by Fiona Kidman
I’ve walked all over the city, here in Wellington, and I see you everywhere, in all our old haunts. I want us to be together. Could you make this break with your life and start anew with me? I would care for your children, I would do whatever it takes, but I can’t face the rest of my life without knowing where I stand with you.
With all my love,
Nick
A letter written a quarter of a century ago. A proposal of sorts.
She hears of Nick from time to time. He is alive. She thinks he’s remarried after a divorce she heard about on the media grapevine. There was a time when she thought she couldn’t live without him, but it passed. What would she have done had she read this letter at the time? She’s glad she has been spared this choice. The days when she caught herself thinking about Nick simply moved further and further apart. She is as whole, in this fractured steamy life, as she ever can be.
Nevertheless, an unexpected thorn of grief pricks her, a sudden rawness stirs around her heart.
CURIOSITY WAS WHAT LED BELINDA to her sexual encounters, she thinks. Although wasn’t it like that for everyone? Didn’t everyone rage with lust? She needed so badly to know what it was like when she was young. Some of the girls at school slept with boys and got away with it. One of the prefects slept with a married man whose wife had complained to the school, and the girl had been expelled. (Belinda rages when she thinks back on this, the unfairness of it.) She felt like an outsider in those days; she was the girl who lived with the weird old aunt and didn’t have pretty dresses for school dances. Boys, those other girls assumed, wouldn’t look twice at Belinda.
But they did. They pashed her behind the bike sheds and in the shelter sheds, feeling her breasts and pushing their thrusting busy fingers inside her, one of them leaving a huge love bite on her neck that she could barely hide. She took to her bed for a couple of days while it subsided, and told Aunt Agnes she was sick.
Her aunt had groaned and rolled her eyes. ‘Well, you have to get used to having your periods, you want to be thankful you get them,’ she said. ‘If you ever fall, it’ll be the last sight you have of me.’
Belinda remembers the way she lay in bed hoping her period would come because she wasn’t exactly sure what had to happen in order to fall pregnant. She didn’t like to ask anyone at school because they would think she was odd, not knowing, and because what she did was a secret. The names of those boys who sweated and groaned against her have all but vanished from her memory. But back then, she knew that, sooner or later, she would have to find out what happened next.
At a dance, one night, she had seen an ordinary enough man, older than she was, but there was something about him that she liked. He asked her for the supper waltz and then if he could have the last dance with her, and take her home afterwards. In the back seat of the car, it had begun the way it had with the boys at school. His fingers unhooked her bra and his hands were on her breasts, then they moved down to her panties and pulled at the elastic. She wrapped her legs around him then, and felt her body saying thank you as he entered. It seemed perfectly natural and not difficult at all. Her ardour seemed to briefly startle him, the way she came so quickly and cried out.
The young man’s name was Seth, a university student. He didn’t come home to Masterton very often, and there were weekends she couldn’t get away to the dances without her aunt knowing. Aunt Agnes disapproved of dance halls. Their encounters were infrequent, perhaps every two or three months. Once he appeared with a girl who turned out to be his sister. He pretended he and Belinda didn’t know each other that time, offending her. Of course his sister knew who she was because they had gone to school together. His sister wasn’t one of the girls who slept with boys. She would go on to be a debutante, in a white gown that was like a precursor to a wedding dress. He didn’t even ask Belinda for a dance.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said the next time he saw her. ‘I don’t know why I did that.’ She knew, though; she wasn’t good enough for his sisters. When they began to make love, he said he was sorry again. ‘We need to be careful, I forgot to bring a rubber,’ he said. He began to withdraw but it was too late, and it was, for her, such unbridled pleasure. Afterwards, he stroked her hair and whispered how much he liked her and how pretty she was. He wasn’t sure when he’d be back, but he hoped she’d be around.
And then he vanished.
It wasn’t as if they’d talked much. What they had in common, at that point in their lives, was a yearning for each other’s bodies. She had discovered his second name and the house where his family lived, and sometimes she would walk past in a way that she hoped might appear accidental if she was spotted, hoping to bump into him. It didn’t happen, and after a while she had to stop because the baby she was expecting was beginning to show. Soon, Aunt Agnes would send her away to live on a farm and tell her never to darken her door again.
Later, after she and Seth had been married for some years, and were the parents of three children, she began to wonder what it would be like to sleep with a different man.
She sits at the long rimu table where she and Seth and their children have sat so many times, the letter in front of her. The night she and Nick began their affair really started six or more years before they realised it, in the sense of sleeping together. It had been going along in its own way for all that time, a courtship of sorts. One night, they had stayed up on a beach, and talked about their crazy dreams. She was twenty-four. Nick was free, or so he said. His wife, whom he had left, was a short plump nurse with a Yorkshire accent and big eyes she surrounded with dark eyeliner. Nick had met her on an overseas trip, studying film direction, and persuaded her to marry him and come to New Zealand. He felt responsible for her, he said, although Esme seemed good at looking after herself, a woman with a sharp tongue and a quick comeback.
