This Commercial Life

10

This Commercial Life

    Teddi Bates held up a wall hanging and looked at it dubiously. “Ye-ah...”

    “The lounge-room’s off-white,” said the well-dressed woman with the really flash purse.

    Was it? The wall hanging, which was very arty indeed, was composed of bits of rough wool and little sticks, and um, dead leaves? With kind of string, y’know? All in very pale shades, you might of said some of the wool was oatmeal and some pale grey, but very, very pale. And the sticks were, um, stick-coloured. Of course, these shades were very In, Mum had had an Australian magazine the other day that was full of them, some huge great place with a fabulous view of the sea, all done out in very, very pale shades... Well, yeah, very In, but a bit depressing, eh? Washed-out, kind of, y’know? Actually Teddi would of said this wall hanging was kind of Seventies. Was it what very with-it ladies went in for, these days? Though this lady did sound like an Australian...

    “Here’s Polly, she’ll know!” she said with a sigh of relief.

    Polly came over to them, smiling. “Can I help, Teddi?”

    “Yeah, this lady, she was wondering if this hanging’d look good in a white room.”

    “Off-white,” said the thin-faced woman with a frown.

    Polly looked at the hanging with her head a little on one side. “If you’re looking for something in muted shades I think it would go very well.”

    “Muted!” agreed Teddi pleasedly. “That’s it!”

    “Mm...” The lady fingered a bit of, like, stone? that was kind of worked into it. “What is this?”

    “That’s pumice: the craftswoman lives near Lake Taupo, where the soil’s very pumicey from the volcanic deposits,” Polly explained smoothly. You had to admire her! thought Teddi. How on earth she kept track of them all, goodness only knew! There was piles and piles of stuff and a lot of it looked really same-y, but Polly always seemed to remember where each thing had come from.

    “You mean she picked it up off the beach? In Australia we have laws against destroying the natural environment in that way,” the woman stated grimly.

    Shit! Teddi gaped at her in dismay.

    But Polly wasn’t phased. “Well, no, as a matter of fact I think she would have found it in her garden: the soil’s full of pumice, where they are,” she said smoothly.

    Phew! After that it was all plain sailing, and the Australian woman paid up without a murmur. Just a MasterCard, like anyone’s, so sucks to her!

    “Hey, Polly,” said Teddi thoughtfully, leaning on the counter, as the woman disappeared back in the direction of the Royal K.

    “Mm?”

    “The lady that made that wall hanging, did she really get the pumice out of her garden?”

    Polly smiled serenely at her. “No idea, Teddi. Just tell them what they want to know, is my motto.”

    Cripes! Wait until she told Mum about that!

    “Mind you, the soil is pretty pumicey where they are: it could’ve been true,” she added calmly.

    Abruptly Teddi broke down in a terrific giggling fit. Behind the giggles, though, there was still the awed thought: Wait until she told Mum about that! Because at one stage Mum had said she wouldn’t put anything much past Polly Carrano. Teddi had thought it was just Mum being Mum, but... Well, she wouldn’t go that far, but, um...

    “I think this it,” said Polly, stopping at the turn-off to a horrible dirt road.

    Teddi had agreed dubiously that she’d like to come with her to see this wood-turning man. Well, the weather was bad, like it usually was during August, they weren’t getting any custom at Galerie 2, and the Royal K was practically empty, so Sol had said why not maximise the time—sometimes he was very American; you kind of forgot, because most of the time he was just, well, not ordinary, but you know: not very American. Why not maximise the time and get out and source some stock for the store? And it would be a good opportunity for Teddi to start getting to know the craftspeople and their wares.

    They had driven for miles up the boo-eye, Teddi sort of praying that Polly’s old car wouldn’t break down. Never mind that Sol reckoned it was the solidest thing ever made, men always said that sort of thing about cars, didn’t they? And then the blimming things broke down and left you stranded in the middle of nowhere!

    “Are you sure, Polly?” she said in a small voice.

    It was pretty obvious that poor Teddi was in a terrible state of nerves. Sol saying something stupid about the car being the solidest model ever built this side of the Iron Curtain hadn’t helped. She was too young to remember much about the Iron Curtain, and she certainly wasn’t educated enough to take the remark as a joke. Or, indeed, to snap back at the silly sod with something that’d flatten him but good. And his further remark, that Teddi had better remove them jangly earrings, they was calculated to send the average timid wood-turner a-runnin’ for the high hills, had made it worse! Of course it was true that most male New Zealanders were complete wimps, and many of their more reclusive artists and craftsmen were extreme exemplars of this syndrome, but why go and say something calculated to put the poor thing off even more than she was already?

    “No,” Polly admitted, opening her door. “That’s why I’m gonna check out those letterboxes.”

    They were the sort of letterboxes that you only saw way out in the country. Like, barrels on stilts, kind of. Well, one looked almost like an old-fashioned metal letterbox with a curved top, but bigger. But one was definitely an actual barrel. None of them looked as if they were actually used, in fact the barrel was all rusty.

    “Yes!” reported Polly with a smile, getting back into the car with a bunch of mail in her hand. “This is right!”

    “Polly,” gulped Teddi, “did you open his letterbox?”

    “Yes, ’course. We can drop off his mail, it’ll save him making a trip.” The expression on Teddi’s face registered. “I grew up on a backblocks farm,” she said kindly. “Anyone that came to see us would bring the mail in as a matter of course.”

    “Yes—um—would they? I see!” gasped Teddi. “Aw, yeah: like Gran. Um, not Mum’s mum, you knew her, eh?”

    “Yes, of course, Mrs Corcoran,” Polly agreed, starting the car again.

    “Yeah. Not her, Dad’s mum: she lived on a farm over Helensville way. It’s quite developed, these days,” Teddi reported with a little sigh. “We drove over that way last month—well, you know what the blimmin’ school holidays are, I was desperate for something to amuse the kids. Only it was a wash-out, really. They never knew Gran, of course. And I can hardly remember Granddad... She had a huge persimmon tree.”

    “Ooh, really? I love persimmons!”

    “Yeah, me too. Well, you know: after Gran had shown us how to eat them! It was all gone. I couldn’t even figure out where the tree had been. ’Ve you ever tried those new ones? Japanese, I think they are.”

    “I know the ones you mean,” Polly agreed. “They reckon you can eat them without letting them go soft, eh? I’ve never fancied them, really.”

    “Nah, me neither.”

    They drove slowly up the bumpy track, surrounded by thick, dark bush. It was a dark, overcast day, looking as if it might pour at any minute: you could hardly see a thing.

