48
The Town Of Titipu
It was February, but Dr Davis was on holiday. She’d had a stint back at work in January, largely in order to escape the crowds of milling schoolkids, or possibly the milling crowds of schoolkids, that were infesting the city, the beaches, and even, God alone knew why, the suburban shopping centres. She was now taking the leave that she was supposed to have had in January. Since the schoolkids were all back in the stuffy, non-air-conditioned institutions of learning New Zealand provided for the rising generation, the weather was stinking hot: in fact five thousand times hotter than it had been back just before Christmas when their official holidays had started, poor little sods; but there was, amazing though this might seem, nothing even the Gummint could do about the date on which His birthday fell.
She ended up towards lunchtime in Carter’s Bay. She hadn’t been up this way for ages, and there was always the possibility of a dip in the Inlet. If the tide was out, which it usually was, the dip would resolve itself into sitting in two inches of warmish water, but she thought she could cope with that.
The rest of the world was wearing silly peaked caps, usually backwards, and floppy grey or black tee-shirts ten times too big for them, and either huge baggy shorts with extraneous pockets reaching the knee, or more-than-skin-tight, stretch-knit poly-something things guaranteed to foster nasty cases of the itchy horribles after five minutes’ wear in the sticky North Auckland weather of early February, but Jill stuck firmly to her usual holiday wear: a white cotton bowling hat with a widish brim sensibly lined in dark non-reflective green, a blue and white Dacron blouse and normal-size blue cotton shorts.
The menopause-pink Carter’s Bay video-hire shop, and Jill had forgotten this, actually, was no longer there. Bother; at the back of her mind there had lurked the thought that it might have different junk from either of the two video places in Puriri. The BNZ building it used to be in was still there, at least its shell was, but they’d repainted it. Terracotta and grunge were obviously much more suitable Colonial colours than menopause pink for an Edwardian bank that had never known anything but the touch of dark cream until the video shop hit it in the booming Eighties. Innocent, that’s what we were in the booming Eighties, thought Jill sadly, driving past it. Innocent.
The rumour that the Iceman had got the Post Office clock going was true, but then, she hadn’t really expected it not to be. According to May Swadling that clock hadn’t worked back when Jack’s grandfather— Oh, forget it. The rumour that a bakery had opened up next to Swadlings’ was true, too. Once upon a time—this was back in the days when Main Road, Carter’s Bay, featured nothing but dust, an immense camber on the road surface apparently designed to deal with yer actual monsoons, and the dairy—Jill would have stopped off at Swadlings’, like the rest of the country, for an ice cream, but today she didn’t bother. She knew the Swadlings weren’t there any more. Sighing, she headed for the roundabout. It was still as bad as it ever had been, but she managed to get onto it and off it without ending up thirty miles south of her intended destination. …Remember way back when? There had been nothing up this way but Jake’s bach. Back when Polly had first got herself mixed up with him and all her workmates had tutted and shaken their heads and, if more outspoken, warned her she was making A Big Mistake getting involved with the Playboy of the Australasian World—around about then—Jill had once, though aware he was wishing her at Jericho every moment of the trip, come up to the bach with them. Back then the bach hadn’t been all Habitat-Mod like now: just a grungy rundown little old wooden bach with beat-up furniture in it like anyone’s. The road had been unspeakable. It was now macadam all the way to Kingfisher Bay. Er, well, that trip had been over ten years ago, come to think of it. The times, they were a-changing, all right. Though Jill Davis, M.A.., Ph.D. wouldn’t have taken any bets that the whole flaming Sir George Grey User-Pays Unwanted University hadn’t been in that damned entrepreneurial head of Sir Jacob’s even way back then…
“Hullo, May,” she said cautiously in the new dairy In Kingfisher Bay, not sure the woman would recognise her.
Mrs Swadling beamed. “It’s Polly’s friend Jill, isn’t it? How are you?”
Allowing she was fine, Jill bought an ice cream and let May tell her how happy Gerhard and Mayli were, and how settled they seemed. She waited, but May didn’t tell her it didn’t matter that Mayli was a Black girl. Times had changed, all right. She agreed, lying in her teeth, that Kingfisher Bay was looking very smart, agreed that Polly and Jake were back from Argentina, agreed that of course it didn’t matter that their kiddies had missed the first week of term, and agreed that it was lovely to see Dorothy so happy at last. This last was a piece of complete hypocrisy, since she hadn’t actually seen Dorothy at all since well before Christmas. Though of course she’d heard; in fact Polly had rung her up from ruddy Argentina to tell her the good news. May Swadling would have been very glad to hear this, in the unlikely event she didn’t already know, but unfortunately Jill couldn’t work out a way to tell her which wouldn’t imply (a) that she was criticising Polly’s extravagance, (b) that she and Polly had been taking a prurient and nosy interest in Dorothy’s private life, and (c) that she required May to join her in a sort of sniggering and complacent superiority over Polly’s said extrava— Oh, forget it. She agreed that the weather was very warm, agreed it usually was at this time of year, agreed that the Government was mad without needing the words “school”, “term” or even “semester” to be uttered, agreed it was so nice (May’s expression) that Angie and Bill Michaels had decided to settle up here, agreed, à propos de rien, that Mitsuko Takagaki was a dear little thing, and at long last tottered out. Her ice hadn’t quite melted away so she tottered over the road and over to the seawall, collapsed thereon, and conveyed it to her mouth with a shaking hand. Very, very gradually the sugar, and quite possibly the calcium, began to restore her strength…
After a while a burly, hairy figure in ragged denim shorts, jandals, and a torn black singlet wandered up to her. “Gidday,” it said mildly. “Shouldn’t you be back at work?”
“Very definitely,” she sighed.
Bill Michaels sat down beside her on the warm concrete wall. “Been talking to May Swadling?” he said kindly.
“Something like that,” she sighed.
“What are you doing here?” he asked with a laugh in his voice.
“Mooning over the long-ago,” admitted Jill glumly. “I suppose you never used to come up this way, back then. I mean, when all this,” she said heavily, waving her hand at the assorted expensive hardware in the marina and the trendy hideosities on the slope above it, and firmly keeping her shoulder turned on the Royal K, “did not exist.”
“Before his bulldozers got going, ya mean,” he diagnosed without difficulty. “Yeah, we did sometimes. Used to bring the boat up, if the tide was right. The kids liked it. Sometimes used to come up for Christmas dinner.”
Jill looked at him uncertainly.
“Back in the days before the granny hormones got going she never used to do a steaming hot turkey: we usually had a picnic. Fizz for us, Coke for the kids. They quite often voted for the Inlet.”
She nodded feebly.
Bill rubbed his chin. “I’d take you out on ’er, but she’s too much for me, all on me own. Col was up here, but he’s pushed off back to his place: re-designing his entire teaching plan. Young, ya see? Give ’im time, he’ll learn. Um, well, fancy a bit of a potter in the runabout?”
“Have you got one?” said Jill feebly.
He eyed her tolerantly. “Yeah. Well?”
“I’ve got nothing better to do,” she admitted, getting up. “Do I dare ask why you aren’t at work?” she added, as they headed down to the marina.
