The Trouble With Fire Read online

  ‘Nino’s mother?’

  ‘The Italian boy’s mother — perhaps you never met her. Well, you’d gone by the time the father died, so you wouldn’t remember her in her weeds. Oh, there’s that red dress. I’ve seen you in that, too; no, it’s not right. And green.’ She fingered one of Hilary’s jackets, and let the fabric fall. ‘Green’s all right, but you need warmth, more strength in your colour schemes, really you do. Some browns, bright orange, earth colours, autumn tones — you know what I mean?’

  ‘Of course,’ Hilary said, recovering herself. ‘So that’s what you mean by colours? You give people advice about what colours to wear?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ Meryl said, ‘but I can explain.’

  They had returned to the kitchen. Meryl was already at the bench, holding the teapot. ‘We could do with another brew,’ she said.

  Hilary took the pot from her hands. ‘Sit down, Meryl,’ she said. ‘I’ll make the tea while you explain. I have to get changed and go out in a little while, so perhaps you could,’ and here she groped for a word that didn’t seem offensive, ‘summarise.’

  Meryl opened a little black zippered business satchel and set about sketching some lines on a pad she had taken from it. ‘I’m kind of an adviser,’ she said, ‘but I only sell my services to a few people at a time. I’ve given you a free treat because we’re old friends. But most people would have to go on a waiting list, although they can make a bit of money signing up other people while they’re in the queue. And if they follow the advice properly, they can end up as advisers themselves.’

  ‘Giving colour advice?’

  ‘It depends on a person’s specific needs. Now in your position, you’re always going to need appearance advice. People like you have to look their best. But you could advise people about what books to buy. People who know about books are always in demand. It’s a multi-level scheme.’

  ‘You mean I could buy into the scheme?’

  ‘Why yes, I knew you’d catch on.’

  ‘You’re talking about pyramid selling?’ Hilary said this more sharply than she intended, willing this odd artificial conversation to end, for the woman to leave her house.

  Meryl blinked, her face beneath her make-up turning dark red, the familiar blush of her girlhood. Her throat gave her away: it started there. Hilary was afraid that the light eyes would spill.

  ‘You must remember the dress you wore that night,’ Meryl said. ‘Well, I was only trying to help.’

  WHEN HILARY WAS AT UNIVERSITY, she saw Nino one day in Auckland. It was the early 1960s. She wore a black polo-necked jersey and black pants, a duffel coat and a long purple scarf. Her hair floated long and curling around her shoulders. She smelled of cigarettes and coffee, for she had just left some friends in a café. They had been talking about Simone de Beauvoir and The Second Sex. Someone was arguing that de Beauvoir’s life didn’t stand up against her theories, that she listened only to men. Hilary had an essay due and decided to leave them to it. It was a wintry Sunday afternoon, fine although a sharp wind blew off the harbour. A group of young men were idling down near the waterfront, hanging about, smoking and watching girls. She knew they would look at her and she chose to look straight back, and found herself looking Nino in the eye.

  ‘Nino,’ she called.

  At first he didn’t recognise her. When he did, he hesitated, before walking slowly towards her. ‘You’ve grown up,’ he said.

  ‘You too.’ Hilary couldn’t think what else to say. His black hair was slicked up and he wore stovepipe pants. She saw that he was still very thin.

  ‘You live here, too?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘Would you like some coffee?’ she asked. Her legs were trembling.

  ‘Nah. Thanks, but my mates and I are going to take a spin up the coast.’

  One of the mates let out a long low whistle. ‘A bit out of your league, aren’t you, Nino?’

  Nino scowled back over his shoulder. ‘I’ll be back soon,’ he called, and turned towards her. ‘Just walk,’ he said. ‘Up the street.’

  So they walked, the two of them heading along Queen Street, a few feet apart, not touching.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘cheeky sods.’

  ‘You left school so suddenly. Did you go to work with your father?’

  ‘For a while.’

  ‘Not now?’

  ‘He carked it. I work for a builder. Look, that stuff when we were kids, it was nothing. It was a long time ago.’

  ‘I’ve often thought about you,’ she said slowly.

