All the Way to Summer

by Fiona Kidman

  He hesitates before stooping to pick up the green and pink-striped towel where it has fallen from Janie McCaw’s shoulders onto the path.

  Governing

  ‘Hullo, the gang’s all here,’ the prime minister shouts as he rushes through the cabinet-room door, as if he is exactly on time and waiting for his ministers, not they upon him. He waves a sheaf of papers over his head.

  The men gathered at the table look up from their study of the day’s order papers, and it’s hard for them to suppress smiles behind the wreaths of smoke. This is the way it is: just when things seem gloomy and the books don’t balance, Coates bounds in and the serious business of governing the country seems lightened. But this morning he is not in a mood to dally with jokes.

  ‘I have a new idea,’ he announces. ‘I’m going to introduce a bill that will provide more educational opportunities for young Māoris.’

  ‘That’s not scheduled on the order paper,’ says Albert Davy, an adviser to the party who, of late, Gordon Coates has begun to look upon with suspicion. He has appeared a stalwart friend in the past, but these days he has a sly air about him, as if he is not quite open. At times he is aggressive in his manner. The night before, he and Coates dined together at Bellamy’s. Over pork chops and a whisky or several, Mr Davy had said, in a tone tinged with dislike, that the Right Honourable Prime Minister was playing to the Māori vote to the detriment of the wider population. ‘Do you not think,’ he had said, ‘that if the banks run out of money, your European constituents might have grounds to complain that not enough of the vanishing funds have been spent on them?’ This is the very same man who devised the brilliant advertising slogan ‘Coats off with Coates’, which helped sweep him to victory in the last election.

  ‘I have the support of Sir Maui Pomare,’ the prime minister had said then, ‘and, on the other side of the house, Sir Apirana Ngata will support me to the utmost, no matter that we are in opposition to each other.’

  ‘That is the trouble,’ Davy had replied. ‘You have friends in all the wrong places. You’re a farmer but you run with Māoris and Red Feds. You’ve lost your sense of the rest of this country.’

  ‘I’ll thank you to keep a civil tongue in your head, Mr Davy,’ Coates had said. He had lit a cigar and blown smoke over Davy’s roast potatoes. Now he wished he had not.

  ‘I suppose Sir Maui already knows of this,’ Davy says evenly, turning to the Minister for Internal Affairs alongside him. ‘But the honourable member is Minister for Health, not of education.’

  Maui Pomare turns his large handsome head towards the adviser with an expression of contempt. A doctor once, he has spent many years in America. He speaks with a faint twang. ‘Health, education, they go hand in hand. Ask any fool that, and he will tell you the obvious: it’s not enough for Māori children to be sound in body, though that is surely a beginning, but they’ll go nowhere in the Pākehā world without knowledge of its ways.’

  ‘Perhaps Sir Maui has known what you’re thinking a lot longer than the rest of us, Prime Minister.’

  Coates returns Davy’s stare. ‘This idea of mine is one I thought of on my way to work,’ he says. ‘It’s to do with the responsibility of parents to ensure that all children attend school on a regular basis, whether they be native schools or otherwise.’

  ‘Then if you have only thought of it this morning, we can’t put it through on today’s order paper. The bill has to be written.’

  Coates shrugs. ‘The matter will be raised, the public made aware.’ He laughs, runs his hand through his auburn hair. The debating chamber awaits, with its ornate furnishings, lush carpet and green leather chairs. He prepares himself for a performance to the visitors’ gallery, where the public watch. The ladies sit in a separate compartment and, even though they have to queue for a ticket in a way that the gentlemen do not, there are always several there, many of them dressed to kill, a fur stole draped casually around shoulders, hats with tilted brims, their mouths red bows. He looks up now and then, aware when one tries to catch his eye.

  He will keep his cabinet guessing. He knows the rules as well as they do; whether he will try to break them or not is entirely his business.

