All the Way to Summer

by Fiona Kidman

  So, when he asked her that last time they were together, ‘What is it that you want?’, she had known that he trusted her not to tell him the truth, not to say the words that would have kept him. It was in her power to tear his heart apart, but she didn’t. What use was half a heart to her? She didn’t say, ‘Just you, just you for always,’ because that would have been to hold him when he wanted to be set free. Instead she said, ‘My darling, my darling, be happy.’ And another baby stirred in her womb.

  Postscript

  Long after, years and years on, when the old people are gone, Gordon will come back to the Kaipara, his power faded, the dances and parties over and also the money, of which there was never as much as one might have thought. He will want to give the land back. When the people say, ‘No, it is too late, it cannot be put right now,’ he will suggest that one of his daughters marry into the family, so that they will be linked with the land. The daughter herself will seem not to be against this.

  But her mother is English. She will say, it will not do.

  Tell Me the Truth about Love

  1

  On this blustery Friday afternoon in July, Veronica is able to tell Drew McGuire that she has somewhere else to go after work. She doesn’t need to join her colleagues for their weekly social drinks. Thank God it’s Friday, but not for her.

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ says Drew, as they tramp the school’s linoleum-floored corridors. ‘You can tell me, Vronnie. I know what it’s like to be lonely.’

  Vronnie. A name he called her when they were young. Nobody uses this name now; it belongs in the dustbin of memories, along with Afro perms and protest movements; Veronica wore maxi skirts and platform soles at the time.

  Drew has temporarily rejoined the staff, after an absence of years. He is a thin, fair man, his balding white skull only lightly masked with thread-like hair. Thick spectacles shroud his light-blue eyes. It is his short-sightedness that has caused him to leave the stage.

  Drew was an eccentric teacher of English when he first came to the school. The kids liked his accent and his manic gleeful impersonations. People said he was just too good to stay in teaching. Veronica, who loves teaching, could never see the logic in this. She’s always liked chalk and scratchy blackboards and the smell of big boys and girls in uniform on wet days. Drew can’t wait to be off again when his cataract operation is done. For a while in the nineties, he was in a comedy show on television. He keeps his cell phone on in class to take producers’ calls.

  Well, yes, Veronica thinks, Drew probably has been lonely, two or three times. She has gathered that Drew is currently unattached. But it is the end of his first marriage that she remembers.

  ‘Truly,’ she says, ‘I’m going to stay with friends in the country.’ It sounds like a Russian novel. She decides not to tell him who she is going to stay with.

  ‘Well, just give me a bell, sweetheart.’ He says sweetheart in a deep theatrical way. He and Veronica have arrived at the end of the corridor. Drew stops and fumbles in his pocket for a notebook.

  ‘Have you got a pen on you? I’ll give you my number.’ Can he be serious? She sees herself as he must, a thickening teacher of history, with straight toffee-coloured hair streaked with grey, half spectacles perched on the end of her nose.

  And there is the matter of the past. Surely, he cannot have forgotten the role she played in his life. But perhaps that is her complication, the long view she brings to everything she sees, to the people who reach out to her. More likely he is just thinking that she is someone who might be available. Still, she can’t help wondering how well, even, does he remember Maura?

  ‘Now you will ring me,’ he fusses, handing her a slip of paper. ‘In the old days, we could talk to each other, you and me.’ That is not how she recalls it, but at least it is an acknowledgement. The world is changing all around him, Veronica thinks, and he hasn’t noticed. It’s like cyberspace hasn’t been invented. That’s what she likes about history: it’s fluid, it changes all the time. Perhaps that’s why she remembers all that detail about their lives and re-evaluates it over and again. Some day she hopes she will work it all out. Whereas Drew, she suspects, watching him disappear in the direction of the staffroom, is stuck with a notion of how they were, youthful and unchanged by the passage of time.

