Someone's Wife Read online

  First published in 2019

  Text © Linda Burgess, 2019

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  Allen & Unwin

  Level 3, 228 Queen Street

  Auckland 1010, New Zealand

  Phone: (64 9) 377 3800

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.co.nz

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065, Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand.

  ISBN 978 1 98854 725 1

  eISBN 978 1 76087 219 9

  Design by Megan van Staden

  Author photograph on page 303 by Robert Burgess

  For Benedict, Julia, Flora and Edward Burgess; Gemma, Joe, Lucie and Max Sheehan; and Robert. With love.

  And to the indestructible memory of Les Atkins.

  Contents

  INTRODUCTION

  1. WE’D BE CALLED WAGS NOW

  In which rugby enters my life and never really leaves it

  2. THE TRUE STORY

  In which I become a middle child

  3. THANK GOD WE MADE IT

  In which cars enter my life

  4. THE EASIER VERSION

  In which I contemplate the accuracy of memory

  5. THE STALKER

  In which my flatmate gets unwelcome attention

  6. TEACHERS’ COLLEGE

  In which they try to teach me how to be a teacher

  7. GIRL ONE

  In which I meet a very troubled girl

  8. THIS IS YOUR LIFE

  In which we briefly learn how it feels to be famous

  9. LYON

  On living on the other side of the world

  10. TOBY

  In which we have to confront our worst fear

  11. ST PETER’S COLLEGE

  In which I go back to work

  12. TEN CHRISTMASES

  In which I really do wonder about Christmas

  13. I KNOW THEM SO WELL

  In which I discuss my longstanding relationship with the royals

  14. RE-ENTERING

  In which my children go to university … and then come home

  15. TREES

  In which I go over the top about trees

  16. LEONARD COHEN

  In which I’m captured forever by Cohen

  17. AFTER ENID

  In which I’m self-indulgent about my idea for a TV series

  18. ON BEING GAUCHE

  How to be left-handed in a right-handed world

  19. TRAVELLING WITH LUCIE

  In which we take our eldest grandchild to Europe

  20. HOMESICKNESS

  In which I remember the perfect places left behind

  INTRODUCTION

  Years ago, I was in a lift at Creative New Zealand in Wellington with two of New Zealand’s most prestigious writers: Dame Fiona Kidman and Owen Marshall. If this lift crashes, I said, they should accept that the person who will get mentioned first in the news will be me: the wife of an ex-All Black. Owen, usually astute but at times ludicrously modest, said five of his most nonsensical words ever: ‘And so it should be.’

  My father had died before I published my first novel in 1994, but had he lived I doubt he would have said to me what he said to Robert when he got into the All Blacks: ‘When you die, they’ll put your name in the paper.’ In Dad’s world, this was the highest accolade, given only to those who deserved it. And those who deserved it most were men who could be thrown face down in the mud without flinching.

  I’m a writer not because I want my name in the paper but because the two things I’ve always loved most are reading and discussing other people. Gossip is much maligned. There’s nothing that beats settling down—preferably feet up on a comfortable sofa—with a perceptive friend, and going hard at it about that infinitely fascinating subject, the human condition. The only thing that equals talking about other people is reading and of course writing about them. Hell may well be other people, but heaven is too.

  I’ve been lucky to be able to use this interest professionally, having spent decades teaching literature, and writing book, television and film reviews. I’m always interested in character above plot. Who cares if someone does something if the reader or viewer can’t be presented (as subtly as possible) with a person with interesting, credible layers?

  Plot is not story: stories I cannot do without. If they don’t come to us perfectly formed, which they only rarely do, then we weave them from what we have. Humans are at their centre. Stories unite us: without them, we wouldn’t have a past; without them, the present would be untethered, the future even more unimaginable. We need them to make even some sense of the absurdity of life.

