Happy New Year

27

Happy New Year

    Phoebe woke up at what felt like crack of dawn on New Year’s Day. Possibly the crack of dawn feeling was occasioned partly by the slight hangover, which was consequent on S. Winkelmann’s having insisted they consume the local fizzy plonk he’d purchased instead of nipping back into town to Phoebe’s to retrieve that bottle of the real stuff that she’d purchased. And possibly it was occasioned partly by the fact that early morning sunlight was pouring in through the high, uncurtained wall of glass in his attic room and the fact that IT WAS THE CRACK OF DAWN!

    Also the S. Winkelmann form was not at this precise moment present, which didn’t help. Before she could draw breath to moan, or bellow “Where the Hell are you?” or something of that sort, his head appeared at the top of the spiral staircase, grinning.

    If the place had been Phoebe’s, something would have done about that staircase: the effect wasn’t noticeable in the warmer weather, but in winter, as Phoebe had now had plenty of time to find out, it provided the attic room with a piercing bloody draught, as it led from the cramped back regions of the shop downstairs (that was, from between the bloody back door and the staff bog) right into Sol’s living-room. Well, only room.

    True, he was putting in a divider between this room and his kitchenette. True, he had already put in a rudimentary bathroom, which he was now in the process of doing up. And if he had not done so, the place would not have seen Phoebe for dust, as she had fervently assured him. Sol had replied in mild surprize that he wouldn’t dream of asking a lady to sleep over in a place with no bathroom. Phoebe, to her inner fury, hadn’t been able to tell whether he was getting at her or not.

    “Hi, Happy Noo Year,” said the head, grinning. “Bought you a noospaper.”

    “Happy Noo Year,” responded Phoebe limply. “The Herald?” she croaked as he tossed it onto the divan. “God, where from?” She took another look at him. He’d had a shave, though it was true he was merely wearing crumpled denim shorts and rubber jandals. “You’ve been in to Puriri,” she croaked.

    “Nope, only Carter’s Bay,” he said mildly, perching on the edge of the bed.

    “You mean Carter’s Bay is open at crack of dawn on New Year’s Day?” croaked Phoebe.

    “Sure! Well, lessen Jack and May Swadling decide to close the dairy and go on up to visit with her sister in the Bay of Islands. And anyroad, it ain’t crack of dawn. Say, sorry, honey, did I wake you?” he said sheepishly.

    “No, Winkelmann, the head consequent on that plonk we drank last night plus the fact that the sun gets up at crack of dawn woke me.”

    Sol didn’t remark on the “sun” one, he’d heard it all before, and she knew he couldn’t afford to curtain the huge triangular window in the gable. Well, not that and fix up the bathroom and finish the kitchenette and— A few things like that. He got up and said: “I’ll get you something for the head.”

    “No, don’t bother, I’ll do it; I’ve got to go to the bog anyway,” sighed Phoebe.

    “Honey, soon as Lame Higgins can manage it, we’ll get that upstairs toilet plumbed in—”

    “Yeah, yeah,” sighed Phoebe, assuming her dressing-gown, even though you’d have to be over fifteen feet tall to be able to see in through his wall of glass, and trailing off to the downstairs bog. And utterly refraining on the subject of “Lame” Higgins. Sol was adamant that was what the Carter’s Bay’s plumber’s cobbers all called him. As Mr Higgins didn’t limp, possibly his real name was Liam, or even Lamont, but Phoebe had never tried to find out, because for one thing the knowledge definitely wouldn’t be worth the effort and for another thing she had already fallen into the trap of exposing herself to Sol’s injured defence of “cobbers” as “one o’ them gen-yew-wine Noo Zillund vernackalars. –Huh? –Oh, yeah, sure: Anty-pohdean vernackalars, yup.”

    Mr Higgins would apparently turn up to assist Sol with the plumbing when he felt like it. This attitude was pretty well endemic to New Zealand plumbers and Sol had assured Phoebe fervently it was a world-wide trait, far’s he could tell. He would have done it all himself, Phoebe had no doubt, except that strangely enough it was illegal for unregistered persons to plumb in toilets in New Zealand.

    And to think that Phoebe had always heretofore unthinkingly assumed the liberal-pinko-leftie attitude that we were an overregulated country! Just showed the dangers of assuming any attitude without thinking why you were doing it, didn’t it? An object lesson, really. The country being what it was, it was also an ultra-conservative attitude, but that was another story.

    After all the exercise of going up- and downstairs, not, to say to the medicine cabinet in the rudimentary upstairs bathroom in search of aspirin, she felt slightly more awake and was able to say, as she crawled back into bed: “Anyway, why in God’s name did you buy the Herald?”

    “Ain’t it traditional?” he said in an injured voice.

    “A round trip. of 10 K or so at crack of dawn to buy an unreadable rag that you don’t want to read,” acknowledged Phoebe, opening it, “is one of our great Anty-pohdean Noo Zillund traditions, yup.”

    “I ain’t never seen a Noo Year’s Honour’s List,” explained Sol sadly, sitting down beside her shins.

    “For God’s sake,” groaned Phoebe.

    “No: honest!” he said, all expectant-like.

    “Well, it won’t be as exciting as last year’s,” she noted grimly, giving him the back sections of the paper. “It may not be in those sections,” she noted. “And before you immerse yourself in the prices of second-hand Hondas and the line-up for the Big Race, why does this front page have sums all over it?”

    Sol replied with the utmost placidity: “May Swadling cain’t add in her head, thought you knowed that?”

    Phoebe, as he very well knew, could not stand either the laconic proprietor of the Carter’s Bay dairy or his pleasant wife. In fact on one particularly bitter occasion, when she’d been in search of vegetables and wholemeal bread, and had gone to the little shop, which of course was the only place apart from the brand-new Garden Centre that was open on a Saturday morning in Carter’s Bay, she had been heard, though fortunately only in the car, to declare that Jack Swadling was a lazy bastard not merely imbued with but marinated in laissez-faire, and that May was a mindless nullity with nothing in her head beyond the perpetuation of her genes and knitting patterns. Sol had merely returned to this that he thought the “knitting patterns” was a weak note. And he guessed the Swadlings weren’t that interested in selling fresh produce, they had a yard and so, he guessed, did the most of Carter’s Bay. Whereat Phoebe had replied acidly: “You mean ‘vege garden’, you Yankee twit. All right, then, we’ll have stewed beef and white bread for dinner, and if your colon doesn’t like it, too bloody bad.” –It had been one of those winter’s days when the wind had been howling up the spiral staircase.

    Phoebe immersed herself in the front section of the Herald without remarking further on May Swadling’s sums. Or deigning to notice his reply, really.

    Sol searched eagerly through the back sections. After some time he reported sadly: “It ain’t here.”

    Phoebe was now immersed in a cretinous dissertation on the causes of the Gulf War which appeared to be composed solely of chunks out of Reuters’ bulletins and out-of-date third-hand reportage gleaned from CNN. Mostly from CNN from nowhere near the front line. Like, Tel Aviv. “Mm?”

    “It ain’t here.”

    “Perhaps they forgot it, this year.”

    Sol glared.

    Sighing, Phoebe said: “Have you looked through this section?” Pointing at it where it lay discarded on the divan.

    “Uh—” Sol eyed the smudged photograph of holidaymakers on Takapuna Beach, obligatory toddler in nothing but a sunhat and nose-paint well to the fore. In front of all those hugely expensive trendy condos that defaced the beachfront of Takapuna Beach. In fact, if Phoebe looked closely she could have pointed out the condo that belonged to their very own Clive Williams; yes, the one who drove a Porsche, donated “English” (or possibly Spanish) sherry to Meg O’Connell and Bill Coggins, and was on St Ursie’s Board of Governors: the very same. Of course he was gay and would never produce offspring to grace St Ursie’s, but on the other hand his family owned half of Remmers shops and he was one of Those Williamses. And, as the sherry indicated, very good-natured. Also civic-minded. And he let their playing-field to them at a peppercorn rent, what was more.

    “Behind Clive’s condo,” she said patiently.

    “Uh—oh. I thought this was just kinda the holiday section or something.”

    Phoebe snatched up another discarded back section of the Herald with a trembling hand. “NO! This is the holiday section!” she shouted, pointing with a trembling hand to the words “HOLIDAY SECTION” that adorned the front page of this section above the half-page photograph of a two-storeyed caravan.

    “Oh—yeah.” Looking bewildered, Sol turned past two full pages of recipes with large smudged photographs, a half page of book and film reviews (it wasn’t the Entertainment Section, though, as today wasn’t Saturday), got momentarily lost in an interview, complete with smudged photographs, of the famous “New Zealand born” film star Adam McIntyre, who was coming out to play Oberon in the University Drama Club’s summer production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream—it still wasn’t the Entertainment Section, though—eventually determined it wasn’t an interview at all, it was a fudged-together kind of something based on a press release and what the writer had read in a fan magazine, and finally fought his way through to—

    “Jeez,” he said dazedly.

    “They’ve knighted the last P.M.,” hazarded Phoebe. “And the last Minister of Finance,” she added hurriedly.

    “Weren’t they the same?” he said confusedly.—Phoebe choked.—“Uh, wal, almost... Sheesh,” he said deeply.

    “They’ve knighted Evan Black. So as he’ll match his brother,” hazarded Phoebe into a very out-of-date article on the leader page that was, strangely, almost literate. Oh. Pinched from The Guardian. She should have known.

    “Huh? No-o... That’s your K.C.M.G., is it?” he said confusedly.

    “What? Oh, God: give it here,” she said resignedly.

    After she’d translated all the initials for him he went back to it happily.

