All the Way to Summer

by Fiona Kidman

  As I am drawn to words so, too, I have a passion for synchronicity, numbers and apparently random events that fall into unexpected order. A strange thing had happened at the embassy the day before. One of the women who worked there asked me what part of my city I lived in, back home in New Zealand. When I told her, she said, ‘I’ve got a friend who lives in that suburb. What street?’

  I told her. She said, ‘That’s the street where my friends live. What number?’

  The house turned out to be two doors away from mine. In fact it was a house where my husband and I once lived, a place where we were not always happy and words could turn as sour as milk on a hot day.

  Now, in the Temple of Literature, some other words flooded back, ones that I’d forgotten for years: I bind myself unto this day. I stood still and listened to the refrain. Not writers’ words or the cruel barbs of the past. Nothing to do with Hanoi.

  I bind unto myself the power

  Of the great love of cherubim;

  The sweet ‘Well done’ in judgment hour …

  It goes on for many verses. St Patrick’s Lorica. My father’s family was Irish. What I knew was just this: I was bound each day to the hospital where my husband lay and words for the moment seemed neither here nor there.

  At the hotel, I reported the taxi driver. Almost as soon as I had done this, I regretted it. What did it matter? I had my dollars. The head of the taxi company came to the hotel, gave me back my money, apologised and bowed. I said, ‘I don’t want him to get into serious trouble. I expect he has a family who depend on him. Don’t make him lose his job.’ The head of the taxi company bowed again.

  I told someone at the embassy what had happened. ‘He’ll be all right, won’t he?’ I asked.

  The woman looked at me and shrugged. ‘He’s probably been taken into the forest and shot.’

  I said, ‘You don’t mean that.’ She didn’t reply.

  I don’t know what happened to the man. But I looked at myself in the mirror that night, Western and virtuous and deadly. Jacaranda petals on the surface of the pool.

  I blame myself. That is a fact, and it doesn’t go away. In the hospital, Stacey was still crouched on the floor outside intensive care, still babbling into her phone, banging her free fist up and down on the concrete. She saw me and stood up, switching off the phone. ‘Do you believe it,’ she screamed. ‘I’ve told these jerks in there what to do, and they’re not listening to me. My daddy knows what they should be giving him.’

  ‘They may not have that specific drug,’ I said.

  ‘It wouldn’t matter if they did, they’re too stupid to know what to do.’

  ‘Perhaps they know more than you think,’ I said. I saw the Vietnamese doctor looking at me, his gaze calm and level. ‘Would you like to come in and see your husband?’ he said. ‘You could give him a little food.’

  I put on my mask and gown. ‘Does this mean he’s going to get well?’

  ‘In time,’ he said. ‘Soon he will go to another ward.’

  I fed my husband small spoonfuls of rice porridge. I met Anne for lunch. We went to the Green Tangerine, a restaurant in an old French building with a mysterious staircase to an upper landing. We took a table in the courtyard; for dessert we ate citron givré, a tangerine carefully hollowed out and refilled with the flesh mixed with cream and liqueur. The soft substance, the tart mixture of flavours combined like shots, as if we were drinking hard liquor. I began to feel drowsy. Anne said, ‘About that money you’ve got in your safe?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Perhaps it’s time you bought yourself some treats. How about we go down Silk Street this afternoon?’

  So we resorted to Pho Hàng Gai, Rue de la Soie, the street lined with silk shops. I picked up handfuls of different silk, holding them to my face, and in some I thought I detected the scent of skin like warm honey on the tongue, though it may have been that of food cooking at the back of the shop or incense burning. It didn’t matter. If I closed my eyes for a moment, I was overcome with a young woman’s ardour, could see the golden sheen on the back of my husband, my beloved, the play of light and dark, and I thought, M.D., you haven’t abandoned me. I was wrong to doubt. I ordered jackets and skirts and pants. I went on doing this for several days, the sweet cool fabrics slithering between my fingers, like the touch of my lover, while hundred-dollar bills drifted away.

  I left the three wives behind me at intensive care. No, I think Irene rescued her husband the same day my husband was moved to another room, one where I could make short visits and talk to him. Irene and her husband were returning to America. Stacey may still be in Hanoi, perhaps strapped to a chair somewhere, out in a forest. I could have spared her a backwards glance, but I didn’t. But I did put my arm around Maria, awkwardly, because we were strangers, only there was nobody else and she was on her own. ‘He was a good man, my husband,’ she said, or that’s what I understood her words to mean. His body was being taken away.

  Another week passed. We talked a little during my visits, but not about much. My husband couldn’t imagine the places I’d been visiting. I watched as the tiny beautiful hovering nurses tenderly massaged him. I saw that they liked him, and I wanted him back for myself. Early one morning, I made my forty-first taxi ride across the city. I met with a French nurse, who was accompanying us back to New Zealand. Four seats were booked for our party at the front of the plane — one for the nurse, one for an oxygen tank, one for my husband, and me. We boarded an ambulance, and my husband caught brief glimpses of the city as we drove through it. We passed over the long bridge spanning the vast river that I’d detected the night we arrived.