    “Um, this wood-turning man, is he married?” Teddi asked uneasily.

    “Ian Peters? No, I don’t think so. He was by himself the other time I came up here. Jake was on the trail of some genuine old kauri stuff for an English business mate.” She eyed her sideways. “The sort that builds a huge modern house with giant glass walls slap-bang in the middle of a field in the freezing cold English countryside and then complains forever more about his heating bills!”

    To her relief Teddi collapsed in giggles, gasping: “Yeah! Like that really silly series on TV! Mum’s always glued to it, don’t ask me why! I said to her, look, Mum, in the first place none of those Brits know what do-it-yourself is, all they do when they reckon they’re gonna design a house and put it up is pay an architect and a builder, and in the second place, it’s total rubbish, you can’t live like that in England without spending a fortune on double-glazing and central heating! –Only she reckons it’s lovely and she likes that awful man that’s the presenter.”

    “I wouldn’t’ve thought anyone could,” said Polly weakly.

    “Nah,” she agreed comfortably. “So did you find anything for Jake’s friend?”

    “Yes, a really huge wooden bowl. About a foot high—sorry, what is that in centimetres? Um, let’s see... Thirty! It’s terrible: I must have been so brainwashed when I started school that I still have real difficulty with metric measurements! I mean, I can do the maths, that’s not the problem!”—Teddi had already realised that Polly was a whizz at maths; and if she hadn’t, Sol had kindly explained that was what a statistical linguist did, and that was how she’d started off in her varsity job. She nodded respectfully.—“But I just can’t relate it to reality!” Polly finished with a laugh.

    “Yeah, I think I getcha. We had a lady in—actually she was the one that bought that lovely silk scarf with the screen printing: you know, the one that Sol said was kind of like a Monet painting—and she was, um, was it German? Yeah, that was it: she said she couldn’t get used to having to think in euros, and she could work out what it’d be in marks at the old rate of exchange, only that wasn’t much help, was it? But she bought it anyway!” she finished happily.

    “Yep, that’d be the same thing,” Polly agreed.

    “And did the man like the bowl?”

    “Um, well, you can’t really tell with these smoothie businessman, but he said he did, and he did put it in his sitting-room. But he wanted to do business with Jake, you see. Though I did think he was genuine about admiring the big one in our family-room. It’s the one I salvaged for a fruit bowl for the bach, I’ve always loved it.”

    Teddi’s jaw dropped. “But that’s not kauri!”

    “Nope, black beech, from the South Island,” replied Polly calmly. “Jake gave him a dissertation on the native woods of EnZed and showed him all the kauri he’d stuffed into the house, and after that he said a big bowl rather like ours only in kauri would be lovely.” She glanced at her quizzically.

    Teddi swallowed.

    Polly shrugged. “That’s big business for you. So hypocritical that you can’t actually tell when they’re genuine.”

    “Heck,” she muttered.

    The horrible track wound on into the dark bush...

    “Here it is!” said Polly with a sigh of relief. “I was starting to wonder if he’d pulled the place down.”

    “Yeah, me too,” agreed Teddi gratefully. She stared at the house. “What is it?” she said faintly.

    Polly’s big grey-green eyes twinkled. “You thought it’d be terribly rustic and crafts-y, eh? So did I. Well, at least a wooden bach, maybe creosoted, like ours. Jake asked him straight out and he admitted it’s two metal sheds from Mitre 10, one he salvaged off his Dad’s place, and one he actually bought, kind of stuck together. But the wooden verandah’s nice.”

    It was wooden, yeah. Untrimmed shaggy logs. You wouldn’t of been at all surprised to see the tops of them sprouting leaves.

    “How does he keep it warm?” croaked Teddi.

    “I wondered that, too,” said Polly placidly. “Jake asked him that as well. I mean, we could see he’s got a pot-bellied stove in there, but it looks freezing, eh? But actually he’s lined it properly with Gib-board and that insulation stuff behind it.”

    “Pink batts?”

    “Not the walls, I think it’s some sort of shiny stuff—well, the macho men went into it in detail, but I stopped listening,” she admitted, grinning. “But he has got pink batts in the roof, yeah. He said the heat was going straight out of it.”

    “It would,” Teddi admitted faintly. “Polly, has—has he got a toilet?” she quavered.

    “Yeah, two. A chemical toilet inside, he gave in and got one after his first couple of winters, and a long drop down the back.”

    “Good,” she said faintly.

    “I dunno if you can put tampons down a chemical toilet, though, if that was gonna be your next question.”

    “Yuh—uh—sort of!” she gasped, bright pink.

    “Don’t worry, I’ll ask him,” said Polly kindly. With this she got out.

    Teddi just sat there, turned to stone. Well, it was good that she’d volunteered to ask him—but heck! Just like that? Though Mum would probably have told her to pull her socks up and stop being a blushing violet and grow up, or something.

    Sol had of course been perfectly correct—as usual, Polly recognised drily—and Ian Peters duly blenched at the sight of the earringed Teddi Bates in her high-heeled boots, skin-tight black jeans, and perky little lopsided fake-suede jacket with its one big revers flapping open to reveal the incredibly intricate, trendy knots of the big trendy scarf. One of those not-wool yarns, presumably woven on some incredibly intricate Chinese machine—that or slaved over by the fingers of some incredibly ill-paid Chinese factory worker, the result not resembling knitting, crochet or weaving. Not even macramé, if you could remember back that far. True, Polly’s friend Joanie had once had a crochet mag that had had a recipe, not recipe, what did they call them—oh, yes, a crochet pattern, for something that was also full of long, straight strings and unexpected lumps and whorls, sort of in the same generic range. Joanie had once been very into both crochet and macramé, and so had her mum: it was back when Polly and Joanie were still at secondary school. Both the mum and Joanie had failed signally to produce anything using this pattern, that was right!

    “Hi, Ian. I dunno if you got our letter? I’m Polly Mitchell, and this is Teddi Bates: we’re from Galerie 2 in Kingfisher Bay. I did meet you once before, I was up here a couple of years back with my husband, Jake Carrano.”

    “Aw—yeah,” said the tall, gangly, bearded man in the doorway limply. “Right. You bought that big kauri bowl. Um, you better come in.”

    The two women went in, Polly looking about her with interest and Teddi repressing a strong urge to grab her hand.

    “Um, siddown,” said Ian Peters limply. “Want a cup of tea?”

    Teddi looked pleadingly at Polly.

