The Trouble With Fire

by Fiona Kidman

  Despite his love of other people’s adventures, Neil didn’t like to stray far from home. Ruth was sometimes wistful about this, because when she had chosen his books for him, long ago, she had begun to dream of travel, too. As she drove the van around the remote countryside, she had imagined the places she would visit. Where she and Neil would go. But if Neil was part of the dream, he was the part that was realised. He liked to stay at home. He could be stubborn.

  When they were already in their sixties, and Ruth had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, they did go for a trip to Europe. Jemima and her brothers had urged them to take a chance, take a risk and go. They went to Italy because Ruth said she would die happy if she saw the Sistine Chapel and Venice and the Duomo. They never did make it to Paris because her medication wasn’t suiting her and it seemed best to come home. But she said she was content.

  AND THEN NEIL DIED. HIS heart gave out. He did everything for me, Ruth told Jemima, in a subdued voice. She told her daughter this on that last visit to the gannet colony.

  As they sat watching the entwined necks of the gannets, Ruth said, ‘You might think I’m a sentimental old fool, dear, but that’s how I think of my life with your father. We were good to each other.’

  ‘Yeah, okay, Ma,’ Jemima said, embarrassed.

  But Ruth had pressed on, determination in her voice. ‘I need to hold onto it. I grew up without love.’

  ‘Mum,’ Jemima said, ‘what do you mean?’

  ‘Well,’ Ruth said, ‘perhaps that’s not quite true. I experienced love when I was a very small child. I lived with my grandmother down south in Invercargill. I thought of her as my mother. Her name was Kathleen Keats. But then she died and I went to live with my birth mother’s husband and his family on their farm. It wasn’t what my grandmother wanted, but it’s the way it worked out.’ Her fingers moved to her neck. ‘I used to think that this was a punishment for something I did wrong. That I’d been sent away from Kathleen, and had to wear the mark forever.’

  ‘I didn’t know,’ Jemima said. ‘I never thought of you as different.’

  ‘You get used to hiding things. Patricia called me Strawbs. Short for strawberry,’ Ruth said, as if it needed explaining.

  ‘That’s horrible,’ Jemima squeezed her mother’s hand.

  ‘I went to her wedding, but I’ve seer her only once since then, when Mamie was dying. Seeing her acting like the queen of the May, when she was no better than the rest of us. She was a cruel bitch.’

  Jemima was shocked. Her mother never used language like that. ‘That was Auntie Pat? The famous photographer?’ Her inflection was sarcastic. Although she didn’t mention it, she had had a passing encounter with her aunt, Patricia Mullens, or Pattie Mullens, as she was known professionally. But Ruth was focused on her own train of thought and Jemima, aware of how fragile this had become, knew better than to interrupt it.

  ‘It wasn’t just that,’ Ruth said. ‘When I went north, I had my identity taken away from me. I was called Ruth Mullens, but that wasn’t my real name, I was born Ruth Keats. My mother’s name was Joy. Mine was changed by deed poll by Mamie, who I was supposed to think of as my mother.’

  ‘So you were adopted?’

  ‘No, I just had my name changed. I still think of myself as Ruth Keats. I remember a town with a water tower, long summer twilights and my grandmother teaching me how to write my name.’

  ‘Was Mamie awful? We never used to visit them.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have taken you there,’ Ruth said sharply. ‘That farm had the smell of death.’

  ‘Mum, I don’t understand.’ Her mother was shaking again. Jemima covered Ruth’s hand, and suggested that perhaps it was time they went home.

  Ruth was recovering her composure. ‘Mamie wasn’t so bad, she was just dippy, I suppose. I hope I don’t get like her. She had Alzheimers, you know.’

  ‘You haven’t, Mum. Your illness is different.’

  ‘Patricia is no relation of mine at all,’ Ruth said with what sounded like satisfaction bordering on delight.

  ‘Really? So was Les her father?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And he wasn’t yours either?’

  ‘Not as far as I know. He didn’t act like a father.’ And here Ruth flinched, and held her trembling sick hands tightly together.

  ‘What about Auntie Blanche?’

