The Best of Fiona Kidman's Short Stories

by Fiona Kidman

  ‘All my own work,’ she says. The kitchen is freshly painted, Spanish white walls with dark-green trim around the windows. Early hyacinths bloom in containers on the sills.

  He picks around her china, holding up a Clarice Cliff jug.

  ‘Nice. What did it cost?’

  They can do this to each other, it’s almost like a marriage, the way they talk to each other, even now. China doesn’t fascinate him but they share an interest in the way things are grouped, how they are put together. And where they come from.

  ‘Three hundred at auction.’

  ‘A bargain. Have you packed your toothbrush, then?’ Meaning, is she ready to leave?

  ‘Yes, and my hot-water bottle.’

  ‘We do have electric blankets, Veronica.’

  ‘I just like a hottie on my tummy.’

  He groans. ‘You’ve got your cystitis back again.’

  ‘You’d think there’d be some rewards in clean living, wouldn’t you? I caught a chill while I was on playground duty. Anyway, I’m not coming for a free consultation.’

  ‘Lots of fresh water. No alcohol. No spices.’

  ‘Is it worth coming at all?’

  ‘You’d better. Gina’s expecting you to make up four at dinner.’

  ‘Who’s coming?’

  He looks uncomfortable. ‘You’re not the only house guest. His name is Miles.’

  ‘Lewis! Gina’s not matchmaking again?’

  ‘She met him on a course a couple of years back.’ His voice is uneasy. Gina paints in oils, mostly abstracts. ‘Miles runs a gallery in Auckland. He’s been on a buying trip down south. Gina must have mentioned him.’

  ‘Of course, I’d forgotten,’ Veronica lies. ‘Is he gay?’ Straight away she regrets the question.

  ‘Probably,’ he says, more comfortably. Veronica fumes in silence as she completes her preparations for leaving, wishing now that she was staying at home. Of course, Lewis and Gina are always having people to stay, Gina’s new friends, the ones she has made as she has grown older, or Lewis’s students. He teaches part-time at the hospital, the kind of mentor who inspires the young and takes them home to feed and party. Hand fattening, Gina says. Beautiful creatures, but hungry.

  ‘How are the children?’ he asks, studying photographs of her daughter and son.

  ‘Fine. Katie sends you her love. She’s in love again, it seems.’ Katie is twenty-five and never seems to settle at things for long. ‘And Sam’s still in Africa.’

  ‘You miss them?’

  ‘I’ve never been so free,’ she says, collecting her coat. She doesn’t mean to sound short, but it’s such a stupid meaningless question. She misses her children every day, like an affliction. Some days she doesn’t know whether she will resist the temptation to ring them, wherever they are. Not that it’s easy to get in touch with her son, a fledgling botanist. She sees him in the hot sun of Africa (had he got this from Lewis, all those African masks he saw on childhood visits?), and remembers the way he burned so easily when he was small.

  Lewis’s eyes moisten as he looks at a small framed watercolour, a delicate painting of a lake beneath clouds.

  ‘Remember when you bought this? That weekend we all went to Rotorua and swam under the hot falls?’

  ‘Vaguely.’ Veronica is checking her locks. Every evening she inspects them three or four times. It takes time, there are three doors, the back, the front and the garage, twenty-eight panes of glass, of which fourteen are in windows that open. Lewis drums his fingers on the table, with a gathering impatience.

  ‘I don’t take risks.’ Twelve … five, four more to go.

  ‘But you must remember,’ Lewis is saying. It is not the violation itself she is so afraid of any more, not the battering of the body, the penetration, which she can hardly imagine, it is more the loss of solitude, the secret self that old women know. She must have been crazy to say she would spend a weekend in the country with these people. ‘You and Colin bought this later that day at the exhibition.’ His irritation with her fussing is palpable.

  ‘So we did. I think you bought it for us actually.’

  ‘Veronica, don’t. Please.’

  ‘Are we going or what?’ She pulls the door too hard behind them.

  ‘I see you’ve cut the trees,’ he says, as they climb the path to his car.

  ‘Only thinned, they were blocking out light.’

  ‘What would Colin have said? He was sentimental about trees.’

