All the Way to Summer

by Fiona Kidman

  The Sylvia Hotel at English Bay in Vancouver seemed the most perfect hotel in the world. It was covered with ivy; the interiors had dark old beams and rich stained-glass windows. I slept in a bed of such deep comfort in a large airy room that, when I woke up late in the afternoon, I was happy and felt free. I walked along to a shopping centre and bought a face mask from a cosmetics supermarket, complete with an open cool bin of products that looked as if they should have been in a delicatessen. The face mask was made from shiitake mushrooms and came in a pottle, resting on ice inside another little container. Elsewhere, I bought an umbrella and a Vancouver newspaper. I went back to the Sylvia Hotel and put the mask on my face. It seemed as if flesh was being drawn to the surface. Afterwards, I felt totally cleansed, as if I were making myself over into a new person. I sat and watched the sea and ate a chicken breast stuffed with ginger and grapefruit.

  On the flight from Calgary, my plane flew into the eye of the sun, its bright glare leaning through the window. I sat beside the young man I’d met up with in Banff. We had reached that stage of intimacy that insisted (or he did anyway) that we sit together on aeroplanes in order to continue, uninterrupted, the story of our lives. A seemingly endless narrative. I remember the feeling of being dazzled by the sunlight.

  Flo flew in an aeroplane only once in her life, the only time she left New Zealand. She and a group of her friends from the council decided to go to Rarotonga for a holiday. As she went to the departure lounge, her foot caught in the escalator and she fell down and knocked her head. She went on with the journey because she was with her friends, but she didn’t like it, didn’t have a good time. Give me good old New Zealand any day, was all she said about it. Fear of falling. One way or another.

  Once, in the town where my parents and I lived when I was young, my mother ran into Wilf Morton. She was standing in the hardware shop and heard a voice asking for a pound of nails. She knew him straight away, she said, even though his hair was iron grey and he was standing with his back to her. It was something about the way he spoke, as if asking for a pound of nails were a favour he was bestowing on the shopkeeper.

  I only knew about this at the time because I heard my mother telling my father in a low angry voice that evening. But later on, I could see it very clearly. I have a photograph of Wilf, which was tucked in an envelope inside one of the recipe books that I salvaged from Flo’s house, his name written on the back in pencil.

  ‘I said to him, “What are you doing here, Wilf Morton?”’

  ‘And what did he say?’ my father asked, with unusual animation. He enjoyed stories in which my mother’s family came out worse than he did, not that Wilf Morton had ever been family.

  ‘He lives here,’ my mother spat.

  ‘Oh, Gawd, that’s serious,’ my father said.

  ‘On the other side of the inlet.’

  ‘Well, I suppose that’s not so bad. You can keep your eyes skinned when you go to town.’

  ‘Why should I have to cross the road to avoid that man?’

  ‘Fair enough,’ my father said. ‘Did he say what he was up to?’

  ‘He said he was retired.’

  ‘Retired from what?’

  ‘Exactly,’ said my mother. ‘That’s what I said to him — “And what are you retired from, Wilf?” He didn’t answer me, just smirked.’

  I reminded my mother of this once, when we were talking about family matters and the interminable question of why Flo was like she was. (This surfaced when Flo had been irascible or silent on our visits, especially in the days when Helena lived with her.) I’d heard the bones of the story about Wilf leaving Flo once before.

  ‘Oh, that Wilf Morton.’ My mother shrugged in the oblique sort of way her family had.

  ‘What made him so dreadful? Apart from leaving her.’

  ‘There were some things missing,’ she said.

  ‘You mean he stole things?’

  ‘Something like that.’ They didn’t go into details either in that family. A trinket, a farm, a heart — my mother could have meant any of those things. A sense of honour, perhaps; we might think it misplaced nowadays.