    “Yes, that’d be lovely, thanks, Ian, but if you don’t mind, we’d better both go to the toilet first. It’s a long, chilly drive all the way up here,” she said with her lovely smile.

    Behind the horrid curly beard the wood-turner’s face was observed to go very red. “Um, yeah, ’course. Um, through there,” he croaked.

    “Thanks,” said Polly composedly. “Is it still that chemical toilet?”

    “Um, yeah. It’s perfectly hygienic!” he added quickly.

    “Yes, I know, I used it before. I was just wondering, would it take tampons okay?”

    “Dunno!” he gasped. He swallowed hard. “Look, um, you better not risk it.”

    Teddi was now looking desperate.

    Ian Peters was quite young, only in his thirties, but for Heaven’s sake, wouldn’t you have thought— Apparently not, no. Suppressing an urge to tell the man he was a silly tit, Polly said: “No, okay. But it’s not a thing a woman actually has any control over, you know. Give Teddi a plastic bag, then, and she can dispose of it later.”

    “I don’t use plastic,” he fumbled, now positively scarlet.

    Jesus! “Then a paper bag? Or some newspaper?”

    “Yeah, um, hang on!” he gasped, vanishing into the next room, or possibly compartment, of his weird dwelling.

    “That’s the kitchen,” said Polly neutrally to Teddi.

    “I see,” she said numbly. It certainly couldn’t be the workroom, the sitting-room, or the bedroom: all his wood-turning stuff, lathes and stuff, was in here, together with an awful lot of wood, an old sofa, two old easy chairs, not matching, and a single divan bed.

    “Fee-ble,” mouthed Polly.

    Pink though she was, Teddi nodded fervently, eyes very round.

    The blushing Ian produced a paper bag, Teddi vanished with it, and silence fell. Polly considered not breaking it, but that would have been too mean. Presumably he couldn’t help being a hopeless wimp. “Did you get our letter?”

    “Um, dunno. Don’t think so.” He looked at the pile of mail she’d handed him. “It might be in that lot.”

    Polly sat down on the sofa. “You’d better open them.”

    “Um, yeah.” He proceeded to open them. Two of them clearly contained cheques: cripes! How long had they been sitting out there in his unlocked letterbox? Well, it wouldn’t have blown open, it had a latch, but good grief, this was the 21st century! Nicking stuff was practically a universal occupation!

    “Those are cheques, are they?” she said neutrally.

    “Eh? Yeah. Ya never know when they’re gonna pay you. You know: they sell the stuff on commission.”

    “If it was me, I’d be up at my letterbox without fail every day. Your work’s really beautiful, Ian. You do deserve to get the money for it, you know,” she said as kindly as she could. It wasn’t an unknown syndrome amongst craftspersons, true, but these days it was usually the older ones that suffered from it, not people of his age. Most of them were well up with the play, had websites, and preferred payment by electronic transfer. Oh, well, he was lucky that New Zealand was the sort of place where you could still manage to live—just—like this!

    “Ta,” he said feebly.

    “Had you thought of maybe selling through an agent?” –This wouldn’t be particularly good for Galerie 2, of course, but at least an agent could make sure his money went straight into his bank account.

    He goggled at her. “Shit, no! Are there any?”

    “A few. They’ll take you on if you’re really good. They take their cut, of course, but they source outlets for you, and negotiate a good price for your work, and make sure the money goes into your bank account.”

    His wide, bony shoulders moved uneasily. “It sounds a bit complicated.”

    Polly gave up. “Well, look, if you can let Galerie 2 have some pieces, we can at least pay you electronically, um, put the money straight into your account, you know. So as you won’t have to worry about cheques going astray. We’d just send you a little note telling you the money’s been paid.”

    “Um, yeah. That sounds good. Well, Dad did say something about that,” he said vaguely. “But I haven’t got a computer.”

    “No... Oh, I see! Your Dad does his banking on his computer, does he? Pays his bills and stuff like that? –Mm. You wouldn’t have to have a computer, Ian. Just give us the number of your bank account and we can pay the money into it.”

    “That sounds all right. Um, well, there’s some stuff over there, if you wanna look at it,” he said on a dubious note. “But I dunno if it’s what you’re looking for.”

    Polly got up, smiling. “Don’t put yourself down! We’re looking for quality pieces, and going by that big bowl Jake bought from you, that’s what yours are! Why don’t you put the kettle on for that cuppa?”

    “Eh? Aw, right.” He shambled off obediently.

    Polly went over to the shelves that lined his main room. “Mummy,” she mouthed, with an awful grimace. Mind you, it was hard to imagine what other possible reaction anyone with even a modicum of common sense, no matter what age or sex they were, could have to Ian Peters. Well, sit there like a bump on a log, ignoring the whole bit? It wouldn’t be human nature, would it?

    “He’s just getting the tea,” she said with a smile as Teddi came back.

    She nodded. “It’s quite nice, really!” she hissed.

    “Good.” Polly went off to have a pee, sparing her any further mention of tampons.

    Teddi fidgeted, but as Polly had been looking at the stuff on the shelves, went over to them. She didn’t know what she’d been expecting, really, but these weren’t it. Well, if a person said wood-turning, you sort of envisaged... Well, like Pop Evans down the road from them. He was no relation, he was Harry’s friend Kyle’s grandfather, but all the kids called him Pop. He was retired and he had a lathe and did wood-turning in his garage. Ending up with very tall, elaborate candlesticks and walking-sticks, that he varnished with polyurethane, so as they were very shiny. He’d made a set of really big candlesticks for the church in Puriri—it had been empty for yonks but the population had grown so much that a new group had taken it over, not Methodist any more, um... well, one of those new churches that did a lot of singing and playing guitars. Like, not traditional. Apparently they still wanted candlesticks, though. Mum had hauled her round there one Sunday because she didn’t want to go to a strange church by herself, but she hadn’t liked the pop music, she hadn’t gone again. Pop Evans’s huge candlesticks looked quite good in there but you wouldn’t of wanted them in your house. Even his ordinary ones were too big.

    Ian Peters didn’t have any candlesticks or walking-sticks. Mainly bowls or, well, they’d be vases, maybe. If you could have wooden vases? Maybe just ornaments. Mostly quite big. You’d have to have a big room to put them in, but they were great! You could see why Polly had been keen on getting some of his stuff. Very plain, mind you, but the wood sort of glowed. Teddi picked up one of the smaller bowls and held it up admiringly.

    “That’s a knot, really,” said a voice from behind her.

