The Wide Brown Land

12

The Wide Brown Land

    Those who deliberately exposed themselves to something that they knew would be sheer, unadulterated Hell deserved to suffer the tortures of the damned, didn’t they? Polly had known it’d be like this, so she didn’t need to complain, did she? Not that there was anyone to complain to.

    Lady Harding’s idea of the zenith of the cultural delights of Sidders was some Goddawful modern musical—travesty of a musical, more like—at the ruddy Opera House. Unfortunately it was so loud that it was impossible to nod off during it. Though Polly acknowledged silently to herself that Jake would have done his best to. Not that they’d ever have got him to it, of course…

    The participants—singers would have been a misnomer—all seemed to be suffering from some horrible facial skin disease. Ugh! Then a dark-skinned one came on and it dawned: they were all wearing microphones, the sort that were fastened in some way to the cheek. Australia the land of multiculturism of course hadn’t provided a mike that would match this guy’s skin tones—no.

    In the first interval Phyllis said brightly: “I must say I don’t quite see what it’s all about… But it’s very good, isn’t it?”

    (No.) Polly nodded feebly. “Um, very modern,” she offered, even more feebly.

    “Of course, dear! In some ways it reminds me of The Phantom of the Opera! My goodness, that does seem a long while back…”

    It would do. It was. On the other hand, this one’s frightful music was definitely in that vein, yeah. Over-loud, whiny, and saccharine. Sometimes almost achieving a tune.

    Phyllis sighed reminiscently. “John and I saw the Sydney production, of course…”

    “Mm, I remember,” she murmured.

    “We wondered about Lay Mizz, but in the end we decided not to. Well, it didn’t sound very cheerful.”

    Polly winced. Put it well. “No. Horrid.”

    This went down very well: Phyllis beamed at her and continued her reminiscences in an undertone—not that there was any need to: surrounded as they were by the moronic, over-dressed section of Australia that could afford the best seats at the Sydney Opera House for aural dreck, they were failing to attract any notice whatsoever. Well, the decibel level alone would have prevented that: she’d have had to scream at the top of her voice to make any of them overhear her. And this in spite of the fact that a good sixty percent of them had pushed their way out in search of alcohol the minute the curtain had started lowering. Understandable? Well, no, not given the rapturous acclaim that the set-pieces of the thing had received.

    Phyllis and John had seen quite a few modern productions, of course.—Polly nodded in what she hoped was a sympathetic, understanding way. Or at least an accepting way.—Some of them had been quite pretty… But one or two had been rather strange.—Polly nodded again, weakly, this time.—And once or twice dear John had nodded off, she had to admit it! Silly laugh.—Polly smiled and nodded sympathetically.—Ye-es… Now what was that one they’d seen in London during their last trip?—Unfortunately Polly was completely blank on that one. She merely tried to look expectant.—Well, it was sort of off-Broadway, actually! Silly laugh.—Polly swallowed hard.—No, not that, but you know! Whatever they called it in London! Silly laugh.—(A flop?) Polly smiled weakly and nodded.—No, well, it wasn’t like in the old days, of course. Reminiscent sigh. They all wore funny costumes, that was right. But she must say The Lion King was so very, very clever, didn’t Polly think?—Help, how that got onto the scene? Frantically she nodded, trying to smile.—Though actually, on their way back through Canada—Eh? Which time was she talking about?—they’d met up with Janice Waters, would Polly believe they’d been at school together? Dio, of course.—Yep, if you wanted your girls to have the cachet of a private Anglican school and turn out functionally illiterate with nothing between the ears but clothes, hair and makeup and the ambition to catch a well-off provider, Dio was where you sent them, back then. And it had been the same in Polly’s time, actually. She managed to nod but only just.—No, well, Janice McKeon she was now, of course! And of course they wouldn’t have wanted to disrupt her plans, so when she’d said that they’d been going to go to their little grandson’s school production of it, of course they’d said they’d love to come, too. Um, well, actually it had called itself something else, but that was definitely what it was! John had said maybe the name was copyright and the school couldn’t afford the fee, that was right. And it had been adorable, Polly! The little ones in their cute wee animal costumes—of course very amateurish, but that made it better, really! And the heads quite well done—of course only the main rôles, the ones in the chorus just had their dear little chubby cheeks painted with those funny spots—you know, dear!

    Fortunately Polly, the mother of little twin boys who had once been gum-nut fairies in an amateur production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, fuzzy little tutus an’ all, was able to smile genuinely at this one and agree it must have been adorable.

    “Mm…” sighed Phyllis, smiling wistfully. “Little Malcolm’s in cost-accounting now, would you believe? I had an email from Janice only last week… She wants me to get on that new Skype thing, but really, Polly, it just sounds too technical, and then the times are so different, we’d never manage it.”

    “No, it’s well-nigh impossible to talk to someone at the other side of the world. Jake always used to be phoning the overseas offices at weird times of the night.”

    “Exactly, dear! And one can always send the photos by email, can’t one? Well, Alan and Susan have shown me, but I must admit I can’t always get it right. I mean, how do you know where they are on the computer? It puts stuff anywhere!”

    Very, very luckily Polly had heard this one before, whether the complainants were Apple fans or p.c. users, so she just nodded kindly and this time didn’t make the awful mistake of mentioning tree structures. Those whose brains operated instinctively rather than logically, however bright they might be in other spheres—not Phyllis, no-one could call her bright, but others of her acquaintance—such persons just could not grasp it.

    “As a matter of fact—well, he was always wonderful about accompanying me, of course—but dear John always used to say that real musicals ended with Oklahoma,” she then revealed.

    “Oh, yes! That lovely film with Shirley Jones and Gordon Macrae!” beamed Polly.

    “Yes, that was it. I’m surprised you know it, Polly.”

    “I never saw it when it first came out, of course, but Mum and I went to a re-run in Napier—I think I was about ten. It was before I came up to Auckland to board with Aunty Vi, definitely. But Mum’s got it on video, so I’ve seen it since, too. I always enjoy it.”

    “Yes, delightful,” she sighed. “So… well, actually the only word that springs to mind is merry, really.”

    Polly nodded hard, beaming.

    “Ye-es… I went to the film of South Pacific—you’d have been too young for that, dear—now, did I go with Mum? Goodness, I can’t remember. But—well, the singing was lovely, of course, though I must say I couldn’t see what anyone saw in the leading man—well, he was rather plump, wasn’t he? But the girl was lovely, so lively! Only then it got too sad… I couldn’t see why that nice boy couldn’t have married that dear little Island girl: she was so pretty and dainty!”

    Mm, thought Polly drily. The theme of miscegenation apart. Doubtless Phyllis hadn’t noticed the bit where the lively white American heroine was horribly taken aback to find that the plump Italian hero—wasn’t he supposed to be French?—um, that he had two little brown kids.

    “I’d much rather have a cheerful musical,” she agreed.

    Phyllis was very pleased with this remark and, after a half-hearted reference to the film of My Fair Lady—she’d found Sexy Rexy “completely wonderful” but was extremely tepid about Miss Hepburn’s playing of Eliza, good on her—began to tell Polly a lot more about Janice Whatserface’s grandchildren…

    Then the thing started up again. Oh, God.

    During the second interval Phyllis thought wistfully that a drink might be nice, but on the other hand, Polly knew what the crowd would be like. Polly did, indeed: she shuddered sympathetically and admitted: “Yeah, no way am I up for fighting my way to the bar through a pushing and shoving crowd of Aussies. Jake used to take it in his stride, of course.”

    “Naturally, my dear! Well, I have known poor dear John fail once or twice—but not often!”

    “No. They have their uses,” agreed Polly, smiling at her. “Jake was good at grabbing taxis, too.”

    Phyllis shuddered sympathetically. “Joan suggested London, last year, just the two of us, but really—! My heart failed me!”

    “Mm,” she agreed.

    “Then we thought we might come over here—Joan fancied the casino. But last time we came, John actually won: he was so thrilled! Somehow the idea just didn’t appeal, without him.”

