‘I CAN’T STAND the tension,’ says Bethany Dixon, adjusting her collar too carefully. ‘Why did you get me into this, Sam?’
They stand a little apart from the throng of people pressed together in the James Cook Hotel, looking down the long view Wellington Harbour provides, a lost and lovely island floating in the sea above a cloak of fog. Sam has persuaded her to enter Bethany Dixon’s Traditional Cooking in the Guild of Food Writers’ competition.
‘D’you think I should have another glass of bubbly?’
‘Probably not, wait until after you’ve won.’
‘But I don’t know if I’m going to win. Look at all these people, they all know each other — I’ll bet they know who’s going to win. They’re probably saying, look at that old country hick, thinking she can win a flash prize like this.’
‘You don’t have much faith in human nature,’ says Sam, rescuing a fresh glass of champagne from a passing waiter, and putting it in her hand anyway.
‘Only in quantities I can measure,’ says Bethany, looking around with close to a shudder. The voices are very loud, and people call each other darling and dear heart; none of them appear to be talking about food and cooking. Somebody is pointing at her in a not very discreet way.
‘See,’ mutters Sam, ‘if they do know, they want to let each other know they recognise you. Touching the hem of glory in advance.’
‘Then they’ll hate me already.’
The award for which she is short-listed is the guild’s recently established prize for the best newcomer to food writing, a first book published in the previous two years. Her daughter Abbie had groaned when she told her. You won’t like it, she said, I know what Sekhar is like when the film and television prizes are handed out. You can’t speak to him for weeks beforehand because he can’t stand the idea of losing, and you can’t speak to him afterwards because he’s strapped in the middle of conspiracy theories.
It’s just a bit of a laugh, Bethany had explained.
Just you wait and see. Abbie’s voice was gloomy. In fact, Sekhar had won awards in the past, but that didn’t mean he felt any happier. When he lost, it only went to show that people took turns at winning, nothing to do with the quality of the work. Mutter, mutter, mutter, Abbie said, that’s what awards are all about.
Which is how Bethany feels at the moment. It’s not a laugh at all. She is appalled to discover how badly she wants to win.
‘I guess I just want to be sure someone will publish my next book,’ she tells Sam, trying to rationalise her agreement to enter her name for the awards. Troy, the beautiful young man who published her first book, has decided to go to design school instead of pursuing his idea of being a publisher. ‘You’d have thought after all the money he’s made out of my book he’d have taken the business more seriously,’ Bethany complains.
Troy, for his part, says that the book’s success has just shown him where his skills really lie, from which Bethany is left to contemplate whether it’s his style or her food which has won her a following. She raises her glass to him anyway, standing on the other side of the room. He pushes his way through the gathering.
‘Have you got your speech ready?’
‘I probably won’t need it,’ says Bethany. ‘And if I do, you could probably make it for me.’ There she goes, bitchy as the rest of them. Troy appears not to hear.
‘It’s sweet you could come,’ he says to Sam. ‘Are you two an item?’
‘WHICH ONE WAS your favourite?’ Sam asked one day, during the renovation of her house.
She was holding a piece of timber for him at the time. We can do it on a labour only contract and I’ll do the finishing off, he told her when he first suggested the alterations. He had seen the way the photographers stood on stepladders and the kitchen stool to get angles of her. They were in the garden when he suggested it, straight after he had pointed out the skeleton of a praying mantis that had choked to death in the dried curl of a leaf. ‘Sad, don’t you think?’ His minute observations intrigued her.
‘What do you mean?’ she asked, thinking he meant a restaurant, or a movie, something like that.
‘Which chap?’
She didn’t know whether he was being smutty or just curious. ‘Mind your own damn business,’ she said, finally. Comments like this have made her cautious of Sam. That, and the fact she and his brother, to whom she was married, had fallen to bitterness and separation before his death.
‘What do you want of me, Sam?’ she asked him, another day, when they were painting architraves, and he stood too close to her for comfort.