     She gasped, and almost dropped it. “Is it?” she croaked.

    The wood-turner nodded. “Yeah. Only it makes an interesting pattern, see?”

    “Yes, it looks great,” said Teddi shyly.

    “Yeah, nobbad. Only technically it’s a fault in the wood.”

    Um, help, did that mean it’d weaken the bowl or—or what? He didn’t say anything else, so after a moment she ventured: “I really like it, I’m sure we could sell it for you. I mean, the knot, um, makes it look better, really!” she ended on a desperate note.

    “Yeah. I sometimes use stumps, too. Hang on.” He went further down the shelves and held up a big flattish dish. Like, it could of been a big fruit dish, maybe, or just an ornament, it’d look really good on a coffee table. Gee, what a pity they hadn’t had it in when that Aussie lady that bought the wall hanging came in, she’d probably of snapped it up! Though it was quite dark, it might not of toned with her room.

    Polly came back into the main room to find the two of them with their heads together over the big platter. Good grief! He’d actually plucked up the courage to speak to a young woman with jangly earrings, bright scarlet long-life lipstick, and frightening high heels? Not to mention one that menstruated!

    … “What the Hell did you do right, Teddi?” she croaked as they set off down the track with the back seat and the boot of the car laden with wonderful wooden bowls, platters, and lidded pots.

    “Eh?” replied Teddi blankly.

    “You were positively hobnobbing with him over that lovely big platter made from the stump wood!”

    “Aw, that! Um, dunno,” she said, looking very disconcerted. “I don’t think I did anything, actually. Um, I was only looking at the stuff, I didn’t say anything. I mean, he came right up to me and suddenly started talking about it!”

    Polly’s shoulders shook. “That’s apparently all it takes, then! Meek silence, and listen avidly when they start blahing on about their work!”

    “Um, yeah.”

    “Even if you are a female and have to use tampons!” she yelped, suddenly going into a paroxysm. “Help!” she gasped, pulling into the side.

    Teddi glanced back nervously over her shoulder but they’d rounded a couple of bends and were well out of sight of the wood-turner’s strange corrugated steel house. “It wasn’t that funny,” she said on a weak note. “I thought he was quite nice, really.”

    Polly groped for a handkerchief and blew her nose. “Teddi,” she said feebly, “he’s the wimp to end all wimps, never mind his talent! Surely you could see that?”

    Teddi was now rather flushed. “Um, well, yes, of course! But—but at least he’s a genuine person!” she burst out.

    Oh, lawks. What had the unlamented Mr Cartwright been like? Maybe she should have interrogated Sol. “Yes, of course he is,” said Polly quickly. “I liked him, too. But it’s not surprising he hasn’t got a girlfriend living with him. I mean, the house is okay, if you don’t mind the simple life, but it would be very hard to live with a person who’s completely impractical. –Do you realise he did get our letter? It was still in his letterbox. Plus two cheques that he’d left sitting out there for goodness knows how long. Well, over a week, obviously, if our letter was still there.”

    “Y— When he did he tell you that?” she gasped.

    “When you were in the loo. He opened his mail and two of those letters were cheques.”

    “Heck,” said Teddi lamely.

    Yeah, something like that. Polly didn’t say anything else, ’cos it looked as if it had sunk in. She just started up the car and drove them back to safe, well-ordered, conventional little Kingfisher Bay.

    Two ladies came into the shop on a blustery cold day when they hadn’t been expecting any customers. Polly had just popped next-door to see if Sol fancied coming over for a mug of Milo, ’cos she said it was definitely a Milo-y sort of day. They’d been sorting Ian Peters’ stuff, sticking little labels on the bottoms with the price and the sort of wood—that was Polly’s idea, great, eh? So now she wouldn’t have to ask her every time!

    So guess which ones they pounced on?

    “Look at this, Belinda! Is this that native kauri wood, do you reckon?”

    Ooh, heck, she was an American! Teddi gaped at them in frozen horror.

    “No, that’s not kauri, Cecy.”

    Phew, she was a Kiwi: she’d know, ’cos that sort of smart lady with an expensive real-wool coat always did. Like, it was cut like one of those English raincoats, y’know? Only it was a winter coat, you might not’ve thought that’d be a smart look but on her it was ace.

    Only then she went and said: “I don’t know what it is—it’s really unusual. Excuse me: what is this wood?”

    Teddi just gaped at them in frozen horror. Why had she let Polly pop next-door, why hadn’t she gone herself? She might of known this would happen!

    But suddenly a man’s voice said: “That’s pohutukawa: it is unusual, yeah.”

    “Ooh! Dan! Where did you spring from?” she gasped,

    “Came in the back way. Found something for you.” He smiled at the ladies. “You don’t often see it. It’s a very dense wood. But the grain’s interesting, isn’t it?”

    “It sure is! Look at the way he’s used it, here, Belinda, the line of the platter emphasizing the line of the grain but not following it exactly: now, that’s art,” said the American woman admiringly.

    “It is lovely, but it’ll be heavy, Cecy, it’ll make your luggage overweight,” her friend warned.

    “That’s okay, they’ll post overseas,” said Dan easily. “Courier it for you, if you’d rather.”

    Well, yes, Sol had said that occasionally they got a customer that wanted their purchases sent overseas, but he hadn’t mentioned couriers!

    “Great, I’ll take it! I know just where I’m gonna put it.”

    “I’d put it in the Malibu house: in that big drawing-room with the view of the sea,” said her Kiwi friend, smiling. And not, thank goodness, raising any more objections.

    Teddi sagged, as the American lady agreed that was the very place. Honestly, some of them! Didn’t they understand it was like, people’s livelihoods, theirs and the craftspeople’s, when they said things like it’d be too heavy for your luggage? No, probably not. Where had she got those boots? They were fabulous, there was no other word for— Tell ya what, it was her oughta be the American lady, because those boots were as gorgeous as anything she’d ever seen on Sex and the Cit—

    “Um, what? Sorry!” she gasped.

    “The price, honey,” said the American lady with a nice smile.

    Ooh, heck. “Um, we—we haven’t priced these, yet,” said Teddi in a trembling voice.

    “Just got them in—they’re the pieces from Ian Peters, aren’t they?” said Dan briskly.

    She goggled at him. “Um, yeah. Did we tell you that?”

    “Polly did, yeah. Where is she?”

    “She went next-door.”

    “Aw, right. –Polly’s their artefact appraiser: she’ll set a price for you. –Ring her,” Dan prompted the frozen Teddi.

