The Best of Fiona Kidman's Short Stories Read online

  FIONA KIDMAN first wrote short stories in the 1960s and has continued to publish them in books, magazines and journals ever since. Her style has developed and changed, but her piercingly vivid realisation of everyday people has remained a characteristic of her work. This is a collection of the best of her stories—some previously uncollected, some new, others old favourites from her earlier acclaimed collections such as Unsuitable Friends and The Foreign Woman.

  FIONA KIDMAN was born in 1940. She has worked as a librarian, creative writing teacher, radio producer and critic, but primarily as a writer. To date, she has published 17 books, including novels, poetry, non-fiction and a play. She has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, and was created a Dame (DNZM) in 1998 in recognition of her contribution to literature.

  The Best of

  Fiona Kidman’s

  Short Stories

  For Ian, and our family

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Early Stories

  Peas for Christmas

  Flower Man

  The Last Shot

  New Shoes and Old

  Sweet Blackberry

  On the Train

  From Mrs Dixon and Friend

  The Stung Ones

  The Torch

  Desert Fire

  From Unsuitable Friends

  At the Lake so Blue

  A Moving Life

  The Whiteness

  At the Homestead Hotel

  Beyond the Wall

  The Courting of Nora

  Hats

  Needles and Glass

  Body Searches

  Earthly Shadows

  The Tennis Player

  The Sugar Club

  Pudding

  From The Foreign Woman

  Separating

  The Foreign Woman

  Marvellous Eight

  Honor and La Jane

  Sovereign Mint

  Nobody Else

  Nasturtium

  If I Should Mourn

  Paradise

  Border Country

  Again at Batu Ferringhi

  Circling to Your Left

  New Work

  Old and Constant Friends

  Habits of Love

  Tell Me the Truth About Love

  Copyright

  Introduction

  SOMETIME IN THE MID-1960s I began to write short stories. With youthful enthusiasm and, I see, looking back, only a limited appreciation of the form, I wrote them as practice for the larger undertaking of a novel. It was not long before I began to write them in earnest, for their own sake.

  In those early days, I wrote everything with the passionate abandon which now looks like the work of another person. I envy myself that period in my life. I put down whatever came to my head, never asking myself whether or not a piece of writing was appropriate — whatever appropriate meant. It was in this artless state of grace that I wrote a number of stories about rural Maori life, stemming from my early experience. They were all published in Te Ao Hou.

  Later, as a Pakeha, I was challenged about their validity. In 1976, at the Maori Writers’ and Artists’ hui at Lake Rotoiti, a group of young Pakeha told me that I was giving offence. In retrospect, I don’t know whether this was true or not. None of the Maori writers with whom I associated at the time (and who remain my good friends) had thought it necessary to call me to task. All the same, I did listen, although the immediate results were not happy. I began to write from a strictly conformist Pakeha point of view, in which Maori might just as well have lived in a different country from the one that I was writing about.

  Over a period of time, this dilemma was resolved. I began to see that I could not write about a society that was all about one race or another, any more than I could write specifically from a particular class. I wrote a story called ‘Needles and Glass’ which is about looking across from one culture to another, and the irresistible influence that we have on each other; indeed, about the inescapable longing to be part of each other. In my case, it was fact. My children combine the racial mixes of this country. But at another level, I had taken the point. I began to write in a more inclusive way, so that people appeared, regardless of race, if they were part of the story. But I stopped writing them in the first person. I am who I am. Most of these early stories have been buried for many years. When I came to collect my stories I decided that they had their place. They belong in my development as a writer and are true to my particular vision of the world when I wrote them. Some of them are reproduced here.

  The first person has got me into other difficulties. Ours is a small country, and readers see the author as persona lurking under every ant hill. Having worked in radio, I was aware of the enormous impact of the first person on readers. Rule one, if you want to present a story as fiction, don’t use the first person on radio. People will always believe it is the gospel truth about yourself. But this ‘rule’ became a tyranny in itself. In the mid 1980s I wrote ‘The Whiteness’, a first person story about a woman visiting Crete. This was first accepted by an editor, then rejected by his successor, on the grounds that it was ‘an excellent piece of travel writing but not a short story’. Of course, the editor couldn’t be sure about this, because he didn’t know whether or not the events in the story had taken place, or whether the narrator was actually in the state of mind which she recounts. After some to-ing and fro-ing, the story was published in Landfall.

  Once it was published I felt as if I had won a sort of freedom. I set about reclaiming the first person. It is a wonderfully free way to unblock imaginative inhibitions. The mind is at liberty to explore fantasy and wish fulfilment that a character might indulge in. The voyeurism of the character in ‘Pudding’ is a case in point. I often write a story in the first person, and then in the third. Alternating closer and further distances can reveal more and more facets of the same character. Several drafts may pass before I make a decision about which point of view best suits the ultimate story.