‘I don’t know,’ he said, laying down his paintbrush. ‘I thought at the beginning I just wanted to know more about my brother in the last years of his life. I suppose, now, I want to know what he saw in you. If that’s not too offensive.’
‘It’s bordering on it.’
‘It’s not a proposition.’
‘I’m glad to hear it,’ she said.
‘My brother was smarter than me, his instincts were good.’
‘Smarter than you? I wouldn’t have thought so.’ Sam had been a physics lecturer at Dalhousie in Halifax. ‘The bright and glorious career of the younger brother — that’s how he talked about you. He saw himself as a small-town shopkeeper.’
‘You know he was more than that.’
‘Yes,’ says Bethany, ‘I do, but in the end I couldn’t convince him. It’s why he moved on to a poet, but she didn’t do any better than I did. I don’t have a track record in holding on to men, by the way.’
‘It’s because you’re powerful,’ he told her. ‘You shouldn’t take it amiss. Anyway, as far as I’m concerned, my career crashed in flames years ago.’
‘Matt told me something had changed. He was disappointed. He never told your parents.’
‘I know. What family wants a guy who builds log cabins in place of a professor?’
‘That’s self-pity.’
‘I crashed, had a breakdown, as they say. Yeah, you could say that’s fairly self-indulgent.’
‘I didn’t mean it that way.’
‘And then my wife died and I thought I couldn’t survive another day of my life.’
‘I know the feeling.’
‘Do you? Do you really know what it feels like? A son, yes, you lost a son — it doesn’t come much worse. But you can’t compare grief with grief.’
‘No, you can’t and it’s not what I was thinking about, because that’s private, nothing to do with you. But when my husband Peter left, I thought, well, I won’t come out of this one. But I did.’
‘At least he’s alive.’
‘Yes,’ said Bethany, her voice softer, ‘he is.’ It was not long after the unveiling of Ritchie’s headstone. Sam looked at her curiously, and left it at that.
‘AND THE WINNER is,’ says the compere of the awards ceremony. He pauses, an urbane, nattily suited man who has spent long minutes thanking the sponsors, and now takes an inordinate amount of time opening an envelope. Bethany crosses her fingers behind her back. ‘The winner is … Bethany Dixon.’
‘Yee-ess’, cries Troy, punching the air.
‘Now isn’t that somethin’?’ Sam murmurs in his hybrid drawl.
She is propelled forward, flash bulbs going off in her face, television cameras rolling — not that it’s the first time she has faced them, but this time she is actually news. So this is fame. And she wonders, did I ask for it, or is it something that simply happens to you, and then she has to make her speech. She finds herself thanking Troy in extravagant terms, and her family, of course, without whose support none of this would have happened, and her Aunty Vera, and her mother and her grandmothers who made it possible with their memories and recipes. So poised, no notes to speak from, but the words are all there as if she had rehearsed them in her head, which she had without knowing it.
She feels a prickle of tears behind her eyelids when she thanks all these people, and reminds herself that everyone who gets prizes does the same. But it’s no less real, this feeling of honey and bitterness, the losses and gains, that such a moment brings. She knows her life will never be quite the same again.
It seems like hours and glasses and glasses of champagne later that she remembers to slip the cheque for five thousand dollars into her handbag.
‘I KNEW YOU were going to win when they asked you to bring someone along with you. They always do that at award ceremonies so the sponsors can take you out to dinner and not have to spend the whole evening talking to you if you turn out to be a bore.’
‘Charming. How did you know that?’
‘I’d heard.’
‘It’s what Abbie said too.’
‘In the event, they couldn’t stop talking to you all evening. I saw the chairman eyeing you over.’
She laughs. ‘He didn’t offer me any more money.’
Sam and Bethany are driving north the day after the awards. They have been late getting away from Wellington because of more interviews and a meeting with a prospective publisher. Now it is mid-afternoon and they have just reached Taupo.
