The Trouble With Fire Read online

  ‘It’s perfect,’ Geraldine repeated, in the way she had praised the beef, as if stating the obvious, and none of it mattered. She was curled in front of the flickering fire, wearing nothing but a necklace made of fine rolled gold that followed the shape of her collarbone. Her long, carefully crafted hair fell across her shoulders. She stretched her arms above her head and stood.

  ‘You look like a painting,’ he said, reeling off a list of the masters, starting with Rubens. ‘Or an Evelyn Page, perhaps — the woman standing in the boat. The New Zealand painter,’ he added. He was still dressed, his liqueur half finished.

  ‘All these painters and writers — how can I possibly keep up with them when I have five children to look after?’ she said.

  ‘I shouldn’t have said that,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘probably you shouldn’t.’ She knelt on the chair so that her knees were either side of his. The bed behind them had a canopy of white above it, soft and floating.

  ‘Ravish me,’ she said.

  He carried her to the bed, and groaned as he undid his clothes. ‘I shouldn’t be doing this,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t be here.’

  Geraldine reached over to the night table and picked up his cellphone, her fingers travelling over the keys to check that it was switched off.

  Towards morning, she got up from the bed and opened the windows because, although the fire had died in the grate, the room was still so hot she said she couldn’t sleep. Outside, sheep bleated in long concerted aaa-aahs as the beginning of their day drew near.

  Geraldine slept then, face down, one arm flung over Duncan’s chest, as if she were used to the shape of him in sleep. When she woke up she declared herself famished for more of him, and for the breakfast she could smell wafting up from the kitchen, in that order. When at last they dressed the room was freezing; outside they could see that fog had rolled in, creating a lace-edged blanket fluttering over the paddocks. A strange hush had fallen, so that the sheep sounded muted and far away. Geraldine laughed and stamped her feet and made Duncan hurry his dressing as she had, in order to get warm, refusing to close the windows or turn on a heater.

  After breakfast, when Hazel asked them if they wanted to confirm their booking for the second night, Geraldine said yes, yes, of course that was what they wanted, it had been the most wonderful night and she loved the house, every inch of it. She was still smiling, laughing over some joke Duncan had made, not a funny one really, but as she buttoned her orange coat, everything in the world seemed amusing and possible. The coat was a Jane Daniels, made of fine merino wool, meticulously cut.

  ‘Perhaps I’ll call you later in the day,’ Duncan told Hazel. He had taken out his wallet. ‘We should check on the children.’

  ‘The children, of course. Five of them. Really, if you’re coming back, you don’t need to pay me now.’

  ‘Four,’ Duncan said. ‘Well, two of them are mine,’ he corrected himself hastily.

  Hazel noticed that he was counting out cash. ‘Of course,’ she said easily. ‘Of course they are.’ Something like disappointment had gathered around her eyes. Disillusionment, Geraldine thought. Hazel met people like them often enough and was kicking herself for not having recognised them earlier for what they were.

  In Duncan’s car, Geraldine said, ‘You lied about the children — see where that got us.’

  ‘What was I supposed to say?’

  ‘You said five! We have two each. Well, I have two children.’

  ‘It was just a number.’

  ‘Don’t you ever use my children as an excuse to change your mind,’ she said. The tyres of the car were crunching over frost as they jolted down the rough driveway and out of sight of the house.

  ‘All right,’ he said, ‘we’ll stay somewhere else tonight.’

  ‘Oh, don’t feel obliged. I thought you liked last night.’

  The car paused on the edge of the country road as he looked for oncoming traffic. He dropped his head on the wheel for a moment. ‘I did. The best time.’

  ‘You think it isn’t hard for me, too? I’m supposed to be at a school reunion, for God’s sake.’

  ‘That woman will have the car’s registration.’ His voice was morose. Geraldine had suggested taking her car but he thought his green five-door more appropriate. More ordinary, he might have said.

  ‘Oh, damn the car. She doesn’t care about it. I don’t care.’ The bumps had dislodged a miniature soccer ball from under the back seat. He glanced behind him.

