The Best of Fiona Kidman's Short Stories (36 page)

‘Somebody will see us,' he said, as if it was she who had driven the car there.

‘Not like this,' Natalie said, putting her head into his lap.

Nobody had done that to him before.

‘I have decided to risk all,' Natalie wrote to Sasha. ‘I'm in love with him, and now that the new bridge over the river is finished, Monty has been transferred. It doesn't make much difference what I do here. Soon we're going away. What the hell, I'm sure Stuart will follow me.'

What she didn't describe was the relief that it was to leave Mountwood. They had become reckless and foolish, hunting each other out in broad daylight, meeting by the river in lunch hours, at dusk, or on stupid pretexts such as dropping off books to the library in the middle of the afternoon. When she went home her mouth was bruised and her clothes stained. Her eyes slid away from Monty's. Most people knew whose cars went where, and why. Natalie tried to remind herself that Stuart did it too, with her, she didn't do it all on her own. In spite of her brave words, it was sapping her energy, the guilt, the arrangements, the excuses, the sheer organisation of it all.

Marvellous
Eight
is filmed in an Auckland studio that has been converted from a warehouse. Natalie is sent along as part of the team, in order to observe the making of a television play, and also to do on-the-spot rewrites. She stays with Sasha who nowadays lives in a designer apartment, part of her settlement from Jeff. That, in itself, suggests a command of her situation that has escaped other friends who have packed and quit.

Natalie has recently left Monty, and she barely makes ends meet. Monty won't give her a thing, he says, and he even wants the children. It is 1974 and men hardly ever get custody, although sometimes Natalie has the impression that her mother thinks it wouldn't be a bad idea if they were given to Monty. She often minds the children so that her daughter can work, and is looking after them in Wellington right now.

Certainly, Natalie does not laugh at what she has done. She drinks copious amounts of wine in the evenings and wakes, crying, from deep sleeps. Monty had rung the night before while she and Sasha were having dinner. ‘Come home,' he said. ‘Just come home, eveiything'll be all right.'

‘How can I?' she replied, ‘I've got work to do. I have to be here all week.'

‘I know. I mean, when you're finished there, come home.'

She sees they have conducted the conversation as if they were still married, and she is just away for a few days.

But Natalie is not ready to go home yet. She doesn't believe she ever will.

While she is at Sasha's she sleeps in the spare room where Sasha's twin daughters sometimes stay, between boarding school and visiting their father in Mountwood. Sasha's own bedroom is huge and takes up nearly all the top floor of the apartment; she can see Rangitoto from the window. She has a king-sized bed which she shares from time to time with her new lover. Jewellery, real and paste, but all huge and expansive, tumbles in artful
confusion
out of a jewellery box onto the dressing table; the scents of frangipani and sweet pea oils float through the rooms. When Natalie takes a bath, she has first to remove scarlet and citric yellow glass pebbles from its bottom, and lay them around the edge; it is easier to take a shower, but she takes baths, because they soothe her, and besides, she has many preparations to make. Lying in the bath, she counts the coloured pebbles: ‘He'll meet me, he'll meet me not.' She shaves her legs and under her armpits. When she is dry she smoothes body lotion over her skin.

She has arranged to meet Stuart and stay in a hotel with him for two nights. They are booked into the Waverley in Lower Queen Street. Today she is moving on from Sasha's place. It has taken weeks to plan. Natalie is going to pay for the hotel. Stuart never has money of his own, Dulcie runs his business and pays all the accounts.

Natalie's anxiety stems not so much from what she is doing, but from the thought that he will not come, will not be able to get away from Dulcie. It should be easy for him to come to Auckland, but he is such a bad liar she is certain he will mess up his excuses. She harbours, too, a niggling fear that she might get caught. True, she has left Monty, but in the end, she doesn't want to get done for adultery. The thought of losing her children haunts her. When she has been drinking with Victor and Sonny she imagines her children's funerals. This might be the next worst thing that could happen to her.

In the morning, as she prepares to leave Sasha's, solid, thick rain falls outside. Sasha eyes Natalie's suitcase.

‘You can't carry that thing around all day,' she says. The suitcase, covered with shiny burnt orange vinyl, stands hiphigh. It contains a new nightdress with a matching brunchcoat, made of white cotton sprinkled with small blue flowers; the only dinner dress Natalie owns, and no, it is not black, but an odd shade of purple, currently fashionable, which Natalie secretly fears makes her complexion sallow; a change of day clothes; four pairs of shoes to cover
every weather change and possible outing; a large bag of cosmetics, and some extra copies of the
Marvellous
Eight
scripts.

‘Anyone can see you coming. What will people think?' says Sasha.

Natalie can't see why this concerns Sasha so much. What people think hasn't noticeably bothered her, although they have stayed up more than half the night talking edgily about adultery. Sasha laughs a lot, and they both drink too much, and Natalie remembers a moment somewhere towards
morning
when they looked at each other in consternation and fell silent. She is too tired, too fraught to think what all this means now.

The huge suitcase, salvaged from one of her father's overseas trips, is clearly a mistake. With all her planning, how could she have overlooked something so obvious? All day, while she is in the studio, this foolish, ugly thing will stand in the Green Room, broadcasting her intentions. She has turned down the offer of an expense account hotel. The truth is, she had no idea how to tell them that she wanted a room with a double bed.

