The Infinite Air

by Fiona Kidman

  Amohia Street, where the Battens lived, ran close to the large public gardens where the bath house stood and was just around the corner from the Prince’s Gate Hotel where prime ministers and royalty had stayed. Fred and fellow musicians sometimes entertained guests in the reception hall, just for the hell of it, not for money. The Prince of Wales and his wife, Mary, who were soon to be king and queen, had stayed there and, in their honour, large steel archways were placed at the entrance to the gardens. In spring these arches foamed with purple wisteria, the vines turning into green canopies in the summer. Just think, Nellie murmured to Jean, we are walking in the same footsteps as their majesties.

  The house in Amohia Street was rented, but Nellie had furnished the front room in what was already dubbed the Edwardian style: bamboo and wicker furniture with delicate legs and curved backs, except for one solid, dark green easy chair with a comfortable back so that Fred could rest at the end of a day’s work. The chintz-covered cushions were colourfully patterned, the walls papered a dark gold colour, with deep red floral friezes, not flowers all over like most people had — so very modern, Nellie enthused, and look how large this made the house look. The tall vases that had come from Fred’s mother were always spilling with flowers. In the corner of the front room stood a piano which both she and Fred played. Fred, a swarthy man, with eyes the colour of licorice, had discovered Debussy, whose music he described as sensuous, although Nellie found it discordant. ‘Besides,’ she said, ‘that man leads a wicked life in Paris, if the newspapers are anything to go by.’ ‘You’re one to talk,’ Fred had said with a laugh, for Nellie was known as high-spirited. Her musical repertoire was varied, some of it classical, but she liked playing old tunes that people sang around pianos and, for the children, she had picked up tunes like ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’, which was all the rage. She held Jean in her lap and helped her finger chords on the piano.

  The nearby lake, known to Maori as Rotorua-nui-a-Kahumatamomoe, though Europeans called it Rotorua, was an expanse of water so large that it was difficult to see the far shore from the town, dark blue in summer, purple and chill in the winter, with an island lying at its centre. On Sundays the Battens walked along its shore, dodging eddying bursts of sulphur gases. They never entered the pa, home to local Te Arawa, who wove feather cloaks and cooked their meals in the hot pools. An Anglican church crouched on the side of the lake, and from it billowed exquisite renditions of familiar hymns, sung in a different language. Jean listened longingly to this distant music, but her mother said that although they meant well in their Christian endeavours, the Maoris still had a long way to go to escape their heathen ways. ‘My father fought them during the wars,’ she said, her voice cool.

  Some Saturday nights in wintertime, the family went on expeditions to the bath house and hired a family hot tub. Nellie was a strong believer in natural remedies. ‘Off we go,’ she commanded them, in a loud, cheerful voice. ‘Let’s all get healthy.’

  The tub was so deep it was up to Jean’s chin. There were seats around the edge so they could all sit with their feet floating in the middle. Only Jean did not wear a suit that covered her completely, being considered too small for it to matter whether the little flat buttons of her nipples showed or not. When they had soaked, they went off to the changing rooms, and exchanged swimming trunks for their pyjamas and dressing gowns. Afterwards, with much laughter and whispering, they all scampered up the street back to the house, and leapt into their beds.

  Fred was in constant demand in his dental practice, a man with presence. He was a captain in the Taranaki Territorial Army, which he had joined some years earlier, and could lift a cannon ball aloft in each hand. Nellie massaged his broad shoulders when he sat in the green chair in the evenings, pipe in his mouth. His chest muscles rippled beneath his shirt; his dark hair, swept back in regular waves, met in a widow’s peak above the high plane of his forehead. ‘You have your father’s cheekbones,’ Nellie would say to Jean, admiring father and daughter as her caresses lingered on her husband. Jean would sit at Fred’s feet on a low stool engraved with poker-work. His hand would fall on her head while he dozed, fingers entwined in her hair, twitching awake with sudden little spasms of his grip on her skull, like an eggshell about to break open. ‘She is so delicate, our little Mit,’ he commented more than once to Nellie. Mit. It was his name for her then. She used the word when she wanted her mittens on cold winter mornings. There were many of those: it was hard frost country.

