The Trouble With Fire Read online

  RECOUNT TO ME THE CAUSES

  THE CREAM SCHOOL BUS WAS hot and stifling in summer as it trundled past fields of yellow light. In winter, the windows fogged up with the steam from the pupils’ breaths. The last to board had to stand, swaying with their hands on the shoulders of those in front to stop themselves falling as the bus whirled around corners. Hilary always had a seat because, with Anthea and Julius, she was the first on the bus. The three of them got on at the same roadside stop and in the afternoon they were the last off. They met each morning when the sun was barely risen, and the last of the dew still rested on the grass. Some days, if he and Anthea were running late, Julius drove a battered old Ford pick-up to the bus stop and left it there with keys under the mat for his father to pick up later in the day. The invisible father, whom Hilary had not seen either. It appeared that he spent most of his time in the invisible house. The three of them, Hilary, Anthea and Julius, stood in the shade of a hedge festooned with furry banana passion-fruit and pink star-shaped flowers. Writers’ images, though Hilary hadn’t seen this yet, but she would come to it: the erotic fruit with its downy skin, the pulpy tasteless seeds at its heart. Julius said little in the mornings, his blue eyes flat and still.

  Although the distance from one town to another was not far, the journey took a couple of hours either way. The bus travelled down little byways where two or three pupils were collected at hamlets: a church spire, perhaps, a store with a bare wooden front, a cluster of houses, a marae. Julius was the school bus prefect. For most of the journey he looked studiously at a book, pausing now and then to rise and stride down the centre aisle, flicking the heads of those he thought were misbehaving, pushing his hair out of his eyes with a look of exaggerated exhaustion. His thin fingers tweaked the ears of Maori boys, in particular, or else he brought down his copy of the Aeneid on top of their heads. They hunched their shoulders and sometimes Hilary saw how close they were to hitting him, but he was more trouble than he was worth. At the end of the year he would be gone, and so would most of them, without ever reaching the lofty heights of Virgil. Anthea shrieked now and then with a couple of older girls until it was their turn to get off the bus, then she prowled up and down the bus behind Julius as if she was a prefect too.

  Hilary didn’t mind the journey. Like Julius, she studied. It was the end of the ride she dreaded. Anthea’s fingers hadn’t lost their sneaking power to poke and prod. When Hilary protested, Anthea was likely to pull her hair. When she was silent, Anthea called her a frigging little up herself bitch, and wanted to know who she thought she was, too good for the rest of them. This seemed peculiar; there were no Georgian sideboards lurking at Hilary’s house.

  Ohaka High School was new since the war, built around a quadrangle, its paint still fresh, the trees only recently planted, so that one class could look across and wave to their friends in another. There was a small boarding school for boys. It would have been easy not to take the school seriously, but Hilary did. Cleverness opened doors, and she was fast discovering that she had this. She took the languages course and flourished. Her English teacher was a portly man with grey hair and a moustache, and since the first morning of term, when he had read Morte d’Arthur in a voice full of tenderness and meaning, she had loved every moment of his lessons. She liked French and Latin too.

  It was in home economics that she faltered. Held on Friday afternoons, the class gathered up girls from different subject areas to teach them basic skills in cooking and sewing. Hilary found her attention wandering, drifting off to her English essay, or nouns and verbs. The home economics teacher wore a tweed skirt and a brown twin-set beneath her apron, or pinny, as she called it. On an afternoon soon after term began, when Hilary returned a blank stare in response to a question, the teacher said, ‘Yes, well, miss, perhaps they don’t cook at your house. Are you just a tinned vegetable family?’ A ripple of laughter spread around the room.

  The next week she paid attention. ‘Can someone define the meaning of toast?’ the teacher asked. Hilary shot up her hand. ‘Burnt bread,’ she said, before anyone else could answer.

  The teacher found this amusing, too, and so did the class. A girl called Meryl put her hand up amid the laughter. The teacher smiled and nodded. ‘Bread that has been dried and browned,’ said Meryl.

