The Best of Fiona Kidman's Short Stories (55 page)

‘She's there now?'

‘Won't budge. I took a taxi here.'

‘What actually seems to be the matter?' asked Lewis, in his professional voice. ‘What's happened to Morag?'

‘She says she's going to kill herself if somebody doesn't come. Her bloke's seeing someone else.'

‘Who's her husband seeing?' Lewis's voice is corrosive.

‘Oh, I wouldn't know. We're told not to ask things like that, y'know, just listen to the client, what they want to tell you, nothing more.'

‘I don't believe it,' Veronica said, ‘they've hardly been married five minutes. Oh, the pig,' she said lamely, when she saw Gina's contempt.

‘Perhaps you can't blame him, not really. Well, the way things are between them.'

‘What things?'

‘They don't do it. She's never done it. She's a virgin. Look, she says she can't go back to her flat on her own.'

‘I can't leave Katie,' Veronica said, perplexed.

‘Can you look after her?' Lewis asked Gina.

‘I've got my train to catch. I live in the Hutt.'

‘I can run you home later,' Lewis said.

But the problem was resolved by Colin's appearance, although he was dishevelled and wild-eyed.

‘Where are you all going?'

‘Out,' said Lewis, throwing him a look of contempt.

Colin's hands fluttered in odd uncertain little movements of assent, as he turned away.

‘It doesn't make sense,' Veronica said, in the car. ‘Have they tried, I wonder?'

‘She says she can't screw,' Gina said. She sat in front with Lewis where she had taken her place without deferring to Veronica.

Veronica was taken aback, not so much by the language but the image of violence that screwing Morag evoked. Wasn't desire what kept her and Colin going? Well she thought so, they'd done a great deal of what Gina referred to as ‘it' (well, how did one quantify the acts of love in a busy marriage?). But she was tired and pregnant and when she thought about love then, she felt as if she was walking through flannel. She could see that Morag might not be cut out for sex. She leaned her face against the cool glass of the car window and said nothing.

‘Pull a right, Lew,' said Gina.

Veronica cringed in the back seat. Lew. How embarrassing. Glancing sideways at him, Gina looked as if she was discovering the surface of the moon.

The woman who cut Veronicas hair paced up and down outside Fishtails, waiting for their arrival. The lights were turned off, except for a night light
over the door. Morag sat alone in a chair, looking straight ahead at her shadow in the mirror, as if there was someone on the other side.

Lewis rolled another chair over and sat down beside her. He spoke to her gently. ‘It's time to go home, Morag.'

Colin left these lines, like a message, on a sheet of paper propped against the coffee pot.

‘Isn't the rhyme a bit symmetrical?' Veronica asked, when he came up from his study.

‘I didn't write it.'

She hadn't supposed so.

‘A Persian poet. Eleventh century. It's straightforward though. Wouldn't you say it was straightforward, Vron?'

Veronica never did find out who Cam was seeing.

Perhaps she could ask him now. But she wouldn't.

Those blank light eyes.

When Lewis's latest BMW rolls peacefully down her driveway, Veronica is as pleased to see him as always. She doesn't chide him about his extravagance. It is such a pleasure just to have someone drive up on a Friday afternoon.

She kneels at the edge of the verandah nipping tiny spent heads from a patch of sea daisies, hoping to convey that she is not over eager, that she goes away for weekends in the country quite often. Sitting back on her heels, secateurs in hand, part of her is glad that Lewis knows so little of her movements; it makes her feel independent and slightly mysterious. Another part of her wishes that a man drove up and parked outside her house more often.

‘I suppose it's something I miss,' she muses aloud to her women friends. ‘It's an effort, though, meeting someone new and interesting.' She knows women who go to singles groups. ‘They're just not me,' she says. ‘I mean, look, I see all those hairy men's ears in the staffroom. Imagine, well, I can't help it, you see, but fancy getting one's nose caught in all that fuzz.' And she chuckles. She's turning into a character.

When she looks in the mirror, the possibilities are still reflected there, but they are getting clouded in an image of a woman who wears careless make-up
and chunky sweaters, and gives papers at in-service training days. ‘Kia ora tatou,' she says, ‘this afternoon I have a new reading list on the New Zealand Wars and the role of the missionaries.' Her best shoes are black courts and they pinch.

‘The house looks lovely,' Lewis says, bending down to kiss her cheek. How well preserved he looks. His wide shoulders taper down to a firm
waistline
, his grey hair is springy. There is something boyishly rumpled about Lewis, in spite of the deepening folds in his cheeks.

‘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 unawares.

‘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.'