by Fiona Kidman
‘I’ve never been out of New Zealand in my life. I’m not the daughter of a founding father, in fact I’m really nothing at all.’
‘Oh come on, Harriet,’ he said, with a blend of old-fashioned reticence at such familiarity and a touch of arrogance, as if she were in fact the serving-wench class that she was caricaturing for him. ‘You’re certainly something. I know a great deal about you.’
‘Everything and nothing. I’m a first-generation New Zealander. My father has delusions of grandeur and the feudal estate was a small stretch of barren land with only one rather excellent stand of growth beside a river, where he ran the absolute minimum of cows on which to make an economic unit.’
‘Past tense?’
‘They live in a pensioner flat in a town called Whangarei.’
‘Why are you trying to make yourself sound so insignificant?’
‘Because,’ she said, ‘I have so consistently to wage war against those who believe they’re significant. And are almost invariably wrong.’
‘I’m suitably humbled,’ he said, bowing his head.
‘Oh no, you’re not.’
‘No,’ he said, inclining his head again. ‘But I wish I were.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she found herself replying. ‘You may be as arrogant as you wish.’
‘You must never like me,’ he said, quite gravely, she felt. ‘I’m dissolute by nature, and I intend to be dissolute all my life. Look at me, I’m thirty-five and I intend to be very rich by the time I’m forty, and live in Paris and keep a French mistress.’
‘Look at me,’ she replied, ‘I’m thirty-nine and going to seed and my reputation is a mixed bag of inferior glory and manufactured stories about myself, and by the time I’m forty I’ll probably be starting to think about becoming a grandmother. That is to say, with respect to nature and the law, there would be no objection to my becoming a grandmother.’
‘A telling saga. Do you mind?’
‘I should mind if my daughter made me one. For her sake,’ she added, more than a little defensively.
‘I’m sure I would, too. I’ll be nearer to fifty than forty when my daughter faces me with such uncomfortable prospects,’ he said. ‘But that’s a long time away.’
Somehow it seemed as if fifty was, for him, considerably further away than the four years that divided them.
‘You have children, then?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘How many? And how old?’
‘A son and a daughter. My son is three.’ He hesitated perceptibly. ‘And my daughter is just — a month old. Now shall we have dinner?’
As they stood talking, neither noticed that the rest of the party was quietly melting away. They were the only two people left in the room, except for waiters trying to tidy away glasses and ashtrays.
‘I don’t know.’ She looked round distractedly, suddenly thinking that she ought to retreat. The man was quite unbearably attractive. His mouth was full and sweetly drooping, almost childlike in its appeal that she should please him. And she wanted to do whatever he suggested.
How old was his newborn child? A month, he had said. Old memories came back, of herself, long ago in childbirth. Of loss. Of betrayal. What did this man mean asking her to bed with him? But of course this was a nonsense, for she who had always known how to handle any situation. There was no need for her to bed with him.
‘Why do you want me to have dinner with you?’ she asked weakly. She prayed he would be honest.
‘I’d like to hear about your work, and maybe we could talk a little business together.’
She sagged inwardly. It was a sane approach, yet she wished that it had been otherwise.
‘I have to go home,’ she heard herself say dully. ‘The children … I didn’t leave them anything for … my husband’s working late …’
‘You become more admirable by the moment. I find it quite extraordinary that anyone who looks like you, and does the number of things for which you’re so famous, could also be such a totally nice human being.’
‘Don’t be sarcastic.’
‘I’m not. Truly.’ And so intensely and beautifully did he look at her that she was tempted to believe him. ‘Of course you must go home.’
Her heart sank. It seemed that he was not going to persuade her, or convince her of his honourable intentions, or do any of the things that might have made her stay with him.
He is afraid too, she knew quickly and instinctively. He knows that if I stay, we shall become lovers tonight.
‘May I walk you to your car?’ he asked.
‘Please.’ Her knees were trembling.
In his hand was a little notebook and a pen. ‘You’ll let me have your phone number so I can ring you next time I’m in Wellington, though, won’t you?’
‘Of course.’ He wrote it down carefully.
‘May I ring you at any time, or are some times better than others?’
It was as if they had already moved into some private pact. There seemed to be no turning back.
‘People are always ringing me. All sorts of people, nobody minds.’
As he continued to stand looking at her, she added faintly, ‘But maybe … the mornings would be best.’
‘Of course. Now shall I take you to your car?’
‘Please,’ she said again, and together they walked through the muzak-laden air and into a lift that stood open, as if expecting them.
Outside, dark had fallen, and high above, between the buildings, the small hard light of stars could be seen. Beside the car, he inclined his head gravely towards her and kissed her lightly on the mouth. ‘I look forward to seeing you again,’ he said. Then he was gone.
