by Fiona Kidman
‘That would have to go.’
‘You vandal, no way.’
‘We can’t have a pink bath.’
‘Yes, we can.’ Jack caressed its rim lovingly. ‘Beautiful.’
Outside, night was falling and the sweet and dreaming sky began to fill with a huge new moon that frisked past the windows. Jack began to sing ‘I See the Moon’, and Jill joined in, belting out the song in the house that wasn’t theirs, sitting by the radiant fire. Planes coming into land floated past the window. Sometimes, Jack explained, they would fly in from the north, depending on which way the wind was blowing. This one was flying into the wind that was coming from the south; when there was a northerly wind, they would fly in over the sea.
‘The children,’ Jill said dreamily. ‘We’d better go.’ Already she could see the house filled with their books and the things Jack liked to collect: model aeroplanes, sets of scales, goofy notices.
‘You’d be happy in this house,’ Jack said, a statement, not a question. They had turned off the gas, taking one last tour. At the window of the main bedroom, Jack stopped. ‘Kōwhai,’ he said. ‘I’ve been looking for somewhere to plant a tree. I’ll put it beneath this window, and I’ll live long enough to lie in bed and watch the tūī coming in the spring and hear them sing.’ So he didn’t need to tell her how he felt about the house.
As they replaced the key, Jack said, ‘Whatever the offer is, tell the land agent we’ll go higher.’
‘We can’t afford to do that,’ Jill said.
‘We can’t afford not to.’
‘We haven’t any money.’
‘Well, just make it up,’ he said. ‘It’ll turn up.’
They stood on the moon-flooded lawn for another long moment. A large ngaio tree overlooked it, a trickle of shadows falling through its leaves. It is a lawn where both their children will dance at their weddings; Jill will surround it with white roses when their daughter marries, dappled light, stippled light, trickling through the tree branches. One day, Jill will look at the tree in wonder. ‘Everyone I’ve loved has stood beneath this tree,’ she will say to whoever is listening, although that’s probably nobody because all around her is laughter and chatter, but it will be true: her parents, all but one of her aunts, her and Jack’s children, and their children too, and the friends of her childhood, who have never abandoned her, will all have come here and been happy. This will be years and years later, and the house will have grown in size, added onto here and there, though much will remain the same. Like the bath. And, by then, Jack will have seen and heard his tūī sing in the kōwhai tree he plants, its blossom hard on the windowpane, the birds opening their throats full throttle.
‘You can’t do that,’ the land agent said when Jill walked into his office the next day. ‘That house is sold.’ He was a thin man with unnaturally high colour in his cheeks, which rose even higher as his agitation increased. He wore a checked shirt beneath a tweed jacket and a tie made of a ropey fabric.
‘No, it’s not.’
‘I tell you, I have a deal.’
‘But the deal is not signed.’
‘You’re guessing.’
‘No, I’m not,’ Jill said. ‘The vendor rang me last night. Now, listen to me, here is our offer, it’s better than the one you have. At this very moment, our lawyer is arranging the finance. You can’t deny your client the best possible price. It would be’ — and here she paused with a moment of inward glee — ‘dishonourable.’
‘My people may outbid you.’
‘Then we will go higher again.’ Her recklessness thrilled her, her lies rolling off her tongue.
‘Have you got a house to sell?’
‘Yes.’ At least that was true.
‘If you place your sale in my hands, perhaps I could consider the whole matter.’
‘Done,’ Jill said, as if there were no further question, and held out her hand. His was clammy, but he took hers anyway.
The light and shade of their lives. It all happened in that house. There was no turning back to their old ways, or not for long. They learned to get over things, to forgive. The house two doors along became a bad dream, a place of sorrows. So near and yet so close to disaster had they come.
When Jill thought about the perils they had encountered, she shivered and put her arms around herself. Or Jack, when he was near.
The odd thing that happened, as if odd was not already enough, was that the people who wanted to buy Hettie and Roland’s house in the first place were not disappointed at all when they discovered they could buy Jack and Jill’s instead, and so for a while they became neighbours, until they moved on. Jill thought she should visit them but found she couldn’t. That was when it began, her resistance to walking back along that path. That path. There are some paths you can’t turn back on, or you will die. It was enough to see the white wall of the old place from her bedroom window, that is, until the kōwhai tree had grown up in front of it so that in her head it no longer existed.
Storms still battered their new house, as with the old one, but they felt safe in a way they had not done before, the timber frame sturdy enough to resist those gales that thundered in from the north and the south and sometimes within.
Not long after they moved into the house, she met another neighbour at the store, an old man who had known Hettie and Roland. Recently, he had visited Roland in the nursing home where he now lived. ‘He asked how things were going over your way,’ he said. ‘He asked how the Māori outfit was treating his house.’
Jill doesn’t tell Jack this.
Why? Because it doesn’t matter.
They are who they are, and it’s their house now.
As they get older and still busier, Jill and Jack will travel abroad, often together, sometimes alone. But, whenever she leaves the house, Jill will walk around it, saying goodbye. Goodbye, goodbye, house, I’ll be back, she will tell it. And it will be waiting there for her, as if she had never been away, ready to enfold her. A poet friend of hers will write a sequence of poems about her house, and there is a phrase in one of them that Jill thinks of often — thou house — like a prayer, an incantation.
The steps will become more difficult for Jack to negotiate, as Jill supposes must have happened to Roland. She has almost forgotten the existence of the people who went before, though, when a door creaks, Jack might still say, Hullo, Roland or Go home, Hettie. He will sit in the sun in the long, still days of summer and watch the aeroplanes fly past, reliving the days when he had taken to the skies. He will wear a look of contentment, his eyes following Jill around. ‘I’m so happy,’ he will say.