  ‘Well don’t.’

  ‘Did you go down Waterfall Road that day? Please Nino, I need to know.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid.’

  ‘You said you knew where Waterfall Road was.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s right. That’s what I said. I never said I’d go there. Look,’ he said, stopping. ‘You go to university, yes? You’ve got it written all over you. So you should, you sure were a smarty pants girl. I was the dumb bastard who leave your note where my father will find it. His English isn’t too good, so he give it to our neighbour to read. My father say you were a very bad girl, I should be ashamed to even talk to you if you make suggestion like that. He say I will make a bad name all over town if I go down that road to meet you.’

  ‘Is that why you left school?’

  ‘Ah look.’ His voice was weary. ‘Too many questions. I’ve got a good job, nice Italian girlfriend who stay at home with my mother, learn to be a good wife for when we marry, do the cooking. Spaghetti, meatball, minestrone. You make those, Miss Smarty Pants, or do you still make pikelets?’ She didn’t know whether his contempt was real or feigned. ‘The neighbour tell him later on, you are a girl who makes up stories. He hear it from the school. My father is a good man. He has much pain in his life. No more, he tells me, no more bad things in our life.’

  They had come to the corner of Victoria Street, where Hilary was turning up the hill towards the university. His expression was suddenly wistful. ‘I bet you’ve got a beautiful cunt,’ he said.

  HILARY DIDN’T WANT TO ASK Meryl to leave. It was too final, too unkind. Yet she was appalled by what the woman had done — arriving at her house, going through her clothes, trying to sign her up for her wretched scheme. Times must be hard up north. She knew about droughts, and the way people were starting to walk off their land, leaving paddocks bare but for the dust. She remembered the times when her parents’ garden had withered and they had had to ask for tick at Kirk’s, and how it had once taken them a year to pay it off. Perhaps it was like this for Meryl and her husband. Bad things had happened to them, she recalled, like some outhouses burning down, the loss of farm machinery. And there was a son who had been in an accident. However she ended it, Hilary thought, she couldn’t be cruel. She owed too much to the past, the whole story of her own life, which she had the luxury of reinventing to suit herself, the never ending narrative, the lives of others, at her disposal.

  ‘What time does your meeting start?’ she asked, willing her voice to be gentle.

  ‘Aha,’ Meryl said, as if saved. Her hands were flicking through the photographs still lying on the table. ‘That’s what I was looking for. Our school reunion. You didn’t come.’

  ‘I couldn’t make it, I’m afraid. I was travelling at the time.’

  ‘Oh travel, yes, you’re a lucky one. But look, see this picture, here’s our old crowd. Anthea came.’

  ‘Anthea?’

  ‘Yes, you know, she used to come to school on the bus with you.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘She came all the way from England for the reunion.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘She’s a dog breeder — can you imagine. You wouldn’t have thought she’d have the patience for it. In Devon, I think she said. Labradors. She still looks the same, don’t you think?’

  Hilary glanced at the picture of a woman with a shock of grey hair, chin raised.

  ‘She looks like a sheep dog.’

  ‘Oh H
ilary, that’s so mean. She was asking after you. We told her you were famous.’

  ‘And what did she say?’

  Meryl looked at her sideways, her expression still guileless. ‘She said you liked sticking your nose into other people’s business.’ She gave a short little rasp of laughter. ‘It was a joke, of course.’

  ‘What about Julius? Did Julius come?’ Only Hilary knows that he wouldn’t have.

  AFTER SHE HAD WRITTEN A number of books, Hilary was invited to a writers’ festival in Hawaii. On the last evening, a group of writers and academics gathered over a Chinese meal at a big round table. They had all had a good deal to drink and the women were wearing fragrant leis given to them by the festival organisers. Hilary was talking to an historian who taught at an American university.

  ‘So you’re from New Zealand, huh?’

  When she agreed that she was, he asked if she had ever heard of a professor who worked for a while in his department, a man called Julius.

  ‘Why do you ask?’ she said carefully.

  ‘No, you can’t have,’ he said, ‘or you’d know about it. A real scandal. You wouldn’t have missed it.’

