All the Way to Summer

by Fiona Kidman

  ‘You’d better. Georgie’s expecting you to make up four for dinner.’

  ‘Who’s coming?’

  He looks uncomfortable. ‘You’re not the only house guest. His name is Miles.’

  ‘Lewis! Georgie’s not matchmaking again?’

  ‘She met him on a course a couple of years back.’ His voice is uneasy. Georgie paints in oils, mostly abstracts. ‘Miles runs a gallery in Auckland. He’s been on a buying trip down here. Georgie must have mentioned him.’

  ‘Of course, I’d forgotten,’ Veronica lies. ‘Is he gay?’ Straight away she regrets the question.

  ‘Probably,’ he says, more comfortably. Veronica fumes in silence as she completes her preparations, wishing now that she were staying at home. Of course, Lewis and Georgie are always having people to stay: Georgie’s new friends, the ones she has made as she has grown older, or Lewis’s students. He teaches part-time at the hospital, the kind of mentor who inspires the young and takes them home to feed and comfort. Hand-fattening, Georgie says. Beautiful creatures, but hungry.

  ‘How are the children?’ he asks, studying photographs of her daughter and son.

  ‘Fine. Freya sends her love. She’s in love again, it seems.’ Freya is twenty-three and never seems to settle at things for long. ‘And Sam’s still in Africa.’

  ‘You miss them?’

  ‘I’ve never been so free,’ she says, collecting her coat. She doesn’t mean to sound short, but it’s such a stupid meaningless question. She misses her children every day, like an affliction. Some days she doesn’t know whether she will resist the temptation to ring them, wherever they are. Not that it’s easy to get in touch with her son, a fledgling botanist. She sees him in the hot sun of Africa (had he got this from Lewis, all those African masks he saw on childhood visits?) and remembers the way he burned so easily when he was small. At least there is email, and he lets her know from time to time that he is safe.

  Lewis’s eyes moisten as he looks at a small framed watercolour, a delicate painting of a lake beneath clouds.

  ‘Remember when you bought this? That weekend we all went to Rotorua and swam under the hot falls?’

  ‘Vaguely.’ Veronica is checking her locks. Every evening she inspects them three or four times. It takes time, there are three doors, the back, the front and the garage. Lewis drums his fingers on the table with a gathering impatience.

  ‘I don’t take risks. Twelve … five, four more to go.’

  ‘We were students, you must remember.’ Lewis is saying in the background. It is not the violation itself she is afraid of anymore, not the battering of the body, the penetration, which she can hardly imagine anymore, it is more the loss of solitude, the secret self that old women know. She must have been crazy to say she would spend a weekend in the country with these people. ‘You and Colin bought this later in the day, when we wandered into that exhibition.’ His irritation with her fussing is palpable.

  ‘So we did. I think you bought it for us actually.’

  ‘Veronica, don’t. Please.’

  She does remember that day of course, but he doesn’t need to know that. They were students then. They were singing and not very sober, that night when they swam at the falls, all three of them skinny-dipping.

  ‘Are we going or what?’ She pulls the door too hard behind them.

  ‘I see you’ve cut the trees,’ he says as they climb the path to his car.

  ‘Only thinned. They were blocking the light.’

  ‘What would Colin have said? He was sentimental about trees.’

  ‘Oh, who cares?’ she snaps. ‘Ask him if you’re so keen to know what he thinks.’

  He lifts her bag into the boot of the car without answering.

  Colin is long gone. He drills wells on the Canterbury Plains and shares a house with his business partner, Nicko. Freya says her father is actually growing rich and careful, and a bit thick around the waist. Nicko makes fantastic lattes for breakfast. He does most of the cooking and keeps the firm’s books. Veronica wrinkled her brow at this information. There is something she would have liked to ask Freya, but she didn’t.

  Veronica has never told Lewis exactly how she and Colin came to part. In fact, she has never told anyone because what happened was so crazy and peculiar.

