Further Impressions

4

Further Impressions

    Aidan Vine looked round the vast expanses of Judge McLintock’s huge dark brick and glass palace in horror. “My God, it’s all dark brick and tinted glass inside as well!”

    Andrew Barker cleared his throat. “Would be tinted glass inside, eh? If it is outside. QED.”

    “Didn’t you look at the place before you said we’d take it, Andrew?”

    “Well, no.”

    “My God!”

    “It could be quite cosy,” Andrew offered feebly. “Um, ’tisn’t as if we had to live here.”

    “What is this, then, Andrew?” Aidan retorted nastily. “A momentary hiatus in existence? Suspended animation? A tear in the space-time continuum? Freeze-frame?”

    “No! You know what I mean! We’re only on holiday, we’re not buying the dump!”

    Aidan had had some vague idea that he might make an offer for the place, if it suited and if he liked the lifestyle and if he decided that he wanted to come back to the land of his birth permanently— Well. Some of the above. “You’re telling me!” he agreed with feeling.

    Andrew cleared his throat. “Livia said the kitchen’s okay.”

    “And that’s another thing,” his old schoolfriend retorted evilly. “You realise we’re right next-door to them?”

    “Can’t really see that Spanish abortion of old Wal’s unless you peer. The trees sort of screen it. Well, pretty much.”

    “Andrew, we’ll be at bloody Livia Briggs’s mercy every instant of the day and night!”

    “You can be, if you like; personally she’s not getting an instant of my nights!” retorted Andrew with an attempt at humour and extremely unfortunate syntax.

    Aidan winced. “Where did you go to school, again?”

    They had been through the Grammar forcing machine together. “Eh?” he groped.

    “‘Personally she’s not getting an instant of my nights?’” echoed Aidan coldly, raising his eyebrows.

    This effect failed. “You in training for the bench, Aidan? You’ve got the fishy eye, you were your bloody father to the life, there, for a mo’.”

    Aidan bit his lip. “Was I? Christ. Sorry, Andrew. No, well, thirty years of dealing with cretins on a daily basis—it starts to get to ya.”

    “Yeah. Um, not thirty.”

    Aidan was forty-nine. “There were a fair number of cretins in old Wal’s office when I started clerking for him, so, yes.”

    “Pam Easterbrook,” spotted Andrew unerringly. “Wasn’t really cretinism, she just had it bad for you but didn’t have the equipment to convey it, let alone to appeal, poor girl.”

    “You’re telling me!” Aidan agreed with feeling. Pam Easterbrook, one of their fellow law clerks—ninety-nine point nine percent of New Zealand’s law clerks were students, working while they did their LL.B.s—had been a shortish, stoutish, spotty, bespectacled girl given to the wearing of large, fluffy cardies on her already large person.

    “Ya know she’s a judge?” added Andrew idly.

    “What?” said Aidan weakly.

    “Mm. Well, big frog in a small pond, I suppose, Aidan,” he said, eyeing him uneasily. The smallness of New Zealand’s legal pond had been one of the major reasons for Aidan’s deserting his native shores. That and the very natural desire to get out of the orbit of his bloody father. Sir Simon Vine had not only never suffered fools gladly, he’d never suffered anyone gladly, including his own offspring. With the expectable results. Bobby Vine, the eldest son, was in a wee gay nest in Vancouver with his interior decorator friend and hadn’t seen or communicated with his father for over thirty years. Candy, the eldest daughter—she’d always refused to use the “Candida” of her father’s choosing—was in Perth, a grandmother of five at the age of fifty-two, completely immersed in cosy domesticity, with the topping of her Law School year long since forgotten: she communicated cosy family news and lovely Christmas and birthday cards which drove her father apoplectic. Rosemary, the second girl, next one down from Aidan, was in Sydney, unmarried but certainly when Andrew and his wife had visited her a few years ago, shacked up with a very much younger man who was her partner in her successful little restaurant. Any vestige of her brilliant M.A. in history was long since forgotten—along with the fact that she’d ever been a daughter of Sir Simon Vine’s. And Katy, the youngest, for whom Andrew had always had a soft spot, she’d been a plump little thing with specs, was a discontented, twice-divorced and once-widowed, dieted and sun-lamped Americanised hag. Nominally based in Phoenix, Ariz., but actually most of the time at sea on Caribbean cruises on horrible floating casinos. She was very, very well off, both divorces having netted her pots and the deceased husband having left her several mill.: she had her social secretary send her father regular birthday and Christmas gifts and had neither spoken to him nor laid eyes on him for twenty-five years.

    Unlike his siblings Aidan, who had a strong sense of the fitness of things, kept in regular contact with his father, but that didn’t meant he liked the old bastard. Their mother had died long since, and no wonder, marriage to the judge had been no sinecure. Added to which for most of their married life old Sir Cornelius, Aidan’s grandfather, had still been alive. The Hanging Judge, was his nickname in legal circles, ’nuff said.

    After a moment Aidan said on a weak note: “Well, good for Pam, small pond or not.”

    “Yeah. Um, like I say, Livia said the kitchen’s okay. Been done up quite recently.”

    Aidan gave him a dry look. “I don’t think she’s a cook, is she? Well, come on.”

    They went through to the kitchen.

    “Don’t tell me you don’t have this look in Australia, too!” said Andrew crossly to Aidan’s dead silence.

    “Year 2000 Null,” he said faintly. “You know, I had this funny hope—why, I can’t imagine—that giant granite bench tops had not crossed the Tasman!”

    “Global village,” said Andrew on a cross note. “Don’t be so bloody pretentious!”

    “I’m pretentious?” he croaked, gaping round him. The kitchen was huge and contained every Year 2000 cliché imaginable. Blue slate floor—yes. Aforesaid giant slabs of grey granite—present. Giant ranks of white, featureless cupboards, concealing—he’d opened one at random—giant almost-featureless white dishwasher and such-like. Gigantic industrial steel fridge-freezer. Taller than Andrew was. Jesus God almighty, was it one of those Internet fridges? Post-Year 2000, in that case! Huge industrial steel wall oven, giant industrial steel sink and splashback— Oh, forget it. The rest of the house was tasteless early Eighties, so this was precisely and exactly how one would have expected the done-up kitchen to look—yeah.

    Andrew opened a cupboard. “Pointy, pointy coffee pot,” he said on a very weak note.

    This cliché of Year 2000 bad taste was the final straw and Aidan collapsed in wheezing hysterics, gasping: “Put it—on industrial steel—bench—love of Mike!”

    Grinning in considerable relief, Andrew set the awful corrugated steel pointy-topped coffee pot on the sink bench.

    “Your kitchen in Sidders wasn’t much better,” he noted when Aidan was at the mopping stage.

    Aidan blew his nose hard. “A clone, though not this big. Another reason for letting the cow have it,” he said, apparently cheerfully.

    “Yeah.”

    “You and Katrina sorted yourselves out, yet?’

    Andrew made a face. “More or less. She was adamant about wanting the house, and I must say after what she’s done to it, she can keep it, but I put a lot of hard yacker into that bloody garden… Oh, well. Means I don’t have to sell my shares, I suppose that’s good. Would you believe she’s divided up the CD collection?”

    “Yes.”

    Andrew smiled weakly. “Yeah. Good old George said I ought to get all the stuff that goes with the house valued—the motor-mower, that tent thing she’s stuck out the back, the thing that’s supposed to crawl round the pool, that sort of junk—but the Hell with it.”

    Aidan looked at him anxiously. “Mm.”

    “She claimed her pound of flesh out of the launch, mind you.”

