All the Way to Summer Read online

  A powerful collection of stories exploring love and longing from the award-winning author of This Mortal Boy.

  Fiona Kidman’s early stories about New Zealand women’s experiences scandalised readers with their vivid depictions of the heartbreaks and joys of desire, illicit liaisons and unconventional love. Her writing made her a feminist icon in the early 1980s, and she has since continued to tell the realities of women’s lives, her books resonating with many readers over the years and across the world.

  To mark her 80th birthday, this volume brings together a variety of her previously published stories as well as several that are new or previously uncollected; all moving, insightful and written with love. The final stories trace her own history of love, a memoir of significant people from childhood and beyond.

  Contents

  Preface

  1 Circling

  Circling to Your Left

  Hats

  Red Bell

  2 Longing

  The Honey Frame

  Mrs Dixon & Friend

  A Needle in the Heart

  3 Awry

  Fragrance Rising

  Tell Me the Truth about Love

  Marvellous Eight

  4 As it was

  All the Way to Summer

  Silver-Tongued

  Silks

  Stippled

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin Random House

  For Jennifer and Peter Beck and life-long friendship

  Preface

  How does one know what love really is? How many varieties of love are there? Does falling in love mean living happily ever after? Can we ever recover when love ends, or are we changed for all time? W.H. Auden, in his famous poem ‘Tell Me the Truth about Love’, from which I have shamelessly borrowed the title for one of the stories in this collection, wonders what it looks and smells and sounds like. It might howl like an Alsatian, or sing riotously at parties, or, more decorously, prefer only classical music. And, he muses, does it feel as prickly as a hedgehog, or as soft as an eiderdown? Some questions of my own: Does it ache like a tooth? Do hearts really break?

  I can’t answer these questions any more than the poet, but in the last lines of the poem Auden repeats the refrain, begging to be told the truth about love and asking if love will alter his life altogether. This last question seems central to these stories of mine. For the most part, they are about love that changes the lives of my characters, one way or another; love, long or short, and often dangerous, is never forgotten.

  A number of the stories have appeared in my previous collections, written over some thirty years. The theme of love, between all manner of people, has been persistent. This year I turn eighty, and it seems like a good moment to gather up stories that reflect this preoccupation in my writing, but there are some new stories too. For those who have followed the earlier works, the stories are just the same in essence, although this volume has been an opportunity to refresh them, sharpen them up a bit. I am grateful to Harriet Allan for making this possible and for her constancy as my editor over many years of my writing life. The love of good friends matters too.

  Some of these stories are written in the first person. If my readers think they recognise me in these, or the character of Jill in ‘Stippled’, they are probably close. We all have our own histories of love.

  Fiona Kidman, 2020

  1

  Circling

  Circling to Your Left

  Miracles, miracles. Alice was sitting at her desk preparing an interview when the phone call came. She works in a radio station, running a magazine programme about lifestyles. Alice is a personality in her own right, and people seek her views on all manner of issues. People say she is a powerful woman, and indeed she feels strong and vital, but she has also reached that more private age when her children worry about who will mow her lawns and what will become of her. The name of her caller is Kathryn Fox, Kathryn spelled with a K and a Y. She is phoning from Auckland, from an insurance company. Alice can see her behind the desk, cool and efficient, wearing a well-cut suit, a muted but pretty scarf arranged artfully at the throat of her plain cotton blouse. She can hear her asking claimants the correct spelling of their names, an instinctive precautionary gesture, which she carries into her own life — this is exactly who I am: Kathryn with a K and a Y. Mrs, she adds, Mrs Kathryn Fox.

  ‘Yes, Mrs Fox?’ Alice says, preparing to tell her either that she has more life insurance than she can afford, or that she can’t spare an opinion on the subject this morning.

  ‘It’s about my father,’ says Kathryn Fox, quickly. ‘I believe you knew him when he was young, before he married my mother. His name was Douglas McNaught.’ Her voice has become less assured, dropping a note, as if she expects the rebuff Alice might be preparing. ‘It was a surprise that you might know him.’

