Rescue Mission

36

Rescue Mission

    Perhaps fortunately for Akiko’s temper, on the Saturday morning Jake turned up unannounced and forcibly dragged her up the Inlet to spend the day at the bach with the family. It must be admitted that no thoughts about being Westernised and not into subservience, and not taking orders from stupid Men, even crossed Akiko’s mind: she was just so glad to be rescued.

    On the Sunday, however, though she managed to keep quite busy for most of the morning, unnecessarily cleaning the house and putting out loads of washing, boredom threatened to set in again. Eventually she decided just to go for a drive. She would get onto the motorway and go right into the city, and then maybe— Well, Dominion Road? She had been there a couple of times with Polly, Polly liked browsing in the junk shops. In fact, maybe she could retrace their route last time: they had been down Dominion Road and then over to the Great South Road, and had browsed in the junk shops there, too. Not that anything would be open, on Easter Sunday, but the drive would be something to do. Um, how did you get from Dominion Road to the Great South Road? Never mind, she would look at the map! Akiko went out to the car and drove off determinedly. It was just as well that Mitsuko wasn’t there, for she would have been able to tell her that she looked just like Grandmother Takagaki at her worst.

    Although it was barely four o’clock, Dorothy was looking glumly into the fridge and informing it bitterly that at what it had cost her, it did ought to contain something better than leftover flied lice and a couple of anaemic snarlers for Easter Sunday tea, and that if it imagined she was gonna give in and bludge off Adrian and Anna it could think again, when there was a loud knock on her door. Probably only Leigh, wanting to borrow the salt, he was still into cooking. Though according to Martin, still not managing to produce anything edible.

    “Oh. Hullo,” she said inanely, feeling herself redden like a fool.

    “Hullo,” replied Thomas meekly.

    “Did you come up Adrian’s front stairs looking like that?” she groaned.

    “They’re closed, you fool,” he replied amiably. “Longstanding British tradition, to spend church holidays locked in your room doing your girlfriend.”

    “Shut up. Even if they are, it’s none of your ruddy business!” she snarled.

    “Why else do you imagine the corridor is echoing to the strains of The Pearl Fishers? Not a very good version,” he added critically.

    “For Christ’s sake shut up!” hissed Dorothy, grabbing his arm fiercely and hauling him inside.

    “Thanks,” he said mildly.

    “Go and sit down, since you’re here,” she said grimly.

    Thomas sat down on her good Carrano-ized sofa, thus leaving Dorothy free to take a cane armchair at some distance from him.

    “Come over here, I won’t bite,” he said mildly.

    “Really? Your looks belie you, then,” returned Dorothy coolly.

    “Eh? Oh.” Thomas rubbed his chin dubiously. “Barry and I’ve been listening to Wagner most of the weekend.”

    “Wagner as in loud Germanic opera of the most boring and unnecessary kind? That Wagner?” croaked Dorothy, goggling.

    “Ja; und?” he replied insouciantly.

    Gulping slightly, she managed to say: “Well, as Wallis would say, whatever turns you on. Barry Goode? That Barry?” she croaked in spite of herself.

    “Yes. We’ve discovered he likes Wagner. Finished playing The Ring yesterday," he said smugly. “He had to go and blast pink muck off a house on the Point today.”

    “That terracotta-ish perversion of the Pinkertons’,” she acknowledged. “Why didn’t you go and help him do it?”

    “He didn’t ask me. Besides, I’d inflicted myself on him for something like thirty-six hours, solid. Thought I’d better let him recover,” he said with his sidelong smile.

    “Hah, hah,” replied Dorothy very weakly indeed.

    “Got anything to drink?”

    “No,” she replied brutally.

    Thomas got up and investigated her sideboard. “What happened to that brandy?”

    “Musta drunk it,” replied Dorothy in a bored voice.

    “I’ll nip down to the bar.”

    “You will not!” she shouted.

    “I can leave the money on the—”

    “No! If you want to break into the pub and flog Adrian’s grog, well and good, but you’re not doing it while you’re visiting my flat!”

    “Better have a nice cuppa instead, then,” he said mildly, forging off into her kitchen.

    Dorothy just sat there, breathing heavily, ignoring the crashing around that was going on in there.

    “I’ve worked out who must have sent that fax,” he said without preamble, as they were sipping the tea.

    “Eh?”

    Thomas waved modestly at himself. “Did it with me little ’atchet.”

    “Balls,” said Dorothy in a bored voice. “That is, if you are talking about that anonymous fax of Alan’s.”

    “Just listen. I’ve checked up on everyone’s records—”

    “What? Whose?” said Dorothy in spite of herself.

    “Everyone who could have been the Briggs female or her offspring. It isn’t hard to trace the careers of most academics, if you know where to look. There was only one of those hospital administrators that had ever been in the same place as Alan at the same time.”

    “You’re potty! Aren’t you supposed to be setting up a whole bloody faculty? Not to say,” noted Dorothy pointedly, “ordering some actual Geo. Sci. 101-and-holding textbooks, not to say getting your timetables sorted out for next year, not to say finalising those appointments that you still haven’t finalised and that Alan’s started muttering about? Not say doing whatever disgusting things it is that you do with your ruddy nodules?”

    “I’ve been doing all that, too.”

    “You astound me. You and your toy computer,” said Dorothy in a very bored voice as he misguidedly started to tell her about the correlation program he’d designed. “And talking of correlation—”

    “I WANT my own copy of Nature!” he shouted at the top of his lungs.

    When the old pub had ceased quivering and the consequent ringing silence—apart from the strains of The Pearl Fishers from the corridor—had lengthened sufficiently, Dorothy said sweetly: “I’m so glad we’ve got that clear.”

    “Mm. Listen,” he said vaguely. Smiling vaguely.

    Dorothy stared.

    “Et la foule est à genoux…” Thomas hummed along with the remainder of the duet. “Always love it. My voice is too deep for it, though. Um, don’t suppose Jack would like to have a bash at it with me, regardless, would he?”

    “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but if it’s got something to do with that humming noise, ask him. In fact go and ask him now,” said Dorothy pointedly.

    “You are a musical illiterate, aren’t you?” he said, looking at her with interest.

    “Yes. Go on, push off.”

    “No, there is more to tell,” he said smugly.

    “Just give me the conclusion,” replied Dorothy heavily.

    “No, you have to understand how I reached it. Hang on.” He dug in the pocket of his unlikely nether garment.

    “What are those pants?” said Dorothy in spite of herself.

    “Plus-fours. My father’s. He was—”

    “A lot, lot taller than you,” said Dorothy faintly.

    “Not a lot. He was fairly stout in later life, however.”

    “That explains the frill at the waist, then.” The giant baggy pants were gathered in with a tartan elasticised belt of the type not usually seen on boys over the age of about nine. Or these days, just not usually seen. The top garment, tightly tucked in, appeared to be a lady’s floral blouse in a jersey knit. Dark crimson stylised blooms on a dark blue ground, lightened here and there with small pale blue leaves. Except that… Dorothy tried to peer at it without letting the bugger see she was peering. The buttons were on the wrong side. Surely it couldn’t have been designed as a shirt, though? Not deliberately designed. Not even in the Seventies, though it certainly gave off emanations of—

    “I’ve had this shirt since 1972,” said Thomas in a vague voice, unfolding great wads of computer print-out, liberally scrawled on with genuine Parker fountain-pen ink. Dorothy, like the whole of Sir G.G., was aware that Thomas used a Parker with a diabolically wide nib, the which did not help to render the scrawl any more legible. “Carnaby Street.”

    “I can well believe it. Though not that anyone could actually intend that pattern as a shirt, even in 1972.”

    “You’ve forgotten. Used to wear it with a white suit—flares, of course, and sharp shoulder pads—and a very wide pale blue tie.”

    Dorothy gulped. She could believe it, actually. Help. Feebly she noted: “You must have been thinner in those days.”

    “Quite a bit: yes. This material’s stretched, though,” he said vaguely.

    Not enough, it hadn’t. Dorothy didn’t say any more, she felt she’d said more than enough already: she was in very little doubt that he’d worn the get-up on purpose to solicit comment.

    “Here,” he said, smoothing the papers out.

    “I’ve got no intention of trying to fight my way through those beetle-tracks. Just tell me the conclusion.”

    Instead he read it all out to her.

    At the end of it, Dorothy noted pointedly: “We concluded several months back, unless my memory is at fault, that Nigel and Mayli were the only contenders for Wendy Briggs-type offspring. Putative offspring,” she added unnecessarily but nastily.

    “Look, I’ve proved Nigel couldn’t be: his family are New Zealanders for four generations and his birth certificate—”

    “Yes. And whether or not it was Jack’s bright idea to digitise every bloody document that’s ever been produced to, for, by, with or from the bloody university, you had no right,” said Dorothy, starting to get very hot under the collar indeed, “no right at all, to read my staff members’ private and confidential personnel files! OR THE ASSOCIATED DIGITISED DOCUMENTS!” she shouted.

    “No. It was an interesting exercise, though. And if I can hack into those files, it just shows Jack’s famous firewall isn’t as fireproof as he thought it was, doesn’t it?” he replied with, astoundingly enough, no evidence of smugness at all. “I admit it took me a while, but if I can do it, so can any good hacker.”

    Dorothy breathed heavily.

    “Funny Alan didn’t spot it,” he said in a vague voice.

    “If, as I assume we are, we are talking about the fact that Mayli was born in England, he didn’t spot it because in the first place Ken Takagaki interviewed her, selected her, and vetted her documents, and in the second place there is nothing suspicious about being born in England!” shouted Dorothy.

    “There is when your birth certificate shows mother’s name as Wendy Briggs.”

    “What?” Dorothy snatched the print-out of Mayli’s digitised English birth certificate out of his hand. “My God!” she gulped.

