The Best of Fiona Kidman's Short Stories

by Fiona Kidman

  When she rings the vet clinic she is told that no one is going out their way today, unless it’s urgent. Of course that will cost more, though the girl on the other end doesn’t say so, in fact she doesn’t sound as if she cares much. Nora says that yes, it is urgent, the vet must come at once, or sooner, the matter is of the greatest possible urgency, it is the horse Trixie, as if she would know immediately that someone must come, but the girl continues unruffled, barely remembering Nora, which is not surprising given how long it is since her last call. She agrees at last to send someone.

  Nora looks at the door of her father’s room. There is no sound behind it. He will sleep for another half-hour, then wake on time, as if to clockwork, to await the arrival of Trixie.

  She clears the dishes from the table, quick and methodical now, half expecting the vet to materialise at the gate in moments, though it could be hours before he comes. Perhaps she is panicking too. She breathes deeply and evenly, willing herself to move steadily and sensibly through the day and to do each thing that has to be done in its proper order. The top of the heavy old table is cleared now and shines in the light through the windows. She has washed the flowered curtains the week before and the linoleum, though worn, is like a hospital floor, not a speck of dust anywhere, and that isn’t bad for a farmhouse ninety years old with timber that snaps and shrinks at the seams on frosty nights. She has cleaned things, year after year, as if in preparation for something she cannot, or will not name. Nora finds she is listening to her own breathing, and walks out to the garden to listen to the movement of the grass instead.

  Spring has unwrapped the buds on the plum tree, the river shines in the distance, the morning lies like golden wine about her, and the cat rubs itself against her legs. Ah so sensual, her breasts pain her, and there is a tugging at the base of her belly, a drawing down, so that she knows her period will come before the week is out. She is still alive, her body still functions. Her hands flutter to her tender breasts and she lets them rest there a moment feeling the nipples rise. It is so long since that has happened too, more often her breasts feel like scones. Her face reddens, shy and surprised. She glances around quickly but the empty paddocks stretch away before her. The cat rubs its bellyful of kittens against her legs. ‘This is disgusting,’ she says in a loud firm voice, and straightens her back, so that it twinges too, to remind her of her body’s impending condition.

  The moment cannot be delayed any longer. The half hour has been a reprieve, but the time is passing, might already be up. Sure enough, her father’s voice flutters from the bed when she opens the door. His fingers are clenched round the edge of the blankets and his eyes stare at her with violence in their depths.

  ‘Where’ve‘you been?’

  ‘In the garden. It’s such a nice morning.’ She sees there is a white scum round the sucked-in corners of his mouth and that it is beginning to bubble into a froth.

  ‘Where is she?’

  Nora moves to straighten the covers on the bed but his hand shoots forth and grabs her wrist so hard she cries out. She knows the power in those scrawny fingers and usually she is better at avoiding them. She thinks, if she moved away forcibly enough, that her greater strength and weight would bear him along bodily behind her out of the bed, but that he would not release his hold.

  ‘Tell me, Nora, tell me.’ Despite his anger, and his grip on her, his voice is pitiful. He farts loudly and having begun to pass wind he is unable to stop, his body racked with spasms. A foul smell envelops them.

  ‘We’ve sent for the vet,’ she says faintly.

  ‘Have you seen her?’

  ‘No. I was waiting for you to wake.’

  ‘Go on down. She’ll come for you.’ He is quavering.

  As she walks down the paddock she thinks that that will be the nearest her father ever comes to paying her a compliment.

  But his faith is misplaced. Harry sits with the horse but it does not move. Only the tender pucker of the mouth and the erratic fluctuation of the faded roan flanks beneath the blanket are evidence that she is still alive.

  ‘How’s he taken it?’ Harry asks Nora when she kneels beside him.

  ‘Reckon he’ll go clean off his head.’ She talks to the horse, wheedling and prodding, producing sugar and a new carrot from her pocket. It is no use. Harry watches and listens and adds words of encouragement, and Nora wonders why, why are we doing this, what will become of us? For fifteen years this horse has visited her father’s window, every day since he was scooped up in one dreadful movement by the baler from the field of hay. The animal is long past its time to die, for it was not a young horse even at the time of the accident. Yet in living on, it has given the old man something to look forward to each day, it has in its turn kept him alive.