  ‘Thank you, Meryl,’ said the teacher. ‘A thoughtful answer. Can you elaborate? How is the bread dried?’

  ‘By fire, Miss.’

  ‘Very good, Meryl.’ The teacher gave an approving nod. ‘Fire is necessary to make toast. Some food can be cooked with heat from other sources, such as heat derived from electricity, but toast must be made against a flame.’

  ‘That was hilarious,’ Meryl said to Hilary, as they took off their aprons. ‘Burnt bread. You’re quite a card. Do you always make jokes like that?’

  Hilary saved herself just in time from admitting that it wasn’t a joke. She thought she was right, but she didn’t tell Meryl this. Bread, burnt lightly, perhaps, but burnt all the same. Instead she said that yes, it was one of her jokes, and they always got her into trouble.

  ‘I’ll watch out for you,’ said Meryl, in a comforting matronly way.

  She was fifteen. She had had an illness when she was a child and was required to repeat some of her classes (it turned out she had already done home economics so she knew all the answers). Meryl had been abandoned by her contemporaries, who had moved on ahead of her. Hilary didn’t see this at the beginning. She was simply dazzled by having a friend who was fifteen, a girl with a splendid bosom who knew all the boys in the boarding school. Her married sister had a baby. She knew how babies were born and how many stitches her sister had had in her fanny when they cut it to get the baby out. It was 1955 and the word vagina hadn’t entered their vocabulary. Her parents had thought about divorce, because her father used to play around, but now he was on the straight and narrow, although it had left her mother a nervous wreck. Even though, Meryl said darkly, her mother wasn’t sure that her youngest brother was really her dad’s, but her dad didn’t know that. He thought he was the only sinner in the family, and that’s the way her mother liked it.

  ‘How can that be?’ Hilary asked. ‘If she’s married to your dad, he must be the father.’

  Meryl looked at her and roared with laughter. ‘You don’t mean that, do you? Is this one of your jokes?’ She saw that it wasn’t. ‘You really are a kid, aren’t you? Don’t you know how it’s done?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Rooting. Anybody can root. My parents do it all the time, but not always with each other.’

  Hilary had an image then of pigs with their snouts in the ground, snorting and snuffling their way under trees, looking for truffles. She had learnt about this in her French class, a diversion from verbs in her textbook En Route (although even this title was suddenly imbued with new meaning).

  ‘Yes,’ she said doubtfully. She wasn’t aware of her parents rooting. If they did they kept it to themselves but it had become a possibility. Suddenly life was more real than the movies.

  As Hilary walked around the school grounds with Meryl in their lunchbreaks, soaking up these adult perspectives, Meryl greeted boys from the hostel by name, and was rewarded by smiles and raised caps. There was a particular boy they saw each day, a senior, like Julius, but different in every other way. Bruce had the thick limbs of a farm-raised boy, a big chest, and a crop of pimples that always looked on the point of exploding. Though he had the build of a man, he wore short pants and socks pulled up to the knees. He took the agriculture course, to teach him to be a farmer. When he was older he would inherit the family farm, Meryl told Hilary. Bruce sweated when he came abreast of Meryl. Hilary wondered how she knew so much about Bruce. Again Meryl shook her head with amusement. ‘We write to each other,’ she said, and blushed. ‘Hadn’t you guessed? I can’t wait for the school dance, he’s booked every dance with me.’

  ‘YOU’RE ONLY A CHILD,’ HILARY’S mother said, in a scandalised voice, when she raised the subject of t
he dance, although by now Hilary was thirteen.

  ‘It’s a third formers’ dance,’ she said, ‘for people to get to know one another.’

  ‘Will there just be people from your year?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Hilary lied.

  ‘It’s too far away.’ Her mother’s voice held an edge of triumph.

  ‘Meryl says I can stay the night at her house.’ Meryl lived near the school. Hilary hadn’t mentioned that Meryl was fifteen.

  ‘But I don’t know this girl.’

  ‘This is her phone number. She says to ring her mother.’

  Her mother took the slip of paper dubiously. ‘That’ll be a toll call.’

