At the End of Darwin Road

by Fiona Kidman

  A decade or so later, Carole’s mother mailed me a framed picture of Carole before I knew her, holding her second child in her lap. I opened up the package, and there she was, with that same zany grin at the corner of her mouth that I knew so well. Only she was younger in this photograph, and she was wearing a twin-set and pearls. That was the Carole I never really knew. Perhaps it’s the person she would have liked to have been or set out to be. The picture still stands on a desk in my study.

  Chapter 20

  I was still struggling to write Mandarin Summer. Help came in an unexpected shape. I came across Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Anglo/Indian novel Heat and Dust, which I liked immensely, particularly the way she captured the exoticism of her setting and the contrasting reality of life within it. I liked, too, the structure of the novel, in which alternating points of view were presented. What I didn’t realise was that Jhabvala was also a screenwriter, part of the famous Merchant Ivory group that later made a number of period dramas, including Heat and Dust. The choppy style of the novel was very filmic and I identified with the similarities to screen writing. This was the answer I was looking for, and offered a way forward for Mandarin Summer.

  Like the play, my novel explored the voice of the child Emily, who goes north with her parents. Of course it is an autobiographical novel, more so than any I have written before or since. As in the play, too, the pianist, initially a casual visitor, becomes a semi-permanent resident, the fire proves lethal, and the child lives in the house when it happens. None of these things was true, but the story of Constance and Luke Freeman and Emily essentially belongs to my family.

  Unexpected help came, too, from Anne McCarten, who was widely read and well informed about books. With her good degree and interest in literature, I could never quite work out why she worked in the typing pool and looked after our troublesome office, but I was very glad that she did. I had even more reason to be grateful when she offered to type up clean copy of Mandarin Summer in the weekends, and read and re-read parts of the manuscript as it was done, offering sensible comments along the way.

  When A Breed of Women was finally released, I figured I would have a second novel ready to offer Brian Wilder.

  Breed was launched in 1979 at the old Alexander Turnbull Library in Bowen Street, the first launch party in the building since the Turnbull had been shifted to its new National Library premises. To me it seemed like hallowed territory, as it was to the crowds who turned up, used to its quiet atmosphere and book-lined walls.

  Sharon had agreed to launch the book. A day or so before, I had taken delivery of my advance copies. I was at my desk in broadcasting when they arrived. Immediately, I took an extra copy through to Sharon. Keith had dropped by for a coffee and I gave him a copy too. We finished up in my car driving through town with Keith Sinclair and Sharon Crosbie leaning out of the windows waving copies of A Breed of Women and shouting the good news that there had never been a book like it, and encouraging me to toot the horn.

  On the morning of the launch, I woke up at five. I pulled on my dressing gown and went out to the sitting room where I can look over Evans Bay and across the harbour. In the clear calm dawn the faintest breeze ruffled the sea. In the quiet, before people were up, I could hear the chink of rigging on the boats anchored below.

  In a moment of premonition, I saw my life ahead and knew that it would never be exactly the same again. There was no turning back from what I had done.

  I was due to be interviewed on Sharon’s programme later in the morning. When she came on air after the nine o’clock news, she said, ‘Darlings, I’ve got the book we’ve all been waiting for. This book is about us. We’re all in it.’ That night she made another glowing tribute at the launch.

  Again, everyone was there. The family. My parents. Politicians. Journalists. All the old Book Council crowd, including Keith, and masses of broadcasters. Shona McFarlane and her husband Alan Highet, the Minister for the Arts, sat drinking champagne on the steps. We don’t have launches like that any more.

  Leigh was there too, looking tired and distracted as if she wasn’t quite part of the celebration. I knew that she had all but given up on the struggle to live with David. The changes in him were so profound that it was hard to keep love alive. I knew too there was someone new in her life. I could hardly blame her.