  ‘Is that the Red River?’ he asked. When the nurse said yes, he turned his head, and I saw he had tears in his eyes.

  ‘Well, then, I’ve seen it,’ he said. ‘The Red River.’

  Tḁm biệt, I said under my breath. Goodbye. Goodbye, Red River, red bridge, red country.

  I took his hand, our two skins crumpled together. Old silks.

  Stippled

  Jill has lived two doors along from a particular house on the hill for forty-five years without once visiting it. It is not that she is unneighbourly; she greets the people who now live there when she sees them. If they needed help, she would offer it. Sometimes she stands on the road below when she is out for a walk and admires the additions that have been made to the house, the way it is extended to twice the height it was when she lived there, the extra flight of steps, some smart new windows. With its increased height, she believes it will catch some sun, like a tree reaching up to light, which it never used to do.

  It was the lack of sunlight that was her undoing when it was her house. Well, that and the steepness of steps and the squalor when she and Jack and the children first moved in. Jack and Jill are not their real names, but they will do for now. A woman had lived there when the house was still owned by the state; she had been there for several decades while the house collapsed around her, the matchwood lining untreated, the rickety kitchen cupboards still filled with the remnants of her last meals when they bought the house. It was what they could afford when they came to the city, a house the state wanted to dispose of because it was such a ruin and, as the area had become fashionable, state houses no longer had a place in this street.

  Besides, Jack could look at planes coming in and out of the aerodrome not far away; when he was younger he had been a pilot in the air force. And there was the sea to look at, he reminded her, the gleaming vastness of the ocean lying in the distance. Never mind that when the wind howled, and it often did in this windy city perched on the edge of the sea, the roof rattled and shook as if it were about to fly away.

  They toiled in that house, cleaning it up, adding to it, laying carpets and fresh curtains at the windows. One would think Jill might have been happy, but she wasn’t. She was in a constant state of despair, crying and throwing plates when things all became too much. Their house in the provinces had had sunlight and a garden; the children fretted and fell ill to
o often.

  ‘It’ll be all right, love,’ Jack said time and again, and each time she apologised for her discontent. His crinkly black hair was showing threads of grey. Things would get better, she promised. The house looked great, she would assure him, he had worked so hard, it wasn’t that she didn’t appreciate it. During the day, when he was away at work, Jill wrote plays for radio. They paid well and, with the extra she brought in, they could fit out a new kitchen; they had friends over, she tried to think of it as home. Jack was a person who cared for other people in his job as a teacher. She knew it wasn’t fair that he had to come home to caring for her while she behaved like an invalid. But he was worried too; their boy was boisterous and had begun playing on the street, their quiet reflective daughter had nowhere to go except her bedroom, next to the alcove where her mother’s typewriter clacked far into the night as she took on more and more work.

  A long, curving path was carved into the hillside above street level. It led to the house of an old couple called Hettie and Roland, so close yet only partially visible because of the angle of the terrain. They had lived on the hill for even longer than the tenant who had died in the room where Jack and Jill slept. One day, Jill encountered Hettie on the pathway.

  ‘Come in, I need a visitor,’ Hettie had cried. ‘Do come in for a cup of tea. Or a glass of brandy, or whatever you fancy.’ Jill had followed her along the path and up the stairs, built at a gentle gradient.

  Hettie slipped a key from a ledge behind a bush, near the back door. ‘I keep Roland locked up,’ Hettie said with a chuckle. Jill wasn’t sure whether she meant it or not. The husband was there as it turned out; Jill was to discover he always was.

  ‘I hear you scribble a bit,’ he said when they had been introduced. ‘So they tell me.’ She supposed he was referring to the neighbours. As she was learning, the neighbours here seemed to keep up a constant murmuring dialogue to one another.

  ‘I’m a writer, yes.’

  He snorted. ‘I wouldn’t want my wife doing that. Getting her name put around.’

  Still, he talked pleasantly enough about the weather and the government (he didn’t ask her about her politics, only contemplated his own. He was hoping they would soon be rid of the lefties when the election came around). All the while, Hettie was clattering around in the kitchen making a pot of tea, which was cooling by the time she finally poured it, having refused Jill’s offer of help. There was no sign of a brandy.

  Hettie and Roland’s house seemed like everything that Jill and Jack’s was not. Morning sunlight fell through the dining-room window and into the sun porch and the front room where Roland sat day after day, his ancient legs swaddled in a blanket. The rooms were stuffed with furniture that would have been expensive when it was new. A gas fire glowed in a grate, with an old-fashioned fireplace surround made of mauve tiles, stippled with white flecks. Outside lay a large neglected garden. The astonishing view of the sea and mountains stretched endlessly before them, exposed on the cliff top to both the north and to the south. It was difficult to believe that a house so different to theirs could be so close, within calling distance of one another, just a house in between.

  ‘You can have it when we’ve finished with it,’ Hettie said cheerfully one day. She liked having Jill call in. Nobody else came these days.

  Roland hunkered down in his chair. He had been a banker in his day; he intimated that he had made some good investments. ‘I’m not leaving here,’ he said.