“I gave up redesigning my teaching plan fifteen years back, my staff are all well under the thumb, last year’s book orders actually went through, and all queries from cretins wanting to pre-enrol well after the prescribed pre-enrolment date or contrary-wise, to enrol well before Enrolment Day, are being handled by Patrick or my secretary. And the Engineering timetable,” said Bill on a dreamy note, “is as fixed and immutable as the very Theory of Relativity itself.”
Jill ignored that gambit, and merely replied: “Lucky you. Wish I was dean.”
“It has its moments. –Here we are.”
Jill allowed him to assist her frail feminine form into a little aluminium runabout, just like anybody’s. “Have you had this long?” she ventured, as they set off.
“Eh?”
“Look, drop it!” she ordered heatedly.
“I meant nothing by it,” said Bill mildly. “This runabout has been in the Michaels family for twenty-five years last Christmas. I was sure you’d seen it, in fact been in it, about a million times.”
“No,” she said feebly.
He did something to the thing’s engine, and the decibel level suddenly dropped. The thing slowed, but that, in Jill’s opinion, was not a drawback. “What’s up?” he said mildly.
She frowned. “I said. Mooning over the long-ago.”
“Dorothy’s okay,” he said mildly.
“Not that!”
There was a short silence.
“Well, not entirely,” said Jill sheepishly. “Sorry, Bill.”
“He’s not all bad.”
She sighed. “I know.”
They were passing the little boatyard where Sol’s off-sider did inscrutable technical things to boats’ insides. Bill waved, and bellowed: “AHOY!” A tall, tanned figure in denim shorts as battered as his own and a faded greenish canvas hat straightened, wiping its paws on what even from this distance Jill could see was an oily rag, and gave a nautical salute. Sniggering, Jill saluted back, and Euan was seen to laugh and wave.
“Hey, remember that year—”
“No,” she said firmly.
“Yes, ya do, Jill. Euan was doing his Master’s, and him and a few of the boys were helping me out with the lighting for A Midsummer—”
“No.”
“All right, we won’t talk about the long-ago,” he said mildly. “Simone’s a really nice young woman.”
“I know. I’m glad about it.”
Bill sucked his teeth. “Baranski’s not all bad.”
“Didn’t you just say that?” He didn’t react and after a moment she admitted: “He was pretty decent over that do with Mayli.”
“I don’t think Angie ever had the whole story on that one, but don’t bother, ta.”
“I wasn’t going to,” she admitted glumly.
Bill scratched his chin slowly. “According to Ange, Leigh Gore’s really fond of him, and anyone that he’s really fond of, must be reasonably decent at heart. –Don’t shoot me, I’m just the messenger.”
“Mm.” Jill stared moodily over the tranquil greyish-green waters of the Inlet. There it was. Ugh.
“Not still brooding about Sir George Flaming Grey, are ya?”
“Funnily enough, yes. This used to be an unspoilt bit of very, very plain and unremarkable, nay, delightfully boring, New Zealand scrub-scape. It’s very unattractiveness was its attraction,” she said grimly.
“Yeah; on the whole, I’d agree. –See over there, where those kids are playing football? That’s all gonna be glasshouses. Botanical experiments.”
“Bio-engineered experiments,” corrected Jill pointedly.
“All too likely. Jane Vincent—ya know her, eh? Yeah. She reckons they’ve got a new bloke on board in the Bot Department that’s got a project going to de-acidify yer genuine Kiwi tree-tomato. Well, South American, strictly, but I think that one’s long since lost in the mists of time.”
All she found in answer to this was a weak: “You do mean tamarillos, I presume? The red ones?”
“They’re all originally South American, Jill,” he said kindly. “Very big on Solanaceae, South America is.”
“Not that, you clot,” she sighed. “The red ones as opposed to the pale orange, tasteless ones that, or so I’m reliably informed, are no good for chutney.”
“Yeah, I do. Jane’s story is that this cretin envisages your dark red, full-bodied, non-acidic and much sweeter tree-tomato, or tamarillo if you must, selling world-wide like hot potatoes, to stress the solan—”
“Give it a rest!” said Jill loudly in the local vernacular.
“The solanaceous theme,” said Bill with relish. “Well?”
“Well, what?” returned his colleague sourly.
“Indicative, ain’t it?”
Given that the things had apparently been grown in New Zealand back gardens for generations, planted automatically, along with the silverbeet that they’d planted automatically for generations, and that today’s gardeners who had inherited the trees usually couldn’t give the fruit away with a bar of soap—the kids didn’t like them, they were too strong, acidic, and full of iron— “It’s that, all right.”
“There is a funny side. Talking of funny sides, see that there fast-rising white cuboid monstrosity? This side, not Sir G.G.’s.”
She turned her head. “God Almighty,” she said in awe.
“Yeah,” agreed Bill proudly. He drew in a little, the outboard idling. “Nice wee pozzie,” he noted airily.
“Oh?” replied Jill; refusing to be drawn.
He grinned. “That patch of bush to its left is green belt.”
“Lucky them,” she said sourly.
“Not so fast. See how it rises in that charming way to that bare-ish patch of grass on top of that hill?”
She didn’t ask whether the engineering experts guaranteed this would mean the cuboid house would be flooded all winter by the runoff, or even if the hill, which was to the inexpert eye quite low, was guaranteed to shade the house from all morning sun, especially in winter; she merely sighed: “And?”
“Right behind that hill is the other side of that hill; and right below that is Euan’s boatyard in its nice little cove. A nice little cove with interesting sonic properties, especially at dead of night. Especially when, and I grant you this probably only happens once a month, or maybe twice in their busy season, Euan’s testing an engine.”
“At night? I know he’s an engineering bloke, Bill,”—he interrupted her to tell her proudly that the technical term was “good engineering joker” but Jill managed to ignore that—“but when he’s got a nice Simone to go home to?”
“Boy, the distaff side in Pongo sure get the same brainwashing as our lot, eh?” he said in fascination. Jill ignored this completely and so he was forced to add: “He often sets them running and leaves them. Not always, but often enough. Good workout, ya see, and if she’s still running sweet next morning, Bob’s your uncle.”
“Presumably the unfortunate owners of this hunk of space junk didn’t know that,” she croaked, nodding. Having given in almost completely—QED.
“Correct. But it gets better.” He eyed her blandly. “Think ‘white cuboid monstrosities’ for a while, Jill.”
Jill endeavoured to turn the creaking brain over, but nothing was produced except the thought that she could do with a nice cuppa, the which proved she was past it. Only her parents’ generation knocked back the tannin on stifling midsummer afternoons. “Just tell it, Bill,” she sighed.
Without further ado he said: “Sammi Wolfe and Armand Gautier are now an item and this cuboid thing right here belongs to—” He stopped: Jill had at last collapsed in the hoped-for sniggering fit.
“Oh, dear,” she said weakly, blowing her nose.
“Better?” asked Bill, steering away from the cuboid Wolfe-Gautier residence.
“Marginally,” she owned feebly.
Bill steered westwards in silence for a while. Nothing was encountered except a single stilt, standing on a tiny slip of sandbank, looking as if it had long since forgotten why it was there.
“That’s Jane’s,” he noted mildly as they drew level with the A-frame..
“Yeah. Has she got visitors?” asked Jill cautiously, eyeing the green plastic tent in what passed for Jane’s front garden.
“Don’t think so. Oh—goddit. That’s not a tent, Jill,” he said kindly. “It’s a shade house.”
