The Iceman Cometh

Part I. Preliminary Planning Phase

1

The Iceman Cometh

    It was pretty generally agreed in academic circles, when the decision was announced, that Sir Jacob had run mad. The country didn’t need another university. What it did need was money poured into the run-down institutions of higher learning it did have, higher academic salaries (in order to attract applicants of higher quality from the Grate Offshore, of course), decent student subsidies, more post-graduate scholarships, and higher academic salaries. Oh, and less political interference in higher education, but that went without saying. Almost. His declared intention was to call it “Sir George Grey University”, which on the whole was marginally better than calling it “Sir Jacob Carrano University”, or “Poenamo”, or “University of the Hibiscus Coast” or, indeed, “University of New Zealand”, all of which had been advanced at one time or another as alternatives by his ill-wishers. And by those who did not believe that “Business Studies” was a subject, let alone a discipline.

    There were them as reckoned the Gummint Ought To’ve Stopped It, but then, there always were. But Sir Jacob was filthy rich and he was putting his own money and that of some like-minded corporate mates into it, not to mention into the infrastructure that would be needed to support a huge institution of higher learning miles up the coast at the far edge of Puriri County; so the Government, far from stopping it, welcomed it with open arms, not to mention all that overseas exchange it was its stated aim to generate from its Business Studies, Management, and English as a Second Language courses. Not to mention welcoming the whole idea of a university that would pay its way instead of being a giant drain on the economy. And after all, on the other side of the Tasman the Aussies had a Bond University. Though there were some who maintained that that was no excuse.

    “So who did get it?” asked Jill Davis of the French Department of a much older and of course very under-funded institution of higher learning, yawning over a gin and tonic in the S.C.R.

    “What’s wrong with you?” returned Bill Michaels of Engineering with no evidence of sympathy in his voice or manner,

    “Flaming mid-year so-called exams, that’s what’s flaming wrong with me, Bill!” retorted Dr Davis, M.A., Ph.D. feelingly in the vernacular of her adopted country.

    “Don’t have ’em,” advised the Dean of Engineering laconically.

    Jill shook her glass threateningly at him,

    Grinning, Bill, who was a mainstay of the Bar Committee, ceased momentarily to lean heavily on the bar, and refilled it. “Pom. Kincaid. Ever heard of—” He broke off, Jill was choking on the ice-blocks he’d considerately topped her glass up with.

    “Ee-ii-ah! Sod it! Ice—argh!” she gasped, approximately.

    “Whinging Pom,” he noted, leaning over to bash her helpfully on the back.

    Jill swallowed ice frantically, her eyes bulging.

    “You’ve gone all bulgy-eyed,” noted the engineer with interest.

    “So would you!” she gasped. “The Iceman?”

    “Eh?”

    She sighed, and held out her glass. “More. If this is the Kincaid I have an ’orrible feeling it is, make it a triple—and don’t bother about the bread, thanks.”

    The sympathetic engineer duly filled her glass with gin and waved the tonic at it.

    “Ta,” said Jill feebly, gulping. “God!” she said with a shudder.

    “Can’t be that bad, can ’e?” asked Bill with friendly interest.

    Cringing, Jill replied: “Not flaming ’alf, mate! The Iceman?”

    “You said that,” said Bill, eating a very acid gherkin. “Cripes! Acid!” he gasped.

    “They always are.” Jill took a handful of peanuts.

    “Watch it: you either inhale and choke to death on the skins, or the said skins wind themselves round your uvula and you choke to death, or them little claws on yer actual nut get into yer windpipe and you choke to death.”

    “What?” she croaked.

    “Popular pseudo-scientific myths of the under-twelve set. Possibly related to the growing prevalence of peanut allergies in the younger percentile of the population, in its turn possibly related to the prevalence of super-hygiene and moth-proofed carpeting in the general pop—”

    “Look, drop it! Is this Alan Kincaid that we’re talking about?”

    “Well, think so. I registered ’e was a Pom, and that tit Wiley”—this was their own respected Vice-Chancellor: Jill nodded wisely—“was looking sick. So I thought, in me simple engineering way, that it couldn’t be all bad.”

    After a moment she admitted: “No, well, the Iceman’ll set the thing up on corporate, cash-generating lines, all right.”

    Bill took a handful of peanuts. “Could this be bad?” he enquired blandly.

    “Uh—well, possibly not entirely. It won’t be a university, though!”

    Bill ate peanuts. “True.”

    Waving the peanut fumes away politely, Jill replied: “Yes, but seriously, Bill, he’s—he’s—” Words failed her.

    “The Iceman,” said the engineer kindly. “You said. Knew ’im at Cambridge, didja?”

    Jill winced. “‘Knew’ would be an overstatement.”

    “Not in the Elizabethan sense,” said the engineer mildly.

    Giving in, Jill allowed herself to smile faintly.

    “So is he Scotch or English?” he asked idly.

    Jill replied sweetly: “He’s got a Pommy accent you could cut with a knife, is that answer enough for you?”

    “It’ll do. Go on, tell us about this Iceman stuff.”

    “Um… well, shall I start at the beginning, like Alice? He’d be a good ten years older than me.” She ruffled her neat fawnish hair. “Early fifties?”—The burly engineer, who was himself well into his fifties, eyed her in some amusement, but let her tell it in her own way.—“So when I was up,”—Bill charitably overlooked the fact that Dr Davis had fallen into her native vernacular, though recognising silently that there were them around as wouldn’t—“Kincaid would have been thirtyish, I suppose. He was a don, at that stage: that was how he started. Bright boy. Knew all about Lacan et al. when the rest of us were still struggling to spell Kierkegaard.” Bill merely looked mildly interested. Smiling a little, Jill said: “Double first, rowing blue, not a Hearty, mind you: at the time, us eager young things were encouraged to go to his lectures.”

    “What on?”

    She shuddered. “Saussure, mainly.”

    “Oh: back then!” he said in great enlightenment. “Hang on, thought that was against the regs, in Cambridge?”