    The launch had been one of the big bones of contention in the Barker household. Katrina had used it as fuel in the campaign to get Andrew to move from attractive, convenient, and sufficiently up-market Castor Bay to horrible, artificial and ultra-glossy Kingfisher Bay, on the shore of an inlet up the boo-eye in northern Puriri County, with the benefit of a slot in its extortionately expensive marina. She didn’t like boating and as Andrew had just explained, she didn’t really want to sell the Castor Bay house. The whole thing had been an indicator of the state of their marriage, in fact.

    “Buy a nicer one,” said Aidan kindly.

    “I might just get a runabout, I’m bloody sick of huge, shiny consumables that pointlessly reinforce one’s status for the other consumers.”

    Well, yes, that was frequently the after-effect of a rotten marriage that had concentrated almost exclusively on the acquisition of huge, shiny consumables. “Yeah. Well, there’s plenty of scope down here for runabouts—or whatever you fancy, really.”

    “It’s not real sailing, though, Aidan,” said Andrew uneasily.

    Aidan had once done the Sydney-to-Hobart and had until fairly recently owned a share in an America’s Cup contender which Paulette had personally made sure was sold to another shiny-consumable-fixated cretin that had forgotten what real sailing was. “It’s not heading into a Force 10 gale bum-up winding winches, no! And thank God for it!” he said with a laugh.

    Andrew relaxed. “Isn’t that what sailing is these days, though?”

    He shuddered. “Too right! I think I’ll buy a nice little wooden boat.”

    There might be one of those left in the whole of New Zealand, yeah. Andrew just nodded sympathetically, reflecting that he himself would settle for an aluminium dinghy.

    “Or even a tinnie,” said Aidan dreamily.

    “Eh?”

    “Uh—I’ve forgotten what they’re called over here!” he said with a dismayed laugh. “What a cretin! Um, well, a runabout. Um… aluminium.”

    “Shit, is that what the Aussies call them? Just an aluminium dinghy, Aidan.”

    “I have been away from home too long,” said Aidan with a rueful smile.

    It was him that had said it, so Andrew merely nodded and didn’t express the thought that it was probably too long, and given that in any case Aidan came from a far-from-typical New Zealand background, what with the line of judges and old Sir Cornelius’s mansion in Remuera that Aidan’s father now lived in, it was highly unlikely that he’d be able to settle for anything as down-market as either an aluminium dinghy or the laid-back sort of lifestyle that visibly most of the country still enjoyed. Not on this side of Lake Taupo, no. But definitely the rest of it. Andrew himself came from a very ordinary home in Te Atatu and had got into Grammar on a scholarship. Endowed, actually, by Sir Rupert Vine, M.P., Aidan’s great-uncle. Yeah, well.

    “Coffee?” suggested Aidan with a smile.

    “I don’t think that that pointy cone is gonna produce coffee, Aidan.”

    No!” he said with a laugh. “Livia said she’d put in some essential supplies, it’ll be instant!”

    It was. And after a long hunt Andrew found the very latest model of Russell Hobbs Forgettle and Aidan unearthed some Y2K stark white coffee cups, midway between demitasse and teacup size—par for the course, exactly—so they had it.

    “We’ll get in to Taupo this afternoon and buy some coffee mugs,” said Andrew with great determination. “I vote for one with a green map of New Zealand on it and the mystic rune ‘Haere Mai’.”

    “That’s apocryphal,” drawled Aidan.

    “Ya wanna bet? But if you prefer we’ll get you one with a lovely pale puce magnolia on it.”

    “That’s at least twenty years out of date, Andrew,” he said on a weak note.

    “Taupo is,” replied Andrew with relish. “Hey, tell ya what, let’s go now and get fish and chips for lunch!”

    “Fush and chups,” said Aidan with a sigh. “There actually are Australians who comment on that—as if, to boot, they were the first ones in the universe to have remarked it, God!”

    “No-one’ll remark it round here, matey. Come on, stir ya stumps!”

    Aidan groaned but stirred his stumps. It was the caffeine talking, of course. Well, that and the relief of finding himself free of bloody Katrina, the bloody dump in Castor Bay, and that bloody albatross of a launch at last, poor old Andrew.

    … “These are miraculous!” he discovered about half an hour later, eating fish and chips on a tiny little beach with nothing in sight but the silver-blue lake and, way off at the far end of it, a glittering, snow-tipped peak.

    “Taste quite fresh,” agreed Andrew, grinning. “The fish is good, too. Fresh-frozen!”

    Aidan took a large bite of his. He nodded incredulously round it. “Is it just middle age or finding oneself free of bloody Paulette, or what?” he croaked, having swallowed. “Surely you can’t have real chips and actual fish on this side of the Tasman?”

    “Wouldn’t go that far. Probably haven’t been kept as long in the freezer room out back as your average Sydney fish and chips, though.”

    “No,” said Aidan with sigh. “How many oysters have you got?”

    “Um… eaten two: six, as promised. Haven’t you?”

    “Yes; this is definitely Paradise on Earth.” He ate a hot battered oyster. “My God, these are real Bluff oysters!” he cried.

    “I’d say so, yes,” agreed Andrew. “Probably batters them himself.”

    “In the twenty-first century?” he whispered. “Can it get better?”

    Andrew’s nice brown eyes twinkled. “I’d say so. Hang on.” He swallowed his mouthful of fish and carefully selected a large round stone from the piles next to them on the tiny beach. “Watch.” He tossed it at the water.

    Aidan looked blank for a moment. Then he shouted: “My GOD, it’s floating!”

    “Pumice,” said Andrew smugly.

    Aidan shoved an oyster in his mouth, wrapped his remaining fish and chips carefully and weighted them down with a handy piece of driftwood, grabbed a round pumice stone, and stood up. He threw it as hard as he could. “Floating,” he said with a deep sigh.

    “Yep.”

    Aidan sat down again and reopened his fish and chips. “I sh’pose one cou’ ’ve ’dushed it,” he said with his mouth full.

    “Mm? Oh—deduced it? Perhaps, but it’s so gloriously unexpected,” he said with a smile.

   “Exactly! How did you know? Or did you deduce it?”

    Andrew smiled a little. “Dad used to drive us down sometimes to see the old cousins in Wellington—they’ve long since gone, dear old ducks, they were his dad’s cousins, technically. Always used to stop round Taupo and let us throw pumice in the lake.”

    “At the lake,” corrected Aidan with a deep sigh. “Lucky, lucky you.”

    Andrew had had to share a bedroom with two noisy, footy-playing brothers all his teenage years and had had the Devil of a job to get the amount of homework done that the Grammar forcing house deemed necessary if you were gonna top the Schol. list like what Grammar boys always did. Dirk had been into Heavy Metal as well as the rugby and Murray thought he could play the electric guitar and Dad had never bothered to shut the cretins up until around eleven. And not then in the weekends, if he’d had a few beers.

    “Yes,” he said smugly. “I know.”

    The food was all gone, as was the Coke that Andrew had remembered to buy at the last minute to wash it down with—disappointingly, as Aidan noted, it didn’t taste anything like the fruity, hair-on-your-chest Coke of their boyhood—and Aidan had had a nice play with the pumice.

    He sat down again and after a while said: “You thought any more about that job of yours?”

    Andrew made a face. “Not really. Sick of it. Well, I know I won’t get any higher—don’t want to, actually. Not one of Sir Jake’s financial whizz-kids.”

    Aidan had been under the impression that the Carrano Group was about the solidest multinational in the universe. “Um, Sir Jake Carrano’s not losing it, is he? Letting financial whizz-kids in, I mean?”