  ‘She and I aren’t related either,’ said Ruth. Her voice was quivering with exhaustion. ‘But she was my friend. We would go out together and search for frogs and wild ferns in the swamps together. We found a bird’s nest once, with eggs in it. They were beautiful. Blanche was Les and Mamie’s daughter, the one they had together, but there was no love lost between her and her dad. Les wanted a boy for the farm, someone he could leave it to. I felt bad when I left Blanche on the farm. She was still a little kid. I’ve heard she’s living in an ashram in India. She always was different.’

  ‘What happened to your mother? This Joy?’

  ‘That’s a very good question, dear. I don’t know. Nobody does.’

  PATRICIA MULLENS WAS AN OLD woman when she phoned Jemima, looking for Nick. Her voice was husky but honeyed and, yes, powerful. That was what came to mind. She was older than Ruth, and newspaper pictures showed her as a broad heavy woman with a short grey bob which revealed her strong features. Jemima had read that Patricia was a widow, but still a philanthropist to the arts, like her late husband. They had set up trusts to deliver funding to several projects before his death.

  Nick and Jemima were still married then. Patricia wanted a photograph of him. A special favour. She didn’t take many photographs these days, but she’d been talked into a series of artists’ portraits and Nick seemed like a perfect subject. She wondered whether Jemima could give him a message.

  Jemima said, ‘I think we’re related. Aren’t you my Aunt Patricia?’

  There was a pause on the other the end of the line.

  ‘I think there must be some mistake,’ said Patricia.

  ‘I’m Jemima, your sister Ruth’s daughter.’

  ‘I don’t have a sister called Ruth,’ Patricia had said. Jemima wondered if this was the confusion of age, in spite of Patricia’s profile and reputation. It was, too, the moment when she began to take an interest in her mother’s past.

  Nick had agreed to the picture, of course. He was honoured to be noticed by Patricia. His career hadn’t been holding up so well just of late.

  Patricia came up to Auckland and spent a day with Nick, taking pictures of him around the city. She didn’t want to photograph him at home, she said; domestic interiors were not really her thing. Nick said she was a fantastic vibrant woman, with an earthy turn of phrase.

  ‘Did you talk to her about being my aunt?’ Jemima asked.

  ‘Oh sweetheart, we didn’t have time to get onto things like that.’

  ‘But you said you would.’

  He shifted uneasily. ‘I just don’t think she was that interested,’ he said finally.

  The image of him, as it turned out, was magnificent, showing a delicate dark face, tragic eyes beneath a thatch of straight black hair, a deceptive smile. But by the time it appeared in a gallery, Nick had already gone. Jemima didn’t get an invitation to opening night.

  RUTH WAS DYING. FIRST SHE had pneumonia, then another adverse reaction to her medication. The doctors were ‘working on it’ but Ruth wasn’t responding. She was very thin, and Jemima, remembering the day they had gone to see the gannets, had a suspicion that Ruth didn’t plan to get better. That she had simply had enough. Jemima took six months off from her job in Auckland to care for her mother. There would be a plus to this: she could use the time to think about poetry. Being back in her hometown, but apart from it now, would give her a fresh sense of perspective of her life up until now. She was thirty-five, had been married to a celebrity, who didn’t think she had talent, though of course (he said) he wished she did (she had had a handful of poems published in small magazine), divorced and ready to start again
. In a way her mother’s illness was a gift, she decided, as she packed up her desk.

  It was all much harder than she expected. Her mother’s speech was mostly unintelligible, and she became irritable at the smallest thing. The heat was oppressive, soaring close to forty degrees in the shade some days, and they had only fans to keep the air moving. Her father hadn’t believed in air conditioning. The district nurses were rushed off their feet, with cutbacks to the public health system, and sometimes they didn’t make it until after lunch, by which time Ruth was fretful and unresponsive, and Jemima’s back was aching from trying to settle her comfortably. At least her father’s relatives brought meals. They sat with Ruth and told Jemima to go out and get some fresh air. It wasn’t all bad. But poetry seemed increasingly elusive.

