The Best of Fiona Kidman's Short Stories

by Fiona Kidman

  ‘Not to own the picture in that way,’ she says. ‘You don’t understand. Just to be able to wake up and look at it. To think about the journey.’

  ‘The journey, oh yes,’ says Miles.

  ‘Surely there’s more to art than sales?’ Veronica says, defending Gina.

  But: ‘That’s not what he said,’ Gina responds, her voice sharp. She has put on music, The Penguin Café’s ‘Oscar Tango’, intense swollen music that makes Veronica’s head throb. Veronica has changed, something was called for, it was clear. She leans back, feeling more or less presentable in a grey sweater, more like a tunic, a slender black skirt, long Turkish silver earrings. All the same, she doesn’t feel at home in Gina and Miles’ company, more like a detached stranger trying to break into a group without any guidelines as to what will interest them.

  Lewis is absorbed in the children from the moment he enters the house. The girls are called Hilary and Aretha. They clutch his legs and demand rides on his back. On a command from her mother, five-year-old Hilary scurries away to bed, but Aretha, two years younger, won’t leave. She is still coiled around Lewis’s neck when Gina begins serving dinner.

  ‘She must go to bed. I’d already put them down for the night.’

  ‘Well there you go, darling child. Mummy says its time for bed. We’ll just have to take you along.’ Veronica sees how he is inflamed with love for these girls, all his coolness deserting him.

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ she offers. ‘I’ll say night night to Hilary.’

  From where she is perched on the edge of Hilary’s bed, she watches Lewis tuck Aretha in bed, putting her Raggedy Ann down beside her. Lewis would die if anything happened to these kids, she thinks, and shivers.

  ‘Say it Daddy, say it,’ says Aretha. ‘The thank you God song.’

  ‘For a lovely day,’ he murmurs, ‘and what was the other I had to say?’

  ‘Now I remember, it’s Go-od bless me,’ the girls sing along with Lewis.

  ‘Sometimes I worry,’ says Lewis, as they return to the dining room, ‘I think that I’ll be too old to be any use to them when they grow up and I won’t have long enough to find out what happens next in their lives. At other times I’m all selfishness, and grateful they didn’t come earlier. Whatever would we be doing with ourselves?’

  Veronica is about to say pretty much the same as all of us, as they open the door. But when she sees Gina and Miles standing side by side, she hesitates and says nothing, momentarily blocking Lewis’s entrance into the room. Miles holds a tureen of soup and Gina has been lifting a ladle from it. It is nothing, Veronica tells herself. A helpful domestic gesture. But their fingers touch.

  The meal is simple and to the point: light spinach soup, Basque chicken with a hint of chillies against the peppers and olives, hot French bread to mop up the sauce, a fresh green salad.

  While they are eating, the storm that has threatened all afternoon breaks. Lightning strikes and thunder rolls outside, torrential rain falls straight and flat like an Asian monsoon. The power goes out, and Gina and Lewis fetch more candles, Gina cursing that the chicken is cooling as they continue their meal in the flickering half dark. They take extra helpings of salad, although Veronica finds it a trifle bitter for her taste. So, it seems, does Lewis, who says so.

  ‘It’s got mustard leaves in it,’ says Gina, defending her territory.

  ‘A minimalist salad,’ says Miles.

  ‘Thank you, Miles.’

  ‘An intellectual salad,’ says Lewis gloomily. There is another flash of lightning, in which, for an instant, his face is bunched and old.

  The moment passes. Instead of art, they lapse into desultory conversation, telling stones about storms and catastrophes. Miles begins one about an old woman next door to his house (when he still had one, he said, when he was still a married man) who climbed an apple tree in the rain and disappeared. Like Jack climbing the beanstalk and out a hole in the sky.

  Their meal is ending with floating islands, oeufs à la neige. Almost too rich, Veronica notes, a touch of bravado, perhaps.

  ‘She got stuck in the tree?’ Gina asks, perplexed.

  ‘She dissolved in the rain?’ Veronica enters the spirit.

  ‘Fell out of the tree like a ripe apple. As it happened, she’d fallen on my side of the fence — under the hydrangea bush, there all the time.’