‘Only another hour or so,’ says Bethany, adjusting her seat back so she can sit up straighter.
‘I think we should get a meal. Why don’t I shout you?’
‘It’s too late for lunch and too early for dinner,’ she says, glancing at her watch. ‘We’d just have to cool our heels.’
‘I could do with a break,’ Sam says, flexing his shoulder muscles. He had insisted on driving earlier in the day because she is tired and still excited. Although she knows this is sensible, she wants to drive for she feels high and the road is uncurling beneath her in a way she has dreamed of long ago. He had given in at their last stop, at the roadside, to take photographs along the Desert Road. The pylons marching across the moonscape land towards the mountains.
‘I need something to remember this place by,’ Sam said. He looked drawn round the mouth, his colour grey.
‘You’re going home then?’
‘Sooner or later I’ll go back,’ he said.
They reach the detour round Lake Taupo, and suddenly he jams his feet against the floor as if he’s putting on the brakes, and pulls the wheel to her right, so that the car following almost runs up her tail. ‘Straight ahead,’ he cries.
‘Christ Sam, you’ll get us both killed!’
He looks momentarily sheepish. ‘Well, wouldn’t that be somethin’? Sorry Bethany, I want to go round by the lake. Matt and I used to fish the lake when we were kids. Summer holidays, you know, all that stuff. I’d just like to take a look.’
Again, there is that hint of farewell in the air.
As they drive along, Bethany is reminded of her affection for places by water, especially lakes, where there is a fluid darkness beneath polished surfaces. The mountains are hard and bright-edged against the sky.
‘We could stay here the night,’ Sam says. ‘Take some time out.’ They have already stayed in the same hotel for a night, but it has hardly seemed like that, the large, impersonal rooms several floors apart, at the end of a day of triumph. ‘Do you have to get back for anything special?’
She doesn’t know why she agrees. Perhaps it is the tiredness in his face, the kindness he has shown her over the past days and months, his uninhibited enthusiasm for her work. In a moment, before she has had time to change her mind, she sees a motel with a vacancy sign outside and pulls into reception, committing herself.
It is a luxury unit, with an upstairs and downstairs. Two bedrooms lead onto an upper landing.
‘D’you want me to sleep downstairs?’
‘No,’ she says, uncertain now that they are alone. ‘It would be silly to sleep on the sofa when there are comfortable beds up here.’
Downstairs the living area leads off to a thermal pool, waist-deep perhaps, with a ledge running around it. ‘That looks the ticket,’ says Sam.
‘My aunt used to have a pool like that,’ exclaims Bethany. ‘Peter and I used to tub in it, it was wonderful. Why don’t you have a soak? You look as if you could do with it.’
‘Do you feel like it?’
‘Later,’ she says.
Upstairs, she lies down on one of the beds and closes her eyes. She thinks, I am fifty-six years old, alone in a motel with a man I hardly know who keeps making odd suggestions and may be manic, or homicidal. What happened when he cracked up? She had never been told; perhaps Matt never knew. I’m probably still half-drunk on champagne or I wouldn’t be here.
She thinks she might have dozed for a while. The next thing she sees is a reflection of him in the landing, from the mirror facing the door, a towel wrapped around his middle. A man with big sloping shoulders, his waist folded over in a circlet of spare flesh.
‘I’ll make us some tea,’ she calls, pulling herself together. ‘There’s a courtyard outside, I’ll take it out there in a few minutes.’
Hastily, she splashes water over her face while he moves around in the next room, dressing himself. It might not be too late to go home, to ring and discover messages on her answerphone, a forgotten appointment.