    “Quick, sell your shares, Aidan! –No, ’course not. They’re very, very carefully chosen as cadets: he selects their varsity courses himself and goes over their results with a fine-tooth comb—no kidding. Anyone who doesn’t measure up is let go. Then if they’re bright enough and go-ahead enough and got a smattering of social nous he sends them to Harvard Business School, where they learn to be really button-down collared and financial, plus gaining a proper load of social nous. Then he tells them that that huge contract they signed can stand if they want it to but if they really wanna rise in the Group they’ve gotta get out on the sites with CD—Carrano Development, to youse lot—and get dirt on their hands and learn about timelines and managing blokes from the ground up. And here’s the real contract. That eliminates ninety percent of them, they go off to teach Business Studies or run BrierleyCorp into the ground or something. Exxon, possibly.”

    “Right,” he said weakly. “Got it. –He sends them out on the sites after they’ve been to Harvard? Jesus!”

    “Yep,” said Andrew smugly. “Hard man, Sir Jake. It works, though.”

    “No wonder he’s a billionaire,” said Aidan feebly.

    “Uh-huh.”

    Belatedly Aidan realised that he’d let Andrew side-track him. “Look, seriously, have you thought what you might do if you don’t want to stay with the Group?”

    “No. Haven’t got any talents, unlike some.”

    “Balls! Well, uh, go back to law?” –Andrew had done an indifferent LL.B. but combined it with a very good B.Com., while Aidan had been doing an indifferent B.A., though he’d loved the subjects, and a brilliant LL.B. Of course he’d got Schol., and with his family’s money he hadn’t needed the job in Wal Briggs’s office, but his father had insisted he get the experience. Aidan had chosen Briggs, the legal Establishment’s bête noire, to spite the old bugger. By the time he was thirty he’d realised he’d been bloody lucky to have had the chance. No-one on the far side of the Tasman had ever heard of Sir Simon Vine but they all knew of Wal Briggs: that case he’d taken to the Privy Council had made headlines not just in the tabloids but in legal circles all over the British Commonwealth.

    “Um, well, what are you envisaging, Aidan? Solicitor’s office, bit like old George’s? It’s mostly conveyancing and wills, besides the divorce work. Not exciting. Um, would you be interested in us setting up that sort of practice?”

    A New Zealand law degree did qualify you as a barrister and solicitor, but…  Aidan bit his lip. Andrew was right, exciting was what it wasn’t. “Well, no. Don’t think I’d be any good at it. Most solicitors, certainly in a local practice, if that’s what you’re thinking of, spend half their time as extempore marriage counsellors and grief counsellors.”

    Andrew was rather red. “That’s a bit off!”

    “I tell it like I see it,” said Aidan grimly.

    He always had done, reason he’d run foul of the fucking Sydney law club, what else? “All right, you’re not wrong, but why put it like that?”

    “Because that’s what it is, Andrew. You’re good with people and they relate well to you, I think you’d probably enjoy it. But I’d hate it.”

    “Actually I don’t think I would enjoy it, I seem to have sort of run out of…” Andrew made a face. “The mental—no, it’s more emotional, really—the sort of emotional energy that makes you able to cope with other people’s problems without sinking under them. Not to say, makes you want to.”

    “Yes,” said Aidan, frowning over it. “It’s partly the divorce, of course—me as well, don’t start. But… One can only do so much. And if one hasn’t the temperament to be a do-gooder, or to continually sacrifice one’s own needs to other people’s, it doesn’t work, does it? For years I envied the top surgeons, then when Mark Hewitt had to have his op and I met his surgeon I realised that very few of them attain real sympathy, either, or even try for it. It’s all manner and they’re completely detached from the whole bit—have to be, for self-preservation, I guess.”

    “Yes. So much for the soapies,” said Andrew with a grimace. “Um, I was really sorry to hear about Mark, Aidan.”

    “I know, I got your letter,” he said in a faraway voice, staring at the lake. “Uh—no, it’s okay,” he said, looking at Andrew’s concerned face. “I got on better with Mark than with any of the other partners in the firm, but we weren’t really close. Golfing buddies. He had a damn’ good legal mind, mind you—I do miss that.”

    Andrew just nodded silently.

    “You should have seen the memorial service! Everyone from the Attorney General down, the P.M. sent a wreath, all the ladies in gauzy black hats and new black spring outfits—some of the bitches must have spent as much as they would on an outfit for the Cup—and every last member of the fucking Sydney legal Establishment as po-faced as you wouldn’t believe! When you think of the back-biting that went on when he came out of the closet!”

    “Par for the course for that sort of type, Aidan,” said Andrew. “Did poor Francis go?”

    “Mm: wept buckets, supported by his old mum. Well, so did she. Rather funny, actually: of course he left it all to Francis, and the old mum was sporting a Double Bay hat and a smothering fog of Chanel Number 5! Sydney-sider accent you could cut with a knife! They hated her, but what could they do?” He grinned at him.

    “Yeah,” said Andrew in some relief, grinning back. “Um, and Mark’s own parents, Aidan?”

    Aidan made a sour face. “Nope. Not Pygmalion likely. Fundamentalist Baptists or something—so much for Christian charity. His sister Barbara came, she’s a very decent woman, but apart from her and her husband the only members of his family to turn up were his cousin Claire with her partner, Freda.”

    “Typical; ruddy twenty-first century or not,” concluded Andrew sourly.

    “Mm. –Francis had moved the old mum into the high-rise with the astounding view of the city: the tongues were at it like nobody’s business!”

    “Good on him. Um, what’s he like?” asked Andrew a trifle nervously.

    “Great fun, if one can get over one’s prejudices. Terrific sense of humour. The overtly gay type, full of extraneous dears and y’knows—that went over good, it was what they were expecting. None of them saw beneath it to the genuine grief,” said Aidan grimly. “Or the genuine goodness: he offered Mark’s bloody parents a lump sum, you know. Made Allan Michaelson write an official lawyer’s letter on headed paper, Allan just about had a fit. They threw it back in his face,” he said, shrugging.

    “Fuck them,” said Andrew grimly.

    “So say all of us.”

    Andrew licked his lips. “Fifty-two, wasn’t he?”

    Aidan sighed. “Mm. Talk about the big chill! I suppose it’s that even more than the divorce that’s made me look twice at my bloody footling life and my bloody pointless career.”

    “Yeah,” agreed Andrew sympathetically.

    “Mind you, Mark had done it all and then some. Tried every sort of smokable, injectable, ingestible, sniffable substance known to mankind. Just about every sort of sex, too. Wonder it wasn’t AIDS took him off, really… Dear old Gordy Sieff distributed the usual boxes of cigars round the office on the firm’s anniversary. I chucked mine into the harbour on the way home.”

    Mark Hewitt had had lung cancer. “Lesson to us all,” agreed Andrew. “So old Gordy’s still turning up at the office to give you his blessing, is he?”

    “Mm. –Every time I see him,” said Aidan, “I wonder why the Hell I can’t settle for the sort of solid career and happy home life he’s had. He’s a great-grandfather now, always shows us the snaps of the kids…”

    “Um, Aidan, Jewish boys of that generation married nice Jewish girls that expected to set up a home for them.”

    “Eh? Yeah. Well, yeah, s’pose they did. But he’s satisfied with it, that’s what I mean! No, more than that: happy with it! Totally contented.”

    Andrew sighed. “Yeah. Are we the X generation or something, then?”

    “Don’t ask me. I am aware that there’s some sort of popular myth with letters in it, probably dreamed up by Yank publicists for the purpose of selling consumer tack, but I’m damned if I know what it actually is. Well, too young to be baby-boomers, maybe we’re too old to be Xers? Maybe we’re in between two named generations, Andrew. Adrift.” He shrugged.