  ‘You’ve had Mrs Hardcastle in again,’ Nellie said one evening.

  ‘Now why would you say that?’ Fred asked.

  ‘I’d recognise that freesia perfume anywhere.’

  ‘Oh that,’ Fred said. ‘I don’t notice things like that. It’s all disinfectant and soap when I have someone in the chair.’

  ‘She bought it in Grasse, on her grand tour of Europe last year. It’s very distinctive. She wears it to meetings. Her teeth must be in a terrible way, the number of times she visits you. Not that you’d think it to look at her. She’s not a bad-looking woman.’

  ‘I’ll take a note of it next time, pay her a compliment if I think of it,’ Fred said easily.

  While her husband was at work, Nellie was busy about the town. She rode a tall white mare from one committee meeting to another, seated side-saddle and dressed in a green jacket, a plaid riding habit and a hat with a brave red feather tucked in its band. The committees were mostly for theatrical societies, but also for the rowing club. She and Fred both rowed on the lake. Then there was the organising committee for the annual military ball, and for the flower show. Her blooms won the sweet pea division every year. She grew vegetables, too, lettuce and spinach in abundance, believing as she did in healthy nutritional diets. But, really, the theatre was Nellie’s first passion, begun when she was a girl in Invercargill. She was a regular feature at the Theatre Royal, the Fairy Queen in The Sleeping Princess when she was just fourteen, and then there were musicals at the Opera House in Wanganui where she kicked up her heels, and showed a little ankle, and met her husband in the process. And now here she was in Rotorua, at the Lyric, playing the lead role in Lady Frederick, a widow with a past, and she loved the way the part made the audience laugh. People could think what they liked of her, say she was wanton and abandoned, because of the way she threw herself into every activity, but she knew the truth, that nothing would happen if someone didn’t lead with a bit of spirit.

  Louis Blériot’s exploits stood for everything she had ever imagined, the power to propel oneself through the air. In her dreams, she would confide to Jean, she sometimes found herself walking around a room, a library perhaps, with very high walls lined with books, and she would be reading the volumes on the top shelves, her feet just walking along the air beneath her. After Blériot’s flight, she told astonished members of the gardening circle committee that she saw herself as he did, alone in space. Only the other side remained unattainable, the far shore.

  The horse she rode was lent to her by an American called John Hoffman, a big man with a crest of hair already turning white, although he was of an age with Nellie. He had emigrated at the turn of the century and ‘gone native’, as it was said, marrying a Maori woman, and already there was a child every year. Nellie found it most peculiar, but she needed a horse and liked Hoffman. He kept two or three and raced them from time to time. He needed his horses to be ridden, he said. The white mare had nice shoulders and a good steady eye, nice for a lady to ride, especially as she took her little girl with her more often than not. Sometimes he would wink, and whisper in Nellie’s ear as she dismounted at his stable. ‘A bit of a flutter?’ he would ask, and laughing she would hand over some coins. The next time he saw her, he would press the palm of her hand. ‘You’ve got a good eye for a horse,’ he often said in his soft drawl.

  ‘And you’re leading me astray,’ she invariably responded. Once she said, ‘Now don’t you dare tell my husband. He thinks I’m cleverer with money than I really am.’

  ‘Oh,
but I think you are. I think you study form more than you’re letting on.’

