At the End of Darwin Road

by Fiona Kidman

  The week before we came away to live here in France, I went for one last quick trip back, to see if I could find the missing key. I stayed away from Darwin Road until the last evening, wanting to keep myself free from the old emotional twang of the heart-strings that I felt every time I drove up that road. To be objective.

  As I had done now and then over the years, I knocked on the door of the house that had replaced ours, although it was some time since I had done this. I noticed that extensive herb gardens had been planted and there was still an exotic mass of tropical foliage, a few orange trees, though not a full orchard. But there was something missing that sent a shiver down my spine, although I couldn’t at first work out what it was. Something felt wrong.

  I was welcomed by the latest owners, who offered to walk me round. I wished that I could walk on my own, but they were friendly and there were things they wanted to ask me about, so we meandered along together. I knew not to expect any sign of the cottage, that it had finally been dismantled. We walked towards the river, and then it hit me. I couldn’t believe that I had not picked up this absence straight away. The belt of gum trees, our trees, had been cut down. I was looking at the bare space of paddocks beyond.

  I stopped and said foolishly, ‘The trees, why did you cut the trees down?’

  The owners looked at me in a perplexed way. ‘Our neighbours were having theirs done, so we thought we’d have ours done as well. They were no use.’

  We walked on a little way in silence. The wife said, ‘We found an old stove in the shed. We wondered where it had come from. It looks like an antique. Perhaps you might know?’

  So we went into the shed that my father had built, where I learned to milk a cow and earn enough money to buy Pride and Prejudice.

  ‘It’s quite black. It really needs a coat of boot polish to bring it up,’ said the wife, uncovering her treasure.

  ‘It’s not black,’ I said immediately. ‘If you scratch it, you’ll find it’s green.’

  ‘Ah, so you do know it?’

  ‘It was my mother’s range.’ I could feel hot embarrassed tears prodding behind my eyelids. That tiny range, the oven not much bigger than a shoebox. As they scratched and marvelled over the green enamelled surface that emerged, I began to say goodbye.

  Really, there was nothing left at all.

  I hadn’t expected things to turn out like this. When I went looking for the end of Darwin Road, I was looking for a story that is no longer there. Instead, I found a town here in France that became the framework for my own story. Or part of it, because this is only the beginning. What followed after I left broadcasting and took charge of my life, when I at last believed that I had earned the right to call myself a writer, is another story again. When Madeleine stepped down from the airport bus at the end of our street in Menton, I saw for the first time that the Darwin Road which has haunted me for so long, is now a place in the imagination. The scent and the sunlight and the orange groves were all here, and so was our long friendship, intact on the other side of the world. I had found the end of Darwin Road, but it was not the end I expected, or where I thought I would find it.

  We have known such happiness here in Menton. The rough leaves are falling over the avenue de Verdun. I have collected up my papers in the Katherine Mansfield Room at Garavan, and left a note to welcome the next writer. I have taken a last look at the engraved brass plaques on either side of the door as I closed it for the last time. The right-hand plaque lists the stories that Mansfield wrote at Villa Isola Bella; on the left these words are inscribed:

  Katherine Mansfield, née à Wellington Nouvelle-Zélande le 14 Octobre 1888 morte à Fontainebleau le janvier 1923. ‘You will find Isola Bella in pokerwork on my heart. Vous trouverez Isola Bella gravé sur mon Coeur.’

  That line makes me very emotional because I have an idea that these words are now engraved on my own heart. They say you never get over Menton.

  We have been into the mountains to eat dinner with Madame Imbert and Michel and Luc for the last time. They held an impromptu birthday party for Ian, and Madame cooked us pissaladière and ravioli tossed with freshly gathered white Italian truffles. We toasted each other over and again in a mysterious slightly cloudy wine, and we all wept. We have said goodbye to William Rubinstein in Nice, who has looked after us so kindly while we have been here, taken tea with the Waterfields and the Duponts, shaken hands with Monsieur Parabis and his wife, who live in the apartment building. We have shaken hands, too, with all the staff at the little mini-market by the bus station, opposite the end of Montée du Lutetia, and one of the young women cried. You won’t be here to see my baby, she said, patting her stomach. Le bébé. We have said goodbye to Pepe, the waiter who kept a special plate of hors d’oeuvres for us at six o’clock when we went for a drink under the shaggy umbrellas, ducking through the cars from the café kitchen on the other side of the road. He looked dejected and shook our hands. ‘Au revoir, au revoir,’ we called as we walked away up the street. At the corner, we turned. He was still standing there. He raised his arm once more, and then he was out of sight.