    “‘Afloat, afloat in a melon boat,’” said Andrew dreamily.

    “Poddon?”

    “Sorry—stupid!” he said with a laugh. “Out of an old book that Megan used to love. Wasn’t one of ours, but wasn’t old enough be to one of Mum’s; think the people down the road gave it to her, their kids were older than us and none of them were readers. Well, um, adrift, like you say? Floating, see, like the pumice.”

    “Mm. How is Megan?” asked Aidan with a smile, lying back on the pumice.

    “Still divorced, still coping magnificently with the three huge teenagers at home plus that pre-school thing she runs. –It’s bedlam, Aidan!” he said earnestly. “The minute the kids get let out the door they start screaming!”

    “Eh?”

    “Honest! They run across the playground, screaming! Katrina would have had ten fits if either of ours had behaved like that, pre-school or not! But Megan takes it in her stride.”

    “Good for her,” he said, smiling.

    Andrew smothered a sigh: he’d always hoped that his sister and Aidan— But Megan had too much sense to look at Aidan and Aidan, alas, was too up-market to look at sturdy, sensible Megan Barker from Te Atatu. “Anyway,” he said on a sly note, “you’ve got talent, you can give up your day job!”

    “Talent sort of!” said Aidan with a laugh. With a very different hat on, Aidan was Dale Addams, writer of SF stories for kids. The sort of thing that came out with bright paper covers, large print, and half-page black and white illustrations. He said himself that they were unreadable by anyone with a reading age of more than eleven. Mind you, when he was eleven he’d long since got through the entire Arthur Ransome oeuvre—which he owned, there were some advantages in being a rich kid—and had embarked on his grandfather’s set of Walter Scott. The Dale Addams books were immensely popular in both Australia and New Zealand and, current reading ages being what they were, consumed avidly by boys until the age of about fourteen, when it was customary, the balls having dropped, to stop reading print. Rudeish pics in Playboy or Cosmo, yes. Pics in car mags, yes. Actual print, no. Girls matured earlier, so they had a smaller window in which to enjoy Dale Addams’s Fire Riders series and Freddie Astro series and Galaxy Galleons series. Tennish to ten and a halfish, really. Though oddly enough the recent popularity of the Harry Potter epics had given Aidan’s Freddie Astro a boost.

    “We haven’t had a new Freddie Astro for ages,” noted Andrew on a wistful note.

    “No. Got sick of the little twerp.”

    “Oh, dear. Then it wouldn’t do to try and churn out another.”

    “No. I only do it for fun, anyway. It certainly wouldn't keep me.”

    “It wouldn’t need to, you've got pots!”

    Aidan made a face. “Mm… The thing is, writing the kids’ stories is a great break from the law, but I don’t think I’d have the impulse to do it for its own sake. It’s, um, well, the contrast or something. Different sides of the brain?” He shrugged.

    “Mm.” Andrew’s son, Bruce, who was now twenty and determinedly doing agricultural science at Massey in pursuit of his vocation to raise organic pigs—Katrina had tried to stop him and Andrew had supported him, one of the causes of the marital bust-up—had always loved Aidan’s books, and even Miss Melanie Barker herself, aged twenty-two going on forty-two, had graciously condescended to them until the make-up and the fashion mags took over round about fifteen—slow developer, right. But Aidan only had the two girls and Andrew was almost sure they and Paulette didn’t even know he was Dale Addams. And nothing tomboyish had ever been allowed to come near those two overdressed little horrors, their mummy had made sure of that. “It beats me how you can write stuff that’s just right for boys,” he admitted.

    Aidan gazed up at an azure sky scattered with tiny puffs of white. “I started it to see if I could. Picked up an English paper that had a really interesting interview with a children’s writer who uses an extremely limited vocabulary. He said it was partly his editor but that he just does it naturally. If it feels right, that’s how it comes out. So I had a go. After a bit I found that it was half instinctive—don’t know how, but I just sort of, um, put my head in the right shape,” he said, pulling a face. “That’s the way I think of it, sorry—and then I mostly write instinctively but with a sort of, um, layer of intellectual control. Um, the only thing I can compare it to is amateur dramatics at Grammar, where one was the character but at the same time was aware of oneself controlling the character. The same sort of, uh, duality, if you like.”

    “Crumbs,” said Andrew numbly.

    Aidan laughed. “Sorry! It’s totally unlike writing my legal stuff: that’s purely the cognitive side of the brain! And frequently very hard grind indeed. Word by painful word.”

    “Mm. Nothing in the legal pipeline, then?”

    “Isn’t five hundred pages on company law enough for one twelvemonth, Andrew?”

    “How much of it’s just a rehashing of the previous edition, though?”

    “Literally none, it’s a new title, but in actual fact the whole thing’s a rehash.” He shrugged.

    “You need to give it up, all right!” said Andrew with feeling.

    “Mm, no argument there. And do what, though?”

    “There’s the rub… Bruce would like it if I came into the pig-farming thing with him.”

    “What?” Aidan sat up in sheer horror.

    “They’d be free-range, I wouldn’t be mucking out sties!” said Andrew crossly. “But I’m not that fond of pigs.”

    “I should bloody well think not! Uh—well, Wal mentioned some sort of permaculture venture round this way. Sounds interesting, though the bloke that’s running it’s only managing to keep it going because he’s got a dedicated—what was the phrase? Oh, yes: permaculture nut,” said Aidan with a grin, “to do most of the gardening for him.”

    “Gentleman-farmer? Thanks very much!”

    “Um, no, well, hobby farmer? Baby ponies,” said Aidan, making a soppy face. “Sweet fuzzy-headed chookies?”

    “Those Chinese ones: I quite like them,” said Andrew, his thin face taking on a defiant look.

    “Those ones at the zoo always looked as if they needed a good wash… I know!” said Aidan with a laugh. “Guinea fowl!”

    “Eh?”

    “I’ve never had it here or in Oz: doubt the kweezine ventures of Sidders have ever heard of it. Possibly because there are no recipes for smothering it in chilli and Kafir lime leaves.”

    “Please! One has just eaten!”

    “Sorry. But they’re lovely birds! Delicious eating, too. Cast your mind back to when we used to go to the zoo: in the intervals of holding Megan back from immolating herself in the penguin pond—”

    “Otter pond.”

    “Them an’ all—when one was wandering down that path where one saw the free-range Chinese hens—”

    “Dirty ones, right,” said Andrew, nodding.

    “Will ya shut up and listen! The other birds that always used to be pottering round with them! Fattish, sleek, greyish birds with, uh, turned-down bums—”

    “Eh?”

    Aidan cleared his throat. “Yes, turned-down bums. They were Guinea fowl. Pintades.”

    “Eh?”

    “Think!”

    “Um… I sort of remember them—funny-looking.”

    “It’ll do,” said Aidan with a sigh. “There would be a niche market. Even if there wasn’t they’d be lovely birds to have wandering around!” he admitted with a smile.

    “Very practical, Aidan. A farm full of Chinese hens and funny fowl with turned-down bums. You’d be flogging ’em off by the million.”

    “Wouldn’t have to make money out of it: as you pointed out, I’ve got pots. But if you insist, run it as a B&B?”

    “Middle-aged fantasy, Aidan,” said Andrew definitely.

    “We are middle-aged,” he said sourly.

    “Thanks! You can be, if ya like; I’m not!”

    Aidan gave him a dry look: Andrew was six months younger than him. “Yeah, right. Though one does needs a cook for a B&B.”

    “Anyone can do breakfasts, surely? Put a little saucer of expensive English jam or American grape jelly on a pretty tray cloth, a glass of orange juice, lovely wholegrain toast and Bob’s yer uncle!”