  Hilary tried to explain that what happened in American universities wasn’t necessarily known in New Zealand. All the same she was interested.

  ‘Oh, he was a bit of a fiend. Sex for grades, you know the kind of stuff. Perhaps not such a big deal,’ the man said. ‘You say you haven’t heard of him?’

  ‘No,’ Hilary lied. Better to say nothing. She had had three glasses of wine, and she was due to fly home the next day. She knew how bonhomie and eternal friendships made on book tours ended almost as soon as you left the departure lounge at the airport. She would say something, too much, and then she would find herself confiding a long complicated story that did nobody, including herself, any credit. Later, she did some research on the internet and turned up Julius’s name, but nothing to indicate what had happened, just the date when his career as a history professor had ended. Although it appeared that he was still alive, his career and publications had stopped abruptly. He lived somewhere in California, and Hilary could see it, a gated community in the sun where Julius and his wife (for one was mentioned) could stay safe from the world. A man who took sweets from children. A man with a high forehead and blond hair grown thin.

  THIS WAS NOT THE ONLY lie Hilary had told in her life. Before she left school, in the very last home economics class of the year, when they were making small Christmas cakes to take home, she came out with a bizarre lie, so odd and unexpected that she would never be able to understand why it entered her head. She told the girls in the class that she was leaving because she was pregnant.

  At first nobody believed her, but Meryl was staring at her with startled eyes. Hilary spun her story elaborately. She was more than two months along, and her parents wanted to get her out of it, it was all they could do, they were so ashamed of her. She would have to go to a home for unmarried mothers. Her mother had already written to a place where she would go the following year. She would miss a whole year of school, and then goodness knows what would happen to her. Perhaps she would go to a school in Auckland if anyone would take her. It was all rather a mess.

  ‘Is it Nino’s?’ Meryl said, and Hilary saw that she was counting out time on her fingers. ‘Is that why he left school?’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Hilary, ‘it’s a boy back in Alderton, someone I’ve known for years, but you know, these things happen.’

  She knew then she had caught their attention. Because it was the last day of term, the teacher allowed them to chatter as they worked. The group believed her. Some looked distressed and patted her shoulders. Meryl was close to tears. Nobody was without response or reaction. She had hooked them.

  ‘You’re not telling the truth, are you?’ someone said.

  She was about to admit that it was all a great lie, when the girl said: ‘It’s him, isn’t it? The Italian boy? We won’t tell a soul.’

  So then she did tell them it was a lie, and it was harder to convince them of this than it had been to make up the story. Some of them looked angry that they had been fooled and some of them still didn’t know what to believe. Her fiction had had greater power than her truth.

  But she had entertained them for an afternoon.

  Meryl was gathering herself to leave. ‘I’m going to ring a taxi. D’you mind if I use your phone? My cell’s gone flat.’

  ‘I can run you to where you’re going.’

  ‘But you’re going out.’

  ‘In a little while. I’ve got time.’ It was Hilary’s turn to look away. She had seen the way Meryl’s face had lit up at her offer. Hilary found herself again entertaining a flicker of remorse, a wish that she was somehow a kinder, more generous person.

  ‘You were asking about Julius,’ Meryl resumed. ‘Anthea said you had a crush on him.’

  ‘I what?’

  ‘Oh, come on, Hilary. She said he used to buy you lollies and you took it the wrong way. Goodness, Hilary, I don’t know what to think, but she did say you even asked him to meet you along Waterfall Road.’

  ‘That was Nino.’ Hilary was so shocked she found herself blurting it out before she could stop herself.

  ‘Well, that’s what I said. It did get me wondering, though. What you told us that day in cooking class, it wasn’t true, was it? I mean, I’m sure it wasn’t, of course. I just, well, you know …’

  ‘You just wondered,’ said Hilary. She saw that Meryl hadn’t come to give her advice about her dresses, or even to sell her shares in a pyramid scheme, although that would have been a bonus. After all these years, she still wanted to know what had happened, to excavate the past. Hilary wanted to say to this intruder, with her sad bag of papers and diagrams, and excuses for visiting, that you had to read books to find out what happened next. Like the movies, that was where real life happened. Or not.