    “I’d say that proves Alan never laid eyes on it,” he acknowledged.

    Dorothy replied somewhat feebly: “Or that he’s genuinely forgotten all about the incident, which even Jill Davis reckons he genuinely has.”

    “Your Sergeant Baxter can’t have checked,” he noted.

    “No, because HE is isn’t a MANIAC!” shouted Dorothy.

    “Thank you,” he said modestly.

    There was a sufficiently long silence.

    “Christ,” said Dorothy feebly.

    “Mm. Well, I did offer to nip down and grab some grog,” he said drily. “Er, actually I’d have let you have the rest of the holiday weekend in peace—well, I’d probably have inflicted myself on you,” he said with a flicker of that sidelong smile, “but I’d have spared you this. Only the bloody father’s turned up, and the girl’s half out of her tree.”

    Dorothy’s jaw dropped. “Just put that in words of one syllable.”

    “We-ell… You do know your phone’s out of order?”

    “YES!”

    There was a short pause.

    “Look down the road. They’ve got a tent there,” said Dorothy heavily. “I’ve rung Faults, Adrian’s rung Faults, and Adrian’s mum’s rung Faults, if ya must have it: and Faults have solidly denied that there is anything wrong with our line, in spite of the fact that their fucking tent’s been sitting out there for four days!”

    “They’ve cut the cable, I dare say,” he said detachedly.

    “Yes. Will you please tell me what you’re on about?” said Dorothy through her teeth.

    “Oh—sorry. Akiko rang me in a state—”

    “Rubbish. Akiko does not fly into states.”

    “She was pretty near one this afternoon. I wish you’d just shut up and listen,” he complained.

    Dorothy gaped indignantly.

    “She went for a drive—Akiko, this is—and—” What it amounted to was that Akiko had got lost somewhere in the vicinity of Dominion Road, had remembered Mayli’s address, and popped in to ask directions. Only to find the family in an uproar: Mayli’s father had just turned up. Joe Coffi. Reportedly “ver-ree black and tall: very nice-ah man” and desirous of taking Mrs Coffi back home to America.

    “Shit,” said Dorothy feebly.

    “Mm. According to Akiko, ‘Mayli in terrible state, she says he-ah bad man and he’p-ah ruin her mothah’s rife, him and Alan-ah, and she kill-ah him.’” He eyed her drily.

    “Uh—Mayli’s saying she’s gonna kill the father?”

    “Him and then Alan,” said Thomas drily. “Akiko described it as ‘not just transference-ah, something genuine in-ah past.’ –She no find out just-ah what,” he explained courteously.

    “Hell’s teeth,” muttered Dorothy to herself.

    “That was more or less my reaction, yeah. However, Akiko assured me she and Mrs Gordon from next-door were holding the fort. They’ve given Mayli a sedative.”

    “Right. Uh—well, that does seem pretty conclusive,” said Dorothy feebly. “The only question that remains is, why did she pour all this into your shell-like?”

    “My boyish charm?” he suggested modestly. “No, well, I think there might have been a slight element of panic, not to say an element of dumping it thankfully on the shoulders of the nearest father-figure. Though it sounds as if she’s done pretty well. Er—she made me promise to come and tell you right away.”

    “Then why the fuck didn’t you, instead of sitting there coming out with all that crap about pearl fishers and computer print-outs and cups of bloody TEA?” she shouted, scrambling up.

    “Sit. As I said, Akiko is coping. I didn’t want you to rush off at a tangent. I promised her, in fact, that I wouldn’t let you do so. She would like your help, but what she seems to envisage is some rational support in talking over how the family should handle Mayli.”

    Dorothy glared.

    Thomas scratched his chin. “There’s a younger sister, she seems to be making it worse, but I didn’t quite gather how. I did say I wouldn’t let you go down there on your own.”

    “This would be after she’d found my phone’s out of order and fallen back on you as second choice, would it?”

    “Yes,” he said calmly. “I rang Faults, too. They gave me the same story, so I was very rude to them. On the assumption it could hardly make it worse. If you’ve calmed down, we’ll take my car.”

    Dorothy opened and shut her mouth. Thomas just waited, looking mild.

    “Um—okay. Thanks, Thomas,” she said reluctantly.

    “Oh, my pleasure. By the way, Penny Bergen rang me just as I was leaving—she’s rung Faults, too, by the by. She wanted me to remind you about the rehearsal tomorrow.” Dorothy just looked at him dazedly, so Thomas the Tank Engine, smiling just a very little, took her elbow, picked up her handbag from the sideboard, looked in it for her door keys, and conducted her out. He even opened the front passenger door of the red Jag and helped her into it without getting his ear bitten off for his pains.

    “I’ve got the address,” he said cheerfully, “but you’ll have to navigate.”

    “What? Oh. Yes. Take the motorway,” said Dorothy dully.

    Cheerfully humming bits of the duet from The Pearl Fishers, Thomas headed for the roundabout.

    It was a sufficiently dingy little bungalow, within spitting distance of the ditto little bungalow where Dorothy, Jack and Kathleen Perkins had grown up. Dorothy looked at it a trifle limply. Grass grub in the front lawn an’ all. A plumpish, pretty, brown-haired girl was sitting on the front steps. Dorothy approached cautiously, trying to ignore the fact that Thomas was walking very close behind her breathing all over her. “Hullo, would you be Kitty Coffi? I’m Dorothy Perkins.”

    “Thomas Baranski,” said Thomas, looking at the girl with interest. “I see. Half-sister.”

    “Yes. Hullo,” said Kitty glumly. She took a deep breath and burst out: “Mayli’s gone mad, she reckons she’s gonna kill him, and he’s nice, really! He’s been divorced for five years and he only stuck with her because of the kids, and he’s been looking for Mum for years!”

    Taking all of this with a large grain of salt, and very much avoiding Thomas’s eye, Dorothy just nodded kindly.

    Kitty blew her nose. “She reckons she’s not gonna let him take Mum to America, and I can’t go!”

    “I see. How old are you, Kitty?” asked Dorothy.

    Kitty blew her nose again. “Seventeen.”

    “Mm. And is Mayli your legal guardian?”

    “Um—dunno. Why?” she said blankly.

    Dorothy tried to cast her mind back to herself at seventeen, but failed dismally. Had she ever been that ignorant? “Mayli can’t stop you unless she’s your legal guardian. Your mother would normally be that, unless she’s signed the guardianship over to Mayli.”

    Kitty just looked blank.

    “What is the age of majority, here?” asked Thomas.

    “Eighteen. And shut up. I’d say it’s between you and your mum, Kitty,” said Dorothy as kindly as she could.

    “Mum wants to go.”

    “Once a groupie, always a groupie,” noted Thomas thoughtfully.

    Dorothy had been thinking the very same thing. Nevertheless she retorted swiftly: “Shut up. –Can we go in, Kitty?”

    “Um—yeah! Sorry!” she gasped, scrambling up.

    In the shabby living-room—cheap furniture of the sort that had featured a lot in the flats of Dorothy’s earlier period: easy chairs with wooden arms and squarish squabs covered in bumpy orange ersatz something that probably didn’t have a woollen fibre in it but was nevertheless hot and scratchy to sit on—Akiko was discovered along with a large Black man in impeccable American clothes—Dacron, probably, thought Dorothy uncharitably—and two middle-aged women. One was greyish-haired and competent-looking in spite of the bright magenta track-suit, and the other was fluffy-haired, plumpish, blondish and apart from the fact that she was in a wheelchair, a dead ringer for Catherine Burchett Kincaid with about ten extra years and a lot of worry on her shoulders. Dorothy swallowed.

    “Ah: Dorothy! Thomas! Thank-ah you both so much for coming!” cried Akiko, springing up.

    Dorothy shook in her sneakers but bloody Baranski didn’t speak, thank Christ, so she was able to reply: “That’s quite all right.”

    Akiko then effected formal introductions. Joe Coffi looked and sounded quite a decent sort, actually. And if he blinked at the sight of Baranski, what normal human being wouldn’t? Mrs Gordon from next-door more than blinked, in fact her jaw was observed to sag, but it was just as well Dorothy hadn’t taken any bets about the time it would take before she was eating out of his bloody hand, because it took approx. fifteen seconds.

    … “It would be the best thing for dear Wendy, really,” said Heather Gordon when they were all sipping cups of tea and eating Shrewsbury biscuits, even the red-eyed Kitty. “Dear Mayli does her best, but— Well, you know. She has to work full-time, of course, and Kitty’s at school all day.”

    “Yeah. I’m retired now,” explained Joe Coffi for the second time.

    Dorothy nodded. He was a fair bit older than Wendy Briggs Coffi. But then, the groupie type frequently went for older men, unless she was vastly mistook.

    Joe then produced a wallet full of photos of his grown-up kids, their kids, and the retirement condo in Florida, and proved to everyone’s satisfaction that he had the wherewithal as well as the inclination to support Wendy in comfort for the rest of her natural. Which probably wouldn’t be that long, reflected Dorothy as, it then becoming apparent that Mrs Coffi was suddenly very tired, Mrs Gordon, competently gathering up Kitty in her wake, shepherded her off to bed.

    “Now we have to-ah persuade Mayli,” said Akiko into the sudden silence.

    “Yeah,” agreed Joe Coffi glumly.

    “She can’t stop you, you know,” said Dorothy kindly.

    “No? She’s giving it one Helluva good try!”

    “She can’t legally stop Kitty going with her mother, either,” said Thomas kindly.

    “Shut up, Thomas,” groaned Dorothy.

    “Look, if it comes down to a legal battle, he might as well know the facts.”

    Joe Coffi sighed. “It won’t, there’s no way I’d put Wendy through that. I just want to get Mayli to see reason! Well, gee, I can see she’s been the mainstay of this here family and I can understand her being sore at me. But mind you, Wendy wanted to have the baby," he said with a sigh, passing his hand across his forehead. “It wasn’t the Dark Ages, she could have gone to a nice English clinic, had the pregnancy terminated, y’know?”

