The Infinite Air Read Free

streets, hitching posts for horses, small houses made of wood and roofed with iron. What made it different from other central North Island settlements were the thermal pools, volcanic steam rising in unexpected places from the turbulent earth. Geysers erupted, spewing hot water into the air, and mud bubbled on the corners of the streets. The air was suffused with the pungent smell of hydrogen sulphate. Although visitors to the town spoke of the stench of rotten eggs, those who came to live there soon stopped noticing it. Because of the curative properties of the water, a spa resort had been built at the eastern end of the town, a sprawling mock-Tudor bath house with its back to a lake, and also a number of large hotels to accommodate those seeking cures. Beneath the charming entrance to the bath house, with its grand sweeping staircase, and an orchestra playing soothingly on a balcony, lay a complex subterranean basement where patients underwent therapies intended to remedy all manner of ailments. The lights were dim, and the powerful reek of sulphuric gases caught one in the back of the throat.
    Amohia Street, where the Battens lived, ran close to the large public gardens where the bath house stood and was just around the corner from the Prince’s Gate Hotel where prime ministers and royalty had stayed. Fred and fellow musicians sometimes entertainedguests in the reception hall, just for the hell of it, not for money. The Prince of Wales and his wife, Mary, who were soon to be king and queen, had stayed there and, in their honour, large steel archways were placed at the entrance to the gardens. In spring these arches foamed with purple wisteria, the vines turning into green canopies in the summer. Just think, Nellie murmured to Jean, we are walking in the same footsteps as their majesties.
    The house in Amohia Street was rented, but Nellie had furnished the front room in what was already dubbed the Edwardian style: bamboo and wicker furniture with delicate legs and curved backs, except for one solid, dark green easy chair with a comfortable back so that Fred could rest at the end of a day’s work. The chintz-covered cushions were colourfully patterned, the walls papered a dark gold colour, with deep red floral friezes, not flowers all over like most people had — so very modern, Nellie enthused, and look how large this made the house look. The tall vases that had come from Fred’s mother were always spilling with flowers. In the corner of the front room stood a piano which both she and Fred played. Fred, a swarthy man, with eyes the colour of licorice, had discovered Debussy, whose music he described as sensuous, although Nellie found it discordant. ‘Besides,’ she said, ‘that man leads a wicked life in Paris, if the newspapers are anything to go by.’ ‘You’re one to talk,’ Fred had said with a laugh, for Nellie was known as high-spirited. Her musical repertoire was varied, some of it classical, but she liked playing old tunes that people sang around pianos and, for the children, she had picked up tunes like ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’, which was all the rage. She held Jean in her lap and helped her finger chords on the piano.
    The nearby lake, known to Maori as Rotorua-nui-a-Kahumatamomoe, though Europeans called it Rotorua, was an expanse of water so large that it was difficult to see the far shore from the town, dark blue in summer, purple and chill in the winter, with an island lying at its centre. On Sundays the Battens walked along its shore, dodging eddying bursts of sulphur gases. They never entered the pa, home to local Te Arawa, who wove feather cloaks andcooked their meals in the hot pools. An Anglican church crouched on the side of the lake, and from it billowed exquisite renditions of familiar hymns, sung in a different language. Jean listened longingly to this distant music, but her mother said that although they meant well in their Christian endeavours, the Maoris still had a long way to go