The Best of Fiona Kidman's Short Stories (56 page)

‘I could just give you the money.'

‘How much?'

Veronica emptied her shoulder bag into her lap, counting notes and loose change, fifty dollars in all.

They had circled the town, back to the point where they picked her up. ‘Have a nice night,' one of them said.

‘See you,' she said. The street was as empty as ten minutes before. She leaned against the window of the carpet shop, overwhelmed with such sadness
and so great a sense of abandonment she thought she would never recover.

A part of her is ashamed, even now. She is ashamed that she did nothing. The next woman might not have been so fortunate, not so able to deal with unruly young men, she might not have liked dogs.

But when she got back to the motel, Colin looked up from his journal, his face furious. ‘You're early,' he said.

‘Something happened.'

‘Oh yes.'

She picked up the shiny motel kettle, intending to make tea. ‘D'you want to hear?'

‘Christ, Veronica, why d'you always interrupt? Just when I'm getting going?'

When she didn't answer, he said: ‘Well, what was it then?'

‘Nothing.'

In the morning she said she was going home. She said they should stop living together, there didn't seem any point. In her ashamed heart lurked gratitude. Freedom seemed to have come cheap at the price.

Secrets. Veronica has one of her own.

Even now, she wakes early in the morning and checks locks she knows perfectly well she had secured the night before; in a bookshop one night she hears a young poet reading (for she discovers that love of poetry is not
necessarily
forsaken along with the poet): ‘she leaves her fingers in the locks' the poet said, it's a phrase that haunts her. It is as if the poem has been written for her. I don't want to be caught unawares, she says … I don't take risks.

Although she tells no one about her experience, it is one of those full stops in her history. A moment she can refer to in all that collection of years that is her life.

When she told Lewis about the separation he laid the palms of his hands flat down on his desk — she had gone to his rooms to tell him — tears leaking along his nose and into the corner of his mouth. Veronica didn't actually leave Colin, he was the one who moved out. She could have the lot, her middle-class dump. He was lucky to be out of it.

This is not exactly what he said to Lewis, sitting in the back bar at De Brett's.

‘She needs counselling,' he said.

‘Not Veronica,' said Lewis.

‘What about those poems I dedicated to her?' Colin asked.

‘Disown them.'

‘Are we still friends?'

‘You've got a nerve,' Lewis said. Or this is the version he told Veronica.

Veronica marvels that Lewis chose her over Colin.

By then Lewis had married Gina, years before all of this happened.

Veronica leans back against the ivory leather of the car's upholstery, the
dashboard
panel twinkling before her, as they join the traffic flow stretching north. The silence between them is not a great way to start the weekend, their usual easy rapport absent.

‘He was my friend, too,' Lewis says, by way of an ice-breaker.

‘I know, I know,' Veronica says, because something has to be said. They have started this conversation several times over the years but it never goes anywhere. Really, what Lewis means, they both mean, is: once we both loved Colin. Only he didn't live up to our expectations. Which seems callous. As if they are betraying themselves and their own finer feelings.

‘I don't think Miles is gay,' Lewis says, as they wait at the roundabout for the traffic to clear.

‘Miles? Oh, the house guest.'

‘Gina's friend.' His voice a trifle heavy.

‘I wouldn't mind turning over some of my pictures,' Veronica says, glad of the opportunity to steer the conversation in a different direction. ‘Perhaps I could talk to this art dealer.'

‘I like your pictures the way they are. Oh, this damn' traffic.' His fingers drum on the steering wheel. ‘Gina will be waiting for us.'

After her marriage, Gina's defiant self-confidence seemed to ebb. ‘It's lonely being a doctor's wife,' she would complain, her voice puzzled and uncertain.

Lewis would be at his wit's end. ‘For God's sake, talk to her will you, Veronica?'

‘There's so much responsibility,' Gina would complain. ‘This woman says she's dying of a carbuncle, the pain's so bad, do you think she'll die?' ‘Oh Veronica, I can't stand how people are in pain, but I don't know whether to call Lewis or not. What's a real emergency?' ‘Veronica, we went out to dinner the other night. I'm sure his friends are laughing at me, all those wives that doctors find in Fendalton and Khandallah. It's because I'm from Upper Hutt.' ‘Veronica, they think I'm too young for him.'