    Jumping, she gasped: “Righto!”

    Fortunately the two up-market dames didn’t seem to mind the wait: they started picking over the other wooden pieces from Ian Peters. Dan eyed the proceedings drily. Who the Hell had suggested Teddi for this job? Earrings and all—today’s were made of multiple strings of minute brightly-coloured beads. He’d sort of thought that kind of thing had gone out in the Seventies—okay, it had come back. Clashed horribly with the string of lumps—plastic, too shiny and bright to be stone—on the piece of... tarred cord? Black cord, anyway, round her neck. On top of the endemic EnZed jersey. True, the three little shops weren’t that warm. And also true, Teddi’s jersey was possibly quite with-it. Fuzzy, but very low-cut over the tits, so you couldn’t have said it’d be very warm. Very draughty, more like. Therefore she was wearing a high-necked tee under it. The latter was a very dark, but shiny purple. The jersey was a horrid shade of green, a bit greener than olive, but bad. And the lumps of the necklace were largely orange. Or maroon. So there ya were.

    Polly came in, smiling, on a gust of freezing wind with a hint of sleet in it. “Sorry to be so long!” She immediately went over to the counter and started charming the up-market ladies—no sweat. Dan eyed this performance sardonically but said nothing. Incidentally, today she was wearing, under the large fawn Burberry which was a dead ringer in style for the brown-haired Kiwi woman’s coat but, he would have taken his dying oath, cost ten times as much and was a million times more authentic, a pair of tight dark brown velvet trousers that sort of stroked those lovely thighs, and a surprising garment in palest green teddy-bear fur, he didn’t know what else to call it, though there probably was a word, kind of a chunky short jacket, over a plain white tee. The latter Calvin Klein: dying oath, geddit? Yeah. Nice, plain pearl bobbles in the very nice, neat ears. Size of a well-grown pea. Not costume jewellery—dying oath, again. Her helping-in-the-shop gear, right? Right.

    The unconvincingly blonde American dame—sixty if she was a day—eventually decided to take another Ian Peters piece as well, a tall vase that they had priced, and to boot had stuck a branch of very dead New Zealand flax in. Not what you saw on the trendy patios of the purblind and lobotomised comfortably-off, no. A genuine Phormium tenax seed head, no hybrids need apply. Long, thin, slightly gnarled-looking black stem, about as tall as Dan was, with those genuine incredibly shiny black seeds—and the smell of summer. Sweet tar, was the closest Dan had ever got to it. He knew for a fact that Sol had got going on this particular flax head with the Superglue long since, it had started shedding its seeds, so it was no longer entirely natural, but what the Hell. This was the 21st century, after all.

    “Oh, wow,” said the American woman on a longing note as Polly carefully lifted it out.

    “Cecy, you’d never be allowed to bring something like that into the country, those are seeds!” warned her friend urgently.

    “I guess not...”

    “I’m afraid it’s not for sale, in any case,” said Polly nicely. “We love it too much!”

    “I can sure understand that... You know, if you’ll pardon me, I keep having the feeling we mighta met, honey.”

    “I don’t think so,” she said nicely but definitely; boy, was that a nice-lady brush-off or was it? How many times must she have had to use that one? Dan found he was experiencing a very odd mixture of emotions. Kind of an admiring despair? Well, close.

    “It must be just one of those things! Like, a chance resemblance!” gulped Teddi.

    Yeah. That or the woman read the celeb mags slavishly, not to mention Vogue. According to Teddi herself—and Dan Carter saw no reason to doubt her word in this instance—Lady Carrano had featured in not just Vogue Australia like you might of expected because he was always going over there on business, unquote, but also the American Vogue, you know, that frightening lady ran it—you know, what they based The Devil Wears Prada on!—and the French one!

    The New Zealand woman, meanwhile, had became distracted by some of Michaela’s pots... And eventually they emerged from the shop having bought the two Ian Peters pieces and a set of “darling” papier-mâché boxes for her dressing-room in the town house (Cecy), and a Michaela Daniels slab vase for the patio together with a most unusual necklace of pieces of pale grey agate interspersed with pieces of dark green marble (Belinda). Not carrying them, of course, except for the necklace—Galerie 2 would send them.

    “That was a nice necklace,” said Teddi in mournful tones as the shop door tinkled after them.

    Dan had been about to croak out some sort of admiring comment on the outrageous price Polly had charged the Yank dame for the artefacts plus courier charges. He swallowed.

    “Yes, lovely,” Polly agreed. “You know, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t borrow some of the jewellery to wear while you’re serving, Teddi.”

    “Then they’d ask to buy it and she’d burst into tears,” drawled Dan, recovering his wind.

    “Hah, hah,” replied Lady Carrano without interest. “Why not, Teddi?”

    “Um, wuh-well, would Sol mind?”

    “’Course not! –Give him a bell, tell him the coast’s clear, if he fancies that Milo!” she added with a gurgle.

    “Righto. –Aw, yeah: Dan reckons he’s brought something for us.”

    Polly stared at him. “You’ve sourced something for the shop?”

    “Yeah. So?”

    “You oughta have my job instead of me!” she said fervently.

    “No!” cried Teddi in anguish.

    Galerie 2 rang with silence.

    “I mean,” she gulped, turning scarlet, “he doesn’t know as much as you, Polly, and—and he won’t know about the prices or the courier stuff or that!”

    “Added to which,” drawled Dan, eyeing the pair of them drily, “he doesn’t wear a genuine Burberry, real pearl earrings, genuine Calvin Klein tee-shirts, and a pale green fuzzy thing that those two dames could barely take their eyes off. I thought the American was gonna ask you where you bought it—would’ve, is my bet, but for the put-down you gave her.”

    “What put-down?” cried Teddi indignantly. “She never!”

    “No, well, polite-lady style. When she said they hadn’t met, you twit. Go on, ring Sol, for Pete’s sake, I could just do with a mug of Milo, it’s perishing out there. –The thing’s by the back door,” he added to Polly.

    “I’ll look at it,” she replied temperately.

    Right. Ignoring every last syllable he’d just uttered. He’d thought the “pale green fuzzy thing” might do it, if the “genuine Calvin Klein” bit failed. Serve him right.

    Dan had sourced a giant pot. Giant. It came to just above Polly’s knee and it was about as wide as it was high. Not round, you might have called it misshapen, but only if you knew nothing whatsoever about pottery...

    “Dan,” said Polly in a trembling voice, “that’s not a Doreen Blumhardt, is it?”