  Homing In

  The green sweep of the trees beside the driveway is what he loves best about Premier House. They are true trees of New Zealand, glossy-leaved, dark and dense and, on a night like this, dripping with fog-strewn cobwebs, shining in the light spilling from the house. When he walks up the drive, he remembers a particular section of land up north that stands apart from the burnt-over earth, with its stumps of scrub where grass has been sown. He owns this piece of land; it’s best not to remember that, but it keeps coming back to him, as if in a dream. It’s an area of bush so thick that a man could lose himself in a minute if he didn’t keep his wits about him. He has planted a kauri tree here in the grounds of his official residence, and one day, a thousand years on, someone will look at it in wonder, marvelling at how it came to grow here in the city.

  Premier House, 260 Tinakori Road — the two-storeyed wooden house also known as Ariki Toa — is set above the road. A huge glassed-in verandah on the right shelters the entranceway; beyond is a reception area, bay windows with handsome stained glass and leadlights, twinkling chandeliers. Its grandeur encompasses him. He always knew he had a place in the world. As though this were his destiny.

  The children’s voices rise to meet him, and then they are throwing themselves at him, one grabbing a hand, another throwing herself at his knees, a flurry of arms and legs. Irirangi — the one on whom he has been allowed to bestow a Māori name, although her skin is as pale as buttermilk, her hair with a hint of auburn gold like his own — and Patricia and Josephine. ‘Father, Father,’ they cry. ‘Where have you been?’

  And he’s telling them that it’s been a busy day at work, and the nanny is saying, ‘Quietly girls, quietly, now mind your father,’ and in the background one of the older girls, Sheila, he thinks, is at the piano playing something sweet and dreamy — ‘Für Elise’, perhaps, which is what young girls love to play when they are just getting the hang of music and their fingers are spreading across the keys beyond scales and nursery rhymes. A house full of women: five daughters, the sweet scent of their creamy, freshly washed bodies, and the nanny, who is still young herself, with dark hair and eyes and a flair for fashionable clothes, even if her ankles are not her strong point. He has thought, in passing, of slapping her bottom, just to see what she would do. And, somewhere, somewhere in here beyond the noise and bustle of welcome there is Marge, his pretty English wife with her big blue, adoring eyes.

  ‘Where is she?’ he asks the nanny. She looks at him and scowls, and his spirits sink a little. He had forgotten that the nanny is given to moods. Marge has told him that she has been unlucky in love, and that they should be kind to her when she is down. But sometimes he fears she is showing the disapproval Marge would never express, on his wife’s behalf. What has he done now?

  ‘Lying down,’ says the nanny.

  ‘Is she unwell?’

  ‘It’s the Irish in you,’ responds the woman, ‘all mad. You never stop to think, do you?’ The nanny is Scots Presbyterian. She had to think twice about taking on a job in this house, even though they were Protestants. Not the same kind of Protestants as her; the Irish never could be, she said at the time, which had made the prime minister laugh. Now it looks as if nobody is amused.

  Marge is coming towards him, her hair all over the place, her cheeks flushed and damp, as if she has indeed been lying in bed, and crying at that. She clutches the Evening Post.

  ‘Gordon,’ she says, ‘how could you?’

  There, pictured on the front page: he is walking, hand in hand, with Janie McCaw, out of the Thorndon Baths.

  Courting

  Perfume. It was Marjorie Cole’s scent that had attracted him from the beginning. She had been piteous on the first occasion he met her, a young woman from England who, against all her father’s advice and at only sixteen, had com
e to join her sister and brother-in-law in New Zealand. Her father was a doctor, a man of the world. The thought of this child going to the colonies seemed absurd when she could have a life of comfort at home. But her brother-in-law was sick and, as Marjorie had said to her father, ‘Whatever will Babs do among all those Māoris if poor Otter becomes worse?’ Her sister had written that they were going to take a small cottage near the sea at a place known as the Kaipara. The weather was good, orchards had been planted, the water teemed with fish. Somewhere Marjorie had read that the first settlers heard the sound of snapper fish crunching the shellfish on the shores of the harbour, and this information she read aloud to her father. The living would be easy.

  ‘What of these Māoris?’ her father asked.