“Yuh— Uh— Jane Vincent’s growing orchids? Tender wee ferns?” she groped.
“Nope. Tamarillo rejects,” he said on an airy note.
“That,” replied Jill crossly, “is entirely spurious, and unworthy of you, Michaels!”
“It’s true, though. The tit from the Bot Department was gonna throw them out, on account the iron in ’em woulda put hair on ya— Siddown!” he gasped, as his passenger rose and made a grab at the tiller.
Jill collapsed back onto her seat but ordered: “Steer in, or I’ll drown both of us, and that’s a promise.”
“Jane’s probably at work, or up the Inlet spying on defenceless fantails, but I dare say she won’t mind if ya gawp at her seedlings,” he noted, obligingly steering in to the bank.
Determinedly Jill got out, went up to the tent, and peered in. Lumme. Yep, thems were those: the elderly Martensens down the road from them had a couple of what they called tree-tomato trees and what their grandkids referred to as “tamarillos, ugh, yuck!” “I entirely capitulate,” she groaned, returning to the runabout.
“Yeah, well, after you’ve done that, you can give us a shove off, it’s bloody shallow just here,” replied Professor Michaels graciously.
“If I give you a shove, how the Hell do I get into the thing again?” returned Jill logically.
“You wade out and clamber over the side. Whaddelse are them genuine human shorts, not produced in the Westernised world post-1984, intended for?”
She might have known that he’d never be at a loss for words. Sighing, she pushed the thing, with him in it, the great fat oaf, waded out, and with a certain amount of screeching at him, not to mention the panting and gasping and—ow! Bloody Hell!— the scraped shins, got in.
“How—do your—family—stand—?” she gasped, collapsing wetly back onto her seat, or, ledge.
“Been used to boats all their lives,” the oaf said insouciantly, heading the thing west again.
“Not it, actually,” replied Jill sweetly.
Bill shook slightly, but merely warned: “There’s Michaela and wee Grace. But I wouldn’t look, ’cos his mum’s out here this month.”
Gulping, Jill looked in the opposite direction from the steel-willed, taffy-haired Mrs Gracie Rosenberg. “Er—how does Michaela get on with her?” she ventured.
“Very well, actually. They’re chalk and cheese, of course: old Gracie’s the most managing female that ever walked, not excluding the Wicked Witch of The West—Ms Wolfe, to you—Mrs Danvers, and the anonymous heroine of the same epic.”
“So you think she was a managing little toad, too!” discovered Jill with a huge sigh.
Bill eyed her tolerantly. “Yeah. In embryo, of course. That female in the Hitchcock version brought it out quite well, if ya cared to look.”
Jill nodded fervently.
“Talking of which—” he added, as the Perkins residence hove into view. Shit, had he creosoted his ruddy landing stage?
“Isn’t it illegal to put creosote in the Inlet?” croaked his esteemed colleague, reading his mind.
“I’d say so,” said Bill faintly. “Well, I’ll drop a word in Beth’s shell-like, and it won’t happen again—to return to my last remark but fifteen.”
“You’re not claiming Beth Martin’s an embryo Mrs Danvers?”
“I never said that!” he said hurriedly. “No, well, think about the Du Maurier nameless heroine, not to mention that tit of a hero, and then think about her and Jack.” He sucked his teeth, and looked airy.
“Er… Yikes,” she concluded numbly.
Bill bowed modestly. “Mentioned it to the Carranos—she reckoned she’d seen it all along, of course. But Jake brought up the analogy with Polly’s mum—she’d be Beth’s aunty, ya see. Sweet as all get out, ya know? But she’s ruled old Dave and them three boys of theirs with a rod of iron all their lives.”
“Uh—but they’re the macho sort that do knuckle under to the little woman,” she offered feebly.
Bill looked smug. “Think about it.”
Jill thought. She looked back in awe at the vanishing split-level, vaguely Frank Lloyd Wright lines of Jack Perkins’s house… Golly.
A short space of grey-green Inlet went by in silence.
“Looks good, eh?” he noted as the Curtis-Gore residence hove into view.
It did, yes. Modernish, not too extreme, even though it was a pole house. That area underneath, which if Jill’s vague memory served her was they way they built ’em in Queensland, something to do with letting the humidity circulate, would be great for the kids to play in on damp days. Of which North Auckland certainly had plenty. “Is it habitable, though?”
“Yeah. See that kinda basement area?” Rapidly he gave her the engineering chapter and verse. Jill ignored it completely. “She can hang the naps under there,” he ended pleasedly.
“They’re all disposable these days: breeding women have at last emerged from the age of slavery!” said Jill loudly.
Bill looked crushed. “Forgot,” he admitted. “Saw them down the dairy last Sunday: he was going on about never getting any sleep: it brought back horrible memories, ya see, and they were so bloody vivid I sort of overlooked the passage of time. Anyway, half the time it was me that boiled the damn things up, Angie was always busy doing bottles or having collywobbles or post-natal blues, or managing Play Group, or all of them together.”
“I’ll apologise if only you’ll shut up,” she sighed.
“Yeah. Sorry. –Moana’ll be home; we could drop in,” he said on a hopeful note.
“Bill, it must be almost lunchtime, won’t the poor woman feel obliged to offer to feed us?’
“No, well, we’ll tell her Polly’s expecting us for lunch, eh?”
“Is she even up there?”
“Don’t tell me May didn’t wise you up on that one!”
“I’ve forgotten,” she sighed. “So much has happened since.” She looked at his hopeful face. “Oh, all right, if you must.”
“Our Helen’s had hers,” he noted.
“Yes, Polly said— Oh! Congratulations, Bill: your first grandchild,” said Jill very sheepishly indeed.
He grinned. “Ta. I’m accepting cigars on Geoff’s behalf. It’s a boy. William, at the moment, not Bill or even Will. Col suggested Willy—long distance, at our expense, naturally—but that went down like you might expect with all concerned. No, well, it all went very well: Helen’s always been strong as a horse, of course. But Angie was on tenterhooks because of the miscarriage, first time they tried. But what with the mother-in-law and the two sisters-in-law and the neighbour that’s had four of her own and sixteen, I kid you not, grandkids, she decided they might manage without her.”
Jill nodded and grinned, even though wondering somewhere at the back of her mind why the news of yet another unneeded addition to the global population explosion always made even confirmed spinsters like herself grin happily. Genetic programming, no doubt.
By this time they were pulling in at the Curtis-Gore bank, even though as far as Jill’s recollection went they hadn’t actually agreed they would. And with only a passing dissertation on the ease with which a small landing-stage might be built thereon and the engineering principles which would apply to same, they were up the short flight of steps and knocking at the open door. After a few minutes a female voice shouted: “YEAH! Come IN! We’re in the KITCHEN!” So they went in.
“Lunchtime, is it, Gore?” said Bill immediately as the proud father was revealed holding the infant tenderly on his business-suited knee while the proud mother, barefoot in a glowing red and orange muumuu that would have done Woodstock proud and then some, stirred something on the stove with the one hand while holding a large book of the textbook variety open in the other hand.