One evening, Jill will come home late. Jack will forget that he is old, and he will go racing down the steps to meet her.
Jack will fall down and break his crown, and that will be the end of that.
Jill will not go tumbling after, but her heart will tumble on its own, over and over again, so bruised she thinks it will never recover.
She will stand at the window on nights when the moon is rising and the lights of aeroplanes trail fire across the dark sea as they come in to land. She will turn and look back to the stippled fireplace and see the two of them, merry as thieves, making the house their own.
They will not know any of this on the night of the dancing firelight and the big tender moon.
They will not know.
Acknowledgements
From Mrs Dixon & Friend, Heinemann, 1982: ‘Mrs Dixon & Friend’
From Unsuitable Friends, Century Hutchinson, 1988: ‘Hats’
From The Foreign Woman, Vintage, 1993: ‘Circling to Your Left’, ‘Marvellous Eight’
From The Best of Fiona Kidman’s Short Stories, Vintage, 1998: ‘Tell Me the Truth about Love’
From A Needle in the Heart, Vintage, 2002: ‘A Needle in the Heart’, ‘All the Way to Summer’, ‘Silver-Tongued’
From The Trouble with Fire, Vintage, 2011: ‘Fragrance Rising’, ‘Silks’
New and previously uncollected: ‘Red Bell’ (a sh
orter version appeared in the Warwick Review UK), ‘The Honey Frame’ (first appeared in takahē magazine), ‘Stippled’
‘Tell Me the Truth about Love’ is a poem by W.H. Auden.
Extract from the untitled poem ‘written on seeing the Four Freedoms section’ by Cecil Day-Lewis reprinted by permission of Peters Fraser & Dunlop (www.petersfraserdunlop.com) on behalf of the Estate of C. Day-Lewis.
When your heart’s on fire / You must realise / Smoke gets in your eyes comes from ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ (Harbach/Kern) © Universal Music Publishing. Reproduced by kind permission of Universal Music Publishing.
Look for the silver lining / Whene’er a cloud appears in the blue / Remember, somewhere, the sun is shining / And so the right thing to do is make it shine for you comes from ‘Look for the Silver Lining’ (Kern/De Sylva) © Universal Music Publishing. Reproduced by kind permission of Universal Music Publishing.
The poem referred to in ‘Stippled’ is from House Poems, no 15, by Rachel McAlpine.
Seven Lives on Seven Rivers by Dick Scott provided inspiration and information for the stories ‘The Honey Frame’ and ‘Fragrance Rising’.
‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ is a poem by Dylan Thomas.
The picture on page 363 is reproduced with kind permission of Motueka Public Library.
The author thanks Louisa Kasza and Harriet Allan for their wise and perceptive editing, and for their friendly support for the work.
Fiona Kidman has published over 30 books, including novels, poetry, non-fiction and a play. She has worked as a librarian, radio producer and critic, and as a scriptwriter for radio, television and film. The New Zealand Listener wrote: ‘In her craft and her storytelling and in her compassionate gutsy tough expression of female experience, she is the best we have.’
She has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships; in more recent years, The Captive Wife was runner-up for the Deutz Medal for Fiction and was joint-winner of the Readers’ Choice Award in the 2006 Montana New Zealand Book Awards, and her short story collection The Trouble with Fire was shortlisted for both the NZ Post Book Awards and the Frank O’Connor Short Story Award. Her novel This Mortal Boy won the 2019 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize, the NZ Booklovers Award, the NZSA Heritage Book Award for Fiction and the Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Novel.
She was created a Dame (DNZM) in 1998 in recognition of her contribution to literature, and more recently a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honour. ‘We cannot talk about writing in New Zealand without acknowledging her,’ wrote New Zealand Books Pukapuka Aotearoa. ‘Kidman’s accessible prose and the way she shows (mainly) women grappling to escape from restricting social pressures has guaranteed her a permanent place in our fiction.’
This Mortal Boy
An utterly compelling recreation of the events that led to one of the last executions in New Zealand.
Albert Black, known as the ‘jukebox killer’, was only twenty when he was convicted of murdering another young man in a fight at a milk bar in Auckland on 26 July 1955. His crime fuelled growing moral panic about teenagers, and he was to hang less than five months later, the second-to-last person to be executed in New Zealand.
But what really happened? Was this a love crime, was it a sign of juvenile delinquency? Or was this dark episode in our recent history more about our society’s reaction to outsiders?
Black’s final words, as the hangman covered his head, were: ‘I wish you all a merry Christmas, gentlemen, and a prosperous New Year.’ This is his story.
All Day at the Movies
Wry, moving, beautifully observed and politically astute, this novel from one of our finest chroniclers pinpoints universal truths through very New Zealand lives.
Life isn’t always like it appears in the movies. In 1952, Irene Sandle takes her young daughter to Motueka. Irene was widowed during the war and is seeking a new start and employment in the tobacco fields. There, she finds the reality of her life far removed from the glamour of the screen. Can there be romance and happy endings, or will circumstances repeat through the generations?
Each subsequent episode in this poignant work follows family secrets and the dynamics of Irene’s children. The story doesn’t just track their lives, but also New Zealand itself as its attitudes and opportunities change — and reverberate — through the decades.
VINTAGE
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Vintage is an imprint of the Penguin Random House group of companies, whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
First published by Penguin Random House New Zealand, 2020
This collection © Penguin Random House New Zealand, 2020
Stories © Fiona Kidman as per details on page 365
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Book design: Katrina Duncan © Penguin Random House New Zealand
Cover art: Garden Painting No. 3 (detail) by Gretchen Albrecht, 1972
Author photograph by Robert Cross
Prepress by Image Centre Group
A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand.
ISBN 978-0-14-377366-5
THE BEGINNING
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