  The next week the book sold 9000 hardback copies. I lost count of how many it sold over the years, but I think it was about 40,000. The reviews were very mixed. The Listener was decidedly ho-hum. The critic in Landfall wrote, ‘Sigh! The thinking woman’s Mills and Boon.’ It didn’t seem to make any difference. People bought and bought it. I was all over the newspapers, the most interviewed woman in the country at the time, everything from the lightest women’s magazines to the feminist journal Broadsheet. Foolishly, I told one interviewer that I had bought a pair of French stockings for the launch. The ensuing article described me as ‘a plump housewife in French stockings’. It was true. Like Harriet, I was decidedly overweight at the time.

  A rumour circulated that I was about to be sued by someone who believed they had been caricatured in the book, but nothing ever came of it. It was surprising the number of people who believed they were portrayed in the novel. One day I was walking down The Terrace with Michael King when he said, ‘Fiona, you don’t know how embarrassing this book of yours is for me.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘ask yourself — Harriet’s boyfriend is called Michael. People just assume it’s me.’

  I burst out laughing. ‘Oh vanity,’ I said. Good friend that he was, the thought of him as a romantic hero had never crossed my mind.

  I tried to explain that in fiction you made things up, but he didn’t see it. ‘Anyway,’ I said on a cross note, ‘even if he was based on a real person, I would hardly have given him his real name, now would I?’

  I suppose that was the difference between us, why Michael was a non-fiction writer and I was a novelist.

  As well, the book was banned from many school libraries, including the one where Ian taught. I knew he was embarrassed by this, in the same way that he found it difficult to mix with people who assumed that every detail of Harriet Wallace’s life reflected mine. We became socially withdrawn for a long period and neither of us would answer questions in each other’s company about the book. But, outside of home, and much to my astonishment, I seemed to have become a feminist icon of the times. When I stood up to speak, people began to clap before I had opened my mouth. Fame and notoriety stalked me hand in hand.

  Such a radical shift was bound to create some ripples. Although we had fallen quiet in each other’s company, Ian and I hung onto each other for dear life. I might have had a glimpse into the future, but I had had no idea that the changes would be so profound. I learned, with dismay, that some of my mother’s family were not willing to give house room to the book. I had thought I could do no wrong in their eyes, that I would be forgiven whatever I did. But now I saw that I had gone a step too far. To my surprise, however, my father seemed to take it all quite well, as if scandalising his wife’s family wasn’t such a bad thing. My mother set her face resolutely and defended me. She would always accept my books for what they were, not what her family would like them to have been.

  Now and then I would be pleased by someone who told me that A Breed of Women had made them laugh. I had included some moments of comedy, black perhaps, but funny all the same. Most of the public had taken the book with such deadly seriousness, an earnestness I never intended. When someone glimpsed an element of mockery, it changed the way they read the novel. But perhaps that was the real problem for the many men who were so troubled by its contents, and why it caused so many extreme reactions.

  The worst response happened when I was scheduled to appear on a television programme designed for family entertainment. David Hartnell plastered me with a heavy layer of make-up. Then I was left to sit for some hours while the rest of the show was pre-recorded. Finally my turn came. The comp
ere didn’t look quite like the Mister Nice Guy of the screen.

  ‘What about the morals of this woman, this character in your book? What about her drinking?’ he thundered. ‘What sort of example are you setting the women of New Zealand?’

  The audience laughed, titillated by this humiliation. Finally I was released, to stumble over a pile of cables in the half dark. I was refused tissues to remove the garish clown make-up. Of course, the item was never shown, nor, I realised, had it ever been intended that it should. I was the comic turn, the extra. This unsavoury tale graphically illustrated the way in which, at the most extreme end of the scale, men had decided to deal with women’s experience — through calculated laughter and ridicule.

  Apart from these personal costs, there were other, later repercussions. Women often asked me for advice about separation and divorce but I had none to give. One woman approached me at a reading and said, ‘You owe me twelve thousand dollars.’

  Of course I asked why.