  ‘I can’t stand things rolling about in the car. Can you fix it?’

  ‘I’m not your bloody wife.’ They were quarrelling for the first time. Later she would think she should have known then, that in shifting the boundaries of what had gone before, they had begun their descent.

  ‘Aren’t you scared? What if you lost your kids?’ he asked.

  ‘Hardly likely.’ All the same, she ran her hand through her hair, clutching it in an anxious knot. ‘My children are near enough to grown up.’

  ‘Well, mine aren’t.’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about my children any more,’ Geraldine said. ‘Besides, this was about us being together for a weekend. Who mentioned forever?’

  But for a time, when they had recovered themselves, the idea took hold and enlarged itself. Forever. Perhaps.

  A MAN WAS STABBED IN the city. The police were looking for a youth in his late teens, dark-complexioned, of medium build, last seen wearing a grey hoodie. And a weapon, believed to be a kitchen carving knife. If people were stupid enough to get into fights they got what they deserved, Geraldine’s husband said as he glanced over the newspaper. Her husband was an industrial designer whose company exported millions of dollars worth of goods all over the world. He had the competitive edge, he often said, and Geraldine was glad that Duncan couldn’t hear him say things like that. Geraldine lived with her husband in the central city, in an apartment in a converted warehouse with exposed bricks and giant pipes in the ceilings. They had two Hoteres, a McCahon and a Frizzell hanging among their paintings, although Geraldine hadn’t mentioned this to Duncan. Sometimes, just lately, it seemed to her that an air of emptiness pervaded the apartment. The boys went to boarding school during the week and came home at the weekends.

  ‘I don’t like these things happening in the city,’ Geraldine said to her husband with a shiver. ‘He was killed for his iPod.’

  ‘They’d been fighting,’ Geraldine’s husband insisted. ‘Another loser.’

  ‘Anyone can get stabbed,’ she said. ‘I worry about the boys.’

  A flicker of concern crossed his face. ‘They need to watch out for themselves. Keep an eye on them,’ he said, as if this resolved the matter. ‘And you watch yourself in town. Don’t go out in the mall on Friday nights.’

  This was an absurd thing to say because Geraldine didn’t go out alone on Friday nights. She would be going somewhere with him, to dinner at a brasserie, or at a colleague’s house, or with the parents of their children’s friends, occasionally to a theatrical performance of one kind or another. Because her husband was a minor corporate sponsor they had complimentary tickets for opening nights at the ballet. They sat in one of the rows at the opera house reserved for the prime minister and the leader of the opposition, who came in when the rest of the audience were seated. Geraldine would be wearing something severe and simple with a low-cut back that showed her shoulder blades and a floating stole in a colour to match her dress. ‘Hello,’ they would say, in subdued intimate voices, and people would lean across the rows to shake hands. ‘Good evening, Prime Minister,’ her husband would say, because privately he disliked her, although Geraldine would call her Helen, as if they were friends.

  Geraldine and Duncan had met in the bookshop where his friend worked. Geraldine had gone in to buy a guide to the classics for one of her sons, who was struggling with the topic at school. The bookseller had called Duncan over and suggested he was just the man to find something that would help. ‘How old is he?
Sixteen? He needs Robert Graves, of course.’ The shop had got busy and Duncan’s friend was occupied, so they searched for the book together. ‘Voilà,’ Duncan had cried, pouncing on the book and flourishing it aloft, like a scholar who has just made a find. ‘Or should that be eureka?’ Afterwards it seemed natural to have coffee. The bookseller, a round man with a beard, eyed them benevolently when they left the shop, as if he had just arranged something important.

  She would wonder if the bookseller had already become Duncan’s confidant, if he knew more about him than his tastes in reading. That Duncan was dissatisfied with disposables and weekend sports runs, badly cooked meals and the way even a good salary didn’t seem to run to all the things that families needed these days. These things he told her about later, although in a glancing way, indicating that he knew it was bad form to talk about the wife he was betraying. Not, he hastened to add, that he hadn’t known what he was signing up for when he married; it was just the reality that was hard. He’d possibly left his run a little late.