  ‘Oh, who cares?’ she snaps. ‘Ask him to stay if you’re so keen to know what he thinks.’

  He lifts her bag into the boot of the car without answering.

  Colin is long gone. He drills wells on the Canterbury Plains and shares a house with his business partner, Skip. Katie says her father is actually growing rich and careful, and a bit thick round the waist. Skip makes fantastic lattes for breakfast. He does most of the cooking and keeps the firm’s books. Veronica wrinkled her brow, worrying over this information when she received it. ‘It’ll be hard if either of them decide to get married again,’ she said, the mother hen at work. ‘Yeah,’ Katie had said, and sighed.

  Veronica has never told Lewis exactly how she and Colin came to part. In fact, she has never told anyone, because there was something crazy and odd about what happened.

  They took a holiday in Gisborne, that small city of swirling beaches and vineyards where the sun rises earlier than on any other city in the world. Although it was a holiday, Colin walked around with a little notebook practising his keen observer’s look, snooping on conversations in cafés, hushing Veronica — he was trying his hand at writing for the stage. The children were teenagers when they made what turned out to be Colin and Veronica’s last trip. They decided to stay home, and this, in itself, had undone Veronica. She couldn’t believe they wouldn’t come. She worked hard on family holidays.

  ‘Let’s stay in a motel,’ Colin suggested, ‘have a real break. Who needs tents and sand in our lunch any more?’

  In the evenings Veronica walked through the town on her own. Colin said it was a good time of day to write up his journal. Sometimes when she returned he was sitting, staring into space. ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked him more than once, and he would say, ‘Nothing, nothing at all.’ He had had a new book out in the spring, called Ginger Modern, thematically linked poems about an artist who steps out of a post-modern frame into his own reality. They had some spare money. Veronica worked full time again and Colin usually had a small job of one kind or another. Once or twice, he said, well, look, love, you can’t just create all the time.

  Every evening, Veronica took the same route, dawdling in front of the shops. Cars sped up and down the wide streets, horns honking, girls squealing.

  A car stopped one evening while she was balancing the merits of blue Bremworth carpet against gold Cavalier. She didn’t turn around, didn’t think about it, until she was grabbed.

  A door slammed shut behind her. Her scream was lost beneath the squeal of tyres. There were three young men, one on each side in the back seat, and the driver. They were young dangerous-looking men with dreadlocks and tattooed throats. Beside the driver sat a Rottweiler, the hairs on his ruff standing up.

  It is the Rottweiler that will save Veronica.

  ‘So what are youse doing out?’ asked the grubby youth beside her. The hairiness of his shirt like a pelt against her bare arm. His hand with broken fingernails close to her knee.

  ‘Walking,’ she said, her throat dry with terror. ‘Just out for a walk.’

  ‘You want a beer, missus?’

  ‘No. Thanks.’ I am too old for this, was her thought. Glancing sideways at the boy’s jeans to see whether the dark stretching of his cock had begun, fighting rising nausea. The smell of sour beer, sweat, the dog’s fetid breath in her face.

  ‘What’s the dog’s name?’ she asked, keeping her voice as soft and level as she could.

  ‘The Tyrant,’ said the driver. From the pride in his voice she could tell she had taken him un
awares.

  ‘Eh, Tyrant.’ The Rottweiler subsided, regarding her with curious friendly eyes.

  The dog reached forward and licked her face.

  ‘Shit,’ said the driver. ‘Bloody mongrel. Where you from?’

  ‘Wellington.’

  ‘Walling-ton,’ he mimicked her, as if she was the queen in a flowered hat and white gloves taking the mickey out of them. This was the most dangerous moment.

  ‘Why don’t we buy him a tin of tucker at the dairy?’ She fondled the dog’s ears.

  ‘Yeah, why not?’ said the driver. Perhaps they had thought she was younger when they picked her up, that they would like her more. Or the driver was just weary with driving around and taking risks. ‘We’re skint.’

  ‘I could just give you the money.’

  ‘How much?’

  Veronica emptied her shoulder bag into her lap, counting notes and loose change, fifty dollars in all.

  They had circled the town, back to the point where they picked her up. ‘Have a nice night,’ one of them said.

