by Fiona Kidman
I explained that I had a husband and young family in Wellington.
‘Well, tell them to shift too,’ he said.
But by that time the die had long been cast.
It was a night of drama. The director had had a serious love affair with a beautiful young violinist, and this was their last evening together before she left for England. I found myself crying inconsolably with Tony on the back doorstep of the house where the party was being held. I had no real idea why at the time, but I suppose it was because life was full of choices, and some of them were hard, even the ones with obvious answers. Tony ordered a taxi for me and I made my way back to Niyaz’s place in Remuera, where I was staying.
Niyaz had left Rotorua and her marriage some years before. Her life had been difficult since then, involving long separations from her son. Although she had felt like a captive in her marriage, her freedom had a bitter tinge to it. All the same, she had acquired an MA in political science and a teaching job in Auckland. We sat up until morning, talking about the way we led our lives and what to do about them. All around us, people’s lives were falling into various states of disrepair.
Lauris’s life was in turmoil and she was thinking of leaving Trevor. Ian and I were having less to do with the crowd at Naenae as damage spread among our friends. Several marriages had broken down, and others were on the brink. The parties we went to often had a tense atmosphere. I had become close to Alison Littlefair, but Gordon had a destructive personality. As well as making her life hard, he liked setting other couples up against each other, as if it were a sport. He had already told me that I wasn’t worth Ian’s time. There was a spectacular night at a house in Goldie’s Brae, when Gordon was baiting an old friend of his from university days in England, throwing in some political angst along with the personal. Joe, a gentle pink-faced man, ended up with a plate of spaghetti on his head, the strands dripping down his shirt collar. I used that scene in a later novel, True Stars.
Could I have gone off to England to make my fortune? No. That was never the issue. But although I was working so hard, running in so many different directions at once, there was something I couldn’t see, a contentment I couldn’t put out my hand and touch.
As it happened, the deal from Section Seven couldn’t have come at a better time. When I got back to Wellington, a call came from a neighbour two doors along the street. He and his wife were selling their house, and remembered, rather belatedly, that we had expressed interest in buying it if it ever came up for sale. They had actually moved out; the house was standing empty and an offer on it was due to close the following day. It was really just a courtesy call to cover their memory lapse, not an invitation to buy.
As I put the phone down, Ian and I looked at each other. Although we had made our house comfortable, I had never been happy there. I spent as much time as I could away from it. The total absence of sun was a major problem, much like living under the macrocarpas in Rotorua. I often thought that if I could just get away into sunlight, my life would be better. Living so close to Rena was difficult too; as her problems mounted up, I was called along the street more and more to hear the various tales of despair, most of them, in my view, self-inflicted. But she didn’t do me any good either.
Ian said, ‘Come on, let’s go and look.’
The house was just along the path: we didn’t even have to go down to road level to reach it. But it was round the corner, and the cliff top there reaches a promontory so that the house is exposed to both the south and north in a wide-angle sweep. From the front window you can see not just across Cook Strait and Evans Bay and the boat marina, but right back across to the city and the harbour. It was a beautiful clear moonlit night, the sky like an immense starry cave above us, a hint of frost in the air. In the past, I had visited the elderly couple who owned the house, and I knew where they kept a spare key. Sure enough, it was still there so I collected it and opened the door. The gas was connected, though not the electricity. We turned on the gas fire in the empty sitting room and watched it glow into life. Then we walked from one empty room to another, in our minds filling them with our presence.
Finally we sat on the floor in front of the fire, like two joyful thieves. I said, ‘I have to live here.’ Ian agreed.
In the morning, I saw the agent. I said that I had come to make an offer on the house. ‘You can’t do that,’ he said, ‘it’s already sold.’
