At the End of Darwin Road

by Fiona Kidman

  Chapter 18

  This morning I got up at five thirty. I don’t know what woke me, perhaps one of the trains that rattle across the bridge over avenue de Verdun, coming and going to Italy.

  I went out onto the balcony and stood looking in the greenish grey light of dawn towards the sea, to where I thought I might see Corsica. An earlier fellow had told me that if you looked at this time of day, it was possible to see the island lying on the horizon, although I suspect you have to be higher up in the mountains.

  After a while I went back to bed and fell asleep. When I woke, Ian had gone out and the day proper had begun. Before long, I spotted him coming along the avenue, which is filled with buckets painted cobalt blue and crammed with chrome-bright zinnias. The public garden spaces are planted with vegetables, peppers, tomatoes, maize. Why don’t people steal the vegetables? we asked Luc the other day. He laughed. They know that the dogs have already pissed on them. Well, that makes sense: there are dogs everywhere, even with their own seats at restaurant tables, where they sit with their long coiffed hair falling over their eyes, just like the old ladies who inhabit this Riviera resort.

  Ian was loaded with fresh fruit and croissants, and had an English language newspaper under his arm. He goes out every morning to the markets to buy fresh supplies, before it’s too hot. A heat wave has developed over Europe. The temperature has soared beyond that of the desert train stops in Australia. It’s too hot to go backwards and forwards to the Katherine Mansfield Room, easier to write here in the apartment. Soon after we arrived, I discovered that the card table beside the door to the balcony unfolds to reveal a perfect work surface covered in green baize. This is where I set up my notebook computer. We open all the doors and, because we are a little way above the town, up the mountain, a breeze slips through the apartment from time to time. At lunchtime, I stop work, drink ice-cold rosé and eat fresh rosy peaches. All my life I have been unable to bite a peach. Like my grandmother Small, on my mother’s side. Now it is not a problem at all.

  I watched Ian turning into Montée du Lutetia, the steep little street where we live. He half raised one laden arm in salute, as he walked towards me. This is the story of my life — Ian walking towards me, never away. There were times when he might have. I don’t know whether anyone else would have stayed.

  Memory can be difficult sometimes.

  In the beginning I was so consumed with the pleasure of writing that I didn’t consider the implications of going on and on until something was finished. Some days I’d wake up and begin to write with such freedom and spontaneity that it seemed effortless, and there are still days that are like this. I’m happy when I’m in this state, and when I haven’t been writing for some time I become unhappy in some deep subconscious way. But as the early years passed, I began to worry that I didn’t have the staying power to finish a major work. This was partly why it took me so long to begin my second attempt at a novel. I hadn’t written my first by the time I was twenty-eight, as I had once hoped, and if I didn’t do something about it, it wouldn’t happen by the time I was forty. I’d kept on writing all those things that could be completed in short bursts to meet deadlines, followed by a little celebration and meeting people. In essence, I’d forgotten how to be alone.

  About the time I set forth yet again to write a novel, I discovered a book that actually did change my life. Working It Out: 23 Women Writers, Artists, Scientists, and Scholars Talk About Their Lives and Work was edited by Sara Ruddick and Pamela Daniels, and had a foreword by Adrienne Rich. The contributors all talked about the working life of the creative mind. An essay by a psychology professor called Virginia Valian held the key for me to making good use of limited time. As she identified, it’s often not the time a piece of work will take, but the fear of being cut off from the world that puts people off writing. When she was young, Valian had faced real problems with completing work. She would try to concentrate on work she had set herself, but the hours stretched ahead of her, hours she believed she must fill in a significant way, and she couldn’t face them. So she didn’t begin work at all. She then began experimenting with breaking time down into small, quality chunks, what she called ‘doable, imaginable’ acts. In short, she proposed that by working for, say, fifteen minutes, without interruptions of any kind — no trips to the kitchen for a snack, or to the bathroom, no phone calls, just work — it was possible to achieve a surprising number of words on the page. The writing didn’t have to be complete or polished, but it was a confirmed act: it existed. Most people, she reckoned, could survive fifteen minutes of work. If they were having a good time, they might like to keep going. If they weren’t, they should stop. This was the difference between quality time and unimaginable quantities of time.

  Valian showed me that what I had been doing, ever since I began to write seriously, was, in a sense, a method, and one particularly suited to a woman with a domestic life. All those early mornings, the snatched minutes and hours when I worked as if my life depended on it, had been to some effect. What I needed to grasp was how to work consistently on one continuous project without stopping. Her words persuaded me to ‘work it out’ for myself. To find my own system.

  And this is it. I figured out that it was not so much the time, but the amount of work that I could achieve each day on a regular basis that counted towards my finishing something. Earlier, Keith Sinclair had mentioned something along these lines. I remembered him saying that if a writer writes a thousand words a day, it’s possible to work out roughly how long a project will take. Treat it like a job, until you’ve finished, he said.