    Briskly Thomas the Tank Engine agreed with this, naming in passing a really nice London clinic plus into the bargain the precise year of Mayli’s birth, but fortunately no-one seemed to notice anything. Dorothy took a deep breath, deciding that the situation was bad enough without hours of fighting your way through polite mouthings being added to it, and said very firmly: “Wendy does strike me as that type, Joe. Weak, and a follower, but very stubborn.”

    He blinked. “Uh—yeah. Well, yeah, Dorothy, you’re right, there!” he said with feeling. “She always was that type.”

    “Mm.” Dorothy eyed him drily. “Threw herself at you, did she?”

    “I guess,” he said sheepishly, scratching his grizzled curls.

    “Yes. I know someone who knew her back in her univ— college days, and she was evidently like that then.”

    “Oh, sure. She told me about that guy. Drove herself into a state, huh? I was afraid she was gonna do the same thing; only she was so dead-set on having the baby, and all, that— Well, I dunno. Maybe the baby was a distraction, y’know?”

    “Very likely,” agreed Dorothy calmly, not bothering to give it more than a split second’s thought.

    “Joe, he gives her a lot of-ah money: she decides emigrate to New Zealand,” explained Akiko, smiling at him.

    “Yeah, well, couldn’t see what else to do. Hell, I told her I was married, first off—and she swore she was on the Pill!”

    “That type does,” agreed Thomas. “I had a girlfriend round about that time, or could have been a few years earlier: Rosemary. Had that look in her eye. I dumped her the minute she said she’d take care of the precau— All right, I never spoke!” he said to Dorothy’s scorching glare.

    “We are not here to exchange chummy reminiscences of the good old Sixties and Seventies, in spite of that bloody shirt!” she said, more loudly than she had in fact intended.

    “Jesus, is that— I used to have this yellow and orange shirt, it had a collar just like—” Joe broke off, grinning sheepishly.

    “I think-ah her mother tell Mayli she not know you married,” ventured Akiko.

    “I guess so, Akiko,” he agreed heavily. “But gee, can’t she see that whatever happened back then, I’m genuine about wanting to see her mom happy for the rest of her days?”

    “No. She’d see you as a usurper,” said Thomas brutally, “on top of having always seen you as the villain of the piece. Look, there’s a bit more to it than you know. Uh—damn, where do I start?” he muttered.

    “For me, I’d start with a glass of hard liquor in my fist, Thomas, only there isn’t any in the house,” he returned glumly.

    “Then you’ll have to hear it without grog,” said Dorothy on a grim note. “Go on, Thomas, but for God’s sake make it short!”

    “I’ll try,” he said meekly.

    “Alan,” prompted Dorothy, unimpressed.

    “Right. Our top boss is a fellow called Alan Kincaid. Mayli’s his PA. Ever heard the name?”

    “Uh—no,” said Joe blankly.

    “Think about Wendy’s blighted Cambridge career, for a moment,” advised Dorothy drily.

    “College,” prompted Thomas.

    “Uh—well, she never said all that much. She said they were all snobs, as a matter of fact.”

    “Yes,” he agreed simply. “What about the fellow she had the crush on: the one she chucked herself in the river over?”

    “Uh—can’t recall— Shee-ut, is it him?” he croaked.

    “Yes. He has absolutely no idea that Mayli’s her daughter.”

    “Thomas, you meana tell us, Mayli been ah-hiding all this?” gasped Akiko.

    “Yes.”

    “But how you know? She not ur-tell-ah you? She tell you, Dorothy?”

    “No. She didn’t tell either of us,” said Thomas, quite briskly, for him. “Never mind how I know, for a minute. Actually I’ve only just discovered her mother’s name was Briggs.” He hesitated. “Look, I don’t want to make the girl out to be a raving nutter—”

    “She behaved like ur-raving,” said Akiko cautiously.

    “Yeah. Akiko, here, was real good with her,” said Joe approvingly.

    “Good,” he said, smiling at her. Akiko was observed to smile back, brightening up no end, the way his many females fans did. Dorothy swallowed a sigh.

    Thomas then related the whole story. Quite succinctly, really. But it did take some time, since it had to include the business of the anonymous fax from Wairakei and the now very obvious conclusion that Mayli must have sent it.

    “Long arm of coincidence,” summed up Dorothy drily, when they were more or less over it.

    “Yes. But lotsa English people have-ah relations in New Zealand, lotsa English people come out-ah here,” said Akiko matter-of-factly.

    “Mm.” Dorothy looked wryly at Joe. “The question is, what the Hell do we do now?”

    “Get Mayli to a good psychiatrist?” he suggested uneasily. “Wish I could take her back with me, but if she won’t come—”

    “Maybe when she know ur-truth, she calm down,” suggested Akiko.

    “Yes, well, in spite of Mrs Coffi’s disability,” said Dorothy on a firm note, “I think she’ll have to be persuaded to tell poor Mayli the whole truth about—well, not only about your relationship, Joe: about that bloody silly do at Cambridge, too. I admit Alan probably didn’t handle it well, but frankly it does seem to have been ninety-nine percent Wendy’s fault: Jill Davis was quite clear that he never encouraged her.”

    “Yeah. You can leave that to me,” said Joe Coffi simply.

    Dorothy nodded: it was now apparent to her that whatever Joe’s background might be, he had not been behind the door when brains and determination were handed out in the Coffi family. Probably where Mayli got hers from.

    “What about the anonymous-ah fax?” said Akiko after some thought.

    Dorothy replied cautiously: “If we can get her calmed down to the point where she can apologise to Alan, I think that’ll settle it.”

    “Yes, but Dorothy, the police involve’!” she cried.

    “Uh—shit, yes; I’d forgotten that, Akiko. Um… well, Jim Baxter’s retired, now. I could have an unofficial word with him, eh?”

    “Yes, that be best,” she agreed in relief.

    “Yeah, well, we’ve settled it all nicely, haven’t we?” said Thomas cheerily. “Apart from the essential point of how to calm Mayli down.”

    “Will you just shut up?” moaned Dorothy.

    “Like Dorothy says,” said Joe Coffi stolidly: “Wendy’ll have to put her in the picture. Let’s just start with that, huh? Not anticipate trouble.”

    “Okay,” Dorothy and Akiko agreed thankfully.

    “Meantime,” he said thoughtfully, “think I might try dragging Wendy’s doctor away from his golf, or whatever your doctors do here, holiday weekends.”

    “Not a bad idea,” said Thomas cheerfully. “I’ve just remembered, there’s a carton of Jamaican rum in the car.—Jake Carrano got it for me.—Forgot to unload it. I’ll go and fetch a bottle, shall I?” He went out, looking cheerful.

    “That,” said Dorothy feelingly, “is Baranski all over, and I apologise grovellingly for it, Joe!”

    “That’s okay. Think I will try calling the doctor.” He strode out.

    Dorothy and Akiko looked at each other a trifle limply.

    “Joe a strong man,” ventured the little Japanese girl finally.

    “Say what!” agreed Dorothy feelingly in the appropriate vernacular.

    There was a thoughtful silence.

    “Well, so’s Alan a strong man. She obviously goes for that type.”

    “Yes,” Akiko agreed.

    There was another silence. Then their eyes met.

    “She awfu’ like Catherine!” squeaked Akiko, clapping a hand abruptly to her mouth.

    Dorothy grinned. “My thought exactly. –Well, come on, let’s see what they’ve got in the kitchen, I suppose the mob’ll have to be fed, regardless.”

    “Yes. Good-ah idea,” she agreed thankfully.

    Joe Coffi did find Wendy’s doctor and after the doctor had seen her, prescribed a mild sedative and a good night’s sleep, seen Mayli, shaken his head and prescribed a strong sleeping-pill, the rest of them had tea. Apart from Mrs Gordon, who admitted that she was supposed to go over to her sister’s tonight, and if they didn’t need her— She was allowed to escape, with the grateful thanks of all of them. Akiko was baffled by the contents of the Coffi family’s fridge, and Kitty was now in the sitting-room glued to the TV regardless of the male peer group drinking rum in there, so Dorothy fell back on one of her mum’s good old stand-bys for Sunday tea. “Mousetraps.” Grated cheese mixed up with egg and milk and spread on slices of bread, the result baked in the oven. It eked out one egg, in the case of the Perkins family, and four in the case of the Coffis, rather well. Fortunately there was plenty of bread, because the members of the male peer group both had appetites to match their size. Joe pronounced the mousetraps real tasty even though, as there had been no bacon, they were flavoured with nothing more than a splash of Worcestershire sauce. Thomas noted that they were an interesting Colonial manifestation of the high-tea syndrome but was silenced, not so much by Dorothy’s withering “You ate enough of them!” as by Kitty’s and Akiko’s simultaneously collapsing into helpless giggles at it.

    Kitty burst into tears of relief when Dorothy said she thought she’d better stay the night, so in the end she and Akiko both stayed, and Thomas went off cheerfully with Joe and the remains of the crate of rum to his motel, both of them promising, or perhaps threatening in Baranski’s case, to be back in the morning. Dorothy was allotted the spare room that had been the other sister’s, and Akiko, at Kitty’s earnest invitation, shared her room, which had twin beds. It was a pretty expectable teenage room, except that in addition to the pink floral bedspreads and matching curtains, the large and hideous poster of INXS or something of the sort, and the shelf of electronic gear, it featured a solid bookcase with some pretty solid stuff in it. Kitty was apparently doing maths and sciences at school: she revealed that Mayli thought she could get a good job in IT support but she was more interested in the engineering side of electronics.

    “No wonder she want to go to America with him,” said Akiko in a lowered voice, as they waited for Kitty to produce clean sheets.