  Colin was a dark rosy-lipped poet with slim hips and a sweet white smile. His study was a shed in the back garden of the house where Veronica still lives. Handsome young men sat around like acolytes and smoked dope with stringy girls in overalls. Veronica got sick of pulling marijuana plants from between the daisy bushes. The girls talked about menstrual extraction, anger management and recipes for vegetable stew. They walked through the house without knocking. This was Wellington in the days when poets and artists around town still held salons in squalid houses while their wives cooked in woks over broken gas rings. The last of the wild children. By the end of the decade, they would be talking about shares and the falling value of the stock market.

  Veronica and Colin’s house was almost indecent in its newness, a wooden bungalow on the down side of the road in Highbury, but at least they caught a glimpse of the ocean. Colin was becoming famous; it was the time when he began to think he was invincible. His photograph was in the papers, usually looking hunky and casual, while driving a truck, which is what he did for a part-time job. The Listener ran a double-spread feature on him, he often read poems on the Concert Programme in his dark uncultivated voice with its hint of a vee in place of ‘th’, and a singing intonation. Real New Zild, but true, a second Baxter, another Glover, raved one reviewer, not quite what he wanted to hear; he was hanging out with the Black Mountain poets, stylistically, and he thought it was bad for his image. Women rang him late at night. One of his poems was about a Canadian girl with eyes ‘like burnt holes in the ice’. More like two piss holes in the snow, said Veronica, who had met the girl. But she said it with a smile because she did trust him, and because she couldn’t see that anyone could see much in the girl anyway.

  Veronica paid the mortgage but didn’t mind, at least not very much, although she would have liked the garden to herself on Sunday afternoons by way of reward. ‘My wife, the bank manager’s daughter,’ Colin said with a laugh. ‘I married into the middle classes.’ Veronica hated it when he talked like this. Her father was just a bank clerk, she explained, nothing grand. Besides, Colin’s references to money management made her feel bossy and difficult. Colin’s family were farm labourers. ‘Farm labourers never had to worry about mortgages,’ he declared, ‘they never got them.’ The true prole. He and Veronica had met at teachers training college, after Colin finished his degree, but he had flagged teaching before he even started. That bothered Veronica, but by that time they were already married, the glamour couple, the party animals at college, who had taken the plunge as soon as they graduated. At the time, Veronica felt swept off her feet.

  ‘Sometimes I feel like we’re drifting,’ Veronica told Lewis. Lewis was best man at their wedding and their oldest mutual friend. He was a doctor, setting up his first practice. ‘A doctor who can quote Milton and the Book of Common Prayer,’ Colin said if asked to describe Lewis. ‘Would you believe it?’ ‘What hath night to do with sleep’ was Lewis’s favourite quote when they flatted together in university days. But it went back further than that. Lewis had loved words when they were children, living on different sides of the track in the same small town. Perhaps Colin would never have learned anything had it not been for Lewis.

  In the early years of Veronica and Colin’s marriage, Lewis visited every weekend that he wasn’t on duty. Although he rented a beautiful apartment on The Terrace, crammed with treasures from regular travel as the years passed — old maps, African masks, Asian statues — he often preferred to sleep over on their convertible divan than stay at his place alone. ‘Lewis is married to us,’ Veronica and Colin half joked to each other. There were times when they were hard up — which was most of the time — when they would suddenly have a little mo
ney, and Veronica guessed that they had had help again and that it wasn’t from her parents.

  ‘Of course you’re not drifting,’ Lewis said sturdily that afternoon. He and Veronica had been drinking coffee in the kitchen while Colin entertained in the garden. ‘You two are the air each other breathe. C’mon, let’s see what the blighter’s up to.’

  And they walked together down the garden, Veronica pleased to have Lewis at her side as they took their place in the group. Nobody appeared to notice their arrival.

  At some point, Lewis’s visits had become less frequent, she can’t remember exactly when, but perhaps for a while without her noticing. ‘Jealous,’ Colin said when Veronica mentioned it. ‘He was always jealous of my friends.’

  ‘He wasn’t jealous of me,’ Veronica had protested.

  ‘That was different.’ He used a tone of exaggerated patience, as if something obvious were escaping her.