  ‘Well, you just might have to,’ Hettie said in a chirpy voice and laughed. Her white hair straddled her face, and her nose dripped. Jill thought there was something odd about her response, though she couldn’t put her finger on it. ‘Our son doesn’t want it. We’ve just the one son,’ she told Jill. ‘That’s right, isn’t it Roland?’

  ‘Just one,’ he said and winced.

  ‘I can never remember. Sometimes I think we had more.’ Her voice was wistful.

  ‘That’s enough, Hettie,’ Roland said.

  ‘Such beautiful children you have, Jill,’ she said, as if she hadn’t heard him.

  ‘I’d be choosing who I sold my house to,’ Roland said, his lip curling. He might be chair-bound, but his mind still crackled. ‘If I ever did. I don’t think you’d be able to afford this one.’ He fixed Jill with a cool, appraising stare. It seemed that her visits didn’t please him, he had taken against her for some reason she couldn’t discern. He saw her and Jack as new people, and poor at that. Who else would have bought the dump along the path? Or perhaps it was simply that he saw Hettie as she had become and was ashamed that Jill saw it too, for she could hardly have missed the way things were.

  ‘I’ll let you know if the house ever goes on the market,’ he said, his voice crisp. She saw herself then, in his eyes an opportunist come to get the better of them, two old people falling apart. That must be the problem. Her face was hot, it wasn’t as if she had asked, the conversation belonged to them. Yet he must have seen how she looked around her with longing.

  It was the last time Jill visited them.

  Someone, another neighbour, told Jill that Hettie had been found wandering downtown in her nightie. Apparently, it was Hettie who needed locking up, not that this surprised Jill.

  And then, without a word to anyone, Hettie and Roland were gone. Jill heard this when she was buying bread at the local shop on the corner. She supposed that the son, whom she had never met, had come and taken them away. The house was being rented out. Or that’s what she was told. Later, she saw a death notice in the paper for Hettie, but it seemed Roland was still alive.

  Four years had passed since she and Jack had come to live on the hill.

  When the phone rang one evening, Jill answered. It was Mark, the son of Hettie and Roland. This was the first time she had heard his name. He was ringing, he said, for the honour of his family name. Only that day, he had learned that Jack and Jill had been told that, when his parents’ house was up for sale, they would be told.

  ‘I thought it was rented out,’ Jill said.

  ‘That didn’t work out.’

  Jill’s heart was racing. ‘So we could buy it?’

  ‘Well, not exactly. We’ve had an offer for it. The sale closes tomorrow.’

  ‘So — what exactly is the point of you ringing me?’

  ‘As I mentioned, our honour.’ His voice was impatient, as if this might be a concept she wouldn’t understand. ‘My father thought you ought to be told; I gather he’d made some sort of a promise to you. Well, we lived in that place for a long time. It’s where I grew up. We knew the people all around.’

  ‘The neighbours, yes.’

  ‘My parents had a good name in that street.’

  ‘Of course,’ Jill said. ‘But the house is still on the market until tomorrow?’

  ‘Technically, yes, that’s the case. But really it’s gone.’

  ‘So it’s still possible to make a higher offer than the one you have?’

  ‘It’s in the hands of the land agent,’ Mark said. ‘Really, it’s out of my hands.’ He named the land agent and hung up before Jill could speak again.

  When she told Jack, his face darkened. ‘The prick,’ he said. ‘He didn’t want us to have it.’ Jill hadn’t realised that he wanted the house too. He’d never said when she had gone on about it. ‘You’ve dreamed about that house, haven’t you? I know, love, I know.’

  ‘It must be standing empty,’ she said. ‘All the time, and we didn’t know.’

  ‘Shall we go and look at it anyway? We could break in.’ Jack was like that, a man of good works who, underneath it, was a law unto himself. ‘Just so we could have it for an evening.’

  ‘Actually, we mightn’t have to break in,’ Jill said. ‘I know where there might be a key.’

  The children had reached an age when you could take your eyes off them for a little while. They called out to them to mind themselves for half an hour.

  Just as Jill guessed, the spare key to the house was tucked away on the ledge, w
here she had seen Hettie retrieve it years before. It was a very still evening, a winter chill in the air as if there might be a frost in the morning.

  A floorboard creaked as they entered the house. ‘Must be Roland,’ Jack said, making Jill give a muffled scream. He was good at that, conjuring up small frights out of nothing, his way of joking.

  But the house was empty, stripped of every single thing that had made it Hettie and Roland’s place. The rooms seemed to roll on, one after the other, making the house much larger than they had believed it. It wasn’t a grand place, not a mansion like some of the old houses in the city, although it had high, white ornate ceilings of an earlier time. There was just something about the space and lightness of the house that entered one, now that it had been stripped bare to its essential self. The electricity was turned off at the mains, but a box of matches remained on the stippled hearth, perhaps so the land agent could demonstrate the fire. Jack lit a match and tried the gas flame; it sprang into life, and within minutes the room was glowing with its heat.

  There were leadlights in the windows, and a big bay window where Jill could see herself curled up reading a book.

  ‘Look at this,’ Jack called, and she went through to the bathroom where he stood admiring a dark-pink bath and wash-stand, quality Shanks porcelain. ‘You don’t see that every day.’