by Fiona Kidman
In the end I did nothing and the matter rested uneasily on my conscience. I didn’t go north to the Waikato for the family funeral, nor did I go to demonstrate when David’s court appearances turned ugly. I had supposed, in a naïve and silly way, that David would plead guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of insanity. I was wrong. In court, he said that the gun was in the wardrobe, and that in a fit of rage at things that were said in a quarrel, he had grabbed the weapon and shot her without thinking. Worse, Leigh’s character was painted into an ugly corner. She drank and smoked dope, it was said, she had a lover, a dirty mouth, her underwear wasn’t as clean as it should have been. He pleaded manslaughter on the grounds of provocation and got away with it. Within five years or so he would be practising medicine again.
Crowds of women turned up at the court bearing placards to protest at the way Leigh’s character had been portrayed. I felt simply numb with grief.
Some time after this, a memorial service was held for Leigh and finally I surfaced. I wrote a poem for her. One of the men I worked with tried to have me sacked because I asked Anne to type it up for me in the lunch hour, but the complaint was dismissed. I stood up and recited the poem at the service. All kinds of people spoke, including human rights campaigner Rosslyn Noonan, various people from the pro-abortion lobby, a politician and Edelgard, her hairdresser. A group of string players played Leigh’s favourite music, and television turned up to film her ‘supporters’. I didn’t feel particularly heroic. To be honest, I felt as if I had failed a friend, though I couldn’t say exactly why:
All of them had known that Vree was in trouble, and nobody had done anything to save her because, in the end, they were afraid of her husband. They were afraid of his authority, afraid of making trouble, afraid of losing their causes. I did what I could, Tess comforts herself. I have mortgages and regrets, just like everyone else. But hers is a writer’s problem. She has got to close top the action, like a photographer in a war zone, and the edges have become blurred and she can’t stop pressing the shutter on and off.
Twenty years later, I went public with my view of what really happened when Leigh died. I would like to have let it rest, as I am sure most people would. But the case against Leigh became a standard line when ‘men’s rights’ were being argued. She was used more than once in the media as an example of the lengths to which a ‘bad’ woman will drive a man. One day, that line drove me to sit down and write the other version. Of course it hurt people, and of course it changed nothing. But Leigh was a person who deserved to be remembered better.
At the time, though, it felt as if a cause had turned into a war.
Chapter 21
I now had the task of finding a publisher for Mandarin Summer. Apart from anything else, I wanted to put A Breed of Women behind me. Although I had had so many letters of appreciation for the book, and it finally moved from the banned list to being taught in some secondary schools, I didn’t open it again for close to twenty years. When I did, I was surprised. The person who wrote that book wasn’t a very polished writer, but she had a passionate and youthful energy that I couldn’t help but like. Was that really me?
I went to Auckland and saw my agent, Ray Richards, who arranged a meeting with David Heap at Heinemann’s. A few days later came a call from his chief editor, David Ling. He had read the book, as had Michael Gifkins, a freelance editor who did most of Heinemann’s reading. They were wildly enthusiastic about the book and had agreed to publish. These two men would be my editors for nearly a decade.
The book puzzled readers when it came out. As Brian had predicted, it was a disappointment for those who loved A Breed of Women. But the book created a new readership who saw in Mandarin Summer an odd little ‘cult’ novel, something dark, a trifle sinister, and exotic for New Zealand. I hadn’t named Kerikeri, partly because I was not ready, when I wrote the book, to acknowledge just how much of it came out of my own family’s life, and partly because I had wanted to create the sense of the big house — Carlyle House in the book — as an isolated and singular backdrop for the mysteries of the story. The novel is long out of print but for many it remains one of the most interesting I’ve written.