  In the interval between her mother’s revelations at the gannet colony and moving home to stay with her, Jemima had had the opportunity to make some enquiries about her missing grandmother, Joy Mullens. Ruth had two newspaper clippings, yellow and crumbling with age, that she had given Jemima. Let that be an end to it, she had said. It was all she knew. Joy’s appearance was described, and what she was wearing when she was last seen by her husband.

  So that was Joy and that was Ruth. One of the clippings, from Truth, showed a grainy indistinct picture of an ordinary-looking young woman with a pleasant smile. Her grandmother. ‘Wife Known to Have Had a Past’, said the headline.

  There were many questions she wanted to ask her mother, but the time for that was over. What she did find, among her mother’s papers, which she had begun to sort, were three letters from Blanche Mullens, written over a period of years, from India. They asked about Ruth’s children, and contained vivid accounts of life in the ashram. There was nothing about their childhood. She could be any friend keeping in touch by mail. The address, in an area called Rishikesh, remained consistent. Jemima, chewing on the end of her ballpoint one day while her mother slept, wrote a letter to Blanche, instead of a poem.

  A LETTER CAME FOR JEMIMA, forwarded from her Auckland address. By now her leave had passed and she had let her job go. Summer had been and gone. The decision to stay had been easy, even though caring for Ruth was so exhausting. The thought of leaving her mother in a hospital or a hospice seemed out of the question. Ruth would not be abandoned again.

  The letter was an invitation to be a guest poet at a reading at Te Papa, in Wellington, the following week. The event would take the form of a panel for ‘emerging poets’. Her fares would be met and there was a modest fee, which was welcome. Her funds were running low. Jemima rang the organiser and explained the delay in receiving the invitation. She was in Napier, she said, and probably couldn’t get away because her mother was so ill. There was a sigh of relief. ‘Well, we’d have to scratch for fares,’ the organiser said. ‘It’s dearer to fly people from the provinces than down from Auckland. Silly, isn’t it?’

  Jemima mentioned this to her aunt, one of Neil’s sisters, a woman with a shining white halo of hair, when she brought over a casserole that evening. She told it in an anecdotal way, as something that had simply happened during her day.

  Her aunt said, ‘You have to go. I insist. I’ll pay your fare if you like. It’ll do you good.’

  When Jemima remonstrated, her aunt said gently that she wouldn’t be any help to Ruth if she didn’t look after herself, and not to worry, that she would be by Ruth’s side every minute that she was away.

  In the end, the organisers said that it was all right, and if she didn’t mind waiving the fee, they could probably afford her. It seemed magnanimous: she wondered if a certain notoriety surrounded her now, as the ex-wife of the noted playwright. She’d heard that Nick had shifted to Wellington since going off with his latest, a married woman.

  THE READING WAS TO BE held in the Te Papa theatre, where Jemima was taken to meet the others on the panel. She had been met by the organiser of the event, an older woman dressed in black. A group of five poets was taking turns to test the microphone. The atmosphere in the room seemed chilly, the lights cool. Most of the other poets, four women and a man, were younger than her. She wondered if she might already be too old to be an emerging poet. In Auckland, she held her own, but after months in the provinces, she felt suddenly down at heel, as if she had slightly lost the plot, was not properly groomed. She was wearing dark trousers, one of last season’s jackets, flat shoes, a casual look that she associated with poetry readings. She’d worn her fair hair loose, a style left over from her days with Nick. Beautiful hair, he’d said, the night he met her, his fingers holding a handful of it, his mouth nuzzling her throat. She knew now that all his women were blonde, as if to offset his own appearance. One of the others, a petite smart woman with a cap of yellow hair, and dressed in an orange designer dress and blue Minnie Cooper shoes, sidled up to her. Her name was Gail, and she wanted to know all about Jemima and the work she was doing. She said she’d seen a very significant poem of hers that made her cry.

  ‘Which one was that?’ asked Jemima.

  ‘Oh goodness, I should have written the title down,’ Gail said. ‘Something about loss.’ Jemima supposed that they had all written poems about loss, but didn’t say so. Something about Gail made her cringe.