    “In those days, it just about was!” said Jill with feeling. “No, well, one or two of the women’s colleges had some slightly more forward-looking dons. Slightly.”

    “Uh-huh. Be why you switched to Manchester for your doctorate, will it?” he said with huge sympathy.

    “Drop that,” said Jill coldly. “Where was I? Uh—Kincaid’s lectures, yes. Annihilated anyone that was dumb enough to ask any sort of question afterwards, even though he specifically called for questions.”

    “Oh: one of them.”

    She eyed him suspiciously but he appeared genuine. “Yes. So bright he couldn’t see that other people might be slow and plodding but could have something worthwhile about ’em, somewhere, if encouraged: you know?”

    “Uh-huh. Born teacher: right.”

    “Quite,” she agreed acidly. “In my second year I got out of the bloody college—it was still all single-sex in those days, pretty much full of pathetic Medes and Persians—and shared a flat with half a dozen like-minded persons of several sexes.” She eyed him blandly. Bill didn’t react. “One of them was of the female persuasion and doing English—his subject, in spite of the structuralist leanings—and nuts, but nuts on him. –Don’t ask me why,” she warned.

    “I won’t.”

    “In my Bognorish innocence I had never encountered the phenomenon before, so I didn’t realise it at the time, but Wendy Briggs was a power groupie. And the Iceman certainly emanated power. He was going places, had it written all over him. Prematurely bald or not,” she noted by the by.

    “Uh—oh. Think I see what you mean. We don’t get ‘em so much, in engineering.”

    “No. –God,” said Jill with a sigh: “Wendy Briggs: I haven’t thought about her in yonks. According to her own report, when she burst in upon him in his set—um—rooms, and declared her undying devotion—having been driven to desperation by being virtually ignored through nearly a year’s tutorials, you understand—”

    “These’d be these Educating Rita-type tutorials, would they?” he said in a confused voice.

    Bitterly regretting her misguided attempt to translate “set” into the Kiwi vernacular, Jill replied through her teeth: “Do you want to hear this, or not, Michaels?”

    “Not all that much. But Angie’s got a bloody committee meeting tonight: there won’t be any tea for me,” he said mournfully.

    “Male bludger,” replied Jill pleasedly.

    “Yeah. Go on, for Pete’s sake! What did he say, and what did the poor kid do?”

    “According to report, he said: ‘Miss Er—Briggs, is it? Please control yourself. Whatever—’ What was it? Oh, yes: ‘I assure you that whatever romantic outcome you may have imagined for this scene, it isn’t going to happen.’”

    Bill’s jaw sagged. “God Almighty!”

    “Mm,” agreed Jill drily, finishing her gin.

    “The bastard!”

    “Well, yes; it’s hard to think how he could have put it more cruelly.”

    “You’re telling me! So what did the poor little tyke do?”

    “Came home and bawled all over the flat. We thought that was It, and put her to bed with a couple of sleeping pills and a slug of three-star brandy,”—Bill winced in spite of himself—“but when Kath and I got in after classes next day she wasn’t there and that fatuous clot Gary Harmon—never trust a man called Gary with one R,” she advised: Bill nodded wisely—“said he thought she’d gone for a walk.”

    “Yuck. Chucked herself off one of the towers? Under a bus? Wait on, ugh: not a train?” he said, looking sick.

    “No, thank God. The river. In more or less full view of a group of hopeful fishermen further up the bank, so she was rescued in time. But she chucked in her degree and went home.”

    “Shit.”

    “Quite. Kath and I,” said Jill, taking a deep breath, “misguidedly went to see the Iceman. Don’t ask me whether it was to beg him to say something kind to poor bloody Wendy or to have a piece of him, because I don’t think we knew, ourselves. He gave us a short talk on the responsibility of the individual for the acts of the individual and asked us to leave, as he had a student coming for a tutorial.”

    “Jesus,” said Bill limply. “Not really?”

    “Really. It took us months to get over it: we seethed whenever we caught a glimpse of him or even passed by his college. Kath embarked on a campaign of going to his lectures and sitting with her arms crossed, glaring at him, but he probably never even realised she was there. Well, his lectures were pretty popular with them what fancied themselves as the young moderns: they were always bloody crowded. We tried with both hands to think of some way of starting a boycott, but couldn’t come up with a thing.” She revolved her empty glass in her hands for a moment and then looked up with a wry little grimace. “It was years before it dawned on me that he was almost as young at the time and just about as bloody silly as Wendy was, and that while her silliness took her one way his took him the other. Well, to put it crudely, her heart was ruling her head—I dare say because she couldn’t bloody well help it—but his head was ruling his heart, more than likely out of misguided conviction.”

    “Yeah. Well, that puts it crudely, all right,” he said kindly.

    “Some of us have them sorts of misguided conviction in our misguided youth.”

    “Uh-huh. Some of us grow out of ’em, too. Has he?” he asked baldly.

    “I haven’t heard all that much about him, not on a personal level, over these last twenty— Um, no, Bill, I wouldn’t think so,” she said limply. “I don’t say he’d make that sort of damned stupid speech to a silly little groupie any more, but—” She shrugged.

    “Uh-huh. So what’s he been up to, over the last twenty years?”

    “Where do I start?” she said wildly. “A stint at Harvard while he was still into Lacan, right? Umpteen eminent publications. –Renaissance poetics, and please don’t start,” she said heavily.

    Bill shrank into himself.

    “Very funny. Uh—what next? He went off to Harvard Business School when he decided he’d sucked structuralism dry, but— That wasn’t next. Went back to Cambridge, got in some solid research. Then… oh, yeah: a year’s fellowship at Manchester.”

    “Oh, with your old mate?” he said snidely.

    “Wolfe,” said Jill clearly, “is not in the English Department. Though you’re not far wrong: they had a flaming row—well, one gathers Wolfe exploded and the Iceman was icier than ever. Blows were exchanged but only on paper. Wolfe lost.”

