My Father's Island

by Adam Dudding

  From the start, there was a network of interweaving links between the two families: Mick was especially fond of the youngest Dudding daughter, Anna; I trailed around like a puppy behind Sarah, three years old than me; my sister Natasha was best mates with Caz Delaney who was in the same year at school, and so on. But there was an especially close connection between Dad and Carol. When I asked Carol if I could visit her to talk about Dad, she said sure – but she suggested I bring Lois along too and we’d make a lunch of it. So here we all are.

  Carol is saying she and Dad would go for long walks together to Long Bay, usually with our dog Emma, sometimes with three-year-old me. They would talk about this and that, but especially about poetry. Carol had recently discovered the poetry of D. H. Lawrence, and she and Robin would stride the cliffs and shoreline discussing Lawrence’s fragmentary ‘pensées’ of the 1920s, in which he condemned bourgeoisie and wage-slavery and dark satanic mills – just the sort of thing that resonated for Carol as a brainy, left-wing Londoner with working-class roots. She especially liked Lawrence’s five-line poem ‘Immorality’, which she thought described the way people with depression treat those closest to them – people like her husband Mick, say, who’s periodically been visited by the black dog all his life. The poem in full goes:

  It is only immoral

  to be dead-alive

  sun-extinct

  and busy putting out the sun

  in other people.

  Carol is talking about all this when Mick, a quiet, thoughtful, sweet guy who was a printer for most of his working life, clears his throat and says, ‘Lois. Can I ask you a personal question?’

  ‘Uhuh,’ says Mum, through her quiche.

  ‘In 1974, did you ever think Robin and Carol were having an affair?’

  ‘No,’ says Mum.

  ‘You didn’t?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well I did,’ says Mick. ‘That was one of the reasons, raking through my memory, that I thought we’d better get out of New Zealand, because it was all going wrong.’

  ‘When?’ says Mum, which isn’t the question I’d have asked.

  ‘1974,’ says Mick. ‘When Carol and Robin were out together a lot.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Mum. ‘I knew they did.’

  Group conversations are especially difficult for Mum to follow – the cross-conversations turn to fog – and I’m not sure how well she’s keeping up, but I’m pretty sure she means she knew Carol and Robin spent a lot of time together, not that she knew about an affair. But now I’m confused too. I ask the obvious question.

  ‘So were you having an affair?’ I ask Carol.

  ‘No,’ says Carol. ‘But it was a bit like an affair. There was a very strong bond, and there was a lot of attraction. Maybe in a different time and place you might, but we were part of a network, with all the children and so on. We didn’t have an affair.’

  I ask Mick: ‘If you were so worried, did you ask Carol about it directly?’

  ‘No,’ says Mick.

  ‘Oh you did,’ Carol corrects him. ‘On the plane when we left. You asked me on the plane.’

  Carol was hardly the only woman to develop this kind of more-than-just-friends relationship with Dad. Some of them were there in the letters I saw in the Turnbull.

  ‘I like you & love you and need you,’ wrote one Islands contributor who used to visit Sealy Road quite a bit. ‘I am married, you are married, you can relate to me just fine on those terms, and it is my feelings which screw up, at least, a friendship.’

  Another writer fretted: ‘If I stopped to think about it, I’d never come near you again,’ and added, in a postscript: ‘I’m sleeping with gurus when it’s offered.’ (I’m not sure if this was a coy invitation, or a factual update about some other guru or gurus she had encountered.)

  Another woman, a family friend for a time, wrote a touch wistfully, ‘Dearest Robin, Since you left [. . .] it became clearer how much you meant to me . . .’ Yet another woman wrote: ‘In some strange way I still look to you for approval of the things I do and am. Is that healthy?’

  Both Mum and my older sisters say it was always obvious to them that Dad was very keen, flirtatious even, with Wendy Galvin, the helpful (and beautiful) neighbouring mum who saved the day with rides to Playcentre and dropped-off casseroles. ‘Though,’ says Mum, ‘I don’t think he would have taken her to bed or anything.’