    “Mm, well, there’d certainly be more opportunity over there.”

    “Hai.”

    As Kitty came back, beaming over an armful of bedding, at that point, they said no more.

    Next morning was pretty traumatic. Well, breakfast was all right: Mayli and her mother were still fast asleep, so Dorothy, Akiko and Kitty had theirs in peace. More or less, given that Kitty submitted Akiko to a relentless interrogation about her family, how they lived, and what they all did. Apparently Ken Takagaki’s sisters had both done science degrees: this went down really well. Kitty then revealed, going very pink, that she was doing Japanese at school: Mayli had been to see the headmistress and forced them to let her do it instead of French, even though if you were in the science stream you weren’t supposed to have Japanese in that option. Akiko looked as if she understood all this, so Dorothy didn’t try to interpret, just put plenty of honey on her toast and tried to make a shape in her head of the sensible, no-nonsense but verging toward the kindly tone it would be appropriate to take with the crazed Mayli.

    Whether or not Mayli had actually been raving the day before—and if Akiko said she had been then it was five hundred to one she had—she certainly wasn’t this morning. She came into the kitchen just as Dorothy’s third cup of well sugared, milky Instant was passing the epiglottis and said firmly: “It’s very kind of you both to help us out, but I’m fine now. I’ll handle it.”

    “If Mum’s going, I’m going!” shouted Kitty, turning bright puce.

    “That’ll do, Kitty. Mr Coffi isn’t responsible for your support, you’re no relation,” said Mayli calmly.

    “He’s OFFERED! He WANTS to! You’re MEAN and HORRIBLE, Mayli Coffi!” she screamed.

    Akiko got up quickly. “Yell and shout no help, Kitty. Come on, we make beds now, okay?”

    Looking sulky and defiant, Kitty went out with her. Pausing at the door to warn: “You’re not my legal guardian, you can’t make me do anything, so there!”

    “That not help, neithah,” said Akiko sternly. “I try that with my Aunty Masako when I very bad teenager, my mothah send-ah me her place for semester. It no go down well, I got it in-ah neck, you bettah berieve! No way to convince-ah adult. No way convince my Aunty Masako, anyroad, she dragon-ah lady.”

    “Heck, what had you done?” asked Kitty in awed tones.

    The door closed on Akiko’s voice replying composedly: “To get sent to Aunty Masako? Better you no know! Oh, okay, I tell, I can see you ur-got more sense than me.”

    “Has she?” said Dorothy very drily into the silence in the kitchen.

    “What, Kitty? More sense than Akiko? No,” replied Mayli grimly. “She’s a nit-wit. But she’s got the sort of brain that can do maths and science: she’s got a future if someone can keep her off the boys.”

    Dorothy scratched her head. “Yeah, well, I can’t speak from experience, only observation: I’ve done some bloody stupid things in my time but I was never a nit-wit. But I’d say that if she wants boys she’ll have them, one way or another.” She shrugged slightly. “Call it Nature or hormones, it takes a large percentage of the female population that way. She may come to her senses when she’s in her thirties or forties, some of them do.”

    “Yes, and some of them just go on ruining their lives,” replied Mayli grimly, “falling in and out of stupid relationships with useless men!”

    “Yes. It achieves the desired result, though: keeps the human race going. Nature’s bloody cruel,” said Dorothy detachedly.

    “I’m not letting Kitty fall into that trap,” returned Mayli, icy-cold.

    “I think my point is,” said Dorothy dubiously, scratching her head again, “that no matter how hard you try, Nature will defeat you in the end. When I did my degree the brightest girl in the Honours class got engaged less than halfway through the academic year and dropped out to follow the boyfriend to Berkeley: he’d got a scholarship. She’d been Senior Scholar the year before, and was all set to land a post-grad scholarship after Honours: the professor was reliably reported to be ropeable. She was extremely pretty in a rather overblown, very yellow-haired, and definitely hearty style. Played a lot of tennis. Probably a dead-ringer for one of those Betjemanish girls. –Sorry.”

    “I have heard of John Betjeman,” she said grimly.

    “Sorry again, then. Why not sit down?” said Dorothy mildly. “Let me get you a cuppa.”

    “No, thanks, Dorothy, I’ll do it. It was good of you to come, but I’m over the shock, now.” Mayli went over to the bench and began making herself toast and coffee.

    “Perhaps I’d better just come straight out and say that I know a lot more about your family background than you’ve ever mentioned, Mayli.”

    “What, from him?” she said with a scornful laugh.

    “Not from Joe, no. I dare say you don’t want a spinster librarian’s opinion of him, but I’ll give it anyway: he strikes me as a decent sort.”

    Mayli said nothing.

    “Your mother’s maiden name was Briggs, right?”

    “Yes,” she said grimly. “Is that relevant?”

    “Very. I don’t know if you’ve ever met Jill Davis: she has been to some does where half the types from Sir G.G. have been present, but you’ve tended to avoid those, haven’t you? She teaches French at the university. Auckland, I mean,” Dorothy amended a trifle feebly. “She was at Cambridge at the same time your mother was. In fact they were flatmates the year that your mother made a fool of herself over Alan.”

    Mayli went on mechanically putting sliced bread in the toaster. After a moment she said in a hard voice: “I see. Another of his many female fans, is that it? Well, it won’t wash, Dorothy, Mum’s told me the truth about him.”

    “I don’t think so. Jill Davis is pretty well known to the whole of the university as a man-hater from way back. She shares a house with a like-minded female friend, even more terrifyingly macho than she manages to be, and their main interests outside their work are golf and fishing. Oh, and Gretchen plays poker, I believe.”

    “I don’t see what this has got to do with anything, Dorothy,” she said politely.

    “Yes, you do, Mayli. You may have some sort of fixation about Alan Kincaid, but you’re not thick. Jill would be the last woman to admire Alan’s type. Either sexually or intellectually, come to think of it. In fact, you may have heard the phrase ‘the Iceman’ bandied about in the environs of Carter’s Bay?”

    “Yes,” she said grudgingly. “So what?”

    “So Jill’s the person responsible for spreading it all over the country: apparently they used to call him that back in his Cambridge days. –When he was reported to have been a disciple of Lacan, and if you’d ever heard the scorn in Jill’s voice when she pronounces that name you’d know she could never have been a fan of Alan’s!” said Dorothy with some feeling.

    Mayli replied in a grim voice: “I don’t know what you’re talking about."

    “Oh. No, you probably don’t: you’re too young.”

    “You mean too young and never been to university like all of you,” she replied bitterly.

    “Yes, I probably do,” agreed Dorothy cordially. “What I’m trying to say, though I realise that the definition of a fixation is that a person can’t be talked out of it, is that although Jill’s a man-hater and quite ready to apportion blame liberally in Alan’s direction, her version of the story most definitely includes the information that he never for an instant encouraged your mother.”

    “He DID!” she shouted furiously.

    Dorothy didn’t know whether to be glad or sorry she’d broken down that cold composure: because frankly, she didn’t have a clue where to go from here. However, as it turned out she didn’t have to go anywhere, really, because Mayli went on shouting for some time and then burst into a storm of sobs. Dorothy just sat there, letting her bawl. It went on for quite a while.

    “Better?” she asked cautiously at last.

    “No,” said Mayli sourly, feeling for a handkerchief.

    Dorothy also felt in her pockets. Bum. She looked around desperately, found a tea-towel, and thrust it at the girl.

    “This is a tea-towel!” said Mayli indignantly.

    “Yes, well, blow your nose anyway. The fact that you’re not too far gone to reject it with disgust is possibly a good sign. Either that or you’re a totally obsessive personality, and not blowing the nose on tea-towels is just one of the many manifestations of it, in which case I frankly admit I’m stumped.”

    Mayli did blow her nose, though staring numbly at her as she did so.

    “I do admit half of the country, the female half, even if it owns shiny New Age dishwashers, shares the obsession.”

    “Can you always think two different things at once?” said Mayli very faintly.

    “At least five, usually. Before breakfast, too.” Dorothy looked at her thoughtfully. “I see. You thought you were the only one in the universe. Well, you’re not. It often goes with brains.”

    “Or with obsessions?” she said bitterly.

    “Dunno. I suppose I’ve always been boringly sane, myself. Though personally I wouldn’t have said so: thinking five contradictory things before breakfast is more or less the opposite of the idée fixe, isn’t it? You’d better see if you can get your mum to talk honestly about her and Alan. Or strictly speaking, about her. He didn’t come into it much.”

    Mayli merely glared, so Dorothy decided not to say that Joe was going to have a go at Wendy. Instead she said: “You’d better have your breakfast. And forget about Alan for the time being. Just ask yourself where your mum’d really be better off: in Joe’s bloody condo with all the comforts American medical insurance can buy, or scraping along in this dump while you and Kitty fight over her bloody boyfriends. And let me just add this: in Joe’s socio-economic bracket Americans send their daughters to college as a matter of course: it’s not necessarily seen as an alternative to boyfriends and marriage. While in grungy New Zealand petit-bourgeois suburbia, never mind the bloody New Age, it still is. Don’t get me wrong, I grew up about five hundred yards away. Kitty would have a much, much better chance of a decent lifestyle and a solid career and a nice hubby on top of it over there than she would here, believe you me.”

    Mayli looked sulky, but plugged the jug in again and added more hot water to her coffee. Dorothy just waited while she sat down and drank some of it and ate her now leathery toast.

    “You’re not like what you are at work,” she noted sourly.

    “No, a certain amount of hypocrisy prevails in the chaste precincts of Alan’s user-pays university,” agreed Dorothy blandly. “Though I don’t think I’m totally different. Just more so.”

    “They’re all hypocrites!” she said fiercely.