  I am finishing this account back in Hataitai. A whole year has passed since we set out for Menton. Our grandson is planting an olive tree on the bank below us. The crisp skin of our own autumn sky stretches over us. Beyond us lie the parched bones of bare hills after a late summer drought. While we’ve been away a mass of wild orange nasturtiums has appeared along the length of the bank beneath the kitchen window. Their sharp peppery scent rises up to meet me as I walk down the stairs to my study. It can take a long time to find your way home.

  Works by the author quoted in this volume

  The first page reference for each quotation relates to At the End of Darwin Road, the second to the work quoted.

  Mandarin Summer (Heinemann edition, 1981)

  page 26 ..................................page 184

  page 30 ..................................page 1

  page 45 ..................................page 182

  A Needle in the Heart

  ‘All the Way to Summer’

  page 43 ..................................page 167

  The Best of Fiona Kidman’s Short Stories

  ‘Paradise’

  pages 45–46 ...........................page 304

  ‘Circling to your Left’

  pages 82–83 ...........................page 328

  ‘At the Lake So Blue’

  page 92 ..................................page 113

  ‘Nasturtium’

  page 218 ................................page 290

  page 219 ................................page 294

  page 220 ................................page 295

  page 252 ................................page 297

  page 253 ................................page 298

  Ricochet Baby

  page 77 ..................................page 30

  Songs from the Violet Café

  page 140 ................................page 47

  Search for Sister Blue (play)

  pages 172–173 .......................page 4

  Wakeful Nights: Poems Selected and New (poems)

  ‘Wakeful Nights’

  page 105 ................................page 111

  ‘Taupo Writers School’

  page 133 ................................page 87

  ‘Return to Waipu’

  page 175 ................................page 5

  ‘Carole Something Like a Lombard’

  page 243 ................................page 108

  Honey and Bitters (poems)

  On Going Missing for the Wattie Awards’

  page 200 ................................page 27

  ‘Winter Roses’

  page 208 ................................page 51

  Other works quoted in this volume

  pages 19–20 Letter from Henry Eakin to Hugh Eakin, 11 March 1935

  pages 39, 40, 41 �
��Kerikeri Gold: A Behavioural Investigation of the Process Involved in the Evolution of Spatial Patterning and the ‘personality’ of Kerikeri, Bay of Islands’, Christine Elson-White, master’s thesis prepared for Massey University

  page 54 Towards the Dawn, Lawrence Donald, Wilson & Horton [?], 1942

  pages 55, 56 Dorothy’s Little Tribe, Joan White (late nineteenth century children’s novel)

  pages 85–86 Pride of the Lion: Waipu, The People and the Place, Waipu 150 Trust, 2002

  pages 122–123 An Accidental Life, Phoebe Meikle, AUP, 1994

  page 185 ‘Words’, Robin Hyde, from Houses by the Sea, The Caxton Press, 1952

  pages 195–196 ‘Katherine Mansfield’, Robin Hyde, from Houses by the Sea

  page 209 ‘The Mountain’, Lauris Edmond, from New and Selected Poems, Oxford University Press, 1991

  Acknowledgements

  Grateful thanks are due to Meridian Energy who sponsored the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship which I held in 2006, and also the Winn–Manson Menton Trust and Creative New Zealand staff who administer the programme. Special thanks are due to Richard Cathie and Gordon Stewart, and also to the French Embassy in Wellington. I truly appreciated the opportunity to work at Villa Isola Bella, where Mansfield once lived, in Menton, France. I thank William Rubinstein, Luc Lanlo, Michel Imbert and Madame Berthe Imbert for their warm friendship during a wonderful year.

  Three people make my writing life possible through their support and belief in me. They are Ian Kidman, husband and companion for 48 years, and my editors, Harriet Allan at Random House, and Anna Rogers.