    No, added to which the Joan woman was a hen. But then weren’t they all? “No,” Polly agreed kindly. “I wouldn’t fancy the one in Hobart without Jake. Did you and John come with us that first time? Before we were even engaged. I had a lovely new dress: pale green.”

    Phyllis looked doubtful. “I don’t think so… I do remember you had a lovely pale green dress when you got engaged, Polly; I think you wore it to dinner at the Yacht Club that time!”

    “Yes, I think I did.”

    “But I don’t remember going to Hobart with you and Jake back then.”

    “Um, no, actually I think it might have been Ron and Muriel Carewe. Jake was always very fond of them. Old Ron was one of his earliest business associates. I think the story was, he was willing to take a chance on a very young entrepreneur!” she smiled.

    “That does sound like him, dear! What a dear old man he was! Well, a bit of a rough diamond, of course, but none the worse for that! And Muriel was a lovely woman. I remember the first time John and I dined with them—she did all the catering herself, you know. She’d made a wonderful apple pie—traditional: rather a heavy sweet short crust; but not soggy,” she announced firmly.

    Polly nodded. “Mm, Muriel was a great cook.”

    “Yes. It was just like my old Gran’s cooking, to tell you the truth, Polly, and that’s going back a fair few years!” Happily she began to tell her about her grandparents’ house—crumbs, in Onehunga? Phyllis had come a fair way since then! Polly listened in fascination. It took a while but she eventually worked out that it must have been Phyllis’s mother who was the snob, more or less bullying the dad into everything—the gran was his mother. He’d been a bright boy, scholarships to both secondary school and varsity, but he’d have been quite content with a suburban law practice, only his wife had pushed him into running for the local council and eventually for Mayor of Auckland—must have been before that, then, that she’d pushed him into joining the Masons, Polly recognised silently—and that was how Phyllis and John had really got together! Though of course they had met before, at a dance the Dio girls had gone to. Right. Got it.

    This slice of Colonial history completed the second interval and then the bloody musical recommenced. By the end of it Polly had a headache, so she made no objections when Phyllis suggested they (a) just wait quietly in their seats instead of trying to push through all those awful people, (b) go to the loo, the crowds should have cleared by then, and (c) ring “that lovely limo firm of Jake’s” again. Polly agreed to the first two suggestions but noted apropos of the last: “Don’t worry, Brett’ll be waiting for us when we come out. They always do, that’s why Jake stuck with them.”

    “Really, dear? Wonderful!” she sighed.

    Yes, well, there had been some advantages to being filthy rich. Not to say to being married to a man who had the energy—not mental energy, exactly, psychological, really—plus the determination to try every bloody limo and taxi service in Sydney until he found one that would actually offer what he considered a decent service in the first place, and then perform as promised. Polly herself had felt completely exhausted just witnessing the process.

    The next day, Phyllis decreed, would be consecrated to shopping. Not ordinary shopping, of course. No touristy souvenirs need apply, no tee-shirts with fake or simply ripped-off Aboriginal designs on them, no plastic boomerangs, no ersatz didgeridoos, no fuzzy toy koalas made by Chinese slave labour... Not even key-rings with small pics of koalas, kangaroos or wombats set in clear plastic appending from them. No. Double Bay. Yeah, well, it spelled P,A,R,A,D,I,S,E to ladies like Phyllis. So they went. The same limo service, yes. This driver was Brad.

    Aw, gee. A boutique full of floaty, multi-coloured Ken Done-type leisure wear, whaddaya know? Resignedly Polly followed Phyllis in. One could only hope poor Brad had brought something to read. Or maybe he’d just listen to Sydney’s endless talk-back shows on the limo company’s car radio.

    Of course they weren’t the latest thing, but they always looked good, didn’t they? And you did want something nice for lounging wear.

    Right, Phyllis, lounging all by yourself on your huge patio by your huge pool that took up most of what might once have been a nice old garden on Millionaires’ Row. None of the sections were very big, because all the other millionaires had crammed in there. Except for Jake. He’d had more sense, not to say more taste.

    “Um, yes,” she muttered, as Phyllis hauled one off the rack and held it up critically. “Um, I’ve got one something like that one, actually. Jake bought it for me. At least… I didn’t see it when Katie Maureen helped me pack my clothes. Um, maybe I left it down at Taupo.”

    “At that lovely Taupo Shores Ecolodge? John and I did so enjoy our stay there. Well, I suppose you couldn’t say it was up-market, but lovely tasteful décor, and the food was wonderful! As good as dear old Muriel Carewe’s, but with ra-ather more  knowledge of modern nutrition!”

    In that case she couldn’t have been exposed to Jan’s Black Forest Cake—or, come to think of it, the Black Bottom Pie that she’d given up making because, whether or not the punters lapped it up, it was just too disgusting, really. “Yes, Jan’s food was always gorgeous. Pete’s daughter Jayne’s doing the cooking now, but Jan’s passed on all her recipes to her!” she smiled.

    “Mm, lovely,” said Phyllis abstractedly, lifting up another long, floaty, multi-coloured garment. “Now, what about this? I do like these shades of pink!”

    Along with the blue, green, yellow and everything else in it, presumably. Polly agreed obligingly that that one was pretty.

    That wasn’t it, by any means. She had to look at every possible and impossible garment in the shop. Finally, unable to decide between the two she liked best (the first two she'd picked out, yes), she decided to buy them both. They would always come in handy, wouldn’t they?

    Polly agreed, what else was there to do?

    Unfortunately it wasn’t time for lunch yet, though Phyllis thought they might look for a nice coffee shop…

    Naturally there was one, so Phyllis had a decaff cappuccino and Polly had a short black, full cup, admittedly with a glass of spring water on the side, but she had a very strong feeling that if she didn’t get a caffeine injection immediately she might scream. Or go barking mad. Or both. Phyllis then looked longingly—but only looked—at the dainty little cupcakes and fruit tarts the place had on display, not to mention at the giant uncut heavily frosted and/or chocolate-coated sponges and the enormous cream-laden pav, dribbled with passionfruit in what Polly would have said was a slap-dash, lazy look that Mum wouldn’t have put up with for an instant, easy-going though she was, but which was possibly today’s In Thing? Yes, undoubtedly, looking round at the general ambiance of stifling gentility mixed with up-marketness. Unfortunately, however, like the rest of Australia’s smaller catering establishments, they had never cottoned on to the fact that polyurethaned wooden floors were bloody noisy. Especially when your patrons were ladies in high-heeled clumpy shoes. Their acoustic effects would have done credit to the Opera House and then some. It was like being inside a ruddy echo chamber or something! There were only half a dozen tablesful of other chatting coffee-drinkers, but the noise was already at the unpleasant level.

    Pale brown decaff fluid topped with an unenthusiastic layer of froth—lazy again, they presumably just didn’t try, the average commercial espresso machine was more than capable of frothing milk properly—the said pale brown fluid had perked Phyllis up sufficiently for more shopping, alas. So they did that.

    First, the dress shops! They were all dead ringers for the terrible place on Rodeo Drive in Pretty Woman, of course. November in Sydney was bloody muggy, so Phyllis was, naturally, appropriately garbed in something that had been the very height of fashion in Auckland last summer, with the matching fascinator perched on the side of the smart silver hair. Whether the colour had been very In, God knew. It suited her, though: a pinkish-fawn lightweight suit, brightened by the flower spray of coral and, possibly, tourmalines in gold on the lapel and the bright coral feather spikes on the fascinator. Polly herself was in a sleeveless white-dotted grey summer frock that the uninitiate would have dismissed as rather ordinary but that Phyllis’s eagle eye had of course spotted was not. A wonderful cut, Polly, dear! Paris? Rome? She honestly couldn’t remember. Probably Jake had chosen it. She was reduced to murmuring: “I’ve had it for a while.” Yes, but something that well cut did not go out of style!

    Phyllis’s curiosity on the subject might have gone unassuaged for all time—unless of course she came into Polly’s room at the hotel later to check—but then a divine little frock was spotted that was just Polly’s colour!