After John Gore, rather a nice name, Jill had to admit, though as the baby was very dark it probably didn’t suit it, but what the Hell, three cheers for the global village and the melting pot and all that—after the infant, then, had been duly admired, Leigh showed them over the house. Lots of knotty-pine floors, expanses of smooth white plaster here and there, high gabled ceilings of more knotty pine. A family-room plus a small sitting-room, the latter with Leigh’s good Persian rug in it: well, that was sensible. The kitchen was nice and big, and it and the family-room were open-plan: sensible, if you were planning a growing family. The master bedroom was very pleasant: big French windows with a lovely view over the Inlet, floating white gauze curtains, timber Venetians for privacy and to keep the winter weather out. White plaster walls again, with the main colour, apart from the golden glow of the knotty-pine flooring, being a deep maroon: a plain duvet and pillowcases, very modern-looking. The pictures weren’t modern: they were flower studies. Jill went up close and looked at them with great interest. A set of botanical studies, just prints, possibly enlargements of the originals, but rather nice. Australian natives? Yes: Leigh confirmed placidly that Moana had bought them at an exhibition but never had anywhere suitable to hang them. Browns and dull yellows or dark reds, against grey-green wispy foliage.
“Like it?” said Bill as, firmly refusing the kind offer of lunch, they got back into the runabout.
“Yes, very much. I couldn’t imagine what they’d end up with: I’d have said their tastes were diametrically opposed.”
“Yeah. Casual but nice, isn’t it? I really like that pole-house style… Oh, well,” he said on a glum note.
Jill swallowed. “Bill, don’t you like the flat?” she said cautiously as he gunned the engine and headed for, apparently, the North Pole.
“Eh?” he shouted. “Sorry,” he said, doing the noise-reducing and slowing thing— Throttling back!
Jill smiled at him. “Throttling back,” she said. “Don’t you like Angie’s dinky unit?”
“Not much, no. Though I fully take her point that we don’t want to be lumbered with a ruddy great section, at our ages. But it hasn’t got any garden at all,” he said glumly.
“No-o… It has got a shed substitute, I’m told.”
He grimaced. “If ya mean the games room, she turned that into a spare bedroom when Babs and her hubby came out for Christmas.”
Jill gulped. “Sorry.”
He scratched his chin slowly. “I quite fancy the place on the higher side from Simone and Euan’s.”
“Uh—a swimming pool?” recalled Jill hazily.
“Yeah. Nice oblong job. No, well, it’s a bit like theirs; not quite the same layout.”
“Isn’t it huge, though?”
“Actually the living area isn’t. Downstairs there’s a triple garage. Hers, his, and the launch, geddit? But up above, there’s just the one storey: balcony at the front, like Simone and Euan’s, but the rooms are miles smaller. And there’s another balcony at the back. Euan reckons they’ve filled it with Cupids peeing into ponds and Aphrodites at the Waterhole, and his collection of pet orchids that he shows, but it’d be really nice if ya got rid of the crap. Steps down to the back garden, but we’re not decrepit yet. And we could put in one of those miniature lifts, no sweat. You know: staircase-lift. Not to the garden, down the front stairs: get you up from the front passage,” he said laboriously.
“Er—yes.”
He gave her a hopeful, pathetic look. “We will need a bit of room, for the grandkids.”
“Bill, I had better warn you right now, that I shall sycophantically agree with whatever Angie may say to me on the subject, whether or not it is diametrically opposed to what you want, and whether or not,” said Jill firmly, “I happen to agree with her point of view.”
“Mean cow,” he replied, sighing.
“Yes, but you’ve always known that. Um, build something really grimy, or better still take the motor-mower apart, in Angie’s new spare room?”
He grinned. “I had thought of that. She might take the point once she’d calmed down.”
“Or you could just say,” said Jill sweetly, “that you’re unhappy in that poky little dump and you really like Euan’s and Simone’s neighbours’ place. Is it for sale, by the way?”
“Thinking about it. Only is it the right time to cash in their investment?” He shrugged.
“The Nineties mind-set, Bill,” said Jill kindly. “A house isn’t a home, it’s an investment.”
“Apparently, yeah. He’d be thirty-four at the most,” he said heavily. “Jesus, when I was his age— Forget it.”
“Times have changed,” said Jill mildly. “That was one of the things idly passing through my mind as I sat peacefully on that seawall some five thousand years back.”
“I could take ya right home. Or ya wanna get off at Gerhard’s place?” he said kindly, since they were passing it.
“No, they’ll be at work. –He did patronise the grass farm,” said Jill with a little smile.
“Of course. Nice bit of Bonn in outer Puriri County,” he noted. “Does Mayli actually like those stark white concrete walls and so forth?”
“She seems to. It is rather elegant.”
“Well, nice to look at, but I’d hate to live there!” said Bill with a sudden laugh.
Jill smiled. “My sentiments exactly.”
They pottered on peacefully. Eventually Bill noted: “Jake did have a scheme to get Inoue to buy up all this, didja hear that one?”
“This?” said Jill faintly, waving at the vast expanse of low, unidentifiable scruffy shrubs and weeds to their left.
“Yep. On condition it could have one residence on it and the rest hadda be a reserve until Hell froze over. But Inoue flatly refused. Told him he didn’t think Posy would be happy in the back of beyond.”
“No, well, she’s certainly an urbanite,” said Jill very faintly, trying to envisage it and failing utterly. Up here? It was—thank all the gods that were—still genuinely scruffy. In fact, almost backblocks, it was so scruffy and undistinguished and delightful.
“Right. So he’s bought a place in that ruddy white wedding-cake condo Jake stuck on the Point, and she’s happy as Larry in it. Fake Florentine terracotta pots filled with them weird Australian grass-trees all over the balcony: that kinda junk.”
Jill quailed.
“Inoue doesn’t give a stuff what she does to the place,” he assured her. “Well, Masako’s taste was all in her mouth, remember?”
“Yes,” she said faintly.
“There you are, then.”
“Bill,” said Jill limply, in spite of herself, “does he intend marrying the woman?”
“God knows. They seem happy enough as they are.”
They pottered on. The thought that Polly might be working on her latest statistical linguistics tome had had more than time to surface—more than—before they reached the isolated little creosoted house that was the Carranos’ bach. It was strangely dark and smart looking. “Christ, is he super-duperising it?” she croaked.
“Eh? Aw—nah. Even old baches need a new coat of creosote from time to time, Jill. Well, every seven years or so. Had it done while they were in Argentina, so’s the pong’d have time to wear off a bit by the time they got back.”
“Mm. Um, Bill, Polly might’ve come up here to get a bit of work done,” she croaked.
“Never mind, we’ll interrupt her and make her have some lunch.”
Limply Jill let him lead her inside. Dr P.M. Mitchell was discovered in the tiny lean-to kitchen, making salad. She appeared happy to see them, and without even having to be prompted by Bill fed them on lettuce and tomato salad with excellent vinaigrette dressing, EnZed pressed ham just like anybody’s, and a mixture of dark Reizenstein’s rye, undoubtedly brought up from home with her, and Tip-Top sliced white from Swadlings’. It wasn’t until they were at the coffee and cake stage—had to be Polly’s mum’s Christmas cake, it was so dark, oozing and rich—that she dropped the bombshell. “I’ve officially resigned.”
Bill dropped his cake on the shiny yellow vinyl flooring of the lean-to kitchen.
After quite some time Jill managed to croak: “You’re not taking up that Cambridge fellowship, Polly?”