  I had been asleep. The young man had kindly placed a pillow against me. I looked down on a tapestry of forests and lakes beginning to cloud with ice. Soon we would be in Winnipeg. The young man had quickened my senses, but I was old enough to know that what seems romantic on the outside can be a substitute for grief, and I was grateful to have gone on in the world long enough to understand that. Later, we would send signals from afar, messages through mutual friends, invitations to book launches that were impossible for the other to attend, things like that, not the conspiracies of the heart that letters and emails involved. I’ve known any number of silver-tongued men, but I think my aunt only knew one.

  I sat in the Sylvia Hotel and watched the sea. Some of this story hadn’t happened then, but in a few days it would. The young man I would meet in Banff, he was as dangerous as an elk. He was going to meet up with his wife later on the tour. He was nursing one of those harsh little secrets that men have, the kind that are common enough, but will tear lives apart. I’ve made several generalisations about men here: by and large, I think they’re not bad, which is one of those sweeping assertions that don’t get as much press as the other sort. Let me say here that I think Theo was as decent and kind a man as it was possible to meet. I knew nothing unpleasant about him, nor have I heard anything since to alter my opinion of him. It was just that he lacked judgment in some aspects of his life, that he was helplessly in love with his wife and that he was undeniably homely.

  You could say people bring it on themselves, but I’m not sure it’s true; one will be absent from a marriage — there in the flesh, but absent in themselves. And then it’s too late. You can tell from looking at some couples, even in photos, that one person’s eyes have slid outside the frame. I have a picture of a group of us writers who went on that tour, and the young man from Banff is there with his wife. On that day, he is in the marriage still (although not for much longer), but his eyes are following the exit signs.

  I came across a quote written by a young Frenchman in the seventeenth century. I’ve kept it for so long I don’t know how I found it. It’s copied down in my handwriting on a brown scrap of paper, brittle with age:

  L’absence est à l’amour ce qu’est au feu le vent.

  Absence is to love what wind is to fire.

  Silks

  When I think of love and how things began for us, I think of a house by a lake and us lying in bed with our skin like twin silks sliding together. I remember the venetian blind and the slats of light that shone through, moonlight but also sunlight, because that was the way it was: we were in that bed night and day. That was the time, too, or thereabouts, when I began a kind of worship for a writer who lived by lakes and made love with a man in a room where the slatted blind made stripes on the soft and shining light of his back.

  The writer, a Frenchwoman called Marguerite Duras, was born in Vietnam, a girl who made love with a man of another colour, a woman who lived outside the pale. That was like me, only I married the man I was in love with, when I was young. Who knew whether it would last? That was the question they all asked, the good Presbyterian men and women who were my aunts and uncles, on the day that I married. We married, my husband and I, in a church with flax-lined walls, while a thunderstorm broke overhead and the rain poured down, and nobody could hear the promises we made. As I say, I was very young. My waist was twenty-two inches in circumference. I had thick, dark hair. The art of love came easily to me. I worked in a library and read French writers, and Duras was another love, a passion that went hand in hand with the discoveries of the flesh that I was making. In my lunch-hours I rushed home. My husband would be there before me. We would make love and go back to work. It was an exhausting life.

  Duras led us to Hanoi, but this was many years later. Close to fifty, in fact. We could look back and say fifty years of married drama and laugh, but it held the ring
of truth and remembered fires, the silky fire of sex, the fiery nights when we broke things, a couple of black ragers in our worst moments.

  It was not the first time we had been to Vietnam. We were no strangers to the East, but we hadn’t been to Hanoi. I had followed Duras around the world, stalked her ghost: to Saigon (which is how I think of Ho Chi Minh City because Saigon sounds wilder, tougher, more glamorous, I suppose); to Chợ Lớn, where she had spent her afternoons in the bed of her Chinese lover when she was supposed to be at school, and along the Mekong River in a flat-bottomed barge in search of her house (which we never found); and to Neauphle-le-Château, the French town where her house stands abandoned beside the still dark pool that is another reflection of what I call my inner life. I had leant my face against her windowpane, looked at the scuff marks her feet had made on the skirting boards of her kitchen. And I had been to her plain grave in Paris, marked with the stark initials: M.D. Just that. But I had not been to Hanoi, where, for a brief time, her widowed mother ran a boarding house beside a lake. My own mother had worked in a boarding house. You will see how it comes together, her life and mine, though sometimes this interest can be misunderstood. Are you an alcoholic? I was once asked by a journalist. Of course I said no, because I am a woman of good reputation and live in a small country. I had written an account of my life, and the journalist thought it incomplete. They always want to know more than you want to tell them. They want a scandal, of course. Duras was an alcoholic. She drank herself into comas. I have never done that. For a time, I drank too much. That isn’t the same thing at all.