    “That’s probably true. Some would claim that a certain amount of hypocrisy is necessary to maintain the civilised veneer—and even desirable. It’s a point of view. Personally I’m quite keen on paying off my flat and saving for my old age, that’s why I do it. I can’t answer for the rest of them. I sort of vaguely remember that at your age I would have hotly denied any accusations of hypocrisy, on the job or off, but I have to admit it’s getting harder and harder to remember back that far. But as far as human relations went—I think I mean ‘relationships’ in today’s terms—I was pretty bloody intransigent, I do remember that. It didn’t get me anywhere, of course, it seldom does.”

    “If you’re trying to warn me—”

    Dorothy got up and went to make herself another cup of Instant. “No. If I was warning you, I’d warn you. I think I’m probably trying to say that intransigence is natural at your age but you’d probably get on a lot better—I think I mean ‘cope’ in today’s terms—cope a lot better if you could be more flexible. So would Kitty, of course, but at her age they can’t think in abstracts at all, let alone start to see themselves and other people objectively.”

    “Are you implying that I can’t see him objectively?”

    “Who?” said Dorothy to the electric jug without much interest in her voice.

    “Him. Joe Coffi. My father,” said Mayli grimly.

    That was probably—well, possibly—a great step forward. Have a medal, Dorothy the Grate Head-Doctor, thought Dorothy drily. “No, but I’m sure you can’t. Probably Kitty can’t, either, but at least she seems to like him. Have you ever thought that she’s the type that needs a strong male figure in their lives? Doesn’t much matter if it’s Daddy or step-dad or uncle or even the boyfriend.”

    “You mean if she latches on to Joe she—she won’t go running after boys?” said Mayli dazedly.

    “Nothing that cut and dried, I’m afraid. But if she admires him she may—well, adapt to what she sees that he perceives as the desirable model of a stepdaughter? Nice college girl, Cashmere sweaters and whatever the equivalent of neat tweed skirts is these days?”

    “Designer jeans,” said Mayli faintly.

    “All too probably.” Dorothy made her coffee and came and sat down with it. “What’s your other sister like?”

    “Georgette? Dumb. Very pretty, but really dumb. The sort that never even tries to use her brain. She’s married: it seems to be what she wants. We don’t see all that much of her, actually.”

    Dorothy nodded. “They often go like that. Get fixated on having babies for several years. The lucky ones never wake up at all.”

    “I’ve often thought that,” she said dazedly.

    “There you are, then. Does your mother own this house?”

    “I can see the economic advantages of it!” she said angrily.

    “Yeah.” Dorothy finished her coffee slowly. “There’s no need to let Joe rush your mum into anything, of course. Mind you, she’s got rush-ee written all over her, I have to say it. I think I might toddle back up the Coast and grab Jill Davis off the golf course. You might as well hear the truth about Alan from the horse’s mouth.”

    “No—”

    “Yes.” Dorothy got up. “I know all about that fax from Wairakei, by the by. I’ve been trying to work out some good excuse for not letting Alan know it was you. Besides sheer cowardice, of course. Mind you, he’s bright as Hell, he’ll understand why you did it—before I’ve finished telling him, probably; but it threw Catherine pretty well off-balance, he’ll have a right to be bloody angry.”

    Mayli’s jaw had dropped.

    “Not that I blame you: at your age I’d probably have done the same, with less excuse. But we’re all human and most of us are pretty pathetically weak, even the ones that give a very good imitation of strength, like Alan. In another thirty years or so, if that brain of yours keeps doing its stuff, you may be able to see that.”

    “Dorothy, he was—”

    “Yeah, we all know what he was doing, Mayli. I don’t really think you did it to save Catherine from a fate worse than death, you did it to avenge your mother, so don’t tell me anything different, it’d be a waste of breath. I might see you later today if I can drag Jill back down with me, otherwise it’ll be tomorrow. If you can manage to ask Joe to show you the pics of his condo, do: it’ll reassure you about whether he can keep Wendy in comfort. See ya.”

    She went out quickly, more or less to stop herself gabbing on and making it worse.

    “Are you comatose or only semi?” she said grimly to a blurred Pommy voice that had succeeded the blurred Yank voice that had answered Joe’s room phone at the motel.

    “Why?”

    “Because we’re going back up the Coast right now, and if you’re semi you can come and fetch me— YES, everything’s all right, you moron!” she shouted as it interrupted her. “And then I’ll dri—”

    “You’re not driving my J—”

    “BRING THE BLOODY CAR OVER HERE NOW!” she shouted, hanging up with a rending crash. She then became aware that Akiko’s and Kitty’s heads were sticking meekly round one of the bedroom doors. “Don’t panic, that was Baranski with the grandfather of all hangovers trying to tell me I couldn’t drive his sacred macho vehicle,” she explained bitterly.

    “He wi’ let-ah you!” predicted Akiko with a laugh.

    “You better believe it,” replied Dorothy cordially. “Um, if you’re staying on, Akiko, it might be a good idea to encourage Joe to take Wendy out for a drive if she feels up to it—Kitty, too,” she said, smiling at the kid. “I think Mayli probably needs a bit of time to herself, to think.”

    “Okay, fine, Dorothee.”

    “I’m going to have a word with Jill Davis, I think it might do Mayli good to hear the Cambridge version from an outsider.”

    “Okay, yes: good idea!”

    “We might come back down today, otherwise it’ll be tomorrow.” Dorothy cleared her throat. “I mentioned the fax to Mayli.”

    “All-uh-read-ee?” she gasped.

    “Yeah, well, it might be a counter-irritant. Dunno. But maybe you’d better not bring the subject up unless she does.”

    Akiko agreed fervently she wouldn’t. They had finished the beds so there was nothing for Dorothy to give them a hand with. So she went and sat on the front steps. Unfortunately Kitty came and sat beside her and asked her what she really thought about American universities and the sort of career a girl could have if— Oh, well. At least the kid wasn’t talking about boys.

    “This,” remembered Dorothy evilly as it got out of the macho vehicle, “has got a family in Yankland: you wanna ask him about American colleges. One of his daughters does something technical.”

    Thomas had now reached them, the Coffis’ front path being the usual three-yard strip of cracked concrete they favoured round Balmoral, Sandringham, Mt Albert and them parts, at least in the bits that hadn’t been relentlessly trendified, so he was able to agree: “Yes: Jordana. Sound-person in television. She could have done better for herself, she did quite a decent degree, but it’s what she always wanted. –Stanford,” he explained. Before Dorothy could move, speak, or, as a third and possibly preferred choice, scream, he’d given the kid Jordana’s email address.

    “Thought you wanted to go?” he added in mild surprise.

    Dorothy got up. “Yes. Give me the keys.”

    “I’m perfectly—”

    “Give me the KEYS!”

    Thomas the Tank Engine gave her the keys to his shiny red Jag.

    “And just shut up,” she added, possibly redundantly, as he got in beside her, looking meek. She put the thing into gear and drove it away.

    “Yikes,” said Jill feebly when Dorothy, more or less shouting Thomas down, had more or less explained.

    “Lord Peter rides again,” said Gretchen, somewhat less feebly.

    “It was actually,” said Thomas, waving a modest paw at himself, “meeting you at the Carter’s Bay Primary School Annual Fund-Raising Fair that set me on the right track.”

    “Shut up, they don’t wanna hear it,” warned Dorothy. “Computers and private and confidential digitised documents come into it,” she explained to Jill and Gretchen. They weren’t at golf, they were in their garden, filling little black plastic pots with snippets of geranium and the like.

    “She’s right, we don’t,” agreed Jill just as Thomas misguidedly opened his great fat mouth. “Wendy Briggs is Mayli’s mum. That’s quite enough, ta.”

    “What are all those little bits and pieces for?” replied Thomas politely.

    “Most of them are for Beth.” Jill sat back on her heels and brushed mud off her hands in a perfunctory manner. “We know she hasn’t got a garden. Sol’s made her a sort of…”

    “Barrow,” said Gretchen.

    “Only in the burial sense, I think! It’s a tub, but it’s so huge it’s more like a wooden trench.”

    “Good, ve call it a trench, then,” she decided cheerfully.

    “And the rest are for Annick to plant around her carpark. Whether or not the whole area is shortly gonna be inundated by the dust from Carrano Development’s bulldozers clearing that site for the new dairy over the way.” Jill creaked to her feet. “Ow. –Come on. Let’s have a cuppa and decide whether we can work up the emotional energy to face Mayli.”

    “If ve put it off, it vill only get worse,” said Gretchen detachedly.

    “Thanks.”

    Dorothy hadn’t actually thought that Jill would put it off: she wasn’t that sort of person. And sure enough, when the cuppa and a very nice date loaf had disappeared, large portions of the latter down Baranski’s gullet, she got up and said glumly: “Come on, then.”

    “You can come in my car,” said Thomas kindly.

    Dorothy was just opening her mouth to refuse this kind offer for all of them when Gretchen accepted it happily, with a passing remark on the price of petrol.

    Mayli opened the door looking very cross. She had giant rubber gloves on, and was swathed in a large and hideous yellow and brown plastic apron, with her hair tied up in an old scarf. Anybody else would have looked like Mrs Mop in person in this get-up, or at the very least Mrs ’Arris, but she looked stunning. That bone structure was born to wear a turban, decided Dorothy groggily. Reflecting by the by that of course Mayli was the sort of female that would throw herself into frantic domestic activity at times of stress. Rather than collapsing in front of the telly with a packet of chocolate biscuits like the other half of the world, yeah.

    “Hullo, again, Mayli,” she said, taking the bull by the horns. “This is Jill Davis. Can we come in?”

    “I suppose I can’t stop you,” replied Mayli grimly, standing aside.

    In the sitting-room Dorothy introduced Gretchen and they all sat down like bumps on the proverbial.

    “Is Wendy home?” said Jill into the silence.

    “No.”

    There was another silence.

    “Are you that one that was at university with Mum?” asked Mayli reluctantly.