  They had taken a holiday in Gisborne, that small city of swirling beaches and vineyards where the sun rises earlier than on any other city in the world. Although it was a holiday, Colin walked around with a little notebook practising his keen observer’s look, snooping on conversations in cafés, hushing Veronica — he was trying his hand at writing for the stage. The newspaper job was long behind him. The children were teenagers when they made what turned out to be Colin and Veronica’s last trip together. They decided to stay home, and this, in itself, had undone Veronica. She couldn’t believe they wouldn’t come. She worked hard on family holidays.

  ‘Let’s stay in a motel,’ Colin suggested. ‘Have a real break. Who needs tents and sand in our lunch anymore?’

  In the evenings, Veronica walked through the town on her own. Colin said it was a good time to write up his journal. Sometimes when she returned, she would find him sitting, staring into space. He had had a new book due out in the spring, called Ginger Modern, thematically linked poems about an artist who steps out of a post-modern frame into his own reality. They had some spare money. Veronica worked full time again, and Colin usually had some freelance work of one kind or another. Once or twice, he said, well, look, love, you can’t just create all the time.

  Every evening, Veronica took the same route, dawdling in front of the shops. Cars sped up and down the wide streets, horns honking, girls shrieking. A car stopped one evening while she stood looking into the window of a closed shop, coveting a dress and planning to come back the following day. She felt herself lifted in an instant, scooped up into the vehicle.

  A car door slammed shut behind her. Her scream was lost beneath the squeal of tyres. There were three young men, one on each side in the back seat and the driver. They were young dangerous-looking men with dreadlocks and tattooed throats. Beside the driver sat a Rottweiler, the hairs on his ruff standing up.

  It is the Rottweiler that will save Veronica.

  ‘So what youse doing out?’ asked the grubby youth beside her. The hairiness of his shirt like a pelt against her bare arm, his hand with broken fingernails close to her knee.

  ‘Walking,’ she said, her throat dry with terror. ‘Just out for a walk.’

  ‘You want a beer, missus?’

  ‘No. But thanks.’ I am too old for this was her thought. Glancing sideways at the boy’s jeans to see whether the dark stretching of his cock had begun, fighting rising nausea. The smell of sour beer, the dirty seat, the dog’s fetid breath in her face.

  ‘What’s the dog’s name?’ she asked, keeping her voice as soft and level as she could.

  ‘The Tyrant,’ said the driver. From the pride in his voice, she could tell she had taken him unawares.

  ‘Eh, Tyrant.’ The Rottweiler subsided, regarding her with curious, friendly eyes. ‘Eh, good boy.’

  The dog reached forward and licked her face.

  ‘Shit,’ said the driver. ‘Bloody mongrel. Where you from?’

  ‘Wellington.’

  ‘Walling-ton,’ he mimicked her, as if she were the queen in a flowered hat and white gloves taking the Mickey out of them. This was the most dangerous moment, she would think later.

  ‘Why don’t we buy him a tin of tucker at the dairy?’ She fondled the dog’s neck.

  ‘Yeah, why not?’ said the driver. Perhaps they had thought she was younger when they picked her up, that they would like her more. Or the driver was just weary of driving around and taking risks. ‘We’re skint.’

  ‘I could just give you the money.’

  ‘How much?’

  Veronica emptied her shoulder bag into her lap, counting notes and loose change, fifty dollars in all.

  They had circled the town, back to wh
ere they picked her up. ‘Have a nice night,’ one of them said.

  ‘See you,’ she said. The street was as empty as ten minutes before. She leaned against the window of the frock shop, overwhelmed with such desolation that she thought she would never recover.

  A part of her is ashamed, even now. She is ashamed that she did nothing. The next woman might not have been so fortunate, not so able to deal with unruly young men, she might not have liked dogs.

  But when she got back to the motel, Colin looked up from his journal, his face furious. ‘You’re back early,’ he said.

  ‘Something happened.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  She picked up the shiny motel kettle, intending to make tea. ‘D’you want to hear?’

  ‘Christ, Veronica, why d’you always interrupt? Just when I’m getting going?’

  When she didn’t answer, he said: ‘Well, what was it then?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  In the morning, she said she was going home. She said they should stop living together, there didn’t seem to be any point. In her ashamed heart lurked gratitude. Freedom seemed to have come cheap at the price.

  Secrets. Veronica has one of her own.