All the same, she makes tea as she has promised, and carries it outside. There is a little sun left in a corner of the yard; she moves a table into the puddle of light. As Sam walks out she sees the cat, tucked in the warmest patch of bricks, near pots of geraniums. It is not a very big cat, a dark tabby with a patched pink and black nose, but it is surrounded by six or seven kittens, most of which are almost as big as she is, all of them suckling her voraciously. Her offspring have her pinned to the ground, one holding her down between her top paws, its body wrapped over her throat, two more over her hind legs, the rest spread along each side. Bethany motions for Sam to walk quietly, not that it looks as if these creatures will be easily disturbed.
‘They’re consuming their mother,’ she says, as he settles himself.
‘It happens,’ Sam says, looking at her.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Nothing in particular. I’ve just seen how women get eaten up by their families.’
‘You can’t say that about a woman whose just won a big prize,’ she says lightly.
‘I would have said it about my own wife.’
‘Perhaps she liked it,’ says Bethany, watching the cat.
‘She did, I think. But that never seemed to be quite the point. Have you thought of travelling, Bethany?’
‘I have. A little.’
‘Very little, from what you’ve told me. You should be experiencing food around the world, eating in the top restaurants.’
‘You think I could improve on my skills?’
‘You know that’s not what I’m saying. I wondered if you’d like to make a trip.’
She tenses again, not knowing where all of this is leading. ‘With you?’
‘Bethany, I’m not asking you to sleep with me.’
‘That makes a change.’
‘I’m not saying it’s unappealing. Truth is, I couldn’t if I tried. I even sit down to pee these days.’ He smiles slightly at the thought.
‘Spare me the details,’ she says, repelled by his disclosures.
‘I’ve got cancer and soon I’ll die.’
‘Shit, Sam.’ She knows as soon as he’s said it that it’s true, the stocktaking of his past, the careful friendship, and, she doesn’t quite know how to put this to herself, his presumption and curiosity, as if he had a right to pry. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
He smiles, a little wintry grin. ‘So you’d be sorry for me?’
‘Okay point taken.’ She is silent for a while. ‘How long?’
‘Six months, a year if I’m lucky. And yes, I’ve had all the goddamn treatment that’s likely to make any difference, and I live with it day by day. When it’s time to go home I will, and my son will come from Italy until it’s over.’
‘Sam, I’m so sorry, all the same.’
‘Of course you are,’ he says, watching her intently. ‘I wasn’t going to tell you.’
Nonetheless, she rushes in to explain herself. ‘It’s just that I’m more careful of myself now, I’ve made lots of mistakes. I see what I want more clearly than I did.’
‘I understand that.’
‘So why did you tell me?’
‘I want to ask you something, a great indulgence perhaps, or it could be something that would be good for both of us. You’re looking worried again. It’s okay, I really don’t want a last-ditch marriage, or what sentimentally might pass for a romance. But it’s occurred to me that I’d like a friend with whom I could see a few of the old sights for the last time. Florence, where I’ll meet up with my son for a short while — I’ve probably told you he’s an art historian — Paris, Prague, the home of an old friend, perhaps Spain if there’s time. I thought I wanted to go alone, but then I met you, and began to wonder what it might be like to travel with someone who has intelligence and wit, and whose eyes are seeing these places for the first time, who might show me what I haven’t seen for myself and am unlikely to discover, at this stage, on my own.’
‘I see,’ says Bethany. The cat suddenly stands and walks with determination towards the outer courtyard, dragging kittens until they scat ter. They begin to play among themselves, not seeming to notice her absence.
‘You have some money of your own,’ Sam says. ‘I’m not even offering to be a sugar daddy.’ He laughs, as if the notion is slightly ridiculous. ‘Rich prizes, you might as well spend them on something for yourself.’
It’s possible, Bethany thinks, that there will be days when he is not a good companion and she might not even like him. She understands, though, that at the end of the journey, she will have liked him well enough to miss him. She has, she believes, learned one or two things: that to be solitary is a choice, not a vice. And perhaps, in the end, that pain simply rests, that when it raises its head it is almost intolerable, but it is possible to survive until the next time. That there is joy in the spaces in between.
‘Well, what do you think?’