“No. I’m going to have some time off, and there’s some research I want to do. After that, Alan’s suggested I might like to think about setting up a Department of Linguistics for him. It’s not a bad idea,” she said dispassionately. “I’d have to work in closely with Leigh Gore: it’d be part of his faculty. It won’t be this year: later next year, possibly. Our kids are already so heavily involved in after-school activities that I hardly see them in the afternoons. Though Alan did suggest thirty hours a week might suit me, to start with.”
Smiling weakly, they agreed that she might as well think about it, thanked her politely for the lunch, and tottered off back to the runabout.
After a couple of minutes’ very slow, aimless steering in the vague direction of east Bill managed to utter: “Jill, she has been iffy about working for ruddy Dennis Barlow for years—”
“I KNOW!” she shouted.
“Jake’ll be pleased: less travelling for her.”
Jill just sighed.
Bill looked moodily down the Inlet. “Plus ça change? No, don’t mean that.”
“The opposite, you cretin.”
“Yeah.”
Baranski’s giant woodsmanly mansion was now to their left. Jill would have suggested they pass by hurriedly on the other side, but Dorothy in person appeared on the lawn and shouted: “OY! COME—OVER!” So they steered in to the giant jetty.
Dorothy looked just the same, in fact she was wearing the ancient sleeveless yellow blouse and old blue shorts that Jill had seen in her round Puriri every summer since she herself had taken up residence in Kowhai Bay, ditto the old red Roman sandals. And by this time Jill could overlook the smart silver hair.
“Thomas in?” said Bill by way of greeting.
“No, he’s gone in to work. Possibly in order to disprove Jack’s claim that the timetable program on the system is more infallible than the Pope, but I stopped listening. Hullo, Jill.”
“Hullo,” said Jill warily.
“Do you think geraniums might grow here?” asked Dorothy on a glum note.
Jill blinked slightly. “Uh—what, here?”
“On this expanse of well-trodden mud and couch grass as ever was, yeah.”
Bill bent. “Not couch,” he announced definitely, straightening.
“Good,” said Dorothy dully. “Well?”
“Were you envisaging a bed of them, or a row, or just clumps?” replied Jill weakly.
“Dunno,” she said with a sigh. “I’ve got a brown thumb, as you know. Well, black, really. I managed to put those potted palms Polly gave me in just the wrong place, and they almost died, but fortunately she shot over here the minute they got back from Argentina and corrected me.”
“Getting some sun, now, are they?” said Bill kindly.
“Yeah. –Geraniums?” she said hopefully to Jill.
“I can certainly give you some cuttings, Dorothy, but even though they’re pretty hardy, this ground’ll need some digging over.”
Bill bent again. “Manure,” he announced, straightening. “Make ruddy Thomas dig it in for ya: he’s hefty enough.”
“Mm,” confirmed Jill. “Why don’t you try silver-leaved plants?”
Dorothy just gaped at her.
“If you’re wanting to brighten the place up, that is? –Yes,” she said as Dorothy nodded glumly. “They’re salt-tolerant, you see. Silver-leaved plants and ice-plants,” she decided.
“Yeah, could look good, eh?” said Bill, producing a small notepad and a stump of carpenter’s pencil from the pack pocket of the shorts. He scribbled. “Here,” he said, offering it to Dorothy.
She gaped at the sketch of a cheery rock garden, complete with undoubted ice-plants and possible silver-leaved plants, and a little crazy-paving path leading up to what was undoubtedly Thomas’s house.
“That’s it!” said Jill encouragingly, looking over her shoulder. “You certainly need a path. It won’t stay February for ever, you know.”
“This place must be a bog in winter,” agreed Bill. “Get in touch with Sean Whatsit, Michaela’s mate that does the landscape gardening, shall I?”
Dorothy was seen to hesitate. She was seen to lick her lips. Then she was heard to say: “Oh, bugger him. All right, Bill, do: thanks very much. I’ll never manage it on my own, and he doesn’t appear to have any affective grasp of the concept ‘garden’ at all.”
“Righto. Tell Sean price is no object, shall I?”
“Uh—” Dorothy looked at the sketch again. It incorporated several large boulders not unlike those which artfully adorned Jack’s environmental acres. “Oh, the Hell with it. Yes.”
“He’ll be pleased. David Lee’s going to do his himself, except for the lawn, and Gerhard’s place is finished. And Moana’s finishing off theirs, they don’t want any more done.”
“We didn’t see the Lees’, did we?” said Jill.
“Got a nice big toetoe on the water’s edge. No, well, nothing to see, that place of his off Manukau Road’s hanging fire.”
“Which end?” asked Dorothy limply.
“The town end, he was a senior lecturer for some time. Technically it’s in One Tree Hill. Doesn’t mean it’s not a late-Fifties box, though, and his asking price is a bit steep. Mightn’t be, if they’d left the Fifties kitsch in, but—”
“Yeah, yeah.” Dorothy looked at his sketch again. “It looks really good,” she murmured.
“Yeah. A cuppa’d hit the spot,” he said brazenly.
“Bill! Polly’s just given you lunch!” cried Jill indignantly.
“Never mind, I wouldn’t mind a cuppa. Come on in,” said Dorothy.
Once inside it dawned that Jill had never seen the place before, so she gave her the grand tour. Ending up back in the giant living-room with the giant plate-glass windows and the view of the Inlet.
“Er—south-east?” discerned Jill delicately, squinting at the view.
Dorothy sat down with a sigh. “He would choose to build here. It does get the morning sun. There, see?” she said, pointing to her giant Carrano palms neatly positioned in the window.
Jill smiled faintly. “Mm.”
Since Bill had officiously gone off to the kitchen to make the tea, Dorothy then swallowed, and said cautiously: “Um, so you’ve seen Polly?”
Jill sighed. “You’ve known for months, have you?”
“I’ve known that Alan was very keen on the idea, yes. He wants to expand into languages and linguistics, make the place a centre of excellence in the South Pacific.”
“It could certainly do with one of those.”
“Mm. I’ve only known about Polly’s decision for a few days.”
“Yes. It’s all right, I’m not about to blame you,” said Jill heavily.
There was a short silence.
“I’m terribly sorry, Dorothy!” gasped Jill, reddening. “I suppose I ought to be saying congratters, or some such.”
Dorothy grinned at her. “Ta. Though on contemplating the wilderness he’s let grow up around the dump, I’m not so sure! No, well, I will turn the foreshore into a rock garden, and Thomas can choke on it,” she said firmly.
“Good. The front sweep’s all right,” offered Jill kindly.
“Yes. I shudder to think what he spent on those so-called pavers, but at least they’re solid, with solid cement between them. I don’t think he’s heard of moss or slime, but I’m biding my time until next winter. Thought we might put some whopper flax bushes out there, whaddaya think?”
“Native flax?” said Jill feebly, even though that was always what was meant. Phormium tenax. It had become, over the past twenty years or so while Jill hadn’t been looking, quite a popular garden plant with the upwardly-mobile middle classes.
“No, the hybridised red-leaved sort,” said Dorothy with a wicked twinkle in her eye.
Jill broke down and had an awful sniggering fit. And was able to sit up and drink her tea quite happily, even though Michaels had stewed it horribly.