    “Phyllis, I’ve got loads of green things,” she managed weakly. “I really don’t need anything.”

    “Nonsense, dear, a really pretty dress that suits one is a tonic! Come along, now, try it on.”

    The saleswoman had already managed to look down her nose at Polly in her simple dress; now she was doing it again, though she’d been keen to suck up to Phyllis. Knew a buyer when she saw one, obviously. Polly took a deep breath. “All right, Phyllis, but I’m doing this for the Pretty Woman and all of the women of the world who’ve ever been deemed unworthy of Rodeo-Drive-type up-market merchandise.”

    Phyllis emitted her neigh of laughter, squealed: “Naughty!” and then hissed: “Watch this! –Excuse me, Miss!” she called to the woman, who was not actually that far away from Polly physically, though mentally and emotionally she was clearly in Siberia. Deepest Siberia. “Do give me your expert opinion on this lovely frock!” she cooed, holding it up under Polly’s chin. “I do think it just suits Lady Carrano, don't you?”

    Funnily enough after that the woman was all over her. Phyllis gave her a triumphant nod as she was ushered personally into the changing-room. Cubicle, rather. They didn’t waste space in Double Bay: they knew the value of a buck.

    “Do allow me, Lady Carrano,” the bloody woman cooed as Polly tried to unzip her dress.

    All right, let her. She thanked her politely…

    “Eaves Saint Lorront Rive Gorshe!” she gasped.

    “Pardon?” replied Polly, putting on her blankest expression.

    “This label!” she gasped. “Eaves Saint Lorront Rive Gorshe!”

    “Oh: Yves Saint Laurent rive gauche? So that’s where I got it,” said Polly indifferently. “I couldn’t remember: I’ve had it for years. I used to really like their prêt-à-porter, but I didn’t much care for the stuff Tom Ford designed for them; I think they’ve replaced him, now. For dinner wear I prefer Givenchy. And for evenings, mostly; though my husband once chose a Vivienne Westwood Watteau evening dress for me: rather a lovely shade of green. One of the 1996 Collections, I think it was.” She gave her a very kind smile and added: “That was the period when she was rather into that soft, romantic look: yards of silk, you know.”

    “Sex and the City!” she gasped. “Sarah Jessica Parker’s wedding dress!”

    “Was it?” said Polly kindly.

    “Yes! I saw the movie—not last year, the year before, that’s right! It was fabulous!”

    Did she mean the dress or the movie? Both, possibly. “As recently as 2008? Was it a new movie?”

    “Yes, of course!”

    “Oh? I didn’t think Westwood was still into that style. Still, I suppose even those big fashion houses can’t afford to turn down that sort of commission.”

    “Um, no. Do let me help you into this, Lady Carrano.”

    The dress was tried on and unfortunately it fitted. “I’m not sure,” said Polly, squinting at the portion of her reflection that was visible in the cubicle’s mirror. “Would you ask Lady Harding to step in and give her opinion, please?”

    Would she? Like a shot. Like—a—shot. Sod the bloody woman.

    So Phyllis, seeing the discarded grey dress hanging up, was able to note happily: “Yves San Laurong Rive Gauche! I thought it must be from Paris!”

    “Mm, probably. Paris is a nice place to shop, the central city’s still so lovely and old-fashioned. Jake used to like shopping in Tokyo, but I always found it too glitzy. What do you think of this green dress, Phyllis?”

    Phyllis’s face fell. “Oh, dear. It is your colour, but… Well, I suppose I’m unconsciously comparing it to Paris couture, but…”

    “Mm. Looks cheap, doesn’t it?”

    “I’m afraid so,” she admitted sadly. “Off the peg-y.”

    Er, yeah. Well, prêt-a-porter was off the peg, in fact it wouldn’t be wrong to say that was one of the standard translations of the phrase, but— Yeah.

    Phyllis was now peering down her back at the green dress’s label.

    “Well?” said Polly.

    “Australian… But she’s supposed to be a very good designer!”

    Yeah, well, Aussie couture, off the peg, made in China by slave labour. If it had been an ordinary shop, staffed by ordinary girls, charging average prices, she’d have bought it like a shot. The colour did suit her. But this up-market joint with that snooty madam out there? No—way.

    “I really think this shop’s a bit of a disappointment, Phyllis.”

    “You’re right, dear. Shall we go?”

    “Yes,” she agreed, struggling out of the green thing and resuming her own dress.

    Helpfully Phyllis zipped her up, murmuring on a wistful note as she did so: “San Laurong Rive Gauche… Lovely.”

    “Shall I wrap it for you, Lady Carrano?” asked the snooty madam eagerly, bustling forward as they emerged.

    “No, thank you. But perhaps you could give your buyer a message about your designer from me?” said Polly, suddenly inspired.

    “Of course, Lady Carrano!” she agreed eagerly.

    “‘Big mistake. Big. Huge.’”

    And they exited triumphantly to the accompaniment of Phyllis’s delighted neighs.

    That was the highlight of a bad day, really. Phyllis did find a shop she liked better, and bought two suits and a dress. Then she found a delightful lingerie boutique and forced Polly to buy a pale green floaty negligée because it was just the colour of that lovely pale green dress she’d had when she was engaged to dear Jake! Oh, well. It could always go to the next Carter’s Bay Primary School Fair, they always wanted second-hand clothes, and some young matron from the district would doubtless be thrilled by it. Once upon a time Polly would have been, too. So why not now? We-ell… She didn’t think, really, it was because she no longer had Jake to admire her in it. Not to mention take it off her. No, it was the feeling—which she’d had for several years now, it was nothing to do with Jake’s death—that consumer junk of any description just no longer appealed. It didn’t seem either relevant or real, somehow.

    Jenny Mayhew, she who had been the cheery, hard-working Jenny Walsh, way back when Polly had shared that flat her cousin Hamish had found in Paris, grinned at her. “All those society dames are the same, Polly, you must know that. That’s what their lives are, poor things!”

    Polly nodded hard. “Mm. But unadulterated exposure to it for days on end…”

    “You didn’t have to come with the woman.”

    “No, well, I’ve known her for years, ever since Jake and I were engaged, and she’s genuinely fond of me. And she was very fond of Jake.”

    Jenny’s shrewd brown eyes twinkled. Polly always had been too soft-hearted for her own good. Letting those ruddy gays she’d been sharing the Paris flat with eat the food she’d paid for, and listening for hours to their long moans about whatever. Their love-lives, probably. Oh, yes, and one of them had tried an “ashram”, that was right, and was very distressed because he’d failed at it. It hadn’t been a real Indian ashram, more like a commune where the all-white participants did a bit of yoga, lit a lot of incense sticks, and smoked a lot of pot. Jenny seemed to remember that Polly had ascertained that nobody had pulled their weight, nobody was responsible for anything, nobody took responsibility for anything—this included things like doing the grocery shopping, feeding their unfortunate chooks, looking after the vegetable garden, cleaning the house, and paying the rent—so it was hardly surprising that the whole thing had come unstuck. The kid had only been about twenty-two, so Polly, never mind that she herself couldn’t have been more than eighteen, had tried to tell him very nicely that everybody had to experiment and it took lots of people ages to find a lifestyle that really suited them. Words to that effect. Well—without telling the boy he wasn’t grown up yet, had been the point!

    “You’re too soft, ya mean,” she said affectionately. “Never mind, now she's gone back home you can just relax with me and Tom!”

    Polly beamed at her. “Yes. This is lovely!”

    The house and garden weren’t bad, no: it was Jenny’s grandparents’ old house in Canberra: quite central, you could easily walk to such places of urgent interest as the High Court, the Art Gallery, and, if you needed to stretch your legs a bit more, the National Library of Australia. The whole of Canberra and its surrounding suburbs, whether officially in the A.C.T. or New South Wales, could only be classed as anally neat, however, and Tom and Jenny only went on living there because they had good jobs at ANU. They were looking forward eagerly to the day when they could retire to their weekender out on the coast near the tiny settlement of Gorski Bay, not far from Wollongong: Tom’s grandparents’ old place, this time. It would very much have surprised the easy-going Jenny Mayhew to know that her opinion of Canberran suburbia was shared by Sir Mark Dignam, erstwhile representative in Australia of Her Britannic Majesty.