    “Right, you can do the breakfasts. –No, but lots of them offer the choice of just bed and breakfast or pay for your dinners as well.”

    “Marry a cook,” said Andrew drily, getting up. “Not that one’d have you: you’d be forever telling her where she went wrong and there oughta be more orange and less sugar or some such crap in the crap.”

    “If you’re referring to that misnamed Canard à l’orange in that vile chow-house in Sydney—”

    “Yes.”

    “It was crap!”

    “Yes, but they didn’t know any better, Aidan,” he said heavily. “And they didn’t understand when you told ’em why it was crap.”

    “No. The word ‘standards’,” said Aidan with a very sour expression on his handsome face, “has no meaning on the other side of the Tasman, either.”

    “You chose to go there. –Come on, I’m gonna buy a mug with a map on it today if it kills me!”

    “I don’t think we’ll be holding the funeral very soon,” said Aidan wryly, obligingly getting up and following him back to the Japanese 4WD that Katrina had generously let him have while she kept the Merc. Aidan felt meanly glad—though he knew it was petty and beneath him—that he’d sold the Roller instead of letting Paulette have it to tool around town.

    “This!” said Andrew with a snigger, quite some time later, in the third souvenir shop they’d tried.

    Aidan looked at it and sniffed. “That is a map, yes, but that mystic rune says ‘Aotearoa’, not ‘Haere Mai’. And it’s a tee-shirt, not a mug, yer mug.”

    Andrew collapsed in a helpless sniggering fit.

    Grinning, Aidan took another tee-shirt off the rack. Ooh! Whereas Andrew’s was boring white with a boring green map on it this one was bright red with a—well, greenish map on it, the green hadn’t taken too well on top of the red. “Ooh, look, the maps have got places on them. ‘Rotorua’, ‘Taupo’, ‘Mt Cook’—oops, no, ‘Mr Cook’!”

    Andrew gave a howl.

    Aidan looked at its label. “Made in China,” he discovered pleasedly.

    Tears poured down Andrew’s cheeks. “Stop—it!” he gasped.

    “’Tisn’t me, it’s these products of the souvenir tee-shirt makers’ art.”

    Andrew blew his nose. “What size is it?” he said feebly at last.

    “Uh… dunno. Don't think ‘Kenny’s Souvenirs’ can be a size.”

    “It’s the name of the shops,” said the refeened lady in the purple whatsit behind the counter in distinctly narked tones. “Are you taking those tee-shirts?”

    “Um, well, might be, if they’re the right size,” said Andrew in a very feeble voice. He took the red one off Aidan. “Size M, you nana.”

    “M for Male, M for medium or M for—”

    “Shut up, Aidan,” warned Andrew unsteadily.

    “Mao,” finished Aidan. “’Tis a little red tee-shirt.”

    Caught out, Andrew gave a startled snort of laughter which he tried unsuccessfully to turn into a cough for the benefit of the purple-clad lady behind the counter. “Um, medium, not little,” he said feebly. “I think it might be too small for you, old mate.”

    Aidan took it back and held it up against his chest. “Blow.”

    “Try the white one.” Andrew gave it to him and held the red one against his own chest. “Um… dunno.” He looked in vain for its price. “Um, sorry, how much is this, please?” he said to the purple-clad lady.

    Looking wary, she told him the price.

    “Tourist prices,” said Aidan to his dropped jaw. “That’s nothing in yen.”

    “No? It’s still a fair bite in Yankee dollars!” replied Andrew in shaken tones.

    “Don’t be such a Scrooge, we’re on holiday. And you can’t wear those nancy-boy tee-shirts that Katrina chose for you, you’ll shame me all over Taupo.”

    “I dare say Taupo is full of suffering victims in apricot and—what was it she said? Fancy word for green. Avocado? Anyway, apricot and pale green striped tee shirts or pale pink tee-shirts with nasty little tan collars that their exes forced on them last summer. –Um, that really is too much to pay for a very shoddy tee-shirt, Aidan.”

    “Rubbish. How much is this one, please?” he asked nicely.

    The answer was they were all the same price.

    “Aidan, for Pete’s sake! It’s at least four sizes too big for you!”

    “Balls; all the guys are wearing ’em like that these days, it’s got street cred. And two korus. Brown ones. Give me that red one. –I’ll have both of these, please. You haven’t got any mugs with maps on, have you?” he said nicely to the purple-clad lady. “No? Pity.” He paid for both tee-shirts with his Gold Card, which he was interested to notice she accepted without a blink, presumably the customers were all Yanks or Chinese—blind ones, yes—and received gratefully the intel that they had another shop on such-and-such a street that had more mugs.

    He removed the white tee-shirt from the white plastic shopping carrier with the green and brown map of New Zealand on it featuring a very blue Lake Taupo larger than life-size and, remarking that the bag alone was worth the price, solemnly handed it and its remaining contents to Andrew. “Merry Christmas.”

    “Daft bugger,” replied Andrew, grinning in spite of himself. “All right, I’ll have it, you can afford it!”

    “Yeah. Come on, let’s try the other shop! Got the map?”

    “Two,” admitted Andrew, holding up his carrier bag.

    Taken completely unawares, Aidan collapsed in a spluttering fit of the most painful kind. Grinning, Andrew grabbed his elbow and steered him out.

    “Ow!” he gasped on the pavement, wiping his eyes. “Boy, that did me good!”

    “Yeah,” agreed Andrew. “Um, we could skip this other place, if you like.”

    “Certainly not! We’re going to find a mug with a map of New Zealand on it today or you're gonna die trying, ’member?”

    They got back in the 4WD and after a certain amount of driving round in circles and a pause while Aidan removed his perfectly respectable jersey-knit golfing shirt and got into the huge white tourist horror, Andrew having dared him that he wouldn’t, finally found the other shop and went into tit.

    “Mugs,” said Aidan, nudging Andrew.

    Andrew was staring at the ladies examining the mugs, his round, unremarkable face slightly flushed. Aidan took a look at them. Not bad. Probably not that much younger than they themselves were, but not bad. The clothes looked like imitation Ken Done fabrics, but not the cheapest sort. Australian tourists? American tourists just come over from Australia? He had another look at the make-up. The one with the good tits in the tight yellow shoe-string-strapped singlet over the coral bra was definitely not an American, no. The other one might be—that was quite a decent engagement ring—but for an American dame of that age the make-up was a bit subfusc— No, Australian, he recognised as she said: “Libby, I don’t think Tamsin’ll think a mug with a tiki on it’s funny.”

    “You can’t come to a tourist mecca and not buy a tourist mug with a tiki on it!”

    “I can, very easily,” she said, but not reprovingly, in fact with a definite giggle. Aidan looked with interest at the light golden-brown hair. At one stage Paulette’s had been just that shade, but he’d take a bet that this woman’s was natural. Pity that that draped blue thing was concealing her tits. Never mind, the other one’s were really good!

    To his astonishment Andrew, who was too nice to accost strange women in souvenir shops, at this said: “’Scuse me, but that’s an awfully nice tiki mug; if you’re not interested we might buy it, we’re definitely looking for tourist mugs.”

    The taller woman in the blue smiled at him and said: “You have it, then.”

    “Aw, this tiki’s a really leering one, though!” protested the woman with the darker brown hair with a laugh. By God, hers looked natural, too! Really lovely. Thick. Shiny.

    “Give us a look,” said Andrew, grinning, and getting rather near to the tits. Aidan gave him an astonished look that he didn’t see. “Ooh, yeah! I won’t deprive you of it, then.”

    “Thanks!” she said with another laugh. “I’ll buy it for myself, since my sister thinks my niece won’t appreciate it. Look, there’s more, but be warned: the tikis have come out a bit different on each one, you may not find another really leering one!”