After that she felt strong enough to admit: “This jaunt up the Inlet is part of my tour of the complete makeover—not to say takeover—of Carter’s Bay and environs. That mall on the main road’s horrible, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. –Moll,” corrected Dorothy solemnly.
Jill sniggered slightly, in spite of herself.
“There is talk of a new housing development, out on the southern side of the primary school,” Dorothy added. “Medium density, medium priced, suitable for young families willing to put their souls in hock for the next seventy years.”
“They’d certainly get more use out of the school than those Jersey cows on the southern side of it now,” she conceded heavily.
“That reminds me, how’s Catherine and the wee boy?” asked Bill.
Jill blinked, and reminded herself hastily that after all, he was a father of four and grandfather of one.
“Blooming,” replied Dorothy, smiling. “Talking of takeovers, why not pop over there, if you’ve nothing better to do? Actually I was thinking I might go on over myself, I’ve got a recipe I promised Catherine. It’s one of Mum’s—Kathleen enclosed it in her last letter, before either of you start.”
“What for?” asked Bill simply.
“Guava jelly.”
He recoiled. “Ugh!”
“No: funnily enough the jelly’s lovely.”
“It does use EnZed guavas, does it?” he croaked.
“Those little sour red ones, yep.”
“Sour and sicky. If Catherine’s looking for them, she can have the lot off our bush,” said Jill, shuddering.
“She’s got a whole hedge of them, but I dare say all contributions will be welcomed. But I probably should warn you that she’ll insist on giving you five dozen litre-jars of the stuff in return,” said Dorothy with a twinkle in her eye.
“Cor, is she one of them?” asked Bill with interest. “Thought that went out with—well, since the subject came up earlier, Polly’s mum’s the last I heard of.”
“Yes! She’s Dorothy’s pink woman!” shouted his esteemed colleague. “Where have you been, these last two years or so?”
“MIT, largely. In that case, let’s get on over, she’ll undoubtedly give us afternoon tea,” he said insouciantly.
There was some heavy breathing and muttering, not to say injunctions to each other to ignore him, but the ladies finally got their acts together and headed down to the runabout with him, Dorothy remembering at the last moment to grab the recipe that was the ostensible reason for her trip.
Jill hadn’t been down Toetoe Bay Road for ages and ages. She concentrated on her driving, trying to ignore Bill’s and Dorothy’s injunctions to look at this, that or the other evidence of super-duperising by the ruddy Iceman or them as were under his influence. At the bottom of the road she looked dazedly at the absence of cream-sided, large-eyed cow, as to the left, and the presence of house skeleton, a couple of small vans, a large concrete mixer, and half a dozen sweating navvies, as to the right.
“That’s Kevin Goode’s new house,” explained Bill helpfully from the back seat. “See, that’s him and his broth—”
“Yes!”
“It’s a deterrent,” explained Dorothy helpfully as, Bill having hopped out and punched a button, the gate swung open and Jill began: “Why—?” and then thought better of it.
“Forget it,” she sighed. “What’s he done with the cow, or don’t I dare ask?”
“Cows: there’s two, now. Buttercup and Daisy,” said Bill placidly. “They’re round the back, in the orchard. Self-manuring system, ya see. Seems to be working quite well. Dunno whether they’ll have a go at the buds on the fruit trees next spring, mind you.”
Jill got out groggily. She looked dazedly at the house, the neat flowerbeds between the verandah and the fully paved cream front sweep, the neat little cream-paved path leading off to the right…
“You’re right,” said Bill cheerfully. “Two or three years back this was a broken-down old dump that hadn’t seen a lick of paint since Adam was a lad.”
“So it is the old house?” she said dazedly.
“Yeah, ’course. Still got the old sash windows, see?” Casually he outed with the penknife, mounted the verandah, and prodded one of the window frames in question. “Solid as a rock. Kauri.”
Jill didn’t even hiss at him for sticking knives into someone else’s property, she just nodded groggily.
Bill then rang the bell and to boot shouted: “OY! Catherine!”
They waited. The only sounds were of hammering and some sort of power tool, floating up from the building site to their rear, and the faint, regular plash of breaking wavelets to their right.
“Perhaps she’s out,” said Jill at last.
“Mm? She might be round the back. Does this look like a word to you?” replied Dorothy.
Obligingly Jill peered at the recipe. “Nope.”
“Come on,” decided Bill, “let’s go round the back. Give you a good look at the stables and the pool, anyway.”
They went round the back. Groggily Jill admired the view of spick-and-span stable block and the horse paddock next to it with the palomino mother and daughter in it.
“See?” Bill then said blandly. “Pool.”
Jill had to swallow. Beyond the patio, a large flat area contained one small blue plastic inflatable paddling-pool, sitting on a stretch of rough grass. It was currently hosting two ducks of the Muscovy variety, and one of the yellow plastic. “What happened?” she said feebly. “Have the pool suppliers gone broke?”
“No,” said Dorothy mildly. “It finally dawned on Alan that Catherine had developed a habit of turning green and bursting into tears every time the word ‘pool’ was mentioned. So he’s given it away. This is going to become a courtyard garden on the lines of your average Alhambra, but without water features. Well, a small wall fountain.”
“How can it be a courtyard? There’s five acres of lawn and the open sea to the right,” said Jill groggily, staring at her.
“Semi-courtyard, then.”
“Yep,” agreed Bill cheerfully. “There’ll be a wing along that side, extending that extension, with a verandah on the inner side, and then—well, you or me would call it an extension of the patio, with some potted lemon trees, Jill,” he said kindly.
“Yes. It’ll go right up to the garage wall over on the right, there, and the lion’s face will dribble water from the garage wall.” Dorothy shrugged, as Jill gaped at the stretch of ground that would thus be semi-courtyarded. “Well, it will be relatively dry for the kids to play on.”
“I won’t ask what’s wrong with good old EnZed grass,” she said with a sigh.
“No, don’t,” agreed Bill kindly, patting her shoulder with a meaty paw. “It may never happen, too.”
Jill snorted richly.
“Well, the pool hasn’t,” said Dorothy mildly.
“Er—true. Is someone going to knock on the back door?” she said limply.
Bill obligingly knocked. Nothing happened, so he opened it, stuck his head in and shouted: “OY! Catherine! Anybody home? –There’s some cakes on the table,” he reported.
Dorothy stuck her head in beside his. “And five thousand jars. She’ll be down the back, picking fruit. Come on.”
They came on. The lovely old orchard, Jill discerned groggily, was cordoned off, not by a spruce picket fence, not by ten thousand yards of hugely expensive horse railings, but by an unwound roll of wire-netting, just like anybody’s. It was sort of half-heartedly supported by stakes of the sort generally sold at garden centres for supporting hefty tomato plants or runner beans. She watched groggily as Dorothy went up to a large tree and skilfully detached one end of the said wire netting from it.
“This is supposed to be temporary, Jill,” explained Bill calmly. “Though on anybody else’s property ya wouldn’t believe that for an instant.”
“Er—no: be here until Hell freezes over or slightly longer,” she recognised groggily. “I can see it’s to keep the cows in, but not why he allowed it.”
“He’s got a lot on his plate, not to mention all those late nights, with the kid,” said Bill smoothly.