    “And you didn’t know whether to cheer or not,” he noted sardonically.

    “It was during one of my strongest anti-Wolfe periods: I cheered,” she admitted feebly.

    “Uh-huh. And?”

    “Berkley. –Was that next?” She shrugged. “Visiting fellowship.”

    “Good at those, was ’e?”

    “Quite. I forget the chronology, but round about that time he wrote that bloody book that topped the best-seller list. Well, not quite.”

    Bill snapped his fingers in exasperation with himself. “Got it! The dirty Elizabethan book, right?”

    “More or less, mm. Rumour had it that left to himself the Iceman would have called it The Metalanguage of Elizabethan Demotic and Jocular Speech or something equally exciting. But some brilliant new broom at his publishers spotted what they had, added a lot of shiny coloured pics, all more or less dirty, and turned it into—”

    “Elizabethan Bawdy!” said Bill with a laugh. “He’s that A.H. Kincaid! –Can’t be all bad, then,” he said with a confused look.

    “He is,” replied Jill grimly. “Believe it. Um—my chronology’s a bit vague. But at some stage he decided Lacan was Out, and Management was In, and took himself off to Harvard Business School. He didn’t have any problems getting in: he’d been wearing button-down collars back in my day.”

    Bill nodded sympathetically. “And?”

    “Then Thatcherism happened along, Bill, and Guess Who was made Vice-Chancellor of one of the newer and shinier institutions of higher learning? In order to knock any vestiges of leftie ideas it might have been harbouring in its more obscure corners firmly out of it, and knock the principle of User Pays firmly into it. Which he done, no sweat. And then, Guess Who got appointed top honcho on one of the main academic chop committees?” she said sweetly.

    Bill attempted to smile insouciantly, but failed. “Gotcha. So, post-Thatcherism, is there anywhere he can go? Hang on: be why he’s coming out here!” he said brilliantly.

    “I’m damned if I know why he’s coming out here. Well, they’re offering the V-C a monster salary, could be an inducement.”

    “Don’t you mean CEO?”

    “Vice-Chancellor by any other name, then. –Is it true the bloody place is going to be run by a Board of Management?” asked Jill in spite of herself, taking a gherkin.

    “Leave them, for God’s sake, you’ll be burping all night!”

    Jill looked frantically at the gherkin.

    Bill’s hairy paw closed tenderly over it. He deposited it in a clean glass which he produced from behind the bar.

    “Ta,” she said feebly. “–Is it true?”

    “You know Jake Carrano as well as I do, Jill: ask him! Uh—no, sorry,” he said with a sheepish grin, even though it was true that they did know Sir Jake and had both known his wife, who was an academic at their own institution, for years. “Of course it’s true. They’re not even having a token Senate. Deans, plus the University Librarian, and the Registrar what they’re calling the Senior Administrator not the Registrar, are gonna be all that’s on this Board of Management, apparently.”

    “What about full professors?” croaked Jill.

    “Well under the thumb, where they oughta be. –Oh, the giant salaries plus the bonuses they’ll get when they make their departments actually pay’ll console them for not being able to sit on anything that resembles a Senate, Jill,” he assured her. “That It?”

    “Uh—about the Iceman? More or less, yes. He did a couple of textbooks which have since become classics, drop in at the University Bookshop if you don’t believe me, and look under E for English or L for Linguistics, and another solid academic success: unreadable, very Lacan-ish. Since then he’s only published grim tomes on how to make your institution of higher learning cost-effective and a couple of textbooks which have become classics, look under B for bloody Business Studies, about whatever it is that bloody Business Studies does.”

    Bill looked at her uncertainly. Dr Davis wasn’t actually famed amongst her colleagues for her admiration of the stronger, some would say feebler-minded, sex. “How’d he get the nickname, or is that one of yours?” he ventured.

    She shrugged. “l can’t take the credit. He was already the Iceman when my dim Bognorish light first shone upon the—”

    “Have another gin.”

    “Better not, I might pass out. I’m waiting for something pale green and fuzzy round the edges to flicker through that door,” she explained.

    “It’s just come in,” said Bill as something solid and blonde but definitely with a tendency to fuzziness round the edges came in. “What the fuck’s up with her?”

    “She’s coming down with the flu and it’s flaming mid-year EXAMS!”

    “Oh—right,” he acknowledged mildly, waving.

    Gretchen could scarcely have missed them: at this hour of a wintry mid-year night there was almost no-one save themselves in the large lounge bar full of comfortably saggy large armchairs and sofas which was called the S.C.R. for historical reasons which Jill was in no doubt only a very small percentage of her colleagues related to anything to do with the Mother Country.

    “How are you feeling?” she said kindly as her housemate staggered up to them.

    “Bloody, I haff definitely got the flu,” said Gretchen, ignoring Bill, who was still waving.

    “Better let me drive, then,” he said mildly. “She’s full of gin.”

    “I am fit to DRIFE!” said Gretchen, rather loudly.

    “Not your bloody Porsche,” he groaned. “We’ll take her heap.”

    “Didn’t bring it in today,” admitted Jill, grimacing.

    “Right.” Bill looked at his watch. “Yeah. OY! VAN JOHNSON!” he bawled.

    The man who was just going out, whose name, perhaps needless to state, was not Van, jumped, and came over to the bar. “Yeah?–Hullo, Gretchen, you coming down with the flu?” he added kindly.

    “Yes,” said Bill briskly. “You can give us all a lift down to the ferry.”

    “Aren’t you supposed to be looking after the bar?” said Van Johnson in confusion.

    “No. Jack Masters is, but he’s got the flu, too. Came on, you lot!” he added irritably, “or we’ll miss the bloody ferry.”

    They came on.

