The Best of Fiona Kidman's Short Stories

by Fiona Kidman

  ‘You’ll be lonely when you get home.’

  He paused again, then answered carefully, ‘You must listen when I tell you that things are not simple.’

  ‘You’ll come back tomorrow?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘And Greece?’

  ‘I said I’d think about it.’

  ‘Saga po para poli,’ she said softly. She didn’t know whether he understood, or heard. She said it again, in English: ‘George, I love you so much.’

  But already he had closed the door behind him. His footsteps receded up the path into the quiet dark. She heard his car start, and drive off. Across the bay, the lights were shining.

  No, life was not simple. Already, she supposed, some other woman waited for him somewhere. But even that was an odd comfort, signifying that he had no lasting commitments beyond this house. True he had wept, but that, she believed, was for the breakages and damage of life, and not for Susan. She realised how little she knew of these matters, but they were neither here nor there, and it puzzled her that he must create difficulties where, it seemed to her, none existed.

  He was as Baba was, and tomorrow he would come back. Soon they would go to Greece. Oh the islands, the beautiful islands. He would hold her hand as they glided between them, and she would find a husband.

  Marvellous Eight

  WHEN NATALIE SOAMES became a television writer it seemed as if her whole life had changed. Of course, it had been changing for a long time but up until then the changes had signalled not so much achievement itself but, rather, signs that she was moving closer to her goals. Then one day something happened; it felt like luck.

  For years she had asked her Little Theatre Group in Mountwood to workshop her plays, but nobody was really interested in local plays, they said. Afterwards, she would say scornfully to reporters who asked her about her early beginnings, that they were still into Noel Coward in the provinces. No wonder nobody wanted to know. But then she and Monty moved to Wellington on transfer and she met a man at a dinner party given by one of her husband’s colleagues (they were both civil engineers in a government department) who said he would introduce her to somebody in an agency. She didn’t believe it, things like that never happened to young women who had lived most of their lives in Flat Top Road, Mountwood. And, even if he did give her an introduction, she was sure that if nobody wanted to know in Mountwood, they would want to know even less in Wellington.

  But she was wrong. The first person the agency offered her work to was a television producer called Victor. Straight away he rang her up and asked her to come and see him.

  ‘It’s great,’ Victor said, ‘it’s the coming thing, women’s voices.’

  ‘Is it?’ she asked politely. She was interested in Women’s Liberation but she wasn’t sure whether she was ready to be an expert.

  ‘Look, your work’s good. If you can just confront the issues more squarely I’ll make you a household name.’ Victor leaned over the desk. He was a man with a high forehead and a mane of fair hair. His eyes were intense. It was said that he was shy with women. You won’t get the casting couch treatment from him, the agent had said reassuringly. ‘There are women out there who are suffering,’ Victor said. ‘You know it and I know it. You’re an intelligent woman. Don’t you want to articulate on their behalf?’

  ‘I suppose so.’ If she sounded uncertain it was because, until then, it had always seemed wiser to write men as the central characters in her plays. But she supposed he was right. Of course she had suffered. She still did, for that matter. But it was difficult to say exactly why. Between them, she and Monty had suffered — over lack of money, broken nights with children, for the small grievances that living amongst the expanses of a new suburb inflicted on people, such as loneliness and boredom, and not having a car when they needed it most. In what seemed like the end, they were suffering from not saying enough to each other.

  Victor was clearly waiting for more, so she said: ‘I didn’t think I was the only one to blame. Yes, of course, I’ve taken a lot of male-orientated shit.’

  ‘You’re smart,’ said Victor. ‘By the way, I drink.’

  ‘So do I.’ It was true, though she had only recently found this out.

  ‘Come to the pub.’

  He reminded her of Stuart, her lover back in Mountwood, but she didn’t sleep with him. In the year that followed, she was faithful to Stuart — or Monty. She could never quite decide which of them demanded her loyalty most. For that matter, Victor never asked. Instead, he introduced her to a director called Sonny Emmanuel, and commissioned her to write her first play for television. Sonny had black crinkly hair, a beard and a myopic gaze behind his thick glasses. He was saving up to spend a year in a kibbutz and maybe if he could make enough money he’d take the children too.