    “All you had to do,” Jenny noted now, reverting to a previous topic, “was ask that nit Hamish where I was working.”

    Not objecting to this slur upon her cousin’s character, Polly replied: “I know that now, but he’s never mentioned you, so of course I assumed that he wouldn’t know.”

    Jenny sniffed slightly but refrained from further pejorative comment. The handsome red-headed Hamish Macdonald—at least, he’d had red hair back then, it would no doubt have gone grey by now, or hopefully fallen out—always had been a nit, in her opinion: the completely self-absorbed sort. So up-himself that he’d never looked twice at Polly, who was one of the prettiest girls that she, personally, had ever laid eyes on—but ya see, she was only an undergraduate, and he was into over-scented French dames that were in with the nobs of their mutual profession. She merely said: “You could have found me on Linked In yourself.”

    “I panicked,” replied Polly simply.

    Mm. Jenny swallowed a sigh. Apparently what she’d done was rush off to some librarian mate—or ex-librarian, she thought it had been—and ask her. The lady in question had leapt on her computer and found her details in two twos.

    “Yeah. Never mind, ya got here. –Hey, has Hamish gone bald?”

    “No. Silver, very pretty, like Mum’s—it’s that side of the family. Haven’t you seen him at conferences and things?”

    “No, different streams. He’s still into the Pacific thing, and I switched to Australia-Asia relations yonks back—well, saw a new, shiny bandwaggon, thought I’d better be on it if I wanted to eat for the foreseeable future,” said Jenny with a shrug.

    Polly nodded, smiling. Jenny never had had any illusions about the academic life! Which reminded her— “Hey, know what I was re-reading the other day? I brought it with me as an antidote to Phyllis Harding.”

    The mind boggled. “What?” she croaked.

    “Gaudy Night!” said Polly with a loud giggle.

    “Uh—Dorothy Sayers? The one about Oxford?” she croaked. “It’d be an antidote to the Lady Hardings of the world, I suppose, but, uh, is it still readable?”

    “Very. In fact after the dreck that’s floating around these days it was wonderful to re-encounter her English. And she’s still thoroughly sound on Women’s Lib, not that she’d have approved of the expression!” said Polly with her gurgle of contralto laughter.

    Jenny smiled a little: Polly’s laugh brought back the old days in Paris so vividly. “That’d counteract Lady H., all right.”

    “Mm, but her—I can only call it hero-worship, really—her hero-worship of the Oxford academic life, in fact of the academic life in general, is a scream! –Hang on, I’ll get it!” She bounded up and rushed out.

    Jenny raised her eyebrows slightly but collected up the breakfast dishes that were still on the kitchen table and dumped them on the bench. They’d kept, thank God, Grandma’s old kitchen. Doubtless the last one left in the A.C.T.—make that the A.C.T. plus the whole of NSW—with the original cupboard doors, little round mesh-covered air holes, an’ all. Ooh, now here was a thought: what about ripping them out and taking them with them when they retired? Ah-hah! She was quite sure that no houseproud 21st-century kitchen owner in the entire country would want them: the first thing the buggers’d do on buying the house would be to “makeover” the poor old kitchen, probably knocking that dividing wall out entirely to make an abortion of an open-plan family-room. They’d get a shock if they tried that, Tom reckoned that wall was holding the roof up, heh-heh.

    “I love your kitchen!” beamed Polly, apropos, coming back with the dog-eared paperback in question.

    “Ya can’t have it,” grinned Jenny. “Hey, whaddaya think of this? Rip the cupboards out and take them with us when we retire?”

    “I would!” she beamed.

    “Great. I’ll tell Tom it’s the cupboards or a divorce,” she said firmly.

    Polly’s big grey-green eyes narrowed. “Or,” she said slowly, “rip them out now and instal them in your bach—your weekender, I mean. Then the new owner wouldn’t be able to sue you for taking a fixture that was legally part of the house’s contents. Never mind if the blighters were gonna put in ruddy white Melamine instead, the minute they’d got vacant possession.”

    Jenny’s jaw sagged. Living with Sir Jake Carrano for over twenty years must have rubbed off! “Yeah,” she gulped. “Great idea. –Sue us?”

    “Mm.” Polly opened the volume. “I think it’s fairly early on,” she murmured. “Where she’s thinking how pure and simple and noble the ivory-tower life would be.”

    Jenny winced, but nodded obligingly.

    “Here! It’s not a whole passage, like I thought, it’s two bits of the same paragraph: ‘If only one could come back to this quiet place,’—that’s Oxford—‘where only intellectual achievement counted;’—your jaw may well drop—blah, blah… Then she goes on: ‘The fact that one had loved and sinned’, etcetera, ‘was of less ultimate moment than a single footnote in a dim academic journal establishing the priority of a manuscript or restoring a lost iota subscript.’—Don’t ask me what that is!—‘It was the hand-to-hand struggle with the insistent personalities of other people, all pushing for a place in the limelight, that made the accidents of one’s own personal adventures bulk so large in the scheme of things.’” She grinned at her.

    “What? Give me that!” Jenny read the full paragraph over feverishly. “By God,” she said numbly.

    “Yes!” said Polly with a loud giggle.

    “The woman can never have worked in a flaming academic institution in her life!” said Dr Mayhew in a shaken voice. “She actually assumes that ‘pushing for a place in the limelight’ doesn’t form part of the academic life? She musta been blind!”

    “Mm, well, blinded, perhaps. But I don’t think she did ever work for a university, Jenny.”

    “Um… But she wrote a lot of serious stuff, too, didn’t she?”

    “Well, she did that Jesus-thing for the Bible-bashers.”

    Jenny tried to smile and failed. “Oh, yeah. A play, was it? –Yeah.”

    “Mm. And she did do a very readable translation of the Divina Commedia. I read somewhere that the critics panned it, but all the posh Pommy papers invite the established gurus in whatever subject to do the reviews, so that woulda been jealousy ’cos she got published in million-selling Penguins and they didn’t.”

    Jenny swallowed. “Right.”

    “Well, maybe she lived in college when she did those, but that was later.”

    “Yeah, it musta been. I mean! The buggers ‘all pushing for a place in the limelight’ is ANU to a T!”

    “Yep. In fact the whole world of scholarship to a T,” agreed Polly.

    They looked at each other weakly and then suddenly burst out laughing.

    “And it’s not just in their academic work, either,” admitted Jenny. “The competition that goes on for more power within the department is unbelievable!”

    “Yep.”

    “I think this rates another coffee,” Jenny decided, getting up to make it. She went over to the bench. “Does she go on in that vein?”

    “Not as bad, but she’s still tempted. Only then Lord Peter comes on the scene!” said Polly, collapsing in giggles.

    “Oh, of course! That’s the one where they get engaged!”

    “Yeah. The silliest proposal ever written. I won’t say ever written in the English language.”

    Jenny was rinsing out the coffee-pot. “In the whole world?”

    “No—well, that, too! No, he proposes in Latin!” gasped Polly with another burst of giggles.

    Jenny dropped the bottom of the coffee-pot in the sink. “Blast! –In Latin?” she croaked, picking it up.

    Polly nodded madly. “Mm!”

    “But—uh…”

    “I know. If there’s an opposite of instinctive, that’s it. Counter-intuitive, maybe? He’s been madly in love with the woman for years, she looks like giving in at last, the sexual tension must be crackling between the pair of them: the last thing any red-blooded bloke would think of would be using a foreign language to express his deepest feelings in!”

    Jenny nodded, her eyes bolting from her head. She grabbed the book again and turned to the back. “Cripes. Um—he’s making it easier for her?” she croaked.

    “I think that is the intention, yes. But even given his personality as she is wrote,” said Polly on a very dry note, “does it seem credible or even likely to you?”

    “Nope.” She closed the volume and handed it back.