    They did manage to catch the ferry and Gretchen, though now starting to shiver, did not chuck up as Bill had predicted; and Bill, overriding Jill’s somewhat feeble protests that they could take two buses and get themselves home to Puriri County before dawn, bundled them into the ancient station-waggon that was waiting for him at the Devonport wharf, and drove them all the way up to Kowhai Bay in Puriri County. There he kindly superintended Gretchen’s being tucked up in her room with her electric blanket on, a hottie on her tummy, and a basin placed handily near on her bedside table. Of course Jill was then morally obligated to feed him but she’d seen that coming some two hours since. The engineer informed her kindly that cheese on toast wasn’t a meal even with salami under the cheese but nevertheless ate large quantities of it.

    “Did you hear when the Iceman’s coming out?” she asked idly, as they sagged mindlessly in front of a re-run of the new version of Minder, Bill having vetoed the opposition’s re-run of Star Trek The Next Generation because he’d got the whole thing on tape.

    “Mm? –I miss good ole Terry,” he said sadly. “This new kid’s only a kid.”

    “We’re getting old, you mean.”

    “That, too.”

    They watched glumly as Ray in a zoot-suit that Terry wouldn’t have been seen dead anywhere near chatted up yet another gorgeous bird. The gorgeous birds never appeared for more than five seconds continuously by Jill’s watch and never had anything you could call personalities, let alone a place in the plot: was this indicative of the Nineties Generation Mind-Set? “Did you?” she said, as the ads started.

    “Eh?”

    “Hear when the Iceman’s coming out?”

    “Uh—no. Well, ruddy soon: the word is Jake wants him in on the initial planning. What they want is to catch the overseas students, poor bloody misguided little bastards, in time for the actual opening of the first building.”

    “They’ll have to, no-one in this country could afford their ruddy fees!”

    “True. Cup of tea?”

    “You know where the kitchen is.” Jill wrenched the blab-out off him and turned on the Kitecat ad.

    Bill sighed, and got up. “Honey or condensed milk?”

    “Medium-strong, with milk. Don’t offer Her any, she’ll chuck it up.”

    “I wasn’t gonna. –If you want the gen,” he said as Jill hurriedly pressed the button again, the Kitecat ad having metamorphosed into a thing that tried to convince you that the ANZ’s lending rate was, not better than anyone else’s, even the ANZ didn’t go that far on steam non-cable TV, but slightly more than risible: “try ringing Polly. She is his wife, after all: if anyone knows what stage Sir Jacob’s Folly’s at, it oughta be her.”

    “Last time I breathed the words ‘Sir G.G. University’ into her shell-like, she turned on me with a snarl.”

    “In that case I wouldn’t ring her, then,” he noted, wandering out to make a cuppa.

    Jill sighed. She watched glumly as the ANZ’s feeble effort gave way to a pink batts ad. It looked like the same pink batts ad she’d first seen fifteen years ago and probably was.

    “Sir Jacob’s Folly’s a good name for it,” she said as he came back with two mugs of tea.

    “Dunno that I agree. It’ll make a mint and be a howling success, like all his bloody capitalist ventures.”

    “Isn’t that the point?” said Jill heavily.

    The engineer smiled a little but merely replied mildly: “Drink that up, it’ll do you good.”

    Jill sighed, but sipped tea and watched the new Minder with the sound off.

    “Look,” he said heavily after this had gone on for some time: “we’ll watch flaming Star Trek The Next Generation instead!” He wrenched the blab-out out of her lifeless hand and changed channels. After an ANZ ad or two had flickered by them, it came on.

    “He,” said Jill, swallowing, “reminds me ’orribly of ’im.”

    “Eh?” Bill experimented a little. Patrick Stewart’s measured Pommy, not to say poncy, accents came and went in the most amazing fashion: ooh, fun!

    “Don’t do that! –Captain Flaming Picard that they can’t pronounce: he reminds me of the Iceman.”

    “Oh, yeah, you said he was bald,” recalled Bill fuzzily.

    “Um—well, that too, I suppose,” she said sourly as the bald one produced one of his usual pontificating, Yank-written pieces of blatheringly self-righteous, morally re-armed pomposity. “Blab it out, for God’s sake!”—Grinning, Bill blabbed the bald one out.—“No: I meant that cold control.”

    “If he was like that twenty-odd years back, he’s probably still like that: yep.” He blabbed Commander Riker in and out. “Not as good. Not such a pompous git,” he reported regretfully.

    “No.”

    They watched Star Trek The Next Generation with patches of soundtrack for a while. As an ANZ ad flickered on and Bill, wincing, momentarily switched the whole thing off, she said glumly: “Yes.”

    “Huh?”

    “A pompous git. He was bad back then, he’ll be worse now.”

    “Uh-huh. Never mind: not our worry.” Bill sneakily switched over but it wasn’t Ray and Arfer, it was an ANZ ad, so he hurriedly switched off again. “Unless you’re thinking of applying for one of those vastly inflated salaries?”

    “No. Well, Polly reports they’re not having anything approaching arts or humanities.”

    Bill scratched the whiskers. “They are having an Engineering Department but that doesn’t mean they’re having anything approaching engineering.”

    “Well said.”

    “Bridge-building for third-worlders,” he said sourly.

    “Well, yes! –Oh,” said Jill weakly: “Literally. Mm.”

    “Literally and metaphorically. Is Polly really tee-ed off with him?” he asked curiously.

    “She referred to his ‘solid curly head’ and called him ‘His Sir Jacobness’ seventeen times in the space of five minutes in my hearing only last week, so I’d say so, yes. Well, you know what he is: he sprang it on her, in the first place, and in the second place it turns out Carrano Development’s owned all the far side of Carter’s Inlet since around the time they got married; you know: when he bought up all the southern side and built Kingfisher Bay and the bloody marina; and that does somehow seem to suggest that the whole scheme might have been lurking full-blown inside the said solid curly head for the last millennium or two.”

    “Right,” he acknowledged, wincing. “You really wanna watch this tit?” he added, switching on again, and wincing as Captain Picard appeared again, looking sanctimonious.

    “No. I thought you were the one that liked it?”

    “More an addiction than a liking,” he said, rubbing his nose thoughtfully. He switched it off. “I’ll put on some Mozart, shall I?”