  Many people have given a great deal of their time, helping fill gaps in my memory of some events and commenting on my version of others, in the interests of accuracy. In particular, I thank our son Giles Kidman who decided, without being asked, that he wanted a true account of his life recorded. I thank other family members, including our daughter Joanna Kidman, and our niece Christine Kidman for their views on our family history. Thanks, too, are owed to Jennifer Beck, Mary (Agatha) Campbell, Sharon Crosbie, Fergus Dick, Julian Dickon, Frances Edmond, Chris Else, Cath Ferguson of the Procter Library in Kerikeri, and Trevor Ferguson, Maurice Gee, Mrs Nell Graveson, Chris Hampson, Michael Harlow, Sam Hunt, Witi Ihimaera, Madeleine McFadden, Alison Morgan, Adrienne Morgan-Lynch, Rosemary Norman, Catherine Parker, Bob Ross, Don Starr, Kristen Wickens and Niyaz Martin Wilson.

  For research material, thanks are due to Jo Boyle of the Royal New Zealand Plunket Society and Claire Benson of the Ministry of Women’s Affairs.

  About the Author

  Fiona Kidman has written more than 20 books, mainly novels and collections of short stories. Her most recent novel, The Captive Wife, was a joint winner of the Readers’ Choice Award and a finalist for the Deutz Medal for Fiction at the 2006 Montana New Zealand Book Awards. The Book of Secrets won the fiction category of the awards in 1986, and several other of her books have been short-listed. She has been awarded a number of prizes and fellowships, including the Mobil Short Story Award, the Victoria Writers Fellowship, and the OBE for services to literature. In 2006 she was the Meridian Energy Katherine Mansfield Fellow in Menton, France, and toured France as part of Les Belles Etrangères, sponsored by the French government.

  Fiona Kidman is a Dame Commander of the New Zealand Order of Merit and lives in Wellington.

  Other works by Fiona Kidman

  Novels

  A Breed of Women (1979)

  Mandarin Summer (1981)

  Paddy’s Puzzle (1983, also published as In the Clear Light)

  The Book of Secrets (1987)

  True Stars (1990)

  Ricochet Baby (1996)

  Songs from the Violet Café (2003)

  The Captive Wife (2005)

  Short story collections (as author)

  Mrs Dixon and Friend (1982)

  Unsuitable Friends (1988)

  The Foreign Woman (1993)

  The House Within (1997)

  The Best of Fiona Kidman’s Short Stories (1998)

  A Needle in the Heart (2002)

  Short story collections (as editor)

  New Zealand Love Stories: An Oxford Anthology (1999)

  The Best New Zealand Fiction 1 (2004)

  The Best New Zealand Fiction 2 (2005)

  The Best New Zealand Fiction 3 (2006)

  Non-fiction

  Gone North (1984)

  Wellington (1989)

  Palm Prints (1994)

  Poetry

  Honey and Bitters (1975)

  On the Tightrope (1978)

  Going to the Chathams (1985)

  Wakeful Nights (1991)

  Play

  Search for Sister Blue (1975)

  Copyright

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand

  A VINTAGE BOOK

  published by

  Random House New Zealand

  18 Poland Road, Glenfield, Auckland, New Zealand

  www.randomhouse.co.nz

  Random House International

  Random House

  20 Vauxhall Bridge Road

  London, SW1V 2SA

  United Kingdom

  Random House Australia (Pty) Ltd

  20 Alfred Street, Milsons Point, Sydney,

  New South Wales 2061, Australia

  Random House South Africa Pty Ltd

  Isle of Houghton

  Corner Boundary Road and Carse O’Gowrie

  Houghton 2198, South Africa

  Random House Publishers India Private Ltd

  301 World Trade Tower, Hotel Intercontinental Grand Complex,

  Barakhamba Lane, New Delhi 110 001, India

  First published 2008

  © 2008 Fiona Kidman

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted

  ISBN 978 1 86979 640 2

  This book is copyright. Except for the purposes of fair reviewing no part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Text design: Anna Seabrook

  Cover illustration: Ian Kidman, Te Kaha, 1964

  Cover design: Katy Yiakmis

  Printed in Australia by Griffin Press