  As it happens, a thousand words a day is about right for me. I can write more, but writing is physically and mentally demanding and if I write too much I get too tired to begin again the next day, and the routine is lost. Because I know there is tomorrow, I’m generally excited about what the next day will bring, rather than being frightened of it. Later, after the early novels, I began to do a rough plan, using a board in my study with notes pinned to it, showing an outline of where the book was heading, so that I didn’t have to stop and struggle with the structure in the middle of what I was writing. That, at least, was something I learned from television, to storyboard efficiently. Not that I did this for A Breed of Women. Rather, when I was back home, writing my book, I remembered that I had once been accustomed to solitude, that it had featured in my life for much of my childhood, and that I had survived it. More than that, I had often been happy in my own company. As I wrote I began to like myself again.

  In many ways, A Breed of Women fell into place as if it had always been there, although not without some lost direction at the beginning. There were some decisions to be made. The characters had some strong resemblances to women I knew, and to their lives. To my own, too, as it happens, although, as I have often told people, I am not Harriet Wallace, the central character. When I look back, I can see that I was naïve if I expected people to believe that she and I did not share exactly the same stories. Harriet grows up in the North in a tiny township called Ohaka. It means ‘the place of the dance’, and so far as I know there is no such place. It is a nice name for a town and I’d like to think there could be a real one some day.

  When Harriet is a teenager she goes to live in a small North Island town with an aunt. I wrestled for some time with what to call this town. In the end, I invented Weyville, because it sounds so much like other small towns in the North Island — Hunterville, Morrinsville … Harriet has a brief disastrous marriage to a young Maori man called Denny which ends when their baby dies at birth. The couple divorce and, after a second marriage and the birth of more children, Harriet and her husband move to Wellington, where she writes poetry, becomes a television presenter who gets sacked for putting on too much weight, and develops a drinking problem.

  So the bones of my own progress from rural to city New Zealand are there, but of course the journey is laced with events that never took place. For a long time I was asked about my ‘first’ marriage, and about the p
rocess of divorce.

  I was drawing on the experiences of a number of women for the novel. As I wrote, I felt their voices at my shoulder, as argumentative and real as if they were in the room. There was one crowd of friends saying ‘No, no you can’t put that in, everyone would know it was me.’ Others urged me ‘not to leave it out’ or said, ‘You’ve got it wrong, it wasn’t like that.’ I wrote 70,000 words before the magical transformation between ‘what happened’ and fiction took place. It’s a mysterious alchemy, almost impossible to describe, yet a writer knows when it has happened. It is not the blunt pickaxe of ‘the characters taking over’: I don’t really believe in that kind of automated dictation. Ultimately, I like to be in charge. But there is a moment when something happens that arises entirely from the character’s experience or personality. Then you know that the characters have achieved a life beyond you or the people you know. At that moment, you sit very still and listen to what they have to say to you.

  And this is the commitment you enter into in a novel: to be willing to do a good deal of listening, to talk to your characters when they talk to you, to keep track of what they tell you, even when you’re not writing. I keep a pen and a small notebook with me at all times, because I don’t always remember what I’ve been told, and have to write down straight away what I hear. This is what happened when I was writing A Breed of Women, and it wasn’t until that moment of listening occurred that I knew how to write the book. I took the first 70,000 words down the garden (because of course they were written on paper then, not a computer), dumped them in the incinerator and set fire to them.

  I have never done anything so drastic with a manuscript since, but then it was the right thing to do. I began the book all over again, listening to the voices of Harriet and her friend Leonie, and all the people they encounter along the way.

  The subject of rape arose in the book, because that was something my friends and I talked about, the forced casual nature of sexual encounters in our youth, and what constituted consent. Since I had written Angel, and my own close brush with a would-be rapist, I had thought about it a lot. At a dinner party in A Breed of Women, a man suggests that rape doesn’t occur because people would hear women screaming if they were being raped. Harriet suggests that all the guests shout ‘rape’ as loudly as they can. When they conduct this experiment, nobody comes, and the dinner party continues, point proven.

  In order to write this scene, I conducted an experiment of my own. I went through the back fence and saw my elderly neighbour to warn her what I was about to do. Then I went back to the house and shouted ‘rape’ at the top of my voice for five or ten minutes. I opened the doors and windows and shouted and still nobody came. I rang my neighbour and asked her how it had sounded. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘have you done it? I didn’t hear a thing.’

  The women in my book have love affairs, and quarrels, and they drink a lot. I had wanted to write about that because, for many of us, the 1970s sometimes seemed like a decade of blurred vision. Perhaps, reading this, you will wonder if I used only my imagination and other people’s experiences, without ever having to feel remorse or regret of my own. Well, of course not. You couldn’t get through those times without making some mistakes. I made some of my own. One of Harriet’s is rather too close for comfort, a night when she has been with friends and had too much to drink. She gets in her car, drives in the opposite direction to home and finishes up on a dark deserted beach some thirty kilometres from home, having travelled over a steep and winding road. She sits in the dark at three o’clock in the morning in a state of sudden clarity and absolute horror at what she has done. Something like this did happen to me while I was still writing the book, and the episode was painfully etched on my conscience.