  By the time Jean was four she had grown strong, with wild unruly curls that reached to her shoulders. She and her second brother, John, bore a close resemblance to each other, small-boned and dark-featured, with the same alabaster complexion that came more from their mother than Fred. Harold, the older of the two brothers, was taller and, in a way that was hard to define, more awkward in his skin, as if something were slightly broken in him already. Sometimes Jean noticed displeasure in her mother’s voice when she spoke to Harold that was never apparent when she talked to her and John. It was years and years later, after flights that circled the globe, after fame, and loss, and despair, when Jean came to bury her mother in a foreign country, that the marriage and birth certificates she carried revealed that Harold’s birth had occurred a few short months after her marriage. This had happened in a town down south, before Fred and Nellie’s move to Rotorua. Not that this could have accounted for the way Harold was, except perhaps for an inner core of desolation Jean sensed, which might have stemmed from this beginning, the embarrassment he would have caused his mother.

  Still, it was Harold who wanted an atlas, to study maps of the world. He wanted to become an explorer, like Dr Livingstone. His father sent away for a Times Atlas and, when it arrived, Harold invited John and Jean to join him in poring over more than a hundred coloured maps of the world. He traced his finger over country after country, noting where there was still not enough information for the cartographers to fill the gaps. Africa, thanks to Livingstone, looked well coloured in. ‘There’s Russia. And Asia. Look, I could go to China, there’s lots to discover there,’ he said, full of longing. His voice had just broken, and his limbs gangled across the floor.

  ‘There’s a hole in the middle of Australia,’ John said.

  ‘Oh, that’s not far away, someone will find it soon I expect.’ It was Harold’s habit to contradict nearly everything his brother said. He never ‘played’ with John, the way his mother hoped. The distance in their years had opened up, so that John and Jean seemed more of an age than the two brothers. Harold let Jean trace her finger across the Nile. ‘You couldn’t go there,’ he said, ‘too many crocodiles, and besides, girls can’t be explorers.’ After a while he got bored with the younger children’s company and went to his room, taking the atlas with him. He was a boy who often got tired, or that was what Nellie said, although there was something worried in her tone.

  One day, Jean managed to open the front gate, and escape down the road on her own. It was Harold who found her, amid the panic that ensued in the household when her disappearance was discovered.

  ‘I was going off to explore,’ she said. ‘It sounded really interesting.’ Harold grabbed her fiercely by the arm and dragged her back along the street, Jean yowling like a stray cat.

  ‘Trust you to get me in trouble,’ he said, as he handed Jean back to their mother.

  Nellie looked the situation over, dismissing Harold with a wave of her hand, barely a thank you. ‘Now stop that noise, Jean,’ she said. ‘We’re British. British people don’t cry.’

  Jean and John created their own diversions. Nellie had a tin cabin trunk that she had used to transport her belongings from the South Island before she met Fred. It had come all the way from Scotland when her mother was a new bride, just seventeen years of age. Her name was Mary Anne Shaw and she married a military man called John Blackmore. Nellie spoke of her parents and her eight brothers and sisters with pride, although the family had dispersed since she was a girl, and she had lost track of most of them by then. But Mary Anne’s cabin trunk had been given to her, and now she filled it with an assortment of her and Fred’s old clothes, his raincoats and worn-out dentist smocks, a baggy pair of trousers, a tie on which he had spilled tomato soup that his wife had failed to remove, a shapeless trilby that had sailed off his head and landed in the lake when he was trout fishing; old petticoats and some dresses Nellie had discarded after a season or two of wear because the fashion had changed, a pair of green velvet dancing shoes with one broken heel, a rope of beads.

  These were the children’s dress-up clothes. ‘Don’t be shy,’ Nellie cried. ‘I was never shy about what I wore when I was a girl. Do you know, for a dare, I once rode a man’s bicycle down the main street of Invercargill, wearing a pair of serge bloomers? My brothers were horrified but people laughed and cheered. They thought it was hilarious.’