  ‘How did you make the connection?’ Alice asks, the interviewer at work. But she felt the flutter of her own pulse.

  ‘Well,’ Kathryn takes a deep breath. ‘I heard you on the radio once, and you mentioned Fish Rock. You described a man you had known there, at work in his cowshed. When the cows got stroppy and wouldn’t do what he wanted, he used to yell at them, “I might as well talk to Jesus”.’

  Alice puts down her pen. ‘Niall McNaught.’

  ‘My grandfather. Are you with me?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Alice. ‘I am.’

  ‘My father was dying and I had been sent to my grandparents’ farm so that my mother would have more time to nurse him.’ Kathryn’s voice assumes a relentless quality now that she is underway. ‘I was very small. I sat on the railing of the yard and listened to my grandfather say those words every evening one summer. “You might as well talk to Jesus,” he said, and I knew he was talking to more than the cows. I’ve never heard anyone else say that since. Soon afterwards he died, and, not long after that, my father died too.’

  ‘So your father didn’t die on the farm?’

  ‘He’d been overseas to fight in Malaya,’ Kathryn says, ‘you know, the one that’s called Malaysia now.’ Of course Alice already knows this, but she doesn’t interrupt. ‘When he came back, he had some jungle illness. He went back to the farm, but he was never able to work the way he had before, and he and my mother moved to town.’

  This is something Alice doesn’t know. ‘Did he work again? In town?’ Everyone in Fish Rock knew what you meant when you said ‘town’. The place was to the north, not as big as a city, but it had hotels with starched linen tablecloths in the dining rooms, bookshops and a theatre, warehouses and stock and station agents. It was where you went if you needed the dentist.

  ‘He went into the stock and station and worked there for as long as he could. You did know them, didn’t you? I’m not wrong?’

  ‘Yes, I did know them,’ says Alice slowly. There is a silence between them while Alice asks herself whether or not she wants to help the woman at the other end of the call.

  As if she senses her hesitation, Kathryn Fox steps in, assertive again. ‘Just tell me what my father was like.’ Not pleading, just matter of fact, and ready to give information of her own. ‘My mother remarried, she couldn’t see how much my father mattered to me. She was very happy with my stepfather, and he was good to my sister and me. “What is there to tell?” she used to say when I asked her about my father. “He was sick and he died.” Whatever it was that she had fancied in him, she’d forgotten. Well, perhaps you wouldn’t know about that, but just something, some of the things he might have said and done. Forgive me, perhaps you don’t remember much about him at all.’

  ‘He was a gay dog,’ Alice says, instantly regretting it.

  ‘Gay?’ Kathryn says.

  ‘Not like that. It’s what we said
back then. Language changes.’ Alice recognises the distance between them, between Kathryn’s age and her own, between knowing and not knowing her father. ‘He did a fantastic set of Lancers. Well, we just did a set occasionally at the end of square dancing.’

  ‘Let me get this straight, you’re telling me my father square-danced?’

  ‘Yes. But not only that. He was a knockout. I mean, he was very good looking.’

  Kathryn says, ‘I would never have imagined that. My mother didn’t keep any photos. Nobody told me he was good looking.’

  Alice thinks Kathryn may be sorry she has rung, that Alice is romancing an image for her, or that she doesn’t remember him at all. ‘Was your mother called Rhoda?’ she asks.

  ‘No.’ Kathryn mentions the name of a woman Alice has never heard of, who, she says, her father had met in hospital soon after his return from the jungle. They had married almost straight away.

  This is the miracle, a chunk of missing history, offered to Alice on a morning when the wind whistles between buildings and the traffic five storeys down is blocked by a blown water main and the tower block next door is being evacuated by a faulty alarm system.

