The Best of Fiona Kidman's Short Stories (41 page)

‘L
IFE IS BETTER THAN DEATH
. Well at least it is more alive,' Vree would say, and order a gin.

Vree had hair like nasturtiums. When Tess went out to meet her she'd be waiting for her somewhere in the street, always in a place where the light struck her amazing shock of hair. It stood out in a shining halo, and it was so full of electricity Tess could feel it bristling in the air between them when they went inside the pub and took off their coats.

Usually Vree would have her dog Malcolm X with her. He was as dark as a seal. He looked at her all the time with strong intelligent eyes, his body fretful. When she went into the pub he would sit outside and wait for her.

‘It's Vre-ee here,' she would say when she rang. She was one of those friends who you waited for to ring first, or she was at the beginning. Later, if you loved her, you had to call across spaces.

Over and again, that's as far as Tess gets, when she tries to write about Vree. She finds bits of paper torn off the ends of newspapers with notes she has written to herself. They say things like: ‘The resignation with which some women allow themselves to be killed.' Or: ‘Taking pills.' Or: ‘The freedom to be a feminist, e.g. Vree/early years ha ha.' Tess is a writer who has been planning to write Vree's story for a long time. Maybe it's a movie script, she thinks, but the producers all want stories about winners these days. The victim era is over, they say. She finds another shred of newsprint with ‘the pain of love' scribbled on the edge.

Tess met Vree at an anti-apartheid demonstration. It was difficult going out to demonstrate when the children were small. Her husband believed in most of the causes but he sometimes suspected the motives of those who got involved. ‘What difference will you make?' he asked, as he prepared to heat yet another tin of spaghetti. ‘Wouldn't it be more practical solidarity with
humanity to cook the dinner, which God knows I wouldn't mind getting if only I had the time, if only you would give me a few days' warning and I could arrange to come home early?'

The marchers assembled as the lights were coming on in the city. They had brought torches to carry in the dark. Everyone was issued with black armbands, as the order went out from the front to march in single file, in total silence; if the going got rough they were to fan straight out across the street, shoulder to shoulder. Vree and her husband walked up and down the line handing out leaflets with the armbands. It was clear they were leaders.

‘You're new, aren't you?' she said, stopping beside Tess. Tess was nonplussed by her appearance. She wore tailored slacks, a neat little paisley scarf tucked into a cashmere sweater, and, over that, an elegant dull-green cloth jacket that offset the colour of her hair. This was not her idea of how a revolutionary should look. She felt embarrassed by her own dowdy dressed-down style. Vree fixed her with glittering eyes and seemed about to say something more, when her husband appeared beside her. He was a big burly man with an educated voice. Vree moved on quickly; in her wake, Tess sensed a ripple of unease. The next day Vree rang and asked if she could visit.

‘You don't have to march,' she said, when she arrived.

‘There are heaps of things you can do to help, even if you are at home.'

She took Tess's children to the zoo and sang songs with them on the way home.

‘May and September,' said a woman called Una, who knew Vree. Vree's husband was twice his wife's age. Instead of children, because they couldn't have any, they had causes together. His money bought high profiles for issues. Nobody knew how much money he had. He didn't make the ten richest men in the country, or anything like that, but he had a lot. He had held the key to the locker room since he was born, so it didn't matter how he spent his money. What he did was eccentric rather than radical. He collected beautiful things, paintings, fine wines, Persian rugs. In their bedroom stood a two-metre-wide wooden opium smoking couch, inlaid with mother-of-pearl.

Una was his personnel manager, she hired and fired his staff. Nobody could miss her devotion to him. ‘I'm more his age, I understand him,' she said to Tess. Her grey hair was crisply cut, she wore mohair sweaters and new gold. Seen in the supermarket, choosing beans off the shelf, she didn't look like a serial wife, but she was. None of her husbands disturbed her constancy to Vree's husband. ‘He'd never been married before,' Una said. ‘She trapped him into it, you know.'

When she delivered boxes of mailout material to Tess, Una stood in the
doorway, smoking Ivory filter tips and delicately picking the tip of her tongue. Tess's job was to put circular letters in envelopes and post them. This was nothing to do with Una, who didn't believe in causes and always voted National. Delivering the boxes was just an extra she did for Vree's husband on her way home.

‘Vree's such a bitch,' she said, on her second visit. ‘D'you
know,
she gave me a vase for my birthday, and then told me to increase my insurance. So it was Moorcroft, so I know it was expensive.'

‘Vree's kind,' said Tess, bridling. ‘She sent me flowers for my birthday.'

‘Is that all?' said Una.

Una talked in clichés. Vree wore a huge square-cut emerald ring, like a character out of one of Joan Didion's novels. ‘Emeralds bring bad luck,' Una said. ‘You mark my words, that marriage is doomed.' Tess thought that Una might fancy the ring.

Shortly after this, there was a mix-up over the pamphlets. Una delivered a box that wasn't supposed to go out for another week, and the police got to hear of a demonstration they weren't meant to, and cancelled it.

Una appeared at Tess's house, looking anxious.

‘It was Vree's fault,' she said, ‘she told me to deliver them.'

Vree came round, white-faced and drawn. ‘I'm sure I didn't tell Una to deliver them,' she said, ‘but if she said I did, I must have. Una's always right.'

Vree's husband rang. ‘Who's responsible for this mess-up?' he asked.

‘Me, if that's easiest,' said Tess.

There was a pause. ‘I know my wife,' he said.

Tess didn't know what he knew, or thought he knew, about his wife.

The next time Vree came round, Tess asked her what was going on, although she didn't tell her what her husband had said. ‘Are you happy, or what?' she asked.