  ‘See you,’ she said. The street was as empty as ten minutes before. She leaned against the window of the carpet shop, overwhelmed with such sadness and so great a sense of abandonment she thought she would never recover.

  A part of her is ashamed, even now. She is ashamed that she did nothing. The next woman might not have been so fortunate, not so able to deal with unruly young men, she might not have liked dogs.

  But when she got back to the motel, Colin looked up from his journal, his face furious. ‘You’re early,’ he said.

  ‘Something happened.’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  She picked up the shiny motel kettle, intending to make tea. ‘D’you want to hear?’

  ‘Christ, Veronica, why d’you always interrupt? Just when I’m getting going?’

  When she didn’t answer, he said: ‘Well, what was it then?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  In the morning she said she was going home. She said they should stop living together, there didn’t seem any point. In her ashamed heart lurked gratitude. Freedom seemed to have come cheap at the price.

  Secrets. Veronica has one of her own.

  Even now, she wakes early in the morning and checks locks she knows perfectly well she had secured the night before; in a bookshop one night she hears a young poet reading (for she discovers that love of poetry is not necessarily forsaken along with the poet): ‘she leaves her fingers in the locks’ the poet said, it’s a phrase that haunts her. It is as if the poem has been written for her. I don’t want to be caught unawares, she says … I don’t take risks.

  Although she tells no one about her experience, it is one of those full stops in her history. A moment she can refer to in all that collection of years that is her life.

  When she told Lewis about the separation he laid the palms of his hands flat down on his desk — she had gone to his rooms to tell him — tears leaking along his nose and into the corner of his mouth. Veronica didn’t actually leave Colin, he was the one who moved out. She could have the lot, her middle-class dump. He was lucky to be out of it.

  This is not exactly what he said to Lewis, sitting in the back bar at De Brett’s.

  ‘She needs counselling,’ he said.

  ‘Not Veronica,’ said Lewis.

  ‘What about those poems I dedicated to her?’ Colin asked.

  ‘Disown them.’

  ‘Are we still friends?’

  ‘You’ve got a nerve,’ Lewis said. Or this is the version he told Veronica.

  Veronica marvels that Lewis chose her over Colin.

  By then Lewis had married Gina, years before all of this happened.

  Veronica leans back against the ivory leather of the car’s upholstery, the dashboard panel twinkling before her, as they join the traffic flow stretching north. The silence between them is not a great way to start the weekend, their usual easy rapport absent.

  ‘He was my friend, too,’ Lewis says, by way of an ice-breaker.

  ‘I know, I know,’ Veronica says, because something has to be said. They have started this conversation several times over the years but it never goes anywhere. Really, what Lewis means, they both mean, is: once we both loved Colin. Only he didn’t live up to our expectations. Which seems callous. As if they are betraying themselves and their own finer feelings.

  ‘I don’t think Miles is gay,’ Lewis says, as they wait at the roundabout for the traffic to clear.

  ‘Miles? Oh, the house guest.’

  ‘Gina’s friend.’ His voice a trifle heavy.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind turning over some of my pictures,’ Veronica says, glad of the opportunity to steer the conversation in a different direction. ‘Perhaps I could talk to this art dealer.’

  ‘I like your pictures the way they are. Oh, this damn’ traffic.’ His fingers drum on the steering wheel. ‘Gina will be waiting for us.’

  After her marriage, Gina’s defiant self-confidence seemed to ebb. ‘It’s lonely being a doctor’s wife,’ she would complain, her voice puzzled and uncertain.

  Lewis would be at his wit’s end. ‘For God’s sake, talk to her will you, Veronica?’

  ‘There’s so much responsibility,’ Gina would complain. ‘This woman says she’s dying of a carbuncle, the pain’s so bad, do you think she’ll die?’ ‘Oh Veronica, I can’t stand how people are in pain, but I don’t know whether to call Lewis or not. What’s a real emergency?’ ‘Veronica, we went out to dinner the other night. I’m sure his friends are laughing at me, all those wives that doctors find in Fendalton and Khandallah. It’s because I’m from Upper Hutt.’ ‘Veronica, they think I’m too young for him.’