  As with the Delaneys, the Galvin and Dudding families were interwoven. Our girls babysat their kids. Dinners and favours were exchanged. Before I started school I was best friends with the oldest son, Jeremy, a reckless, exciting kid who taught me how to ride a bike and led me on Red Indian-style sorties through the bush where we’d break branches, try to start a fire, or leave a poo amid the leaf litter. Jeremy’s dad had a car that didn’t break down and a job that wasn’t conducted from a shed in his garden, and their house had unusual things: carpet, indoor toilets, central heating, a TV that Jeremy and I would lie in front of, feet waggling, to watch Batman and The Six Million Dollar Man.

  But, just as with the Dudding–Delaney friendship, there was an especially strong connection between our Dad and their Mum. Wendy, 10 years Dad’s junior, would come over and she and he would talk for ages in his office. Dad would drop in for a coffee at her place as he walked to the Torbay dairy for his 10 Pall Mall plain. When Wendy struggled to cope after the birth of her third child, Dad would bring the weeks-old baby back to our house for emergency feeds of mashed banana and yoghurt.

  The Galvins moved away from Torbay in the mid-70s and the families lost touch, but I find Wendy in the phone book. When we meet she says she remembers the kindness of Lois and Robin and their support as she struggled, never an earth mother, with being stuck at home with young kids. She remembers her middle-class amazement at Lois’s uncomplaining acceptance of the Sealy Road clutter and poverty, and the shitty little kitchen. When I ask if there’d been anything more to her relationship with Dad than standard neighbourly amity, she said no. But she also said she’d never noticed Dad was smitten with her, so I’m not quite sure what to make of that.

  Anyway, after Carol and Mick Delaney and their four children escaped back to England the families kept in touch with exchanges of letters and photos, and Dad and Carol maintained a separate, more personal correspondence for a couple of years.

  Looking at it now, says Carol, she can see what happened between Dad and her (and presumably between Dad and other women) as a kind of emotional infidelity. She recalls Robin saying to her at the time that Lois had told him she felt a bit envious of the pleasure he was clearly getting out of this thing he had with Carol, whatever it was.

  Mum nods.

  ‘That was typical Lois,’ says Carol. ‘She put her finger on it.’ But in those days, ‘having an affair meant having a sexual relationship, so if you didn’t have a sexual relationship you hadn’t had an affair’.

  We work away at the last of the quiche, and Carol and I speculate about what Dad might have thought he was doing. Carol wonders if Robin had some sort of emotional need that meant he felt he couldn’t afford to expose himself to Lois.

  I say that as long as he was able to get away with it, it was probably rather pleasant being a serial non-adulterer: he’d have got that fluttery feeling of first attraction and the establishment of something that’s deeper than just flirting, but still bypassed the messiness of an ‘affair’.

  ‘Hmm,’ says Carol. ‘All the build-up but none of the repercussions. I could do with one of those.’

  ‘Talking about affairs,’ says Mick. ‘I don’t think people have affairs any more, do they? They just fuck.’

  Mum laughs.

  Perhaps this conversation should be awkward, but it really isn’t. It’s just three old friends, average age 79, plus the 44-year-old son of one of them, talking about a fourth old friend who’s not there, and sifting through the embers, or ashes really, of long-ago loves and longings.

  Mick talks about the relative promiscuity of different bra
nches of his family tree (the Cockney lot were always ‘carrying on’ but the Irish Catholics on the other side never did), and Carol talks about her southeast London childhood, when her neighbours would head south to Kent for the summer hop-picking season – dahn ’opping – during which everyone lived in huts, turned brown as a berry in the sun, and the natural matrimonial laws were out the window for the duration. But eventually we return to Dad and his women.

  ‘I suppose,’ says Mum, ‘that most wives wouldn’t have stood for it.’

  ‘I think that with Lois it was confidence,’ says Carol. ‘She knew Robin would never leave and what did it matter anyway, because she’d rather go and read her book than get wound up about something that wasn’t worth it. She’s a very secure woman.’