  ‘That’s horrible.’ Veronica shudders, even as Gina stifles laughter.

  ‘Myocardial arrest,’ says Lewis, his tone short. ‘I’m going to check that the girls haven’t woken up.’

  Gina is still laughing when Lewis leaves the room, her face flushed from the wine, her manner careless. She loves this man, Veronica sees, without surprise, observing Gina’s gaze resting on Miles. She knows the way Gina looks when she is falling in love; she has seen it before, helpless and wide-eyed, a flaring around the nostrils as if she is smelling incense, as she looked when Lewis had knelt at Morag’s side in the hairdresser’s salon. This cannot be, this terrible wounding of Lewis.

  Earlier, she had decided that her modest collection of art wasn’t worth discussing with Miles, but now she changes her mind.

  ‘I’m thinking about getting some new pictures,’ she says. ‘I’d love to look at your catalogues. Have you brought any with you?’

  ‘Of course,’ Miles says, switching his gaze away from Gina. Veronica sees that he understands what Gina has not, that their looks have been intercepted and translated.

  Gina is abrupt. ‘It’s getting late. Why don’t you two talk about it tomorrow?’

  ‘I’d love to.’

  ‘After we’ve brought you breakfast in bed. We like to spoil her,’ Gina tells Miles, as if Veronica needs cosseting.

  So Miles and Veronica spend Saturday looking at catalogues and transparencies, in between playing snakes and ladders with the children, waiting for the rain to clear. A drizzle persists, and it is very cold outside. Veronica looks with an appraising eye at Hoteres and Woollastons, an Albrecht, a Spencer Bower, which she hovers over, and a whole host of dazzling others, all artists whom Miles seems to have known in person, to hear him talk. She puts yellow stickers on pictures she would like to view. She finds one that interests her in particular, by an artist she has never heard of; an abstract that combines a strange heat with a sense of loss, a mysterious upward movement that suggests women dancing.

  ‘Influenced by the poem sequence Ginger Modern, when it was set to music.’

  Veronica draws a sharp breath.

  ‘You know it? A work of genius.’

  Gina is within earshot (she has made a point of not moving out of range all day). Veronica decides not to lie. ‘My husband wrote that. Former husband, that is.’

  ‘You were married to Colin?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He looks at her with new eyes. ‘I knew there was a traumatic divorce.’

  ‘Not really. Just a divorce.’

  ‘But it was. Colin never wrote like that again. I met him afterwards, after you. He told me about it. In the end he gave up. Well, I suppose you know all about that.’

  ‘It depends on whose version you’ve heard. Colin didn’t stop writing on account of me.’

  ‘How can you be sure of that?’

  ‘I’m not a hostage to Colin’s fortune. He stopped writing before we parted.’

  ‘What about Ginger Modern?’

  ‘It came out of a long silence. In fact, if you really want to know, he’d written it years before it was published. He found it in some old papers he was going to burn, and decided to chance it after all.’

  ‘So when the poems stopped you left?’

  ‘You make it sound very obvious.’

  ‘Why are you so fucking calm about this?’ Katie demanded of her mother, after the divorce. ‘Don’t you care?’

  Veronica doesn’t know. She blames herself for all manner of things; like Katie’s lovers who come and go, about the physical distance Sam puts between them, about her own condition of stasis. She is not sur
e how any of it has come about, that sudden walk, her refusal to look back. She knows that for most of the time she is content, a woman who has surrounded herself with small treasures and a workload that doesn’t leave time for reflection. It is only when she comes here that she is seized by an old restlessness, and wonders if she should stop coming.

  But, once or twice, she has flicked through old family photographs, Colin, Veronica and the children, in which she is startled to see herself, body turned slightly away from Colin, eyes looking outside the frame. That’s why history is history, she thinks, we don’t see what’s happening at the time.

  ‘Perhaps I’m being impertinent,’ Miles is saying, ‘but he mentioned a great love in his past.’

  ‘Oh love,’ she says, in much the same way that he had dismissed Gina’s spiritual journey.

  ‘I just assumed. A thousand apologies, Veronica.’

