The Best of Fiona Kidman's Short Stories (43 page)

A
LARGE MANSION
, built by people with colonial pretensions, it had burned to the ground in a mysterious fire and now all that remained was a grove of orange trees encircling the spot where it had stood.

Nora lived there first, when the house was owned by her husband. She loved it, clothed it with satin fabrics and polished its surfaces. She was a dry stalk of a woman sucked of her juices by the sun, but she had a way of creating fragrances in dim corners. Her cupboards smelled of spices. Gus had tired of the house and sold it at the same time that he had tired of her. The war had just ended, and he had done rather well at it. On his return he felt confined by the house, the orchards, the absence of adventure. Nora wanted to stay on in the house but he wouldn't let her. Then she wanted to go with him but he wouldn't have that either. Now she lived in a cottage that she had built with her bare hands. The person to whom he sold the house was Cora.

Cora's life in the big house had not been exactly unhappy, because she was clear-eyed and down-to-earth about happiness. You either had it or you didn't. But it was she who no longer cared for her husband, Bim, at the time.

The pair of them had opened up the big house, and let the rooms out to boarders. They hoped to make a quick fortune up north, enough to line their pockets and move on. Only it hadn't worked out like that. Bim went away for a weekend, and during his absence the house went up in smoke. Each blamed the other for burning it down, each said the other had done it for the insurance money. Bim said, how could he have done it when he wasn't there, and Cora said, but how do I know you didn't come back and light the fire, because you never said where you were going, and Bim said, well, I was with a girl of course, but he never came up with a name. Cora said he was no gentleman and if he had really been with a girl he would have produced the goods all right when he was in a spot like that.

Neither of them got the insurance money, but what Cora did get was
Edwin, the insurance assessor who was sent up from Auckland to investigate the fire. Their first looks at each other were like lightning rods, and they swore they would never leave each other from the day they met, even though it meant all kinds of messy sacrifices for Edwin, and rather less for Cora. Not long afterwards, as it turned out, Edwin inherited some money from his aunt who had lived a recluse's life. The money not only saved them from
destitution
, but provided enough to buy them a small house with wide verandahs, tucked away behind delicately blush-tipped hakea hedges, where they did nothing much but look at each other day in and day out, when they were not occupied with living off the land.

As for Laura, well, she'd lived in the big house at the same time as both of the others. She was the one who cooked the meals while my father did the gardening. Nora, who had first employed them as a couple, recommended them to Cora and they had stayed on, for a time at least, though by the time of the fire Laura, my mother, and my father had moved us to a house of our own. It was a modest bungalow surrounded by passionfruit vines on trellises, and a paddock that ran three cows and a nanny goat. The distance between it and the big house was short enough for Laura to walk over to work twice a day (to clean in the morning and to prepare dinner in the evening), and close enough for us to stand and see the fire.

My father ran down the road and tried to put the fire out, along with a score of others from the neighbourhood. My mother did try to shield my view so that I wouldn't see the leaping flames above the gum trees, the blinding arc of light reflected in the clouds, the sparks which showered the air with dazzling, ferocious gaiety. This was the house I had briefly known as home. She wanted to save me from the terror of watching it perish. But of course I saw. I felt the heat of the flames. I heard the confused birds waking as if night were day. Of course I remembered.

I see the three of them sitting on the bank of a stream, Laura, Nora and Cora. We are at Cora and Edwin's place; it is early summer.

We had driven over in Nora's old car, a forest-green Morris Eight, the one parting gift from her husband, the war hero. The road was pitted and already there was red dust in the air. Bougainvillea and hibiscus were tangled in the hedges. We had driven past citrus orchards. Their tangy fragrance filled the air. Nora drove with my father sitting beside her. Over his knee he held a .22 rifle.

We had negotiated the crossroads and travelled past avenues of gums, impenetrably thick and turquoise in the blue-white air, and now we sat, with our picnic spread out on a gingham cloth amongst the pennyroyal. My mother had made most of the food, she always did, even though she was no longer
officially the cook. There were bacon and egg pies, scones, tomato sandwiches and a fruit flan. Nora had brought home brew, made in her copper, which everyone except me was drinking. Cora's contribution was fruit picked fresh from the trees. Edwin's espalier-trained red delicious were in their first season. He and Cora were as proud of the apples as of children. If we'd been a bit younger, they said, looking fondly at each other, of course we'd have had a baby. They belonged to that time when love must declare itself as an active creation. Everyone else was glad that it was too late for them since they could never have borne the presence of a third person. But the apples were another matter, in which they could rejoice: Edwin and Cora's creation, lying in an open rucksack in the grass.

Laura, dressed in a print dress with a crossover bodice, gathered the skirt over her knees and rested her head on her arms; her dark hair was parted in a wavy bob which she pinned above her left ear with a long hairclip. Beside her, Nora's hair stood out in a ragged grey halo; she wore a man's Aertex shirt and slacks which, despite their age, betrayed a stylish cut. Cora's bib overalls were made of khaki war surplus material, and she was the only one to wear a sunhat over her curly still-yellow hair; she picked buttercups and placed them in her lap. Laura and Cora exchanged tailor-made cigarettes, Nora insisted on the rollies she had always smoked. The men sat near the women but not close enough to interrupt them. The women talked about me, and sometimes to me, but not much. It was a day for adult conversation. They had all drunk several glasses of Nora's beer. My father sang a few bars of ‘Cruising Down the River'. Cora joined in, bridging the space between them.

Edwin picked a piece of grass and, stretching it between his thumbs, his palms just ajar, blew into it so that it emitted a long tormented whistle like a balloon being slowly released.