And some good news was on its way. I had been awarded the Scholarship in Letters. I could go off my radio contract for a year to write, and my job would be there waiting for me at the end of it. But as I cleared my desk, just before Christmas, I made a decision. I was not coming back to broadcasting. Ever. And I was never going to take regular work again. I had proved I could manage; I knew I could get work despite my lack of training for pretty well anything. But for nearly twenty years, I had juggled with a variety of jobs and family and writing, searching this way and that for a way to find balance in my life. I had seen other people self-destruct. I felt worn out, not just from my job, but from the griefs and losses of recent years. From now on I would live by my words and some teaching. This was it.
I remember a summer afternoon a few weeks later. I was digging in the garden at the back of the house. There was not a sound except the singing of cicadas. Shadows fell around me through the ngaio tree creating sunlit patterns on the grass. I couldn’t remember ever feeling happier.
Eventually, there was no dodging the issue of where Mandarin Summer was set. Towards the end of the following year a television crew wanted to make an hour-long documentary of my life in the North for the Kaleidoscope arts programme. A week was put aside for filming and, once I’d agreed to the deal, it became clear that much of the documentary would be set in Kerikeri. By then, I was sixteen kilos lighter and had had my hair Afro-styled. I had looked at a picture of myself at Alison’s wedding when she remarried (she is now Alison Morgan), and knew that I didn’t want to be that exhausted, overweight woman any more.
There was a crew of three on the film shoot. The presenter and director was a woman called Katherine Findley, whom I met when we both worked on the Listener, and there was a cameraman and a sound technician called Owen. Over a week in Northland, we formed those strange connected bonds that develop on movie sets. You get to know, after a while, that these are illusory friendships, and in a year or even a month, you will hardly recognise one another in the street. Even the place where we stayed served as an unreal setting for our long late-night conversations: a rambling motel, deep in the country, with suites decorated as the Hollywood, the Las Vegas, and Roman Nights. Katherine was installed in the Arabian Nights room, which invited ‘sheiks and slave girls to enjoy the deep purple splendour, the desert stars twinkling in the ceilings’. Outside, cows scratched against the fence posts and moaned softly to themselves. I reached out one night in the Las Vegas suite, looking for the light switch. It was a large wooden dice fixed to the wall with Blu-Tack.
Only the backdrop for my life was not a set, I told myself, it was real. It was at the end of Darwin Road.
The owners of the property that had once been Goathland Farm allowed access to our crew. Katherine and I sat outside the remnants of the old army hut that had been my home and talked about the life I had lived there, while the blue gums rustled sweetly in the background. There were some things I might have said but didn’t. My parents were still alive. I felt I hadn’t known the person my father was back there, what was true and what was not. When he died, the year after the programme was shown, I still didn’t know.
He died one Sunday afternoon. The family had come to accept his melancholy ways and long expectation of death as the way he was, rather than something to take seriously. One day he will be dying and nobody will notice, we said to each other. But my father’s life, which had been so full of small twists and reversals of fortune, turned out to have an ultimate irony about it.
In another room of the same hospital, his first great-grandchild, Joanna’s daughter Amelia, lay sleeping. She was two days old and he had longed to see this baby just once before he died. I confess that somehow between the joy of becoming a grandmother, concern for Joanna, and the anxiety of daily visits with my mother to see my father, I had not r
eally prepared myself for his death. He had lost his voice completely a week or so before, his throat either closed over by his cancer, or perhaps a constriction from going cold turkey. An earnest young intern had decided he must give up cigarettes when he entered hospital, although he had smoked them every day since he was fourteen. A few days earlier, I had given him a notebook and pencil, begging him to write a note if there was anything he needed to tell us. In a faltering hand he picked up the pencil and wrote his last message: ‘Nothing to say’.
That Sunday afternoon, I went along to the maternity ward and asked that our daughter and the baby be taken to see my father. The staff refused because he was in the chest ward, classified infectious. Indeed, it was a dingy four-bedded room where there had been two deaths that week. Across the aisle from my father’s bed, a wizened old jockey shouted reports of my father’s condition to passers-by, in an excited falsetto.
At five o’clock we left him. Giles would be with him at six. Before we left, my father took my mother’s hand and bit her thumb hard: remember me.