Jill nodded groggily as she tottered through the Iceman’s apology for a cow fence and Bill hitched it back onto the tree. Two Jersey cows and two calves were discerned grazing placidly. Just as she was admiring them from a safe distance a giant Jersey bullock came up and looked at her. Jill stood her ground, God knew why.
“It’s a pet. Let him lick your hand,” prompted Bill.
“Bill, if one does that, the things follow you forever and a day, didn’t I tell you that horror story about that time we went fishing—” She stopped; Bill had let the giant thing lick his hand and then given it a hefty thump on the rump, meanwhile shouting: “Get OFF!” and it had wandered off. “It’s a pet,” he repeated.
“Yeah, yeah.”
“The kid’s named it Biggles.”
Jill choked.
Bill grinned, and shouted: “OY! Catherine!”
“I’m just down here!” came a faint yodel in reply.
So they went down there… Ye gods and little fishes! Had Polly once mentioned casually that Catherine had a passionfruit vine at the back of her orchard? Jill just stood and goggled.
“She’s got one or two passionfruit here,” said Bill blandly.
“Ye gods,” she said in awe.
“It’s nice and sheltered,” said Catherine, pushing a curl behind her ear under a giant battered straw sunhat, and smiling shyly. “Hullo.”
At this stage it apparently dawned on Dorothy that Catherine in all probability hadn’t spoken to Jill since the bloody engagement party, so she hurriedly performed introductions.
“I know,” said Catherine, blushing. “You’re the lady that was at university at Cambridge with Mayli’s mother.”
“Uh—yeah,” she muttered.
“How is she?”
“Wendy?” said Jill weakly. “Not too bad. Mayli had a note from her just last week. Seems to like Florida.”
Catherine allowed that that was good and admitted under interrogation by Bill that she was picking windfalls and blackberries—Jill looked at the giant tangle of them in silent horror; didn’t the Iceman realise they were considered an invasive weed by the farming community?—and a few passionfruit because she was going to make some passionfruit butter for June Blake Cakes, and some for Molly and Mike Collingwood because their vine wasn’t as big as hers. She greeted the Perkins family guava jelly recipe with great pleasure, said that the word Dorothy hadn’t been able to decipher was setting—“setting consistency”, see?—and admitting it was just as well they’d come, or she’d have forgotten the time, led the way placidly back to the house. Though not without urging a basketful of passionfruit on them. On the way she casually gathered a handful of runner beans, noting: “I think I’ll do that salady thing that Alan likes. It’s easy: you just cook them slightly and pour the salad dressing on them and put them in the fridge.”
“The result being what Revill’s would call Haricots verts vinaigrette and charge ten bucks a throw for,” sighed Jill. “Yeah.”
“Not ten!” said Catherine in horror.
“I kid you not. So if you were thinking of selling Adrian a few bushels of your beans, Catherine, feel free to charge him twenty dollars a bushel.”
“Do you think he might want some?” she said hopefully. “They’ve gone mad this year, it’s all that cow manure Alan put on them when he was trying to prove how much good the cows’d do the orchard.”
“Er—mm. Well, I’m sure he would, Gretchen and I had dinner there last week and he was moaning like billyo about the wholesale price of beans.”
“Good, I’ll give him some,” she said mildly.
Jill smiled feebly.
What was left of the afternoon was taken up by inspecting the baby, in Bill’s case changing the baby and sitting him on his knee for the next hour, and by helping Kevin and Barry Goode and Barry’s three labourers to consume a giant afternoon tea. All the males present bar none seemed to take this last as a complete matter of course but Jill was, frankly, flabbergasted.
“So?” said Dorothy with a smile in her voice as, having made sure the gate had closed behind them, they set off for home laden with ripe passionfruit, fresh farm eggs, fresh farm cream, an unpaid-for June Blake sponge each, and five bushels of runner beans, Jill having incautiously admitted that theirs weren’t doing nearly so well this year and she’d mention the idea of cow manure to Gretchen.
“I don’t know, frankly, Dorothy,” admitted Jill weakly.
“Balls!” said Bill robustly from the back seat. “Hey, did she say we could have these other cakes if Revill’s doesn’t want— Only asking,” he said, subsiding, as they both shouted: “NO!”
“Anyway, she’s happy as Larry,” he said, rallying. “Written all over her. Looks blooming, eh?”
Catherine’s hair had looked like a birch broom in a fit once the sunhat was removed. It hadn’t seemed to occur to her that she might comb it. Her naturally pinkish face had been slightly sunburnt as to the nose and chin. And she had been wearing a faded pink print frock, about two sizes too small in the bust and liberally adorned with blackberry smears. So Jill just nodded weakly when Dorothy advised: “The Y chromosome. Ignore it.”
“Come on, Jill, ya gotta admit the Iceman seems to have done one thing right, at any rate!” he urged.
“Yes,” agreed Dorothy. “Don’t forget to drop me off,” she reminded Jill.
“What? Oh, of course, I can go down Sir George Grey Boulevard, can’t I?”
“That’s right,” she agreed placidly.
Jill sighed but did steer for the Sir G.G. road rather than dumping Dorothy back in Kingfisher Bay at the mercy of the Michaels runabout. “Want the campus?” she said, not thinking.
“In this gear?” replied Alan Kincaid’s University Librarian in horror.
No, of course not: she merely looked normal. Swallowing a sigh, Jill drove on past GATE 1. And GATE 2. And GATE 3. And GATE 4. Not remarking on the fact that the last two led to nothing.
At Baranski’s woodsmanly mansion the woodsman in person came wandering out to meet them. “There you are.”
“Are you back?” replied his life-partner presumptive.
“Why not? It’s getting on for teatime,” he replied calmly.
“He’s practising the Kiwi vernacular, don’t ask why,” said Dorothy heavily, getting out of the car with her June Blake cake, her fresh eggs and cream, her beans and her passionfruit.
“Been over to Alan and Catherine’s, have you?” said Thomas, smiling.
“Yes. And expect five dozen litre-jars of guava jelly any minute now,” she warned.
“Guava? But surely New Zealand isn’t tropical enough—”
“Don’t ask. Did you remember to go to the supermarket? –No. Right, get the car. –Thanks for the ride,” she said, bending down to Jill’s window with a grin. “They are all right, you know.”
“Mm. Well, on the evidence of the cow fence, possibly they are,” she conceded cautiously.
“And the pool,” said Bill, getting out of the back seat and coming to insert his hairy, breathing, black-singleted presence at Jill’s side.
“Not the Kincaids, is this?” said Thomas in confusion, coming up to Bill’s window. “Is this a case of the dog that barked in the night?”
Very fortunately, before anyone else might have felt they had to reply to this Dorothy shouted: “NO! And get the bloody Jag out, we’re down to our last roll of bog paper and there’s NO MILK!”
Winking, Thomas ambled off towards the garage.
“She could have picked those things up while were we in Carter’s Bay,” noted Bill as they drove back up Sir George Grey Boulevard.
“Not and co-habit bearably with him,” replied Jill firmly.
“No-o… Isn’t that presupposing that he deliberately didn’t bother to go to the supermarket?”
“He did. Whatever his conscious mind might be telling him.”
“Er—ya could be right.”
“I am right.”
“Mm,” he agreed mildly, winding his window right down. “Lovely day, eh?”
“Yes,” agreed Jill, sighing. “Yes.”