    “Go on, then.”

    He got up, but hesitated. “Better look in on Her, do ya reckon?”

    “She won’t thank you for it,” Jill warned him.

    Bill went anyway.

    “Shivering again. Got very hot, chucked up once, felt better,” he reported.

    “Mm.”

    Bill eyed her sideways as he sorted through their Mozart. “Wouldn’t mind being a fly on the wall at Sir Jacob’s Folly,” he said a trifle wistfully.

    Jill sat upright with a gasp. “Bill! You wouldn’t?”

    “Not permanent-like, no. Say they offered me a whacking great lump sum—like during the year that happened to coincide with me sabbatical leave.” he said, winking very slowly at her, “to set their ruddy bridge-building department up for ’em? Well,” he said as his colleague glared in speechless indignation: “someone’s gotta do it. And they’re spending untold mill. on a lovely set of parallel processors: IBM SP2’s,” he elaborated, as Jill remained unmoved. Jill continued to remain unmoved but he went on anyway: “God only knows what they imagine they’re gonna run on ’em: they won’t need that sort of capacity for their flaming accounting system or their pathetically networked, pathetic ‘Here’s-a-lovely-mouse-with-lovely-pickies,-kiddies’ version of a fat-witted word-processing toy, let alone to send email to like-minded cretins all round the Galaxy, but if that’s what’s gonna be around, I wouldn’t half like to get me mitts on it. Just for a play,” he explained unnecessarily.

    “Angie’ll kill you,” predicted Jill laconically, not bothering to ask how he imagined he was going to wangle it. “Either put that Mozart on, or go home. No, preferably both.”

    Bill put the Mozart CD on, sat down and listened to it. But he did go home after that: Angie would be back from her committee meeting by the time he got back, he said hopefully.

    By the time he got back, even though he broke the speed limit all the way down the motorway to the Takapuna junction, Angle was not only home, she was in bed, half asleep.

    “Where the Hell were you?” she greeted him groggily.

    “Kowhai Bay. That clot, Davis, let the Aryan idiot drive her into work this morning in the Porsche even though she knew she was coming down with the flu.”

    “Um—Gretchen’s got the flu, you mean?” she groped.

    “Yeah.” Bill wandered into the ensuite, yawning. When he got into bed about two minutes later he tried to tell her about the Iceman and associated subjects, but Angie shut him up crossly, pointing out that it was past midnight.

    He tried to tell her over breakfast but Angie had recently started a part-time job at the Polytech, teaching English as a Second Language, and was still very nervous about it, so she shut him up crossly.

    When he eventually revealed the Master Plan, some weeks later, her jaw sagged and she stared at him speechlessly.

    “It isn’t the money,” he said hastily, “so don’t say money isn’t everyth—”

    “Bill MICHAELS! When you PROMISED we could go to America this time!” Angle raved on about the promise that he’d apparently made to take her to MIT, why the fuck she wanted to go to MIT God only knew. He endeavoured to explain it was nowhere near either California or Florida, but got screamed at for his pains.

    “Look, even if I do go to MIT those jokers’ll never let me play with their SP—”

    “SHUT UP!” screamed his wife, bursting into tears and rushing out of the room.

    Oops. Bill pulled his ear slowly. Well, MIT wouldn’t be all bad. Some good jokers there.

    He continued to moon after Sir George Grey’s SP2’s for some time, however.

    If the clear-sighted Jill Davis, who had few illusions about her adopted country, couldn’t imagine what the Iceman was coming out to New Zealand for unless it was the salary, the Burchetts of obscure Toetoe Bay, on the contrary, had a very good idea indeed.

    “He’s coming out to grab the house off us,” said Catherine mournfully.

    “You mean the property,” corrected Noelle automatically. “Well, do something, Mum! It’s not too late!”

    Catherine looked mournfully at the letter in her hand and said nothing.

    “C’n I have the stamp?” asked Dicky hopefully.

    “Cretin-head!” shouted Noelle angrily.

    “It’s not his fault, he’s only nine,” said Catherine sadly. “Um—it’s a boring English stamp, Dicky,” she warned.

    “Yeah: ace! Can I, Mum?”

    Catherine wasn’t actually Dicky’s mum: he was the child of her sister Saskia but they hadn’t seen hide nor hair of Saskia for years, and he’d sort of automatically copied Noelle. Catherine had a sneaky idea that when he was very little he’d probably thought that it was her actual name, but she hadn’t expressed this theory to anybody: it was the sort of thing other people flattened you about, especially Noelle.

    The set-up at the Burchetts’ tumbledown house in Toetoe Bay might have made you think that Saskia Burchett owed Catherine more than something, but this wasn’t so. Noelle had been an accident: she was twenty-one and Catherine was now thirty-eight. Catherine’s and Saskia’s father, now late and unlamented, had been a surgeon and he had been more than prepared to have the pregnancy terminated, besides being very angry with Catherine indeed. Mrs Burchett had supported him, she always did. Catherine hadn’t deliberately gone out and got pregnant, in fact she hadn’t been quite sure when Des was doing it that he was actually doing it, and she wasn’t absolutely sure that she wanted the baby, but she was sure that she didn’t want an abortion. Not that it would have been Mr Burchett in person who would have performed the operation, but one of his mates. Not that they weren’t all horrid.

    Saskia had seen the whole thing as a heaven-sent opportunity to get her younger sister out of the family home and away from Dad’s clutches: she had supported Catherine and, in spite of the floods of tears and the general wishy-washiness that had always characterised her sister, had finally prised her free of the parental clutches and borne her off triumphantly to her own neat flat. There Saskia and her flatmates Sue and Barb had been terrifically supportive of Catherine, driving her to antenatal classes, going into the classes with her and giving her supplemental advice on what she was supposed to be doing when she got flummoxed, which was most of the time, and helping her with the exercises at home. This had to be done with one’s back to the pupil, because Catherine’s brain did a flip in her head when a movement was demonstrated to her by a teacher facing her, and she was physically incapable of copying it. At first Sue and Barb had found this very hard to believe but over the nearly seven months of the pregnancy that she spent in their flat they became convinced of it.

