True Stars

by Kidman, Fiona

  Fiona Kidman

  TRUE STARS

  For Flora, my mother,

  and the indestructible memory of Warwick Flaus

  Although there are references to living politicians in this book, Kit Kendall, Rex Gamble and Alan Smart are fictitious characters. Any resemblances are coincidental. As a work of fiction, it does not represent a chronological account of the events of 1988. All the other characters are fictitious too.

  Acknowledgements

  Much of this book was written while the author was Writer’s Fellow at Victoria University in 1988. Thanks are expressed to the QE II Arts Council/NZ Literary Fund, the University, and particularly staff in the English Department. Thanks are also due to Owen Dance for his help with research and interested support.

  The author and publisher are grateful to the following companies for the use of their material:

  ‘Angel of the Morning’ by C. Taylor, lyrics reprinted by kind permission of SBK Songs Australia Pty Ltd;

  ‘Knock Three Times’ by L. Brown and I. Levine, lyrics reprinted by kind permission of SBK Songs Australia Pty Ltd and Festival Music Publishing Group;

  ‘River Road’ by Sylvia Tyson, lyrics reprinted by kind permission of Salt Music (Lcosong);

  ‘Lara’s Theme’ by Maurice Jarre, lyrics reprinted by kind permission of J. Albert & Son Pty Ltd;

  ‘Daybreak’ excerpt from Mortal Act. Mortal Words by Galway Kinnell. Copyright © 1980 by Galway Kinnell. Reprinted by kind permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Epigraph

  Part I

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  Part II

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  About the Author

  OTHER BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHORS

  Copyright

  …. dozens of starfishes

  were creeping ……

  ……. they sank down

  into the mud; they faded down

  into it and lay still; and by the time

  pink of sunset broke across them

  they were as invisible

  as the true stars at daybreak.

  (from ‘Daybreak’, a poem by Galway Kinnell)

  Part I

  1

  Imagine: picture this. Kit Kendall weeping, with his head down, in his parliamentary office.

  Kit, who had listened to the Beatles, marched in protest against the Vietnam War, fallen in love once by moonlight, cried when Kennedy was shot, written poems in treetops and saved forests from destruction. Today he could hear only the roar of the crowd, and it was not for him.

  It might be called a mid-life crisis of sorts. Kit Kendall was forty-five years old, had been married for the past twenty-two of them, had two children, a son and a daughter, commonly known as a pigeon pair, to whom he was devoted, and lately he had acquired a mistress. He had been chosen by the constituents of Weyville, a small town close to the centre of the North Island, to be their elected representative, and sworn an oath of allegiance in the House of Representatives not once, but twice, to serve them and his country.

  In return for this honour he occupied a very small office which could be found by his visitors when they had walked down several long varnished corridors in Parliament Buildings, only a small remove from the area known as Siberia. He had done little to warrant such an undistinguished corridor but, quite simply, that was the trouble; he had done very little. The office floor was covered with green carpet squares and the walls painted institutional cream. On his desk stood a studio portrait of his family. In his desk lay, face down, a snapshot of the woman who had his unlisted telephone number. Kit drew a salary of $49,000 (due to rise soon) with fringe benefits — he franked his personal and electorate mail for free and ate cheap meals at Bellamy’s. Today, for lunch, he had eaten spiced pork spareribs, apple pie with cream, and cheese and biscuits, accompanied by a bottle of rather young local wine, in the company of two backbench colleagues who had already taken drink for breakfast and a trade unionist who considered putting his knife and fork together on the plate to be the province of the bourgeoisie. This meal, subsidised by the taxpayer, had cost him $9 per head. He sat on two Select Committees and the trade unionist had briefed him and his colleagues on a late submission to one of them. The trade unionist and the three politicians all knew that it would not be considered. They all knew, too, that evidence of its presentation would salve several consciences, and the fact that it was late would permit them to salve their own.

  His first meeting of the afternoon had been with a Weyville citizen who wished him to lend support for a dispensation to build a factory amongst houses in his electorate. In times of hardship, anything should be possible, the constituent argued. The prospect of a position on the board of directors if the proposal went through had been implicit. The citizen, whom Kit suspected of having once been his wife’s lover, though he didn’t have any real evidence to support the idea (and indeed, he was prepared to pander to every suspicion he could entertain about his wife, by way of alleviating his own guilt), was a key player in the proposal because he was arranging finance for it. He did not hold shares in the open market himself; they were held in his own wife’s maiden name. Kit, who was shorter of money than he ought to be these days, found the idea attractive though he said only that he would think about it. It was a temptation he intended to refuse for the moment but the offer held hope for an uncertain future.

  He listened to the crowds outside; he could identify voices speaking through loudhailers. There was a large police presence in the building. The people outside were shouting in a monotonous chant We want jobs we want jobs what do we want? Jobs jobs jobs. Kit could visualise them, the scruffy jeans, the headbands, the street theatre, the tired faces animated by the momentary excitement, the way they would all wilt away into the afternoon when the speeches had been made and they couldn’t think what to do next.