Amelia’s father was with us. He was a Spaniard, something which had interested my father. Over the last years, he had tried to teach himself Spanish from one of those old yellow covered Teach Yourself books. At the door, I turned.
‘Say something to him in Spanish,’ I said to Amelia’s father, walking behind with me. He turned back.
‘Todo está bien. La niña es hermosa. Te veré pronto abuelito,’ he said. Everything is fine. The baby is beautiful. I will see you shortly, Granddad.
Somewhere between five and six, a nurse decided to prop my father up on a chair and feed him his tea. Between spoonfuls of custard, over that last horrible supper, he stopped breathing.
My father had become something of a legend in life. So, too, he was in death.
Last week, we went to Ireland. We boarded a plane at Nice in the South of France, just half an hour’s drive away from where we live. To get to the airport we catch a bus at the bottom of our street, which whirls us through the dazzling Mediterranean seascape, past Roquebrune where my distant kin, the Empress Eugenie, lived when she was old, past Beaulieu and Villefranche, stopping here and there to pick up passengers in Monaco, before dropping us at the door of the terminal. When the Aer Lingus flight took off, I began to cry. This was not what I expected of myself. I learned to control tears in public places long ago. My father always said that it showed a lack of breeding. But I couldn’t help myself. I wept all the way to Dublin. I’m going to Ireland, I said over and over again as the plane swept over mountain ranges and the green valleys of France, over the sea and past Land’s End.
In my handbag was a precious bundle of papers. As well as letters from my grandmother to my father, including her last, there were others from my grandfather and my great-aunts, Poll and Sal. These later ones told different versions of the story familiar to them all: the apparently sudden death of my grandmother. They contained descriptions of the last days and hours of her life, the people they knew who brought cakes to the house, and short graphic descriptions of life in Ireland during the Troubles. Included in the letters were promises of money and better times to come. One called my father Nip, another called him Lofty, another by his given name Hugh. Of equal importance, the letters included the address of the house on St Patrick’s Quay where my great-aunts had lived all their lives, and where my grandmother, Ann O’Hara, grew up. It was time for me to find out whether any of it still existed.
We caught the train from Dublin to Cork, down past the estuaries and tidal flats and through the green landscape, the abandoned farms, the little houses. At Cork, we caught a bus to Bandon. It is a pretty market town, more prosperous-looking than some I had seen. I thought first to call at St Peter’s Church, where the death records were kept. The graveyard was a wild overgrown place, full of falling down tombstones and rusted railings. A curate, new to the town, was in charge while the vicar was away. He had such trouble opening the safe where the record was kept that he had to call in the sexton who had been there ‘for a long, long time’. At last I held the book in my hands. And there, next to each other, were the names of my two great-aunts, Poll and Sal, or Margaret and Sarah to be correct, who had died just five months apart in 1949.
‘So now,’ I said to the sexton, ‘would you be kind enough to help me find their graves?’
But although we searched, there was only one O’Hara grave, a common grave that had had its last recorded burial in 1913. ‘Oh, it will be where they were laid,’ the sexton informed me. ‘Nothing is surer. Not everybody had their names put on the headstone. I mean, look at it this way if you will, who would be left to put an inscription for two maiden ladies, if all their family was away and gone across the sea?’
I wasn’t sure about this. I thought it strange that two women as well educated as my great-aunts appeared from their letters, and so long prepared for their own deaths, would not have made other arrangements. I doubted they would have been happy laid to rest in a common grave, without an inscription. But there were no other O’Haras in that cemetery, nor, it seemed, any left in town. All gone.
The sexton talked easily to me for some time. Some things he told me unbidden rang true. About the police barracks where my grandfather was supposed to have been staying when he met my grandmother and took her away to England. About my father’s and my own maiden name being common enough in Ireland.