    “Ooh, good, are there? Look, Aidan, there’s loads!” he said, bending to the shelf.

    The ladies were now looking at Aidan, smiling, so he was forced to say something. “I thought we were looking for tourist mugs with maps of New Zealand and the mystic rune ‘Haere Mai’?”

    The ladies giggled and the dark-haired one—she had a lovely wide mouth, and huge dark eyes, which actually looked much better without make-up than they would have done American-style—looked admiringly at his tee-shirt and said: “I love your tourist tee. ‘Aotearoa’, it’s almost as good as ‘Haere Mai’! Look, Jayne!”

    “It’s got a map, too,” said the other one, smiling.

    Funnily enough Andrew was no longer looking at the crookedly-printed tiki mugs, he was looking at her, with the most fatuous expression on his dial Aidan had seen on it for many a long year, in fact not since their law clerk days, when he’d developed an enormous crush on a girl doing French at varsity who’d had a boyfriend who, get this, was the varsity boxing club’s champion and six inches taller and three stone heavier than he was! Aidan might not have recalled this episode so clearly, except that he’d recently come across her photo in a Vogue in his dentist’s waiting-room. No, she hadn’t married the boxer, so Andrew might have been in there with a chance if he’d ever worked himself up to the point of making his move, which he hadn’t. She’d married Auckland’s own billionaire—yes, Sir Jake Carrano, that was who. Very possibly this woman—who did look a bit like her, the lovely hair was lighter but she had the same sort of oval face and a similar sweet expression—would turn out to be the wife of—well, take your pick. A robber baron from Western Australia? A top pollie? Er, not from NSW, he’d met most of them. But that still left a lot of choice, didn’t it? A close mate of Sir Jake’s who would put the kybosh for good an’ all on that career of Andrew’s that he reckoned he didn’t want any more? Yeah.

    “A green map,” Andrew was pointing out with a silly grin.

    “Very green!” she agreed, giggling.

    “And see those things? Brown. Two of them. You might not know them, but they’re korus,” he said proudly.

    “Um… Maori motifs?” she ventured with a lovely smile.

    “Got it in fourteen,” said Aidan in a bored voice.

    “Oh, so you’re not Australian, then?” she said, awarding him the smile, this time.

    “Ah… how shall I put this? I might have the general knowledge to recognise a koru when I saw it even whilst still being Australian—though I concede it’s unlikely, statistically speaking,” he said thoughtfully. The dark-haired woman gave a startled giggle and Aidan found he was smiling at her. “Um, actually I’m a New Zealander by birth, worked in Australia for the last twenty years,” he ended feebly.

    “Worst of both worlds,” said Andrew, giving him an annoyed look. Why? Oh, good God: thought he’d just insulted the ladies’ no doubt jingoistic sensibilities!

    “It explains why he knows what a koru is, though,” returned the dark-haired one. “A tiki mug’s almost as good as a map mug, I think.”

    Andrew jumped. “Um, yeah. Well, let’s have a look at them!” He bent once more and peered. Helpfully the ladies came and assisted him. A lot of giggling ensued…

    Aidan sighed. He wrenched his gaze off the dark-haired woman’s bum, to which it had unaccountably strayed as she bent to a lower shelf, and went over to a rack of horrible bright printed garments and stared fixedly at them. This was ludicrous! At his age—not to mention her age? Hadn’t had it for a while, that was his trouble. Maybe he shouldn’t have told that bitch Sheilagh he’d had enough, ta but no, ta. Or that bitch Lesley from Moreton King, last year. But finding out she’d been doing young King—not even the old man, there might have been some slight sort of justification for that—at the same time as she was doing him—

    “Aidan!”

    Aidan jumped. “What?”

    “What say we buy a set of tiki mugs? Not matching, of course! See, I like this one, with a definite squint, Jayne likes this one, it’s smiling, and Libby likes this sneering one!”

    Jesus, had the cretin gone and let introductions happen? It was highly unlikely they’d get rid of them without at the very least a drink—or, this being the middle of EnZed, afternoon tea: he’d fallen out of his tree, that was what! Sure enough, the nong was now saying eagerly: “Oh—let me introduce you! Aidan Vine—”

    Yeah, yeah. Aidan accepted introductions and agreed they’d better buy a set of tiki mugs. Noting as the three of them hunted for a fourth one that would, apparently, complete the set: “Andrew, you realise that that bloody woman at the other shop knew damn well they didn’t have map mugs here and sent us here deliberately because she realised we’d give in and buy some other crap?”

    At this Libby straightened, smiling, and said: “Coral Kenny. She’s the owner. Of course she did, she’s a very sharp businesswoman!”

    “Purple, too,” admitted Aidan. He could feel the silly grin on his mug but it wouldn’t go away. Nor, unfortunately, would the hard-on. Damn!

    “Mm!” she agreed with a giggle, nodding hard.

    Aidan wrenched his gaze off the tits, which also had a tendency to nod, well, jiggle, and, though unable to stop himself mentally awarding a medal to the modern bra designer, said coolly: “Well, settled on a fourth mug, then?”

    At this there was a burst of giggles from the direction of the shelves and Jayne stood up, very flushed. “Andrew’s found a rude one!” she gasped.

    “Yeah!” said Andrew on the broad grin, holding it out.

    Aidan took the mug, perforce. He had to swallow. The brown tikis were obviously transfers and whether the hand holding the transfer had slipped, or this one hadn’t been peeled off its whatsit properly— In any case, the lower part of the tiki’s anatomy, technically its folded legs if one was being captious, had a small but definite protrusion. Uh—actually a piece of the transfer that had come slightly adrift, one side of it had a black edging like that round the whole thing.

    “Yes, this is a rude tiki, all right,” he admitted.

    “Ooh, let me see!” said Libby eagerly, coming up to his side. It was a warm day: this close, Aidan could feel the heat coming off her body. And definitely smell her scent: mmm, Arpège, classic! What a lovely change after the muck the females of Sydney soused themselves— Er, yeah. Be a duty-free. The clothes were reasonable but the handbags were merely pretty and they very clearly weren’t in the income bracket that bought French scent as a matter of course.

    “Help!” she gasped, going very red and collapsing in giggles.

    “We’ll take it,” said Aidan drily, handing it to back to Andrew and taking the chance to step away from her, because really—

    “Too right! I say, if you girls have finished your shopping, what say we grab some afternoon tea?” he said eagerly.

    Jesus!

    “But aren’t we depriving the gentlemen of your company?” asked Aidan nicely. “What is it, this afternoon? Oh—fishing, I suppose!”

    The two women looked at him with completely blank expressions. Then Jayne went very pink and gasped: “Oh! I see what you— Um, no, Aidan, we’re by ourselves, I’m a widow and Libby isn’t married!”

    Eh? Not married? Then what the Hell had the tits been doing, these last twenty-odd years? He was bloody sure she wasn’t a Les. For one thing, never mind the cretinous Yank media’s efforts to persuade the cretinous TV-watching public otherwise, Leses did not dress like that. Not in anything that showed off the tits like that, and never that colourful. Dull, tailored fawns and greys, usually. Just like a man—right. And why they wanted to be just like our side when they loathed men— No, well, it wasn’t just her clothes, he’d’ve known anyway. Whether it was pheromones or not, God knew, but one could always tell.

    Bloody Andrew was urging afternoon tea on them. They dithered but accepted, had anyone thought they wouldn’t? As they didn’t know Taupo either there might have been some difficulty in finding a place, another than the horrible milk bars they’d passed on the way here, but the girl behind the counter very helpfully told them where Graceland was. Yeah, she had got the idea off Elvis Presley’s house, only see, her name was Grace! Um, yeah, there was an old jukebox, she admitted to Andrew’s excited enquiry, but it didn’t play, acksherly.