    “Close but no cigar. –Didn’t think you dated back that far,” he added snidely.

    “Idiot. Who is it by?”

    “Don’t think you’d have heard of him. He’s quite a young joker.”

    The exterior of the pot was three-quarters glazed, in shades of dull green-grey and brown with patches of rough, dappled oatmeal and shinier, very dark brown patches, topped off with streaks of very shiny black, dripping right down to the matte terracotta of the bottom third. Inside it was a softish, slightly streaked grey-green. But where the streaks on the outside ran vertically, inside they all went horizontally. True, at her best Michaela also produced work of this quality. But very few other potters did. And, though the natural-look style had been popular for years in New Zealand it wasn’t fashionable these days. It was the last thing you’d expect from a young potter.

    “Well, who?” she croaked. “Um, if you want a commission, Dan, of course there’ll be no problem.”

    Dan sighed. “I’m not keeping his name to myself for the sake of the commission! Scott Tama McDougall. –Not a Maori—on either side, before you ask.”

    “I wasn’t gonna,” said Polly dazedly. “Why do these people do it, if they’re not Maori themselves?”

    “No idea. I have met the parents: the mum’s a white mouse—sort that burns to a crisp if she gets five minutes of sun, and uses the clothes drier even in summer—and the dad’s the pale, pudgy pakeha sort that works in a downtown high-rise and pats himself on the back for getting out in the weekends to do the lawn with his ride-on mower. –An insurance office.”

    “That adds verisimilitude,” she owned weakly. “Thank you very, very much, Dan! It’s wonderful!”

    To her relief this seemed to strike the right note: the sardonic Dan grinned and replied happily: “Glad you like it.”

    Why had he, apparently, taken a scunner to her? Well, he’d certainly been avoiding her for the past several weeks, and he hadn’t said anything pleasant to her when they had bumped into each other, so... Oh, well. It must be the Lady Carrano shit, he’d been all right at first. He was a really interesting man, and very attractive, but if he wasn’t willing to make any move, that was it, wasn’t it? Because chasing them never worked. If they did let themselves be caught they only resented you forever and a day. Added to which, did she want a bloke, even for a casual relationship—heck, even for mere friendship!—who was gonna let himself be put off by the Lady Carrano shit? No—way. That was just so... feeble. Yes, feeble.

    They were just standing there admiring the pot when Sol arrived. “Wow! Uh, only one problem,” he recognised on a rueful note, scratching his chin.

    What? Trust a man to raise stupid objections! It was just the sort of quality thing the shop needed! “What?” asked Polly indignantly.

    Dan had a fair idea what was coming. He hid a smile.

    “How in Hell do we move it?”

    “Ooh, help!” she gulped.

    Sol raised his eyebrows at Dan. “You hauled it this far, huh? Guessed you better take it in the store.”

    “Yes, but Sol, what if we sell it?” cried Polly.

    “Tell ’em you’ll send it on.”

    “We’ll have to,” she said in a hollow voice.

    “Uh-huh. Snare for the unwary novice, ain’t it?” he drawled. “Say, was there a rumour of Milo, seventeen hours back?”

    Polly eyed the pot nervously. “Yes—um, talking of backs, are you sure you want to carry it, Dan?”

    “Nothing wrong with my back,” he replied easily. “Your husband had a bad back, did he?”

    The cheeky sod! “No, but I know that once your back’s gone, that’s it, it’s never the same again.”

    “Ain’t that the truth,” agreed Sol on a rueful note, rubbing his lumbar region. “Have to be careful for the rest of your natural, and the minute it starts in to giving warning signals, do your exercises and sleep with the backboard. Sorry, fella, but I ain’t volunteerin’ to help.”

    “Don’t you mean, ‘I ain’t a-volunteerin’ to help you-all’? –Wasn’t asking you to.”

    “Bend ze knees!” said Polly quickly as he bent to it.

    “Right.” Dan bent his knees, hoisted the pot, and staggered through to the shop with it. They heard Teddi gasp: “Ooh!”

    Sol gave Polly a dry look. “Guessed he done it. Milo?”

    She jumped. “Yeah. I did boil the jug, those seventeen hours back.” She switched it on. “Sol, we’ll have to pay him a commission,” she said in a lowered voice.

    “Yup.”

    “What is he living on?” she murmured, staring at the jug with a frown.

    As she might have expected, blimming Sol Winkelmann countered this kindly, disinterested enquiry with: “Thought you’d never ask.”

    “Drop it, Sol. What?”

    He sniffed slightly. “Driving a truck for Col James. –Jolly Jim Carriers, Puriri County’s answer to FedEx.”

    “FedEx! Three trucks and a van!”

    “Yeah. Wal, pretty good for Puriri.”

    “They mostly do furniture removals,” she said weakly.

    “Then that’ll be what Dan mostly does,” he replied smoothly. “Milo?”

    Okay, that was all she was gonna get out of the bugger. “Milo,” Polly agreed resignedly, picking up the tin.

    Alison Hollister pushed her mass of greying, fluffy fair hair back behind her ear, looking desperate. “I’m sorry, Polly, but I haven’t had time to finish that quilt.”

    “That’s okay,” replied Polly calmly. “We’ll just buy some of your lovely goats’ cheese, then. And have you got any soap, today?”

    Happily she agreed she did, and they went off to the little shop. Alison ran the place by herself, so the shop, which was only a converted sun-porch, was locked and empty: what if some customers turned up while she was out with the goats, or immersed in her quilting? Oh, well, she was the older type of craftsperson.

    “Try some of the soap, it’s lovely, Teddi!” Polly urged.

    As she’d expected, even though it was the 21st century and goats’ milk soap had been around for years, now, Teddi looked at her in horror. No, well, it was a class thing, really, wasn’t it? So much for Godzone, the classless society! The Bateses were just an ordinary family from Carter’s Bay. Not that Polly’s own background was much different, but although Dad had been a hard-working farmer all his days, they’d ended up more affluent, and the boys had all done the Ag. Sci. course at Massey, and then she herself had gone to varsity in Auckland—and of course Aunty Vi had done very well for herself, and bought a villa in a Grammar Zone suburb. Before Mount Eden went totally up-market, true, but it had still been a very nice area. She’d been into health foods in her later years. Well—slightly tempered by habit, not to say by what was available in the EnZed shops! Remember those wholegrain sandwiches of hers with the alfalfa sprouts, Vegemite, and tinned asparagus? Ugh! –And even Mum used goats’ milk soap these days without a blink.

    “It’s lovely and creamy,” she murmured.

