The Trouble With Fire Read online

  Fiona KIDMAN

  The Trouble with Fire

  ‘[Her] stories remind me of those of Alice Munro. Though they are very much of a time and place they have a universal dimension.’

  — Booksellers News

  For Harriet Allan, friend and editor

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PART 1

  The Italian Boy

  The History of It

  Preservation

  Extremes

  Heaven Freezes

  Silks

  PART 2

  The Man from Tooley Street

  Some Other Man

  Under Water

  PART 3

  Fragrance Rising

  The Trouble with Fire

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  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 night 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.

  from Paradise by Fiona Kidman

  So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us.

  Gaston Bachelard

  The Italian Boy

  A FARMER’S WIFE

  APART FROM THE SOFT FOLDS beneath her chin, there was not a great deal about Meryl that appeared changed. She wore her hair in exactly the same fair bob, flicked under at the ends, as she had when she was fifteen, and her pale eyes were seemingly as innocent as ever. Hilary had seen her once or twice in the years between, so none of this surprised her. Some of her contemporaries were so weather-beaten and misshapen by time and hard luck that she didn’t recognise them when they introduced themselves at public readings of her work. They would sit at the back of the room, not people who frequented literary gatherings as a rule, trying to catch her eye. Their expressions, when they came up and said, ‘Remember me’, during signing time, contained a certain hurt bewilderment when she was forced to admit that she didn’t have a clue who they were. Afterwards she was swamped by guilt.

  But Meryl was not one of them. Hilary could spot her at once. All she needed was a beret slouched back over her hair to reveal her profile, the smooth complexion and even smile, and they could have been walking arm in arm down a country road together. As well as encounters on Hilary’s book tours, they had even sought each other out from time to time when they were younger.

  Her visitor had caught her unawares on a Saturday morning while she was putting out the rubbish. ‘Surprise,’ Meryl had called in a carolling yodel, as she came up the path. ‘Betcha didn’t expect me.’ Her voice still had the nasal twang Hilary remembered. It reminded her of why, in the end, she had been glad to escape Meryl, why their efforts at reunion had failed so miserably.

  In a few minutes, she was sitting at Hilary’s kitchen table, asking for sugar for her tea, which she liked ‘hot and strong’. ‘Just energy shots, I don’t usually need sugar, except when I’m working. I’m on my way to a conference,’ she explained. ‘It’s just down the road.’ She chuckled. ‘You might have taken your name out of the phone book, but I’ve got your address — remember we sent each other Christmas cards? I couldn’t pass this near without seeing you.’

  Hilary shivered, this closeness of Meryl like a chill breeze on her skin. It was all she could do not to draw away. ‘A conference,’ she said carefully. ‘Does that mean you’re not living in the country now?’

  ‘Oh, I’m still a farmer’s wife, Hilary, if that’s what you mean. But we country women do have businesses of our own, you know.’ Hilary felt that familiar remorse, as if she was being judged for having changed. ‘You’ve kept your looks,’ Meryl said, ‘but you know you do need your colours done.’

  ‘Colours?’ Hilary repeated.

  ‘Colour is my business,’ Meryl said. ‘I saw you on television the other day talking about your new novel. And I thought, she still hasn’t got it. You know I always did have to tell you how to dress. You wore the oddest clothes. Don’t you remember, my mum and I used to find you dresses for the dances because yours were such a hoot? It came from being brainy — you couldn’t see how you looked for the nose on your face. My mother passed away, did I tell you, she was ninety-seven, and I was blessed to have her for so long, though God took her mind well before that. Look at you, still wearing purple. You’re not an old lady, Hilary.’

  In spite of herself, Hilary glanced down at the mauve jumper and trackpants she was wearing. As you do, she thought grimly, when you’re putting out the rubbish.

  ‘Much too cold for your complexion. You wore that lilac-coloured dress with the diagonals the first time you went to a dance. You didn’t listen that time, did you? You must remember.’