    Barb was a nursing sister and had some modern ideas and Sue and Saskia had some modern ideas anyway, so even though the period had been the mid-Seventies and thus practically the Dark Ages, Catherine had been forced to keep very, very fit during the pregnancy, not allowed to lounge round the flat eating chocolates or dozing with her feet up, and forcibly accompanied on long walks every morning by Sue or Saskia, and frequently Nev from next-door after his run as well, and every evening by Barb if she didn’t have the late or the early shift and by Saskia or Nev from next-door if she did. It gradually dawned on the girls at the flat that Nev admired Catherine. They all did their best to persuade her that he would be an ideal husband, or at the very least, she could live with him (the word “partner” not being bandied around much even in liberated circles such as those of Saskia, Sue and Barb in the Seventies), but Catherine would only say vaguely that she didn’t think she liked him enough. Wait until the fuzziness of the pregnancy wore off, decided Sue and Barb, not noticing that Saskia was reserving judgement. The fuzziness of the pregnancy presumably wore off, because she duly had Noelle—with very little trouble, according to Barb because she was so very fit after all that exercise they’d forced her to take—but Catherine remained vague but unenthusiastic on the subject of Nev.

    When the baby was born old Uncle Robert Kincaid, who lived well north of Auckland, miles up the boo-eye past Carter’s Bay, came into town to admire it, and even though he was disappointed it wasn’t a boy that she could have called Bob, offered Catherine and it a home with him up at Toetoe Bay. No-one was under the illusion that he wanted an unpaid housekeeper: Saskia usually attempted to clean the place up for him whenever the girls went up there—usually on Sunday afternoons when Barb was off-duty and Sue didn’t have netball and the tennis season was over—and had only ever got shouted at for her pains. Saskia accepted for her immediately but Catherine would have accepted anyway: she liked Uncle Bob, he didn’t hassle you.

    Saskia remained very supportive of Catherine and Noelle for the next seven years. This was just as well: Uncle Bob had been a bachelor all his life: he didn’t have a clue about croup, or when you started kindy, or what the Carter’s Bay Primary School should be teaching Noelle. Then when Noelle was eight Saskia went on an overseas trip and decided to stay on and work in Europe. Mr Burchett had been born in England, which apparently qualified Saskia to work there. Uncle Bob and Catherine didn’t ask: it all sounded much too complicated.

    Once Saskia disappeared the visits of Barb and Sue, which had been pretty frequent—they had both long since married but had still seen Saskia regularly—dropped off. Uncle Bob and Catherine didn’t mind much: they appreciated the thought, but Sue and Barb in person were both rather hard to take, especially Barb. Noelle, who had grown up fully as bossy, managing and determined as Barb herself, didn’t mind at all. By the time Noelle was twelve the visits had stopped almost entirely and it was down to Christmas and birthday cards and regular invitations from Barb to Noelle to join them and their kids for camping trips. Noelle went: no-one else was offering her camping trips in real tents and, though she didn’t quite analyse it in so many words, Barb was easier to take on holiday, when she was in one tent and you were in another with Peggy (known to her intimates as Petula, because no-one in the whole COUNTRY was called Peggy, Mum!) and Joanne.

    Then Saskia came home, pregnant. She was not opposed to abortion on principle but didn’t Catherine think that childbirth was something every woman owed it to herself to experience once? Having experienced it once, Catherine was able to reply very firmly No, to this. Saskia had decided to have it in New Zealand because although the British National Health was free, too, she thought our antenatal care was better. She had not come home poor and destitute, she appeared to have a lot of money, because she immediately bought a car. Explaining why she hadn’t had her own car shipped out from England. Uncle Bob and Catherine didn’t listen much, it all sounded much too complicated.

    When the baby was born Saskia thought she wouldn’t keep it, after all. Child-care was available back in England but full day-care was extortionately expensive and she would really need to concentrate on her career over these next five years or so. The father had been white, so she was sure she’d easily find a suitable family to adopt it.

    “I’ll have him,” said Catherine.

    Saskia had looked at her dubiously: was she sure? Because let’s face it, it—all right, he—wasn’t nearly as pretty as Noelle had been.

    Noelle had been a very pretty baby indeed: very dainty. Catherine had smiled reminiscently, but had looked at the red, squirming, skinny Dicky and repeated: “I’ll have him.”

    Saskia had agreed, with the proviso that she would send regular maintenance: it would make up for not having to go through all the hassles and the paperwork of legal adoption. Catherine had agreed sunnily to this proposition.

    So Saskia had vanished into what the country was beginning to refer to, when it remembered, as “offshore” rather than “overseas” and Catherine and Noelle had happily taken the red, squirming, skinny and very unattractive Dicky home to Toetoe Bay. Uncle Bob was pleased, though he felt it was a pity Saskia hadn’t wanted to call him Bob.

    Saskia sent money for Dicky every month. Catherine conscientiously put most of it into a Post Office Savings Bank account for him, Noelle having explained laboriously to her that Bursary wasn’t enough, Mum, and he’d need the money if he wanted to go to varsity; and if he didn’t, well, what if he wanted to start a business? So Catherine, Noelle and Dicky scraped along pretty much as Catherine and Noelle had always scraped along, Dicky’s savings account grew steadily, and Saskia, who no longer had any notion of the price of anything in the country of her birth, continued to send regular sums without asking what Catherine was spending them on, and extravagant presents for birthdays and Christmases, most of which were too old for him or that he couldn’t use. Like the electronic thingy when he was four that had to be plugged into your television, she’d forgotten that Uncle Bob didn’t have a television. Or the thingy this last Christmas: Catherine hadn’t even known what it was and Noelle had had to explain that it was a CD player, Mum. And a really good one! Catherine hadn’t known what “CD” meant so Noelle had explained that, too. Dicky had pointed out they didn’t have any CDs to put in it, so Noelle, whose kind heart was occasionally allowed to outweigh her immensely hard head, had gone out, not that day or the next, the shops were all closed, of course, but as soon as they re-opened, and bought him a CD. Thirty-five dollars worth of Madonna, and at that it was on special. The innocent Dicky didn’t know who Madonna was but he was happy to be able to make sound come out of his new gadget. Catherine didn’t like it but developed a habit of quietly going into the kitchen when it was making the noise.