    Teddi swallowed, but valiantly bought a cake.

    Okay, she’d spare her the cheese! Polly bought quite a lot: some for her, some for Michaela and Sol, and some for their cousin Beth Perkins, who lived down the Inlet Road, too. She wasn’t sure that Beth herself did like it, but there was no doubt that her husband, Jack, would: he was into anything up-market. Attraction of opposites, that marriage...

    “I was just thinking,” she said, staring vaguely at Alison Hollister’s sparkling-clean fridge, “isn’t it funny how some marriages work out even though the people are complete opposites?”

    There was dead silence in the neat little shop.

    Polly turned round in surprise. Oops! “I didn’t mean mine!”

    “Um, no!” gasped Teddi, her face flaming.

    “No,” said Alison faintly. “Well, I must say,” she added, rallying slightly, “that Ken and me were opposites, all right, but that was never gonna work out, I was an idiot to think it could.”

    “Most of us are completely driven by our hormones when we’re young,” Polly admitted sympathetically.

    “Heck, yeah!” Teddi agreed, visibly forgetting to be embarrassed. “I couldn’t see past him, y’know? Everyone said he was a dead loss—well, Mum, mainly—but Grandma as well! But I never listened, of course.”

    Alison sighed. “No, you don’t.”

    “Mm. I was thinking of my cousin Beth, actually, and her husband, Jack,” Polly explained. “He’s quite a febrile personality”—oops, again, Alison was nodding but Teddi was looking bewildered—“and Beth’s placid and quite gentle, but she can be very determined. And he’s pretty up-market—well, had a very good job in the States, and he’s on a huge professor’s salary at Sir George Grey, and he’s the sort of person that if he buys anything it has to be the best—y’know?”

    Alison obviously did: she was shuddering. “That’s just like my mother-in-law!”

    O-kay. Right. Explained a lot, didn’t it? You couldn’t imagine a bloke with a mother like that settling down to Alison’s sort of semi-rural, health-foody, crafts-y simple life.

    “Yes,” said Polly. “Beth’s simply not interested in consumer junk, she just likes things to be nice and simple.”

    The quilter was now looking at her in dismay.

    “No!” she said quickly. “That’s just what I’m saying! They’re blissfully happy together! She just lets him super-duperize the house round her and lets it all flow over her. And Jack is quite a self-aware person, thank goodness, he does know he’s doing it, and he doesn’t mind if she doesn’t fall over herself when he buys an even trendier leather sofa to replace his previous trendy leather sofa, kind of thing!”

    “Aw, yeah, I know!” cried Teddi, brightening. “He’s the man that gave that weird leather sofa to Goode as Olde! Avon was saying they can’t sell it.”

    Polly grinned. “Yeah. That was one of his rawhide efforts imported from the Southwest. New Mexico, I think.”

    “You mean he gave away an expensive sofa?” croaked Alison.

    “Yeah, well, professor’s salary and a huge share portfolio on the one hand—never mind the global crisis, he doesn’t seem to have suffered—and then on the other hand, Avon’s husband, Rab, the guy who runs Goode as Olde, is his son!” said Polly with a laugh.

    “I thought he was Scotch?” groped Teddi.

    “Rab? His mother took him to Scotland when he was quite young. Her and Jack split up years back.”

    “Right,” she said weakly. “I don’t think I’ve ever met his dad or his wife, though, Polly.”

    “Beth’s very like Michaela: same lovely auburn hair. No, well, she tends to just look in the shop window, I have to admit.”

    At this point many persons who sold their wares through Galerie 2 might have pointed out that that was a pity, if her husband was that well-off, and maybe Polly ought to encourage her to come into the shop instead, and buy something, but know what? Alison Hollister didn’t. No surprises there. Polly refused nicely to buy any of the goats’ milk yoghurt—she adored the cheese but didn’t like the yoghurt—and chose some soap. Some of the plain, creamy cakes for herself, Michaela, Beth, and their other cousins in Puriri County, Mirry and Clara, rose-scented for Mum, lavender-scented for Aunty Kay and Aunty Miriam in Taranaki, and ditto for Aunty Jan down in Christchurch, on the principle that if she didn’t she was bound to hear the others had got soap. And on second thoughts a little presentation box of sample soaps for Phyllis Harding, who wasn’t very well these days, and another for her old school friend Joanie, who was the sort of person who loved putting that sort of thing out in fancy little bowls in her bathroom.

    As they headed towards the southern motorway and thence the Auckland metropolitan area, Teddi said slowly: “Ya know, if she’s often down the back like today, she could miss out on an awful lot of custom.”

    “You noticed,” replied Polly drily. “Well, various people have suggested she ought to at least schedule herself to be in the shop during the day, if she can’t afford to get someone in to mind it, but she’s not the sort of person that can keep to a timetable. Though to some extent the goats timetable her!”

    “Eh?”

    “Like cows: you have to milk them early in the morning and late in the afternoon!” said the farmer’s daughter with a laugh.

    “Oh, yeah, of course. So what was she doing in that shed she wouldn’t let us go in, Polly?”

    “That’s the dairy: she would’ve been making cheese or yoghurt. There’s very strict hygiene regulations, it took her years to even get permission to produce cheese to sell. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to let us in there, the regulations won’t let her.”

    “I see. There’s more to it than you’d think.”

    “Yes, though the actual process of making cottage cheese is very simple,” said Polly drily. “—I thought I might drop in on Joanie on the way back,” she added.

    Teddi was looking out of the window. “Ye-ah... Ooh, look! Pukekos! I haven’t seen any round our way for ages.”

    Two pink-legged, stoutish navy-blue birds were pottering along the nature strip. Still acting as if they owned the joint, after nigh on two hundred years of European settlement, and good on them! Hilarious, really, how the coming of the motorways throughout South Auckland had actually encouraged them! True, it was their natural habitat, it had once all been swamp, and the Maoris used to drag their canoes across the isthmus from the Waitemata Harbour to the Manukau. And the wide grassy verges with the deep ditches dictated by the wet New Zealand climate were quite undisturbed by human beings—they suited the pukekos to a T!

    “Swamp hens,” agreed Polly with a little smile.

    “Eh?”

    She swallowed. “That’s what pukekos are, um, technically. Swamp hens.”

    “Aw, right! Um, sorry, didja want to drop on a friend, did you say?”

    “Mm. She’s very nice.”

    “Yeah, ’course, why not?” said Teddi valiantly.