  ‘Accepted.’ She feels something closing around her, that old flannelly feeling, bats’ wings in her hair.

  ‘All the same, you liked that painting,’ he persists.

  ‘A coincidence. I’ll look at the rest later,’ she says, pushing away his catalogue and yawning. It’s not feigned, Veronica really does feel exhausted. Miles puts the catalogue to one side, vexed.

  ‘You two getting along all right?’ Lewis asks, in passing. He has Aretha on his shoulders and Hilary by the hand. The weather is clearing. ‘Who’s coming for a walk?’

  ‘All of us,’ says Gina, looking firmly at Miles and Veronica on the sofa.

  So they walk, all six of them, through the gathering evening light. The clouds are that dark amber and gold that often follow thunderstorms. The estuary stretches beside them as their boots make rough tracks in the grass. A group of black wading birds, white ruffles under their tails, are slipping the long orange straws of their beaks in and out of the water, as if sipping.

  Slipping and sipping. Colin would have liked that. For an instant, Veronica is wistful.

  Gina walks beside Miles, talking animatedly, as they slowly draw ahead. The others follow with the children, stumbling as they ford a swampy piece of marshland. The fingers of wind on their cheeks keep them moving. Lewis looks ahead at the two heads bent in conversation. He is not a stupid man, Veronica thinks, he will understand soon enough. She feels a rush of pity, or something more, for him.

  ‘We should catch the others up,’ she says.

  But by now Miles and Gina are far ahead, having reached a ridge where they stand silhouetted against the evening sky, their figures like dark puppets on the horizon.

  ‘I think the children have just about had enough,’ Lewis says. Hilary has been complaining to her father about water in her gumboots. ‘Will you tell Gina I’m turning back?’

  Gina is startled by Veronica’s appearance at her side. Miles is less surprised, as if he has been half expecting her to turn up.

  ‘I suppose I’ll have to go, too,’ Gina pouts, when Veronica explains about the children.

  ‘Perhaps Miles and I can walk on a bit further,’ Veronica ventures.

  Even Gina, in this lovelorn girlish way that has overtaken her, understands that for the moment enough is too much. She turns on her heel and stalks off across the paddock, calling to her family, then breaking into a run and scooping up Hilary to piggyback her, just as Lewis has Aretha on his back. They look like a perfect, laughing, happy family. Veronica feels her heart breaking. Perhaps they will escape this time, but there will be another and another, she supposes, now that Gina is no longer content.

  Miles pockets her hand, almost absent-mindedly, linking his fingers through hers before she can pull away. There is something comforting about the lacy intimacy of their fingers curled up there together … like dancing with the man who had danced with the woman who’d danced with a man …

  ‘You’re not as I might have expected you — had I ever anticipated meeting you,’ Miles remarks, as they walk on.

  ‘So, what would you have expected?’

  ‘Someone harder.’

  ‘Oh, I’m hard all right.’

  ‘No, you’re not. You like rescuing people. As long as it’s not yourself.’

  ‘That’s presumptuous. Some people shouldn’t have to be rescued.’

  ‘Ah, Gina. I was wondering when we would come to the lecture. One of the better school teachers, Colin said.’

  ‘I don’t want to hear any more of what Colin thinks of me.’

  ‘Faith is the leap you ask me to take into your darkness …’ he recites, changing tack.

  ‘Ginger Modern.’

  ‘Love, there is always a price …’

  ‘You know it then.’

  Of course I do. But he didn’t write it for you?’

  ‘You’re the one who understands the poem, aren’t you?’

  ‘So who did he write it for?’

  ‘Oh, who knows? I mean, poems are glorious fabrications, in much the same way of art.’ This trips off her tongue, sounding worldly and wise.

  ‘Or history?’

  She hesitates. ‘Does Lewis know that you know Colin?’

  ‘Colin’s never come up in the conversation. Should I tell him?’

  ‘Probably not.’

  ‘So where does Lewis fit in?’ he asks.

  ‘Nowhere. I just wondered.’

  Only she has said it first. Lewis. Lewis.

  ‘He was our oldest friend,’ she says stiffly. ‘He and I have always taken care of each other.’