  This is why I think of this book as a memoir of sorts. Of course it’s linked to my life and what’s happened to me, but I hope it’s not a self-centred what-I-did-next kind of story. I intend these essays to be a sidelong glance at the times in which I’ve lived—decades of extraordinary change. When, in my early teens, living above the bank that my father managed, I went downstairs in the evening to type out my stories, I certainly couldn’t have imagined being able to write a novel on a computer or even, should I be foolish enough to wish to do so, on a tiny machine that’s also a phone. I could not have imagined a machine that not only remembered all I wrote but could also, irritatingly, change words because it assumed it knew what I wanted to say better than I did.

  Secrets still existed back then, and every family had them. Now much of the world is like I’ve always been: generally hopeless at keeping them. I shouldn’t admit this, because once before when I did, it caused one of my best sources to threaten never to tell me anything again. In my own defence, I show discretion: I don’t blab. Which is why, though I’ve generally used people’s real names, I’ve made an exception when it comes to a vulnerable, tragic schoolgirl.

  Two of these essays have previously appeared in the gratifyingly young and cool online journal The Spinoff. I’m grateful to the books editor at the time, Steve Braunias, who was interested not only in what I had to say but also in how I said it. He has an astute eye—and ear—for what makes a piece of writing work, and I thank him for valuing my writing, and his insightful encouragement. I thank my friend Raewyn Bright for her unstintingly enthusiastic reading. I also thank North & South magazine for publishing the essay written as a result of the wonderful Darcy Residency, which gave me three misspent months on Waiheke Island. Robert was with me: someone’s husband.

  I thank Jenny Hellen and her team at Allen & Unwin for suggesting that I write this book for them to publish; and as does every writer in New Zealand who has the benefit of her immense skill, I thank editor Jane Parkin.

  1.

  WE’D BE

  CALLED

  WAGS NOW

  In which rugby enters my life and never really leaves it

  A rugby game lasts a whole day. Your father wears a gaberdine raincoat and takes the family to the rugby grounds in New Plymouth. Rugby Park. You have to get there early to get a good spot on the terraces. So first you watch tiny little boys milling around the field without much of a clue, then bigger boys, from New Plymouth Boys’ High, then a curtain raiser with grown-ups, then at last it’s Us, playing to keep The Shield. Dad is on his feet. Ref! Ref! Tackle him low! Off! Off!

  There must’ve been a packed lunch. Bacon and egg pie? There were probably Minties. And we must have set up a continuous match-spoiling whine, because next time there’s a g
ame Dad relinquishes his fantasy of a happy family having fun together at the footie and we’re dropped off at the picture theatre. There is a mass of other rugby orphans. Towards the end of Robin Hood a printed page briefly overtakes the screen. The feet of those among us who can read drum excitedly. We have won. We have kept The Shield.

  ‘Did We win?’ I ask Robert if the Hurricanes are playing. But We is a shallow word now. In Taranaki We work on the local farms, in the freezing works, teach in the local schools. We have surnames that I recognise. We aren’t paid lots of money—any money—to move Our families from somewhere else in the world.

  Our friends have a car radio. We’re on our way back from a rugby game in Feilding, and we turn on the news and hear Robert has been selected to play against the Lions. It’s unexpected: he’s been in the early trial, and isn’t in the Possibles vs the Probables. Miss Tomlinson, senior mistress at Palmerston North Girls’ High, where I’ve been teaching for the few weeks we’ve been married, says to the girls gathered in the assembly hall on Monday morning that Mrs Burgess is such a good coach her husband is in the All Blacks.

  The DIC department store in Palmerston North has an almost life-sized photo of him in their window, scoring a try. He’s Our Boy!

  One of the girls in my 4th Form English class tells me she’s heard another girl saying, Your husband, he thinks he’s shit hot.

  I go down to Wellington to watch a test match, and my friend Sue and I call in on Robert at his hotel. When we ask where his room is, the lift man won’t take us up. ‘But I’m his wife,’ I say, cravenly. ‘If we let you in,’ he says, ‘who knows where it’ll end?’

