Astrid and Veronika (13 page)

Astrid said nothing, but Veronika could hear her take a deep breath. Veronika sat up and let her feet drop to the floor. She looked at her watch and saw that it was midday, almost noon. She heard Astrid stir behind her, and she stood up to give the old woman room to sit. But she remained lying, turned onto her back.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I think that might be just the right thing for us to do.’

She didn’t move as Veronika quietly slipped out of the room.

 

When Veronika returned in the afternoon, she found Astrid sitting on the bench on the porch. She had changed into a white shirt and there was a navy blue woollen cardigan on her lap. Her hair was wet and combed back. Veronika looked at her and thought the old woman was carrying herself differently. There was a subtle change in the angle of her chin, her posture. Resolve, she thought. Dignity. And perhaps relief.

They walked slowly down the hill. The rain had stopped, but it was humid and the sky was overcast. The rain had brought out the smells of the grass and clover. Veronika hooked her arm and invited Astrid to put her arm inside, which she did. As their steps found a common rhythm, the old woman leaned lightly on Veronika’s arm.

The open grassy space by the river, beyond the church, was crowded with people, many dressed in the colourful traditional village costume. The women’s red skirts swirled and there was a sense of happy anticipation and festivity, even excitement, as the boats approached and faint music could be heard. Four large rowing boats were coming down the river in procession, each with a fiddler accompanying the rowing. Veronika and Astrid stood a little to the side, watching in silence as the boats landed and the crews joined the people gathered on the riverbank and made their way up to where the maypole lay, dressed with birch branches and wild flowers. The fiddlers joined the other musicians who stood ready, and as a team of men started to raise the pole, the fiddlers tuned their instruments. To Veronika it looked like an ancient ritual — heathen, almost. The music was traditional, a little melancholy, yet lively and danceable. And as soon as the pole was upright and secured, adults and children gathered around it, holding hands, and the dancing began.

Astrid stood holding her cardigan with both hands, her eyes on the people moving around the pole in the traditional midsummer songs and dances. She turned to look at Veronika, gave a little nod and a faint smile. She slipped her arm through Veronika’s again and they stood together, watching.

After a while Veronika said, ‘Let’s go and sit over by the river. We can still hear the music and we can see the water.’ She had felt the pressure of the old woman’s arm on her own grow slowly heavier. As they sat down on the grass, the first rays of the late afternoon sun darted through the opening clouds. Astrid held Veronika’s hand while she sat, but seemed comfortable as soon as she had stretched her legs in front of her, down the sloping bank. Veronika gathered her skirt around her legs, already encircled by mosquitoes. She was fanning the air in a feeble attempt at discouraging the insects when Astrid patted her arm.

‘Here, have some,’ the old woman said, holding out a bottle of roll-on mosquito repellent. ‘Midsummer time, never leave home without it,’ she said with a little smile. Veronika gratefully applied repellent to her legs, arms and neck.

‘We must pick the seven flowers on the way back,’ Veronika said. ‘Can you remember them from the song?’ She looked at Astrid, who looked back with an amused smile.

‘Oh, forget-me-not, and timothy grass. And bluebells. Violets?’ Astrid paused.

‘Yes, and red clover,’ Veronika added. ‘Cotton-grass. And one more, the one that I can never remember the name of.’

‘Yarrow,’ said Astrid. ‘I read about yarrow many years ago. That the Chinese used the stalks for divination. So I think it is appropriate for your midsummer posy.’

Veronika looked at her with surprise, but Astrid had her eyes on the river, where the late sun now played, sending bright reflections in all directions.

‘And who will you dream of, Veronika?’ Astrid said, without taking her eyes off the water. ‘With the flowers under your pillow. Who?’

Veronika didn’t answer. She sat with her legs pulled up and her arms clasped around them, her chin resting on her knees.

‘I came here to escape my dreams,’ she said eventually.

But I still dream about the sea. My enemy. I dream about my enemy, not my love. I dream about the infinite expanse shimmering in all shades of blue and green, from blackest navy over unfathomable depths, to bright emerald where the land below comes closer to the surface.