    “Yes. Dorothy’s ordered me to tell you the lot. I dunno that there’s much to tell: I was only a bystander.” Jill scratched her neat fawnish hair. “Um, we were in our second year. It’s traditionally the time for going off the rails a bit: the first year you’re usually so busy finding your feet that you don’t really have time to land yourself in the poo. And Finals are still comfortably far off on the horizon.”

    Dorothy and Gretchen both eyed her dubiously: what with the jargon and the accent; but Thomas agreed happily: “Oh, absolutely.” Even fruitier. In fact about a million times fruitier: Jill, after all, had been out here for something like fifteen years. Dorothy gave him a warning glare but he appeared oblivious.

    “Yes,” said Mayli unwillingly.

    Jill sighed. “We were flatting: there was Wendy and me, and a tit called Gary Harmon, and Kath Border. And occasionally one of Gary’s or Kath’s boyfriends. Wendy and Kath and I had all been residents in the bloody college the year before and had got out of it as soon as poss. –YES!” she said impatiently as Thomas made an arcane inquiry about colleges. “Just shut up, if you can’t be relevant, will you?” He subsided, while Dorothy made mental preparations to give Jill the Order of Merit, First Class, with gold oak-leaves. “Um, well, we knew Wendy had this almighty crush on the Iceman—um, Alan Kincaid, that is, but we didn’t take much notice of it, because to our certain knowledge, the previous year she’d had a crush on a Dr Kemp, Moira Kemp, who wasn’t gay, was happily married, and couldn’t help the fact that she was very pretty and given to smiling at wet undergraduates that asked footling questions after her lectures. –We all came in for the smile, not only Wendy, get it?” she said heavily as Mayli frowned. “Then more or less at the same time there was a boy of about her own age called… um, can’t remember. Ali? Aziz? He was a Pakistani. That got pretty heated until Wendy found out his family had long since got him safely betrothed to a nice little girl from back home. Not Pakistan, Birmingham,” she noted drily. “So she busted up with him very noisily. Um, think the next was Prof. Ransom, but that only lasted about a couple of weeks, he had a nose like Rudolph’s. Quite a power in the land, though. Never noticed her, I don’t think; he had dozens of similar little fans. Then she went down-market for a bit and had a fling with the lad from the bike shop. That lasted until some misguided don who lived locally with her family asked a bunch of students to tea and she met the brother’s school chums. In this instance, one chum. Six foot, blue-eyed, yellow-haired. She made the most absolute pest of herself, always going round to see the boy on flimsy excuses. I don’t think his mother was best pleased. Added to which, the boy himself wasn’t interested, but that didn’t stop her.”

    Dorothy glanced cautiously at Mayli.

    “It’s all right,” she said, swallowing. “When Georgette was fifteen she did the same thing. It was the Methodist minister’s son. She started going to church and everything. Eventually his mother came round and asked us if we could tell her not to come round any more because Michael had to sit Schol. that year, it was distracting him. Um, that’s my other sister, between me and Kitty,” she said lamely.

    “There you are,” said Thomas on a pleased note.

    “If I thought for one minute you could be trusted in the Coffis’ kitchen I’d tell you to go and make a cuppa,” noted Dorothy heatedly.

    “Ja, go on. I come—” Gretchen caught Jill’s eye. “No, maybe I don’t come vith you,” she said ruefully.

    Thomas replied in an injured voice: “But I want to hear it!”

    Jill took a deep breath. “Go on, Gretchen, go and make us all a cuppa, for the Lord’s sake. You’ve heard it all before.”

    “Ja, several times,” she admitted gratefully, escaping.

    Jill sighed. “Well, that was more or less it for our first year. Oh, no: I tell a lie. Duncan Morand. She went to all his lectures, and used to embarrass the rest of us horribly by always asking questions afterwards. The Duncan Morand,” she added heavily.

    Thomas nodded, so Dorothy was able to point out: “Thomas has heard of him because he’s a ruddy Pom, too; and I’ve heard of him because in my young days librarianship was considered a nayce career for a girl with an arts degree. But Mayli could be lucky enough to have escaped that particular manifestation of British culture.”

    “Sorry,” said Jill weakly. “Telly don. Wrote that abysmal biog. of Willie Maugham, putting in all the dirty bits; it made his name, even if it made him unpopular in some circles. Then he produced an even more abysmal thing on Isherwood, realised there was no profit in it, and brought out that bloody awful series. Sort of P.G. Wodehouse with the dirty bits put back,” she elaborated limply.

    “The Crumpet and Friends. No?” said Dorothy. “Lucky you. Two Eggs and a Crumpet. What else? There were about six of the bloody things. The Crumpet Abroad. They went over really big with the section of Puriri County that considered itself to be faintly literary and sophisticated. We had to buy multiple copies of them while the craze lasted.”

    “Mm,” agreed Jill. “Well, back in our day he was still nominally earning his living as a don, think he must have been writing the Isherwood opus. Wendy was only one of the many, male and female, but most of the females were too shy to open their mouths in his lectures, so she managed to get noticed. Kath and I gave up sitting with her,” she recalled sheepishly. “He asked her to one of his bloody cocktail parties, where he was reputed to shag all the female admirers in turn, and duly did her. She was worse than ever for a bit, and then… Oh, yes. The Long Vac. intervened, perhaps mercifully, and during it he managed to get himself flaunted all over the papers doing a minor starlet very publicly on the Costa del Sol.” She shrugged. “So at the beginning of the new term Wendy declared she never wanted to set eyes on him again and would come to our linguistics stuff with us instead. Unfortunately Moira Kemp was a great fan of Alan Kincaid’s and advised us earnestly to get along and hear something really new and exciting. Wendy tried the asking-questions-afterwards trick with him, but he was no Duncan Morand, and she got duly withered. But unfortunately that just seemed to reinforce the impression that he was a wonderful scholar. She went round talking about his, quote unquote, ‘great brain’. Gary and Kath tried rhapsodising over a fictional character called ‘Drained Brain’ but it was water off a duck’s back. She more or less took it from there.”

    There was a short silence.

    “Took what?” said Mayli tightly.

    “The crush, Mayli,” said Jill with sigh. “Haunting his staircase—luckily for him, they had a dragon of a porter; accosting him in the street on flimsy excuses; doing her damnedest to get him for a tutor; standing for hours in their quad in the hope he might appear; finding out the pub he favoured and spending all her evenings there; trying to park her bike next to his: you name it, anything the sillier sort of female undergrad with a crush on a don can dream up to do to catch his eye, she did. It didn’t work. She even invited him to a damned party she threw in the flat—having to invite several other dons as camouflage, you understand. Of course he never turned up and she bawled her eyes out all night. The episode where she bearded him in his rooms was just the culmination of several months’ silliness.”

    “I haven’t told her the details. Not that I knew them,” murmured Dorothy.

    “Oh. Well, none of us knew the details,” said Jill heavily. “Well, it was like this, Mayli—” She told her the story. Not omitting the point that Wendy’s so-called suicide attempt had been carried out within a couple of hundred yards of some very visible fishermen.

    “Admittedly what he said was bloody cruel,” said Thomas judiciously. “But I think anyone would have been thrown off-balance.”

    “Ja; though that does not excuse his choice off phrase,” said Gretchen from the doorway. She came in with a tray of tea and put it on the coffee table.

    “No,” muttered Jill, eyeing Mayli nervously.

    After a moment the girl said dazedly: “You mean him and Mum never—um, never had a thing?”

    “They certainly weren’t lovers, no,” replied Jill coolly.

    “But I—”

    “We weren’t privy to the details of his private life, way down at the bottom of the pecking order where we were. But on the unhappy occasions when she dragged us out to his favourite pub, he was occasionally observed with a very glamorous French visiting fellow hanging on his arm, No, I tell a lie,” she said thoughtfully: “plastered to his arm.”

    “Delphine Frey, ja. That book off hers certainly demonstrates the profit that can be reaped from a judiciously chosen relationship with the right scholar at the right time,” noted Gretchen, handing cups of tea.

    “That’s irrelevant. And can profits be reaped?” replied Jill on a weak note. “Though I grant you that it oozes A.H. Kincaid at his structuralist period from every pore.”

    “Ja.”

    They eyed Mayli dubiously.

    “She put you up to this,” she said bitterly.

    “What, Dorothy?” replied Jill coolly. “Only insofar as she dragged me over here when I could have much more usefully employed pruning our front hedge or making a meatloaf for lunch. Or even both. Those are the facts as I know them.”

    Mayli just looked at her dazedly.

    “Drink your tea,” said Thomas kindly, as the females around him didn’t volunteer anything. Mayli just blinked at him, so he got up, with his tea, and came to sit beside her on the sofa. “How old are you, again?”

    Dazedly she told him.

    “Yes. It was a bloody long time ago,” said Thomas the Tank Engine ruminatively. “Joanna and I were having kids and rows, back around then. Seems like a lifetime ago. She wanted me to buy this bloody detached villa—stockbroker Tudor. You know, fake black beams on fake white plaster. Disastrous. I almost did it, too. But it emerged that the plan was to rip out the perfectly conventional cabbage roses the walls were smothered in and replace them with genuine oak panelling she imagined she was going to pick up for a song at the local antique joints.”

    “So you refused?” asked Gretchen clinically.

    “Oh, Hell, yes!” he said breezily. “Added to which the dump was a good two hours’ drive away from work, whereas the flat she’d chosen for us was very convenient, in all senses of the word. Not that I spent more than two months of the year at the office anyway, I was usually out in the field,” he explained cheerfully to Mayli.

    “Oh, yes,” she said numbly, drinking her tea. “You must have been, yes.”

    “Let me get this straight,” said Dorothy feebly. “Joanna and presumably the kids had to live in this flat, convenient or not, for twelve months of the year, and you lived in it for two, and you nevertheless refused to move to a decent house with a garden?”