  Victor loved her play when it was written; everyone in the department just adored it, he said. It was about a woman who refused to be interviewed with her husband when he went for an important job and then ruined a dinner party for his prospective employers, thus bringing about the downfall of her marriage. I’m a woman in my own right, she said, I’m not a career wife. This said, she left with rejoicing and supportive women friends. Victor paid Natalie for the script but there was a problem about production money with the men upstairs. The play made them nervous. ‘We’ll just have to work on their political education,’ Victor said. ‘Give it time, we’ll do it sooner or later.’

  Natalie wrote another play, about a sad love affair between a young woman visiting Wellington for a day on a cruise ship and an ageing artist. Victor loved that too but in the end there wasn’t enough money in the budget for that either. (Far too much OB, lovie, Sonny told her, and it would ruin, but ruin it if it was moved inside. Hadn’t Victor told her they could only afford three sets, two corners, and four minutes of OB?) ‘I’m afraid it’s fallen over, Nat,’ Victor boomed over the phone. Still, she could write for their new series in the autumn.

  He and Sonny took credit for developing the series. It was called Marvellous Eight. The two of them, and various writers, thrashed out ideas in the back bar at De Brett’s, against the smell of counter lunches. The series was a comedy about a woman counsellor, and each writer wrote one of the eight episodes as a self-contained play, dealing with a day in the counsellor’s life.

  ‘You know you’re the only woman writer we’re asking,’ Victor said.

  ‘I can’t write comedy,’ Natalie said. ‘Anyway, it’s sick laughing at counselling, you’re laughing at people’s problems.’

  ‘Exactly, humour’s just grinning at misery.’

  ‘Is that original?’

  ‘Of course it’s not. Neither’s television. Now write something and don’t take yourself so fucking seriously.’

  Eventually, she proposed an episode about a woman in her sixties who consulted the counsellor in the hope of finding out how to deal with her children. Her children, in their forties, went to the counsellor so they could work out how to deal with her. Her granddaughters, in their twenties (Natalie had an uneasy feeling she was shortening the biological time clock but Victor reckoned they could all just fit into it), were counselled on how to deal with everyone else. Their brother, dressed up in women’s clothing, set himself up as a counsellor too. Complications multiplied when the counsellor, unaware of his true identity and the fact that she was counselling all his female relatives, took him on as an assistant.

  ‘Black. Richly comic and very black,’ Victor said. ‘Whoever is it based on?’ They were in the pub.

  ‘It’s original,’ said Natalie. ‘Is that breaking the rules?’

  She could have sworn he was nonplussed. ‘Actually, I’d thought you might write about a marriage.’

  ‘I’ll tell you when mine gets funny,’ she said. She could see now that they had been counting on her. ‘Get Sonny to write about his.’ She’d heard Sonny had a mistress at whom his wife threw pots and pans. She supposed that was why he was going to a kibbutz.

  ‘I can’t cop
e any more,’ Sonny said, ‘somebody buy me another beer.’

  Mountwood sits, little changed since the summer that started in 1970 and ambled on into a late autumn in 1971. The town is built on a flat plain near the base of a mountain range; wintry mornings are rigid with ice, summer afternoons simmer like hot honey beneath the sun. On clear nights the sun sets in a bitter bright pink blaze behind the black hills. A river runs on the outskirts of town and its edges have been landscaped into a park.

  There is one long main street flanked by clothing shops, delicatessens, and miniature department stores. It is dissected by smaller streets including one that bulges in the middle to form what is described as a mall, though the locals call it a ‘mawl’ and it has indeed become a place where mauling and street violence can happen at any time.