  Partway through the game someone is knocked out and lies on the ground, so flat he can hardly be seen. Number 10 isn’t anywhere. They put the player on a stretcher and cover him with a blanket. A man behind says, ‘Looks bad.’ It is number 10. I scream. It sounds odd even to me, that scream. Cinematic. The man says, ‘Oh shut up, you silly bitch.’ ‘It’s my husband,’ I say, and his wife gives him a hard well-that’ll-teach-you whack with her elbow.

  A chubby boy in a St John’s ambulance uniform is sent to find me in the crowd. Make way for Mrs Burgess. Make way for Mrs Burgess. The crowd parts respectfully, mentally composing the story they’ll tell their workmates on Monday. I’m nearly at the bottom of the stand where his body has been taken when the man on the loudspeaker announces Bob is just fine. There’s a roar of relief and just a hint of disappointment.

  The next day at the hospital his bed is surrounded by men in white coats with stethoscopes around their necks. I feel the nausea of fear, but as I go in I can see they’re all smiling and he’s holding court from his bed. He’s wearing hospital pyjamas.

  We have our photo in the paper, me at his bedside. The papers make quite a thing of the fact that several of the Lions have visited him in hospital. The British press have taken a shine to him. There’s a profile in The Times: ‘A Cavalier among the Roundheads’.

  ‘I cried,’ says one of my 6th Form girls, ‘when Mr Burgess got hurt.’

  Years later a woman, collecting for St John’s ambulance, knocks at our door. ‘Aren’t you Mrs Burgess?’ She says she was on duty that day. ‘You,’ she says, ‘looked far worse than he did.’ She pauses. ‘You kept saying we’d put the blanket over his head. We hadn’t,’ she says. ‘We wouldn’t have.’

  The next year the All Blacks do an internal tour, and several of the wives and girlfriends who live within driving distance come to Palmerston North to watch Manawatū play the All Blacks. It’s a freezing mid-week day. There’s an aftermatch function: men only. There’s nowhere for us to go. I approach the door. I say, ‘I have some wives of the All Black team with me, and we would like to come in.’ Through the comforting cloud of cigarette smoke I can see the players drinking beer, and the officials drinking sterner stuff. The man from the Rugby Union is resolute. If he lets us in, the floodgates will open. We’ll want fancy stuff to drink, he says. ‘But,’ he says, moist-eyed with magnanimity, ‘if you’d like to help out in the kitchen with the other ladies, you’re more than welcome.’

  We go to the pub. Lounge bar of course. About 40 years later the same man comes up to me at a Manawatū Rugby reunion. He peers at me through rheumy eyes. ‘I remember you,’ he shouts benevolently. ‘A women’s libber! After YOU,’ he chortles, ‘we had to let the ladies in!’

  They’re going to Britain and France for four months. A few months earlier they play against Australia and I go to Auckland to watch the game. I have a week off work because I’ve had a miscarriage. At the aftermatch function I talk to some of the other wives and girlfriends and I say that if he gets selected, I might go. As a teacher I have eight weeks’ summer holiday and we’re paid in advance. I won’t hang round the All Blacks. I’ve a brother living in the UK, and Robert and I had got friendly with Barry John and Gerald Davies when they were playing for the Lions in New Zealand. And Cliff Morgan, the gorgeous Cliff Morgan, over here commentating the games on television for the BBC (‘Bob Burgess played a fine first international’), has given me an open invitation to stay with them in London.

  I’ve obviously planted an idea: eight of us go. Not everybody is happy about it. Some of the older players glower. Some of the wives, especially those suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, openly disapprove. The night before the team leaves, the Rugby Union pays for us to have a night with our husbands in a hotel in Wellington. It’s a first. One of the senior players’ wives, one who isn’t coming, one whose husband is almost feral in his disapproval of those of us who are, says to me, ‘Well at least I know I can trust him.’

  I arrive in time for the first test. I go from Heathrow into London on the Tube, dragging my heavy red suitcase that Mum and Dad bought me to go to university, up and down hundreds of stairs. I take the train to Wales.