    Phoebe stood the reading-out of choice bits quite well, for a time. When it came to the Head of the Education Department getting a gong apparently on the strength of his department’s having been entirely disbanded, however, she took a deep breath and said: “That’ll do. If Someone was to make a pot of coffee I might even struggle past the odd smudged photo of New Year’s Eve revelry and get as far as that section myself. Or even the Holiday Section.”

    “Huh? Oh, sure. This section ain’t got a name, you noticed that? –Say, mountain guiding sure does seem to be an important profession, here. Well, I guess it’s dangerous, an’ all. This lady looks real old, though. Maybe she’s just on the administrative side, huh?”—There was a puzzled pause. Not only on the American side.—“They wouldn’t be tourist guides, would they?” he said dubiously.

    As far as Phoebe knew, Guide Rangi had got her gong about five hundred years back. And there was no other tourist guide who’d become a household name by virtue of having lived to be five hundred. She snatched the section off him with a trembling hand.

    “GUIDES!” she shouted. “GUIDES, you blithering idiot!”

    “Yeah.” Sol peered over her shoulder. “‘Prominent in guiding circles,’” he quoted.

    Phoebe drew a deep breath and closed her eyes. “Girr-rull Scouts,” she said carefully.

    Sol gulped.

    “You must have—”

    “Nup.”

    “Go and make the coffee,” she said tiredly.

    Sol went off meekly to make the coffee.

    Phoebe immediately immersed herself in the New Year’s Hons. Evan Black hadn’t yet been bashed on the shoulder, how surprizing. Oh, probably had it lined up for Queen’s Birthday. There were no names she knew... Well, there were plenty of names she knew, but not personally. –Hang on: Brownloe? Good grief, Ralph’s off-sider! That was quick work. Well, it was only a very minor gong, true, but… Who had pulled what strings? Phoebe wondered without much interest. Possibly Moira Brownloe also was prominent in guiding circles? Her name was so far down the list that the paper didn’t say. Oh, and while she thought of it— Phoebe looked again, but Hugh Morton’s name wasn’t mentioned. That no doubt explained the move to the bachelor pad at trendy Willow Plains: the wife must have given up on him as a bad job.

    Phoebe had had this gratuitous information in re Hugh Morton, whom she didn’t really know at all, from Ralph during the last week of school when she’d been lunching at The Golden Lamb with Westby, the Queen Mother, Clive, and assorted other members of the Board of Governors. She had felt it tactful not to remind Ralph at that particular instant that she wasn’t speaking to him. She was conscious of a fleeting urge to commune with Ralph on the insignificant subjects of Moira Brownloe’s having got a gong and Hugh Morton’s not having got bashed on the shoulder. Because S. Winkelmann, Esq., sure ’nuff wasn’t interested in that sort of socialite drivel, nup. –No, and nor he should be!

    Looking firm, Phoebe turned back to the article on Adam McIntyre and the smudged photograph of the best pair of male legs she’d ever laid eyes on in all her puff. Even the smudging couldn’t disguise ’em. What the actor was supposed to be got up as the paper didn’t bother to say. The university’s outdoor Shakespeare production might be worth going to this year, after all. True, St Ursie’s had made its usual booking to take the upper forms to a Wednesday matinée, but Phoebe didn’t usually bother to go. And certainly not to a schools’ matinée. –Come to think of it, since it was A Midsummer Night’s Dream, even the lower secondary forms might be able to sit through it without falling asleep, listening non-stop to their Walkmans, or fidgeting, chattering, giggling and fighting throughout. Well, possibly not, but it would do the little buggers good. Phoebe got out of bed and went over to Sol’s phone. It was only an extension of the line to the store but at least it was upstairs.

    From the kitchenette behind the divider, which was up in skeletal form, but as yet lacked its cupboards and was quite unpainted, Sol heard her address her own answering-machine as follows: “Remind Helen that the lower uppers ought to go to a matinée of the Dream this year. Preferably sooner rather than later, it’ll be booked solid with Legs McIntyre in it.”

    He sighed a little. She had this charmin’ habit of bouncing up at odd—and sometimes very odd—moments and talking to her own machine. It had been known to turn a guy right off.

    When he heard her get back into bed again he poked his head round the divider and said: “You feel like waffles?”

    Phoebe winced.

    “Oh. I drank as much of it as you did, honey--pie,” he said cautiously.

    “You must have a harder head. Or possibly you’re just more used to bad fizz,” said Phoebe from inside the Herald. Not in anything that could have been called a pointed tone, but…

    “Don’t let me stop you from having waffles, though,” she added politely.

    Sol retired behind the divider again. There wasn’t no point in making waffles for one, all that work and mess... He squeezed some orange juice and said hopefully, bringing it over to her: “Well, would you like toast?”

    “Mm? Oh—ta,” said Phoebe absently, taking the juice. “God, have you seen these house prices? I knew they were ludicrous, but this is just plain silly!”

    The property section was only small, as today wasn’t Saturday. “Oh—sure, those,” he said, peering at several smudged photographs of large and hideous architectural abortions. “Didn’t you tell me Pakuranga was real pricy, though?”

    “Yeah. And the sections are real small, and apparently getting smaller. Look,” she added, turning back: “here’s a feature on your very own Kingfisher Bay!”

    Why had he kinda hoped that by now it mighta become their very own Kingfisher Bay? Swallowing a sigh, Sol looked at the smudged photographs of a Spanish-look architectural abortion, mainly triple garage far’s he could see, a Tudor-look architectural abortion, mainly triple garage, and a... Dutch-barn look? Okay, Dutch-barn-look architectural abortion, mainly triple garage and roof.

    “Sure do go in for the triple garages, huh? Still, those’ll be the fronts,” he said.

    “Er—yes,” said Phoebe, rolling a startled eye at him. “So as one can drive into the garage from the road, mm.”

   Sol explained helpfully: “These’ll be on the down-side of...” He peered. “Bellbird Crescent and Kuh— Kuh—”

    “Stop coughing. Kahikatea Boulevard,” said Phoebe mildly.

    “Yeah. Uh—‘Kai-hika-tee-ah’?” he echoed carefully. “Says ‘Kah-hika-tee-ah’, here.”

    “New Zuld. As she is spoke. Have we not had words on this subject before, Winkelmann?” she said coldly.

    “Oh, sure: Narrerwokkier,” recalled Sol humbly.

    “Mm,” agreed Phoebe, trying not to laugh.

    “Ya know, it’s impossible to second-guess ’em,” he informed her.

    “Mm,” agreed Phoebe, trying not to laugh.

    “Well, anyroad, what I meant was, the guy that took these photos, he’ll have just stood on the pavement. The fancy sides with them balconies and awnings and pools and stuff, they all look over the bay.”

    “Yeah, yeah,” sighed Phoebe. “Look at the prices, was what I was going to say.”

    “Yuck.”

    “The prices, not the photos, clot!”

    “Yuck,” repeated Sol, grinning.

    Phoebe sighed. “Mm.”

    Sol began cautiously: “That old house at Carter’s Bay—”

    “Is about the size of the Carranos’ bloody mansion and about the price, too, and would take the rest of your natural to get even halfway in order. Of course, you may have an ambition to spend the rest of your natural getting a borer-ridden, tumbledown dump into halfway decent order.”

    “No. I only thought— Well, it’s kinda like Tom and Jemima’s old house, don’t you think?”

    “Yes,” said Phoebe shortly. “Did you mention toast, five hours back?”

    He seemed to have put his foot in it, but he couldn’t figure out if it was because the mention of Tom and Jemima’s house had recalled the unfortunate contretemps at the wedding reception to her, or because it had conjured up a picture of cosy domesticity in the back of beyond which, he had sorta gathered by now, if only obliquely, was not Phoebe’s bag at all; or simply because the idea of him devoting the rest of his natural to doing up an old tumbledown wooden house in the back of beyond was not a picture that appealed to her—he’d already gathered that, too.

    “Huh? Oh—toast. Yeah. You want some?”

    “I might manage a small, thin, very dry piece. Only if the words P,E,A,N,U,T  B,U—”

    “I wasn’t gonna mention ’em!”

    “—are not mentioned in my presence,” finished Phoebe. “And don’t bother about the marg, thanks.”

    Sol tottered towards the kitchenette. “Dry toast?”

    “You got it.”

    “Oh,” he said lamely. “Could have marmalade or strawb—”

    “No!”

    “Honey, it’s the same brand of strawberry jelly they serve up the hill a ways at the Pink and White Manuka Motels in them teensy-weensy plastic packets,” he said plaintively.

    “Liar. You can’t buy that in this country. And for the seventeenth time, it’s ‘jam’, not ‘jelly,’ out here.” She lowered the paper and said over it: “Was that only a rumour of coffee, by the way?”

    “I’m goin’!” He disappeared behind the divider but stuck his head out again to say hopefully: “Say, I woulda said it would be ‘borer-riddled’, not ‘-ridden’.”

    “Borer-ridden,” said Phoebe firmly into the paper.

    Sol went into the kitchenette and poured coffee and made very thin, dry toast. It sure as Hell was difficult: well, first you hadda slice the New Zealand unsliced loaf real thin, that was hard enough, and then the toaster curled it up and reduced it to a black splinter while you only just blinked…

    He came out after some time with it all on a tray. Phoebe said without glancing up: “I told you that kitchenette needs an extractor fan.”

    Like, just where he’d bored the hole in the wall to put in a porthole so’s he could see the slope of the hill and the patch of bush and the Pink and White Manuka Motels he shoulda put in an extractor fan, yeah. She was right, too, that didn’t make it any better. He had opened the porthole to get rid of the fine, choking smoke, but it wasn’t helping any. Well, not noticeably.

    “Honey,” he said cautiously: “I did warn you today was a working day, for me.”

    Phoebe lowered the paper. “Yes. Well, that could explain the yodelling on the front doorstep.”