  John was nine when Jean turned four, but he still loved the game. He dressed his sister up in his mother’s cast-off finery, even though the skirts trailed along behind her, and she tripped on their hems. John put on his father’s clothes, playing the part of a young man taking a girl to a dance, bowing low to her, and offering his arm, and they would skip along together. One day John said that, just for a change, she could put on their father’s clothes and he would wear a dress. He put on the old ball gown, gathering up the skirts as far as he could, telling Jean to play the father’s role, while he was the mother. It was while John was swinging the rope of Nellie’s beads in one hand that Harold entered the room. He stood there with an odd smirk on his face. That evening at dinner, he told his parents what he had seen.

  There was an uneasy silence in the room. Fred said, ‘Nellie, don’t you think John is a little old for dressing up?’ Nellie hesitated for a moment. ‘I think the children should be allowed to express their personalities however they wish really. Men play all sorts of roles on the stage. Imagine Gilbert and Sullivan if the men could not wear frills at their wrists.’

  ‘Trust you not to listen to Father,’ Harold said, full of vehemence.

  ‘I played the fool a little myself when I was a girl,’ Nellie said.

  ‘No wonder they shipped you out,’ said Fred, not amused.

  ‘Oh Fred, where’s your sense of humour?’

  Fred had merely shrugged and changed the subject. Later that evening he stood up and put his hat on. He was, he said, going for a walk by the lake.

  Did Jean imagine it, or did her mother mutter the name Mrs Hardcastle under her breath? Harold, who was angry, said so, but his mother turned away as if she hadn’t heard him.

  All the same, when summer came, the children were sent outside more often. Nellie insisted that Harold accompany John and Jean on picnics, even though he had turned thirteen and he resisted the company of the children as much as he could. His parents didn’t always know where he was, and in the evenings, if he were late home, they would exchange anxious looks. It was after one of these late nights that he had agreed with reluctance to a picnic at the lake. Nellie was tired, she had said. Or was she? Jean was too small to know what was really wrong with her mother that day, just that she needed to lie down in a darkened room.

  There was a suffocating quality about the air as Harold and John set off with Jean, accompanied by strict instructions from Nellie for the boys to look after their sister. They went to the lake carrying a picnic basket containing sandwiches and crusts of bread in a separate paper bag to feed to the ducks and swans gathered at the water’s edge. When they had eaten, Harold suggested that they walk on along the shore to the place they called Sulphur Point, which lay behind the bath house. People came down here to do secret things, he said. When John asked what things these might be, Harold was mysterious and elusive. ‘Things,’ he said. They might see things going on. They walked along to where a scrubby plantation jutted out into the lake, and bands of rough yellow mineral encroached on pools of water in the rocks. This was further than they had ever been, but Harold was intent on leading them on.

  John said, ‘I think we should go back.’ He was ten, and beginning to act in a more grown-up fashion.

  Earlier, they had fed all their crusts to the birds. Now a group of swans emerged from the water and began to circle the trio.

  ‘They’ve followed us,’ John said in a small frightened voice. ‘They want more bread.’

  One of the swans arched its neck and raised its wings, beating t
hem fiercely as it approached Jean. The bird’s hard beak was extended, as if aiming straight for her eyes.

  She screamed, putting her hands up to defend herself, while John ran towards her, waving his arms up and down. Harold stood still, shaking in an odd way as if he were helpless, unable to move. Then Jean pulled herself together, shouted for the swan to go away and put her fingers straight out in front of her. The creature stopped in its tracks, wings hovering in the air for some seconds, before folding them away and drawing its long neck back into the cushion of its breast.

  A moment or two later it was gone. Now that the danger had passed, Jean gave one or two shocked sobs, John’s arm around her shoulder. Harold seemed to recover himself and stuck his hands in his pockets.

  ‘So what do you want to do now, cry baby?’ Harold demanded.

  ‘Home,’ Jean said. She didn’t know where her bravado had come from, but she was still afraid, whether of the bird, or her brother, she couldn’t be sure.

  ‘Play mothers and fathers?’ Harold said, a strange smile playing at the edge of his mouth.

  John said no, that wasn’t what they wanted to do, his voice low and urgent.