  ‘Take it out of my allowance.’

  It was agreed in the end. Hilary could stay the night at Meryl’s and go to the dance.

  ‘Can you wear your gym slip?’ her mother asked.

  Hilary felt her heart contracting. She couldn’t believe her mother would say this. Her thoughts raced back to the girls in the debutante photographs, and how she had put aside that dream as impractical. But this might as well be a ball. She mentally cast her eye over the print florals with Peter Pan collars that hung in her wardrobe.

  Her mother looked at her and sighed. ‘I suppose you’re growing up. I don’t think any of my dresses will do.’ She brightened. ‘What about that dress Auntie Peggy gave you?’

  ‘It’s a bit big,’ Hilary said, although already she could see the possibilities of the dress. She thought about Ingrid Bergman, but she didn’t voice this vision of herself.

  ‘I’ll help you alter it,’ her mother said, warming to the project.

  They spent hours doing this. Her mother was supposed to be picking fruit on the neighbour’s property, but she said it could wait. There was lightness, a happiness in the air between them. When the dress was altered, her mother stood back admiring their handiwork, her face glowing, as if she was seeing Hilary in a new light. Her father appeared, and whistled. ‘Just no getting into the lipstick,’ he said, as if it was a huge joke.

  ‘As if she would,’ said her mother.

  ‘You can’t possibly wear that,’ Meryl said, when Hilary showed her the dress. Her mother said, in a brisk tone, that she would iron one of Meryl’s dresses for her; it wouldn’t matter if was a bit long. She whipped out a pretty yellow dress with a wide neckline and a full skirt, holding it against Hilary with a measuring look. She had coarse dark hair that curled back behind her ears, and shrewd small eyes. Hilary smelled tobacco on her breath, and old Evening of Paris perfume on her jersey. She wondered whether the perfume was for her lover or her husband, a weathered quiet man, shorter than his wife, who she met briefly as he came in from the milking shed. Meryl’s house was more comfortable than hers, with a brown crushed velvet sofa in the sitting room, and heavy embossed curtains, a refrigerator in the kitchen.

  In this setting, Hilary saw that her aunt’s old dress from the thirties wouldn’t do. And yet, thinking of last Saturday, and the afternoon she and her mother had spent together, their hands bathed in the soft fabric of the dress, she was overwhelmed by a fierce rush of loyalty. She said: ‘Well thanks, but I want to wear the dress I brought.’

  Meryl walked into the dance hall ahead of her, as if they were not really together, even though she had spent the previous hour anointing Hilary’s face with rouge and lipstick. She had given Hilary a little Clara Bow mouth. Some girls came up to Meryl and said, ‘Well, where did she get that dress?’ and raised their eyebrows at each other. Hilary flushed. ‘Somebody told her it was fancy dress,’ Meryl said, and walked off.

  The first dance was already being called. Bruce was waiting for Meryl. She glided off in his arms. He held her very close, his big feet adjusting to her step. Later in the evening, when their hips seem moulded together, one of the teachers would speak to them, admonishing them to behave in a proper manner.

  ‘I’m going to marry him,’ Meryl said later that night, when they were in bed. As it happened, the following year she would leave school and become engaged to Bruce, but he was not the man she would marry and he wouldn’t be the last man to whom she became engaged. There would be more trials and a few errors before that happened.

  Not that Hilary noticed much of what Meryl got up to at the dance. For a while, she sat alone on one of the long wooden benches that lined the hall, wishing she could disappear. The kindly English teacher with the grey moustache asked her to step up with him for a round, and this was almost as bad as it got. But something was about to happen that would take her mind off all of this. The supper waltz was announced, the halfway point of the evening, and girls began to take the arms of the boys they had been dancing with, before heading off to the side room where tables were laden with cakes and sausage rolls. Hilary thought she might slip outside and wait for it to be over. But then Nino was standing there before her, his face determined. Nino, the fish and chip boy from Italy, with the black blade of hair across his forehead. As she looked around to see who he was going to invite to supper, she wanted to flee. He held out his hand to her. ‘I knew you straight away.’