    Uncle Bob Kincaid had died when Dicky was seven: a terrible blow to all of them, even though they had seen it coming, after all he wasn’t their uncle, he was Catherine’s mother’s uncle, and in his nineties. He had long since explained laboriously to Catherine, who hadn’t understood, though she’d trustingly accepted it, and then again, with some relief, to Noelle, that he couldn’t leave the run-down acres of Toetoe Bay Farm to Catherine: it wasn’t his to leave. The brothers James and Robert Kincaid had come out to New Zealand from Scotland in the 1920s but their older brother, Alan, had stayed behind. James became a grocer and did quite well for himself, producing amongst other offspring the Alison Kincaid who married a rising young surgeon by the name of George Burchett. Robert had gone into dairy farming, buying the Toetoe Bay property with a loan from his older brother, Alan. The agreement had been that the property should be Bob’s for his lifetime and that any sons of his would have a half-interest in it, but if he had no sons it was to revert in its entirety to his brother’s family. Dicky didn’t count, he wasn’t his own son, but his great-niece’s son, Uncle Bob had explained carefully to Catherine. Alan Kincaid’s only son, Hamish, had become a dentist in Edinburgh: he was now dead and his sole heir was his son, Alan Hamish Kincaid.

     It was this Alan H. Kincaid who had written the letter to Catherine.

    “Can I, Mum?” repeated Dicky.

    “Yes.” Catherine handed him the typed envelope with the return address on the top left-hand corner.

    Hurriedly Noelle snatched it back. “Mu-um! This has got the address on it!”

    “So has the letter,” said Catherine mournfully.

    “Yeah, but what if you lose the letter?” retorted her daughter.

    This was certainly a point. It had taken the combined efforts of Noelle, Dicky and Noelle’s boyfriend, Krish (short for Krishna: not Indian, his parents had been heavily into Flower Power and Love is all you need), to find Alan H. Kincaid’s previous letter, of two years back. The one that said Uncle Robert’s niece must continue to live on the property and of course he would charge her only a nominal rent to cover repairs and so forth.

    They all watched silently as Noelle carefully tore off the part of the envelope that bore the stamp and handed it to Dicky.

    “I don’t see what I can do,” said Catherine in a trembling voice as he dashed off to his room to add it to his collection.

    “See a lawyer,” replied Noelle grimly.

    “I don’t know any lawyers,” she gulped. “And don’t they cost an awful lot of money?”

    This last was certainly true: it gave Noelle pause for an instant.

    Krish said helpfully into the instant: “Ya gotta be In to win.”

    “Shut up,” ordered Noelle automatically. “Um—no, he’s right in a way, Mum. Look on it as an investment. We’ll have to get the legal position straight. There’s got to be a way out.”

    “How can there be? The farm doesn’t belong to us.”

    “I wouldn’t call it a farm,” noted Krish fairly.

    “Shut—up,” ordered Noelle between her teeth.

    “It’s only got one cow. Well, two if ya count Daisy,” he said dubiously. Daisy was Buttercup’s calf. The first girl-child she’d had in the last ten years: Catherine had, mistakenly she now felt, taken it as a good omen.

    “He can’t take Buttercup and Daisy, can he?” she now gasped in horror.

    “There! You moron, Krish!” said Noelle angrily to her lover. “No, of course he can’t, Mum, they’re yours.” Krish shrank into himself, looking abashed. –Krish was six-foot-four, blond, and very broad-shouldered. Noelle, who was far more like Saskia and Mrs Burchett than she was like her own mother, was five-foot-two, slim, dark, and flashing-eyed. The two together reminded Catherine vaguely of that song that Uncle Bob sometimes used to hum along with on the one programme he used to listen to on his old radio before it conked out. Something about “and her only four-foot-two.” Maybe it was five-foot-two. Something like that. Catherine had not been able to find that station on Dicky’s terrifically up-market ghetto-blaster that was so heavy he could hardly lift it (Saskia: last birthday), and was privately of the opinion that the man that did the programme must have died around the time Uncle Bob did. Well, that was logical: they liked the same sort of songs.

    Noelle picked up the earlier letter and read it through angrily. Krish watched her hopefully. Catherine stared at the very old, discoloured sea-grass matting on the sitting-room floor and tried to make her mind go blank.

    When Noelle’s reading had produced no result save a scowling silence, Krish rushed in. “The thing is, she’s accepted the terms of that letter for two years, by living here and paying him rent. –Has he done any repairs, by the way?”

    “Shut up!” she snarled.

    “Yes,” said Catherine in a trembling voice. “When Buttercup got out onto the road and that horrible yippy almost killed her with his car, I wrote to him and he had her paddock properly fenced and a lovely new gate put in.”

    “She means yuppie,” explained Noelle shortly.

    Krish had got that: he nodded.

    “He offered,” added Noelle in a hard voice, “to have all the rest of the fences repaired if Mum thought they needed it, but she,”—with a hard look—“wrote back to say they didn’t!”

    “Eh?” he said limply.

    “They don’t really, Noelle, we haven’t got any stock to wander.”

    Breathing hard, Noelle got up. “I’m gonna make a cup of coffee. –Is there any?”

    “There’s your brown dust,” said Catherine dubiously. Uncle Bob had refused to have instant coffee in the house. During her teens Noelle had fought a more or less losing battle over that one, though he had eventually consented to her keeping a jar in the cupboard for her own use, provided she didn’t expect him or her mother to drink it. Catherine didn’t mind it, it didn’t taste like coffee, so if you thought of it as something else—“brown dust” would do—it was quite an acceptable drink. But she had kindly refrained from drinking it in front of the old man.