‘No, it’s not,’ I said, ‘because the owner has told me that the deal doesn’t close until five o’clock tonight. Whatever has been offered, we’ll go higher.’ This was reckless talk on my part of course, but the Section Seven money was burning a hole in my pocket, and we didn’t have to go very much higher. By the end of the day, we had signed for the house. A few weekends later, the school rugby team came and shifted our furniture along the path. The young couple who had lost out to our bid bought our old house. Another family along the road bought their house. Like an army of giant ants we moved our belongings from one house to another.
We have lived in that house for more than thirty years. Things began to change for the better as soon as we moved in. One of the many things I loved was that I could see the school grounds from the house. I could watch our children, and sometimes hear their voices called. I felt a comforting sense of being able to watch over them, as if I might keep them safe. There was space at home for them to play when they got home, and a huge ngaio where Giles built a tree house. The house has grown around us, with rooms added here and there, windows taken out, and larger ones put in place. A small cable car installed on the side of the cliff enabled my mother to live with us years later, and will allow us to stay there until we are old. Or that is the hope. The sun shines into the house in the mornings, and in the garden in the afternoons. Both our children have held their weddings at that house. Some of it is antiquated, and we won’t change anything much else now, but I know it e very groove and corner.
House, I said, when I left to come here to Menton, house, I’ll come back. Whenever I leave it for any length of time, I do the same thing, going from room to room, taking the feeling of home with me.
I mentioned the poet Robin Hyde, but I haven’t said much about her. She was born Iris Guiver Wilkinson in South Africa in 1906 and came to New Zealand as an infant. When she was a teenager she was stricken with poliomyelitis, which left her permanently crippled. Her life was short, eventful and tragic. As a prolific journalist, novelist and poet, she emblazoned her name across New Zealand’s literary landscape. By the time she left New Zealand for London in 1937, she had had two children out of wedlock, one of whom had died. She suffered often from depression. Like me, she loved the North, and I am familiar with places where she lived up there. Her signature novel was The Godwits Fly, about the migration of New Zealanders abroad, like the famed round-the-world flight of the bar-tailed godwits that begins and ends every year in New Zealand. Another novel, Check to Your King, about French adventurer and self-proclaimed monarch Baron de Thierry, was set in the Hokianga. Hyde travelled to England via Hong Kong, but then visited China during the Sino-Japanese War of 1938, where she went into the battle zone and was captured. After reaching London, she died in August 1939, by her own hand. She was thirty-three.
I tell you all this because her framed photograph hangs above my computer on the faded apricot wall in my study back home in New Zealand. Her eyes are dark and heavy with sadness, but you can’t help but be struck by the handsome profile, the strong jawline, the dark hair swept back in a loose bun. She wears a striped cotton dress, the sort my mother and my aunts might have worn at the time; she was roughly the same age. I was given this picture after I had opened an exhibition at the National Library, about Hyde’s life and writing. She is another of those women whose lives haunt me, another one who took the road less travelled, one of those I might have followed, but didn’t. I had thought about leaving, but I stayed. I look at her every working day of my life when I’m at home. Sometimes I think I should take her picture down. After all
, I survived. But I like her there.
And sometimes, here in Menton, I think of her too. I cannot help but believe that Hyde had a great yearning to follow in Mansfield’s steps, and although their deaths were different, one ordained by illness, the other by suicide, there might have been a sweet temptation for one to emulate the other. Towards the very end, Hyde wrote a poem called ‘Katherine Mansfield’.
Our little Darkness, in the shadow sleeping
Among the strangers you could better trust,
Right was your faring, Wings: their wise hands gave you
Freedom and song, where we had proffered dust …
Dust is the unthrown wrestler at our gate.