  My husband met me in Bangkok Airport. He had been to Phnom Penh, where he worked as a volunteer for one of the aid organisations. As he has grown older, he has become more and more interested in saving the world. He does good works and changes lives. I can’t be like him. I find it hard to visit slums, to work alongside the halt and lame, without assuming the zealous smile of a person offering charity. The heat gets to me, and the begging for money, and the children for whom good works will never be enough, the despairing women. And, if I’m honest, I find it hard to get along with the aid workers, who seem to me either rampantly Christian or else escapees from some other reality, jittery with cheap alcohol and casual sex, blazing-eyed and reckless. They’re not all like that, but enough to make me wary. The more time I spend with them, the more determinedly ordinary I become. Judgemental in my way, as the aunts and uncles at my shoulder, a prim elderly woman with frangipani stuck awkwardly behind my ear. My husband doesn’t look out of place. He seems part of the landscape. He sits on the side of filthy streets and eats what’s offered to him while he talks to the people who live there.

  As soon as I saw him at the airport, I thought, He doesn’t look well, something’s not right. He was pale and wandering in his speech. Although we had planned our meeting carefully, he had confused the times and gone to wait at the airport many hours before my plane from Auckland was due in Bangkok. My luggage was the last off the carousel, and by the time I came through the gates he was hysterical about my whereabouts, and security guards had to restrain him from rushing through the incoming passengers to find me. But when he did see me, he didn’t seem pleased, almost as if I were a stranger. We prepared to board the plane for Hanoi, although, even as we did so, I thought it a terrible idea. If there was something wrong, perhaps we should stay in Bangkok. We passed through check-in and relinquished our luggage, so it was too late to turn back. My husband asked me to find a chair so he could take a rest on the way to the gate lounge. I said, ‘Do you think you’re well enough to go on this flight?’

  He said that of course he was, which is what I should have expected. He doesn’t give in easily. Before he left Phnom Penh, some friends had taken him to a noodle shop to eat lunch. It was dirty, he said, but he didn’t want to offend them. He may blend into the landscape, but he tries to be careful, particularly as he had come home to me once before with an illness that had developed in the tropics and took him close to death. Perhaps, he thought, he had eaten something at the noodle shop. Whatever it was, it would soon pass.

  We arrived at night, and the airport was utter chaos: hundreds jostling together, some coming, others going, taxi drivers looking for work, pushing people out of their way. Our driver found us, the board bearing our names held high above the heads of the crowd, and some time later we were being driven towards Hanoi, or so far as I knew. The road fell quiet, and a dark countryside rolled alongside us. We crossed a river and a bridge that seemed to stretch into infinity; I sensed the water beneath us.

  ‘I think we’re crossing the Red River,’ I said, expecting my husband to be excited. He had wanted to see this river, which is also known as Mother River, for such a long time. ‘This must be Thăng Long Bridge.’ He had done so much research, knew all the facts and figures about this extraordinary feat of engineering and about the two villages that lay beneath its spans. He didn’t answer me, and I felt irritated. I thought he could have made a little effort.

  We drove on and on, and we could have been anywhere, being taken far away from our destination. There was no way of knowing or of asking the silent driver, who spoke no English. There was hardly a light to be discerned in the black landscape, and this was something I would learn, that the Vietnamese use electricity sparingly and utter darkness is not unusual. When, at last, the glimmer of a city shone before us, my husband slid sideways onto my lap, resting his head there until we arrived at our hotel.

  ‘I’ll let you check in,’ he said, handing me his passport. This was something he had never done before.