  Meryl’s conference was being held at an Indian cultural building with a façade of minarets and spires, situated in a suburban back street. Hundreds of people were streaming towards it, people who looked tired, as Meryl did. Country people for the most part, Hilary guessed, a few men wearing tweeds, but mostly polyester rain jackets, Warehouse tops and skirts for the women, young and old, people in wheelchairs and on walking sticks, overweight people, skinny people, people with an air of hectic gaiety as if they were attending a gala, muscular men with tattoos and shaven heads, people whose faces wore a kind of callused resignation.

  Hilary sat in her car for a moment, watching in her rear vision mirror as Meryl was absorbed into the crowd, greeted by people she knew, shaking hands, here and there bestowing a kiss. Networking, she’d said earlier. That was the point of the conference really, to hear some inspirational talks, and to network. And yes, she’d been to lots of them: they gave her hope, the motivation to carry on. She didn’t look back.

  The History of It

  They came down to breakfast next morning absolutely their own selves. Rosy, fresh and just chilled enough by the cold air blowing through the bedroom windows to be very ready for hot coffee.

  ‘Nippy.’ That was Geraldine’s word as she buttoned her orange coat with pink-washed fingers. ‘Don’t you find it decidedly nippy?’ And her voice, so matter-of-fact, so natural, sounded as though they had been married for years.

  The woman who owned the guesthouse, described as ‘boutique’ in the guidebook, had laid a fire for them the night before, so that when they retired from dinner the room was warm from its blaze, even though a hard frost had settled in the paddocks beyond. Two chairs had been set in front of the fireplace, as if she expected them to settle down with the liqueurs she had provided — a Drambuie for Duncan and a Cointreau for Geraldine — while they talked over their day.

  ‘Have you got children?’ she had asked when she served dinner.

  They were her only guests, which did not seem to trouble her, although places for another fourteen people stretched away on either side of the vast kauri table. The h
ouse had high ceilings, built in imitation of the Tudor style, but more than a hundred years ago, so it was historic for this part of the world. From the verandah of their upstairs room they saw gently rolling hills and sheep nuzzling close to the fences. On the other side of the house, native bush pressed close to the edge of the carefully cultivated garden where, the woman said, over two hundred roses were planted. If they came back in late spring they could see the riot of colour for themselves.

  Geraldine declared the dinner perfect; the woman, whose name was Hazel, had made her own horseradish sauce to accompany the beef, cooked to exactly the right shade of rare. Everything was natural, the vegetables all grown here on the property.

  ‘So how many children did you say you had?’ she persisted, when Geraldine praised the food.

  ‘Five,’ said Duncan firmly. ‘We have five children.’ His eyes met Geraldine’s for an instant.

  Hazel exclaimed extravagantly then over Geraldine’s figure, how she had kept her looks, and asked the ages of the children. Hazel herself had a tightly packaged body that suggested constant battles with her weight, short blonde hair styled in crisp upward flicks, lips a light shade of fuchsia. She could have passed for fifty, but Geraldine thought her older, perhaps sixty.

  ‘We’ve come to have a weekend away from the children,’ Duncan said lightly.

  Hazel apologised then, said of course, and what was she thinking of, but later when dessert was cleared away she couldn’t resist bringing out some pictures of her grandchildren. They were round and cheerful-looking, standing beside ponies.

  ‘They come here now and then,’ she said wistfully. ‘Not often enough.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Duncan said to Geraldine, when they were seated before the fire. ‘My friend recommended it for the quiet — he comes here when he wants to do a lot of reading.’ Duncan’s friend was a bookseller who believed in keeping up to date with his wares. Duncan managed a research unit in a government department but he spent his lunch-hours browsing in bookshops; reading was his great pleasure, although he admitted to a modest interest in the arts. Mostly he read non-fiction, preferably biography. He had just finished one on Shakespeare’s wife that cast her in a more complimentary light than previous biographers. He liked the many details it provided about Elizabethan farming and the making of malt ale. Duncan had considered life as an academic, but it had not worked out that way.