    “Never mind, we’ll go!” he said with an eager laugh. Boy, was he lit up. “Graceland in Taupo!”

    They went to Graceland. It was a very ordinary coffee shop of the sort to be found all over the British Commonwealth, apart from the lovely big jukebox standing in a corner looking lost with a bloody pot-plant on top of it. Plain brown Formica tables, spindly uncomfortable steel-legged chairs with malformed plywood seats and backs in one, small vase of folded red paper serviettes on each table, smaller vase of plastic asparagus fern and red fabric rose on each table. Er, a red fabric rose with a silver star attached to it, what—? Oh: Christmas, right. That explained the fuzzy silver drapings along the edge of the counter, too. As was normal in such places there was nothing to indicate whether it was table service or counter service but Aidan went firmly up to the counter and asked, leaving Andrew to fart around seating the ladies. Counter service, right.

    “It’s strange cocktail sandwiches, forgotten the word for them, been out of the country too long, or slimy vanilla slices, I’m afraid,” he said, having peered into the plastic hutches at one end of the counter.

    “Club sandwiches, you clot,” said Andrew. “Don’t tell me they don’t have them in Australia!”

    “Not that I’ve seen; only as cocktail sandwiches. The sliced bread’s thicker over there, perhaps that’s why.”

    “Is it?” said Libby blankly.

    Aidan found he was smiling at her again. “Mm; the distinction between toast-sliced and sandwich-sliced is almost indiscernible, haven’t you realised? New Zealand sandwich-sliced is much thinner. Actually, it makes delicious Melba toast, especially with a gas grill!” he remembered with a laugh.

    “He’s thinking of our student flat days, ninety million years ago,” explained Andrew on a dry note. “But yeah, I must admit the toast was good, when he didn’t go into a daydream over Marion Prendergast’s daddy’s great big law firm and let it burn.”

    Unaccountably Aidan returned to this: “Shut up, ya bugger. Wasn’t just that, Marion Prendergast’s great big tits were definitely in there, too!”

    At which both ladies went very pink indeed and gave flustered laughs, so, gee, they certainly weren’t Leses, as if it needed proving.

    He and Andrew would politely have fetched them something but they wanted to come up to the counter and look. Mm, well, the income-bracket thing, wasn’t it? Bloody Paulette wouldn’t have lowered herself—or bloody Sheilagh, either, come to think of it. Lesley would probably have made him sit while she got the food: if she hadn’t been so very keen on sex, not say worn tight business suits that she bulged out of over either nothing but a bra or a very lacy slip top, you might have concluded that she swung the other way.

    “Those ones,” warned Andrew, as Libby peered at the club sandwiches, “have almost definitely got tinned asparagus in them.”

    “Ugh! Tinned?”

    “Yeah, it’s a favourite in New Zealand,” he said, peering into the hutch. “We grow too much of it. Over Hastings way, mainly—it’ll be Wattie’s: Hastings is where Wattie’s started.”

    “You know, Libby,” prompted Jayne: “we’ve started getting some of their frozen stuff in the supermarket in our mall. Tamsin won’t let me buy it, she says it’s imported.”

    “Oh,” said Libby vaguely. “Um, but why not freeze it, though? Then it’d be almost as nice as fresh.”

    “One of the great mysteries of modern food science, Libby,” said Andrew solemnly, and she dissolved in giggles.

    Frowning, Aidan said to Jayne: “I’ve always hated tinned asparagus. My mother used to give bloody afternoon teas where asparagus rolls featured largely—revolting.”

    “Ooh, yes, Mum used to make those when we were little!” she cried. “Remember, Libby?”

    “No,” said Libby definitely. “Um, have those ones got grated carrot in them, Andrew?”

    “Uh-huh.”

    “Raw grated carrot and tinned asparagus?” she said dazedly.

    Andrew collapsed in horrible sniggers, gasping: “Yeah! Sorry!”

    “That sounds really yucky,” Jayne admitted, giving Aidan a timid smile.

    “Yes. You don’t have to eat them, Jayne,” he said kindly. “I think there’s some cake further along, would you like that? –Andrew!” he said loudly. “Move up, you idiot, see if there’s some cake!”

    Andrew investigated. “Yeah, carrot cake and what I think’s a sponge, with cream and kiwifruit on it!” he reported pleasedly.

    “Er—yeah. The rest of the world calls ’em kiwis, but I suppose— Er, no,” said Aidan a trifle limply as Jayne suddenly dissolved in giggles, shaking the lovely hair madly.

    “We usually call them kiwifruit, too,” admitted Libby, smiling at her sister. “I think it's really only the Americans who say kiwis.”

    And the Brits, and the French—les kiwis—and the up-market ladies of Sidders who graciously accepted slivers of them sitting on cuisine minceur sludge and decorated with extraneous wings and curls of God-knew-what and then left half of them on the plate at a cost of extreme damage to one’s hip-pock— Er, yeah. Aidan smiled feebly at them.

    “As a matter of fact,” said Libby, apparently encouraged, damn, he hadn’t intended that, “Dad calls them Chinese gooseberries, still. They’ve got a big vine.”

    “Two,” said Andrew. “You need a female plant and a male plant.”

    Something like that, yeah. Aidan moved heavily down to the cakes.

    Andrew came up to his elbow. “Dad always used to call them Chinese goosegogs, ’member?”

    Aidan smiled reluctantly. “So he did!”

    “Probably still does; we haven’t discussed the topic lately,” admitted Andrew, grinning. “Looks good, eh? Think I’ll have a slice.”

    “Andrew, the place isn’t air-conditioned!” said Aidan urgently.

    “Eh?”

    “Cream in this weather, with no air conditioning?”

    “Brainwashed softie,” replied his friend cheerfully, helping himself to a large slice of cream-coated sponge.

    Aidan shuddered. He looked at the carrot cake. That icing looked as if it might have cream in it…

    “I think,” said a shy voice, “that the icing on the carrot cake might have cream cheese in it. I’ve got a recipe for that, it’s nice. It won’t have gone off; it’s not really warm, is it?”

    “Only warmish, compared to Sydney,” he conceded. “Where are you from, Jayne? Northern New South Wales? Queensland?”

    “Queensland. Our summers are much hotter, and of course much wetter: it’s a more tropical climate. We’re really enjoying the change!”

    “Yes,” said Aidan, smiling a little. “So am I, though more the change from the rat-race than the change in the weather.”

    “Of course. I think Andrew said you’re a lawyer, is that right?”

    Christ, when had he managed to mention that, in between the giggling and the eyeing up the blue bum and the hair and getting very, very close over the mugs?

    “That’s right,” he said nicely. “Company law.”

    Libby came up to Jayne’s far elbow. “You’re not A.C. Vine, are you?” she asked abruptly.

    Aidan blinked. God, surely she wasn’t in the profession! “Er, yes. Aidan Cornelius, after my grandfather.”

    “Crawford’s Introduction to Company Law, 20th edition by Gordon Sieff, edited by A.C. Vine,” she said, nodding.

    His jaw dropped. “Yes. My first tome after I’d gone to Australia, old Gordy Sieff didn’t have the energy— Are you a lawyer?”

    “Don’t sound so incredulous!” retorted Libby on cross note. “Women are allowed to enter even that sacred male precinct these days, ya know!”

    “Libby, that’s mean! Of course she isn’t,” said Jayne quickly. “She’s a librarian.”