  ‘Not many of them,’ Marjorie had replied, undaunted. ‘On the Kaipara, they have mostly killed each other off.’

  Babs and Otter were waiting when her ship sailed into Auckland. The three of them set off with little delay for the Kaipara, travelling by train and ferry to their home near the sea. Marjorie had become uncertain about their venture. On the voyage out, some people who came from the north had told her of the dangers of the Kaipara Harbour entrance, the people who had died. When the ferry rolled and pitched on the last stage of the trip, she thought she might die too.

  The small cottage proved to be nothing like an English cottage, more like a shed where a gardener might keep his tools, except a little larger, with a curtain dividing what passed for a bedroom: a double bed on one side and a single bed for her on the other. The travellers had brought a leg of mutton in their provisions and, on that first night, Marjorie put it in the cold oven of the stove and tried to light a fire. Otter had retired to bed, while Babs mopped him down from a fever that had overtaken him on the journey. Outside, in the failing light, a man approached on horseback. Gordon Coates had ridden over from Ruatuna, the family home, when his sister had remarked on the newcomers arriving with their bags and a cabin trunk, heading for the cottage up the road.

  ‘Everything all right?’ he called out to the girl standing distractedly in the doorway, running a hand through the waves of her hair. It was so clear that nothing was right that he dismounted and walked over to her. She put her face down so he couldn’t see the tears. He put his finger under her chin. She had the bluest eyes of any girl he had ever met. Even though she was in such a dishevelled state, he detected rose water, mixed with the girl’s own fresh scent. He had waited for this moment all his life.

  Only she was little more than a child. He could see it wouldn’t do.

  Later, when Otter had died and Babs remarried and gone to Australia, he found Marjorie working behind the perfume counter at Kirkcaldie & Stains, the big department store in Wellington. No, that isn’t quite how it happened. Babs had written him a note to say her sister had gone to the capital. She didn’t want to impose on him, and she knew he had affairs of state to attend to, but Marjorie was still a young girl. Perhaps he could look in on her at work. This was before he became prime minister, although such was the force of his delivery in the House, and the changes he had brought about for the poor, that everyone knew of him. He was just about to go to war. When he entered the shop, the doorman tipped his hat to him. The graceful notes of a piano being played on the second floor floated down the stairs. Ladies were making their way to the tearooms, where he knew from past visits there would be tiered stands of cakes and scones and tiny cucumber sandwiches.

  The perfume gathered from many gardens now assailed him. Marjorie was absorbed in her task of dabbing scent on the wrist of a customer. When she looked up, she smiled with her pretty rosy mouth, as if she already knew he was there. Her dress draped elegantly from her bustline. The hands that worked their way over the elderly wrist she supported were soft and white, with small shell-shaped nails. He wanted to hold her in his arms. He wanted her to lie in his bed with him. He thought, This is love. Although he had taken women in his arms many times, and they had told him they loved him, he had yet to tell a woman he loved her. He thought his heart a cold stone, but now it was not. For a moment he had to steady himself, so dizzy did he feel with emotion, not to mention the persistent drift of jasmine and lavender that suffused the air. Because he was who he was — Mr Coates — the supervisor of the counter agreed, without even raising her eyebrow, that Miss Cole might take an early lunch with her gentleman caller.

  ‘We’re apart in years,’ Marjorie said, when he blurted out his confession of love. They were not even properly seated.

  ‘Not enough to matter, surely,’ he said. ‘A dozen or so years. It’s neither here nor there.’ He had spoken to an attendant as they entered the tearoom, and now, as if by magic, the woman appeared bearing tea and one of the laden silver stands.

  ‘You hardly know me,’ she said, as she bit into a cucumber sandwich, shunning the scones with their jam and cream.

  ‘Of course I do,’ he said. ‘You think I didn’t watch out for you up north?’

  ‘I heard you had others to watch out for.’

  His face flushed then. ‘There’s always idle gossip in small towns.’

  ‘Is it not true then?’

  ‘It’s in the past,’ he said after a pause. ‘Whatever it was, it’s long ago gone. I would have married by now were that not the case.’