  What Colin said bothered her. It implied an oddness in Lewis, a failing she couldn’t see. ‘I’ll give him a bell, and he’ll turn up, you’ll see,’ was all Colin said.

  Colin hated school teachers’ parties. Grown ups playing party games, he snorted. He accompanied Veronica with bad grace; it was a time when it was still not all right to turn up on your own and say your husband was in bed with a cold. Either he went or you stayed home.

  When Christmas came around, that year she remembers so clearly, there was nothing for it but beseech him to come. She was due to go on maternity leave, there would be a farewell speech for her. Well, what would she tell them, that he would be there or not? This cost her an effort because of course it was about what people thought, and Colin was fond of saying he didn’t care about that.

  ‘Of course I’ll come,’ he said, putting his arms around her, or as far as her big stomach would allow. ‘Whatever made you think I wouldn’t?’

  This was the party where they met Drew and Maura, newly arrived from Scotland. Drew was due to take up his position in the New Year. You noticed him straight away, dressed in a kilt. He danced with all the staff wives, even Veronica, fox-trotting her around the cleared staffroom at arm’s length. He turned games into feats of daring, building a tower of chairs and climbing them, to stand one-legged at the top of the steeple.

  ‘I dare you,’ he yelled to the other men. And they did it, the younger men anyway, so that the party turned reckless and chaotic. When Colin’s turn came, to Veronica’s surprise, he joined in, climbing to the ceiling, where he wobbled uncertainly before collapsing through space, landing heavily on one foot. ‘Oh, shit,’ he gasped, ‘my bloody, bloody ankle.’ But he was laughing, and it wasn’t broken, only sprained, so that he had to keep it strapped for a month. He would appear at his next reading leaning elegantly on a cane.

  Maura never said a word while her husband was performing all these tricks. She sat frozen in a corner and jumped when Veronica spoke to her, responding in a whispering voice. Veronica thought she looked like a margarine sculpture, bland and slightly off-colour. She was a nurse, her specialty nursing children; she thought she would land a job at the hospital quite easily, she said, when prompted.

  ‘Of course I like children,’ she said, gulping and looking away from Veronica’s swollen stomach. A deep blush flooded her impossibly fair skin when she saw that Veronica noticed. Veronica tried to imagine Maura amongst children’s downy heads, bending over them with a sweet, transforming grace. Shy, she decided.

  A crowd, including Drew and Maura, ended up at Colin and Veronica’s. Colin hobbled around playing the host. He and Drew became friends on the spot.

  If Colin went to a party now, he could just get drunk without the games. Except the last time their daughter saw her father he was drinking straight vegetable juice.

  During summer, Colin showed Drew around and took him for trips in his battered Bedford van. The van was sky-blue with fluffy white clouds that Colin had painted on the doors. The young people had gone away to follow the sun, or summer jobs. Maura worked at her new job, and Veronica awaited the birth of Freya. Colin was off work because of his injured ankle. Drew had his almost undivided attention, except in the evenings when Colin wrote late into the night. ‘Vronnie, this is the life,’ he would say when he came to bed, red-eyed and spent. ‘Drew really understands what I’m going through.’

  ‘So, what are you going through?’

  ‘I’ve got to make some changes. I’ve got to settle into my own voice. It’s all crap, don’t you see? I’m sick of the Appalachian bullshit, I need to go back to real meaning. Forget about the kids. It’s time I moved on.’

  ‘I see,’ said Veronica, longing to sleep, thinking her waters might break at any moment and deny her the luxury. She’d heard variations on this theme before. The poets he knew were old fools and young fools, and women.

  ‘I need to begin again at the beginning.’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ she said, closing her eyes.

  Colin said he was thinking of getting in touch with Sam Hunt, but he understood Hunt preferred to do his gigs on his own. He might set himself up doing something like that, a tour in the country. Perhaps Drew could go with him and act as his manager, they could do a kind of double act.

  ‘Drew’s got a job. He’s starting next week at the school.’

  ‘In the holidays, I was thinking.’

  ‘We’ll have a baby by then.’