I will never see him again, she thought despairingly to herself. She drove home in a frightened vague way, almost as if she were drunk. Somewhere along the way she missed a turn-off, and she kept driving for a long time, without noticing that she was on the wrong road, driving slowly and cautiously, crawling her way up the roads, continually checking her speedo to make sure that she was doing a regulation fifty kilometres an hour. Slowing at an intersection, she glanced up, and saw to her horror that the sign above her head read ‘Makara’, the way to the coast, maybe twenty-five, thirty kilometres away. She stopped the car and pulled to the side of the road.
For a long time she sat there trying to orient herself, not so much in place, but inside her. It had now become evident to her where she was, and she knew that when she started the car again, she would drive home sensibly and alertly, knowing exactly the route to follow. What so terrified her was her sense of misdirection.
After all these years, the thing that she had most feared seemed to have happened to her. And across a crowded room at that. She tried telling herself sternly that it was an extraordinary upsurge of physical attraction after a long hard winter, the old story of the sap rising. He had all the hallmarks of the kind of person she had come to despise most thoroughly in recent years, dining well in New Zealand, dressed out in an immaculate accent, and manners that no Antipodean could possibly hope to emulate. There was no reason to believe that he had any talent whatsoever, and every reason to suspect that he had a great deal of money.
She was quite sure that she loathed him, and hoped that she would not hear from him again.
But of course she did. The children had just left for school one morning a few weeks later. Max, tired from working late again, had crept out of the house like a grey shadow, giving her a hug as he went.
A great deal had to be done at speed. She was due at the television studio at ten to front a programme that would feature a visiting overseas author, an American whom she had met and instantly detested the previous evening. Their interview was occupying her mind when the phone rang. It was Michael Young calling her person-to-person from Auckland. He’d be in town the following day — could they have lunch together? He had business to talk with her. Really, it was business, he’d like to leave it till her saw her. Of course it was possible for her to have lunch with
him.
‘That was a brilliant interview you did last night,’ he said when they met at the restaurant.
‘You saw it?’ she said, pleased.
‘Of course. I always watch you.’
‘Oh rubbish, of course you don’t.’
‘Mm-hmm. I do so. You must know that I’d watch you.’
‘More or less since you met me?’ It sounded silly when she’d said it, but it had come out without her meaning it to.
‘More, of course. And I read your books.’
She blushed. ‘Excesses.’
‘Wallace tells all. I never thought to find you a shy person. You’re incredibly much nicer than I expected.’
‘You mustn’t believe it’s me telling all. My poems are … um personal expressions of universal experience. Well, they’re meant to be.’
‘How many times have you told that lie?’
‘Did you have a good flight?’
‘Beautiful. It’s a beautiful country.’
‘Have you seen much of it?’
‘Not as much as I’d like to. I need a suitable guide, otherwise I shall simply return to England like a tourist book. It’s not like me, I like to see places properly, but this job …’ He sighed.
‘It’s not going well?’
‘We haven’t started the magazine, if that’s what you mean.’
‘And will you?’
‘With a lot of luck, and a lot of help in the right places.’
‘So that’s what the business is? You want me to get it off the ground? I don’t have a lot of say in what I do, you know.’
‘What? Oh … a programme, well, of course that’d be marvellous. If you can do it.’
‘Wasn’t that what you had in mind?’
His face lit up. ‘I thought you were being super-cautious. I suppose people always take you out to lunch to see what you can do for them.’
‘I have one or two friends,’ she said drily.
He laughed. ‘I’m sure you have a great many. I’m sorry, I said it was business and it is. Listen,’ and his face was alight with eagerness, ‘we’ve got a good format. The idea is that we carry the best of our hardline basic formula and relevant material through into a New Zealand magazine, but that we cover the local scene with local material. For instance, New Zealand design, New Zealand books, New Zealand art, particularly New Zealand issues and New Zealand politics. That’s where you come in. I want you to do a political column.’
‘Me?’
‘Why not?’
‘Michael, you don’t know very much about me.’
‘Of course I do. I’d watched you in action long before I met you. I had every intention of getting in touch with you. Meeting you that night was a bonus that made it all so much easier, finding out that you really were the right person, instead of groping round in the dark, hoping that you might turn out to be who I was looking for, but dreading that you might be a bitch at the same time.’
‘No, you really don’t understand,’ she said, taking a long drink of her wine. ‘I’d be completely knocked down by the pundits here, I stand for nothing in political science terms in this country. I’m barely educated, for a start.’
‘Oh nonsense. What does it matter what you did your degree in or whether it was first or third class? People who get good degrees often never progress past that point. It’s all a matter of progression from particular points that matter.’
She burst out laughing. He looked slightly offended.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s just I never got a degree … when I say I’m uneducated, really I am. I scraped through School Certificate, a very minor qualification I assure you by today’s standards, in a small North Auckland high school. I did even less well than I expected to. You really must forgive me. I get angry with other people for trying to con the system, like that man I was crucifying last night, but I suppose in a way I have no right to, nobody’s conned the system to get what I want and where I am more than I have.’
He regarded her strangely. ‘The true New Zealand do-it-yourself Kiwi Kathie.’