  Still, all these years later, she wakes early in the morning and checks locks she knows perfectly well she had secured the night before; in a bookshop one night she hears a young poet reading (for she discovers that a love of poetry is not necessarily forsaken along with the poet): ‘she leaves her fingers in the locks’ the poet says, it’s a phrase that haunts her. It is as if the poem has been written for her. I don’t want to be caught unawares, she says … I don’t take risks.

  Although she tells no one about her experience, it is one of those full-stops in her history. A moment she can refer to in all that collection of years that is her life.

  When she told Lewis about the separation, he laid the palms of his hands flat down on his desk — she had gone to his rooms to tell him — tears leaking along his nose and into the corner of his mouth. Veronica didn’t actually leave Colin. He was the one who moved out. She could have the lot, her middle-class dump. He was lucky to be out of it.

  This is not exactly what he told Lewis, sitting in the back bar of De Brett’s.

  ‘She needs counselling,’ he had said.

  ‘Not Veronica,’ said Lewis.

  ‘What about those poems I dedicated to her?’ Colin said, head in his hands.

  ‘Well, what about them?’

  ‘I’ll have to disown them. Are we still friends?’

  ‘You’ve got a nerve,’ Lewis said. Or this is the version he told Veronica.

  By then, Lewis had married Georgie, years before all this happened. It wasn’t as if they were all hanging out together by then. But Lewis had never abandoned her.

  Veronica leans back on the ivory-coloured leather of the car’s upholstery, the dashboard twinkling before her as they join the traffic flow stretching north. The silence between them is not a great way to start the weekend, their usual easy rapport absent.

  ‘He was my friend, too,’ Lewis says by way of an icebreaker.

  ‘I know, I know,’ Veronica replies, because something has to be said. They have started this conversation several times over the years, but it never goes anywhere. Really, what Lewis means … what they both mean is: Once we both loved Colin. Only he didn’t live up to our expectations. Which seems callous. As if they are betraying themselves and their own finer feelings.

  ‘Miles isn’t gay,’ Lewis says, although she hadn’t asked. They are waiting at the roundabout for the traffic to clear.

  ‘Miles? Oh, the house guest.’

  ‘Georgie’s friend.’ His voice is a trifle heavy.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind turning over some of my pictures,’ Veronica says, glad of the opportunity to steer the conversation in a different direction. ‘Perhaps I could talk to this art dealer.’

  ‘I like your pictures the way they are. Oh, this damn traffic.’ His fingers drum on the steering wheel. ‘Georgie will be waiting for us.’

  After her marriage, Georgie’s defiant self-confidence seemed to ebb. ‘It’s lonely being a doctor’s wife,’ she would complain, her voice puzzled and uncertain.

  Lewis would be at his wits’ end. ‘For God’s sake talk to her, will you, Veronica?’

  ‘There’s so much responsibility,’ Georgie would complain. ‘This woman says she’s dying of a hernia, the pain’s so bad, do you think she’ll die?’ ‘Oh, Veronica, I can’t stand how people are in pain, but I don’t know whether to call Lewis or not. What’s a real emergency?’ ‘Veronica, we went out to dinner the other night. I’m sure his friends are all laughing at me, all those wives that doctors find in Fendalton and Khandallah. It’s because I’m from Upper Hutt.’ ‘Veronica, I think I’m too young for him.’

  There were times when Veronica thought Georgie might leave Lewis because of all this. She would talk to Georgie with patience and sympathy. Like Maura, whom Georgie had rescued all those years ago, Georgie loved children and didn’t have any for a long time. There is a difference though. Lewis and Georgie’s marriage was not without heat. But it meandered on and on for years, filled with Lewis’s exhausting compassion for his patients, his collection of treasures and their annual travel: Italy, France (all one summer in Arles), the Lake District. Georgie had absorbed a certain amount of knowledge about music and art and food. Indeed, her experiences are broader than Veronica’s, although she, too, can afford to travel these days and sometimes does.

  And now Georgie has the girls, and Lewis is not on call so often, his practice expanded to include other, younger doctors. At forty, when the subject of children had been dropped as an embarrassing faux pas in their presence, Georgie had become pregnant, as if her hormones had suddenly been kick-started. Her life is full in the way Veronica’s used to be. The blonde blade of a girl has been replaced by one of those intense older mothers.

