl just what she ain’t,’ the older woman said, as we were leaving. ‘I guess she’s better than nothing.’ She slammed the door shut as if she thought Flo might hit her.

  But Flo was staring straight ahead as she marched down the street with me at her heels, and I saw that there were tears glistening in her eyes. ‘I’ve had a few bitter pills in my time,’ she said, as though her jaw were aching, ‘but that really has to be the limit.’

  The barren daughter-in-law. The childless woman. I see now I was her trophy child, her daughter for the moment.

  Of course she had wanted children. Once when I was visiting, we chatted about people we’d known in the town.

  ‘What became of Tommy Harrison?’ I asked. My children were playing in the garden where we could watch them. The sun was melting out of the sky, and I thought the children should come in and put on more sun block, but Flo said, ‘Oh, leave them, the sun’s good for them,’ the way she said, ‘Oh leave the young people alone, let them smoke,’ though she didn’t herself and I think would have hated it if I did.

  ‘Tommy Harrison? Oh, he’s around. Full of himself.’

  ‘I could have told you that.’

  ‘Well, never mind. I’m glad you didn’t marry him.’

  ‘Why? You were keen enough at the time.’

  ‘He didn’t have any children. You might have ended up the same as me.’

  ‘Oh, Flo,’ I said. I didn’t know whether I wanted this conversation to go on, but this was the moment she had chosen to tell me. About the missed periods for a month or two, and the heavy swelling of her breasts, all the hope that followed her around and then the stains in her panties, a day of cramps, and it was over every time. And how this happened not once but often — endless farewells in the bathroom.

  ‘Oh, well,’ she said, and I knew what she would say next, ‘You know, there’ve been a few bitter pills. We were too old, Theo and me. I don’t know what I was thinking of, that he could give me kids. Don’t you think those children of yours should come in out of the sun?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, relieved.

  She had a sliver of snot on her lip that she wiped away with the back of her hand.

  ‘Hay fever,’ she said.

  Not everything in that house was darkness, but when it came, it fell swiftly. Flo and Theo loved the races and dressed up whenever there was a weekend race meeting. This went on for years, until suddenly Flo wanted a change, and they stopped. But they’d decorated their lavatory like one of those joke toilets, with pictures of racehorses, dozens of them, especially of the famous Phar Lap, whose heart, it was discovered when he died, weighed a whole fourteen pounds.

  And, deep in the house, there was a wide passage with a recess, which was like Flo’s throne room. A low seat made of plaited leather on a carved wooden frame sat beside a highly polished mahogany table. On the table stood three objects: a brass box containing photographs of the family, several of me as an infant and of the farm where she grew up; a swirling cloudy-green Crown Devon jug, kept filled with flowers (hydrangeas were her favourite); and the telephone. Flo sat on the low seat and talked on the phone for hours, either to her older sisters, or to her best friend, Glad Dean, with whom she’d nursed in the tuberculosis sanatorium during the war.

  One evening, when I was talking on the phone, I let one of my new silver bracelets rest on the table. When Flo called out that dinner was ready, I swung around from the table, scraping the bracelet along the surface, leaving a deep gouge behind.

  ‘You stupid cow,’ Flo shouted at me. ‘Stupid, stupid, stupid.’

  And then she didn’t speak to me for a week. Theo slunk around the house, not speaking either.

  As Theo was taking his lunchbox out of Flo’s Frigidaire one morning, I said, ‘I’m sorry, Uncle Theo.’ Flo was taking a bath, and the door to the bathroom was firmly closed. Suddenly, the big sprawling house seemed too small for the three of us, and I had been thinking that if things didn’t improve soon I should probably pack up and go back up north to my parents. I felt joyless and as stupid as Flo had accused me of being. I had thought that Theo liked me living with them, but now I felt unwelcome. He gazed past me as if I wasn’t there.

  ‘About the table. I didn’t mean to do it.’

  He shook his head as if to clear it. ‘What about the table?’

  ‘About the scratch.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ He was a bulky man, a bit big around the ears, with a small fold of fat between the base of his head and the beginning of his neck. He put his arm around me with an awkward little squeeze. ‘C’mon little tart, you’re doing all right.’ That was what he called me, his pet name.

  It was Friday when this happened. In the evening he came home very late.

  ‘Been at our mother’s, have we?’ Flo said, without looking up from the bench. His dinner was like a mud cake on the plate.

  ‘No, as a matter of fact, I havven been to Ma’s.’ He stumbled down the passage to the bedroom.

  I thought she would stay in the kitchen, but she followed him, telling him to speak to her. ‘Well, just say something will you,’ she shouted.

  His voice when he answered was too low to hear, but I heard hers, full of contempt. ‘You’re drunk. Think again.’

  Then she said something else I didn’t hear.

  ‘It’s not my fault,’ he said.

  So any number of things could have been going on in that house, and the scratch on the table was beginning to seem like the least of them.