    “On the other hand, she wasn’t that old when she wrote it,” said Polly fairly.

    “Uh—is this in relation to the blindness to the realities of academic life or the proposal, Polly?”

    “Both. I think she might have felt embarrassed about having to write the proposal.”

    “If you say so,” said Jenny limply. Now she came to think of it, one of those gays that Polly had been flatting with had said at one point that she could always see both sides to a question. In fact… Oh, yeah. His feeble-minded boyfriend of the moment had queried this and then he’d said firmly half a dozen sides.

    “What was the name of that gay you were flatting with in Paris, Polly?”

    “Mm?” Polly was looking at the fly-leaf of her book with a little smile. “I must have got it that year, at Smith’s, when I suddenly had a craving for my own language. –That proves how integral language is to feeling!” she added, looking up with a little laugh. “Which gay, Jenny?”

    Jenny was beginning to feel that she was floundering some way in her wake. Half a dozen sides to every question was right—and not only that, the applications of said sides! “Well, any, really. The one that stayed on the longest, I think I’m thinking of.”

    “Jean-Claude. We still keep in touch.” Beaming, Polly described catching up with him in Paris earlier in the year.

    Jenny just nodded numbly. She hadn’t kept up with any of the people she’d known in Paris. Well, it had seemed pointless: back in the mid-Seventies, Australia to the French consciousness might have been the Moon. And the reverse was most certainly true! She had found both the French media and the French themselves incredibly francocentric: even the rest of Europe seemed to be less than half real to them. Nobody—nobody!—had even asked her what Australia was like! But when she’d got home she was able to look at Australia with new eyes, and boy! Parochial and then some!

    “Polly, did anybody ask you— No, hang on. When you got back from Paris what did they ask you?”

    Polly looked thoughtful. “It was mostly about how ruddy Hamish was getting on. Apart from that, ‘Did you have a nice time, dear?’ was about it. Aunty Vi interrogated me about the museums I was supposed to have visited, but that was just her. How about you?”

    “Ditto. With the exception of Hamish and the museums.”

    “Yeah. Well, France was the epitome of parochial, too,” she noted detachedly.

    Jenny jumped. “Yeah! Just what I was thinking!”

    “Did Tom ask you about it?” said Polly curiously.

    She smiled. “I wasn’t counting him. Well, mostly he was concerned to know what jokers I might have slept with—while pretending he wasn’t interested, ya know? But being a construction engineer, he was disappointed that I couldn’t give him chapter and verse on the Centre Pompidouche!” Her eyes twinkled.

    “Good grief!” cried Polly. “Bernard! I’d forgotten all about him! He always called it that, didn’t he?”

    “Uh-huh. I don’t think it was finished, back then. But he still loathed it.”

    “It still doesn’t look finished, “ returned Polly drily.

    Jenny gave a startled snigger. “No!”

    “You’d have thought he’d have been all for it,” Polly added thoughtfully. “I mean, he was so anti-Establishment and so down on the opera because it was subventionné for the benefit of the few, instead of the money going to the masses, and he hated every stone of the Haussmann-style architecture!”

    “Yeah,” Jenny agreed. “But I think the Centre Pompidouche was supposed to be a manifestation of Establishment chest-thumping, too.”

    “That’d be right!” They laughed.

    “What did happen to him, do you know?” asked Jenny idly.

    “No. He wasn’t one of Jean-Claude’s mates, he was a student that was friends with that English girl from the Franco-B., ’member?”

    “Oh, yeah…”

    They gazed into space…

    “What on earth are you to up to, Mum?” said a loud, cheerful voice, and they both jumped ten feet where they sat.

    “What are you doing here, Buster?” replied his mother weakly.

    “Scrounging food,” replied the nineteen-year-old “Buster” simply. “That bloody nong Steve-o’s eaten all the bread in the flat again.”

    Jenny’s and Polly’s eyes met and they both broke down in gales of laughter.

    Buster was Jenny’s and Tom’s youngest: they had three kids. He was flatting with some student mates who sounded just as feckless as Jean-Claude’s mates had been. He could have lived at home but they’d needed another body to help with the rent, and he’d been quite keen on having his independence. So-called.

    “Plus ça change!” concluded Jenny, wiping her eyes.

    “A deodar!” gasped Polly, gazing up at the big dark tree that took up a large portion of the front lawn of the Mayhews’ “weekender”. At least, it was technically the back lawn, if you took it that it was the front of the house that faced the road, but just like Jake’s bach, the old weekender had been built to look out over the water, and it was the back door that faced the road.

    “Ya recognise it, eh?” replied Tom proudly. “Yeah. Grown from a seed Gramps’s old granddad planted when he came out from India—he was in the Civil Service out there. At least, when he was a young man Gramps reckoned he woulda worked for the East India Company, only then the British government took over or something.”

    “Yes,” said Polly, nodding. “After the Indian Mutiny. Or what the British Raj called the Mutiny. I suppose it was, technically, since they were in charge of that part of the country.”

    “I thought they were in charge of the lot?” said Jenny foggily.

    “Not all, no. There was a collection of princely states that they hadn’t taken over. I suppose he didn’t keep a diary or anything, Tom?”

    “Dunno. Never heard that he did. Why?” replied Tom cheerfully.

    “Just that it would be very interesting to read the story of his life.”

    “Oh. Well, think he was just a pen-pusher, really, Polly.”

    “Is this his original house?” she asked.

    “No, far’s I know he only had a shack. No, Gramps built this when he was first married—his dad wasn’t interested: too far out of town, ya see. But Gramps and Gran came here every weekend they could manage it, and every Christmas holidays. Woulda been quite a drive, the roads were pretty bad in those days. Not to mention the old boneshakers he used to drive!” He laughed.

    “Where did they live, Tom?”

    “Sydney.” His shrewd blue eyes twinkled. “He was just a pen-pusher, too. Worked for one of the big insurance companies.”

    “He had the sense not to chop down his grandfather’s shade tree, though,” put in Jenny on a firm note. “Come on, let’s get the rest of the stuff inside and then we can sit under it with a couple of frosties!”

    They did that. The ambient temperature was hitting thirty-six Celsius but the shade under the huge deodar was like a drink of icy water.

    “Pretty good, do ya reckon?” grinned Tom, as Polly leaned back in a real old canvas deckchair, sighing.

    “More than pretty good, Tom!” she said with her gurgling laugh. “Paradise on earth!”

    The Mayhews exchanged glances, smiling a bit. Pretty well anywhere that didn’t include that Phyllis dame would probably strike the poor thing as paradise, but—yeah. The weekender with its huge old deodar was bloody good value.

    … “We usually wait till it’s a bit cooler to go for a swim,” said Jenny, a little later, as Buster urged Polly to join him. “When the sun’s just down, is when we usually go.”

    “Good idea. I think it’ll be too hot for me, just now, Buster,” she said kindly. “I’m not used to your Aussie sun.”

    “Aw. Righto, then.” Buster shed his shirt and ran across the lawn onto the sparkling silver beach. This athletic sight was somewhat impaired when he reached the damp sand, as he then stopped to remove his sneakers.

    “That reminds me: I forgot to warn you, Polly: the sand’ll be burning hot,” said Jenny. “Clueless, there, used to do the macho thing and just dash in, only one year he got blisters on his feet and could hardly walk for a week, so he’s decided discretion is the better part.”

    “Yeah,” agreed his father, yawning. “Added to which, no members of the ruddy peer group to sneer at him, are there?”

    There certainly weren’t. The beach was almost deserted. Way up the far end some picnickers had a big sun umbrella up, but that was all. There were no other buildings in sight: the shallow curve of the bay was lined with low scrub.

    After a minute Polly asked: “How much of this do you own, Tom?”

    “Well, not the beach: ya can’t own an Aussie beach, ya know! No, well, most of it. See that stunted gum along there?” He waved in the direction of the picnickers’ sun umbrella, squinting into the bright blue day. “Up to there in that direction, and right down to… Dunno if you can see them. There’s a row of rocks that used to be a wall, over there, but the scrub’s almost covered them. There’s just a track that gives public access to the beach on the far side.”