  ‘Well,’ she explained, ‘I read A Breed of Women and thought, yes, women can take control of their lives, so I got a divorce. But twelve thousand is what it cost me.’

  ‘Are you happy?’ I asked.

  ‘Absolutely, it was the best decision I ever made.’

  ‘In that case,’ I said, ‘I think it’s you who owe me twelve thousand.’

  We both laughed and agreed to leave it at that.

  Then I had a letter from a man up north, a quiet reflective person, who I’d met on one of my writing courses. He was, he said, grateful that he’d read the book, and that it had made some things clearer to him. A few weeks later a letter came from an acquaintance telling me he had taken his life. I often wondered whether the letter and death were linked, and was deeply troubled by the possibility.

  My relationship with the men in my office had become more difficult through all this blaze of publicity. Helen and the other women in the department were proud of me, and often said so; the men hardly spoke at all. Unhappily, around this time, I had also fallen foul of the management of the drama department. The New Zealand Writers Guild that Ian Cross had long advocated, and involved me in from the beginning, had come to fruition. I was part of the first negotiating team who met with the various media organisations to negotiate better rates of pay for drama: the only woman in this new union role, and the only person to represent specifically radio interests. The television rounds had gone surprisingly smoothly but the radio round turned bitter and personal.

  When I think back, my roles as both an employee and a negotiator were probably incompatible. I didn’t see it that way at the time, as I wasn’t working for the drama department and felt that it was in the interests of radio to retain its writers, who were simply melting away to television. Although I had enjoyed good rates of pay, they hadn’t shifted in eight years.

  I began to understand just how far I had fallen from grace when various staff members met me in the stairwells and, at first, tried to persuade me that I was simply mistaken, and later expressed anger. Tony Groser never recovered his goodwill towards me. As it would turn out, it would be at least ten years before I was employed by the drama department again.

  On the off chance, I applied for the annual Scholarship in Letters, the major writers’ grant awarded by the State Literary Fund. I had repaid my debts and if I could get some serious financial help now, the way ahead might be clear for writing.

  Not that I really expected to win the scholarship. Despite the immense popularity of A Breed of Women, the muted critical acclaim didn’t bode well, nor had it shown up well in the new annual New Zealand Book Awards, designed to complement the more commercial Wattie Awards. Neither of the two men judging the fiction section was renowned for their sympathy for women’s causes. When a shortlist of seven was announced, my book wasn’t on it. I was fairly taken aback. I hadn’t built my hopes around winning the prize but I thought, given the interest in it, the book might at least have been a finalist. If I kept my thoughts to myself, Denis Glover was not so sanguine about his omission from the poetry prize list. He sat hunched at the back of the award ceremony when Curnow went up to win the prize, shouting insults. ‘Fraud! Imposter!’ he called. But I was standing close to him, and saw that he was close to tears. Denis died suddenly, within weeks of the ceremony. With Elizabeth Alley’s help, I took a retrospective tribute to his life and work to air the following evening. Curnow spoke at his packed funeral in Wellington’s Anglican cathedral.

  My consolation prize was a trip to Sydney. A Breed of Women had been around for a year, but Brian Wilder decided it would be a missed opportunity if the book wasn’t promoted properly in Australia.

  I was forty and had never set foot outside New Zealand.

  As I walked into the Harper & Row office with Brian, his secretary was holding a phone. ‘It’s for Fiona,’ she called, although we hadn’t met. ‘It’s Mike Willesee. He wants to talk to her in person.’ I could feel the hush around the office.

  ‘Who’s Mike Willesee?’ I asked. The next morning I would be on the biggest television show in Australia. I did twenty-eight interviews in Sydney and Brisbane that week. On the last morning, I was interviewed on television for Good Morning Australia by a woman who asked me, in all sincerity, what I would do if my children married Maori, like the character in my book. I said, ‘But my family is Maori, that’s who they are,’ and she looked shocked and the interview ended. Later that afternoon, I was in a radio station where I had a sudden moment of feeling like a split personality and actually ‘saw’ a woman who looked like me, in the empty chair opposite, mocking the repetition of the story I had told so many times. It felt troubling and I asked if we could beg off our last appointment. But no, it was Cosmopolitan and far too good an opportunity to pass up.