  Flo kept up her silence for another week. She spoke to neither Theo nor me, not even the pass-the-butter stuff. Flo would rather suffer and eat dry bread than ask.

  Then, as suddenly as all this had started, she was herself again. She resumed the preparation of my favourite foods and was seemingly peaceful, at least with me, until I left at the end of the year to go to another job further south, which my parents had arranged. In the week before my departure, Flo moved back inside herself, although not in the same furious way she had before. It was more as if she were resigned to something that, again, she could not control.

  Less than a year after I left, Theo complained one morning of not feeling well. He went to the doctor and discovered he was dying. He fought a brief battle, which hardly seemed like a fight, with a rapid-moving cancer that had started in his p
rostate. Shortly after, his heart stopped beating. Just like that, without the ceremony of goodbyes.

  The day after the funeral, Helena, the beautiful sickly sister, arrived at Flo’s house with all her bags and said she’d come to stay a few weeks.

  ‘You don’t need to. I can manage,’ Flo told her.

  ‘I doubt it,’ Helena said. She stayed for twenty years, until she, too, died. After Theo’s death, Flo took a job in the county office, keeping minutes for all the council meetings. She had talents nobody had ever guessed. In the evenings, she went home and cooked Helena’s meals, and although Helena talked in a lively fashion whenever I was there, I never heard Flo speak to her directly.

  Once Theo had gone — a builder one day, a man dead and buried a month later — Flo discovered him, as if he had been the love of her life. I think this was one of those fictions that becomes truth. A reconstruction. People believe what they want, I told my audiences on that tour, while Flo was at the hospital. You can say what you like about the boundaries between life and art, but people decide what they believe and that’s that.

  Which I suppose is what Flo did, what kept her going, through the years with Helena and the years beyond that.

  Flo’s poor old rotting hulk had a stale smell hovering over it that no amount of bathing and attention would remove. She breathed in shallow puffs beneath an oxygen mask, not appearing to know or hear us.

  I was due to appear on a panel of writers in the town of Cambridge, nearly an hour’s drive away from the hospital. I was ready to move on. The driving to and from to the hospital had taken a toll. I spoke in a kind of dream when I stood up in front of an audience. In my head, I knew Flo must die soon, but how long is soon? I was going abroad, and in a day or so there would be nothing for it, I would have to say my own goodbye. I was to go to Gisborne the next day, the last stage of my journey, and then home.

  ‘I’ll stay with Flo,’ Pamela said when I explained the situation. I could see how reproachfully she looked at me. I had changed into clothes more suitable for an evening gathering, a long dark skirt with a fuchsia-coloured jacket.

  ‘I’ll see if I can get a later flight tomorrow,’ I said. ‘I’ll stay in Cambridge tonight and come back first thing in the morning.’ Putting it off.

  I met the group of writers in Cambridge and checked into the room next to Davina Worth, a playwright. She writes monologues for solo voices, some of which she performs herself. She’s got clear green eyes and dark hair streaked with grey that falls from a centre parting. She’s a great person to be around, a formidable presence on stage. I began to think that I should not have worried about coming, as she and the poet who was there too would be enough in themselves. I saw the way Davina looked at me. ‘What have you been doing to yourself?’

  I tried to explain, told her how I might still have to go back to the hospital that night. I’d rung and spoken to Joy, and she’d been non-committal when I asked how Flo was.

  ‘You’d tell me if she got worse, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed.

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘I do, yes, I promise.’

  ‘You’re driving yourself nuts,’ Davina said when I relayed this conversation to her. ‘You’re going to Canada next week, stop doing this to yourself.’

  The booksellers sold fifty-seven copies of our books that evening in Cambridge. ‘Well done,’ they said and gave us our cheques for our appearance fees.

  ‘I should go back to the hospital,’ I said.

  ‘You’re exhausted,’ said Davina. ‘You need to come out with us. When did you last eat?’

  She and the poet and I ended up in a café, a reckless kind of place, full of celebrating Cambridge horse breeders having a night out because someone had sold a horse for a million dollars. I can’t remember what I ate, but I drank two glasses of wine and laughed a lot. Davina told us a story about when she’d done some training in Australia for the theatre, and she’d rehearsed Ophelia. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t find her way into the character, which didn’t surprise me. Davina is too much of an extrovert, too thoroughly optimistic about life. ‘I couldn’t get it right. I said to the director, this Englishman with his broad Midlands accent, I said, “Barney, what am I going to do?” And Barney just threw his hands in the air and said, “I don’t know, perhaps you should think of yourself as a cross between a piece of jasmine and a booterfly.”’

  This struck me as so funny, I laughed until I cried, that terrible cracking-up sort of laughter that isn’t about humour, it’s painful and uncontrollable. The others looked at me with concern. When I recovered myself, I said abruptly, ‘I’ll ring the hospital.’