   Sol gulped. He went to the big front window and squinted in the direction of vertically down. Oh, Hell. “It’s a only a couple of guys: I don’t guess it’ll take a—”

    “Yeah, yeah, far be it from me to impede the turning of the wheels of commerce,” sighed Phoebe. “Is one of these coffees mine?”

    “Huh? Sure, honey,” he said vaguely, making rapidly for the spiral staircase.

    “Which one of these coffees is mine?” Phoebe corrected herself through her teeth, taking one.

    He did come back before his coffee had had time to cool completely but of course he did not get back into bed. Even though in Phoebe’s experience it was true that the majority of the male half of humanity both disliked eating in bed and would not get back into bed in order to eat breakfast if they had once got up and dressed (yea, even in shorts and jandals), she found her choler was rising. She fought it down, recognizing grimly that such minor adjustments had to be made in all relationships and besides, it was undoubtedly mainly her hangover. And undoubtedly almost as mainly the fact that she was still pissed off because he hadn’t let her provide decent champagne which she could perfectly well afford, last night. She also fought down the small, disloyal thought that Ralph Overdale, shit though he was, was the sole representative of the male half of humanity within her sufficiently wide and varied experience who could, would and did get back into bed in order to breakfast after once having dressed.

    Another bloody yachtie pounded on the front door of the store when Sol was swallowing the last of his toast and strawberry jam, so she didn’t get the chance that morning to find out whether he was one of the rather less rare males who would get back into bed for purposes other than breakfasting after they’d got dressed in their shorts and jandals.

    “And how was Christmas down on the farm?” asked David Shapiro with a twinkle in his shrewd hazel eyes.

    “Pretty much like what you’d expect,” admitted Ginny. “Not as bad as I thought it might be, though. Only—” She hesitated.

    “They all seemed smaller and distinctly odder and less important, both in themselves and as factors in your life, than you had expected,” said David, standing aside to let her in.

    “Yes,” agreed Ginny, looking at him in some awe.

    “The syndrome is not confined to yourself alone,” he murmured.

    “No-o... I tried to explain it to Vicki, but she said I was mad and everything was just the same as it always had been.”

    “Well, there you are, then,” said David tranquilly.

    Ginny choked. “Yes!” she gasped.

    David showed her into his sitting-room. Ginny saw to her surprize that he didn’t have his little Japanese table out with tea on it like he usually did for their Tuesday Japanese coaching sessions.

    “Roberta really enjoyed it, mind you,” she admitted.

    “Oh, yes, she went with you, didn’t she? But wouldn’t that be—er—not the shock, but the novelty of the new?” the old man said.

    Ginny opened her mouth. She met David’s sapient eye. “Definitely!” she squeaked, giggling.

    David smiled. “Sit down, my dear, there’s something I want to talk about,” he said.

    Ginny sat obediently on his sofa, looking a little scared.

    David sat down in his big chair. He sighed. “You know I lived in Japan for several years when Micky and Fee were only kids?”

    “Yes, you said. They stayed with their Aunty Ann and went to school here, didn’t they?”

    “Yes. I came home for good when Micky was about seventeen...” He paused.

    “Yes,” said Ginny uncertainly.

    David gave a little sigh. “Well, after my wife died I didn’t exactly live like a saint.”

    “Um—no,” said Ginny cautiously.

    “When I was in Japan I had—uh—I suppose you could call it a regular liaison.”

    After a moment Ginny said: “A mistress?”

    “Mm. She was quite a respectable woman, an ex-geisha.”

    Ginny swallowed.

    “I admit her virginity had been sold to some fat businessman for an enormous sum—that’s quite the usual thing, you know.”

    “Mm.”

    “But whether he didn’t fancy her on a long-term basis, or—” He shrugged. “That’s beside the point. She had had one other lover, but he died. When we met she was working in a most respectable geisha house and was quite free.”

    “Yes,” said Ginny uncertainly.

    “I thought about marrying her, but— Well, it wouldn’t have gone down particularly well with my family; and then I didn’t see how I could possibly get a job in Japan when my term with Foreign Affairs was up. And she didn’t fancy coming back here—and who can blame her!” he added bitterly.

    “Um—no,” agreed Ginny.

    David sighed. “So when Foreign Affairs finally told me that was it for Japan and I could accept a post in darkest bloody Nauru Island or mind an office back home and I told them to get stuffed, we just agreed to call it quits.”

    “Mm. –Ooh, do you mean she wants you to go back to Japan?” she cried.

    “No. No, she died some years ago.”

    “I’m sorry!” gasped Ginny.

    David smiled a little. “Don’t be. She was older than me, and she’d had a very busy and quite a fulfilling life. She was an intelligent woman, and after I came home she started a little business and did very well out of it.”

    “Oh.”

    David grimaced. “But I have heard from Japan.”

    She looked at him with her big intelligent, innocent eyes and he sighed a little and said: “From our daughter.”

    “You mean you had a baby?” squeaked Ginny.

    “Yes. It wasn’t carelessness, it was what she wanted. I did try to point out that children of mixed parentage don’t have a very easy time of it in Japan, but—” He shrugged.

    “What’s her name?” asked Ginny eagerly.

    David smiled. “Mitsuko. She was born the year I left; she’s thirty-two now.”

    “Thirty-two!” she gasped.

    “Mm. Well, nearly seventeen years younger than Micky,” he murmured. He eyed her cautiously and didn’t voice the doubts he’d always had on the subject of Mitsuko’s true paternity. He knew his Hanae had wanted to initiate Micky at the age of sixteen when he’d been over for his Christmas holidays. David had attempted to dissuade her but although she had ostensibly given in, he’d never been absolutely sure... Hanae had been keener than ever on having a child the winter Micky was there, he did know that, and that was when he’d given in on that point.

    Ginny gulped. “Do they know? Micky and Fee?”

    David shrugged. “They do now. I was about to say, Mitsuko’s coming out for a visit.”

    “Ooh, good!” she cried. After a moment she said: “You mean you’ve only just told them?” David nodded and she said: “Help. How did they take it?”

    “Fee isn’t speaking to me—well, nor is Ann, it was news to her, too.”

    Ginny bit her lip.

    “And Micky’s pretending to be frightfully adult and sophisticated about it, but actually he isn’t speaking to me, either.”

    Ginny swallowed.

    “Marianne, however, is delighted,” he said, unable to stop himself smiling. His daughter-in-law was a constant source of pleasure.

    “Isn’t she lovely?” she cried.

    “Yes. Entirely. –It’s really very restful having Ann not talking to me.”

    “It must be!” gasped Ginny, giving in and giggling helplessly.

    David grinned. When she’d recovered he said: “Mitsuko arrives next week. I thought I’d better warn you.”

    “Yes: thanks,” smiled Ginny.

    “I’m thinking about going back with her... She wants me to, and she’s got a lover who’s something pretty high up in their immigration department, so we might swing it. Besides, she can afford to support me, she’s inherited Hanae’s business.” Ginny looked dubious and he twinkled at her and said: “Don’t look like that, you look horribly like Ann. It’s a chain of small restaurants. I’d say they specialize in fish but then so do most small restaurants in Japan.”

    “Yes!” she gasped. “That was a piece of luck,” she added.

    “What, the lover?”—Ginny nodded.—“I would doubt that,” he said drily. “She’s very like her mother, and Hanae would have been more than capable of seeking out the man most likely to be of use.”

    “And seducing him?” said Ginny faintly.

    David shrugged. “Why not? Mitsuko isn’t married, you know, and she’s quite an attractive, healthy woman. She could have got married, I don’t deny it: there were several families more than willing to put up with her mixed blood for the sake of the lucrative restaurants,”—Ginny’s colour rose and she looked very angry—“but fortunately she had far too much strength of mind for that.”

    “Good on her!” said Ginny, still very flushed.

    “Mm.”

    “It’s sad, though,” she murmured.

    “Most things are, when looked at in the requisite perspective. –Shall we take tea, Ginny-san?” he added in Japanese.

    “Yes, please, David-san,” agreed Ginny thankfully.

    When the lesson was over she said sadly: “I’ll miss you awfully if you do go.”

    “I’ll miss you, too,” admitted David, smiling at her. “And Marianne, of course. And Micky, to a certain extent, when he’s not being too bloody-minded. Or feeble-minded. Apart from that—” He shrugged.

    Ginny hesitated. Then she said timidly: “Won’t you miss Polly?”

    David sighed. He wandered over to his window and looked at the garden which Ann hadn’t allowed him to turn into a Japanese garden. Or rather, that she’d ruthlessly turned back into a suburban New Zealand garden one spring when he’d had the flu. David hadn’t had either the physical strength or the mental stamina to turn it back again. At least she couldn’t turn his mind into a suburban New Zealand mind.

    “Yes,” he said eventually. “Very much.”

    “They quite often go to Japan,” she said in a timid little voice.

    David turned from the window and smiled at her. “Yes, so they do!” he said gaily. He came over to her and took her hands in his. “May I claim an old man’s privilege, if not an old friend’s?” he said very gently.

    Ginny blushed but said firmly: “Yes,” and held up her delicate rosy cheek.

    David smiled. He turned her chin very gently and put his lips softly on hers.

    After a moment Ginny gave a shattering sob and threw herself against his chest. “Don’t go!” she sobbed into his cotton kimono. –Dark grey, Mitsuko had sent it, and Ann, just before she’d stopped speaking to her dirty old brother, had declared it to be a putrid colour.

    He patted her back gently. “Isn’t the essence of life change?” he murmured.

    “Yes—but you’re the only person—I like!” sobbed Ginny.

    David thought wryly that quite possibly he was the only man, yes, or the only man she liked that liked her in return. He was quite aware that, unawakened though she still was, Ginny was every bit as much a man’s woman as her cousin Polly. Much more so than her twin: Vicki, on the odd occasions when she’d accompanied Ginny, had apparently been perfectly happy to be kidnapped by Ann and dragged off to talk about cats and babies and God knew what. Knitting and microwave ovens, quite probably.