It lay below me as the plane began its descent over New Zealand and it seemed to last for ever. If I blinked I could have missed the tiny sliver of land just risen from the depths. New Zealand. Aotearoa. But I didn’t blink; my eyes were wide open. I felt blank, newly awakened and washed clean, like the windblown land below. I had taken a step off a cliff, not knowing where and how I would land. I pressed my forehead against the window as the plane descended and the land drew closer.

It was early morning and the airport processing was swift. I walked through customs, pushing my luggage trolley, my eyes scanning the wall of faces of the crowd waiting on the other side. But it was he who found me. I felt his hands on my shoulders before I saw him. Then he turned me to face him and held me, and we stood still, an island in the stream of travellers passing by, until an Asian man behind us discreetly asked us to move aside. I looked at James, took in his entire presence: the faded baseball cap over hair that seemed longer and curlier than before, the worn white T-shirt, scruffy shorts, his tanned feet in rubber jandals. His face, where my eyes searched every detail, touching the skin, following the eyebrows, the contours of his lips. Comparing with the stored images. And it all returned to me. Starting as the smallest stirring somewhere deep inside my body, a warmth that spread and reached my limbs, my fingertips, then my lips. My smile felt like laughter.

We walked out into the intense brightness. Thin white clouds stretched across an infinite sky and a fresh wind pushed us along.

We drove towards Auckland. I looked at the passing landscape without registering details. James talked and his left hand pointed out the window, returning to my right knee between each swift movement. I looked at his profile, his hand on the steering wheel, his bare feet on the floor. He looked so perfectly at home, at one with his clothes, his car, the landscape. I realised he was home. And suddenly I became acutely aware of being shrouded in the old world. Out of place, with my winter pale skin, my heavy dark clothes. My body even smelled wrong. Old, tired and out of place in this intensely bright, newly created world where a fresh wind blew and the air had no smell.

We went straight to his mother’s house in St Mary’s Bay. As we stopped, I looked at the house. A white wooden villa, one of many similar along the quiet street. It looked quaint, like something out of a storybook, but larger than I had imagined. ‘My mother lives in a small house in central Auckland,’ he had said. I didn’t think this looked like a small house, with its large bay windows either side of the front door and a wide veranda running along the entire front and continuing around the corner to the right. White roses spilled over the picket fence and there was a large tree with bright red clusters of round flowers, cheerful, like pompoms bouncing playfully in the wind.

His mother came out the front door as we were unloading my luggage from the boot. She stayed on the top step, her arms down her front, hands clasped. She was small, slim, casually but smartly dressed in white linen trousers and a beige top. Barefoot. Her fair hair was tied back. As I walked up the steps, my eyes searched her face for a likeness to her son. She had large grey eyes, no make-up, a rather long nose, a wide mouth with full lips. I could see no resemblance. She returned my gaze, equally focused, but there was a hint of a smile, potentially even laughter at the corners of her mouth.

‘Veronika,’ she said, as if deliberately forming the syllables. ‘Ve-ro-ni-ka. Welcome to New Zealand. I am Erica.’ She embraced me, a soft and swift act, like the touch of a breath of wind. She left her arm on my back, but it was the idea of a soft push rather than the actual physical touch of the arm that guided me through the front door.

We walked through the house and out onto the back porch. The rooms looked like the woman who lived in them — light, airy and attractive. Pleasant, but also private. Not particularly inviting.

James had his room in a sleepout at the bottom of the back garden. He walked ahead of me through the grass, carrying my two suitcases. I looked at his back, let my eyes run along his legs, his arms, his hands. He looked different. Or perhaps just more at home — more genuinely himself. It seemed as if each step he took landed on a spot perfectly fitted for it. I followed, my leather boots trampling the grass insensitively. Inside, I sat down on the low double bed, suddenly tired, even a little sad. He dropped the suitcases, put his hands on his hips and looked at me.

‘Tired?’

I nodded.