  ‘That was a long time ago.’

  ‘It was the night you met Nino.’

  ‘Was it?’

  ‘That Italian boy. Oh, come on, Hilary.’

  ‘I remember the dress,’ Hilary said with reluctance. Of course she did. The dress had been one of her aunt’s cast-offs, a party dress Hilary had worn for a dress-up game when she was younger, a sheath dress from the era of jitterbug and jazz. Keep it, her aunt had said, seeing as you like it so much. Her mother helped alter it so it fitted her better.

  ‘You look so pretty,’ Nino had said that night.

  SCARLET WOMEN

  THE NIGHT OF THE DANCE was not the first time Hilary had seen Nino, but she never told Meryl that. It began in Alderton, but then most things did. That is where Hilary returns when she least expects it. The town sits prickling behind her eyelids when she wakes some mornings, or when she is on a train in a foreign country and sits lulled by its motion, not knowing exactly where she is, or in the moments before she gets up to speak to an audience, and she finds herself wondering how she got there and where she has come from.

  There was one main street, less than a quarter of a mile long, and two bisecting it. A grocery shop stood on one corner and, opposite it, a dairy that sold tobacco and sweets as well as milk and bread, and then came the butcher’s shop. Further along was a dress and fabric shop, a salon where Hilary had her hair cut short in preparation for high school and the regulation clearance of the uniform collar. A pity, said the hairdresser, as she lifted the dark skein of hair she held looped in her hand. You could make a silk blouse out of this. Even though it was a summer day when this happened, Hilary’s neck felt cold and suddenly naked. There was, too, a hardware shop, a small library that opened on Friday afternoons and a photographer’s studio.

  And when Hilary remembers the photographer’s, she sees herself as a twelve-year-old with her nose not quite pressed to the window, looking at the pictures of young women in long dresses. The farmers’ daughters who lived out of town had debutante or ‘coming out’ balls. They were not seen much around Alderton because they went to boarding schools and only came home for the holidays. When school was over they would disappear to new lives. They wore elbow-length gloves with their fluffy white gowns and swore they were virgins, now ready to be courted by the right man, one they could ‘give themselves’ to. Plums ripe for picking, Hilary once overheard her father say, with a laugh. The young women were accompanied by black-jacketed partners, sweaty-looking youths plucked from the countryside to escort them to the balls, which took place in the local returned servicemen’s hall. (These were not necessarily the right men, who might still have to be found in a city, in banking or medicine or law, or even in England, wait
ing to be met by the girls on their big trip abroad, but these were the men who would do for the moment.)

  It was these virgin role models Hilary stood looking at with such longing. Their smiles were wide and gleaming, light was reflected on their hair from the overhead lamps, little twists of tinsel wound around the glittering archways through which they made their grand entrance. Hilary wanted to be one of those girls some day, but already she knew in her heart that it wouldn’t happen. Her parents couldn’t afford dresses like that. They owned a small piece of land where they were setting up an orchard but it would be a long time before it paid its way. In the meantime, they did odd jobs for other people, worked at picking fruit and gardening. Besides, her mother, a sturdy woman who had grown up Presbyterian, found the idea of these balls ridiculous. Pomp, she snorted.

  Behind the main street stood a picture theatre where old newsreels and grainy black and white movies were shown on Saturday nights. Hilary had seen Audrey Hepburn courted by Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday and Ingrid Bergman with Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. She cried on the walk home after Casablanca, making her father irritable. ‘Don’t get ideas about that Ingrid Bergman. Don’t you know she’s living in sin with some Eyetie fella?’ he said. Besides, he liked to sing as they strode along the road beneath the starlit canopy of the sky, and her snivelling spoiled the evening’s treat.