There were times when Veronica thought Gina might leave Lewis because of all this. She would talk with patience and sympathy to Gina. Like Morag, whom Gina had rescued all those years ago, Gina loved children and didn't have any. There is a difference though. Lewis and Gina's
marriage was not without heat. But it meandered on and on for years, filled with Lewis's exhausting compassion for his patients, his collection of treasures and their annual travel: Italy (Tuscany, of course), France (all one summer in Aries), the Lake District. Gina had absorbed a certain knowledge about music and art and food; indeed, her experiences are broader than Veronicas, although she, too, can afford to travel these days, and sometimes does.

And now Gina has the girls and Lewis is not on call so often, his practice expanded to include other, younger, doctors. At forty, when the subject of children had been dropped, as an embarrassing faux pas in their presence, Gina had become pregnant. Her life is full in the way Veronicas used to be. The skinny blonde blade of a girl has been replaced by one of those intense older mothers.

She will be waiting for them beside the quiet estuary of the sea where she and Lewis live. There will be pied stilts and shags stalking, high arched, through the grey skein of water that Gina looks out upon at evening; a row of boat sheds, the blue trickle of hilltops on the horizon. A lifestyle property. The two little girls will be reading books in the glowing gold-and-blue room that opens off the kitchen, the table set
for dinner, a bottle of wine standing open. During the day, Gina will have taken two or three calls from her mother who lives in a rest home. ‘What did you have for dinner,' her mother will have asked. ‘Have you been out? Who did you see?' Gina's brother may have phoned to ask for money. Gina tells Veronica about these problems because there is nobody else amongst her friends whom she can tell. ‘Although Lewis is so good,' she says wistfully, as if she would have liked to bring a wholesome family to her marriage, like a dowry.

‘Miles has arrived,' says Lewis, as they sweep into the circular driveway. He makes Miles sound like a present, gift-wrapped and ready. But for whom is he a present? And if he is intended for Gina, why then is she here?

‘I'm out of control,' Veronica tells herself, ‘my fantastic silly mind.' She lives too much in the fabulous clues of history, her own and others. She remembers the first time she stood in front of a class. ‘History's not definite,' she had said, in a tentative voice. ‘It's not all dry facts and set in concrete. It's more like a jigsaw puzzle or a mystery story, one piece leading to another. We can, each one of us, look at a landscape, or a character in history, or even a set of dates, and see something different from what anyone has seen before.'

‘Like smelling rats in a dunny,' said a girl in the front row, a supercilious girl with a Roman nose and freckles.

‘Quite,' Veronica had said, in her young earnest voice, not noticing the way laughter ran around the class, ‘the connections and clues are limitless.'
But she has built a career and a lifetime on smelling rats, without ever quite finding the source of the smell.

Her place in this family is clear. She has become the aunt, as the children call her, to be dutifully tended. Lewis and Gina are kind.

The idea of the ‘empty wilderness' has taken hold of Gina. The Supremacist Movement, you know, the words tripping off her tongue. I am at one with the idea of the spirit's journey into the unknown, she tells Miles, while he nods his head up and down and tugs at his beard. He is older than Veronica expected, older than any of them, if it comes to it, a big man with a
barrel-shaped
chest, soft grey hair neatly cut to collar length. He is dressed in a tan raw-silk jacket, a black shirt, his throat bare. A touch tropical for a night like this, but in the firelight he is a graceful energetic figure. He has robust
interesting
hands. Yet Veronica sees the way he guards himself, not giving too much of himself away.

‘To own a Kandinsky,' Gina enthuses, ‘what more could there be to life?'

At which, Miles frowns and sighs. ‘Art may be for the upwardly mobile, but it pains me to say, my dear Gina, that I think Kandinsky is out of even your reach. Or my gallery for that matter.'

Gina flushes, as if caught out at child's play. It's been a while since Veronica last saw her. Her tawny hair is teased up with back-combing. Fine threads of gold nestle in her collar bones, veins throbbing like satin piping in her throat. When she smiles her upper lip rides a little too high behind her teeth, as if she is trying very hard at something.

‘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.'