    “You’ll eventually meet more people. You like Roberta, don’t you?”

    Ginny sniffed miserably. “Yes. She’s okay.”

    “And—um—Darryl and John?”

    “Yes, only we’re not flatting with them any more.”

    “Oh no, of course. Are you still with Michaela?”

    “Yes, only Bryn’s coming back next month. I do like Michaela, only you can’t talk to her. I mean you can talk, and she’ll listen, only you can’t have a proper conversation.”

    “So I’d noticed.”

    She looked up at him doubtfully and said: “Other people seem to—you know. Find a really compatible person.”

    “Of the other sex?”

    “Yes,” she said, blushing madly.

    “Possibly some people do. I don’t know any couples where there aren’t compromises, at least on one side. And not so frequently the woman’s as some of your liberated friends might claim,” he added drily.

    “No... No, I can see that. Only most men still seem to be able to escape to their work, don’t they? Even these days... Whereas most women can’t.”

    “No. And those that do, end up holding down a fulltime job and being a fulltime housewife, as far as I can see.”

    “Yes. I said to Vicki the other day that it was only because Jake’s so rich that him and Polly have managed to stay together, and she said I was an idiot, but I think I’m right, don’t you? I don’t think she could manage having kids and a house to look after and get her research done as well, if they weren’t rich.”

    “I’m quite sure she couldn’t. What on earth makes your twin think she could, dare I ask?”

    Ginny blew her nose and said: “I don’t know: I tried to get her to explain—because I wanted to know, y’know?”—David manfully repressed a wince, he couldn’t abide the popular use of the redundant interrogative “y’know?”—and merely nodded.—“But all she said was that anyone could see they were ideally matched.”

    “Stone the crows,” said David mildly. “Well, you can always talk to Polly. I know she’s pretty busy, but she’ll always listen intelligently, which is more than any other of your damned relatives seem capable of.”

    “Yes; and she doesn’t criticize,” said Ginny with a sigh. “Mum did nothing but criticize when we were down at the farm; her and Vicki ended up having a flaming row.”

    “Dare I ask, over what?”

    “No! It’s too boring!” she choked, going off in a fit of giggles.

    “Go on, I can take it,” he said with a grin.

    “Well, it was over Vicki’s fairy costume for A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s a sort of, um, white leotard, I suppose. Spangled. With spangled white tights. She was just going to have the spangles sewn on them at first but then they decided that she’d better wear two pairs, plain white ones underneath and a white fishnet pair on top of those, with the spangles sewn onto them.”

    “Er—yes?”

    “Sorry about the corroborative detail,” she said with a grin, and unexpectedly the old man’s heart turned over. Nice to know it still could, at his age, he thought wryly.

    “That was it, was it?” he murmured.

    “Uh, well, she had the gear down at the farm, you see, and she tried it on and Mum said it was indecent.”

    “Is it?”

    “No, it completely covers her legs and torso.”

    “I admit it sounds the sort of thing that Ann would immediately declare indecent without a second glance.”

    “Yes. Well, ole Mac—he’s the producer—he did say she has to wear it without a bra.”

    As far as David could recall she didn’t have anything much to put into a bra. “Is that bad?”

    Ginny shrugged. “In Mum’s eyes it is, yeah.”

    “Good thing she lives down in Taranaki, then, isn’t it?”

    “Yes, but she’s threatening to come up for the play!”

    “Oh, of course. To see Vicki dressed up in an indecent spangled ballet get-up and hear you say your two lines like a particularly wooden ventriloquist’s dummy. Or have you improved?”

    “No,” said Ginny cheerfully. “I told Mac he oughta let some other girl do the part, but he said there wasn’t another girl with my hair except Vicki and she was a giggling Gertie.”

    “So you’re the lesser of the two evils?”

    “Yes, exactly,” said Ginny with satisfaction.

    They smiled at each other.

    “Who the Hell’s that?” he said, as there was a ring at his front door.

    “Ann: maybe she’s decided to speak to you!” suggested Ginny.

    “She’d come in the back door without knocking,” replied David grimly.

    Ginny looked at her watch. “I think it might be Adrian: he said he’d pick me up if he could get the heap going. Only I told him not to.”

    David went to the door. A staggeringly handsome young man stood on his front step. He looked at David in his grey cotton kimono and his mouth twitched.

    “Say it and you’ll get a knuckle sandwich,” David warned him.

    “Just out of the shower?” he drawled.

    “That isn’t funny, Adrian!” cried Ginny crossly from the passage.

    “It’s not bad, though,” admitted David. “Not good,” he explained hurriedly, “but not bad. Come on in; I think you must the one that cooks, I’ve met the mangroves one.”

    Looking only slightly disconcerted, the beautiful young man came in. He refused a whisky on the grounds that he was driving, but accepted a beer.

    David didn’t ask Ginny what she wanted, he simply made her a shandy.

    “Dad sometimes gives me a shandy,” she said happily.

    “Doesn’t your mother object?”

    “Naturally,” replied Ginny composedly.

    They both laughed and the young man, David was glad to see, looked a bit out of it. However, as they drove off together in the boy’s old banger, it was David, standing at his front gate looking after them down the typical neat suburban street, the verges neatly mown by the occupants and lately decorated by the Council with small kaka-beak bushes that were wilting in the summer heat, who felt out of it. Very much so. Not to say old, and—

    He sighed and walked very slowly inside, firmly closing the front door in case Ann should decide she was speaking to him and discover he’d locked the back door. He checked that the back door was indeed locked, and sat down heavily in his big chair. Should he pack it in here and go off to Japan? It was a big change, at his age. Not that there was much to stay for... Dear little Ginny would find other compatible men—or other things to find compatible in men besides the quality of their minds, he thought with a little sigh. And Polly... Well, there was no use thinking about that, really.

    He was under no illusions about Mitsuko: whether she was biologically his daughter or his granddaughter she certainly had in common with his sister a horribly managing streak. Hanae had had it, too, but being of an older generation had been rather more subtle about it than Mitsuko... Only would being managed in the Japanese fashion by Mitsuko be preferable to being managed here by Ann? And, true, he preferred Japanese food but could his stomach get used to it again on a fulltime basis after so long on a diet of—well, not unadulterated roast lamb and three veg, in fact apart from the one night a week when Ann regularly fed him he ate very little meat, but— No decent wine, either. But there would be sake—and sushi and buckwheat noodles and... Then, what if Mitsuko by some miracle did decide to marry? She swore she wouldn’t, but…

    David sighed. He got himself a second whisky. Better see how it worked out when she got here. When he’d spent time with her in Japan they had always got on very well, but he was under no illusion that—well, that she could substitute in any way for the purely intellectual side of his relationship with Polly Carrano, for example.

    He should have made the break years ago, of course, but with Micky and Fee, and Micky’s first marriage breaking up…

    If he went, would he ever see his latest grandchild again? Micky wasn’t a mean man, but David rather doubted that he’d spring for a trip to Japan for himself, wife and child to see his dirty old father with his love child. Or not in the near future. Which was about all David had left.

    He drained his whisky and poured himself another. Bugger the lot of them, he thought grimly. I will.

    The new term was almost upon them and, Bryn having come back to Michaela’s for it, the twins had moved, with the help of various male hangers-on and their vehicles, into a very small house on Pukeko Drive which had probably once been a bach. None of their helpers had pointed out that it was a dump and the wiring was quite probably both illegal and dangerous: they were all skint, too, and either living in similar accommodation or still at home skiving off their parents. Fortunately the girls’ elderly aunt Miss Violet Macdonald had not yet laid eyes on it.

    “What’s up?” said Vicki, looking uncertainly at her twin’s sulky face.

    “NOTHING!” shouted Ginny. “And LEAVE ME ALONE!”

    “If you’re worried about the play, it’s only two lines.”

    “I’m not worried about the stupid play!” shouted Ginny.

    After a moment Vicki said: “I know Roberta’s not doing Latin this year, but you’ll still see a fair bit of her, they’re not that far away, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

    “Leave me ALONE!” shouted Ginny.

    Vicki went slowly over to the door. “If that dreepy Dickon’s been pestering you again and you’re not keen on him, why don’t you just tell him to get lost?”

    “Why don’t you get STUFFED!” shouted Ginny. “I’m not interested in stupid Dickon Fothergill and I never have been!”

    Vicki hadn’t really thought so. Well, Twin had been giving the poor creep the cold shoulder for over a year, now. “If it isn’t him, what is it?” she said stubbornly.

    “NOTHING!” shouted Ginny, bursting into tears. “And go AWAY!” She threw herself face down on her bed and sobbed.

     Vicki looked at her dubiously, but went.

    ... “I reckon she’s upset about that awful old David Shapiro creep going off to Japan,” she said glumly to Michaela the following Sunday morning, up at the kiln.

    “Mm,” replied Michaela vaguely. “Hang on to that, would you?” Vicki obediently supported a large, flattish oblong pot while Michaela poured slip onto one of its faces. “Ye-ah..” she said, straightening slowly and looking at it without enthusiasm.

    “Can I put it down, now?” croaked Vicki, rather red in the face.

    “Eh? Oh—yes; ta.”

    Vicki lowered the pot carefully. “That stuff’s running off,” she remarked without much interest.

    “Yes, it’s supposed to.”

    “Oh.” Vicki eyed the pot but didn’t say any more.

    Uncertainly Michaela offered: “I thought you said it was the play Ginny was nervous about?”

    “Yeah, I thought it was,” agreed Vicki glumly, perching on the side of Michaela’s barrow. “It starts next Saturday, the dress rehearsal’s on Thursday.”

    Michaela nodded, Vicki had already told her this. More than once.