The official June Blake cakes and sixteen bushels of free runner beans were then dropped off at Revill’s, Bill leading the way apparently without a second thought to the back door. That was, not the entrance to the courtyard, but the back door. That was, the door that opened onto a minute lobby or porch, about big enough for a pair of gumboots and a furled umbrella, and then the actual kitchen door. Preparations for all sorts of delicious things seemed to be well under way in there, and Jill apologised grovellingly for the interruption, but Adrian, who seemed to be in a very good mood, merely waved this away.
“We had a bonzer afternoon tea with your old mate Kevin Goode,” she said evilly to Martin Wolfe in the local vernacular.
“Mrs Kincaid’s are always corker,” he agreed placidly.
Breathing heavily, Jill grabbed Bill’s elbow, refused absolutely to hear of anyone’s feeding them on anything whatsoever, and dragged him out. “The woman must be mad!” she said, breathing heavily on the pavement outside the side bar.
“Eh?”
“Catherine Bur— Kincaid, feeding that lot of bludging males on sponge cake and scones every ruddy afternoon!”
Bill smiled just a little. “You really don’t get it, do you?”
“Get what?” said Jill crossly.
“Come and have a drink—I know you’re driving.” He led her into the side bar and got her a shandy without asking her if she wanted one. “The world,” he said dreamily, having sunk half a tankard of lager, “is by and large composed of two sexes—”
“You can cut that right out!”
“Look, since you were brooding on the long-ago not so long since, ya might cast your mind back to when Polly took up with Jake. Some of us thought it’d be a ruddy disaster, and some of us thought that, never mind her statistical linguistics crap on the one side or his corporate empire crap on the other, the two of them might manage to work it out ruddy well, because he’s a very male joker of his sex, and she’s a very female woman of her sex. And before you start, I’m damned if I can remember which side you or me or Angie were on, all right?”
“Uh—all right. Nor can I, actually,” she admitted limply. “I think I wavered. Gretchen was all on the side of Aryan logic, I remember that much, but I’m damned if I can remember which side that was, either.”
“Mm.” He took another draught of beer. “Aah! –I’d say Alan and Catherine were ideally suited. You ever asked Polly her opinion about him as a bloke, as opposed to an ex-Structuralist that long since deserted that ship and a Business Studies smoothy?”
“Uh—yeah.”
“There you are, then. Catherine’s the sort of woman that actually likes and wants something that male—and yes, there are thousands that don’t: they just wanna run the whole shebang and treat the hubby like another kid and/or nuisance, and don’t tell me you’ve never noticed that syndrome! And very female women that want something that male actually enjoy being surrounded by a crowd of blokes that they’re feeding on home-made cake and scones, Jill.”
“Just stop patronising me,” ordered Jill heavily.
“All right, I’ve stopped,” he said mildly.
Jill thought it over, scowling.
“See? She gave every evidence of thoroughly enjoying herself, not to say being in her element, for the entire afternoon, didn’t she?”
“She was pink enough, yeah. All right, she did. I take back a certain percentage of the male bludger bit.”
“You can take back the mad bit, too: it’s merely hormonal—chromosomal, if ya like. On both sides: dunno when I’ve spent a pleasanter afternoon,” he said, smiling reminiscently.
Jill was now rather pink around the edges herself. “All right,” she said shortly. “It’s sunk in, thanks.” She drained her shandy. “This doesn’t prove the Iceman is the right bloke for her, however.”
“No. Doubt if anything could prove that, except time. But I will just say this: in spite of their obvious differences, the way their minds work is a lot alike. I realise she strikes you as a scatty little fluffy dame, but she’s actually got quite a logical mind. It’s just not on the same wavelength as the minds of the rest of the populace—and,” said Bill on a pointed note, glancing round The Quays’ side bar’s complement of Nineties trendies, “personally I’d say that’s not a bad thing. I dunno how much A.H. Kincaid you’ve read, but his mind’s like that, too. Though far more analytical, I’m not denying that.”
Jill looked at him in frowning silence.
“I’m not putting you on,” he said uneasily.
“I do know that, Bill,” she admitted. “Uh—well, that’s damned good to know, actually.”
Bill had thought it might be, yeah; far more than what he personally considered the much more relevant point of Catherine’s being a very feminine woman and Alan’s being a very masculine man. He forbore to eye her drily.
She drove him back to the Kingfisher Marina in a fair state of glumness, nevertheless, not neglecting to point out acidly as they went: “Tastefully trendy Colonial BNZ without video shop; shiny supermarket opposite space for next shiny supermarket; shiny Toyota yard; actual bakery; flaming Iceman-ised Post Office clock that’s working; ruddy moll.”
Bill said nothing until they drew up near the boat ramp. Then he said: “Technically it wasn’t the Iceman that got the P.O. clock going, it was me and Jack Perkins, the ruddy thing was driving us crackers. Though he certainly gave us the go-ahead.”
“Thus completing the entire takeover of Carter’s Bay. Why am I not surprised?” said Jill dully.
“You could call it the takeover of Carter’s Bay, if you like. Only drag your mind away from Zola, for a moment.”
Jill knew he was very literate, for an engineer, so she didn’t stare at the French lit. reference, she merely said: “Why?”
“You’re thinking,” said Bill with a twinkle in his eye, “of La Conquête de Plassans.”
“I most certainly am!” she agreed with feeling.
“Yeah. But in the light of that swimming-pool that never eventuated, not to mention that blue kids’ paddling-pool sitting in the middle of that stretch of bumpy grass-grub-infested back lawn like anyone’s, have a think about the uses of the English preposition ‘of’, Jill. Not to say, the English alternative, the use of the possessive. See ya!” He slammed the car door and went down the ramp to his runabout, whistling.
Jill drove off, scowling. He was talking through the little hole in the back of that engineer’s head of his, as usual. Um, La Conquête de Carter’s Bay. So what? That was what it was, all right, the complete and utter takeover of Carter’s… Jill gulped. “Hah, hah,” she said weakly.
Anyway, he was wrong! Look at all the trendy shit the poor little town was now full of, thanks to the Iceman!
She drove on, carefully taking the motorway on-ramp. After quite some time of refusing to contemplate the thing at all she said under her breath: “The takeover of Carter’s Bay.” He was wrong, see, because that still sounded… Cautiously she tried: “The Carter’s Bay takeover.”
All alone in the southbound lanes of the giant and still unneeded motorway, Jill gulped. Well, that cow fence was certainly indicative, likewise the paddling-pool. And the grass grub, always supposing that the Iceman knew what it was. All right, then, linguistically you could take it two ways and—and in reality? It was impossible to envisage Alan Kincaid as anything but spruce and efficient, but the more Jill thought about that cow fence, the more she was forced to admit—not that Carter’s Bay had won, no, nor anything like it. But that, just possibly, he had softened. Or, put it like this, a slight thaw had set in! She sniggered, and without consciously intending to, began working out how many of Catherine’s passionfruit she might manage to get onto that superb sponge, along with the cream, of course, before Gretchen spotted her and frugally stopped her.
Later that evening Gretchen of course claimed to have known all along that the pink woman would soften Alan Kincaid up, but Jill just nodded vaguely and concentrated on homemade passionfruit sponge with real Jersey cream…
“The Puriri Chronicles” continue with:
Another Country
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