  He could go outside if he chose. But he didn’t have to. He was not a Cabinet Minister, nor, he had realised, ever likely to be one. His seat was far from safe. An air of inalienable permanence was not on his side. He had no responsibility to the mob outside. He saw himself when he was young, thin, bearded, long-haired, his arms raised and his mouth wide open, shouting into the face of authority. He remembered being dragged away by the police; it still stunned him that his parents were proud. You could say he came from a good family, according to your definition.

  He could not bear to go outside and lift the megaphone to his mouth and stand while being shouted at on the other side of protest. It was not what he had come here to do. But then neither were most of the things he did.

  Imagine. He could not have.

  The bells summoning him to the debating chamber began to ring, shrill electronic blasts which went on and on.

  Still he sat crying. He had learned, minutes before, that another march of the unemployed was to take place, only this one would originate from Weyville, from his own back door, as it were. Keep your cat in your own backyard the kids at his school used to taunt each other when fights spilled over from one family to the next. Not that he was part of the scraps. But he was now.

  Soon he would have a mob all of his own to face.

  He was as unlikely to have help then as his one or two unhappy colleagues had right now.

  He stood, wiped his eyes with a handkerchief which he refolded and put in his breast pocket, checked that there were no specks of dust on his twinkling black shoes
, and set off to debate the affairs of the nation.

  2

  When the phone rang for the second time Rose approached it like a cat circling, then backed away.

  ‘Oh goddam you,’ she said softly. ‘You’ll speak to me one day.’

  It was 1.30 in an afternoon in late March. For over a year someone had been ringing Rose Kendall when she was alone at home, and replacing the receiver without speaking to her when she answered. She said she had no idea who it was when she talked to people about it, which lately had been less and less, although the problem had got worse. In fact, she had many ideas, but they varied from day to day.

  The police had told her that they would do what they could to help but it was a hard crime, which they described as an offence, to crack. The people at the phone company were convinced that it was a domestic problem which she was covering up, or even inventing, although in the circumstances this was what they implied, rather than stated. It was considered untactful to tell the wife of a Government politician that she was a dingbat. They could not understand why the caller never rang when her husband was home. If the motivation was political they hinted, surely it was him that the caller would ring.

  She retreated the length of the room. When she felt she was far enough away she stood holding herself together with her hands pressing her elbows into her sides. On the fourteenth ring the phone stopped, as if it had exhausted itself. If it was an overseas call they would have lost their money more than twice she thought with satisfaction. She was remembering a hotel she and Kit stayed in off Fifth Avenue, the best they could afford then at two hundred a night. If you are making an overseas call, the notice in the room had read, allow the number to ring for a minute, which is ten rings, or you will be charged for the call as if it had been connected.

  Only she did not believe this was an overseas call. She believed that the person who was ringing was someone in Weyville, the town where she had lived all her life: someone who knew her.

  She referred to the caller in her head as they, for the person could not be identified by their sex, and besides she had begun to see them as having several dimensions, maybe heads. At first she had thought of the caller as him, but now she was not sure.

  They will think I am not here, she told herself now. Soon they will stop calling me.

  ‘They must, mustn’t they?’ She addressed the dog at her feet, pushing him with her toe. A small black and tan spaniel crossed perhaps with dachshund. He had stirred restlessly when the phone rang, aware of her agitation. Now he stretched and settled again. Her children had named him Roach when they brought him home. They assured her it was short for cockroach, but she was not sure. They were in high school at the time.

  These days, Rose addressed many questions to the dog.

  The afternoon sun lay across the ordinary furniture. Rose could see dust against the grain of the oak. We should get new furniture, Kit said, at the weekends when he was home from Wellington. His eyes would appraise their old furniture in the new house. Their new old house.

  It was a large house set well away from all the other houses in the street. It had a wide entrance way, and stained glass with knots of roses repeated in the same patterns but different colours throughout the house. A cathedral window dominated the stairwell. The house had been built by an early settler, on farmland that was now a suburb. It was the kind of dwelling that is few and far between in towns like Weyville, a town set on broad plains against the open sky, where an old house usually means a weatherboard box built in the ’thirties. But this was different, the kind of house, at least in the sum of its parts, that Kit and Rose often talked of owning, when the children were small. When they got rich; when they struck it lucky — then they would spend hours lovingly renovating it together.

  Only this house was sleekly functional when they bought it. ‘We won’t have time to fiddle around,’ Kit said, then. It had to work now; they needed the space. He meant, to entertain.

  So as well as roses and tall windows there was a kitchen that looked like the inside of a space re-entry vehicle, and an added-on patio, a barbecue area outside, and a swimming pool. Everything worked. Sometimes at the weekend when Kit was home they did entertain. They entertained people whom they wished to encourage to vote for Kit again at the next election. During the week the house was often empty except for Rose and Roach.

  Kit appeared to be pleased, though he didn’t have time to sit around dreaming these days. She used to wonder where he would be without her to think about the practical things in life. He had been an industrial chemist at the mill before he entered Parliament. It was trees that really interested him. When he was a student and she had first known him, he had spent his vacations fire-watching trees from a mountain top. She was used to managing.