  Perhaps, I suggest to Mum (in another of those complicated leading questions that make me worry I’m just putting words in her mouth but without which we’d never get anywhere), you did find these close friendships Dad had with other women uncomfortable or galling, but you thought it would be narrow-minded or old-fashioned for you to complain about them, whereas a more conventional woman who listened more to her gut than her brain would simply have known she didn’t like it and ordered him to knock it off.

  ‘Yes,’ says Mum (which I hope means she agrees with the entire sentence). ‘But some were stronger than others. Some friendships I didn’t like so much. This particular girl I wasn’t sure.’

  I say: ‘Do you mean the actual affair? The one in Christchurch?’

  ‘Yes. But he got over it. It was not very long. It was before Anna was born.’

  Mick speaks up again. ‘Lois, I think you should prepare yourself for the disclosure that you were married to a serial womaniser.’

  We all laugh, Mum loudest.

  ‘You might have some more children somewhere,’ says Carol. ‘He liked begatting. That was one of his favourite things.’

  As fascinating as it would be, I’m neither hoping nor expecting to uncover a long-lost half-sibling. A string of mistresses seems unlikely too, and I’m not quite up to the task of asking every woman Dad knew if there was anything dodgy about their friendship. But I need to know more about this Christchurch affair Mum has already told me about.

  It was February when Mum first mentioned it. By the time we eat quiche with the Delaneys, it’s April. I then put off hunting in earnest for the woman until July, and it’s surprisingly slow going – I can’t find her in the phone book or the electoral roll or on Facebook or in any of the other obvious places. Each time I hit a dead end I feel a mix of relief and irritation. I still feel uneasy about the entire sheet-sniffing, peeping-Tom exercise, but I also know I need to keep going till I find her.

  I feel slightly less grubby when a friend points out that this is sometimes what happens when you write a book about a parent. Apparently when the Wellington academic Tim Beaglehole began researching a biography of his father J. C. Beaglehole in the 1990s he uncovered his father’s long affair with a colleague and was so shocked he considered abandoning the biography. In the end he wrote it, including details of the affair, and pre-emptively defended himself in the introduction by noting that even such top-notch biographers as James Boswell and Lytton Strachey had understood the importance of scuttlebutt to a personal portrait. If it’s good enough for Tim, James and Lytton, it’s good enough for me.

  Once I find the woman it’s easy to see why it has taken so long. Since 1967 she’s divorced, remarried and divorced, changed her surname three times and her first name once, left New Zealand, started a new professional career in middle age, retired and returned to a different New Zealand city. By early August I finally have her contact details and I email her to set up a phone interview. Her name is Kate.* She was the daughter of Dinny Donovan, the Caxton boss who sacked Dad in 1972 – which perhaps explains the rumour connecting the sacking to an affair.

  When I call Kate I’m too chicken to ask at the outset about an affair, but there are plenty of other things to talk about and we get there eventually. Kate’s in her early 70s – about a decade younger than Dad would be now. She’s clever and chatty, with a spiky, wicked wit. She remembers Dad, and Mum, and the rest of the family, with great fondness. She’s full of opinions worth hearing. We’re on the phone for an hour and a half.

  They met almost as soon as the Duddings got to Christchurch in 1967. Brasch rounded up the literary set for a lunch to welcome the new Landfall editor, and Kate was there with her husband, a Caxton employee.

  Kate noticed Robin. He wasn’t handsome, and he had slightly unfortunate hair that didn’t lie properly, and he didn’t make a show of himself, but he was somehow still good-looking and had a quiet confidence of the sort you might overlook. They were in the same car on the way to lunch, Kate in front, Robin in the back, and it was most peculiar how she could feel his presence.

  They hit it off. After lunch they were somehow the only ones left, stranded without transport, and Kate remembers the pair of them running drunkenly across paddocks to get to another bar where they figured they’d find someone who could give them a lift home.

  She had young children and a marriage on the brink of disintegration. She came out to Barnes Road often, sometimes with the kids, but also alone. She got involved in the production of Landfall and would stay late into the evening in Dad’s study, where the pair of them would talk about books and words, and proofread the next edition together, while Lois popped in occasionally with cups of coffee and pieces of toast to keep them going. Lois was sturdy and calm and carried on, and who knows what she thought about the two of them secluded in there for hours on end. Kate was an occasional artist, too; she designed one of the Landfall covers – a hippyish, swirling pattern of buds and petal with a slightly sexual, Georgia O’Keeffe-ish look.