  ‘I’m going to read a series of linked poems about looking at birds,’ Gail said.

  ‘Blackbirds?’ said Jemima, without meaning to be unkind. That had slipped out.

  ‘I don’t do the Wallace Stevens thing,’ said Gail, her voice sharp with anger. ‘Besides, my poems are sonnets.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I haven’t read your poems yet. But I’m looking forward to them,’ Jemima said, wishing she had kept quiet.

  ‘Of course I may not have time to read them all,’ Gail said. ‘Timing’s important, don’t you think?’

  ‘I’ve timed mine,’ Jemima said. ‘I promise I won’t go over.’

  ‘Who’s for a coffee?’ Gail cried, in an over-enthusiastic way, intended, Jemima thought, to convey what great friends they were, or were about to become. Everyone agreed that that was what they needed, but it was Jemima Gail wanted to walk with on their way to the museum café.

  ‘Friands,’ Gail cried, when they arrived at the counter. ‘We must all have friands, give us some creative energy.’

  And Jemima was agreeing that yes, she would like a friand, but could she have peppermint tea rather than coffee.

  ‘Just like my boyfriend,’ Gail said, a half-hidden glee in her voice.

  Jemima had a sudden queasy feeling in her stomach.

  The woman was giving her a sly look. ‘His name’s Nick,’ she said. ‘He’s a writer too.’

  JEMIMA WALKED QUICKLY ALONG CABLE Street and turned left at the next set of lights. She wasn’t exactly sure where she was going, but if she kept turning left she would, she thought, end up in Cuba Street. It was a while since she had been to Wellington. At first she had thought of walking along the waterfront, but a stiff late autumn wind was scuttling leaves and bits of rubbish across the street, and hard spots of rain were spitting tacks in her face. She felt shabby and disorientated. Around Cuba Street, as she recalled it, she could disappear into the crowd, find a tearoom (did such things exist in Wellington now?) — somewhere to sit down and stop the trembling in her knees. She walked up past the bucket fountain, tipping and swaying, past second-hand clothing shops, the entrance to an art gallery, a pub or two, crowds of youths playing with a hacky sack — a game of ‘chills’, Jemima thought, as one of them demonstrated a foot-stall. Her nephews played this game, and there she went again, her heart aching as if it would break. How she had loved Nick. Wanted children. How she still did. On second thoughts, perhaps she hated him. Nick had children, two born before they were married, with two different mothers. It kept them poor. The real reason he had gone off with the Canadian was because he was sick of her counting out maintenance money from his royalties, and from her wages as well, and her complaining about going on working and not having children of her own. If it hadn’t been the Canadian it
would have been someone else. And now it was Gail.

  The poetry reading would be in progress. It was unlikely they had waited for her. She saw the likely scenario in her head. Gail would have told the organiser that Jemima, the ‘one from Napier’, hadn’t looked too good, just got up and walked out, without saying a word, didn’t even pay for her order. They would have looked at each other with knowing smiles, all in on the secret that wasn’t a secret. They would be on stage, their cadences poised, voices under control, the young man clearing his throat, the way he had when he was introduced to her. She had read some of his poems. They were dense and torrid. There would be hushed moments at the end of each reading before the round of applause. At least Gail would have longer to read her sonnets.

  Jemima stopped to draw breath. Beside her was a shop with wispy curtains on either side of the battered doorway. A board outside offered psychic readings: $35 for half an hour. And somehow, suddenly, she found herself inside, where crystals dangled from the shelves, asking if it was possible that she might get a reading done now. She had never been to a medium before, but she liked the idea that secret knowledge lay close at hand.

  The woman behind the counter shouted out to someone called Magda that she had a client.

  Magda appeared in a doorway leading from a backroom and invited Jemima into a recess at the side of the shop. She was a large woman with long thin bleached hair sprouting in several directions, a tasselled scarf at her throat and many rings on her fingers. The rings were grimy, as if she wore them in the garden, and several of them were engraved with coiled snakes. Bangles clanked on her wrists. She invited Jemima to sit opposite her at a small plastic table