  There were times when Veronica thought Gina might leave Lewis because of all this. She would talk with patience and sympathy to Gina. Like Morag, whom Gina had rescued all those years ago, Gina loved children and didn’t have any. There is a difference though. Lewis and Gina’s marriage was not without heat. But it meandered on and on for years, filled with Lewis’s exhausting compassion for his patients, his collection of treasures and their annual travel: Italy (Tuscany, of course), France (all one summer in Aries), the Lake District. Gina had absorbed a certain knowledge about music and art and food; indeed, her experiences are broader than Veronicas, although she, too, can afford to travel these days, and sometimes does.

  And now Gina has the girls and Lewis is not on call so often, his practice expanded to include other, younger, doctors. At forty, when the subject of children had been dropped, as an embarrassing faux pas in their presence, Gina had become pregnant. Her life is full in the way Veronicas used to be. The skinny blonde blade of a girl has been replaced by one of those intense older mothers.

  She will be waiting for them beside the quiet estuary of the sea where she and Lewis live. There will be pied stilts and shags stalking, high arched, through the grey skein of water that Gina looks out upon at evening; a row of boat sheds, the blue trickle of hilltops on the horizon. A lifestyle property. The two little girls will be reading books in the glowing gold-and-blue room that opens off the kitchen, the table set for dinner, a bottle of wine standing open. During the day, Gina will have taken two or three calls from her mother who lives in a rest home. ‘What did you have for dinner,’ her mother will have asked. ‘Have you been out? Who did you see?’ Gina’s brother may have phoned to ask for money. Gina tells Veronica about these problems because there is nobody else amongst her friends whom she can tell. ‘Although Lewis is so good,’ she says wistfully, as if she would have liked to bring a wholesome family to her marriage, like a dowry.

  ‘Miles has arrived,’ says Lewis, as they sweep into the circular driveway. He makes Miles sound like a present, gift-wrapped and ready. But for whom is he a present? And if he is intended for Gina, why then is she here?

  ‘I’m out of control,’ Veronica tells herself, ‘my fantastic silly mind.’ She lives too much in the fabulous clues of history, her own and others. She remembers the first time she stood
in front of a class. ‘History’s not definite,’ she had said, in a tentative voice. ‘It’s not all dry facts and set in concrete. It’s more like a jigsaw puzzle or a mystery story, one piece leading to another. We can, each one of us, look at a landscape, or a character in history, or even a set of dates, and see something different from what anyone has seen before.’

  ‘Like smelling rats in a dunny,’ said a girl in the front row, a supercilious girl with a Roman nose and freckles.

  ‘Quite,’ Veronica had said, in her young earnest voice, not noticing the way laughter ran around the class, ‘the connections and clues are limitless.’ But she has built a career and a lifetime on smelling rats, without ever quite finding the source of the smell.

  Her place in this family is clear. She has become the aunt, as the children call her, to be dutifully tended. Lewis and Gina are kind.

  The idea of the ‘empty wilderness’ has taken hold of Gina. The Supremacist Movement, you know, the words tripping off her tongue. I am at one with the idea of the spirit’s journey into the unknown, she tells Miles, while he nods his head up and down and tugs at his beard. He is older than Veronica expected, older than any of them, if it comes to it, a big man with a barrel-shaped chest, soft grey hair neatly cut to collar length. He is dressed in a tan raw-silk jacket, a black shirt, his throat bare. A touch tropical for a night like this, but in the firelight he is a graceful energetic figure. He has robust interesting hands. Yet Veronica sees the way he guards himself, not giving too much of himself away.

  ‘To own a Kandinsky,’ Gina enthuses, ‘what more could there be to life?’

  At which, Miles frowns and sighs. ‘Art may be for the upwardly mobile, but it pains me to say, my dear Gina, that I think Kandinsky is out of even your reach. Or my gallery for that matter.’

  Gina flushes, as if caught out at child’s play. It’s been a while since Veronica last saw her. Her tawny hair is teased up with back-combing. Fine threads of gold nestle in her collar bones, veins throbbing like satin piping in her throat. When she smiles her upper lip rides a little too high behind her teeth, as if she is trying very hard at something.