Dead young writers and artists. This morning I made one of my pilgrimages to the higher part of the old cemetery here in Menton. Before I left New Zealand, Vince O’Sullivan told me about Aubrey Beardsley being buried at Menton, something he had first learnt from Lauris. An elderly woman who lived in the town was going away for a while and, during her absence, she asked if Lauris would take flowers to Beardsley’s grave every week, as she was in the habit of doing. Apparently Lauris did this, although it was not something she and I had ever talked about. In the 1890s Beardsley produced dark, perverse and deeply erotic posters and illustrations for literary works, which drew heavily on history and mythology for their inspiration. Of him, Oscar Wilde reportedly said that ‘he had a face like a silver hatchet, and grass green hair’. He died from tuberculosis in Menton in 1898, having hoped, I suppose, that sunshine would heal the deadly ailment. He was twenty-five.
We came across his grave by accident during one of our explorations of the cemetery. Ian likes visiting graveyards and taking photographs. The best route to the Menton cemetery is on the Number 9 Pont Saint Louis bus, which takes you high around the town, through narrow streets and alongside some of the town’s most dramatic friezes, which decorate the houses beneath the eaves with fruit and flowers, birds, griffins, butterflies. Although it’s quite a long ride, this bus takes you fairly close to the cemetery gates. We came up that route this morning. We were looking at an ornate mausoleum, and I stepped back, just avoiding a plain flat slab tomb — Beardsley’s. It was easy to miss. Nobody had put flowers on it for a very long time.
I don’t go every week; it’s a long climb up the twisted paths and rapid flights of steps, beneath the sun and the Wedgwood blue sky. It’s worth it, though, to see Italy over to the left, the ancient spire of Saint Michel and the town of Menton curving away on the other side. But when I do go I lay a little bouquet on the tombstone. I like the connections: Vince, who’s alive and well and sending me sardonic notes from New Zealand, Lauris, writers.
And here’s another thing. Katherine Mansfield’s silk shawl was stored in a cardboard carton in the city’s municipal buildings for more than seventy years. Helen McNeish had located it in the mid-1970s, but otherwise it’s been shut away for all that time. Some local historians have included it in an exhibition of the city’s collection of Mansfield memorabilia. It’s in a glass case at Hôtel d’Adhémar de Lanagnac, an historic house with a small exhibition space just off the main street.
Yesterday, Luc phoned and asked me to come down and see the shawl with him. And there it was, glowing in the filtered light of the room, a rusty soft red, patterned with green. Luc took some pictures of me beside the glass case. Then, on a sudden impulse, he asked the attendant to open the case.
Non, she said, non, not possible.
But might prevailed — Luc is, after all, the Minister for Culture for Alpes Maritime — and to the accompaniment of many protests, the case was opened, and the shawl taken and thrown around my shoulders. And then he marched me out into the street and took my picture among some palm trees. The attendant, a very pleasant woman, looked quite anguished.
But here’s what got me. Not just the soft fabric floating across my arms — I swear I smelled Mansfield’s famous scent. Vince once told me about it, Genet Fleuri, made from gorse flowers I think, much derided by Virginia Woolf. A heavy loitering perfume like a summer afternoon up North, where I come from.
Chapter 16
In 1974 I was asked to judge the Wattie Book Awards (now the Montana New Zealand Book Awards). My fellow judges were Tom Fitzgibbon, a noted educator and expert in children’s literature, and television celebrity Dr Brian Edwards, famous for grilling politicians until they fried. Tom was the convenor. I was surprised Edwards had accepted. He was well-known for his frequent public dismissal of reading, which he said was a boring activity. And look at him. He had a PhD without reading a book. Or so he said.
He stayed true to form. The judges were scheduled to meet and arrive at their verdict at Le Normandie, one of the best restaurants in town. Tom and I fretted over the menu, waiting for the third member of the team to arrive. Eventually he turned up.
‘Hello, I’m Brian Edwards,’ he said. ‘I’ve just come by to wish you well in your deliberations. I don’t read books.’
‘Well,’ said Tom, ‘why are you on the panel?’
Clearly, Edwards had waited for this moment. ‘Ah,’ he said, with obvious relish, ‘I wanted to prove that you didn’t have to be able to read books to be invited to judge them.’