  My phone was out of battery. ‘I’ll phone from the motel when I get back,’ I said.

  Davina said, ‘You needed to do this tonight. What you’ve been doing is too hard on you. You have to stop.’

  The motelier had stayed up for me. ‘I’ve got a message for you. It’s about a relative of yours. I’m sorry, it’s bad news. She’s not expected to live through the night.’

  ‘I’m away,’ I said to Davina.

  ‘I’ll come with you.’

  ‘No, you won’t. I’m going to sleep at the hospital.’

  ‘Shall I let the organisers know you’re not going to Gisborne tomorrow?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’ll let tomorrow take care of itself.’

  I set out into the dark Waikato night.

  Five or six kilometres out of town, the emergency petrol light came on. Slowly, and very carefully, I turned and drove back to town. Everything had turned into a terrible slow-motion drama.

  The first petrol station I came to was self-service only at that hour of the night. The young man behind the steel grille wouldn’t come out for me.

  ‘My aunt is dying,’ I said.

  ‘That’s what they all say.’ He had a cold, lunar face with shadows under his eyes. I couldn’t get the bowser to work.

  ‘Please,’ I said, crying and shaking the grille. ‘Please, Flo’s dying.’

  ‘I’m under orders.’ He was eating a steaming pie out of a wrapper.

  ‘I said, I won’t hurt you. I gave a talk in the town tonight.’

  He didn’t even answer me.

  I drove further up the town. Further away, in the opposite direction from Flo, I found another petrol station and was able to fill the car. An hour had passed since I set out. Then I turned the car into a racing boat of a vehicle, opening her out on the long straight roads as if she were under sail with the wind behind her. Was it the wine? Confusion? Terror at not, in the end, being where I had said I would be? Not being there.

  And where have you been?

  I’m here, Flo, I’m here in the middle of a dark road, and my eyes are blinded by tears, and I cannot see the familiar landmarks.

  I had missed a vital turn-off, and suddenly I was spinning again in the opposite direction from where I was supposed to be going. I reversed, tried to retrace my route, found I had gone in a loop and was heading towards the nearby city of Hamilton, down the motorway with no off-ramp for several kilometres. I came to a roundabout, slowed, understood at last where I was, and set off again. Two hours. The car flying — a hundred and twenty on the clock, a hundred and thirty, a hundred and forty. I remembered Flo ringing me one evening, after she had driven her ancient Mini Minor into a ditch somewhere around here. It had floated in the water, rocking gently until someone pulled her back to safety. Her car worked again when it was dried out, but the council officer wouldn’t give Flo her licence when it came up for renewal at the end of the year. ‘You’d think after all those years I worked for them, they’d have more respect,’ she said at the time. ‘Young whippersnappers.’

  A hundred and sixty. I had never driven this fast before. I started to sing to keep myself awake. During the previous winter, I had taught a creative-writing class. On the last day, my students had sung a waiata, a song of respect and thanks, the one that goes Te aroha, Te whakapono, Me te
rangimārie, Tātou tātou e, and that is what I sang. It means, roughly speaking, love, faith, peace, for all of us. I don’t know whether she would have liked it, but I thought that if I sang it and sang it, it would sustain me somehow and take me to where she was, and I would, after all, be there. That when she said, ‘And where have you been?’ I would say, I’m here.

  And then I was there, and at the front of the little country hospital in a pool of light, clustered on the verandah, I saw a knot of women standing, and I knew that I was too late, that it had already happened.

  Pamela came forward to embrace me, but I pushed her away.

  ‘She went at seven minutes after midnight.’ It was twelve fifteen, and frost was gathering under the trees outside the hospital.

  I walked down the corridor without looking at any of them. I didn’t say I was sorry I hadn’t been there.

  ‘I’m here, Flo,’ I said. But she was not going to reply, not ever. My poor wounded old starfish, her hands together, fingers pointed towards me, poor old fish, stranded for good.

  I shouted at her. ‘Why didn’t you wait?’

  I tore some flowers out of a vase and strewed them around her. When I came through and joined the others, somebody said, ‘We’ll get you a cup of tea.’ They looked frightened of me. Even Joy.

  I told them I didn’t want any damn tea and walked out of the hospital and got into the car. Nobody tried to stop me, though I think now they probably should. I drove very slowly, as if I were a blind person who’d been allowed out on the road. When I got back to the motel, I found I’d locked my keys inside my room. I banged on Davina’s door, but she didn’t hear me. It was three o’clock in the morning. I thought I should sleep in the car, but then I thought I was a grown up now, the next in line to die, one of the old people, so I rang the motelier’s emergency bell.

  I left, headed for Gisborne in the morning and, when I got there, I talked again. About writing. About the imagination. Don’t be constrained by the truth, I said.

  Some days after that, we sang ‘Sheep May Safely Graze’ at Flo’s funeral, and the next day I flew to Canada.