  That summer, Natalie and Monty, and Sasha and Jeff, and Stuart and Dulcie all lived in Mountwood. Some of them were due to leave and some of them are still there and may stay forever. The Flat Top Road subdivision where they all lived had once been farmland. Their quarter-acre sections sat side by side in neat rows. Fast-growing silver dollar gums cast a gentle sheen over the landscape, providing shelter for fruit trees and vegetables. The women acquired colonial dressers and brought out their grandmothers’ china that their mothers had hidden, they replaced their bedspreads with duvets, abandoned their clotheslines for driers, took contraceptive pills instead of using diaphragms, joined reading circles to counter the effects of television. The men shared transport to work so that the women could do car pools for kindergarten and Monty and some of the others dug pits in their garages so that they could work under their cars to save money. Natalie can still see Monty’s sandy freckled face, frowning and puzzled over a handful of wheel nuts, his spiky red hair growing in bunches down his cheeks; like most of the men they knew he wore sideburns. When he looked up, catching her eye, or watching the children, something gleeful flashed behind his eyes.

  In time, the residents of Flat Top Road had begun to prosper. A crowd of them celebrated New Year’s Eve together. Stuart and Dulcie were there. They were older than most of the couples, their children already in high school. It was the first time Natalie had met them properly. Dulcie cornered her to talk about a craft circle she was starting, and looked disappointed when Natalie said she wrote.

  That would be difficult to exhibit,’ Dulcie said, before moving on.

  Behind his wife, Stuart raised one amused eyebrow.

  Later, they all danced to the Beatles. None of them can remember now just who danced with whom, but for the rest of the summer they said that it was funny the way the heat was getting to them that year. In the winter, Natalie and Sasha began to talk of change. They decided that Mountwood needed livening up. Frequently they dressed in home-tailored suits and wide-brimmed hats, like other people wore to weddings, and had coffee in the mall tearooms. Sasha said she was going to leave, but Natalie didn’t believe her. Jeff was an aerial topdresser and seemed too rich to leave. Sasha said she was descended from gypsies and maybe it was true: certainly she was very dark, and she had emigrated from England when she was barely twenty, apparently on a whim.

  Sasha and Jeff knew Dulcie and Stuart better than the others. Idly, over coffee, Natalie asked Sasha more about them. Stuart, she learned, worked as a photographer on the local newspaper, a small daily constantly threatened by takeover. His private passion was growing ferns; he had founded a magazine on the subject and soon, supported by the conservation movement, he hoped it would become his livelihood. Natalie suggested they all get together again but Sasha said Dulcie was a bit too brisk for her taste and Natalie had to agree. Perhaps next summer, Sasha had murmured.

  One morning Natalie rang her and Jeff answered, sounding bleak and distant.

  ‘Can I talk to Sasha?’ she asked.

  ‘Don’t be a hypocrite, Natalie. You know she’s gone.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, where is she?’

  ‘You know,’ he said again, ‘you really are a bitch, ringing up to gloat.’

  But it was true, Sasha hadn’t told her.

  ‘I thought I knew her,’ Natalie told Stuart, a couple of weeks later. ‘Did you know she’s living in Auckland?’ They had met outside the carpark of the school where Stuart conducted a night class in horticulture and Natalie attended a creative writing course run by an English teacher. Secretly, she thought that she knew more than the teacher. He insisted that her work would never succeed because she had too many characters. Shakespeare had hundreds of characters, she insisted. You want me to write to a formula. Life is full of people, that’s what it’s like, she said.

  ‘Would you like some coffee?’ Stuart asked, and she thought, why not, well why not? She couldn’t think of anywhere that would be open for coffee at that hour, but still she thought, why not? Her car looked abandoned as they drove off.

  ‘Sasha had a lover all the time,’ she told Stuart wonderingly, as they drove through Mountwood’s vacant streets. ‘He came down from Auckland and visited her in the afternoons.’

  Stuart shook his head, considering Sasha’s defection. Already he had turned the car towards the river.

  ‘I married young, there’s never been anyone else since I married Dulcie. Twenty faithful years,’ he marvelled to Natalie. She didn’t care about his past. He had heavy eyebrows and deeply recessed blue eyes flecked with green. His nose was over-large, his mouth wide and faintly feminine. On field trips hunting for ferns, his arms had turned brown; the backs of his fingers looked like Dutch rusks in a packet.

  ‘You make me feel very young,’ he murmured when he had kissed her. He reached for the ignition, the adventure over.