‘If you like, though I don’t like the political inference.’
‘I suspected you mightn’t.’
‘Besides, if you know my political sympathies, then you must realise that I sail very close to the wind in my work. Media people aren’t supposed to have political opinions. Or if we do, we’re supposed to have learnt to worship the great god objectivity.’
‘Difficult for such a subjective person?’
She paused. ‘Possibly.’
He sat for longer than he should have without speaking. She concentrated on her food, which she had hardly touched, and drank more wine.
They both looked up at the same time, and he held her eyes. ‘I don’t know … I don’t know,’ he said finally. ‘Harriet, I wish I hadn’t met you.’
‘Before you offered me this job, or at all?’ She was throwing all pride and sense to the winds, yet everything they both said seemed inevitable. She saw that his finely curling fair hair was already grey round the temples.
‘I couldn’t have borne the thought of not meeting you at all,’ he said. ‘Does that answer you properly?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you?’
‘I work hard at being married,’ she said in a stifled pleading voice.
‘I know, I know. I can tell.’
They ate in silence again, though the food was beginning to make Harriet feel ill.
‘About the job, then?’
‘It would compromise my position in television.’
‘Not if you could be objective. I think it’s possible. Do you like the idea at all?’
‘Very much.’
‘Well, then?’
‘I’ll have to talk to people, you know, the ones I work with, see how they feel about things. If I can get a go-ahead without losing my job … I mean after all, it’s possible that the magazine might not keep going, then where would I be?’
‘True enough. And fair too. I can’t ask for more than that. Can you talk to them by next week?’
‘I could try. It depends on whether all the right ones are around. They come and go on assignments so much, one can never be sure … why next week?’
‘I’ll be back here this time next week. I’ve got a big meeting, mostly financial, and the head of our organisation will be over from Britain. If I knew where you stood, that would be a big help. I’ll have appointments all day, perhaps if I could make you the last person I saw before I caught the plane. After all, I can’t really drink till the end of a day like that.’
‘You mean, we’ll have a drink then?’
‘Right. And you’ll tell me what you’ve decided.’
But the following week, he was looking drained with exhaustion. The figures for the meeting were not shaping well, and a lot of things he’d been planning on finalising were still unresolved. Harriet had little to offer in the way of comfort. She had had little support from the corporation. Besides, her own confidence was uncertain. Numerous people had pointed out the quality of other columnists in the field. She would have to be very good indeed to make any sort of dent on the following that more experienced political observers held. Of course there was no doubt that she’d be ready, on the strength of her name alone, but if she crashed they felt it would be a bad crash. Harriet had to tell Michael that, while she was happy to work up some good publicity for him in a number of media areas, as far as her own participation was concerned she’d have to wait till the magazine was under way and reconsider the gamble.
The thought of saying this to him had been depressing her all week. She knew it was absolutely true, yet she so longed to please him that the thought of turning him down was almost unbearable. When she saw him, drooping and fatigued, in the bar where they had arranged to meet, her heart sank.
Yet, it was almost as if he had known what she was going to say. He shrugged and said in his most drawling voice, ‘My dear, it’s been a beast of a day, I’ve got an awful he
adache. Let’s get out of this crummy little place.’
She felt that she had satisfactorily been put in her place. After all, it was she who had suggested the bar that they meet in, and his disapproval signified that she had poor taste. It was an adequate snub from a person like him. She ought to resent it, she knew, and found it impossible.
‘I’ll take you to the airport, then. Perhaps we could have a drink there.’
‘Thank you, thank you,’ he said languidly, and then started cursing as he tried to curl himself into the Mini. ‘These cars were made for pygmies,’ he snapped, his knees almost touching his chin.
On the way to the airport, he asked where they were going.
‘To the airport. I thought we agreed to go there.’
‘I loathe the airport,’ he said, almost petulantly. ‘What am I supposed to do there for an hour?’
‘We were going to have a drink, I thought.’
‘I cannot abide that second-rate barn,’ he said, and would have thrown himself back in his seat if it had been physically possible. Instead, he gave a convulsive and somewhat ridiculous little lurch. ‘One forgets that there is no decent place where one can have a drink in this Godforsaken country.’
They drove in silence towards the airport, along Cobham Drive. Harriet thought that he seemed so detestable that forgetting him would be a pleasure.
‘I’m awfully nervous,’ he said miserably.
‘What about? Will your — your chief roast you?’ she said, emphasising the chief.
He ignored the sarcasm. ‘You.’
She glanced sideways at him.
The sea by the road was indelible blue, and the sun very bright and gold as late afternoon drew in. The colour seemed to be caught up on him somehow. He was more beautiful than she had been seeing him in her mind’s eye all these weeks past.
On an impulse, at the turnoff to the airport, she turned left instead of right.
‘Where are you going?’ he said in real surprise.
‘You’re quite right. It’s a very uncivilised watering hole out there,’ she said. ‘And I don’t really want to drink and make small talk. I thought you might like to sit and look at the sea.’