‘Can you manage in the shower, or do you need me to help you?’ he said, smiling. ‘Hm, I sense that some assistance is required here,’ when I didn’t answer. Then he threw himself on the bed beside me and started to unbutton my blouse.

We stayed with Erica almost a month. James had found temporary work at the city’s underwater aquarium over the summer, with a possible permanent position after that. Although not quite the dream job he was hoping for, it paid the bills. I started to think about my book, writing small patches, while the single cell of the basic idea slowly began to divide and take form and shape.

Erica was away for days at a time, visiting friends at their summer baches and making excursions, so we often had the entire house to ourselves. I spent leisurely hours in the shade on the back porch with Erica’s old ginger cat, and in the late afternoon I would walk to the shops to get something for us to eat. Often we ate out, usually at one of the cafés on Ponsonby Road. I had adjusted to the comfort and space, the unhurried, generous atmosphere, and streets with little traffic. It still intrigued me to hear the locals complain about traffic congestion. It seemed to me the embryo of a city, a potential more than a reality. I looked down at the city below, where the Sky Tower stood like a flagpole marking the spot of the centre of a future major city.

After dinner we would come back to the quiet house and sit in the wicker chairs looking out over the garden, while the setting sun painted the city below spectacularly pink, gold and orange, then purple, mauve, until the intensely dark blue of the night took over. We would make love on the old bed in James’s room with the folding doors open on to the garden. And it was just as before.

‘I was born into the sea; it has surrounded me all my life,’ James said. He lay naked on the bed and the cicadas played noisily in the garden. ‘To me, the sea is life itself. The colours, the smell. I crave it.’ He raised himself onto his elbows. ‘Imagine a high wave, a pale emerald green wall, with a school of kahawai chasing smaller fish. The most beautiful picture in the world.’ He stretched out his hand and pulled me down on top of him. He held my face in his hands and looked into my eyes. ‘I want you to get to know each other. Learn to love each other.’

The next day he took me to Piha to watch him surf. There are pictures of the New Zealand west coast beaches. They feature in books and films. You can read about the dangers, the unpredictable undercurrents, lethal rips underneath a deceptively calm surface. The force of the surf. But nothing had prepared me properly.

We walked from the car, carrying our mats, the picnic basket and James’s surfboard. The vastness was deafening. There were no boundaries, no ends. The beach stretched for ever, dotted only with the odd speck of a visitor. Seagulls hovered in the sky but they never drew close. The scorching light illuminated everything. The sea was everywhere. I walked into the water to my knees, feeling the frightening force of the sea tugging at my ankles, pushing, pulling, ripping. Clawing. James laughed and I could see his mouth move, but the ever-present, never-ceasing thunder of the waves drowned his voice. He pulled at my arms, splashed water at me, laughed and frolicked, while I stood paralysed, feeling the sand being ripped from under my feet.

Afterwards, I sat on my mat, a book on my lap. But my eyes were on James. Even when I took my eyes off the blinding whiteness of the surf and set them on the pages of my book, his image remained. He was out there, a small black shape on a white board, and the image was ingrained on the inside of my eyelids. Dipping between the waves, disappearing for minutes that felt like small eternities. The cluster of swimmers kept between the flags, but the surfers drifted off to the right. When finally he returned, dripping with water and laughter, I felt my hands finally release their grip on the book, stiff and sore.

January was hot and sunny and we spent most weekends on the beach. But it never got any easier. The sea became my enemy. We were fighting over the same man.

In February we moved into a rented house just a few streets away. Erica never questioned the decision and gave no hint of whether she was disappointed or pleased. Still, it was with a sense of guilt that I realised how relieved I felt once we were in our own home. It was a typical old Ponsonby cottage: a lounge, a bedroom and a study. A small neglected back garden with a lemon tree. The back porch gave a glimpse of the sea if we stood and craned our necks.

On our first evening in the house we sat on the floor of the porch, smoking and drinking beer. We had worked hard all day and it had been hot. I felt deliciously tired — physically exhausted, yet mentally alert. And so very happy.