  Immediately after Alice left school, she went to work in the drapery store at Fish Rock. She pushed her way to the head of a queue of young women who thought it might be fun to work on the main (and only) street for a year or two while they got their glory boxes together. She had turned down the idea of going nursing or teaching. For other women, there was the burden of Catholic choice — to be a nun — but that was beyond the imagination of the Presbyterian circle of Fish Rock, a bizarre impenetrable mystery. Who, they asked themselves in hushed voices, would want to live amongst women?

  ‘Why do you want to work in my drapery shop?’ Miss Macdonald, the proprietor, asked her. She was a tall, thin woman with hair escaping in wisps from a huge bun. She was proud that she had not cut her hair for twenty years, although no one had ever seen this massive accumulation let loose.

  ‘I want to earn some money while I decide what to do next.’

  ‘You mean, until someone comes along and offers to marry you? I don’t want boys hanging around here,’ said Miss Macdonald.

  Alice thought it wiser not to tell her prospective employer that she had already been forsaken by Douglas McNaught, although, who knew, he could still turn up some day. Instead, she said, ‘It’ll be hard for my parents if I leave now, just when they’re getting the farm going. I can still help out with the milking at the weekends.’

  This appealed to Miss Macdonald, the notion of hard work and thrift, and also that she could hire Alice without committing herself to the long term. ‘You can have a three-month trial, and then we can decide whether we like each other enough for you to stay on.’

  This was how Alice came to stand behind the counter of the Fish Rock drapery shop, counting buttons, selling girdles and crêpe de Chine, ordering whirl bras spiral-stitched to pencil-sharp points, suggesting sewing patterns to young women beside whom, only a month before, she had sat in geography class, learning how to do rouleau button loops so she could demonstrate them to others, advising Miss Macdonald when they were low on three-ply in the knitting wool section, and all the while breathing in the steady crisp scent of new linen, which still reminds her of buttercups.

  Miss Macdonald had hired Alice first and foremost to sweep out the shop and make cups of tea. All of which she did, but when Alice suggested they order cinch belts because she had heard that these were what the girls in town were wearing (and she yearned for one of her own), her employer gave her a long speculative look, ordered half a dozen and sold out the next day. After that, Miss Macdonald took time out to go to town on a buying expedition and left Alice in charge. When the new stock arrived, turnover increased, and so did Alice’s wages.

  Fish Rock is a string of shops divided by a main road. The post office has long closed. People go to town for their clothes, and the drapery shop has gone. A square white church stands beneath a spreading tree, a museum houses the unsmiling faces of the village ancestors, the community hall is showing its age, a monument to Fish Rock’s war dead, surrounded by a heavy chain, stands sentinel beside the road. Douglas McNaught’s name is not amongst the dead.

  Douglas didn’t fall in battle, and, besides, his war was a jungle skirmish, his going a young man’s response to the unanswerable in his life, not to a call to arms sweeping a nation. His name is written on a headstone in a quiet cemetery near the sea, where sand lifts and falls in drifts against the tombs and dry grasses bend on windy days. Trooper Douglas McNaught, SAS, Malaya. No name of a wife appears. This much Alice knows.

  Her parents’ farm was next to the McNaughts. The McNaughts were an old, settled family, and the Emerys were newcomers, their land a fraction the size of their neighbours’, neglected and overrun with gorse, except for three rich-green river paddocks. Her family had driven into the valley one afternoon in summer near milking time. Their cows were crammed in the back of trucks, their udders near bursting point. Gidday, said the men, standing on the edge of the road. Gidday, Alice’s father had said and gone into the tumble-down shed on the farm to milk the cows as they were unloaded.

  One of the onlookers followed him. ‘Let’s know if you need any help,’ said the man. This was Douglas. He was dark and nuggety, with a sinewy throat rising from his black bush singlet. His hair was crinkly beneath the battered grey felt hat he wore. Nests of hair covered his short strong forearms. When he lit a cigarette, he balanced it for an instant with a delicate flick beneath the tip of his tongue and his top lip before drawing it down into his mouth.