    “She did have the jitters at first—she got in a tizz about her wings, did I tell you?”—Michaela nodded, Vicki had told her. More than once.—“Only now she reckons it’s all a bit of a joke, she won’t take it seriously. Well, I mean, she comes to rehearsal and says her lines and that, only she reckons it’s all dumb,” said Vicki on a cross note.

    “Maybe she’s—um—pretending.”

    “No. That’s what I thought, too, only she’s genuine. She used to get all screwed up before rehearsal—y’know? All tense. Only now she just sits there with her nose buried in a book and half the time she doesn’t even wake up when she’s supposed to be on!”

    “Oh. Well, I suppose it’s good that she’s got over her nerves.”

    “Yes, but that’s what I’m saying, she’s worse, and it’s not the play!” said Vicki crossly.

    Michaela had lost track of the fact that this was what Vicki had been saying and so she looked rather bewildered. “Oh.”

    “Has she said anything to you about that stupid ole David creep?” demanded Vicki with an aggressive pout.

    “Um... No. Well, she said if she had any money it’d be nice to go and see him and Mitsuko in Japan. –Mitsuko’s a very common Japanese name, did you know that?”

    Vicki sighed. “Yes.” Michaela had already told her that. So had Twin. They both seemed to think it was interesting.

    Michaela looked at her pot. “We could leave this.”

    “Whet?” said Vicki with a jump. “Oh—yeah. Righto. Does it have to dry?”

    “Mm. We could do some of those mugs, you can dip them if you like.”

    Vicki beamed. She liked that, it was fun. Not in the cold weather, of course, but on a nice sunny day like this. “Yeah! Can we do them out here?”

    Michaela looked round her vaguely at the scruffy grass near the shed, which she sometimes mowed, when she thought of it, and which Bob sometimes mowed, when he felt extra energetic, but which otherwise didn’t get mown. Since they hadn’t had any rain to speak of for two months the grass was rather tired and dry-looking and neither of them had bothered to mow it. She looked at the manuka scrub which was what mostly covered the slope between the Butlers’ house and the shed, at the scattering of scrawny native trees, dotted here and there with dirty white flags of toe-toe, at the handful of silver birches more or less outlining the track to the kiln and that no doubt were the product of some misguided agriculturist’s hankering after the Mother Country, and the much taller patch of half-grown totara beyond the kiln. The sun was blazing down on this not particularly lovely landscape out of a shatteringly blue sky, the wind was blowing fiercely as it had done most of the summer—a phenomenon Michaela did not recognise as that referred to as “El Nino” by those more aware of media jargon—and the cicadas were zizzing like crazy,

    “What?” said Vicki eventually, as the silence lengthened.

    Michaela came to with a start. “I would like to go to Japan again. But I quite like it here.”

    Vicki looked round her blankly. “It’s all right, I suppose. If I was you, I’d plant some flowers outside the shed. You know: brighten it up a bit. Even some nasturtiums’d look good. Or petunias: those petunias June’s got in pots are ace. You could do that!”

    Michaela replied in a vague voice: “June spends a lot of time on her garden...”

    “Um—yeah. Well, I suppose you have to,” admitted Vicki fairly. “Are we gonna do those mugs, or not?”

    “Yes,” decided Michaela, going into the shed to fetch them.

    They brought them all outside, with a board to set them on to dry, and Vicki sat on the warm, dusty grass and began dipping the ones that needed to be dipped. Michaela was going to paint leaves onto the ones that needed leaves. She sat down with her brush and her jar of glaze and got on with it.

    Some considerable time had elapsed in peaceful occupation before Vicki ventured: “Michaela, do you think a person about our age, mine and Twin’s, I mean, could possibly fall in love with a person that was a lot older?” She paused. “Really old, I mean.”

    “I don’t know: I don’t know all that much about love and stuff,” replied Michaela simply.

    “No, but you must have an opinion!” urged Vicki.

    Unlike her young cousin, Michaela was not in the habit of having opinions on subjects of which she knew very little and about which she had not thought. It was one of the traits that David Shapiro had always admired in her. To start with, Hugh had also admired this trait, but by now he was beginning to find it irritating: admirable, but nonetheless irritating.

    So Michaela replied: “No. Um—well, I suppose it’s possible, I suppose anyone can fall in love with anyone,” she added kindly, as Vicki’s face fell ludicrously. “You could ask Polly, she knows about all that sort of stuff.”

    “Michaela! I could not!” cried Vicki in horror.

    “Why not?” asked Michaela in a puzzled voice.

    Vicki took a deep breath. “Because Jake’s miles older than her, of course! Honestly! Sometimes I wonder what world you live in!”

    Sometimes—not very often, true—but sometimes, Michaela wondered what sort of world other people lived in. It wasn’t one she could conceive of, herself. As she tried to do so, now, her head got that muddled feeling it always did at such moments.

    “Sorry,” she said on a glum note. “I just thought she seemed the obvious person. Um—what about Meg?”

    Meg would immediately spot—or so Vicki believed—who she was talking about, and Vicki didn’t know she particularly wanted that. Because what if it was true and Twin had fallen for an ancient creep? Ugh. Vicki wouldn’t want Meg to know.

    “No,” she said firmly. “I couldn’t ask her.”

    Michaela didn’t ask why not.

    Vicki dipped another mug. “This’ll go blueish, eh?” she said.

    “Mm. You can have a couple, if you like. There’s an expression for it, but I forget it. It means paying a person for their work with a thing instead of with money.”

    Vicki thought about it but couldn’t dredge up the expression, either. “Righto—ta. We could do with a couple of mugs.”

    Michaela didn’t notice much but she had noticed that her young cousins had almost no crockery in the little old house up Pukeko Drive. Parts of Pukeko Drive were quite up-market but it was a long road, running almost the full length of Puriri township, and there were large pockets of it where there was still nothing but fields, as it was right on the western edge of the town proper, though closer in than the campus, which was on the far side of the creek. The little old house was next to one of these pockets. Puriri campus was about twenty minutes’ walk away by road but less than ten minutes if you cut across the paddocks and scrub behind the house and crossed the narrow Puriri Creek on a small footbridge put in when the university buildings went up, so Vicki and Ginny were very pleased with their find and didn’t care that, as it had only two rooms, one of which was too small to contain more than a single bed and a tallboy, Vicki and Euan had to sleep in the sitting-dining room, that the bathroom was across a small open back porch, that the bath itself was a flaking antique, and that the stove, also antique, must have been put in at the time Puriri was connected to the national grid. It being illegal to let a dwelling in New Zealand without a stove, there had had to be a stove. Otherwise it was quite probable that the landlord, who had removed all the grimy curtains, worn and dirty carpets and working lightbulbs before they moved in, would have removed it. They had been disconcerted at having no curtains or blinds to draw but as there was no house directly opposite them, and fields on both sides as well as behind, hadn’t worried. Curtains could wait until nearer winter. –Or until Miriam Macdonald Austin descended on the place the week after next. Or until shortly after the elderly Miss Violet Macdonald dropped in for a visit. The journey from her pleasant Grammar Zone suburb on the southern side of the city would take her at least two hours even if she managed to make a bus connection, but that wouldn’t stop her dropping in.

    Vicki dipped mugs, but more slowly, and finally, after glancing at her cousin’s wide, expressionless face a few times, said in a rush: “What I mean is, do you think Ginny could have fallen for ole Mr Shapiro without—without knowing it, kind of, and now he’s gone she’s pining for him?”

    Michaela didn’t smile at either the idea or the choice of expression. “I suppose it’s possible. Only couldn’t she just be missing him because he liked talking about the sort of thing she’s interested in?”

    “Ye-ah... Do you reckon it is that?” said Vicki eagerly.

    “I don’t know,” said Michaela honestly. “But it could be. Polly was saying the other day that she misses talking to him, and she’s not in love with him, is she?”

    Vicki agreed to this innocent proposition with equal innocence and considerable gratitude.

    Michaela, if such things impinged on her consciousness at all, did not relate them to some preconceived notion of how things ought to be, but merely registered that that was the way things were. Her reaction would have been no different had Ginny been hopelessly in love with David, and she would probably not have managed to conceal this from Vicki, so it was just as well they could agree that Ginny wasn’t.

    This trait in Michaela was another one which Hugh had originally admired very much. He still admired it, but now that he’d had more than enough time to consider it, he had become conscious of an irritated feeling that on the one hand it made her rather too saintly for normal daily life, and that on the other hand his own irritation was distinctly unworthy. Which made him all the more irritated. Hugh was aware that this last was entirely natural, but being aware of it didn’t help him to stop.

    Michaela, in addition to not having wanted to talk about love and stuff in connection with Ginny, hadn’t particularly wanted the subject of love and stuff touched on at all, since she was feeling quite miserable herself about that sort of subject at the moment. Hugh on the one hand had lately been very passionate and demanding sexually, which was good, only sometimes Michaela felt that he was sort of forcing her to respond when she didn’t really feel like it; and on the other hand Hugh had also been very grumpy and captious and disagreeable lately, trying to force her in the short term to spend time at his up-market flat in Willow Grove at Willow Plains, and in the longer term to move into it.

    Willow Grove was now externally almost completed: the concrete drive had been in for some time and the outsides of the twenty townhouses of the development were done. About half of them were now occupied, and Michaela’s friend Sean Stacey who had the landscaping contract was now busily putting in the gardens, with considerable help from Michaela and Roberta. Sean had started off at Art School  doing outdoor sculpture but had switched to ‘‘landscaping’’ as being much more lucrative. Much of his work in fact consisted merely of cutting down trees and laying lawns but latterly, as Puriri County became more aware of such things, and as the creeping rash of developments seeped northwards past Kowhai Bay, he had begun to land some decent contracts. He was looking forward to doing Willow Reach, the next development of Willow Plains, now at the foundations stage just round the corner from Willow Grove up the old Waikaukau Road, and eventually, up beyond Willow Reach and higher on the hill, and thus with better views, Willow Ridge.