  But why that, Nora wonders now. Why Trixie the horse, when there could have been so much else that he’s denied them, and could have shared with them. She is thinking of children she might have had. Come to think of it, now she doesn’t know why they let him do it. There seemed to be reasons once, but it was all too long ago, and now they don’t make sense any more. It is simply that the passing of the years has whittled their resistance away until there is nothing left but this rundown farm, and them. Her and Harry. Two odd people inhabiting a patch of land that neither can lay claim to, and no longer have the courage to leave.

  She looks at Harry with his furrowed face and grizzled hair. When first she knew him it had lain in tight little curls all over his head, now they start halfway back on his head, and instead of copperiness they are an indeterminate brown streaked with grey; the bony forehead starts out more prominently over the deepset eyes, the funnels of reddish hair that cover his body jut out under the too short cuffs of his working shirt.

  That is what she sees, and as the vet comes towards them across the paddock she tries to see what she must look like to him — a tall, too thin, ageing woman, a little stooped, with fair cropped hair, hands that look like Harry’s, wearing a crumpled khaki overall, clean, note that, but crumpled, looks as if she’s never used an iron in her life, and a cardigan with patches … all right, Young and Handsome, so what are you going to do about our horse?

  ‘Why don’t you go back to the house?’ says Harry. ‘I’ll take care of things here.’ He will too, that’s Harry’s role, taking care of things. Of her? Maybe. Maybe that’s what he does.

  The vet is even younger than he first appeared. He is new to the local practice. She supposes he knows what he is doing and leaves him in consultation with Harry.

  Back at the house she enters the room with stealth. The old man pretends to be dozing but he doesn’t fool her. From the smell she knows she will have to change the bed and supposes that’s why he pretends. He is at her mercy. Indeed, his life has been in her hands every day for all the years he has lain here. Yet for all that, he is the one who has stayed on top, he is the boss. Only today he wants information. If, as he usually does, he makes out it is her fault for leaving him that he has messed himself, then she might withhold what he wants to know. Not that she would, surely dear God he knows that too, just goes to show how it matters, that he should even briefly fear her power.

  A photograph of her mother in a heavy gilt frame stands on the dressing room table, and one of her brother alongside of it, the boy who should have had the farm but got himself killed instead. The men in the family haven’t had much luck. As she regards the two faces, carefully composed for the camera, she catches her own dishevelled reflection in the mirror. Have any of them had luck? Faded blonde, the vet might say if he were describing her to anyone. Not original, but it fitted. Pleats under the chin, and pale today, oh God yes, but she was tired, so what about her bodily functions, just let them be over soon, they get in the way and don’t make a scrap of difference to anyone.

  ‘Put your shoulders back, Nora Duthie.’ Her father has stopped feigning sleep. ‘Nobody’ll ever dance with you,’ he says.

  ‘When has anyone ever danced with me?’ she answers, without turning
.

  ‘Never mind, you’ll get a decent fella yet.’

  ‘Shut up, damn you.’

  His barbs are not without point, of course. They always are. By the time she met Harry she’d stopped going to dances. Chaps didn’t like a woman who towered over them, and when she stopped that didn’t seem to do much good either. Harry was the hired man. He never got past sitting in front of the fire with her in the evenings and listening to the hit parades on Saturday night. Hits. My God, now that was a long time ago. Long surpassed by television. She was taller than Harry too, but as they didn’t dance what the hell. Hell. Yes, hell. All of it was hell.

  From the bed the old man starts to sing in a reedy whispering voice: ‘I wish I were in Dixie, hooray, hooray …’

  She goes to him and he clutches at her hand, but not so that he will hurt her this time. Tears squeeze out of the corner of his eyes. Playing for sympathy.

  ‘I’m sorry, Dadda,’ she says, giving him the old childish name: She hasn’t said it in years. If she hadn’t said that she might have said, die, you old bastard, hurry up and get it over.

  Out in the kitchen there are voices, Harry’s and the vet’s.

  ‘I’ll come and fix you in a minute, all right?’

  The young vet’s face is full of regret. ‘There’s really nothing else for it. She’ll have to be destroyed,’ he is saying.

