The Infinite Air Read Free Page A

to escape their heathen ways. ‘My father fought them during the wars,’ she said, her voice cool.
    Some Saturday nights in wintertime, the family went on expeditions to the bath house and hired a family hot tub. Nellie was a strong believer in natural remedies. ‘Off we go,’ she commanded them, in a loud, cheerful voice. ‘Let’s all get healthy.’
    The tub was so deep it was up to Jean’s chin. There were seats around the edge so they could all sit with their feet floating in the middle. Only Jean did not wear a suit that covered her completely, being considered too small for it to matter whether the little flat buttons of her nipples showed or not. When they had soaked, they went off to the changing rooms, and exchanged swimming trunks for their pyjamas and dressing gowns. Afterwards, with much laughter and whispering, they all scampered up the street back to the house, and leapt into their beds.
    Fred was in constant demand in his dental practice, a man with presence. He was a captain in the Taranaki Territorial Army, which he had joined some years earlier, and could lift a cannon ball aloft in each hand. Nellie massaged his broad shoulders when he sat in the green chair in the evenings, pipe in his mouth. His chest muscles rippled beneath his shirt; his dark hair, swept back in regular waves, met in a widow’s peak above the high plane of his forehead. ‘You have your father’s cheekbones,’ Nellie would say to Jean, admiring father and daughter as her caresses lingered on her husband. Jean would sit at Fred’s feet on a low stool engraved with poker-work. His hand would fall on her head while he dozed, fingers entwined in her hair, twitching awake with sudden little spasms of his grip on her skull, like an eggshell about to break open. ‘She is so delicate, our little Mit,’ he commented more than once to Nellie. Mit. It was hisname for her then. She used the word when she wanted her mittens on cold winter mornings. There were many of those: it was hard frost country.
    ‘You’ve had Mrs Hardcastle in again,’ Nellie said one evening.
    ‘Now why would you say that?’ Fred asked.
    ‘I’d recognise that freesia perfume anywhere.’
    ‘Oh that,’ Fred said. ‘I don’t notice things like that. It’s all disinfectant and soap when I have someone in the chair.’
    ‘She bought it in Grasse, on her grand tour of Europe last year. It’s very distinctive. She wears it to meetings. Her teeth must be in a terrible way, the number of times she visits you. Not that you’d think it to look at her. She’s not a bad-looking woman.’
    ‘I’ll take a note of it next time, pay her a compliment if I think of it,’ Fred said easily.
    While her husband was at work, Nellie was busy about the town. She rode a tall white mare from one committee meeting to another, seated side-saddle and dressed in a green jacket, a plaid riding habit and a hat with a brave red feather tucked in its band. The committees were mostly for theatrical societies, but also for the rowing club. She and Fred both rowed on the lake. Then there was the organising committee for the annual military ball, and for the flower show. Her blooms won the sweet pea division every year. She grew vegetables, too, lettuce and spinach in abundance, believing as she did in healthy nutritional diets. But, really, the theatre was Nellie’s first passion, begun when she was a girl in Invercargill. She was a regular feature at the Theatre Royal, the Fairy Queen in
The Sleeping Princess
when she was just fourteen, and then there were musicals at the Opera House in Wanganui where she kicked up her heels, and showed a little ankle, and met her husband in the process. And now here she was in Rotorua, at the Lyric, playing the lead role in
Lady Frederick
, a widow with a past, and she loved the way the part made the audience laugh. People could think what they liked of her, say she was wanton and abandoned, because of the way she threw herself into every