    “Oh, good!” she beamed. “So you won’t be built out by horrid glass-walled monstrosities!”

    “Nope. Ole Gramps had his head screwed on right: when it dawned that more and more campers were trickling out this way in their Fords he bought up all he could. There is a sign saying ‘Private Property’, but it’s pretty faded. We get a few fools in campervans asking if they can park here, but there’s no facilities at all. One or two have stuck it out for a few days but most of them give it away when it dawns there’s nothing to plug into.”

    “Eh?” she groped.

    Tom gave her a dry look. “Well, in your socio-economic bracket you wouldn’t have had to worry, but these days your average camper requires electricity, hot and cold running water, and ranks of coin-in-the-slot washing-machines and driers. Not to mention a petrol pump.”

    “All the caravan parks have them, you see,” explained Jenny kindly.

    “Heck,” said Polly limply.

    “Puts it well,” said Tom drily. “The bloody grey nomads are the worst, but we’ve had a few younger couples that were shockers, too. Buy the ruddy great campervan, that or the caravan they don’t know how to manage behind their giant off-road vehicle that they’ve only used for tooling around town, get out into the woop-woops, and complain like Hell about the lack of facilities. It’s known,” he added snidely, “as getting away from it all.”

    “I see.”

    “There was one lot of grey nomads,” said Jenny reminiscently, “well, they’re all pretty bad, of course, and they all have fridges—”

    “What?” said Polly.

    “Yeah, ’course. And built-in sinks, the designs are really quite clever. But this pair, they had a washing-machine as well.”

    Polly gulped. “How did they fit it in?”

    “It was a miniature one. God knows where they got it. Remember Bernard’s friend Brigitte in Paris?”

    “The tall blonde girl? Yes. She was living with that nice brown-haired guy.”

    Jenny nodded. “Well, they had one; evidently they were quite common in France—good for small flats, you see. It only took about a sixth of a normal load.”

    “Didn’t they live near a blanchisserie?” she groped.

    Jenny grinned. “Must’ve, eh? Every quartier had one! No, well, she was shit-hot on budgeting, and I think she’d worked out it was cheaper to spend hours feeding this blessed little machine.”

    “But— I mean, heck! The lovely lady that ran the one near our flat used to insist on doing my sheets and towels herself—I mean, I was thinking I’d have to waste time watching the machines go round, but the first time I went in she just seized the bundle, beamed at me, and told me when they’d be ready—and it cost practically nothing!”

    “I know. Plus and you wouldn’t be using your own electricity.”

    “Nowt so quare as folk,” concluded Polly limply.

    “You can say that again,” contributed Tom. “This dame that had the miniature washing-machine in the campervan, she used to wash and iron all his bloody safari-type gear, remember, darl’? Ruddy khaki shirts with pleated pockets: you know the sort of gear.”

    Polly’s jaw had sagged. “Tom,” she said in a shaking voice, “this wouldn’t have been a skinny lady with a kangaroo pouch from Adelaide, would it?”

    “Skinny and kangaroo pouch, yes. Dunno about Adelaide—were they, love?”

    Jenny rubbed her nose. “Let me think… He had a ruddy backboard, I remember that. Every time hard yacker appeared on the horizon he had a lie-down on it and let her get on with it.”

    “It must be them!” cried Polly. “There can’t be two lots that bad!”

    “Ya wanna bet?” drawled Tom.

    “She was quite a decent type, oddly enough,” Jenny admitted, “but he was a complete stinker. I think they might have been from Adelaide, but I can’t remember.”

    “It’s gotta be them! Erin and Keith Arvidson!” cried Polly.

    “Um, I think that could have been her name,” said Jenny dubiously.

    “Actually he was such a stinker that we tried to steer well clear,” Tom admitted.

    Polly shuddered. “You would! Jake and I met them… Heck, which time was it? Oh, yeah: the time we went down in spring, when lovely Hill Tarlington was there! –Sorry, talking in riddles,” she said with a twinkle. “It was down at Taupo Shores Ecolodge—Pete and Jan’s place,” she reminded them.

    “We’re going. We’ve booked for the mid-year break,” said Tom with his eyes shut behind his sunnies. “Might get in bit of skiing—anyway, be a nice change.”

    “Yeah, that’ll put the kybosh on ruddy Bawler inflicting himself and the frightful whiny Helen on us like last year,” agreed Jenny.

    Polly had to swallow: “Bawler” was their eldest, so-named because as a baby he had been, and Helen was his girlfriend of the moment. Bawler was thirty-two—Jenny, of course, had been doing a doctorate when they met in France, so she was quite a bit older than her, and Tom in fact was due to retire in only a couple of years. Evidently Bawler had had a string of frightful girlfriends, but Helen, according to his parents, took the cake: tall, skinny, droopy, given to wearing limply frilled floral or vaguely Indian-motif-patterned long dresses, and a purveyor of crystal therapy: “healing crystals” seemed to be the phrase. They lived in Byron Bay—unsurprisingly, according to Jenny—and Helen’s shop was called Crystal Cove. Nowhere near a cove, no, Jenny had said to Polly’s question: on a perfectly ordinary street. Well, ordinary for Byron. Between a health-food shop and a dump called White Magic that stocked about as many dried weeds as the health-food place and crystals as Helen’s place. Oddly, its window was draped in black, not white, with broomsticks—

    But at that point Polly had broken down in hysterics, shrieking: “Apocryphal!” Unfortunately, it wasn’t. Byron was like that. Traditionally Weirdo Heaven, Tom had explained gracefully, only these days, with improved infrastructure and an ageing population, it was more a haven for very well-off retirees that imagined they were leading the environmentally-conscious simple life, or middle-aged would-be trendies and pointy-headed geeky yuppies that all ran Internet-based businesses and could work from home while getting away from it all at the same time as having it all. He'd stopped, panting, at that point, so Jenny had been able to add that Bawler was merely a primary-school teacher. This, however, according to his loving parents, didn’t excuse him. Helen also believed in numerology but Tom had stated firmly that they’d decided to draw a veil over that one for all time.

    “Go on, Polly,” said Tom kindly, since she seemed to have stopped.

    “Well, the weather wasn’t too exciting, and the ecolodge only had a few guests, so Jan just used the big dining-table, you see—”

    “Right: couldn’t escape them,” agreed Jenny.

    “Yes, that’s right. We got the full saga of backpacking over the Serengeti and the Himalayas, not to mention trekking through deepest Thailand—northern Thailand, not the touristy bits where all the yobs go—complete with elephants, and Keith’s heroic guiding of a lost party of explorers out of the deepest Otcheekinokee Swamp. Complete with billy tea made on a campfire lit with his own hermetically sealed waterproof matches. First Erin told us about that and then Keith corrected her and told it better. She smiled all the way through the correcting.”

    “Jesus, it is them!” cried Tom.

    “Um, northern Thailand sort of rings bells,” Jenny admitted, “and—not quite the Serengeti, I think it was Kilimanjaro; but I don’t remember any swamps.”

    “No, you weren’t here, darl’, you’d driven over to the supermarket. Erin came over and forced me to go and have morning-tea with them—aw, yeah, the ruddy campervan had a dishwasher, too,” he remembered.

    “Yes!” cried Polly triumphantly.

    “Right,” he conceded, grinning. “Full-size, built in. I got the full Otcheekinokee Swamp saga, too. Exactly like you said: first her and then him, with her looking smug all the way through it.”

    Polly nodded hard. “Any normal woman would’ve yelled ‘Shut up, I’ve just told them that!’, don’t you agree?”

    “I would’ve!” Jenny confirmed fervently.

    “She would’ve,” Tom agreed, grinning.

    “Yeah…” said Polly with a deep sigh of satisfaction. “They’ve been to Taupo Shores several times, now. Jan reckons Erin’s the groupie personified. Never mind the macho hairdo and the backpack and the shorts and pants she gets around in. Anything he does, she’s panting slavishly in his wake, washing and ironing his blimmin’ safari shirts!”