  Nora closes the door firmly behind her as she joins them. ‘You can’t do that.’

  ‘The animal’s in pain. I can’t leave her suffering.’

  She shakes her head, no.

  ‘I’ve just been explaining to your husband …’

  It’s Harry’s turn to shake his head. ‘It’s for Miss Duthie to decide.’

  The vet looks startled but it’s not his business to comment on their domestic arrangements.

  So Nora tries to explain, in halting sentences, how the horse comes to the window every morning to see her father and that that is what keeps him alive, it is all he has. And this morning he is fretting already.

  ‘Shouldn’t you get the doctor then?’

  ‘It’s the horse he wants, not the doctor,’ says Nora, and the vet looks at her curiously as if the thin greyish woman might be simple. Still, she goes to the phone and rings the doctor, who is already on his rounds up their way, and before long the kitchen seems full of them all.

  ‘I can’t leave that horse to suffer,’ says the vet as matter-of-factly as he can, when the doctor has given old man Duthie a sedative. ‘The animal should be destroyed.’

  Doctor Elliot is almost as old as the vet is young. ‘And I can’t allow you to destroy my patient.’

  ‘I’m not God,’ the vet says sharply and too loudly. He falls silent as they all look at him. He and the doctor consider each other awhile and the doctor is perhaps thinking that the vet is a fortunate young man to have learned such a complex lesson already.

  ‘Will he really die? If the horse does?’

  ‘How can I tell you that?’ asks Dr Elliot. He is a round old man, overfond of the bottle and food. Harry often says he has seen him in the pub on Friday afternoons. It is Friday that Harry goes to the stock and station, and has a jug at the hotel. ‘I seen Dr Elliot,’ he says when he comes home, ‘full as the family po again.’ But the doctor is wise in the ways of his patients who are also his friends. He reflects now. ‘It could happen, though. What do you think, Nora?’

  She sighs and rests her head on the beam by the stove where she is turning pikelets for their lunch. ‘I don’t know. I don’t think he knows how to die. Or you’d think he’d have done it by now, wouldn’t you?’

  Their silence thickens. ‘I think he’ll die though.’ She ladles out more of the creamy mixture on to the stove.

  The doctor says, ‘I could have your father taken to hospital in the ambulance while he’s sedated. We could try and keep him alive.’

  ‘You ought to do that. Something’s got to be done,’ says the vet, wishing to end the dilemma.

  ‘Oh so that’s your advice, is it?’ snaps the doctor, thinking that the vet hasn’t learned much after all. But maybe it’s not his fault.

  He looks at Nora and then at Harry. He has known one of them a lifetime, and Harry — well, long enough. Nora places food on the table as he watches them; the steaming pikelets, a dish of tomatoes ripe from their vines, and some pale glossy ham that Harry has cured. She uses a Reader’s Digest for a mat under the fresh pot of tea. The rough hands shake, she is not used to so much company. On her left hand there is a thin worn ring which has become part of her, as most women’s wedding rings do. Only this isn’t a wedding ring, but a small insignificant engagement ring; it wasn’t expensive when Harry bought it for her all those years ago, the year of the accident.

  The idea of Nora marrying the hired man who came in for the haymaking hadn’t pleased her father. Since the accident with the baler he had had fifteen years of lying under the coloured coverlet that Nora’s mother had made out of patchworks and scraps of bleached flourbag to think about it. It pleased him even less after all this time than it did at the beginning, which he was fond of telling them. What it amounted to was this, that she could have the farm one day, but so long as he lived it was his, he was having no hired man marrying her with aspirations to a fortune, and his brother’s sons would be pleased to have the place if she didn’t behave herself. The fellow could stay for the milking, which he supposed being a woman she couldn’t manage on her own, and that was all. No funny business.

  If they’d gone just a few days earlier, in the full path of his rage, instead of staying around to finish the hay that fateful season, hoping that in doing so they would bring him round to their way of seeing things, it might all have been different, he might have gone to hospital and stayed there, or the accident might never have happened, or any of the other human variations that could be imagined might have occurred. Might. It didn’t matter any more, none at all, his lying there year after year had made it impossible to run away. For Nora anyway, and so, it seemed, for Harry too.