    Since Hugh’s flat was situated really very close to Puriri itself, if you had any sort of a motorized vehicle, Hugh was able to see Michaela whenever he felt like it, and since New Year’s had dropped in on her a lot. At first Michaela had been very pleased about this. Now she wasn’t so sure, because whenever he came he seemed to end up nagging her because she didn’t want to move into the trendy flat with him.

    Michaela didn’t really know why she didn’t want to; but she did know that she didn’t. At the back of her mind, though, lurked the thought that he hadn’t said anything definite like could it be for keeps, and if he didn’t intend it to be permanent, then she knew she couldn’t. Not short-term. It wasn’t so much the upheaval of giving up her own place and then having to look for somewhere else when he changed his mind and decided he didn’t want her after all—though that was certainly a factor. No, it was rather the undefined but nonetheless quite unshakeable feeling that she would never be able to cope with the breakdown of the relationship. She’d get used to him, and to living with him, and then it would all stop suddenly. Michaela had been through that sort of thing once, and once was enough.

    Hugh had already harangued her angrily—not to say eloquently—on the subject of all life being risk, not to say on the subject of emotional stagnation. This had made no impression on Michaela. She could see what he meant, more or less. This didn’t mean that she could make herself alter her feelings. Or even make very much connection, on an emotional level, between what he was saying and the reality of her own situation. She had seen that Hugh had perceived this and that it was making him angrier than ever. She had not seen that one of the things that was making Hugh angry was his realization that what he had so eloquently said was probably a load of populist clap-trap, and that there was actually no objective reason to suppose that his view of the matter was any more valid than Michaela’s.

    The mugs were done, and Euan had arrived in his ancient Fiat Bambina to collect Vicki for afternoon tea with the dreaded Miss Violet Macdonald, and Vicki was just about to get into the Fiat, when a very old and none-too-clean Land Rover came grinding up the dusty ruts of Blossom Avenue.

    “Who’s that?” said Vicki, pausing with one be-shorted leg poised. “That’s not Jake’s Land Rover, is it?”

    “Um... no,” decided Michaela,

    They watched as the Land Rover pulled in.

    “Oh, it’s that American,” said Vicki, without much interest. She was as about into Jack Klugman lookalikes as Penny and Sheila of Air New Zealand’s Pacific route.

    Michaela liked Sol, though as she had never seen very much of him she was rather shy of him. “Yes,” she agreed.

    Sol came strolling towards them, grinning. “Hi, Michaela; hi, Vicki,” he said.

    The two New Zealanders merely replied: “Hullo.”

    Sol was used to that, now; he went on grinning, looking at the two red heads in the sun with pleasure. Vicki’s mound of red-gold curls was pulled up in a very high pony-tail and fastened with a patterned bow in bright jade shades: an Indian silk scarf, adjudged the not inexperienced S. Winkelmann eye. Michaela’s thick, wavy mop was just rioting naturally to about chin-level. Sol thought, as he had done the very first time he’d met her at Tom and Jemima’s that evening when she’d brought the miraculous black pot, that it was the loveliest colour hair he’d ever seen. The sun lit gleams of green and blue in the auburn and he took off his Polaroids and verified the fact that it wasn’t just the Polaroids: zowie! Of course neither of them, with those skins, should have been standing out under the fierce New Zealand ultra-violet at all. Sol debated saying so and decided against it.

    “How’s it going?” he asked, replacing the sunglasses.

    “Good,” said Michaela gruffly.

    “She can say that: she hasn’t got to go to Aunty Vi’s for afternoon tea this arvo,” said Vicki, bitter but smiling.

    “Zat so? Why’d you accept the invitation, Vicki?”

    “She makes you,” explained Michaela in that deep, abrupt voice.

    Sol looked at her with an even greater pleasure than the hair had induced in him, and said: “I know exactly what you mean. Ruthie’s mom specializes in that, too. So this Aunty Vi your aunt, too, is she, Michaela?”

    “Yes.” She paused. “I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten who Ruthie’s mother is,” she said, going very red.

    “I know!” squeaked Vicki. “She’s—um, heck, it’s hard to explain, isn’t it?” she said, beaming at Sol. He nodded, his lips twitching, and she said: “Um, well, Ruthie’s married to Junior Winkelmann: he’s Sol’s nephew; that’s right, isn’t it, Sol?”

    “Yeah, that’s it, honey.”

    “I see,” said Michaela slowly, nodding.

    “Ruthie’s mom is the kind of lady that once your relative has married into her family, you all become her relatives, too. Know what I mean?” he said, poker-face.

    “Ugh, yeah, Aunty Vi’s exactly like that,” said Vicki in a hollow voice.

    Sol was watching Michaela’s face. “Well, Michaela?” he said eventually.

    “Ye-es... I was trying to think of some people that aren’t. Only I don’t think I can.”

    Sol went into a paroxysm. “Boy—you hit—the nail—on the head—there, Michaela!” he gasped through it.

    “Don’t laugh at her,” said Vicki uncomfortably, glancing at her cousin’s now fiery face, and shifting from foot to foot.

    Sol blew his nose. “I’m not; gee, I’m real sorry if you got that impression, Michaela. No, you just hit off our society to a T when you said that: it was just so apt, I had to laugh. It wasn’t you I was laughing at, at all, it was our social mores.”

    “It’s all right,” she said gruffly.

    “She didn’t mean to make a joke,” said Vicki uncertainly.

    “No, I understand that,” he said. “Case of the onlooker sees most of the game, huh?”

    “Um—yeah,” agreed Vicki blankly. “Um—I gotta go!” she gasped as Euan tooted his horn. “See ya!”

    The Bambina roared off in a cloud of exhaust fumes.

     Sol came up quite close. “You a farmer’s daughter, too, like Polly and the twins?”

    “Yes. We’re from Taranaki, like the Austins.”

    “I get it. Is it nice country round that way?”

    Michaela looked round vaguely. “Yes. Prettier than this, I suppose. It rains a lot, though. The mountain’s beautiful, it’s like Fujiyama. Only you often can’t see it because of the rain and the clouds.”

    “Uh-huh. Would it be colder down that way?”

    “Um... I suppose the summers aren’t quite as humid. I don’t know, really, I’m often cold at night in winter up here.”

    Sol was quite sure that was because she didn’t heat her bedroom, and didn’t have an electric blanket. Or even sufficient bedding.

    “Yeah, sure can be nippy, huh? Say, listen, Michaela, would it be convenient for us to go up to your shed and talk?”

    “Now?”

    “Uh-huh. Only if it suits,” he said on an anxious note.

    “Yes, that’s all right: I’ve done those mugs, Vicki helped,” she replied in a vague voice.

    They began to walk slowly up towards the shed. “Where are the Butlers, today?” he asked idly—June’s kitchen windows had been closed as they passed them.

    “At Ida’s place—Bob’s mother. They often go there for lunch on Sundays. She asked me, only I had too much to do. Anyway—” Michaela broke off. “You know,” she said awkwardly.

    “Sure: you don’t want to impose.” He hesitated, but then said cautiously: “I guess Ida’s another one of those ladies that adopt all Rabbits’ friends and relations as hers immediately her son marries one of Rabbit’s friends or relations, huh?”

    Michaela smiled slowly. “Yes.”

    She was looking into his eyes as she smiled and Sol experienced a definite jolt in the chest. He swallowed and glanced away, and began to wonder if what he was about to put to her was such a good idea, after all. Only—it seemed the obvious thing, a good deal for them both...

    They walked on towards the shed through the dark scraggy bushes, he guessed they were that tea-tree stuff, it had pretty little flowers, either pink or white, only at the moment these bushes mostly didn’t, and he glanced at her out of the corner of his eye and admitted to himself that she was rather the same physical type as Phoebe and that that hair was just delirious, if only she’d grow it real long, it— Yeah, well. And Jesus, those thighs were a turn-on in those crazy old khaki shorts she was wearing! –The shorts been short to start with and Michaela, who had much earlier in the day waded into the stream up the slope after a likely bit of driftwood, had rolled them up as far as they would go and forgotten to roll them down again.

    After eyeing the thighs in silence more than once Sol cleared his throat and said: “By the way, Michaela, did anything ever come of that scheme of Laura’s to paint you?”

    “With nothing on,” agreed Michaela on a glum note. “She’s going to, only she’s doing two of Polly at the moment, and then she’s got to do an old lady in a white fur coat, I forget her name.”

    “I get it: these’d be commissioned portraits, huh? For her bread and butter. Whilst yours is”—he glanced at the thighs again and his mouth twitched slightly: Laura had waxed eloquent on the subject of Michaela’s thighs over dinner at Phoebe’s one night shortly before Christmas—”for pleasure, huh?”

    “I think the one of Polly without her clothes on is for pleasure, too,” replied Michaela seriously. “Jake was very angry at first, only then he said he’d buy it.”

    Sol cackled gleefully and she smiled and said: “I thought you’d think that was funny.”

    “Don’t you?” he said, all twinkles.

    “Yes,” she said with a little smile. “I do think it’s funny. Only when you think about it, it fits him, doesn’t it?” Sol looked enquiring and she reddened and said: “I mean, it’s what he would do. So it isn’t really funny. It fits.”

    “Mm... I see. Yep, it fits him, so it ain’t funny in itself so much, only if you—uh—contrast your expectations about the way most husbands would react with the way he reacted, huh?”

    Michaela’s broad brow wrinkled. “Um—yes. I think so. Only I sort of don’t usually think about the way most people would react. –Sorry, I’m no good at talking about that sort of thing,” she said, redder than ever.