  ‘Why are you here?’ she asked. She felt not so much as if she was in a dream, but as if some inner vibration had begun in her breastbone and trembled all the way to the pit of her stomach. ‘I’ve never seen you at school.’

  He shrugged as if people were always asking him why he was there. As they ate supper and, throughout the evening, as they danced, he explained. After Alderton, his family had gone to Auckland to look for work. But then an uncle had come from Italy and the brothers decided that they could give each other strength. His father and uncle had come back up north, united in a new plan to set up shop in Ohaka, near the high school. Already, after just a week, business was good. ‘I hope it stay good,’ he said. ‘Now I find you. You are the only pretty girl here.’

  You ask me what it is like to be Italian, Nino wrote to her. How can I tell you this? I do not know too much about the history of Italy, even though I am from that country. My family live in Italy, the Germans come and then it is Yugoslavia, the boundaries they are always shifting. One day we lived in one country, the next another, without shifting house. So then we are all Yugoslavia and the Germans go away, but the people who are our neighbours now say we are very bad Italian people. All Italian people they will kill because we are collaborators. That is what they say, but my father was just a poor farmer. We lived all right, you know, not as bad as all that. My father grew food on the land, my mother cooked it, just like your family now. But then they want to kill us and so we run away. We run, many run, very many to America, very many to Australia, not so many to New Zealand. I tell you a secret. I have one more uncle in Wellington who has been here a long time, and he gives us money for the shop. It is a secret because nobody like Italian refugees, they look at us in a bad way. My uncle nearly get locked up during the war time here in New Zealand, but he change his name and pretend not to be Italian. He give us money so we do not go to Wellington, it is money for the shop. We are still afraid, but now the law in your country is better. The police tell us not to be scared. We sell fish and chips to everybody here and that is good. But still I am alone and feel very lonely in my heart until I meet you at the dance. Now I have a girlfriend who writes me letters and I write back to you. Love from your friend Nino.

  On Fridays, when Hilary was in her home economics class, she could see Nino across the quadrangle in the woodwork room. He sat by the window where he could see her learning to make scones and pikelets, and gave her little waves when she looked up. This was now her favourite class of the week. Soon Meryl and the other girls noticed. Nino and Hilary. A couple. He wasn’t bad looking, they agreed. She felt grown up and important. Even Meryl was impressed.

  Hilary wrote back to Nino at night by torchlight under the bedclothes. She folded her letters up into tiny squares and put them inside En Route. They passed their notes in the corridor when they were changing classrooms at the bell. Nino had to walk past the door of her French cl
ass on his way to woodwork. She didn’t have adventures in her life like Nino’s to recount. But she told him about the movies, and about holidays in the south with her mother’s family and how she hoped one day to travel a long way across the world. She asked her mother to find books about Italy in the local library. The librarian sent away to the Country Library Service, so it took time, but eventually she had in her possession a handsome book about the great artworks in Rome. You have a very beautiful heritage, she wrote primly. I would like to see the Sistine Chapel and one day to throw coins in the Trevi Fountain. She wrote some knowledgeable comments about the history of the fountain and the Acqua Vergine, the ancient aqueduct that supplied water to ancient Rome. Then, discarding propriety, she wrote: We can go there together, and you can show me everything, and when we throw a coin we can wish for our good luck. Already she had a plan in her head: her own Roman holiday with Nino. She had a future.

  I have not been to Rome, Nino wrote back. I know only the countryside. It sounds very beautiful and indeed I would like to see this city too. I am older than you, but perhaps you know that, he continued, and here his tone changed. Your girlfriend is old too. You are still young girl. I like that you look different from other girls, but you must be careful. I think you are a good girl, and you must stay that way.

  His notes didn’t come so often after that. She wondered what she had done wrong.

  Her mother was fretting about the company she was keeping. She insisted that her friend Meryl be invited to stay with them. Hilary had been resisting this but she knew that sooner or later her mother would ring Meryl’s mother and invite her any way.