Nick was there for the taking then. She remembers the way her bones ached for days after that night, a shrinking down into herself, like coming down with an illness. She told herself it had come about from being on the cold beach all night, but really, it was fear. She was afraid she was falling in love. There was so much to lose if it were love.
Nick went back to Esme. The old friends continued to gather as if nothing had happened, or if it had, they hadn’t noticed. Daniel and Carla, Nick and Esme, Belinda and Seth (although Seth would become a friend later, by default, because he was married to Belinda). Belinda slept with two or three men, because she was truly curious. They were men she didn’t expect to see again. There was a director from Birmingham who’d come out to New Zealand to work on a one-off project; they had a frantic encounter at the wrap party in an office at the studio, with the door locked. Belinda was fairly drunk at the time. Afterwards she didn’t remember much of it. There was a writer she had met at a pub with a film crew up north; she rather fancied him. As it turned out he lived in Wellington so she did see him a few more times, and the sex was different, more measured, with lots of romantic platitudes. At some point she became concerned that he might be getting too interested in her, which had never been her intention. Just as she was worrying about how to get out of this, the writer began an affair with a pale stick-thin woman called Lizzie, which hurt her pride because she hadn’t got in first with ending it.
And, just when Belinda had thought her sexual curiosity sated, and the seventies were over, and promiscuity was becoming less relentless, she and Nick found themselves alone in the countryside one day. She’d been to see Maisie, in shock after Don had died of a heart attack just weeks before, staying overnight to help her clear some of his clothes, which her mother-in-law didn’t want to do on her own. Seth was coming up at the weekend to go through his father’s workshop tools. On the way back she stopped at a roadside stall to buy apples. And there was Nick, buying apples, too.
‘Berlinney,’ he said.
And ‘What are you doing here?’ they both said at the same time.
‘Darling,’ Nick said, in an astonished, joyful way. His eyes were alight with happiness. He had be
en over to the coast to check out a possible location for the job he was working on. ‘Just park your car down the road,’ he said, as if it were all decided, and she would go with him.
She followed him, parking as he had instructed, got into his car as though she were sleepwalking, as though something calamitous and inevitable had finally struck her.
Nick drove through the light of autumn, past apple orchards where perhaps their apples, abandoned at the stall, had come from, past the new olive groves that people were planting, as if they lived in the Mediterranean, past vineyards full of ripeness and the turning colour of the leaves, until they came to a deserted road, more of a track really, leading to paddocks. They made love in long grass, full of dandelions and sticky seedheads and the deep autumn sun shining in the lengthening afternoon.
‘I love you, Berlinney,’ he said.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘I know.’
‘What are we going to do?’ he said.
‘This, just this,’ she said.
SETH WAS THE ONE WHO SAVED them all. Reliable, good Seth who has never let her down. Or not that she knows about, although rumour had it that he got fed up with her antics at one stage and had a fling. She prefers not to think about that. The lid is best kept on some pots.
The year that Belinda and Nick decided they really were in love, Seth was working with a team of scientists who were testing the effects of nuclear radiation in the Pacific’s coral reefs. Their findings were making world headlines. Seth often looked at the end of his tether, white-faced and stressed from the intensity of the work. There was venting in the seabed where bombs had been tested in the past. It took a long time, he explained to Belinda, to gauge the effects of the tests that had occurred years before, and it would take many more years, beyond their lifetimes perhaps, to know what the outcome of it all might be, what might bubble up from deep below the surface. But it was important to find out what they could, to let people know what they might expect, how their health might be affected, what fish from the sea would be safe to eat in ten or twenty or a hundred years’ time.
The bird life worried him the most. Seth had a thing for birds. ‘The sandpipers,’ he said, in a voice of anguish. ‘The fruit-doves, so few of them left.’ Belinda looked at him in his walk-shorts and long beige socks that reached to his knees, his sensible brown leather brogues. He was like a boffin, and she felt a yearning anxious love for him that had nothing to do with Nick. (Nick wore blue denim jeans and a leather jacket.)
The government professed a lack of interest, or so it was read. Muldoon was still in charge then.
As the year ground on, they were haunted by bright images of nuclear explosions and desolation in their wake. All the talk was of nuclear-powered frigates from America bearing down on New Zealand. In August, word came that the USS Texas would arrive in Auckland. The government wouldn’t step in and refuse entry to the port. Protest was in the air again. Belinda and Nick and Daniel and Carla joined a group planning anti-nuclear protests in Wellington. Belinda was never sure where Daniel stood on confrontation with the government. She’d suspected him of betrayal in ’81. But that was all it was, suspicion. They were friends. Weren’t they?
‘Seth, you have to come with us,’ Belinda said. ‘We’re doing it because of you.’
‘No, you’re not,’ Seth said. ‘You’re doing it because you like demonstrations.’ There was a bitter edge to his voice.
‘That’s not true.’
‘If you’d told me you were doing it because you wanted to save the planet from devastation, or because of our children, I might’ve thought about it. Just don’t tell me you’re doing it for me.’
‘Why are you so hostile?’ Belinda shouted. ‘You know what I mean. That I believe in the things you believe in.’
Seth was quiet for a moment. ‘Well, if you’re sure about that, perhaps I will come.’