    At this Sol took her elbow very gently—he knew Kiwis didn’t, in general, but too bad, and he also knew that in view of his relationship with Phoebe he probably shouldn’t, but so what—and said: “Yes, you are, Michaela. Only, if the person listening to you is burdened with a load of dumb preconceptions, then either he’s not gonna have a clue what you mean, or else he’s gonna get angry at having his—uh—hidebound thinking exposed for what it is.”

    Michaela swallowed loudly.

    “Jeez, have I put my big foot in my mouth again?” he said, looking into her face in alarm.

    “No,” she said, swallowing again and glaring at the hills. “It’s only— Well, Hugh’s been angry with me a lot lately, I know it’s because I’m like that, only I can’t seem to—to make myself change.”

    “No,” Sol agreed softly, squeezing her elbow very gently. “We can’t change our innermost selves, can we?”

    Michaela swallowed once more. “No. Well, I can’t, I know that now. I thought I could, once, only now I know I was wrong.”

    “Yeah,” he said in a vague voice, thinking of the—well, it had verged on a fight, all rightee—the near-fight he and Phoebe had had at the beginning of the school year four weeks back. It had started off with his suggesting mildly that she might like to think about moving up nearer to Carter’s Bay permanently once his store was better established, and had progressed through Phoebe’s pointing out acidly that she needed to be near School, to Sol’s declaring he couldn’t see why, through Phoebe’s pointing out she’d nag him to death if they lived in each other’s pockets, to Sol ‘s declaring he couldn’t see why— Ugh. They had both avoided the topic since.

    At the shed Michaela said: “Shall we go inside?”

    “Uh-huh,” he agreed, not realizing that she’d have preferred to be outside. They went inside and Sol sat on the ancient sofa with the broken springs. It was rather crowded with bits of driftwood at the moment so Michaela pulled up a battered Windsor chair and sat opposite him, looking at him seriously, with her knees very far apart. Sol had a perfect view of the pale pink sheen of her inner thighs and didn’t bother to kid himself it didn’t turn him on like crazy. He didn’t guess Michaela would notice the hard-on, though, she didn’t strike him as that kinda gal.

    “Uh—listen, Michaela—” He broke off.

    “What?” she said.

    He was suddenly struck by her immense passivity and—submissiveness? Something like that, yeah. Jesus, it’d be easy to bully a woman like that; Jesus, you’d have to watch yourself every minute so as not to ride roughshod over her, turn her into some kind of a crushed doormat. He found himself wondering if Hugh Morton was the kind of guy that could deal with that. He had no doubt that there was a good deal of steel and indeed stubbornness, in Michaela, too, but somehow—not when it came to relationships with the other sex? No, he rather guessed not...

    “Uh—well, I don’t guess you know that my store’s in a block of three up at Kingfisher Bay,” he said.

    “No. I’ve never been there.”

    Sol swallowed. Coulda guessed that, Sol, boy, if you’d paused a split second before jumpin’ in there with them elephant feet! “No, I guess not. Well, the other two are empty and it seems to me—and a fair few people I’ve spoken to, I mean I’m not the world’s greatest commercial whizz-kid—” He broke off.

    Hell, he was making a mess of this! Should’ve got Phoebe to do it, like she’d offered. Well, actually, she’d virtually insisted, which had made him all the more stubborn about turning down the offer—yeah, well.

    He rubbed a hand over his face and said: “I’m making a mess of this. Only—well, look, I’ve got the opportunity of getting the lease of the middle shop for a song, it’s been empty so long and they haven’t had any offers, and I know a woman who’s interested in managing it. Well, what I’m trying to say is, we’d like to turn it into a real high-class craft shop, and we’re wondering if you’d be prepared to let us be your primary outlet? I mean, draw up a contract and all.”

    There was a pause.

    “Sell my stuff?”

    “Yes,” he said weakly. “Uh—the Royal Kingfisher Hotel has a real high-class clientèle and the bay’s filling up with expensive holiday homes, and most of the marina births are let, now, and they’ re pretty pricy, let me tell you!” He paused. “Hell, I’m not saying these people have got the taste to appreciate your stuff, Michaela, but they sure as Hell have got the dough to afford it, that’s a start, isn’t it?” he said, sweating a bit in the stuffy little shed. The more so since she was still sitting like that and, as he hadn’t expected himself to react to her physical presence, he was somewhat flustered.

    Michaela licked her lips nervously and Sol ‘s heart pounded and he was distinctly annoyed with himself, though at the same time the sensation—well, the sensations,  plural—were not actually unpleasant, by no means.

    “Do you mean you’d want all of my things?” she said.

    “Not exactly. We’d have to talk it over. I’d envisage we’d stipulate we get first choice. Then—gee, I’m not too sure how these things work, but if we’re selling on a commission basis, then we could agree that if the pieces hadn’t sold after a certain time, you could take ’em back if you felt like it. Would that be okay?”

    “Ye-es... Only sometimes I do some work for June. You know, mugs and stuff. Would that be affected?”

    Yeah, it would, if all goes well you won’t have to waste your time on mugs and crap, thought Sol, eyeing the mugs laid out in the sun before the open door with a jaundiced eye. “No, you’d be free to work on other stuff. Only I guess— I dunno. We’d have to stipulate that you’d maybe produce a certain amount for us, huh?”

    The large hands twisted together nervously and she said hoarsely: “I don’t think that’d work, I never know how much I’m going to produce—or—or if I can.”

    “I get it. Okay, we won’t work it like that, then,” he said.

    Michaela just looked at him.

    “Look, if I get a contract drawn up, then—you know any lawyers?”—She shook her head.—“No. Well, you ask Polly to get Jake to have his lawyer look it over, huh?”

    She licked her lips uneasily.

    Sol bent forward earnestly. “Look, I know you don’t like asking them favours, Michaela, and of course he’s a busy man—but just for once, would he mind?”

    “No, he’s very obliging,” she said in a low voice.

    Sol leant back against the broken-down sofa and sighed. “Yeah, and you don’t like putting yourself under an obligation to Rabbit’s friends and relations, okay. Hold on, one of Tom’s brothers is a lawyer, isn’t he? Uh—be the middle brother, I guess: Bob?”

    “Um, is he?” She looked at him timidly. “I could ask Jemima.”

    “Yeah,” said Sol with a little sigh of relief. “You do that, honey.”

    Michaela turned brilliant scarlet from the point where her old cotton shirt was buttoned, about midway between the generous breasts, right up to the hairline, and he gaped at her in consternation.

    “Jesus, what did I— Oh, shit, that just slipped out, it’s my American dialect, don’t take any notice of it, Michaela,” he said weakly.

    “No,” she agreed faintly.

    Sol ran his hand over his face and said: “I swear, I’ve never in my life seen anyone blush like that, it must be that fair skin that goes with that auburn hair— Hell, I’m making it worse, huh?”

    “No: it—it’s silly!” she said with a strangled laugh.

    Sol glanced at her thighs again and back to where that shirt strained its buttons between those breasts and thought: No, it ain’t, honey-pie, it’s good ole S,E,X. Cain’t fight Nature. But didn’t say it.

    “Put me down as a crude Yankee boy that don’t know from where it’s at,” he murmured with a crooked grin.

    “Yes,” said Michaela, smiling. “Can I ask you something?”

    “Sure,” he said weakly.

    “You know when people say a thing’s up-market?”—Sol nodded feebly.—“Well, is there an opposite?”

    “An— Uh, sure,” he said, gulping a bit. “Yeah: down-market. Only I guess—now, correct me if I’m wrong, I might just be extrapolating from my own experience, here—but I’d guess ‘down-market’ started as a kind of joke, kind of making fun at ‘up-market’, y’know? Only now most folks use it automatically, it’s entered into the... lexis,” he finished weakly.

    “That’s one of Polly’s words. She did explain it to me once, only I’ve forgotten what she said,” said Michaela tranquilly.

    “Yeah, it would be one of hers,” he admitted weakly. “Uh—the vocabulary.”

    “Mm. –I did think of asking Tom, only you never know with him, sometimes he won’t take you seriously.”

    “Yeah, I’ve noticed that. Only I always comfort myself,” he said with a twinkle in his eye, “with the thought that that’s his own hidden insecurities coming to the fore.”

    Michaela smiled her slow smile. “Yes. Anyway, I thought you’d know if there really was an opposite. Thank you.”

    “Did you hear someone use it, Michaela?” he asked.

    “Um, yes,” she said, pinkening again. “It was when I was doing some gardening for Tom’s brother—you know, the surgeon one—he’s living at Willow Grove now, and he was saying that he thought a cactus in a pot would be too down-market for Willow Grove and he’d better have a couple of kumquat trees instead.”

    Sol smiled. “By his front door?”

    “Yes. On his porch. And he’s miles worse than Tom, you can never tell if he’s being serious or not, only most of the time he isn’t, I think.”

    “He sure isn’t: their old Uncle Alec calls him a snide bastard, and I guess that’s— What?” he said as Michaela choked and clapped her hand to her mouth.

    “I’m sorry! It was the way you said it!” she gasped, looking at him apologetically as she took the hand away.

    Sol saw that she was really disturbed by her own lapse of manners. He leant forward and very gently touched one bare knee, and said, withdrawing his hand and feigning not to have noticed the fact that she’d jumped sharply: “I guess I mean ‘snide bah-stid,’ huh?”

    “Mm,” she said, biting her lip.

    “Honey, you can laugh at my speech habits any time, I laugh myself—gee, half the time I don’t know whether I’m taking the Mick out of myself or not, it’s become a damned stupid… habit. Shit, did I say it again?” he said, lips twitching, as she turned very red yet again.

    She nodded and he said, very airily: “Must be because you’re a bit like Phoebe, I guess I’ve gotten into the habit of calling her ‘honey’.”