    “Yep,” Tom agreed happily.

    “My God,” said Jenny in stunned tones.

    Polly’s eyes twinkled. “Did you think she was frightfully liberated?”

    She nodded numbly.

    “That’s everybody’s first impression. She’s less liberated than my mum!”

    “Hell, yeah,” said Jenny in a hollow voice. “I mean, Mum’s gone, now, but— Has he really got a crook back, Polly?”

    “Nope. Jan got so pissed off with the creep that she asked Erin that, and she explained with dead seriousness that he hasn’t as such, but that his dad did, and you can’t be too careful when there are warning signs.”

    “Jesus!”

    “And so say all of us,” she agreed.

    “That’ll be why,” said Tom slowly, “me foot got this urge to connect sharply with ’is backside every time I saw him.”

    “Exactly! Jake and Pete both felt just the same, Tom!” said Polly eagerly. “The more so as Pete more or less witnessed him having it off behind Erin’s back with some frightful female that was staying at the ecolodge.”

    “Bulgy eyes,” said Jenny slowly. “That was him, eh?”

    “Uh-huh,” Polly agreed, looking sick.

    “God. Like Poisonous Paul from work,” she recognised. “Heavily married—they’ve got six kids, the bastard can’t keep it in his pants—but he’s had it off with at least three misguided junior lecturers, two very silly secretaries—he’s given them up, nearly came to grief over the second one, she thought he was gonna divorce the wife and had a dummy-spit all over the Prof’s outer office when she found out he wasn’t—and innumerable visiting female firies at innumerable conferences and seminars.”

    “That the time bloody Prof Hutchinson pretended he wasn’t in?” said Tom.

    “Yeah,” replied Jenny sourly. “Don’t stir, anything for a quiet life, keep your head down, and never risk any investigation, however justified, into anything that might look like sexual harassment. Or racial, come to think of it: there was that Indian student that tried to claim Jill Travers was discriminating against her because of her race when she failed her in Pol. Sci. 101. Mind you, that one woulda died the death, anyhow: Jill’s married name is Patel.”

    Polly gave a surprised snort of laughter.

    “Yeah,” said Jenny drily. “Boy, D.L. Sayers didn’t know the half of it!”

    “Who?” groped Tom.

    “Just a detective story writer we were talking about the other day,” said Polly kindly.

    “Thought uni life was a bed of roses where we all live in ivory towers pursuing our arcane studies, immune to the competition and power struggles that the hoi polloi go in for,” explained Jenny.

    “Eh?”

    “It was a long time ago,” said Polly soothingly.

    “It musta been,” he muttered.

    Jenny yawned, and looked at her watch. “We seem to have missed afternoon teatime,” she noted.

    ‘”Never mind, the beer was cold!” said Polly with a giggle.

    “Yep,” Tom agreed comfortably. “Mind you, I wouldn’t say no to a hunk of that Lions Christmas cake.”

    “Already?” said Polly weakly.

    “It’s gone five,” he pointed out.

    “Um, no, I mean, it’s only November—well, late November—isn’t it a bit early for the Lions to be selling their Christmas cakes?”

    “Not in the wide brown land,” he said definitely.

    “No,” Jenny agreed. “The bloody supermarkets came out with hot cross buns at the end of January this year, wouldja believe?”

    “Not really?” said Polly faintly.

    “Yeah. So I didn’t buy any at all this Easter.”

    “Cutting off the nose to spite the face,” noted Tom.

    “You could make them,” offered Polly on a dubious note. “I’m pretty sure there’s a recipe in one of Jane Grigson’s books.”

    “I dare say, but I’ve no intention of slaving over a hot stove— Hang on: the blimmin’ things are made from yeast, aren’t they?” she said accusingly.

    “Yes. With, not from. –Talking of D.L.S.,” added Polly.

    Ignoring this last—you had to, with Polly, it hadn’t taken Jenny long to remember from their student days, or you’d be wandering off at tangents forever—Jenny said firmly: “Then no way. Yeast anything hates me. Shit, we even invested in a flaming bread-maker—when was that?” There was no answer to this enquiry, so she said loudly: “Tom! That wasn’t a rhetorical question! When did we buy that useless bread-maker?”

    “Uh—some time before Blinker researched that flaming Choice mag and found out that all models except the one we didn’t buy stink, if I remember rightly.”

    “Thanks! Anyway, I followed the instructions exactly and the bread came out all lopsided, with part of it all nasty and chewy and the other half all puffy and full of huge holes.”

    “And not properly crusty,” added Tom.

    “Yeah. So I binned it.”

    “The bread-maker, she means, not the bread, but we binned that, as well,” he noted.

    “I gave mine away,” Polly admitted heavily. “It made superb bread, so long as you followed the instructions exactly and measured out the precise amounts. Not the English or French instructions, the German instructions,” she said heavily. “Jake chose it. Then he had to buy a digital kitchen scale thingy to make sure the ruddy amounts were correct.”

    “Digital?” groped Jenny. “I just use Gran’s old scales. You just put the stuff in the bowl and the thing it sits on goes down and the pointer on the thingo goes round.”

    “Yeah, that’s what scales oughta be,” Polly agreed. “No nasty digital displays need apply.”

    “All kitchen scales,” said Tom thoughtfully, “are necessarily digital, in that they display results using digits.”

    Polly broke down in a giggling fit, gasping: “Yes!”

    “What was it like, Polly?” asked Jenny mildly.

    “Flat,” she said, removing her sunnies and wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. “Very flat. Metallic, very finished-looking: nasty. Um, thin. Thin through.”

    “Aw, right: flat,” Jenny agreed, nodding. “Sleek-looking, was it?”

    “Mm. Quite small. You certainly couldn’t weigh a decent leg of lamb on it. Or a turkey. Daft, eh? Because those are the sort of things that always go by weight.”

    “With a digital display?” asked Tom.

    “Yes. Decimalized,” said Polly in a horribly neutral voice.

    After a moment he got it, and collapsed in a spluttering fit.

    “Go on: elucidate,” prompted Jenny tolerantly, when he seemed to have recovered.

    “Our numerical system—boy, that’s done me good!” he admitted. “Our numerical system—expressed in digits, as formerly noted—is necessary decimal. –To the base ten, goddit?”

    “Oh,” his spouse said weakly.

    Tom wiped his eyes. “I’d forgotten for the moment that you’d told me she’s a statistical linguist,” he admitted.

    “Yeah,” replied Jenny on a dry note. “Anyway, statistical linguist, have you ever made hot cross buns from scratch?”

    “As a matter of fact, I think I have,” Polly admitted. “Once. Back when I was young and keen. I can’t actually remember making them, as such, but I do remember thinking that as they tasted exactly like the bought ones, there was no point at all in making them again.”

    Tom choked sightly but Jenny just said firmly: “There you are, then.”

    “Ye-ah…” Polly agreed vaguely, staring out to sea. “Heck, I think that was before I’d met Jake… Who was it, that I was going round with that year? Help, I can't remember. It might have been the year Mannie was overseas on sabbatical. Um, it musta been after I came back from Strasbourg… Or was it before that?”

    “Would you have made hot cross buns when you were right in the middle of your Master’s, though?” asked Jenny dubiously.

    “I was quite into cooking at that stage,” she admitted. “It could have been, but if it was that Jane Grigson book, did I even own it back then?”

    “Could check the date of publication in the book,” suggested Tom.

    “It’s back home… Mind you, the Auckland regulations for an M.A. back then were feeble. Certainly for the Languages and Linguistics lot. It was all exams instead of a thesis.”

    “Most Masters theses aren’t worth the paper they’re written on,” noted Tom. “And certainly not worth the laptops my pointy-headed mob write them on. –Geeks one and all, Polly,” he explained heavily. “Never so much as had a hammer in their hands.”

    “Really? I think our engineering students still tend to be the hairy D.I.Y. lot that were born with hammers in their hands. Well, not the electronics ones, I suppose.”