  It was late autumn but the heat lay over the town as if it were summer. A thick encrustation of grapes hung around the windows. The leaves had a filtering effect on the sharp bright sunlight outside.

  Who, on a still summery afternoon, could be bothered to make pointless telephone calls that required no answer except the sound of her voice, Rose wondered.

  She was a short woman with wider hips than she liked but not so wide that she would not wear jeans. She wore blue stonewashed pants this afternoon and a white muslin blouse with yellow thread embroidery across the chest. She had bought it at Narnia the last time she was in Wellington. Kit would like it, she imagired, but when she showed it to him he hadn’t said one way or the other. Her scrubbed features, bare of make-up, were neat and unremarkable except for wide cheekbones that made her face look broad when she slept, and heavier eyebrows than one expected in a woman. At times she looked brooding, but when she was happy her face became mobile and the sleek brows dramatic. This did not happen often, of late. Her frizzy reddish-brown hair was pulled back with a purple scarf. For women’s suffrage, she had told herself when she put it on this morning, and for an instant, smiled at herself. She suffered moments of panic about her worthiness, and whether she served causes well enough.

  Recently, she had been interviewed by one of the new glossy magazines as part of a survey of changing attitudes in provincial electorates. Should she do it, she asked Kit, who, after speaking to his advisers in Wellington, had said that it was a good idea, as long as she was careful. The article read as follows:

  Weyville’s population is 22,000, which includes 1,500 unemployed. It is a neat town with the usual quota of new shopping malls and glass facades, although a number of shops are currently standing empty. Four high rises dot the centre of town; suburbs spread away, mostly in the direction of the local timber mill, which has been going through a period of restructuring and what its management describes as retrenchment. The eastern suburbs reflect the former rural and farming nature of the district. Rose Kendall was in the process of moving house when I caught up with her. Her new residence is an old homestead property surrounded by one of the area’s more upmarket housing developments.

  A friendly, apparently forthright woman, Rose Kendall has been associated with causes, in particular the feminist and peace movements, since the late 1960s, although she wryly admits to having developed her political consciousness when the Vietnam War was already in its closing stages.

  ‘That’s what came of living in the provinces, I suppose,’ she says with a reflective smile. ‘And of course, the children were tiny then.’

  Pictures of her children, Olivia and Richard, adorn the family home. Olivia, the older, attends university in Dunedin, while her son is currently living in America where he was an American Field Scholar last year, and is now doing a computer studies course.

  There is little sign of early hardship which Kendall, 43, claims she was surrounded by as she grew up. Born and bred in Weyville, a once traditionally blue ribbon seat which changed hands six years ago, ex-schoolteacher Kendall is the daughter of a trucking family which held contracts to service a local quarry and various milling operations. Her father, the late Tom Diamond, may have been rough and ready but h
e had a nose for business. Her brother, Jim, now runs the family firm.

  Pressed to comment on the region’s problems, and the growing discontent of her husband’s constituents, Kendall says she has faith in the Government’s policies. ‘Economic miracles don’t happen over night,’ she says, ‘This is a caring Government.’

  Asked to explain how she relates present record levels of unemployment with her own history of civil liberty campaigning, she flushes angrily: ‘You only have to look at my record to know that I’ve been consistent,’ she says.

  Kendall doesn’t wear a wedding ring these days, but she twists a large topaz ring, which she says was a legacy from her grandmother, as she speaks.

  The article didn’t say that she suffered from pre-menstrual tension, came quickly when she made love, and was bossy in bed — when she had the chance — or that potato salad was her favourite food, although lately she had taken to eating cold potatoes straight out of the fridge.

  It didn’t mention her stepmother whom she had disliked, although she had done her best for the family, or her mother who had died when the family was young, the delicate migrant daughter from a tea-planting family that had given up on Malaysia, or Malaya, as it was, or that Tom Diamond had spent the rest of his life after her death trying to eradicate the traces of her style while at the same time grieving in secret for her. ‘She’s a right little corker,’ he would say about his second wife when they went to the RSA together. They sang Roll me over/in the clover/roll me over, lay me down, and do it again on Saturday nights, drank flagon beer, brought a couple of dozen home, and some mates, stunk the house out, and on Sunday morning, Elsie, that was her name, Elsie, would go at the house like a maniac, polishing the ornaments, and dusting the knick-knacks, getting everything ready for them to work hard until the next weekend. On Sunday night Tom did the accounts, his black eyebrows clenched in concentration. He said he didn’t know who his family was, it wasn’t worth talking about. One night, after a flagon, he elaborated, just the once. Afterwards Rose would think that she dreamed it, that his grandfather who had brought him up in Australia was really called Diamantis; but whatever drop of diluted Greek blood lurked in his veins now, Tom would tell you I’m a Kiwi joker, don’t get me wrong mate, if you didn’t fight for New Zealand, you’re a nobody.