  One night, Robert sneaks me into his hotel. As we go to his room—usually he’s sharing, this time he isn’t—seven or eight All Blacks, all naked or nearly, race past us in the corridor. They’re pushing a vast trolley stacked neatly with towels and sheets. They’re crowing with the fun of it.

  The captain’s fiancée tells me the owner of the small hotel where she and Ian have snuck away to for a night knocks on their door and asks them to leave. He has reason to believe they’re not married.

  I’m walking past New Zealand House and a man walking towards me says—‘Hey! Aren’t you someone’s wife?’

  A tour guide from Palmerston North invites me to join a tour of Edinburgh with a group of New Zealand supporters. As I climb onto the bus he says, ‘We have a special guest today! Three cheers for Mrs Burgess!’

  The All Blacks are setting off for a match in their bus and it’s surrounded by demonstrators who don’t believe in sporting contacts with South Africa. Peter Hain gives Robert the thumbs-up. From the back seat one of the older players, wearing the black fedora hat that establishes him as Senior, growls, ‘Run ’em over.’

  We have Christmas with Cliff Morgan and his family. We go to the American Embassy with him and a small group of his friends to protest about Vietnam. Robert and Cliff discuss whether Robert should wear his All Black blazer. He chooses the dress jacket with the more discreet silver fern. After delivering a letter to the American ambassador, Cliff takes us to the pub with Colin Welland, who I remember from Z Cars, and James Cameron, the first journalist to go into China for decades. I like journalists, I had wanted to be one. I’m forever spilling the beans to Terry McLean, who nabs me whenever he wants someone loose-lipped. James Cameron is so charming, so urbane, so easy to talk to, it’s bizarre to think he’s my father’s age.

  Four of us—well, we’d be called WAGs now—hire a Mini and do a quick tour of Scotland. I’m the only one who wants to see Birnam Wood, just in case Macbeth is around and it starts moving again. We stop for petrol at Loch Ness and one of the others asks the man filling the car if he has seen the monster. His expression shows not the slightest hint that he’s heard this one before.

  By then,
Keith Murdoch is on his way home. Murdoch looks like a person the casting director of a movie based on a novel by D.H. Lawrence would snap up. He is dark-browed with smouldering, wary eyes. He has a full bottom lip. His eyes would make Lady Chatterley abandon her husband’s wheelchair at the top of a steep slope; his neck and shoulders would make Welsh miners tremble. He likes his beer. He has few words. He has the audacity to score the try that means the All Blacks beat the Welsh. You can beat the Welsh but they never lose. There’s an aftermatch function at Cardiff Arms Park, and, Britain being a more civilised place than New Zealand, the ladies are invited.

  Murdoch, who later that night will beat up a security guard, has less than a day left in Britain. We stand with our friend Gerald Davies. Gerald too has dark eyes and, though short, he too would be capable of stirring the primordial parts of Lady Chatterley. He can run and dart and swerve and tackle. And, with his English degree from Cambridge, he has language. Murdoch, who has been celebrating, stands with his beer glass in his hand, and he looks mutely down at Gerald, and Gerald is rocking on the balls of his feet, an angry little rooster, and Gerald’s saying, ‘You’re thick, man. Thick.’

  As the seventies continue, the country is simmering. One, two, three, four, we don’t want your racist tour becomes a skipping rhyme at our children’s school. Our son, all our friends’ sons, play soccer. Someone throws eggs at our house. It’s not We anymore, it’s Them. We are on the local HART committee. Our phone sounds thrillingly echoey, and I imagine someone wearing headphones in a room like one in 1984 listening in on my attempts to persuade someone to take someone else’s place on the Play Centre Mother Help roster. We sit in a circle in a friend’s sitting room and a local trade unionist says, ‘There’s a traitor in this room.’ Someone, he says, is telling the police about our movements. I feel a crazy urge to confess. I’ve always been like that—I’ll tell the teacher it’s me who cheated, just to shut them up. I’m so used to prattling on in an ill-considered way that it could well be me, though other than my daughter’s little friend whose father is the community constable I don’t know anyone in the police. We go home and discuss who the Quisling could be.