Vree was finishing off the children's soggy Weet-Bix at the bench,
CLEAN
ME
, she wrote on Tess's smudgy windowpane.

The abortion debate was at its height. Vree got involved with a group of doctors who were sending women over to Australia for abortions on day return trips. The women flew out to Sydney at six a.m. and got back at midnight. Women from up country had to be billeted overnight at both ends of their journey. Tess took in some women and let them stay at her house. Her children found it hard, strangers coming late at night and weeping in their beds, the bloody sheets.

‘It's unnatural,' said Una. ‘Just because she couldn't have children. She's punishing him.'

‘I thought it was him that couldn't have babies,' Tess said.

Una looked uneasy. ‘He pays the bills,' she said, and changed the subject.

By then, the children were both at school and Tess had gone to work in a newspaper office. She shared an office with a senior reporter who loathed feminists. Every morning, like a ritual incantation, he said: ‘There won't be any of that rubbish in the paper if I have anything to do with it.' Tess wrote articles which she liked to think were anarchical but she learned to be devious about her beliefs.

She was moving into some deep trouble in her life. One morning, as she was delivering copy to the editor, she met Vree's husband coming out the door. She had been crying all night.

‘What's the matter?' he said, barring her way.

Tess was embarrassed. ‘Nothing,' she said. He didn't move. ‘I keep
screaming
at my husband. I don't mean to start but when I do I can't stop.'

‘Is that all?'

‘It's enough.'

‘Yes, I suppose it is,' he said, running his hands through his thinning
flax-coloured
hair. His eyes appeared enlarged and misty behind the strong lenses of his glasses. ‘Would you like a holiday? I could pay for it.'

No. Thank you, but no,' Tess stammered.

‘You could go to the islands. Why don't you go to Bali for a week? It's no trouble.'

Tess began to cry again, unhinged by this sudden casual kindness. She refused, although she was tempted. She had pride, she told herself. Later, she thought he might see her as a cause. She has no idea whether he ever told Vree of his offer.

The debate, which had become a war, shifted to Parliament in the form of a bill to liberalise the abortion laws. Tess, Vree, and a dozen or so women from the overseas support group sat in the gallery late one night while the debate raged across the floor of the House. Later, with nothing resolved, they moved on to the office of a politician who supported them. Litre bottles of gin stood around the room. The group was left to camp out in the office while the politician resumed the debate. A quarrel broke out when an opposing member stormed into the office.

‘Get out,' said Vree, opening a passage through the women to where the man stood. He was an elderly jaunty man with a clipped moustache. It was nearly two o'clock in the morning.

‘You're a pack of dykes,' said the politician.

‘If it's a fight you want,' said Vree, ‘you've already got one. It's out there in
the House, out there in the streets, out where people know what men like you do to women.'

After he'd gone, amidst jeering and taunts, Vree filled everyone's glass again. Tess noticed that hers was full before she added the tonic.

At three o'clock Tess got in her car to drive home. She didn't know how she ended up where she did, because she couldn't remember anything of the dark streets, but when she drove out from Parliament grounds, she knows she must have turned left instead of right. As dawn broke, she found herself in the car with the engine running, but no lights on, at a beach twenty kilometres away, over a winding road. She knew how bad her trouble was, and that Vree's was even worse.

Vree saved her husband's life. They had a country house up north. One night, when they were on holiday, in the middle of a flood, he had a heart attack. Vree drove him through the night, across flooded rivers, to a hospital.

She stayed, for weeks, in the country town where she had taken him. She wrote to Tess from there: ‘It's hard for people to understand about us. I know they think he's a father substitute and it's true, I'm afraid of my life without him. He gives me space to do the things I want. I think I can change the world, which of course is silly, but at least I can try. It's hard to change the world without some money, as any politician will tell you, but you don't have to be corrupt in order to have money. I sit here in the hospital, and outside the trees are dark red and the air is cold and I know that there is the smell of snow around the mountains. It's there at nights when I walk the dog, and I watch him sleeping and know that I don't want to do these things alone. I don't know whether this is good feminist philosophy, but if we cannot find someone to love, what's the point, why do it, and for whom? When we get back to the city and he is recovered enough, there will be a bypass operation, and then we will both concentrate on more things for ourselves, which is perhaps what has been missing over the past few years. I swear my life is about to change.'

She sat at Tess's house the day of the bypass. The hours ticked past. Vree said she wouldn't drink, and Tess had already stopped — well, more or less because true conviction was a slow unfurling of the soul, she had decided, rather than the blinding light of reformation. Tess noticed how Vree's hands shook.

‘I'm having the light fittings changed,' Tess said, to pass the time. Vree had an excellent eye for decorating.

‘About time, I never cared for those,' Vree said.

‘I know, Una told me.'

‘Una? Jesus, Una, the cow. I never told her I didn't like your light fittings.'

‘Truly?'

‘No, I did not. I wouldn't tell Una anything.' Her face looked flat and bleak. ‘Una knows what I think, or what she thinks I think, and then she tells him. Or you. Or anyone who'll listen. Look, your light fittings are okay.'

‘I want to change them anyway,' Tess said. ‘Look, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to cause trouble.'

‘Do you think he'll die?' she asked, her hands restless in her lap.

‘No,' Tess said, and she didn't. Vree's husband was tough. He'd been a hunter and a shooter in his time. He still liked going for tramps on his own.

When the new university year began, Vree enrolled and started studying philosophy and English lit. Her brilliant hair grew down to her shoulders and she swapped linen slacks for jeans, just when Tess was doing the reverse. Neither of them had so much time for causes, although Tess's husband, lit with an unexpected fire, had discovered the passion of protest. Tess stayed home more often while he went to meetings.