    “Mum,” Noelle now said heavily: “I bought it for you.”

    “The jars are good,” said Catherine happily to Krish.

    “Yeah,” he agreed, swallowing a grin.

    “I’ve made some quince jam for you,” said Catherine happily to her daughter.

    “We can’t get through a whole brown-dust jar of that!” gasped Noelle.

    “Yes, we can,” said Krish, grinning broadly.

    “They’re quart jars!” she snapped, forgetting they had all officially been metricated since well before she was born.

    “Yeah: good, eh?” he grinned.

    Muttering about refined sugar, Noelle stomped out to the kitchen.

    Catherine looked thoughtfully at Krish. “I’d say your metabolism can take it. Provided you get a lot of exercise. You’ve got one of those sporty figures, haven’t you?”

    Krish was already aware that Noelle’s mum wasn’t like most people’s mums, so he just said tolerantly: “That’s right.”

    Catherine blinked, smiled confusedly, went very pink, and looked away. Even though he was aware she wasn’t like most people’s mums. Krish also pinkened and looked away. Reflecting as he did so that it was really weird she hadn’t remarried, y’know? Because she was quite attractive, really, and—well, y’know? He wouldn’t of said she was past it, really. He was aware that she had never actually been married but that didn’t stop him, though he addressed her as “Catherine”, from regularly referring to her as “Mrs Burchett”. It wasn’t that he was particularly conventional-minded, it was more that he’d never paused to question his habits of speech. Or those of the rest of the country.

    They stayed for tea, in order to avoid the Sunday drivers heading back to town who would be sure to clog the roads between four and six south of Kowhai Bay, even though it was winter, and also because Noelle was aware that if they hadn’t stayed for tea Krish would have sulked for the rest of the evening. Catherine’s meals were usually disorganised, like everything about her, but also usually very tasty. Today there were two main dishes: what they called “potato bake”: a huge casserole dish of sliced potatoes baked with milk and yoghurt, today with some cottage cheese as well. Sometimes she only had wholemeal flour to thicken the sauce but today she’d used plain flour, to her daughter’s unexpressed relief. Sometimes there was a tasty-cheese topping on it but today it was without because it was accompanied by a meaty curry. Not curry powder, she always made real Indian curry. Krish said happily that it was wonderful: what sort of meat was it? Catherine looked vague but he eventually got her to admit that it was mainly mutton hocks, because they’d been on special at one of the supermarkets in Puriri. Krish said his Gran used them for soup. Catherine replied happily that most people did, she had a great recipe for barley broth with mutton hocks, it was one of Uncle Bob’s mother’s recipes. Krish then asked hopefully what she’d done to the cabbage to make it taste so great but Catherine said that she just cooked it in a big pot with a bit of oil and a sprinkle of water and some caraway seeds and Noelle knew that recipe.

    The pudding was an immense apple and quince pie. Krish had never encountered wholemeal pastry before meeting Noelle’s mother, his own mother having gone off ethnic cooking and ethnic flowing robes and onto convenience foods and washable tracksuits round about the time he was toddling but still in naps and his sister Amy came along, but he was now a convert to it. Noelle preferred bought pastry, if possible filo sheets, but she had now attained sufficient years of discretion not to remind her mother of this. So she merely asked Catherine and Dicky over to their place for next Saturday, kindly promising them Krish to fetch them, and adding that she’d do this ace fetta cheese and silverbeet roll, Mum’d like it. Krish looked sideways at Dicky as the dread word “silverbeet” was mentioned but didn’t express his thought.

    “Will that man chuck us out?” asked Dicky sadly as they waved goodbye to the smart little Honda—Noelle’s, with Noelle driving.

    “I don’t know,” said Catherine honestly. “The letter says he’s coming to discuss the disposition of the property. Disposition means what he’s going to do with it. So it doesn’t sound all that good, does it?”

    “No. Where’ll we go? What about Buttercup an’ Daisy?”

    “I suppose they could go and board with the Fermours.”

    “Yeah, an’ we could board with Noelle!” he cried, brightening.

    “Um—her flat’s a bit small. Um—maybe we could find a house to rent in Carter’s Bay.”

    “Yeah! Then I could go round to Shane Tamehana’s place after school!”

    “Yes,” said Catherine with a sigh.

    “Mum, could Shane come over next weekend and stay?”

    “Yes, if his mother says he can. I thought he didn’t like leaving his computer?” said Catherine in surprise.

    “Mr Tamehana wants to use it for his dumb stuff next weekend.”

    “Oh. Well, all right, Dicky. Um—I hope he won’t be bored,” said Catherine uneasily.

    “Neh!” he said witheringly. “He could come to Noelle’s with us, eh?”

    Catherine agreed that if Shane’s mother permitted him to stay the weekend with them, Shane could come over to Noelle’s. Not allowing her mind to dwell on how Noelle’s cuisine would go down with two little boys of nine years of age. There was no doubt that that they’d get on okay with Krish: he liked kids and kids always liked him. The only strange thing about him was what on earth he saw in Noelle. Well, perhaps he liked being bossed around: lots of men let their wives boss them around, thought Catherine, automatically pushing Dicky into the bathroom and standing over him while he cleaned his teeth. Usually they were wimpish little weedy men, true, but there were probably lots of large softies like Krish out there, too, also letting themselves be told what to do by their partners in life. Catherine Burchett, as will possibly by now be apparent, was more inclined to accept life for what it was than to try to force it into some preconceived pattern of what it did ought to be.

    She went resolutely to bed herself—it wasn’t very late but she always got up early because of Buttercup and the hens and ducks—and tried very hard not to think about being chucked off the farm by horrible Alan H. Kincaid. It didn’t work, and she cried herself to sleep.

Next chapter:

https://conquestofcartersbay.blogspot.com/2023/05/erewhon.html