She was sorry then, but he probably knew that, she decided afterwards. It meant that she wouldn’t be alone with Nick, or that there wasn’t the potential to slide off at the end of the demonstration with him. His wife, Esme, didn’t approve of demonstrations, so she wouldn’t be there.
The protesters had made grotesque masks that they handed out to the marchers. Someone had made a papier-mâché Statue of Liberty wielding a nuclear-armed missile. It was carried at the front of the parade. Seth joined in, in full voice with all the others, marching beside Daniel and Carla.
Two four six eight —
We don’t want your nuclear bait!
Two four six eight —
You can keep your nuclear freight!
They were pouring up Hobson Street towards the American embassy. Someone with a loud-hailer broadcast the news just through that a protester had got on board the Texas and tied an anti-nuclear banner around a chain. There were shouts of joy up ahead. Nick and Belinda had slipped further back in the line.
Nick said, ‘Esme knows.’
‘How?’
‘She heard me talking to you on the phone.’
Belinda looked up ahead. Daniel and Seth seemed to be having a private conversation amid the bedlam. Nick’s eyes followed hers.
‘Meet me in the Basement,’ he said.
The Basement was a café beneath street-level on Lambton Quay. It was a good place to hide out if you didn’t want to bump into people. Belinda peeled off at Hobson Crescent and doubled back into the city.
Nick joined her in the café a few minutes after she arrived. The room was noisy and thronged. The background music was Split Enz — ‘I Got You’. There was an electric beat in the air.
‘What’s Esme going to do?’
‘Well, it’s more about what we’re going to do, isn’t it? I mean, I’ve left her before, you know I went back for the kids.’
‘Yes. I see.’
‘I might have to sort a few things out before I go. Esme thinks she’s got the drop on me at the moment. You?’
‘I don’t know how to leave Seth,’ Belinda said, beginning to cry. ‘I guess I’ll have to.’
‘Don’t look,’ Nick said, so quietly she could hardly hear him, ‘Seth’s here.’
She did look all the same. Seth was standing at the top of the stairs leading down into the café, his mask hanging absurdly round his neck. He turned and walked away.
He wasn’t at home, when Belinda got back. He didn’t come home until four in the morning, his face like chalk, his body shaking with cold. It had started to rain and his coat was damp. Belinda was sitting at the kitchen table, her head in her hands.
Seth sat down opposite her, watching her as she cried. There was still a long time to go before dawn.
‘I’ll make you a hot drink,’ she said.
‘Soon,’ Seth said. ‘We need to talk.’ He leaned over and took her wrists, laying her hands flat on the table between them. ‘I will never lose you,’ he said. ‘Understand that. I mated for life. I’ve arranged for a transfer to Auckland. For all of us.’ He sat back and watched her.
Belinda wiped away snot with the back of her hand, incredulous. ‘How could you have arranged all that tonight?’
Seth shook his head, exhaustion overtaking him. ‘Oh, it hasn’t just happened. You’ve been a bit distracted lately. I haven’t had a chance to mention it.’
‘What if I don’t come?’ she said.
‘Well, sooner or later you will. When Nick’s gone back to Esme half a dozen times. I’ll still be waiting.’
She thought she saw a sliver of light in the sky, clearing rain. ‘You won’t tell Maisie about all this?’ she said at last. ‘I wouldn’t want her to know.’
It didn’t end right away. Thinking back, it limped away. There were stormy encounters in hotel rooms, days of weeping, Belinda’s work in abeyance. Later, a weekend in Paris when their paths crossed, not quite accidentally. They stayed in a cheap hotel. Nick was restless in bed and perfunctory in his love-making. When they checked out, he fumbled his wallet.
‘I’ll go halves,’ she said.
‘Hush,’ he muttered. ‘They think we’re married.’ He handed over cash.
Outside in the street, Belinda said, ‘They don’t care whether we’re married.’
He looked away. ‘Esme checks the credit cards.’
She remembers how they sat in La Rotonde, a few hours before he was due to catch a plane. He held her hand across the table in mute apology. He was changing, she thought, older, but then weren’t they all. It was November; yellow chrysanthemums stood in jardinières, looming like gold lanterns in late afternoon mist. The next day Belinda was going to Spain to meet a woman who wanted her to work on a project in Tahiti the following year, Nick to Amsterdam hoping to locate funding for a project. She had a sudden stricken thought that if anything happened to her, Nick would be the last person to see her, the person who would have to talk to the embassy, to talk to her family, to tell Seth that he had met her on the other side of the world. The idea filled her with horror. At the Métro station Nick said, ‘Well, off in different directions again.’
He kissed her forehead, and she thought then that that was the end at last. One of those things you just know. Or it was for her. (The trip to Spain would go well, her reputation assured by the film made in Tahiti.) After he had gone, she kept walking on, through Montparnasse to the cemetery. She stopped and put a rose on Simone de Beauvoir’s grave. Her daughter’s namesake.
She doesn’t know whether Seth knew any of this drawn-out sorry ending. She hopes not, but supposes that in some way he did. All through the years, she has seen his eyes follow her, and she believes that, in spite of everything, she is loved, if not altogether forgiven.