    “Yes. But it wasn’t a decent house: it was an eyesore.”

    Dorothy breathed heavily.

    “But what I’m trying to say,” said Thomas mildly, “is that it was so long ago it seems like another life. –Joanna was a nice, clean, shiny American lady,” he explained kindly to Mayli.

    “She must have been mad!” said Jill in a shaken voice.

    “Oh, hadn’t you heard that one before? Yes, the whole of Sir G.G. would agree with you on that one, Jill!” returned Dorothy happily.

    The company drank tea in silence. Except for Thomas, who slurped his up and then began to hum. Even Dorothy’s untutored ear was able to recognise it as the pearl thing that had been echoing in her corridor the other day.

    Eventually Mayli said shakily: “I think I see. You mean it doesn’t matter any more, don’t you, Thomas?”

    Thomas scratched his chin. “Hell, didn’t I shave? Um, well, something like that. Think I mean that everyone moves on. Well, I certainly did, can’t imagine why I let the woman marry me. Laziness, more than anything, I think,” he admitted.

    “Yes,” she said faintly.

    “Mind you, I don’t think that people change fundamentally. Well, I can still be bloody lazy on the emotional front,” he said, scratching the whiskers. “Not to say, bloody stupid. You know: something gorgeous fancies me, so I let it, even if it’s evident to all concerned that we’re wildly incompatible. Besetting sins, or something. Dare say your mother hasn’t changed fundamentally, either. Don’t think that arguing with her over going off with Joe will resolve anything, really. You might win, don’t say you might not: but she won’t thank you for it. Dare say it won’t make you happy, either. And she hasn’t got much time left, has she? Why not let her have what she wants?” He shrugged slightly. “Let her go. I mean, let go of her. And let her go off.”

    Dorothy, Jill and Gretchen were speechless.

    Mayli licked her lips. “Yes,” she said hoarsely. “I see what you mean. I— What if she’s not happy with him, though?” she burst out.

    Thomas the Tank Engine shrugged. “Don’t think that comes into it. Look at it logically. You stop her going, she resents you for the rest of her life. She gets her own way, regardless of whether it’s right or wrong, good or bad: no-one but herself to blame if it doesn’t work out.”

    “Thomas, honestly,” protested Dorothy faintly.

    “No, he’s right, Dorothy,” said Mayli. “I suppose, if you think about it logically…”

    Dorothy looked wildly at Thomas. He merely looked back blandly.

    “It’s easy when it’s someone else, isn’t it?” said the girl on a sour note.

    Thomas nodded cheerfully. “Yes. Bloody easy.”

    Jill caught Dorothy’s eye, and got up. “I think we might get going, that mince we bought for the meatloaf could usefully be turned into hamburgers.”

    “Ja, and the stale bread could possibly be toasted. In any case, it vill not taste worse than a hamburger bun,” decided Gretchen, also getting up. “Come on, Dorothy.”

    Dorothy got up slowly. “I don’t think anybody could have thought of anything so far-fetched as putting Jill up to it, really, Mayli. But if she hasn’t convinced you that Alan simply handled a difficult situation very badly, and was never to blame for your Mum’s crush on him, I don’t see that anything else can usefully be said. Or not by us. I think you’d better ask Wendy for the truth.”

    “Yes, good idea,” agreed Thomas. patting Mayli’s shoulder kindly and heaving himself up.

    “Yes,” agreed Jill limply. “Remember me to her, will you? In any case, I’ll give her a bell in a day or two,” she added, going over to the door. “And I’m damned sorry to hear about the MS. Rotten luck.”

    “She has her good days,” said Mayli mechanically.

    Dorothy followed Jill over to the door. “Did Akiko go out with the others, Mayli?”

    “Yes. I’ll see you out,” she said abruptly.

    They went out to the car in silence.

    “Are you going to speak to Dr Kincaid, Dorothy?” asked Mayli tightly as Thomas automatically went round to the driver’s side.

    “No, I think I might let sleeping dogs lie. When you feel a bit more like coping, maybe you could tell him yourself. Or I will, if you want me to. But not now,” said Dorothy, hoping she sounded firmer than she felt.

    “I could speak to him,” volunteered Thomas.

    “You could not! And shut up!” retorted Dorothy angrily. “Look, never mind all that stuff he came out with: don’t feel you have to make any immediate decisions at all, Mayli.”

    “Joe’s pushing Mum and Kitty into making decisions!” she retorted bitterly.

    “Understandable, if it’s taken five years to find you all,” noted Thomas detachedly.

    Dorothy hesitated, but couldn’t think of anything else to say that hadn’t already been said. Or anything appropriate to wither Thomas with. “Well, we’ll be off.”

    Mayli swallowed hard. “Thank you all for coming,” she said hoarsely.

    Jill was now in the back seat. “That’s okay. None of us distinguished ourselves in that episode, you know. Kincaid didn’t stop to look at Wendy as a person, and Kath and I didn’t even keep in touch once she’d gone home. She could have done worse for herself than coming out here and producing you and your sisters, you know.”

    “Ja. And bear in mind that women whose hormones push them towards reproducing their kind,” said Gretchen helpfully, across her, “vill usually do so vhateffer their circumstances.”

    “Um—yes. I suppose so,” she said uncertainly.

    “Oh, Hell, yes!” said Thomas breezily from the driver’s seat. “Well, get in, if you’re coming,” he added pointedly.

    Weakly Dorothy got in beside him. “They’ve got a point. I’ll phone you tomorrow. ’Bye.”

    “Bye-bye,” she said dully.

    Dorothy closed her door hurriedly, and they drove away.

    After quite some time Jill groaned: “Did you have to say that, you Aryan clot?”

    “Sorry. It vas a bit over the top,” agreed Gretchen glumly.

    “I thought it was spot-on,” said Thomas mildly.

    Dorothy sighed. “We noticed. Oh, well, never mind: if it suggests that all the world doesn’t think like the suburban minds of Mt Albert, so much the better. –Where in God’s name are you going?” she added as he braked for the lights at Dominion Road.

    “No idea.”

    “This iss Dominion Road. The St Luke’s direction would be qvicker,” pronounced Gretchen. “However, as it’s a holiday weekend you may take the flyover at the far end of it.”

    “I usually get lost that way,” admitted Dorothy.

    “I’ll guide you, Thomas,” she said placidly.

    “Let her, let her, or we’ll never hear the last of it,” groaned Jill.

    Obediently Thomas let Gretchen guide him all the way back to Kowhai Bay.

    “I’ve got to get back,” he said as Jill generously offered home-made hamburgers on stale bread.

    Dorothy raised no objections: she had a pretty fair idea that Jill and Gretchen had had more than enough of the Wendy Briggs affair for one day. Not to say, more than enough of Baranski.

    … “Was that true?” she said cautiously as they shot up the main north highway.

    “Mm? Oh; no. I’ve finished my shark cage,” he said mildly. “Just thought they’d had enough of us, not to mention of messy emotions.”

    “Mm. Thanks.” After a moment Dorothy admitted grudgingly: “You were bloody good with Mayli.”

    “Was I? Well, thank you,” he said detachedly. “But the proof of the pudding’s in the eating, isn’t it? Wait and see whether she does calm down and does let the mother go without a fuss, before handing out any bouquets. –Not to mention, does let the sister go.”

    “Ye-es… Actually I think she’s not too pleased with Kitty’s school: evidently they had a run-in—Mayli and the school, I mean, not Kitty and the school—over whether the kid could take Japanese this year. Mayli won.”

    “Of course.”

    “So once she’s got used to the idea she may not kick up.”

    “No,” he agreed in a bored voice.

    Dorothy swallowed. “Sorry. I’ll stop blahing on about it. Anyone ’ud be bored after a solid twenty-four hours of it.”

    “Oh, I don’t think you have anything to apologise for, Dorothy,” he said sweetly. “None of it can possibly be said to be your fault. You can’t even be blamed for dragging me into it, since Akiko rang me off her own bat. Tell me, is this assumption of a burden of guilt a cultural norm for middle-aged Antipodean females?”

    “You bugger!” said Dorothy in a shaken voice.

    “Well, is it?” he said mildly.

    After quite some time she admitted: “It damn well is, yeah. As I think, what with all that exposure to bloody Yvonne et al., not to mention flaming May Swadling, you’d have had more than time to see for yourself.”

    “Just verifying my impressions,” he said sweetly.

    “I’ll try not to do it, shall I?” she retorted grimly.

    “Mm,” said Thomas with a smile in his voice. “That’d be nice. Oh, by the by, have you been talking to Leigh?”

    “About what?”

    “Me,” he said modestly. “No, sorry! Me and boredom.”

    Dorothy had to swallow. “The subject did come up.”

    “He warned you, the great big-mouthed cretin, did he?” said Thomas affably.

    “He said you were bloody unbearable when you’d got bored with anything and that you tended to get bored far too often, yeah!” she retorted ferociously.

    Thomas put a hairy paw on her knee. “He didn’t mean you, you nit. Leigh’s not like that.”

    “I suppose you’re gonna claim next that you’re not like that?” said Dorothy somewhat weakly.

    “No. Well, I am as far as unsuitable relationships with incompatible gorgeous birds go, yes.”

    There was an appreciable pause. Eventually Dorothy managed to croak: “Did you say all that stuff to Mayli on—on purpose?”

    “Yes. Well, with two purposes in mind: yes. And?”

    Dorothy merely swallowed.

    “I don’t include you in the category, in case it hasn’t dawned.”

    Dorothy at this point became aware that the hairy paw was still on her knee. “Put both bloody hands on the bloody wheel,” she said dangerously.

    Looking very mild, Thomas did so. “I’m not particularly simple-minded,” he said mildly.

    “No, well, Leigh most certainly has pointed out that you may not look it, but you’re actually damned devious!” retorted Dorothy loudly.