    “Me?” she gulped.

    He smiled a little. “Only physically.”

    Michaela looked down at herself dubiously.

    Sol was swept by a wave of lust. He could have leapt on her, then and there. He swallowed hard and said: “Well, you’ll think over this proposition, then?”

    “What?” she said vaguely. “Oh! Yes; thank you very much.”

    “Good!” he said cheerfully, getting up.

    Michaela got up, too, and looked at him in a way that was both docile and expectant. Sol knew she was most probably only waiting for him to get the Hell out from under her feet, but— He found his fists had clenched and he unclenched them and said, aware that it was probably a mistake: “Say, would you like to drive up to the Bay now and take a look at the place? See what you think? I could give you lunch and bring you right back.”

    An eager look came over her face, and he saw that she wanted to very much, and was suddenly filled with pity as well as the lust, and said very gently: “I don’t guess you get many outings, mm?” Michaela shook her head mutely and he said: “I know Sunday’s a working day for you, but if you’d like to?”

    “Yes—um—are you sure?”

    Sol wasn’t sure of anything much any more and he felt extremely disturbed as well as extremely excited. But he did know he couldn’t bear to let her out of his sight right now, so he said: “Sure I’m sure!” –Yo, boy: Mister Down-Home Yankee himself in person. “Come on, it won’t take long in the Land Rover.”

    He took her elbow, this time quite firmly, and led her out. Michaela then freed herself in order to lock the shed but Sol took her elbow again.

    In the Land Rover the pale thighs bulged gently as she sat, right at the edge of his field of vision—Jesus! Sol drove very carefully up to Carter’s Bay with the most terrific hard-on the whole way. He was past pretending to himself that it didn’t matter or he didn’t care, or—anything, really.

    He barely said a word the whole way, but nor did she, and that part of it was real restful. She didn’t tell him what was wrong with his driving, either, that was restful, too. Sol was aware that this was most probably because she didn’t drive, but he had a fair idea that even if she did she wouldn’t have criticized his driving. Not in the car and not— Yeah, well.

    It wasn’t so much that Phoebe criticized in so many words—well, not all that often. Only, remarks like “That was quick” or “There it suddenly was, and there it suddenly wasn’t” did not actually help an over-eager guy in his late forties, thanks. And sometimes—just sometimes, he would quite like to be asked what he felt like tonight, instead of being told—gently but firmly—what she felt like. Not that he usually didn’t feel like anything on offer, but— Well. There you were. Or, as in the in case of three nights back, there you sometimes weren’t. Phoebe had been very understanding and had tried everything she knew of—and she knew a few things. Only that had made it worse. Like your typical limp rag. Sol’s conclusion had been that it mighta been better if she hadn’ta tried at all and most unfortunately he’d voiced it.

    It was true that since finding out about the interlude with Sir Ralph Sol’s inferiority complex—if that was what it was—about Phoebe’s former lovers had gotten worse. Or he felt it had, which sure ’nuff did amount to the same thing, as far as he was concerned. He had also, though not particularly recently, voiced this thought and had had it robustly rubbished for his pains. Yo, boy.

    Ralph stood on the deck of his Saucy Sal and screwed up his eyes and peered. No, impossible: must be Phoebe in one of those foul pairs of shorts she got round in in the weekend— No, by God, not with that hair! He gave up pretending he could see more than fifty yards with crystal clarity and nipped below and got his binoculars. He focussed carefully...

    Well, well, well.

    Ralph sat down on the comfortable padded sun-lounger on the afterdeck of his floating casting couch and became very thoughtful indeed. Just as well, really, that he hadn’t asked Hugh out on the boat today. Well, Hugh had been like a bear with a sore head for weeks, wouldn’t you think the opportunity to do the master potter whenever he felt like it, more or less, would have— Well, no. Rather manifestly not. Well, well, well.

    Sol let Michaela admire Sol’s Boating & Marine Supplies, that today young Jimmy Burton from Carter’s Bay was in charge of, and while he was there served a customer.

    Then he led her into the next little shop in the block of three and explained the possibilities. Michaela agreed that white would be best for the walls, it showed things off. Yes, matte white. When he showed her the grubby unlined loft she said eagerly that there was plenty of storage space for extra stock. Sol by now was, without having consciously willed it, thinking along the lines of: cosy little nest for her, rather like his cosy little nest in the attic next-door; and had to blink before he could agree with anything like seemliness. She didn’t notice anything, though.

    Then he took her back to his place and proudly showed off his loft. It was now painted white and mostly lined with the metal shelving he’d brought from Florida,  repainted in a nice navy-blue.

    Michaela looked up into the high gable and smiled. “I like these ceilings. That’s a float, isn’t it? They’re super.”

    Sol agreed that his big glass fishing float in its netted holder was super and didn’t reveal how many unnecessary dollars he’d paid for it or the hassles he’d had getting it up there. The striped divan, covered in a rust and navy Indian weave, was the bed as well as the settee, he explained. Only when he was alone—Sol was the sort of person who could say that sort of thing without a blink but he rather thought that Michaela blinked a bit—he slept in the hammock: see? He unslung it from the hook where it was stored and slung it up and Michaela was enchanted with it, and he was very tempted to say that you had to do it real careful in a hammock, it was a bit like the porcupines, but refrained. With an effort.

    Then he led her behind the divider into the tiny kitchenette with its porthole that he’d put in to look up the low slope of the hill towards the Pink Manuka Motel, the White Manuka Motel and the Kingfisher Motel, of different degrees of up-marketness, and explained how nifty it was. And Michaela did not say, as Phoebe had done: “Nifty but cramped. just as well you haven’t got a cat, you certainly couldn’t swing it in here.”

    So Sol then said to Michaela: “Nifty but cramped, I guess.”

    “No, I like it,” said Michaela, peering out of the porthole. “I can see a Jag.”

    Sol peered, too. “Uh-huh.”

    “Hugh’s got one of those,” she said, going rather red. “I don’t know many cars, really.”

    “Do you drive?”

    “No.”

    Well, Sol woulda won that bet with himself, then. Yup.

    He then said he was going to make grilled fish for lunch, did she like that? And Michaela said she liked everything, what sort of fish was it? Sol then found himself explaining at great length about flounder and the Inlet, and Michaela listened, nodding from time to time, and didn’t point out that he was using too much oil on the fish, or too much lemon, or not enough lemon, or even say that he’d burnt their tails. Sol always burnt their tails, lessen he cut ’em off. How else could you tell if they was done?

    He was aware of the puerility of these lines of thought, of course. But he couldn’t stop himself, somehow.

    They ate lunch at the tiny table, white-painted metal mesh, only big enough for two who didn’t mind if their knees touched, set right in the middle of the triangular wall of glass that was the front of the attic room. Sol found that his knees touched Michaela’s rather often and he was as horny as be-Jasus.

    Michaela was very hungry, as she usually was, but as Sol had warned her about bones, ate the flounder with due care. It was quite an easy fish to eat. She revealed shyly that she didn’t think she’d had this sort of fish before, and didn’t register that Sol Winkelmann abruptly went very red and suddenly looked furious. –With Fate, Hugh Morton, Michaela’s wealthy cousins, the whole of Blossom Avenue, himself— He couldn’t have said. All of them, quite probably.

    Michaela was aware of Sol, as she had been since the moment of first meeting him at Tom and Jemima’s, as a sexually attractive animal, but as in her mind he belonged to Phoebe she never thought for an instant that he might be attracted to her. Michaela, though her circle of acquaintance was limited, knew several men who affected her in the way both Sol and Hugh did, and her own excitement in their presence no longer worried her the way it had done in her teens and twenties. She just accepted the fact and never thought, as Phoebe Fothergill, for instance, and many women like her might have in similar circumstances, of making the effort to see if they might take it further.

    Sol found he was more turned on than he would have been by an attempt to attract him. This specific circumstance had never occurred before in his experience, experienced though he was, and he was somewhat disconcerted to discover his own depths of—well, mild perversity? What with the submissiveness and the—the lack of awareness, whatever you liked to call the come-on he wasn’t getting? Yeah, well! It was good, though: perverted, insensitively macho and generally incapable of your modern, equal, sharing adult relationship it might be—mm-hm, yep—but it was damn good.

    Over the washing-up, which owing to the minuteness of the kitchen could only in all decency be done by two adults who were either close blood relatives or very close indeed, he came into bodily contact with her warm solidity rather a lot and finally there was a heart-jolting moment when he turned quite without premeditation and went smack up against those great tits and they both gasped and their eyes locked and bells rang like crazy for an instant in Sol’s head and he knew she was as turned on as he was.

    Then she said gruffly: “Sorry. I’ll get out of your way,” and Sol had to be gentlemanly and edge aside. After all, she was involved with goddamn Morton. And he was involved with Phoebe. Well, he guessed he was still involved: after the humiliating fiasco three nights back he somehow hadn’t called her and she sure as Hell hadn’t called him. Yo, boy.

    Although nothing much else happened that was noteworthy and he took her back to Blossom Avenue very soon, Sol remained extremely aroused by this encounter tor some time and his blood tingled whenever he thought of her, which was rather often. Phoebe did ring him, and they duly took up where they’d left off. With all that that implied.

    Michaela found she was unable to forget Sol and both feared and hoped for the day when he would have signed the lease for the shop and would need her help—which he’d accepted gratefully in advance—to paint it and put things into it.

    Since Hugh was in a really filthy mood, having been brooding on her recalcitrance for some time now, and didn’t contact her—he’d decided to let her stew for a bit—she didn’t have much to distract her from the memory of that brief contact in Sol’s kitchenette. She still thought of him as Phoebe’s property, though.

Next chapter:

https://theamericanrefugeeanovel.blogspot.com/2022/10/through-bush-through-brake-through-brier.html