  It was around the same period as ‘The Whiteness’ that I began to move away from the well-made short story. I was, by then, in thrall, and unashamedly falling under the influence of the Canadian writer, Alice Munro. In her footsteps, I turned belatedly to Chekhov. I learned that the short story could do more than just present a situation and resolve itself. Within the framework of the long short story there was room to unfold whole lives. Munro’s marvellous story of truth and consequences ‘White Dump’ became a touchstone. I do not want to invite unwelcome comparisons — as a writer my own voice is the one I seek to express. But when you find a writer who is developing a genre in a particular way that excites you, inevitably it leads to a new focus, a different way of examining your own method of working. It took me a little while to work out what Munro was up to; I learned from reading and re-reading her work that it is, in the main, a subversion of the traditional ‘curve’ so beloved by creative writing teachers (and one that I, too, discuss in class) to demonstrate story arrival points (this is a causative action class, this is the rising action, the crisis point, this is the resolution and the denouement), into the form of a three-act play. As much of my early work had been writing for the stage, and radio drama, my fascination began to make sense. There are several curves within the framework, and room for sub-text and complications to unravel themselves within eight or ten thousand words. I have mostly been working in variations of this extended form ever since. It’s an interesting challenge; with the same emotional scale as a novel there is still a spine-tingling requirement to achieve the precision of the short story. I wish there was another way to describe this fo
rm beside the long short story. It is effectively a genre in itself. Short fictions is the fashionable terminology but it seems inadequate to me.

  There have been some exceptions and some costs to working in this way. The exceptions are a handful of short stories commissioned for radio, or encouraged by the Listener in its more literary days, of which ‘Hats’ was one. ‘Hats’, about a family wedding, and written one morning, reminded me that the more conventional story form has telling power that can communicate in a direct way with audiences. A good short story is an excellent performance vehicle for a writer. ‘Hats’ has travelled well in New Zealand and over two continents. I must have read it to live audiences a hundred times. It became my safety blanket. One day, I simply had to stop, and move on. But it is still one of my favourite stories.

  The cost of writing long stories has been restricted markets. I am tremendously grateful to Robyn Langwell at North and South magazine for running some of my stories, affording them generous space and illustration, and providing a much wider audience than one would normally hope for. Otherwise, the market has had to be in book form, which means that the appearance of new stories is spasmodic.

  People often ask how the decision is made to write a short story rather than a novel. I find this hard to answer. Stories come to me whole, like poems, so there never seems to be a major problem to solve. You listen to the story in your head, and it has a sort of musical intonation, something that tells you that this is its shape. And then you do it. I’ve never written a short story that turned out to be a novel, or vice versa. Perhaps I could say that stories are the breadth of an expression, and you recognise it when it presents itself. Occasionally a story will come whole in a morning, like a gift (more recently, ‘If I Should Mourn’ and ‘Nobody Else’), but that’s rare and wholly improbable when dealing with the long story. For each gift of the unconscious there is a great deal of work to be done elsewhere. Writing short stories remains the purest form of creative pleasure for me. I need hardly say that good short stories are also my favourite read.

  It seems odd to have compiled a collection without the inclusion of any stories about Bethany Dixon, from whence came the title of my first story collection Mrs Dixon & Friend. Bethany has now acquired a life of her own in The House Within which effectively relates her life story. It wasn’t appropriate to duplicate the stories here again. Still, it was Bethany and the urge to keep writing her story over a period of many years, which provided a major incentive to go on writing in the form. The stories always felt open-ended, as if the character went on living beyond the moment when the end of a story had been reached. Some of the stories in this book also pick up on the threads of the past. I like to think of them as organic, living creations, not closed to the future.

  Over thirty years of publishing short stories I have had more editors than I can count, but some have been especially helpful. I would like to acknowledge the late Phoebe Meikle (who took my grammar in hand), and thank Joy Stevenson, Robin Dudding, Michael Harlow, David Ling, Andrew Mason, Robyn Langwell, and Fergus Dick. In recent years, the tremendous support of Harriet Allan and Anna Rogers has ensured that my stories have maintained a profile before my readers.

  Fiona Kidman

  Peas for Christmas

  ALL THE SUMMER MONTHS, my mother carried water from the river up to the garden. Sometimes as she laboured up the slope with a full bucket in each hand, she wondered about piping it up, but Donald always said it would be uneconomic to take it past the cowshed. And it was true they had never run out of the rain water they caught in the tanks during the winter months, except once in a drought and that had been cruel.

  That dry garden really troubled her. Donald was proud of her garden, and helped dig the ground over in the early spring, but he could never understand about the water. She stopped, dug for a man’s handkerchief in her overall pocket, then wiped her face and carried on.

  ‘Jeannie,’ she called. I went to the door, feeling as guilty as sin, knowing she was carrying the water again. ‘Give me a hand, dear,’ her voice rising like the hazy heat itself from the valley floor.

  So I went down the hill towards her. She was a small person, deeply tanned by the sun, cropped hair turning grey. Together we hauled the buckets up over the brow of the hill, until at last she stood panting by the neat rows of the garden.