  ‘What’s the point of it all?’ he said. ‘You cried all the way home last week, too.’ This was true, but unjust, because they had heard at intermission that a boy in her class had been killed that afternoon when his horse rolled on him. With the hindsight of all those years, Hilary wonders if her father was just callous — for that is what he seemed to her then — or whether he wanted to shield her from the terrors of death. She remembers how she didn’t want life hidden from her, that what really happened was what she wanted to know. On the day of the funeral she had been kept home from school. She didn’t just weep when her father complained about her tears, she burst into loud erratic sobs.

  ‘She shouldn’t have left him,’ Hilary cried, meaning Bergman and Bogart. ‘He was the one who truly loved her. None of them will be happy. Her husband’ll be miserable for the rest of his life.’ And so on. Histrionics, her father said, with a short intake of breath.

  Hilary wasn’t going away to boarding school. Instead, she would catch a school bus to the Ohaka high school some twenty miles away. The pupils who travelled on the bus had parents who were hard up like hers, or they were Maori or Dalmatians. This was as good an indication as any that she would never have a ‘coming out’ ball, but it didn’t stop her from dreaming about one day falling in love. She had periods and the beginning of breasts with rubbery little nipples that she admired in the mirror every night. She needed clothes, she thought, and lipstick and shoes, not Roman sandals, to wear to the pictures. When the summer holidays came, the last before she started high school, she took a job sweeping floors at Kirk’s, the grocery store. Mr Kirk was a short rugged-looking man, used to throwing crates of food around.

  ‘How old are you?’ he barked, when she went to enquire about the job.

  ‘Thirteen,’ she lied.

  ‘Well, make sure you keep up with the work,’ he said, and left it at that.

  Kirk’s stood on the crossroad, opposite the dairy belonging to Burke’s. Kirk’s and Burke’s. Twin shops. People who were going to town often said they were ‘going to Kirk’s and Burke’s’, as if it meant the same thing. Hilary made herself useful, stacking tins the way she saw other staff doing, smiling at customers and showing them where to find golden syrup or matches or floor wax. She hoped she would soon be allowed to serve at the counter. When people from school came into the store she adopted a superior look, as if not having a job and nothing to do for the whole summer was sad.

  Hilary had worked at the shop for less than a week when Burke’s took on a boy, new to the town, to move the milk crates. At the grocer’s shop, some said he was Italian. An Eyetie. Only weeks earlier, Hilary had heard her father use this word and now she saw it for what it was: an insult. But then her father had been to war, and the conflict was still raw. Men who worked in the shop had fought, too. They didn’t talk much about it. But in the language between them, a certain contempt surfaced for those who hadn’t been, or when they spoke of their erstwhile enemies.

  It was hard to guess the Italian boy’s age, perhaps fifteen or sixteen. He was tall and thin with a chest that seemed almost concave. His father was said to be opening a fish and chip shop. Well, what would you expect, Mr Kirk had said with a shrug. That’s what those people did. He wondered aloud how they would make themselves understood. Refugees, hardly a word of English. Up here in the north, they mightn’t get on too well with the Dallies. Sure to be blood on the floor.

  In her lunch-hours, Hilary watched the boy from the corner of her eye as she sat on the bench at the edge of the street verge, her feet surrounded by kikuyu and paspalum. His hair was black and too long for the times, his face hollow-cheeked and drawn and there was a pallor beneath his swarthiness. She knew he had seen her. On his third day at Burke’s he waved, a covert little acknowledgement of her presence. From then on, she would sit each day picking at her lunch, and wondering how she might speak to him, what other signal she could send beyond a wave.