  Kate felt Robin was one of the first people – the first man, certainly – to take her seriously. So many men she knew, people like her father, Dinny, couldn’t imagine how you could be friends with a woman. Women were for the kitchen or the bed and nowhere in between, but Robin saw Kate fully.

  ‘I think Robin sought and needed a female acolyte, a sounding board. We loved some of the same things about books and words. I can remember Robin saying some words and mouthing them, like they were dainty titbits you could eat. He loved the sound of words running together and how they fitted. The poems would come in, and you could tell by the way Robin read them out whether he approved of how the words were strung together or not.’

  Family friends. A special bond between Robin and the mother of the other family. Intense conversations about poetry and words. Stoic Lois hanging about the sidelines and not making a fuss. It’s as if every couple of years Dad, Mum and an ever-changing Other Woman would pick up the same three-hander script for a read-through.

  The obvious question then, again: Was there an affair?

  ‘Well . . .’ says Kate, and then gives so many different answers to the question it takes me a while to decide what they add up to.

  ‘We certainly had an emotional and mental affair, if you like, but if you remember, both Adam and Anna were born during the same period, so I wasn’t the beneficiary. Besides, I was a dim sort of girl and was frightened to some extent of what my husband would do.

  ‘I loved Robin, but I don’t think we had an affair. I don’t think you could say that, though we were both very fond of each other. But a love affair? Nooooo.

  ‘Perhaps,’ she says, laughing, ‘we gave it a try but it never worked.’

  There were occasions when she and Robin went out together, and one of the horrid things about that era, she says, was that ‘people thought if a man and a woman are getting on well and being friendly they must be having sex’.

  I get that. But the person who’d told me there was an affair wasn’t a 1960s Cantabrian prude; it was my mother – broadminded, non-judgemental Lois – and she’d told me only because I asked. These two versions don’t tally.

  ‘Lois must have been fully aware that we were fond of each othe
r,’ says Kate. ‘But that fondness had far more strings, if you like, than sex. And when you say somebody’s had an affair it means they’re having sexual thrashings about, and it wasn’t like that at all.

  ‘I was very fond of Robin – to me he was the father figure I hadn’t had, an older-brother figure I’d never had, an appreciative man I’d never known. He was all of those things to me – of course I was fond of him. Of course I loved him. But not in that way.’

  Kate says the relationship, whatever it was, eventually cooled off. She divorced, remarried, and moved to the other side of Christchurch, after which the two families saw less of each other. Lois and Robin produced children numbers five and six. Life went on.

  The falling-out at Caxton that saw her father fire Robin was even later still, and she really doesn’t think an affair, real or perceived, was a factor. Certainly, none of the many letters written during the Dudding–Donovan stoush contains even a whisper about any impropriety (though arguably it’s not the sort of thing anyone would have put in writing).

  Kate tells me a bit more about her memories of Dad, about Dinny and the Caxton Press, about the horrors of narrow-minded 1960s Christchurch, and about how she learnt of Dad’s death only by reading about it in the Listener. I tell her it was emphysema and she agrees he smoked like a trouper. She inquires after all my sisters and asks me to pass on a hug to Mum – ‘I would have hated to have hurt Lois’. She says she can hear a bit of Dad’s voice in mine, and she recommends Martin Amis’s Experience if I want to read a good memoir about a father. She says there’s a spare room at her house if my family’s ever in town. We hang up. I can see why Dad found her good company.

  A few days later I tell Mum that Kate sends her regards, and that she’s told me there wasn’t an affair as such. Mum shrugs and smiles.

  ‘That’s not what Robin told me.’

  Dad never lost his enthusiasm for literate, attractive young female acolytes, but as he got older and the women he took an interest in stayed much the same age, I suspect their mutual perceptions of what was going on started to part company.