  Even if she was no dancing partner, she had energy and a way of getting on with the work which suited him, who’d been after his own place for a while, and worked here and there, sometimes on the roads, sometimes on the farms, a man from nowhere special. Perhaps it was true, that once he had sought a fortune, although looking at the Duthies’ place he must have decided to settle for rather less. He’d stayed around one Christmas and bought her perfume from the Rawleigh’s man. She’d told him to go away once or twice and then she’d let him stay.

  Now the ring with its diamond chips is dull and plain like its wearer.

  ‘His time’s got to come,’ the doctor says. ‘Shall we just wait and see what happens?’

  She jerks her shoulders up and her eyes burn. ‘You’ve no right.’

  Dr Elliot looks back at her. ‘I’ve done as much as I can. Haven’t you?’ He spreads raspberry jam on a pikelet with delicacy, skimming the knife. ‘There’s a time, you know.’

  He eats the pikelet and takes another one. In a reflective way, he says, ‘The hospitals are full. It’s not usual to admit a man because his horse is dying, you know.’

  In the afternoon the horse dies, and the vet who has felt oddly compelled to stay comes to tell her before leaving to make up his lost day.

  In the night Nora and Harry take turns at watching beside the old man’s bed. He opens his eyes once and whispers in singsong, ‘I wish I were in …’ and lapses back into a sleep or a coma.

  ‘Soon, soon,’ says Nora, and while her back is turned, fetching Harry, he slides off the edge into death.

  In the morning when he has been taken away, the bed turned down and the windows opened wide, Harry comes up from the milking, and from burying Trixie with the help of neighbours who have called since the word spread, soon after dawn. The room is quiet and empty except for the two of them, a hiatus in the comings and goings.

  ‘The Hammonds say you can board with them if you like,’ says Nora. ‘I ca
n hire you for the milking if you want to keep it on for the moment.’

  ‘The Hammonds?’

  ‘You can’t stay here. It wouldn’t be right.’

  ‘And us?’

  She slides the worn ring off her finger, dislodging it with difficulty over the knuckle. ‘I’m not sure that I’d know how to be married now, Harry. Not to … well, change anything, you understand.’

  He nods. Nobody watching her would know whether she was disappointed that he hasn’t argued with her, or whether it is what she really wants. It is unlikely that she knows herself.

  And there is no time to think about it for the arrangements have to be made and lawyers to be seen (the old man has been meticulous about his affairs, the lawyers had their instructions to attend at the house once every six months, for the old man was never sure that Nora wouldn’t try to take over the farm behind his back; they had told him she couldn’t but he didn’t believe them and each time they called they had to produce his will for him to check each page to make sure it hadn’t been tampered with), there is the decision whether to have the organist or not (she decides she will) and whether to have the funeral the next day or hold it over three days because the gravedigger will be away (she decides on the next day) and in no time at all it seems, since the horse took sick, on a sour day to which winter has temporarily returned, they are burying Nora’s father.

  The service is brief. Afterwards the cortège winds its way into the hills to a small hillside cemetery where Nora’s mother and brother and grandparents lie. Only a few cars follow the hearse into the hills, for Duthie was never a popular man in the district and no one knows Nora well enough to feel more than a passing compassion, and even then they are not quite sure what form their sympathy should take. Or that is what their eyes say as they look uneasily around the tiny gathering, only its smallness reassuring them that it was a neighbourly thing to come. The old man’s brother, Nora’s uncle, leans on his stick and watches his two sons and Dick Hammond, Harry, and two other neighbours who have stood in as pallbearers carry the coffin to the grave. It is the presence of the other dead that reassures Nora, standing in the brisk wind, dressed in a cream crimpolene dress revived from the back of her wardrobe for the occasion. She has thought of touching up the outfit with a scarf of her mother’s, kept away in a drawer, but it is green streaked with vivid red, and at the church door she decides that it is unsuitable after all. Instead, she moves quietly to the edge of the grave and lets the scarf fall amongst the sullen clay. The neighbours look at each other and away, and afterwards one of them is heard to say that there might be more to Nora Duthie than meets the eye, and perhaps they have not thought well enough of her in the past. But what they think is not known to Nora, which is not to say that she does not consider the matter. That is why Harry is being sent to live with the Hammonds.