  These were admissions he would come to. But on that day, the one when they met, they had simply found themselves laughing a lot over nothing very much, and exclaiming about their chance encounter, and how you never knew what was just around the corner. She found herself saying, ‘Have you ever had an affair?’ just like that, as if these words were springing from the lips of a stranger. Their laughter became uneasy. She bit her lip and shrugged, looking at him sideways, and he blushed and said, ‘Nothing much more than a bang at the Christmas party’, and God, he could be fired for stuff like that, and anyway it was a mistake and he was sorry it had happened. The woman had left, which was both a relief and made it worse at the same time. ‘You know what I mean?’ Letting her know that what she was suggesting was not beyond the bounds of possibility.

  He didn’t look the way she imagined a scholar would look. He was a lean, closely shaven man with rimless glasses, a bristle haircut, a slight dimple in one cheek; once he might have been athletic. He had fancied an academic life but it hadn’t worked out. Instead, he was an office manager. The bookshop became the place where they met once or twice more before sloping off to Starbucks to drink coffee. She wasn’t sure how many times exactly, because when he suggested they drive out in their separate cars and meet somewhere, she had already decided. It was simply a matter of when, although this was not as simple as Duncan had made it sound at first, because he had to organise to have his car on days when his wife was not using it. Summer was at its height, white daisies with yellow eyes filming the hillsides, agapanthus floating like tethered blue balloons above them when they lay down. When they walked back to their cars, they smelled of grass and pollen, semen and heat. Later, after the weather changed, they began to talk of a weekend away, some place where they could sleep a whole night together in the same bed — or, in a reckless fantasy, two nights even. This would take a long time to arrange. Meanwhile, their meetings were as necessary as eating and sleeping, as nourishing as red meat.

  In a way Geraldine supposed that what her husband said about the man who had been stabbed was true. There was a dark side to the town and it wasn’t very far away, just up the road and around the corner in Newtown, where people lived cheek by jowl in cramped council flats with washing hung out on the verandahs. She had seen them when she took the children to the zoo, places where leaks showed in rusty lines down the sides of the buildings, and dusty flights of steps led up from the streets to rooms with torn curtains in limp disarray at the windows. The occupants were often Maori or Polynesian, or men wearing turbans and women in the shadow of their burkhas; others talked aloud to themselves and laughed at nothing in particular, as if, perhaps, they lived in halfway houses.

  She also had seen the low life that lurked in the shadows, some of it up close and far too personal. Of late, she had become more familiar with the area when she made her way to the town belt reserve to park and wait for Duncan in his lunch-hour. Depending on the weather, they made love on pine needles at the edge of the grass, or in the back of her car, their feet awkward against the door. ‘We can’t go on like this,’ they said, using all the clichés that people say to each other when they haven’t the slightest idea of an alternative. And: ‘We can’t not go on.’ One afternoon, when Duncan should already have been back at work, a face appeared at the window. It was a man with a shock of faded yellow hair and a rough beard, leering and lurching on unsteady feet.

  ‘Give him some money and tell him to go away,’ Geraldine said, pushing her handbag along the floor of the car with her toe so that Duncan could take notes from it. He opened the window a fraction and stuffed a rolled hundred through, while Geraldine sat up and pulled her skirt down.

  ‘Cheers, mate.’ The man laughed. ‘Nice bit of bush there.’ He nodded in Geraldine’s direction.

  ‘We’re going to get caught,’ Geraldine said. Her voice was sharp and frightened. ‘My picture was on the social page of the paper last week.’

  Duncan had seen that, of course: Geraldine and her husband at a diplomatic reception for successful exporters. ‘I doubt if that man looks at the paper.’

  ‘You don’t know. Perhaps he sits in the library when he’s got nothing better to do. You see people like him there all the time.’

  ‘He won’t remember. He’s pissed out of his brain. Christ, Geraldine, we can’t go on like this.’