    “Oh, has he?” he said pleasedly. “Good.”

    Dorothy was silent, glaring at the road. Carter’s Bay was almost in sight when she said reluctantly: “Do you think I ought to tell Alan about all this?”

    “You’re not responsible for finding out Mayli’s the offspring of Wendy Briggs, I am,” he said mildly.

    “No! Um, well, yes,” said Dorothy in confusion. “I just feel he should know.”

    “Why?” he said sweetly. “Apart from sharing the guilt, of course.”

    “I am NOT—” Dorothy took a very deep breath. “It isn’t a question of sharing the guilt.”

    “No? That’s a pity, I’d hoped that you might want to share it with me,” he said meekly.

    “Shut up. Look, the girl is his PA and she has threatened to do him bodily harm! Um, not the fax, but at least tell him about the Wendy Briggs connection?”

    “Maybe you can envisage yourself telling Alan that much and not letting on about the bloody fax, but if so, you’re a better non-sexist person than I am, Gunga Din.”

    She gnawed on her lip. “Bugger. Even if he didn’t get it out of me, he’d guess… Bugger.”

    “Does he want to know?” said Thomas affably, glancing at his fuel indicator. “Oops. Will the Masher of Carter’s Bay be open today?”

    “Uh—oh,” said Dorothy limply as the service station hove into view. “Brian Hawes? Good name for him. Um, must be, there’s two cars there filling up.”

    “So there are.” Thomas pulled in behind a blue Mitsubishi very evidently full of a fighting family. “Got any money?”

    Dorothy scrabbled in her purse. “Hell. Um, no, never had time to go to the bank. Why the fucking Christ they don’t install a hole-in-the-wall at Carter’s Bay—!”

    “Yes. Or even at the university site. Well, it’d be convenient for some,” he said with his sidelong smile. “Haven’t the opposition got banks at their university?”

    “How in Hell do you know— Never mind. Yeah, the theory is the BNZ opened its branch in order to promote those student loans it was making the poor little bastards sign their souls away for in the heady days before the crash and ninety percent unemployment, and the ANZ copied it because they’re like that. Don’t DO that!” she shouted as he patted her thigh.

    “That was an approving pat. I love it when you do your nut like that about the local mores, not to say morons,” he said with a smile. He produced a credit card and looked at it dubiously.

    “What have you put on that?” asked Dorothy in a voice of doom.

    “Marmalade.” He rubbed it on the shirt.

    “Uh—not that. Or was that all?”

    “No-o… I sort of have a feeling,” said Thomas the Tank Engine dubiously, “that there’s something very, very expensive on this piece of plastic that’s put me over my limit. But I’m damned if I can think what.”

    “House. Boat. Up-market Pommy vehicle costing sixteen times the average price of a normal Japanese car,” said Dorothy heavily.

    “No-o…”

    “Try it, and if the machine chews it up or spits it back at you, we’ll know you’re over the limit,” she said brutally.

    “It isn’t one of those, here: it’s the Masher with one of those extremely mechanical gizzmos. Er, no, better not. I’ve just remembered what it was,” he said, stowing the card away again.

    “Well?” said Dorothy in a very bored voice.

    “The billiards table and a palomino for one of my daughters. Well, it was her birthday. The current theory is that riding takes inches off the middle-class female bum. And the company’s very enterprising, they’ve got a Web page, you see, and though I don’t like using my credit cards on the Internet, firewalls or not—”

    “God! Why did I ask!”

    “Plus all the riding gear to go with it. Um, plus what I’d already piled up on this card, think it probably dates back to that time me and Leigh went to Gibraltar. Oh, and Istanbul: that’s right.”

    Dorothy said nothing, she merely delved in her bag and produced her much, much humbler credit card. BNZ Visa, right. “Seven dollars’ worth, okay?”

    Thomas the Tank Engine was seen to gulp.

    “I know that in this gas-guzzler that’ll get us approximately two yards,”—he nodded mutely—“but if I spend any more I’ll have to pay enormous—E-NOR-MOUSE—amounts of interest to the fucking BNZ what hasn’t even got off its arse enough to open a—”

    “I’ll use my Diners’ Club!” he said hurriedly.

    “Do that,” replied Dorothy grimly.

    Hopefully Thomas waved his Diners’ Club card at the Masher. After, not before, he’d had the Jag’s tank filled, yes, filled. Brian blenched. “Um, we don’t take Diners’ Club,” he quavered.

    “Why not? What about all those Japs up at the Royal K?” replied Thomas with friendly interest.

    “Um, yeah. Um, the thing is, they mostly go on tours, ya see. Um, we do take American Express,” said Brian feebly.

    Dorothy leaned forward. “Yes, but this cretin is over the limit on his American Express card.”

    “Um, I think they’ll only charge ya interest. What I mean is, the way most of them work, the banks have to guarantee… Well, um, what is your limit, Dr Baranski?” said the Masher of Carter’s Bay feebly.

    Thomas smiled at him. “Thomas, for God’s sake. No idea, but they sent me a rude letter.”

    “Um, cash?”

    Thomas produced his wallet.

    “You’ve got oodles!” said Dorothy indignantly.

    “Sort of,” he murmured. He handed a fistful of notes to Brian.

    “My spies tell me,” said Dorothy limply after the poor man had gulped and turned green, “that they will change foreign money at the Royal K. Unofficially, I think.”

    “Yeah, but this is English money!” he said in a sort of wail.

    “Worth nothing,” Dorothy explained nastily to the crestfallen Pom in the driver’s seat. “Look, put it on my Visa card, Brian, and this idiot can pay me,”—she grabbed the pounds—“out of this. Plus the interest,” she noted pointedly.

    “Just as well you were here!” said Thomas happily as he drove off.

    “Yes. TURN RIGHT!” shouted Dorothy.

    “Eh? Oh: sorry; take the next.” He took the next and after a few gasps at the ruts in the road where Carrano Development’s bulldozers had recently been busy, not to mention—though Dorothy did—the ruddy great trench right across the road that the telephone men had very recently dug, drew up outside The Quays.

    “Um, did we decide to speak to Alan or not?” said Dorothy in a small voice as he switched the engine off.

    “I decided he doesn’t need to know, but as that was a unilateral decision, I’m quite prepared to listen to your point of view before vetoing it definitively.”

    “All right, good-bye,” replied Dorothy grimly.

    Thomas groaned. “Look— No, all right, explain to me very clearly exactly why you think he needs to know, Dorothy. Setting aside the point that Mayli may take to him with the office stapler.”

    Dorothy floundered, and could come up with nothing better than the point that Mayli might indeed fly off the handle.

    “Whereas if we don’t tell him, he’ll remain in happy ignorance. Not to say, have a decently peaceful family weekend.”

    “Ye-es…”

    “St Paul has a lot to answer for, hasn’t he?” said Thomas detachedly.

    “Shut up. It was all those mediaeval Churchmen as much as him, anyway. Male Churchmen,” noted Dorothy pointedly.

    “I quite agree. What about John Knox?”

    “Him an’ all, I was brought up Presbyterian, yes!” said Dorothy rather loudly.

    “And you never thought you actually subscribed to any of their doctrines, did you?”

    “Look, just shut up,” she sighed.

    “I could advance my theory in re the export of working-class Nonconformist consciences to the Colonies—19th-century Nonconformist consciences, of course,” he said affably.

    “All of that occurred to me about forty years back, and in case you haven’t noticed, it doesn’t make any difference when it comes down to CASES!” she retorted, rather loudly.

    Thomas patted her knee again. “That’s another thing I like about you.”

    “My 19th-century Nonconformist conscience? Yeah,” she agreed snidely.

    “No, the fact that you can grasp that understanding the theory doesn’t make you any better at handling the reality,” he said, patting her knee yet again.

    “Stop it,” said Dorothy weakly.

    Thomas did stop, though noting: “You like it, really.”

    Ignoring that, Dorothy said grimly: “All right, my 19th-century Nonconformist conscience suggests that I ought to tell Alan the facts before Mayli heaves the photocopier at him. That plus my middle-class female Antipodean guilt complex: yes,” she added sweetly.

    “Oh, they’re the same thing, really,” he said affably.

    “SHUT UP!” she bellowed.

    The mild Easter Sunday air of the deserted Carter’s Bay waterfront rang with silence.

    Dorothy breathed heavily. “All right, I won’t mention a word to Alan.”

    “Good girl,” he said mildly. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

    “Not if I see you coming, mate!” returned Dorothy with feeling, getting out.

    Thomas hopped out with a nimbleness remarkable in one of his bulk, not to say in one in those bloody trousers. “At rehearsal. I’ll give you a decent lunch beforehand, okay?”

    “Which credit card will you put that on, Thomas?”

    “Oh, Adrian will take sterling,” he said cheerfully.

    “Oh? In the main dining-room, this’d be?” she said snidely.

    “Yes, of course.”

    Dorothy gulped. “Don’t be a nit, he charges the earth for a mere cup of coffee in there.”

    “Good. Twelve-ish? We’ll have a couple of drinkies first, okay?” he said with his sidelong smile.

    Dorothy was capable of nothing more than a feeble: “This would presume he takes sterling in the side bar, too, would it?”

    “If you insist, I’ll go up to the Royal K and change it,” said Thomas mildly. She opened her mouth but he added: “Come to think of it, I’ve got half a booklet of travellers’ cheques I forgot to change last time I was in the Middle East, could change them, too. Yankee dollars,” he explained, his mouth twitching.

    “I would, in that case,” said Dorothy very feebly.

    “Mm. Wear that tight black velvet skirt, I like the way it clings to your thighs. Bye-bye,” he said, getting back into the car.

    Dorothy was left standing on the pavement like a birk, with her mouth half open.

Next chapter:

https://conquestofcartersbay.blogspot.com/2023/05/clara-and-good-keen-man.html