  Alice’s father managed his farm with care. He’s a dreamy bastard, he farms with a textbook in one hand and a spade in the other, the neighbours said to each other, but they were interested. He used electric fences to make the grass go further. His butterfat average inched up, higher than on the farms around about. You might as well talk to Jesus, said his neighbour Niall McNaught, as try to tell my sons how to do that. Niall’s voice was without envy. He had enough to go round. His three sons had worked on the land since they left school. Malcolm, the eldest, was married and lived in a house across the paddock from his parents; the second and third boys still lived in the old farmhouse. Alan smiled sleepily at people and worked without saying much. He drinks, Alice’s father told her mother, but he’s harmless. Douglas was referred to as the baby of the family, although he was twenty-eight.

  The entrance to the older McNaught house was by way of a verandah, bordered with curly wooden fretwork. In the morning, it was full of fierce heat, and even the geraniums wilted in the scuffed earth beside the path. In the afternoons, the dogs slept there.

  Inside, it was hard to pick that the McNaughts were well-off. Old newspapers and piles of bills were stacked on the sideboards, and ashtrays were emptied only when they were full. In the sitting room, a shabby suite covered in brown moquette was arranged without much thought. The walls were decorated with calendars from the local shops and two ornately framed pictures of Niall’s parents, posing formally in their best clothes; his mother wore a long, dark dress with a high collar. An old piano stood beneath these portraits. The McNaughts played it on Saturday nights when friends came to drink beer and sing. Alan played until he passed out, and then Tilly, the mother, took over. They sang ‘Roll Out the Barrel’, and ‘Coming In On a Wing and a Prayer’ and ‘She’ll be Coming Round the Mountain’, when she comes, when she comes, she’ll be wearing pink pyjamas when she comes. Presbyterian they might have been, but they were new people now, they said. They didn’t have truck with the old nonsense. ‘Well,’ Niall said to Alice’s father, ‘the boys wouldn’t hang around for long if we did, would they?’ Douglas and Alan slept in the same room they had slept in all their lives, in two of three beds arranged dormitory style, across the passage from their parents’ room.

  ‘They’ve got money all right,’ Alice’s father said to her mother. If you knew where to look, it wasn’t hard to see. A race horse ca
ntered in the front paddock, and two long-finned American cars stood in a garage at the side of the house. Over at Malcolm’s new house, his wife, Noelene, had arranged a cabinet full of crystal decanters and Belleek cream lustreware decorated with shamrocks. She hung lace curtains at the windows.

  The McNaughts and Alice’s parents accepted each others’ difference. Tilly of the overflowing ashtrays and ungathered newspapers kept a scrubbed board and an oven that shone like song. Alice’s father was crazy about the McNaught boys from the start. They made him feel like one of the people, a real farmer. Alice believes that her parents were happy there. Their marriage, which had appeared frayed and thin, bloomed anew in the McNaughts’ benign light.

  As for Alice, the McNaughts put up with her.

  She thinks of it now in those terms, she can see with hindsight that she was a bumptious, pushy girl with a need to draw attention to herself. She had succeeded at her last school; she resented her new one. The farmers sent their children to boarding school in town if they thought it worth the money, the rest went to Fish Rock High and planned their leaving and marriage. Clover Johnston was one of the exceptions who, if anything, was cleverer than Alice, but made less of it. She was a modest, handsome girl. Her parents farmed at the far end of the district. Alice and Clover became friends, but out of school they were separated by distance.

  Tilly was past entertaining teenagers. ‘Why don’t you go and see Noelene?’ she suggested when Alice turned up on her doorstep one afternoon over Easter, looking for company. Tilly’s head was tilted to one side, and she was shaking it furiously. ‘I got peroxide down my ear to shift the wax,’ she explained. ‘Makes it fizz, you know. Here, take this bowl of eggs to Noelene, save me a trip.’

  Noelene was going to have a baby. Alice found her in the sitting room, embroidering the front of a baby’s nightgown. She looked impatient and grown up when Alice arrived.