  ‘You said that before.’

  He sighed then. ‘I thought you weren’t afraid.’

  ‘Well, I am now. The car — he’ll remember the car.’

  ‘He won’t have taken the registration.’ Trying to make a feeble joke of their earlier indiscretions. Of course the man, pissed or not, wasn’t going to forget a flame-red Audi shedding hundred-dollar bills on the edge of the town belt. It wasn’t like Duncan’s own car, parked further down the road, full of plastic balls and ready to be turned over.

  ‘Perhaps we should let it go,’ she said. She was digging her fingers into the sides of the seat to stop her hands shaking.

  ‘Is that what you want?’ Thinking back, she recognised something almost hopeful in the way he asked the question. Some tired chime that said he was ready for the affair to end.

  ‘Let’s see how it goes. I’ll call you soon.’ He leant over and kissed her cheek. ‘You’re gorgeous,’ he said as he slid out of the car.

  She didn’t care for the way he said this: it was too easy, too pat.

  ‘I can’t rescue you, you know,’ Duncan said the next time they met, although she had spoken little of her marriage, simply mentioning that at times she was lonely and that she had a lot of money but it didn’t really make a difference, especially if you were used to it, as she had been all her life. Many months had passed since the beginning of it all. Soon it would be spring and then summer all over again. They had agreed to meet for coffee rather than drive out the way they usually did.

  ‘Are you sure it’s not you who needs to be rescued?’ Geraldine retorted. Already she felt an ache of loss, thinking back to their first meeting between the rows of spines and dustjackets in the bookshop, somewhere close to the bestseller stand, the way his friend had thrown them together. As if they were characters in one of the novels he sold, their lives ordered to suit the plot.

  ‘Keep your voice down,’ he said.

  ‘Since when has that bothered you?’

  ‘Since now,’ he snapped. ‘Look,’ he started over, ‘I know this is hard. It’s not what I want. But you know what you said: we’re going to get caught. Think about it. Let’s be careful for a bit.’

  Only she thought it wouldn’t happen. When it did, she wondered at her own surprise. People didn’t get caught by accident, not as a rule. She had heard this from friends. It was the kind of thing they might tell her after a session at the gym when they were fired up and uninhibited. They hadn’t always talked to her like this and she supposed that somehow she looked or acted differently, that they noticed the way she lowered herself tenderly onto the exercycle some days, or touche
d her breasts lightly while she dressed as if remembering a caress. It wasn’t necessarily a planned moment, they said — some instant when one or other of the lovers said, ‘Now, now is the time to get caught’ — but the signals and warnings had already been planted at home. Something had changed. A crisis was about to occur. The messages were as clear as Post-it notes on a fridge door. Listen and watch, and you’ll find out. Only fools didn’t read messages. And, her friends said, it almost always happened when the love affair was drawing to a close, a message that enough was enough. A phone call overheard, a text message intercepted, a hotel bill or a condom in a jacket pocket. Nothing subtle.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Duncan said when he phoned her, ‘I’ve got no idea how it happened. I didn’t mean to leave my phone where she could find it. I wasn’t expecting a message from you right then.’ There was something accusing in the way he said it.

  This was how she came to be standing near the sea at Island Bay on a blustery day in August. She had some books of his. He had a bracelet of hers. They would exchange them at a place where they were not in the habit of meeting. ‘Somewhere where I won’t be tempted,’ he said, only Geraldine didn’t believe him.

  She sat on the sea wall and smoked a cigarette, her first in years. The wind was a northerly, violent and harsh, flicking ash in her eyes and flattening her hair around her cheeks. The cigarette tasted sour and she tossed it away as she drew her orange coat more closely around her shoulders. Across the road stood a small low building on its own, housing an art gallery that showed a regular selection of quality works. She had been to an opening there with her husband. For a moment she considered crossing over and browsing while she waited for Duncan, then decided she might be noticed, perhaps remembered. She turned, intending to go back and wait in the car. But the waves drew her towards the edge of the sea.