    “This at Sir George Grey or Auckland?”

    “Both. –Oh, yeah: I remember!” she cried. “It was the year Mannie was overseas, and that lovely Danish engineer came out on a visiting fellowship! I think it was an overseas endowment, I don’t think our lot coughed up for him. Anders, his name was. Heck, I’d forgotten all about him… No, well, typical European, of course. New Zealand wasn’t really real to him.”

    “Even though he was right there?” croaked Jenny.

    “Yeah. He swore he’d keep in touch, but of course he never did… He was genuinely blond,” she said with a reminiscent sigh.

    Tom coughed loudly.

    “That’ll do,” said Jenny firmly, getting up. “Come on, Polly, let’s get tea ready now and then we can have it straight after our swim. We can disinter that cold chicken, and sling a few tomatoes at that lettuce I bought on the way.”

    “If the shock of finding itself in an actual fridge after three hours in the esky hasn’t killed it,” noted Tom.

    “Just for that you can come and open that blimmin’ jar of olives!” retorted his spouse swiftly.

    Groaning, Tom heaved himself to his feet. He followed them into the house, smiling. What a relief to find that the greatly feared Lady Carrano had turned out to be, as ruddy Blinker hadn’t failed to suggest in so many words, “a kindred spirit”. How he and Jenny had ever managed to produce anything as conventional and, frankly, button-down-collared and anal-retentive as Belinda Mayhew, aka Blinker, God only knew.

    “Hey, Polly,” he said conversationally, as he applied science to the olive jar, “do you find you haven’t got a blind thing in common with your ruddy kids these days?”

    “Tom!” gasped Jenny, turning scarlet.

    “Well, we haven’t, darl’, you’ve admitted it yourself.”

    “Not us,” she croaked, not daring to look at their guest.

    “It’s all right, Jenny. You’ve hit the nail on the head, actually, Tom. Well, Johnny’s into comparative linguistics, we can discuss his subject, but that’s about all, we’ve got nothing else in common. And Davey’s reverted to type: only interested in the farm. And, I suppose,” she added thoughtfully, “reverted to type in another way, too: his girlfriend’s a Maori.”

    Jenny had to swallow, but Tom preserved his cool and in fact noted: “Like his dad’s side, then? Interesting. Does he look like him?”

    “Yes, he looks a lot more like him than the other two do, but he hasn’t got his brains. It’s impossible to hold anything like a conversation with him,” said Polly heavily.

    “Uh-huh. You’ve got a girl, too, haven’t you? Tell me she’s as bad as our Blinker, and I’ll be your slave for life!”

    “In that case drop that olive jar and pick up my train immediately!” replied Polly with a laugh.

    “She can’t be!” cried Jenny unguardedly.

    “Yes. She’s got Jake’s brains, I’ll grant you that, but none of his sense of humour. Her immediate ambition is an M.B.A. from Harvard and her ultimate ambition—as far as the foreseeable future, at any rate—is CEO of the Group.”

    “Shit,” said Tom numbly.

    “Polly, I thought she was only twenty?” said Jenny limply.

    “Nearly twenty-one. Actually she might have had her birthday by now. What’s the date?”

    Limply Jenny told her.

    “Then she’ll be twenty-one tomorrow,” said Katie Maureen Carrano’s mother heavily. “And as she’s forbidden everybody to commemorate it, we won’t be. It would be rather difficult, actually, because she’s in Massachusetts as we speak.”

    “What?” gasped Jenny, dropping a knife.

    “That’s where Harvard is,” explained Tom kindly.

    “Shut up, ya drongo! You mean she’s started her M.B.A. already, Polly?” she gasped.

    “Mm. The northern hemisphere academic year starts in September,” she reminded her.

    “Yeah, but… Time flies,” she said limply.

    “Yeah. Well, she didn’t stay on at school for a Seventh Form year, she passed Schol. in her Sixth Form year, so Jake and I agreed she could start varsity: she’d only have been wasting her time at school. She’s been working for the Group this year to get some practical experience.”

    “They accepted her all right at Harvard, then?” asked Tom on a dry note.

    “Yeah. That bloody great endowment from Doting Daddy mighta helped, of course,” replied Polly sourly.

    “Sorry I asked,” he admitted.

    “No, I’m sorry, Tom. She’s got the smarts, but she’s the sort that’ll accept every advantage that comes her way, I’m afraid. Fair or unfair.”

    “Very like Blinker, then,” he noted drily.

    Jenny had been more or less in a daze; now she came to and picked up her knife. “I think modern kids sort of feel they have to look out for themselves.”

    “At the same time as bludging off their parents?” croaked Tom.

    “Yes: as a matter of fact it’s a facet of the same thing. Grab anything you can, seems to be the motto. Life’s uncertain, there are no secure jobs any more, so it’s look after Number One or perish.”

    ‘Right: that’s the twenty-first century for you,” Polly agreed.

    “Yeah. So much for Australia the land of mateship where everybody’s equal,” said Jenny drily.

    Tom dropped his olive jar into the sink. “Bugger! –Hey, ya didn’t think you were coming over to that, didja, Polly?” he said in tones of horror.

    “No!” she replied with her contralto gurgle of laughter. “What on earth are you doing with that jar?”

    “Aw! This! Physics 101!” he said proudly. “See, ya fill a bowl with hot water—”

    Wincing, Jenny turned back to her rudimentary salad. Oh, well, at least Polly didn’t seem too upset by her kids being just as bad as theirs were. Well, Katie Maureen sounded a hard-headed little thing, but not as anal as ruddy Blinker. And one good thing, she reflected, smiling, as she sliced tomatoes, there was no fear whatsoever that Polly, who’d taken the derivation of “Bawler” and “Blinker” (Belinda had had to have specs very early) in her stride, would evince shock, horror and dismay if the crudely physiological derivation of “Buster” was revealed to her. Like, thought Jenny Mayhew, chopping tomato viciously, all of their anally neat Canberra neighbours bar none, plus ninety-nine point nine repeating percent of the mealy-mouthed prudes comprising the female half of the twenty-first century land of mateship!

    “Oy, why are you pulping them tomatoes?” asked a friendly male voice.

    Jumping, she came to. “Oh, heck. Lost track of what I was doing.”

    “You’re not still brooding over bloody Hutchinson and his so-called scaling of all those nongs you failed, are you?”

    “Help, do you have that here, too?” gasped Polly in horror.

    “Oh, yeah. Too right,” Tom assured her.

    “Um, no,” said Jenny sheepishly. “I was thinking about Buster, actually.”

    “He’s got a few brains,” offered his father cautiously.

    “Yes, but he doesn’t want to apply them, Tom! –Not that, actually. The name.”

    “Officially Julian Cyril, for my two old bachelor great-uncles that were supposed to leave him a fortune,” Tom explained to Polly. “They didn’t, of course: Uncle Julian turned out to have a mistress and two illegitimate kids in Woy Woy—”

    ‘That’s apocryphal!” she choked.

    “Nope. Left ’em the lot. And Uncle Cyril left all his to his flaming Siamese cats care of his bitch of a housekeeper that promptly had the cats euthanised and went on an overseas trip.”

    “No, a revolting cruise,” corrected Jenny.

    “Same thing. But Jenny had always loathed both those names, so we never used them anyway. Called him Buster—well, it came to mind after Bawler and Blinker, you see—called him Buster because the little bugger did just about bust ’er.”

    Polly began to lose control of her mouth.

    “Yeah. Hadda have umpteen stiches, blasted little toad,” admitted Jenny, grimacing.

    “Oh, dear,” their guest said weakly.

    “Go on, laugh,” Tom invited her generously.

    At this Polly broke down entirely, staggering round the weekender’s shabby kitchen, laughing helplessly.

    The Mayhews beamed upon her.

    “Knew she’d laugh!” said Tom proudly.

    “Yes,” agreed Jenny. “Alone of her kind in the blimmin’ twenty-first century, bless her!”

Next chapter:

https://anothercountry-apuririchronicle.blogspot.com/2023/08/fresh-fish.html