  ‘I see.’

  And for a startled awful moment, Veronica realises that he does see, and so, at last, does she.

  ‘Everyone wants to look after Lewis, by the sound of it.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’ Her voice still rigid in her throat.

  ‘Gina once told me that she’d saved Lewis’s bacon. He’d been jilted. Well I expect you’d know that.’

  ‘Of course,’ she whispers.

  ‘He owes her, was the way she put it.’

  Gina. Even Gina knows what she has failed to see. Worse, Gina has always known everything there is to know. Had known what she was letting herself in for. Tough little Gina, coming out of nowhere, full of knowledge.

  He speaks to her kindly. ‘Probably a woman patient or something like that.’

  ‘Yes, something like that. I should go back.’ She is thinking, I’ll go home tonight. I’ll be ill. No, Katie will need me, someone will have to take me back.

  ‘I’d like to see you next time I’m in town,’ Miles is saying, while the cold air floods her hot face.

  ‘Perhaps,’ she says. ‘I don’t know.’

  They have come to a thicket of pine trees along the knoll, and without Veronica noticing, they have moved inside a canopy of branches.

  ‘Let me make love to you,’ Miles says, in a matter of fact way.

  ‘No,’ she says, frightened.

  ‘Don’t be alarmed. It mightn’t be as bad as you think.’ They stand close together, their breaths foggy in each other’s faces. She finds, without knowing how it got there, that Miles’s silky prick is lying in her hand.

  ‘Bad habit of mine,’ he murmurs, leaning to kiss her.

  ‘Stop, please stop.’ Her legs are trembling. She sees he has brought her here, certain of where he was going. He will have been here before with Gina, perhaps expected Veronica and Lewis to turn back together.

  ‘Take off your coat,’ he says against her ear, his fingers urgent at her buttons. Veronica feels herself already undone. She has been ambushed again. But an old hot remembered flame of desire is licking curiously between her legs. He’ll do, she thinks. Like sharing a changing ball.

  Undressing is a problem in the misty air, trousers that stick to her skin, knickers caught ungracefully round her ankles; he lowers her to the ground quickly so that her white thighs are not visible to him in the waning mauve light. They have done nothing, nothing at all, when he says there is something wrong, something not right. The smell, he says.

  Like rotting flesh. They’re not on
their own.

  This, they discover when they draw apart. A human arm lying close to them. Just one arm, not a whole body. Probably a man’s, judging by the hairiness and thick spatulate shape of the fingers. It’s impossible to tell how it comes to be there, or how it was detached from the rest of itself, if that is how a body might be described in its entirety, although Veronica thinks there is a hint of surgical gauze.

  As they restore their clothes, they rehearse this description for Lewis and Gina. They don’t know each other well enough to trust the other one with their lies. ‘We were walking under the pine trees,’ they will say. Why under the pine trees? And Gina will know, and won’t be able to say. Lewis will guess and will say, at least to Gina.

  All this, and more, is what is about to follow.

  Rats in the dunny.

  In the distance, the house stands alone, shimmering with light and the smoke of wood fire, like a comet’s tail. Veronica will stand outside the circle of light as Lewis and Gina, appalled, draw close to each other.

  Later, Gina will leave Lewis for a time; the children will be miserable, and she will go back to him. Lewis will buy a house in town so that she can have more life of her own; for a short time he will be seen at long lunches with another woman but it won’t be Veronica.

  Veronica thinks she will miss Lewis and Gina, but she doesn’t. At least, not much, after the initial pain of this latest separation (because the three of them, going on, doesn’t really make sense, all that stuff, as Katie would say, although they send cards at Christmas).

  She will have an affair in which she takes immense pleasure, with a man who is a little but not ridiculously younger than she is. His skin feels like China roses against hers, although it is dark. He has skinny ribs and a faint foreign smell when she puts her arms around him. It will be her son’s idea that the man, a visiting scientist at the university, should visit her. ‘Please make him at home while he’s over there,’ he writes.

  Well, Sam.

  She will decide, after all, that being on her own is what suits her best. Memory is a fine thing she will say to her friends when they ask her.