  ‘Maybe it’s too hot to water them now,’ she said. ‘D’you think I should leave the watering till evening?’

  ‘The peas would love a drink right now, Mum,’ I said.

  ‘Right, we’ll take a chance.’ We splashed the water up and down the rows, drenching the moth-like petals amongst the green foliage. ‘There’ll be peas for Christmas after all,’ remarked my mother.

  ‘There always are. Don’t know why you worry about it every year.’

  She smiled, as if contemplating a banquet. ‘Yes, we’ll have a great Christmas dinner.’

  ‘Except that I’ll choke on every morsel of Rufus,’ I said.

  ‘No you won’t. Your dad’s raised a fine fat duck there, and he’ll be delicious. I wish he’d clip his wings though. Muscovies are terrible fliers, you just can’t stop them once they get away.’

  She mentioned it again to my dad that night but he laughed at her. ‘Rufus’ll be all right, Mother. How are the peas coming along? Be ready in time for Christmas?’

  And when she assured him that they would, he smiled a slow contented smile, and nodded. The next morning he carried the water for her, but of course he had forgotten about it by the following day, and she was carrying it again. I used to rage about it sometimes, but she would just say, ‘Stop your squawking Jeannie, and give me hand. Think if I lived in a big city.’ For a moment her eyes would wander away into some private vision, before she took up again. ‘Why, I’d have a great load of groceries to cart home from the shops every week. Where’s the difference?’

  And as her thoughts slipped away into a past dotted with city lights, and a fun-filled time, when there had been no young man with a faraway country look in his eyes, and no money, mine would surge forth into the future.

  Auckland was my enchanted city, and at fifteen, as I turned that year, it lay ahead of me, business college the Mecca which would endow me with the poise and capability I needed to enter the world. The long Christmas holidays stretched just weeks away, I felt as if they would never end. Later, I was to think back, and remember them as a time held in suspension, the last interlude before childhood finally deserted me.

  A week before Christmas, my mother and father would go to town to collect the Family Benefit from the Post Office, then they would buy the presents. When I came home there would be a scuffle to hide everything. Everything, that is, except the sherry.

  I would come in from school, and, as I heaved my books down and changed out of uniform, I could see the bottle, standing on the bench. It was my job to bring in the cows, not too bad unless they were on the scrub hills — and they often were, for there was too little pasture to rotate as it should have been done. I was lucky, though, for the dogs worked better for me than anyone. Usually I could sit on the slope by the river for a good twenty minutes before I had any work to do, that’s how good those dogs were. When I came in for afternoon tea, my parents would be sitting waiting for me, rolling themselves some smokes to have on hand during the milking, and they would eye that bottle up and down. Then they set off to the shed, and I would start my homework and prepare the meal. At last they would return and, as they had done every year for as long as I could remember, my Dad would say, ‘Well Mother, what about it.’

  She always came in right on her cue, and said, ‘Well Donald, maybe we could spare a thimbleful.’

  So Dad would undo the cork and they would have a half tumblerful each and pour a drop for me too, which would make for a merry dinner, and Dad would forget to say, ‘Burned the spuds again, Jeannie?’ After that the sherry went away in the cupboard until Christmas Day and not one of us dared cast an eye at it again.

  But that
year was memorable. There were two reasons why, and the first was Rufus. Dad said, how could I call a duck Rufus when it wasn’t red, but I reckoned it was a Christmassy sort of name, and as he was destined to be a Christmas duck, Rufus it was. The night before Christmas Eve that year, we all three of us sat on the porch steps after our evening meal. The sun was drifting out of sight like a fat falling marigold, and the air was cool. I dug my fingers into the earth beside me. If I wriggled them down past the parched crust I found soft moist soil. ‘Soon they’ll make me leave all this,’ I thought, with sudden fierceness.

  But I knew that that wasn’t true, that they would keep me there for ever, given time to think about it, only they didn’t let themselves. Instead, they told each other I must get away from the farm and not get married to one of the lads before I knew what the world looked like. A chance in life they called it. And I knew I would take it, that that was what I wanted, and nobody was making me leave.

  Right then, as I was thinking along like this, there was a rush of wind over our heads as a great bird lifted its wings and soared into the gathering night, like an emblem against the sky. My mother gave a cry and reared up off the steps. Dad just sat there, awfully still and never said a word.

  At last Mum said forlornly, ‘That’s the way they go. Never knew a Muscovy fly off like that at sunset, and come back.’

  ‘He might,’ said Dad, full of despair.

  But we all knew Rufus had gone. I would have been glad actually, if it had not been for the look on their faces.

  ‘Never mind,’ Mum said more briskly. ‘I’ll kill a chook tomorrow and give it a bit of a pot-boil, then roast it up on Christmas morning. It’ll be just as good.’ Never a word of reproach about those wings, mark you, and that’s the sort of thing I like to remember about them.