He declined to stay for lunch and Tom and I carried on judging on our own. The three finalists were Witi Ihimaera for his first novel, Tangi, Tony Simpson for his documentary account of the Depression, The Sugarbag Years and geologist Graeme Stevens for Rugged Landscape. In those days there were no categories for the finalists.
The ceremony to announce the awards was due to take place at a lunch in Christchurch. A day or so before the date, Tom fell ill, so I was the sole judge left to put in an appearance and make a speech.
As it happened, all three finalists lived in Wellington too. It was raining hard when I turned up at the airport, where publishers and writers were clustered in the leaking old aircraft hangar that used to serve as the departure lounge. Christchurch airport, we were told, was closed by fog and likely to remain so all day. A publisher on the organising committee came over and said it looked as if most of them would miss the lunch, but it was important, from the sponsor’s point of view, that the winners and a judge be present. A light plane had been chartered for Witi, Tony, Graeme and me. We were to fly to Blenheim, hire a car and then ‘drive like hell’ until we got to Christchurch. There was one spare seat on the plane and as Witi’s wife Jane was there it was decided she would come with us. I was charged with getting everyone there for the lunch. We might be a bit late, but I was assured the people down there would keep the proceedings going until we arrived.
We leapt into the tiny plane waiting on the tarmac, and headed for Blenheim. Graeme Stevens’s book was, as its name implied, about the rugged geological structure of the landscape and mountains we were crossing. He was a quiet man, whom I never met again, but in the drama of the moment, he opened up to give us a running commentary on the journey, scaring us silly about what might happen in an earthquake, if the land shifted.
In Blenheim, there was not a rental car to be found. Finally, one was discovered in Nelson but we would have to wait an hour for it to be delivered to us. We sat in a coffee bar and counted the time passing while the streets of Blenheim ran with one downpour after another. About eleven thirty, we were able to leave for Christchurch. Tony offered to drive. A pale man, wearing an elegant dark hat with a wide brim, he was well known in trade union circles. He had seemed a little aloof until then, but once behind the wheel, he thawed. We all knew by then that we weren’t going to make it for lunch. I had rung the organisers from Blenheim and told them what was happening. At that point I learned that Christchurch airport had cleared about ten minutes after we left Wellington, and everyone else had arrived on time. Just keep coming, was the decidedly terse message.
The whole undertaking had been miscalculated from the beginning. On a good day, the journey takes about four hours. We might have made it for a late lunch if all had gone according to plan, but we would
be lucky to make it by afternoon tea at the rate we were going. Large slips had come down with the rain, and the edges of the road melted away beside us as we crawled past several washouts. But along the way we had some amazing conversations, not least, the announcement that Jane was expecting her and Witi’s first child. Everyone in the car described a journey they had taken, or a country that interested them. I didn’t have one to describe; even the landscape we were passing through was new to me. As I would write later, in a poem called ‘On Going Missing for the Wattie Awards’, ‘I am lost in time and space/Being no traveller that I could ever boast/Except the countries of the heart’, lines that still have a certain resonance for me. I know it felt strange that day, listening to this conversation among a group of people I had judged, and yet knowing so little of a world that seemed easy and familiar to them. And knowing that I alone knew who had won.
We rolled up to the venue at five o’clock that evening. There were still a lot of people there, many in various stages of inebriation. All the champagne had run out. A television camera was pushed in front of Witi’s face. ‘Mr Ihimaera, how does it feel to have won the top award?’ he was asked.
Witi turned to me with a look of total astonishment. ‘Have I won?’ he said.
I was proud of myself. Spotting the winner on the day literary prizes are given out is an old Wellington game. You wait until the day itself to strike, doing a bit of needling here and there at those who might be in the know. I had been caught the previous year when I was a judge of the Feltex-sponsored television prizes and, over a long champagne-fuelled lunch, let it slip to a major contender that he wasn’t in the running. He didn’t turn up at the awards ceremony and I’d vowed never to let it happen again.