  ‘It’s getting the money together to get started,’ Colin said gloomily, as if she hadn’t spoken.

  ‘I suppose so,’ Veronica said.

  Veronica found it impossible to explain the way she missed Lewis when he wasn’t around. After all, he was Colin’s friend first. But Freya brought him back to them, as if he’d never been away. He was almost fatherly towards Freya, the baby who had arrived in the heat of late summer. He visited at the hospital when she was born and distracted the staff with advice bordering on instructions. When she went home, he popped in after surgery just to see how she was doing. He appeared one afternoon while Colin was holding court. A look of surprise and disapproval registered on his face as he looked down the garden from the verandah. Veronica could see him waiting for Colin to give a sign that he had seen him. It didn’t come.

  Colin stood reading poems aloud to his audience, one hand clutching a sheaf of scruffy papers, the other combing his wavy hair back from his forehead.

  Drew sat at the edge of the circle beside the daphne bush, for once appearing a little aloof, perhaps because he was older. Around his head he wore a red-and-blue bandana, a stubble of beard sprouted on his chin.

  Lewis leaned on the railing, listening to Colin, his face working.

  … and so I came to where

  you slept

  touched the dreaming

  of your face and knew

  your dreams were all of me …

  ‘He’s still flogging Ginger Modern,’ Lewis said.

  Colin’s very first published poem. Veronica had been proud of it when it appeared, not long after she met him. ‘It’s for you,’ Colin said, as if she might need reassurance that there was nobody else in his life. People looked at her, knowing she was loved by a poet. Like being the mistress of a king or a president.

  ‘I always liked it,’ she said.

  ‘Of course,’ said Lewis after a pause. His knuckles were white along the edge of the rail. ‘Of course, so you should. And who’s that chap?’ He was referring to Drew. The way Colin recited the poem, he looked as if he were speaking directly to Drew.

  ‘Oh, him, that’s Drew McGuire,’ Veronica said. ‘Trust Colin to show off to the newcomer. He’s been quite taken with him.’

  ‘You should take a firm stand,’ Lewis said violently.

  Veronica was taken aback. Perhaps Lewis really was jealous. She remembers the tremor of the shock she felt, the way something was being said, and not said.

  ‘It’s the artist’s life, I guess,’ Veronica sighed, pushing aside her discomfort. ‘He’s doing so well, what am I supposed to say? You can’t expect him to live
just like you, Lewis.’ If there was something prissy about the way she said this, she didn’t care. Lewis didn’t have the right.

  Chalk and cheese, the two men used to boast. But the elements were falling apart.

  ‘I get tired of the chip on his shoulder. It’s time he grew up.’

  Drew stood up on a signal from Colin. He had brought his bagpipes with him.

  ‘You’re not going without saying hullo, are you?’

  ‘You tell him from me,’ Lewis said as he left, the opening strains of ‘Amazing Grace’ in his wake.

  Veronica and Colin received an unexpected invitation to visit Drew and Maura. To please Drew, Veronica agreed. Now that she had Freya, visiting was like an interruption to the daily flow of happiness that she felt. Freya occupied her night and day. Every fold of her dimpled skin, the beginning of a smile, the extraordinary scent of her, like ripe pears, absorbed her. Her secret little thought: I don’t need history, I’ve made it. There is nothing she would not do for this miracle.

  The invitation was for Sunday lunch, although Drew called it their ‘dinner’. Their flat was a square one-bedroom box with blankets thrown over the shabby armchairs. There was no sign of Maura. ‘She’s late back from her shift at the hospital,’ Drew said. ‘I don’t expect her to be long.’

  He produced some beer from the fridge. Veronica, who was breastfeeding, drank tap water. Drew put on a record, Brailowsky playing Chopin’s ‘Polonaises’ plink plink plink, on and on as the afternoon wore away.

  ‘We wouldn’t have come if we’d known Maura was working,’ Veronica told Drew, sitting and rocking Freya.

  And, later still: ‘We would have brought something to eat, something to help out, perhaps we should go now?’