  I had been travelling for many hours. I gave my husband some Lomotil from our first-aid supplies to cure his stomach upset, then lay down in the Sunway Hotel and slept until morning, hoping that he would do the same. The sheets were made of exquisitely fine, white cotton.

  He was worse in the morning, but still I thought it would pass. I went to breakfast. The dining room of the hotel was restful, like that of a French inn. The walls were covered with vivid Vietnamese artworks that, although colourful, didn’t detract from the cool white-and-green ambience of the room. I ate some dragon fruit and melon and a little muesli. I walked along the street, a shabby crowded avenue in the Old Quarter, slung low with the great burden of electrical wires, just as when the war was on, although nearly thirty years had passed. I walked nearly to the end of the street until I came to the Opera House, then became alarmed that I wouldn’t be able to find my way back and my husband would be alone and frightened and more ill. At that moment, perhaps, I understood that things could be serious and that, actually, I was trying to walk away from the situation. I went back to the hotel. He looked dreadful. He didn’t want a doctor, but we agreed that if he wasn’t any better by three o’clock, I would call for one. But it was two o’clock when I went to the reception desk. ‘Help me, please,’ I said. ‘My husband is sick.’

  ‘We’ll get a taxi for you, Madam, and send you to a clinic,’ the woman said.

  But no, I said, no, he needs a doctor to come to him; and very soon one did, a young woman, with an attendant following her, and a short time after that an ambulance was summoned, and my husband was carried on a stretcher with an oxygen mask over his face through the lobby of the Sunway Hotel, and a siren was shrieking above us, and through the window I saw the thousands of motorbikes that clog the streets of the city fanning out about us. I had dropped everything, thrown some valuables in the safe and fled.

  At the clinic, he was isolated from others coming and going, though I sat beside him and laughed and made jokes. I was given a gown and mask to wear. I said things like, ‘Here I am in Hanoi, looking after you, I’m pretending to be Hot Lips Houlihan’, and pushed my mouth out to make it fat.

  ‘Wrong war,’ he said. ‘Wrong country.’ He didn’t have much to say after that. Before I met him, my husband had been a pilot in the air force. I said, ‘Buck up, old chap.’ I sang a line or two of ‘The Bells of Hell Go Ting-a-ling-a-ling’. Nothing made him laugh. I st
ill didn’t believe there was much that a quick shot of antibiotic wouldn’t cure. A young French doctor came and went, his face grave. Hours passed. My husband seemed worse. ‘We think he has cholera,’ the French doctor said. I stopped joking.

  Outside, night had fallen. The doctor said, ‘You realise your husband is very ill?’ Dazed, I said, ‘Yes, no, yes I do,’ and started to cry. He looked at me wearily as if I were misbehaving. ‘We’re going to send your husband to a hospital where he’ll be more comfortable. You’ll need to check it out with your insurance company.’

  But night was hours ahead of us in New Zealand, and when I tried to phone the insurance company there was nothing but a voice message giving the times that the company was open. The woman behind the desk at the clinic had an impassive Vietnamese expression. She explained that, if my insurance company could not confirm our policy, I must pay for my husband’s treatment for that afternoon. Could I please hand over my credit card? The cost was five-thousand dollars, or thereabouts.

  In my haste to leave the hotel, I had brought only one of the two cards we carried, and it did not have enough money on it. I cried again, I may have shouted, but none of it made any difference. In the background, my husband was a strange grey-paste colour, and tubes and drips were poking out from all over him. I said that I would talk to my twenty-four-hour bank service, and I did. In the end, the credit was authorised. As we left the clinic, we reached the street in the midst of Hanoi, its street vendors and crowds, the bright lights of open shops, the cascades of silk in front of them. An ambulance waited for us. My husband was carried by four men holding his wheelchair, but before he could be boarded he projected a wild, vile green plume of vomit that spread over everyone within reach. Green rain. Shrill cries of horror erupted from the passers-by. Those carrying my husband turned and began to carry him back into the clinic.