  I had been persuaded by Leigh to come out of my self-imposed exile for the sitting in Parliament to pass the Contraception, Sterilisation and Abortion Act, which would enable women to obtain abortions for other than medically life-threatening conditions. The previous five years or so had seen intense political activity in the abortion debate. In 1975, under Prime Minister Bill Rowling, the Labour government had established a Royal Commission of Inquiry on Contraception, Sterilisation and Abortion, which sat for twenty-one months. In the same year Air Commodore Frank Gill had introduced a bill that sought to restrict abortions to public hospitals (known as the Gill Bill), but it had been defeated. Although the royal commission report was very conservative, it was introduced, with many amendments, by the National government. On 15 December 1977, it was decided to pass it in one all-night sitting, with the House under urgency.

  This, of course, was a campaign that Leigh and David had long championed, along with other leading figures in the movement. I had had to bow out of providing accommodation for Sisters Over Seas. Both our teenage children had friends staying either on a semi-permanent basis or as regular visitors, and most nights there wasn’t a spare bed in the place. Giles’s best friend Boydie, who had migrated from a settlement on the East Coast, was living with us, and Vannessa Ternent, a school friend, used to stay over at the weekends. There had perhaps been an element of relief in letting go of this arrangement with SOS. I found I had a divided heart over the predicament of some of the young women who stayed with us. Most of them wept through the night, both before and after their secret shameful flights to Sydney. Some of them wanted to keep their babies, but could see no way of doing so. At least one of the deaths of my friends’ daughters had been due to the ‘shame’ associated with an out of wedlock pregnancy, and her subsequent pain over giving her baby up for adoption.

  Although adoption worked for us, I was increasingly aware that this was not the case for all families, and certainly not for all the children who had been adopted in the past, or for the many women who had been scarred by giving up their children. There was now a groundswell of opposition to adoption, which I understood, although I was often discomforted by those who felt bitter towards women who had adopted. I saw my own role as being part of a movement towards wider options. The Labour government’s 1974 introduction of the Domestic Purposes Benefit, to provide support for single mothers, seemed singularly enlightened legislation, although it took a few years for it to catch on as a way to deal with unplanned pregnancies.

  However, my views on women’s right to choose remained unchanged and this night in Parliament was such a momentous one that I agreed to go along with Leigh. A big group of women was camped out in the office of the feisty young National MP, Marilyn Waring. The House was sitting under urgency. Gin was being poured by the tumbler. Every now and then Frank Gill came to the door, red-faced, to stand shouting and jeering. At one point, he lurched into the office, raising his fists in a threatening manner. He and Waring were both members of the same party, but they couldn’t have been more opposed to each other’s views.

  Marilyn faced him squarely. ‘Get out of my office,’ she ordered.

  Gill looked as if he was going to refuse and blustered about his right to be in that part of the building. The mood in the room turned ugly as the women readied to throw him out bodily. Soon after that I left. I found the enraged politicising over women’s rights and bodies an unhappy spectacle and I’d had enough of the aggression. I wasn’t there when the bill was passed. Some time in the early hours of the morning, I got in my car and accidentally headed for Makara, in the opposite direction to home.

  Anybody who does something as stupid as that doesn’t deserve the right to forgive themselves unless they vow not to do it again and mean it. I did, and so does Harriet Wallace. The novel, then, allows for redemption in the face of folly. In many ways, like the character of Bethany Dixon, Harriet was an alter ego, but a much raunchier, more up front one than Bethany. Harriet stands up for herself and says what she thinks. Not everyone admires that trait in a woman, even now. But, for the times, it was a declaration about what women could do if they set their minds to it.

  Almost as much as the characters in the book, the town of Weyville was a place that readers would iden
tify with, as if they lived in it themselves and I was simply writing their town in disguise. People from Whangarei to Gore claimed it as their own. They insisted that I could confide the truth to them because it was so obvious. I’ve kept the place in several stories, but like a mad town planner I’ve been able to put in whole new subdivisions, and redesign its town centre. As its population has risen, only its essential nature remains the same — a central North Island town, with shining blue or thundery grey days in summer, biting cold, clear frosty light and a rim of pink over evening hills in winter.

  I finished the book early the following year. On the last day, I began early and typed with furious haste. There was a function at the Book Council that evening, and I had decided that if I could finish the book in time I would go. I’m a fast two-fingered typist and I broke all my own rules, typing 6000 words that day. When I got to the party I met Michael King at the door. ‘You look as if you’ve seen a ghost, Fiona.’

  ‘I’ve seen the end of my book,’ I said, ‘and I reckon it’s going to work.’

  I did some revisions, paid a friend to type up clean copy for me, and sent it off to Ray Richards. Ray had been the managing director of A. H. & A. W. Reed when Search for Sister Blue, which sold well for years, was published, and had since set up as a literary agent. In his forty odd years at Reed’s, he had ‘discovered’ many notable authors, including Barry Crump and Mona Anderson. His original intention as an agent was not to take much fiction but, as a gesture to the past, he agreed to look at my book.

  A couple of days later the phone rang around six in the morning. ‘Ray here. I’ve been up all night. I’ve just finished your book, couldn’t put it down. I’ll find you a publisher.’