A bird called and my father cocked his gun. He shot quail and pheasants, even though it was not the season. Like Cora and Edwin, we were all looking for food off the land. But though we heard the bird, nothing stirred.

‘Oh quail quail quell quee-quee-quee,' called Cora.

Laura remembered a treat from her youth. ‘I wish I could eat a pigeon stew,' she said dreamily, and a frisson of desire rippled through her. Eating a protected bird was probably the most wicked thing Laura would ever do. Nora and Cora looked at each other over her bent head.

‘I'd like to dance with a Bulgarian and eat asparagus with my fingers,' said Nora.

‘What would you do with a Bulgarian?' Cora asked.

‘I'd start at the beginning all over again,' Nora replied. Her voice was dreamy. ‘I'd go back to the night I met my husband. There was a ball on at
my home. I wore a long pale rose silk dress that clung to my thighs. My father had watched me come down the stairs and exclaimed to my mother, she can't wear that. How can you let her? My mother had been there when I ordered the dressmaker to make it for me. I think she thought of it as a little girl's dress. I was fifteen at the time. My mother had a way of failing to see things. It was her greatest charm. It meant that we had, oh, how can I put it,
hedonistic
childhoods. We did what we wished. We were rude to servants who were almost unfailingly kind to us, we ate unsuitable food day or night as the fancy took us, we wandered the countryside barefoot in the summer even though my family were gentry. It's not surprising, at least to me, that my mother had failed to notice that the silk she had allowed me to buy was so fine as to be almost transparent, and that the body that it covered had developed curves. Not very large curves,' she noted, looking down at her too thin frame that now showed not a trace of breasts beneath her shirt. ‘But enough you know, the suggestion of a body that was about to entrance Augustus Medlicott, who, as you know, is the recently removed and little-lamented Gus.' Her voice deepened when she lied.

‘He fell for you straight away?' Laura said, round-eyed.

‘Oh yes, of course. So did half a dozen men. Gus had come for the
weekend
. My brother met him at Oxford. Of
course he was English and unfortunately a Protestant as well.'

‘You mean a Methodist or something?' my father asked.

‘No, no, nothing like that. Just an ordinary C of E.'

‘I could never see the difference,' murmured Cora. ‘They're all smells and bells, aren't they?'

‘He was Low Church,' Nora said, reprovingly. ‘It was a disaster. Of course I made love to him, or should I say he made love to me, behind a hydrangea bush. I wanted to so much at the time, and nobody had told me I shouldn't. I hadn't the faintest idea, you understand. Of course they made me marry him, no doubt about it.'

‘I don't believe a word of it,' said Cora.

‘Of course you do,' said Nora. ‘Why shouldn't you, it's an ordinary enough kind of story, though goodness knows what Gus thought he was letting himself in for. But it wasn't inconvenient, he was about to be sent down anyway. I think he believed he'd get the castle; he had already noted what my parents had failed to see, a weakness in my brother. It's very pretty round County Cork, you know, and castles don't come that easily. Gus was quite a poor boy, in fact, with a tremendous opinion of himself. He joined the air force when the first great war broke out and ended up in Russia fighting Bolsheviks. He was away for years, and barely got out alive. By that
time my father had lost a packet. He used to go to New York and play the stockmarket but people like him weren't equipped for the war, he didn't understand about war bonds or anything like that. He bought a phony goldmine, and we were reduced to growing potatoes round the castle just like everybody else.

‘Ah faith,' she said with an exaggerated inflection, and stretched herself. ‘Gus was furious when he came back. Here he was with a bride still barely twenty and a little boy — I was sorry he wasn't a girl, I'd have called her Hydrangea — and no money at all. But, at least, when he recovered he grew a handlebar moustache, and won a decoration, not to mention rank — that's how we went out East, to carry on the good fight, you know. Well, it was a great old life while it lasted. We left the boy at school back home. Then they chucked us out of China, not a thing we could do about it, and so we ended up out here.'

‘I've never met your son,' said Laura.

‘He doesn't have a taste for the colonies,' said Nora, and for a moment it seemed as if she might abandon the conversation.

‘And the castle?' asked Edwin, who of course had an interest in real estate.

‘It's still there. The boy's got it. Well, my sister threw girls, as my father would say, like pigs and dogs throw litters, and my brother went soft in the head, it must have been all that education, and nobody would have him, and so there you are, my boy amongst the ruins. A letter came to say that it belonged to him. Lawyers skip generations of women of course — you must remember that even if my family had wished it otherwise, and they would not, boys take precedence over their mothers in lines of succession, just like royalty. There he sits in the castle. It's fitting. I expect Gus will end up there sooner or later to winkle it off him.'

‘Maybe your son'll restore it, to pass on to his children,' said my mother.

Nora crossed her wrists and linked her thumbs together, fanning her fingers. We understood the image, a butterfly, such as we made in shadow play at night. ‘The end of the line,' she said. ‘Hard to believe. I should have called him Hydrangea. Gus sees it as my fault of course. Bad blood. What does it matter, though? I like to think that one day the boy will find my silk dress in an old closet and put it on in front of a mirror and feel as beautiful as I did. Although I've heard that whole wings of the castle have crumbled, I hope the staircase at least is still intact. I hope he walks down the staircase feeling beautiful, as I did, and meets a beautiful boy. There now, what more could a mother wish for her son?'

‘Your turn, Cora,' said Laura. She had stolen a glance in my direction to see if I was listening. I studied a strand of mosslike weed.

‘My history begins with Edwin,' said Cora. Their eyes met, locked in a light and starry embrace.