    “I used to work for a big public library system. That was one of the books I had to catalogue: they had quite a big law section with most of the basic texts. I only remember it because we had a big argument over what cataloguing rule applied,” said Libby, going, Aidan was not displeased to see, rather red by the end of this speech.

    “I see. Well, that’s me.”

    “You turned out not to be the author,” said Libby, scowling at him.

    “Hah, hah: take it off your CV, Aidan,” said Andrew quickly. “Join me in a piece of sponge with kiwifruit and cream, Libby?”

    “Um, yes, I think I will, thanks,” said Libby gratefully.

    “Libby, you didn’t take a carrot and asparagus sandwich, did you?” croaked Jayne, looking in dismay at her tray.

    Libby gave her a defiant look. “Yes, why not? We’re on holiday, and they go with the tiki mugs!”

    “And with Aidan’s tee-shirt!” said Andrew with a laugh. “Come on, old mate, buck up, you’re holding up the queue!”

    “Oh—sorry,” he said lamely, perceiving that a large woman in a floral sunfrock—God, did they still wear those here, too? Australia was infested with them in summer—and a thin woman in a depressed blue-grey blouse and horrid polyester navy slacks had tacked themselves on behind their group. He took a slice of carrot cake: all the others had food on their plates and he didn’t want to look any more particular than he’d already made himself—and he could always leave the icing if it tasted off.

    … “Honestly!” said Andrew with an exasperated laugh as they headed the 4WD back to the house, quite some time later. “What’s up with you?”

    “Nothing, though I could get quite physiological in telling you what’s up with you, mate,” replied Aidan nastily.

    “Well, yeah!” he said with a laugh. “Why not? Lovely woman, isn’t she?”

    “Which one, Andrew?” replied Aidan nastily.

    “Eh? Jayne, of course! Not saying Libby isn’t nice, too, but Jayne’s a corker!”

    Aidan sighed. He’d regressed to the vernacular of the Boys’ Own Annual along with the adolescent behaviour, apparently.

    “I got the distinct impression you weren’t entirely immune yourself, either!” said Andrew with a laugh.

    “Oh, shut up.”

    “Aidan, they’re a pair of perfectly pleasant women, apparently free of encumbrances, and about the right age for us—unless you’ve suddenly started fancying the dollybird type?”

    “No!”

    “Didn’t think so,” he replied on a dry note. “Not when you were looking at Libby’s tits in that singlet thing, anyway. So what’s wrong with her?”

    “Nothing,” said Aidan tiredly.

    After moment Andrew said: “I see. Not flaunting those Hermes purses your ladies have to carry: that it?”

    Paulette certainly had, yes. As he’d pronounced it in English Aidan was able to reply nastily: “Hermès, you fool, and it’s handbags.”

    “‘In a handbag,’” he said deeply. “Not over here it isn’t, old mate. If you only came home to despise everything you lay eyes on and reject a perfectly nice woman who looked to me quite ready to let you show her a good time, why didn’t you bloody well stay in Sidders with bloody Paulette and her bloody Ur-mezz accessories? Or should that be ack-cess-wah?”

    “No,” said Aidan, biting his lip. “Sorry, Andrew. I didn’t mean— In any case,” he burst out, “she wasn’t ready for any such thing: didn’t you hear that Woman’s Lib speech she favoured me with over the bloody lawyer thing?”

    “Um, no,” said Andrew on a weak note. “What bloody lawyer thing, Aidan?”

    “In the queue,” admitted Aidan lamely. “When we were looking at the food.”

    “She remembered your book, I’d’ve thought that was quite a compliment,” said Andrew dazedly.

    Aidan shrugged. “Forget it. Anyway, she’s not my type.”

    Andrew opened his mouth. Then he shut it again. Then he took a deep breath and said carefully: “Aidan, dear old fellow, you might have tried to kid yourself for thirty years that it’s not your type, but don’t the physiological indications suggest otherwise? –Only if you’re like the rest of us blokes,” he noted wryly. “You’ve had the skinny society bitch sort with the right sort of daddy, that you tried to kid yourself you wanted, and it didn’t work, did it? Don’t tell me that was just Paulette in particular: it wasn’t. She’s the wrong type entirely for you. You’ve always wanted the busty, wide-hipped sort, ever since the days of poor old Pam Easterbrook and her ruddy fluffy cardies.”

    “What? Bullshit!” he cried angrily, very flushed.

    “Aidan, the whole office realised it, you couldn’t be in the room with her for two seconds without getting a monster hard-on—even old Wal remarked on it. Though Pam herself was too innocent to notice, I think. Pity; might’ve been better for the both of you if she had noticed.”

    “Look, this is absolute crap!” he said heatedly.

    “No, it isn’t, Aidan,” said Andrew calmly.

    Aidan swallowed. “I never fancied Pam Easterbrook!”

    “You might not have, no, or at least that cold legal brain of yours didn’t, but your flaming prick did, and don’t try to claim otherwise,” replied Andrew calmly.

    After a moment Aidan said sulkily: “Physiology.”

    “That’s precisely what I mean! Stop denying it, Aidan, you’ll only end up hurting yourself again. I’m not saying settle down in a wee suburban nest with Libby McLeod—dare say she wouldn’t have you on a permanent basis anyway, what sane woman’d want that gourmet lifestyle of yours?—but if it’s on offer for the holidays, go for it!”

    Aidan gnawed on his lip and didn’t reply.

    Andrew drove on in silence for a while. Then he said lightly: “Pam Easterbrook’s on offer again, you know. Must be five years—more—since she divorced that little weed she married. –Under the mistaken impression she needed something she could dominate, I think; whereas what she really needed was the sort of six-foot-four hunk that went round ignoring all that bust and brain same like he was ignoring the scores of over-optimistic little typists that made him cake for his birthday and brought in little bunches of flowers for his desk.”

    “We had to share that desk, if you remember: those bloody flowers weren’t necessarily for me. And your élitism is showing.”

    Andrew ignored this completely. “You remember that little weed: same year as us. Clerked for Kent, Kent, White and Clarke-Walker.”

    After a moment Aidan said limply: “Was it White?”

    “Dunno, it just came out. Probably changed their name since then anyway, most of the big legal firms did in the Eighties, didn’t wanna be left behind by the bandwaggon.”

    Aidan sniffed. “Same like the Sydney ones, then. Except for a couple of the really old-established firms that had some notion of what tradition, not to say standards, meant. –Don’t tell me: no better over there, why did I go?” he added, scowling.

    Andrew had certainly been thinking it, though he didn’t know that he’d been going to tell him. “Mm,” he agreed mildly. “What was his name? Um… Jones, that was it! Musta been half Pam’s fighting weight!” Gradually he became aware that that was a stunned silence emanating from his left-hand side. “Jones,” he repeated, clearing his throat.

    “Not Tom Jones?” said Aidan dazedly. “That weed?”

    “Yeah. Well, his name was Jones, but not really Tom. Murray Whatsisname from—um, shit, forget what firm he was with now, um, Micky Shapiro’s outfit, I think—he dubbed him that, remember? Drove the little squirt absolutely ropeable!” he said with a laugh.

    “Pam Easterbrook married that miserable little squirt Tom Jones?” he croaked.

    “Yeah,” said Andrew drily. “There you are, see? Helluva waste of all that bust and brain, cardies an’ all.”

    “Shut up about the fucking cardies, Andrew,” warned Aidan.

    Andrew glanced sideways at him. He could see he was really shook up—good. Serve ’im right. He left it at that, though without very much real hope that Aidan would come to his senses and take up with something nice, and ordinary, and that he actually wanted, like busty Libby McLeod.

Next chapter:

https://summerseason-anovel.blogspot.com/2022/10/gracious-living.html