  A girl called Anthea appeared in the shop one day. She was someone Hilary had hoped never to see again. Anthea was older than her by three years or so. For a time, when they were still quite small children, they had attended school together, before Anthea was sent off to boarding school. She had been a person to avoid, her tongue was cruel, her fingers like sharp claws that stabbed you in the arm when nobody was looking, leaving twin bruises. It was never possible to tell what would attract her malice from one day to the next. Some sour irritation within seemed to overtake her, and when it subsided she stopped as if nothing had happened. Her grandfather, said to be a wealthy man with an English title, had dispatched his youngest son, Anthea’s father, to New Zealand because he hadn’t done well enough at Eton. A remittance man. Although their house stood not far from where Hilary lived, she had never seen it, sheltered as it was by a high hedge. Those few who had described it as a ramshackle cottage. But there was talk of a splendid dresser, resplendent among camp stretchers and sticks of cheap deal furniture. A Georgian dresser, a district nurse told Hilary’s mother. She had been called to the house to attend a family illness. Some fine porcelain cups and saucers, too, remnants from a former life, some lost refinement.

  When Anthea came into the shop, she gave Hilary a long baleful stare. She had thick wavy hair, a brown mane with rough texture, and strong chiselled features.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she asked.

  ‘I work here,’ Hilary said, and realised, as soon as the words were out, that she had spoken with too much pride.

  ‘Work,’ said Anthea, ‘you’re just a kid. A brat.’

  Hilary stood holding onto the end of her broom handle and said nothing.

  ‘They don’t pay you, do they?’

  It seemed best to shrug it off. ‘Pocket money.’

  ‘Pocket money. You’re not worth it. I suppose you’ve heard I’m going to Ohaka this year?’

  Hilary felt suddenly sick. She remembered, then, that Julius, Anthea’s older brother, had come back to the town, and for the past year had been travelling to high school on the bus. Julius was unknown to her, someone who had always gone away to school. But now she saw how it must be, that the family had run out of money, and their children were reduced to the local school.

  Anthea turned and walked out of the shop. Julius was waiting for her outside. He looked nothing like his sister — almost grown up, tall, with limp fair hair flopping over his high, round brow. His skin strained as if bursting with brains beneath his forehead. Brainy, he looked brainy, Hilary thought. Anthea stood talking to him and they both turned and looked back over their shoulders.

  ‘You should keep away from those two,’ said Mr Kirk, startli
ng Hilary. ‘They hang around here trying to buy lollies on the cheap. They ran a slate with us, until I told their father they weren’t paying. Now I hear they’re running one across the road at Burke’s.’

  ‘Is it okay if I go for my lunch now?’ Hilary asked.

  The grocer gave her an old-fashioned look. ‘Just don’t go hanging around boys,’ he said, as if he had read her mind. She had lain awake for several nights planning how she would make an extra sandwich, slip a boiled egg into her brown paper bag. She now knew the Italian boy’s name was Nino. She was sure he was hungry. Something wolfish about his expression suggested he had gone without. But when it came to the point, her throat felt constricted. She had wanted to call to him but nothing came out. He waved again and ducked his head.

  Hilary didn’t make it past lunchtime at the grocer’s shop. When she got back, Julius stood talking to Mr Kirk.

  ‘She’s only twelve,’ he was saying, in his drawling accent. He pointed towards Hilary.

  ‘Is this true?’ asked her employer.

  ‘I’ll be thirteen in three months.’

  ‘So it’s correct, you’re twelve now?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. Julius was smiling.

  ‘You’ll have the law on to me,’ Mr Kirk said. ‘Go on, out with you. Out. I’ll make up your wages to the end of the week.’

  Her father, who had been proud of her venture into work, told Hilary later that Julius had taken her place. But apparently he lasted less than a week.

  Nino’s family moved away almost as quickly as they had arrived. They were said to be trying to start their shop in another town, one that didn’t mind their cracked syllables and halting sentences so much. You couldn’t be sure in a town like Alderton whose idea it was for them to leave, but Hilary found herself wondering if Anthea and Julius’s family might have had something to do with it. But that didn’t seem likely. People thought they were a joke too. Hilary’s father said Nino’s father had told someone he was a doctor back in Italy, but could you believe that? Who would be starting a fish and chip shop if he was a real doctor? Yet there was a note of sympathy in his voice.