  She will be waiting for them beside the quiet estuary of the sea where she and Lewis live. There will be pied stilts and herons stalking, high-arched, through the silver-grey skein of water that Georgie looks out upon from her kitchen window, a row of boatsheds, the blue trickle of hilltops on the horizon. A lifestyle property. The two little girls will be reading books in the glowing gold-and-blue room that opens off the kitchen, the table set for dinner, a bottle of wine standing open. During the day, Georgie will have taken two or three calls from her mother, who lives in a rest home. ‘What will you have for dinner?’ her mother will have asked. ‘Have you been out? Who did you see?’ Or Georgie’s brother may have phoned to ask for money. Georgie tells Veronica about these problems because there is nobody else amongst her friends whom she can tell. ‘Although Lewis is so good,’ she says wistfully, as if she would have liked to bring a wholesome family to her marriage, like a dowry.

  ‘Miles has arrived,’ says Lewis as they sweep into the circular driveway. He makes Miles sound like a present, gift-wrapped and ready. But who is he a present for? And if he is intended for Georgie, why then has she been asked?

  ‘I’m out of control,’ Veronica tells herself, ‘my fantastical silly mind.’ She lives too much in the fabulous clues of history, her own and others. She remembers the first time she stood in front of a class. ‘History’s not definite,’ she had said in a tentative voice. ‘It’s not all facts and set in concrete. It’s more like a jigsaw puzzle or a mystery story, one piece leading to another. We can, each one of us, look at a landscape or a character in history, or even a set of dates, and see something different from what anyone has seen before.’

  ‘Like smelling rats in a dunny,’ said a girl in the front row, a supercilious girl with a Roman nose and freckles.

  ‘Quite,’ Veronica had said in her young earnest voice, ignoring the way laughter ran around the class, ‘the connections and clues are limitless.’

  But she has built a career and a lifetime on smelling rats without ever quite finding the source of the smell.

  Her place in this
family is clear. She has become the aunt, as the children call her, to be dutifully tended. Lewis and Georgie are kind.

  The idea of Fauvism, what Georgie describes as ‘wild beasts and bright nothingness’, has taken hold of her imagination, the words tripping off her tongue. I am at one with the idea of the spirit’s journey into the unknown, she tells Miles, while he nods his head up and down and tugs at his beard. He is older than Veronica expected, older than any of them, a man with a big barrel-shaped chest, soft grey hair neatly cut to collar length. He is dressed in a tan raw-silk jacket, a black shirt, his throat bare. A touch tropical for this time of year, but in the firelight he is a graceful energetic figure. He has robust, interesting hands. Yet Veronica sees the way he guards himself, not giving too much of himself away.

  ‘To own a Chagall,’ Georgie enthuses, ‘what more could there be to life?’

  At which Miles frowns and sighs. ‘Art may be for the upwardly mobile, but it pains me to say, my dear Georgie, that I think Chagall is out of even your reach. Or my gallery for that matter.’

  Georgie flushes, as if caught out at child’s play. It’s been a while since Veronica last saw her. Her tawny hair is teased up with back-combing. Fine threads of gold nestle in her collar bones, veins throbbing like satin piping in her throat. When she smiles, her upper lip rides a little too high above her teeth, as if she were trying very hard at something.

  ‘Not to own the picture in that way,’ she says. ‘You don’t understand. Just to be able to wake up and look at it. To think about the journey.’

  ‘The journey, oh, yes,’ says Miles.

  ‘Surely there’s more to art than sales,’ Veronica says, defending Georgie.

  ‘That’s not what he said,’ Georgie replies, her voice sharp. She has put on music, The Penguin Café’s ‘Oscar Tango’, intense swollen music that makes Veronica’s head throb.

  She has changed her clothes, something was called for. She leans back, feeling more or less presentable in a grey sweater, more like a tunic, a slender black skirt, long Turkish silver earrings. All the same, she doesn’t feel at home in Georgie and Miles’s company, more like a detached stranger trying to break into a group without any guidelines as to what will interest them.