  ‘You’re certain of that?’

  ‘I’m bound to the Māori cause in politics,’ he said gruffly.

  ‘But not in your heart?’

  ‘Of course it’s in my heart. One cannot stand by and watch injustice. I owe an allegiance.’

  ‘To whom, Mr Coates? Who do you owe?’

  ‘The people,’ he replied. ‘You’ve seen the Kaipara. I owe the people of the Kaipara.’

  Her fingers pleated the sharp edges of the linen cloth in her lap.

  ‘Our home will be there?’

  ‘Eventually,’ he said. He spread his hand over hers, sensing her capitulation. ‘But for now you will stay here, and — God willing that I should return from this war — one day, I promise you, you’ll live in the prime minister’s house.’

  For her wedding gift, the following week, he bought a dressing table set of amberina perfume bottles, the glass full of reflected yellowish fire. He would have her, and have her, before he sailed. He would leave her with a daughter, but then Gordon Coates often did that to a woman. He would come back to her a hero, and the daughters would keep arriving.

  Land

  News travels fast in the north. It was always so. On the Kaipara one morning, a flight of fantails flickered around the doorway of the whare of Te Mate Manukau, and then, although he and his wife tried their best to stop it entering, one flew inside. Te Mate Manukau said to his wife, there is trouble in the south. There was bitterness in his voice.

  The land above the Ruawai plain seaward of the hill, Ngāti Whātua land, once belonged to the chief, but when his daughter gave birth to the first of her children, he gave it to the man who would be his son-in-law. That was what he believed. The chief continued to believe this when more children were born. He was proud that the man would marry his daughter. The man himself was a chief, a prince among men.

  Or so he considered then. He no longer believes that the marriage will take place, although sometimes a lingering hope stirs within him. The fantail entering his house is not a good sign and, since he gave over the land, his thoughts always turn in that direction and how he has come to lose that which was precious to him. The man who would have wed his daughter has changed his mind, had more children already by another woman, and left them behind too, one of them already dead.

  His thoughts fly to his grandchildren, who he can see at play not far away. It is simply the death of hope, he thinks then. It is a knowledge being borne to him that what he most desires will never happen.

  In the distance, he sees his daughter and, from the way she stands, he sees that she knows something already. Soon enough, he will find out the details for himself. He watches her walk across the paddock, head bow
ed. When she reaches the river, he calls sharply to her mother.

  Her eyes travel the path their daughter has taken. They take in her stance at the edge of the water, up to her knees in the mud, the mangroves closing around her, despair in every line of her body. ‘Stop her,’ Te Mate commands his wife. His wife can run faster than he can with his stick.

  ‘She’ll come back.’

  Te Mate is gathering himself, urging his wife on.

  ‘In a minute she will be all right,’ she says.

  ‘How can you say that?’

  ‘She knows he is gone. She knew long ago. Don’t startle her.’

  So it is as he thought, although nobody has told them; it is about the man.

  After a time that seems to go on forever, although really it is just a minute or two, their daughter straightens herself, returns the way she went, wiping a mud-stained sleeve across her face. The eldest of her girls runs towards her, pulls at her hand.

  Aroha, my darling, my darling, be happy.

  It is true, she has thought of slipping into the river, letting it sweep her along out through the mouth of the Kaipara. Of course, her father had been angry. He had given the land. Beautiful land, still clad in bush, tall trees, dark furled ferns, a stand of tōtara.

  But what good had his rages done? Gordon wouldn’t change his ways. He didn’t for her, nor for Annie Ngapo, with whom he has also had children. At the store this morning, the ferryman told her: he is married, it is in the newspaper. The Pākehā girl with a face like whey who stayed here a little while, you know the one I mean? And she knew straight away that it was true, and what she had been told did not surprise her. She had always sensed the ambition in his barrel chest, the one that covered hers so many times, her breasts against his skin. They have known each other since they were children. Through and through. The smell of each other when they lay together. Mussels and eels, whisky and tobacco, their dark mingled musk close to the earth. She could hear the sound of him thinking in the stillest moment.