  Sydney was crowded and teeming with rain as we threaded our way into the building. At forty, I was very aware of my weight, and I was feeling dreadful. We were hustled into a room where a photographer was organising his gear. ‘Take your clothes off and get on the couch,’ he said, without turning. He tossed a leopard-skin bodysuit over his shoulder.

  His face fell further than mine when he turned around. He had been expecting their centre fold girl of the month. As it was, a discreet head and shoulders turned up in the magazine with a caption ‘career girl of the month’.

  While I was in Sydney, I learned that Brian didn’t want to publish Mandarin Summer. I had sent the manuscript on ahead to him. It was, he thought, the kind of strange little book that might go well as my fourth or fifth novel, but not my second.

  The day after I arrived home, David shot and killed Leigh.

  I had been worried about her for a long time, of course. A week or two before I went away, she rang me to tell me that she was planning to leave David soon. I had rung the house before I left but there was no answer. I arrived at midnight from Sydney and rang Leigh as soon as I got to work next morning. When she answered, her voice sounded strange and hollow. She had gone away with the man she was in love with, but a phone call from one of David’s relatives had persuaded her to come back and see him. The previous morning he had roamed the garden, carrying a gun and threatening to shoot himself. They had spent hours talking to each other, without reaching any conclusions. He had poured her several strong gins, and then told her she drank too much. That morning, before he had gone to the surgery, he had given her some Hemineurin to take, which would make her throw up if she drank. It had also made her sleepy and now she was going to lie down.

  ‘Leigh,’ I said, ‘what has he done with the gun?’

  ‘It’s downstairs in the gun cupboard,’ she said.

  ‘Are you sure of that?’ I felt very frightened for her.

  She assured me that the gun was not in the room.

  ‘You should go now,’ I said. ‘Leave today.’

  ‘I can’t, I’m just too sleepy.’ Her voice trailed away. ‘I’ll ring you tomorrow,’ she promised.

  As I prepared for work the following morning, I heard
a news bulletin. A man had been arrested at a ‘residence in Kelburn, a plush inner suburb of Wellington’ where a woman had been found dead of gunshot wounds. Police were now guarding the entrance to the property. I knew straight away. This was the second time in as many years that I had learnt of a friend’s death on the morning news. Ian, for some reason, was late going to work that morning. He took me up to Kelburn and we drove past the house. Sure enough, the police were there. When I got down to work, I rang the newsroom to confirm the name of the person who had died. It was Leigh. Then I rang Adrienne Morgan-Lynch, our mutual friend, and the whole surreal nightmare unfolded:

  When Tess woke the next morning, Vree was dead. Her husband had shot her through the back of the head while she sat on the end of their bed. Later, in court, he told the judge that she had said terrible things to him, and compared him with Clicks. He had taken the gun, and she had fallen silent. ‘She bowed her head, and then I shot her,’ he said. Of course he wouldn’t have missed, the women said, he’d been a good hunter. One of her teeth was pinned to the floor with the bullet. He smoked a cigarette and called the police.

  Only the names, as they say, have been changed. Leigh was thirty-nine when she died. I waited for the police to come and see me while they conducted their interviews, but nobody came. I went to my lawyer and asked him to help me make a statement. I was, I believed, the last person to speak to Leigh. He listened to me, took down many notes, and advised me not to go to the police. There was, as he pointed out, nothing I could do to bring Leigh back. And, by that time, David had a high-profile lawyer. I had been David’s patient, and my lawyer thought that if I had any private issues I might prefer not to have raised in court, it would be wise for me not to appear. I saw what he meant.