  ‘Wait,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t want anybody getting hurt,’ he said, when she slid her hand along the inside of his thigh. ‘I don’t want any more marriages going under,’ he said, like a drowning man.

  ‘Somebody will see us,’ he said, as if it was she who had driven the car there.

  ‘Not like this,’ Natalie said, putting her head into his lap.

  Nobody had done that to him before.

  ‘I have decided to risk all,’ Natalie wrote to Sasha. ‘I’m in love with him, and now that the new bridge over the river is finished, Monty has been transferred. It doesn’t make much difference what I do here. Soon we’re going away. What the hell, I’m sure Stuart will follow me.’

  What she didn’t describe was the relief that it was to leave Mountwood. They had become reckless and foolish, hunting each other out in broad daylight, meeting by the river in lunch hours, at dusk, or on stupid pretexts such as dropping off books to the library in the middle of the afternoon. When she went home her mouth was bruised and her clothes stained. Her eyes slid away from Monty’s. Most people knew whose cars went where, and why. Natalie tried to remind herself that Stuart did it too, with her, she didn’t do it all on her own. In spite of her brave words, it was sapping her energy, the guilt, the arrangements, the excuses, the sheer organisation of it all.

  Marvellous Eight is filmed in an Auckland studio that has been converted from a warehouse. Natalie is sent along as part of the team, in order to observe the making of a television play, and also to do on-the-spot rewrites. She stays with Sasha who nowadays lives in a designer apartment, part of her settlement from Jeff. That, in itself, suggests a command of her situation that has escaped other friends who have packed and quit.

  Natalie has recently left Monty, and she barely makes ends meet. Monty won’t give her a thing, he says, and he even wants the children. It is 1974 and men hardly ever get custody, although sometimes Natalie has the impression that her mother thinks it wouldn’t be a bad idea if they were given to Monty. She often minds the children so that her daughter can work, and is looking after them in Wellington right now.

  Certainly, Natalie does not laugh at what she has done. She drinks copious amounts of wine in the evenings and wakes, crying, from deep sleeps. Monty had rung the night before while she and Sasha were having dinner. ‘Come home,�
�� he said. ‘Just come home, eveiything’ll be all right.’

  ‘How can I?’ she replied, ‘I’ve got work to do. I have to be here all week.’

  ‘I know. I mean, when you’re finished there, come home.’

  She sees they have conducted the conversation as if they were still married, and she is just away for a few days.

  But Natalie is not ready to go home yet. She doesn’t believe she ever will.

  While she is at Sasha’s she sleeps in the spare room where Sasha’s twin daughters sometimes stay, between boarding school and visiting their father in Mountwood. Sasha’s own bedroom is huge and takes up nearly all the top floor of the apartment; she can see Rangitoto from the window. She has a king-sized bed which she shares from time to time with her new lover. Jewellery, real and paste, but all huge and expansive, tumbles in artful confusion out of a jewellery box onto the dressing table; the scents of frangipani and sweet pea oils float through the rooms. When Natalie takes a bath, she has first to remove scarlet and citric yellow glass pebbles from its bottom, and lay them around the edge; it is easier to take a shower, but she takes baths, because they soothe her, and besides, she has many preparations to make. Lying in the bath, she counts the coloured pebbles: ‘He’ll meet me, he’ll meet me not.’ She shaves her legs and under her armpits. When she is dry she smoothes body lotion over her skin.

  She has arranged to meet Stuart and stay in a hotel with him for two nights. They are booked into the Waverley in Lower Queen Street. Today she is moving on from Sasha’s place. It has taken weeks to plan. Natalie is going to pay for the hotel. Stuart never has money of his own, Dulcie runs his business and pays all the accounts.

  Natalie’s anxiety stems not so much from what she is doing, but from the thought that he will not come, will not be able to get away from Dulcie. It should be easy for him to come to Auckland, but he is such a bad liar she is certain he will mess up his excuses. She harbours, too, a niggling fear that she might get caught. True, she has left Monty, but in the end, she doesn’t want to get done for adultery. The thought of losing her children haunts her. When she has been drinking with Victor and Sonny she imagines her children’s funerals. This might be the next worst thing that could happen to her.