I walked back to the town and bought a sheaf of chrysanthemums to lay on the grave. They looked incongruous in the long unkempt grass, but perhaps, on Sunday, as the congregation filed past, someone might stop and say the name O’Hara, and remember.
Afterwards, when it was too late, and I had to return to Cork, I learned that there was another newer town cemetery, about three miles out of the town. That is where I believe my great-aunts are buried.
The sexton did, however, point me in the direction of St Patrick’s Quay. I walked through winding lanes, with picturesque houses side by side, painted in pretty colours, and all of it felt familiar, as if I had been there before. The quay area by the river had been renamed, but there were the houses that made up Cavendish Square, and there the house where my grandmother was born.
My father had often spoken of this house, of grand rooms and views across the river and rolling hills beyond. In my head, because we were always poor, and because I never knew what truth really meant to my father, I had come to believe that what I would find was some small derelict cottage, like the place at the end of Darwin Road.
I should have known better. Broken-down Irish cottages don’t buy farms in New Zealand. Instead I found a substantial and handsome residence, ample and two-storeyed. It was all as my father had described it. This was the house that had rescued us from Darwin Road.
When Ian and I returned to Menton the other night, I felt an odd sense of peace. We had been in Edinburgh at the festival, where I had given a reading with a fellow New Zealand writer, Fiona Farrell, and it was because of the festival that I hadn’t been able to stay longer in Ireland. But in a curious way, I had seen enough. My father’s stories, and the strange emotional catch he got in his voice when he spoke of Ireland, made sense to me now. We floated high up in our bus from the airport, back around the bays, the mansions and the luxurious boats of the Riviera, coming down from a hill towards the rosy red tiled roofs of Menton, the citrus groves and the scent of flowers, and it was like coming home, in a sense. Or rather, I understood that this journey was nearly complete. That it had almost done its work, of taking me there and back.
There’s a lot I haven’t said about Menton. About the dinners by moonlight in strange magnificent old gardens, like that of Englishman William Waterfield, or the days spent in the mountain villages where we have become known, or the evenings when we ate in the town square and talked with artists and their friends who came out after dark. Or the music. Or the tango dancing. So much. But that was never the idea.
There is another part to this story, something I have been coming to.
I came to Menton with the intention of writing a different book from this one. The journey I took to Kerikeri last year, the one I wrote about at the beginning, had given me the idea of writing a retrospective account of my life in Kerikeri, alongside what the place is now, and about how the past and the present influence each other. Afterwards, I went backwards and forwards a couple more times, talking to those old timers who were left and scouring through library records. I found, for the first time, the island hideaway of the poet Lawrence Donald, and marvelled at the causeways and bridges that he had built single-handed. An empty mansion belonging to an absent owner stands there now. I visited an elderly woman I had known as a child. She lives down a long dark driveway and her rickety house is still full of the treasures of China. ‘Ah,’ she said, swinging a rope of pearls in her hand. ‘Your father used to work for us.’ I visited one of the Dalmatian women I went to school with, who has worked in a fish and chip shop all her life. Her olive skin is flawless, and she seemed genuinely pleased to see me. I called on one of the Maori families whose relatives I had gone to school with, and sensed they found my visit intrusive. I phoned another woman I had known when I lived there and asked if we might meet. She was, she said, rather busy making plum jam that day. ‘You do rather like to trawl, don’t you?’ she said, as she ended the conversation.
I talked to some of the many newcomers in the town and in the adjacent bays. Most of them are rich beyond my comprehension, but in a different, more modern way than the old China hands. Nouveau riche, I suppose you would call them. I found the town as impenetrable as I had when I first went there sixty years ago although, on the face of it, the landscape had opened up. Many of the orchards had gone, and great swathes of gum trees had been cut down, giving the town a naked look. When I wondered aloud about the reason, to a man who ran a trendy little gift shop in the town, he shrugged. Dangerous, he said. Branches fall off and kill people. ‘They call them widow trees,’ he said. I had never heard that expression or, for that matter, that anyone had been killed by falling gum trees up there in the North.