There is nothing Natalie can do about the suitcase. Sasha, on her way to her new job in a Parnell boutique, kisses her goodbye, looking worried.

‘Are you sure you can look after yourself?'

Natalie shrugs, impatient to be on her own. The taxi she orders doesn't come. When she rings the company, they tell her it has already been and nobody came out when they tooted. She says it must have gone to a wrong number. The despatcher is not in a mood to argue. It won't be sent back unless she agrees to wait outside. While she waits thunder erupts and she is afraid of being struck by lightning. Rain trickles under the collar of her red plastic mac. When she arrives at the studio she is half an hour late, her hair is plastered to the sides of her face, her shoes squelching. In the Green Room, she kneels to wrestle with the catches of the suitcase. Under the vinyl, the case is made of cardboard. Water has soaked through a split and collapsed a corner. Sonny Emmanuel stands behind her while she hauls out one of the spare pairs of shoes. ‘You're late,' he says. ‘I can see your tits.'

The studio is like a barn with brick interior walls. Light filters through a skylight in the immense high ceiling. The shadow of the boom is reflected upwards by the studio lights.

‘Jesus fucking Christ,' Sonny shouts. ‘Where's my leading lady?'

‘She's in the loo, she's got the trots.' The production secretary looks racked.

‘Well, get her out of the bloody loo, tell her I've got a shoot to do. Go and wipe her arse for her, do something, just get her in here.'

By ten o'clock the leading lady still hasn't appeared. ‘We'll do a
walk-through
. Okay, okay, everybody. Natalie, you be the counsellor, all right?'

‘I've never done anything like this,' Natalie protests.

‘So you can learn.'

‘But I'm the writer, not an actress.' She hears her voice rising, tries to bring it down.

‘What are you?' Sonny's eyes are wide, a vein on his forehead stands out like an angry little insect. ‘Are you the fucking union? Is that what you are? I mean, if you're the union why don't you just sod off? Who needs writers here anyway? I mean, do you know how much per minute it takes to make your crapulous unfunny little soap opera?'

‘I'll do it, Sonny, I'll do it.' I mustn't cry, she thinks, I can't put mascara on again before lunch.

‘Okay, good girl, of course you will. Right, stand by everybody, from the top of the scene.' Sonny is full of sudden false bonhomie.

Natalie takes up her position at the desk, and leans forward, chin resting on her knuckles.

‘Great,' says Sonny, ‘you look like a counsellor, so help me, even the clothes are right. Very comforting, very bloody pious.'

‘They're not,' Natalie starts to say, looking down at the buttoned-up green blouse, the black jerkin, which she had chosen with such care.

‘Shut up,' says Sonny, ‘just talk to Mick.' Mick is an elfish gay, playing the transvestite counsellor.

(
The
actress
Natalie
is
replacing
appears
on
the
set,
looking
washed
out.)

Nearly a year has passed since Natalie and Stuart last saw each other. When she first left Mountwood, she expected him daily. Her dreams were radiant and carnal. He did meet her once in Wellington, before she left Monty. The reunion hadn't gone well. Looking back, she blamed herself for being too eager. He had gone back to the rules that had been laid down at the beginning. Her declarations had alarmed him anew. When he returned to Mountwood he had written: ‘I can't leave Dulcie now, you must see how it is for her.' There were the children to think of. He must think of his, even if she did not consider hers (she only just forgave him this). Dulcie had begun menopause. Menopause, Natalie discovered, could last for ten or twelve years.

Yet still he wrote to her, as if she was a listening post in the wilderness. Much later, she would think how unfair that was, as if the unguarded word was somehow less damaging, less compromising than their actions. In fact they were worse; they could be revisited, relived, time and again, in secret places. She opened a security-box at a bank to keep his letters safe. Eventually, the words convinced her that her life was a lie. I have left Monty for good, she wrote to him. Don't think it was on your account, it is what I must do for myself.

This was not the exact truth. Monty had told her one day that if she didn't snap out of herself, he couldn't take any more, and so she had packed, not expecting to leave, but it reached a point where neither would back down and say it was a bad idea. He had wanted her to come back straight away, and then he didn't, and then he turned difficult about property and custody, and she was sure she had done the right thing all along. Natalie told herself she had left him. It was what she told Stuart.

For two weeks she raced to the post office drop where she picked up his letters, but nothing came.

Finally she rang the newspaper office. Stuart had left. ‘Where will I contact Mr Carter?' she asked, trying to make her voice sound impersonal. As he had been promising, she discovered that the magazine was now his full-time occupation.

She risked more; she rang him at home. Dulcie answered, Natalie hung up. Carefully, she worked out Dulcie's likely movements, the times she went to the supermarket, the classes she might be taking this year, the times the women's squash courts were available. It was like living in Mountwood again, without being there. The fourth time she caught him, by which time nearly a month had passed.

‘I can't leave now,' Stuart said. ‘Dulcie and I have put everything into the magazine.'

‘You could get something here,' she said, ‘you could go part-time here, and do the magazine as well.'

‘I can't.'

‘You mean, she holds the purse strings.'

‘Darling, you don't understand. You've got all your life ahead to do the things you want.'

After a while she said, ‘Did you ever love me?'

‘I do love you.' His voice was weary.