    So Polly rang to be sure it was okay, and then they dropped in on Joanie. She was a very nice person, and Polly had always been very fond of her, though they had nothing much in common except for their mutual attendance at St Ursie’s School, ages back. She herself had been able to stay with old Aunty Vi, or being a country girl she’d have had to be a boarder, and Joanie’s family, who lived locally, had of course been affluent enough to pay the fees. Joanie and her Tom now lived in Mount Albert, which was kind of the next suburb out of the Grammar Zone. These days its elderly, unremarkable wooden bungalows, many of which had never even attained verandahs, were considered very desirable—them and their horribly shiny, null, renovated kitchens, thrown into one with their sitting-rooms. Mind you, it had always been nice, in a prim sort of middle-middle way. Middle-middle like what you’d take your life in your hands to actually utter, in God’s Own Country! Ridiculous, wasn’t it? The class differences existed: why pretend they didn’t?

    Joanie was a plump, blonde, smiling person—she always had been plumpish but now she was even plumper—and thrilled to see Polly, delighted with the miniature soaps, and very pleased to meet Teddi and interested to hear she was managing the crafts boutique. And since it was now lunchtime insisted on giving them some. No, Polly wouldn’t take them out for it, don’t be silly! She’d just rustle up a quiche! Polly gave in—she might have known, Joanie always had been that sort—and they sat down companionably in Joanie’s pleasant open-plan kitchen-dining room—not horribly shiny, no, just comfortable and convenient—while she made it.

    It was a lovely quiche: she had a trick pastry that was really easy. The experts would doubtless have said it wasn’t real pastry, because she used self-raising flour, but it was yummy, so up the experts! With finely sliced zucchinis, cheese, and ham, no added salt, her and Tom were being careful about too much salt these days, but a bit of ham was all right! Obligingly she gave the admiring Teddi the recipe. –There was the small point, Polly realised silently, that Gail Bates, Teddi’s mum, was a superb pastry chef. Oh, well, sufficient unto the day. And if you were a working mum with two voracious kids—Teddi’s Harry was eight and a very athletic little boy, not one of those skinny ones that picked at their food and drove their mother to despair, like her Johnny at that age—and Marisol, where that name had come from it was probably better not to ask, was a sturdy, placid little girl of six who’d eat anything—if you were a working mum, you needed recipes that were quick, easy and tasty. And failsafe, as Joanie was just assuring her it was.

    “I won’t give it to you,” she added pointedly. “I know you’ve stopped cooking!”

    “Using the oven, anyway,” Polly agreed. “Too right.”

    “I wish I could. The kids’ll eat spaghetti bolognaise, of course, but ya can’t have that every night,” said Teddi with a sigh. “And a roast’s so expensive, isn’t it? Mind you, Mum has us over every Sunday, she’s been really great, I dunno how I’d of coped without her.”

    Polly didn’t have to say anything, because Joanie was saying: “You’re lucky to have her.” She could always be replied upon to say the right thing, bless her! Now she was offering to give her some really easy recipes that were good and filling, and did she have a crock pot? Teddi looked blank, so she corrected this kindly to “Slow cooker, you might call it.” Depending on how Americanised you were, yes, thought Polly: it seemed to be the term now in use in the U.S., but actually the original Crock Pot was an American invention! Sure enough, Teddi recognised the expression. Joanie explained earnestly that they were wonderful, you could do a stew, you had to use a really cheap cut of meat, the more expensive ones were no good, they just disintegrated, and you could brown the meat and onions in the frying pan first if you wanted to, but you could just pop it all in the slow cooker, and provided you added some seasoning and maybe some Worcestershire sauce, and she often added a tin of tomatoes, it turned out really tasty! And you could even do lasagna in it!

    “Surely not?” said Polly in spite of herself.

    “Yes, honest!” Joanie bounced up and got the book. Teddi didn’t look convinced, so she explained that she quite often did it when their Brian asked his footy mates round! Adding with a merry laugh that you had to know in advance, of course! See, if Teddi put it on in the morning it could just be cooking away quietly by itself all day! Teddi’s conclusion was that that sounded great, so Joanie promptly donated the book. No, she could keep it, she knew all her favourite recipes by heart!

    “She’s really nice,” was the verdict, as they headed for Dominion Road.

    Mildly Polly agreed.

    “I like her house: she’s done it up really nicely, hasn’t she?” was next.

    “Not too Seventies for you, Teddi?” replied Polly, unable to stop herself.

    Teddi replied seriously: “Not really. The kitchen’s nice and modern, eh? But the front room’s lovely, the curtains look really good, eh?”

    “Yes. It’s a Sanderson linen, I think: a William Morris design—Honeysuckle. She’s always had that curtain material, but she replaced the old ones a few years back.”

    “I wouldn’t of thought of that dark brown, but it looks great. And the cushions match, they look lovely. That’s a good look, with the two two-person leather sofas, eh? I like that dark green, brown would of been too much. The rugs are nice, too, but I dunno about wooden floors; I mean, they look great, but body-carpet’d be warmer, don’t you think?”

    Was she gonna argue? “Yes, but once Joanie and Tom realised the floors were solid kauri, they couldn’t bear to cover them up. And the house was nice and warm, wasn’t it?”

    “Yes, you’re right. I wouldn’t mind a nice old villa like that,” she said with a sigh. “I mean, we had that old house of Uncle Bob’s—he was my great-uncle, really—only some people from up the varsity, they offered me a real good price for it and I hadda sell, he’d run up debts all over the place and left me to pay them off, wouldja believe he’d only made the down payment on the blimmin’ four-wheel drive? And he’d spent megabucks on that stupid gym equipment, you should of seen the credit card statement! And the flaming boat!”

    “I see,” said Polly lamely. “I thought— I mean, Grace said you were quite near the roundabout and I thought she meant that was your uncle’s place.”

    “Nah. Our place is a dump. Well, I dunno how old it is, but Mum reckons it’s Fifties. She reckons she can remember the family that had it back in the Sixties.”

    Could she? Gail Bates, though she had given the impression of complete middle age for the twelve years or so Polly had known her, must actually only be in her mid-fifties. She must’ve been about ten in the mid-Sixties. Presumably she was the sort of person that did recall in minute detail all the people she’d known as a kid. Well, never moving away from the town where you were born would tend to reinforce it, of course.

    “I suppose you could think about doing it up, Teddi,” she said kindly. “When you’ve saved up a bit.”

    “Maybe. Kids are so expensive, though.”

    Well, Polly was the last person to judge that one, but perhaps if modern families didn’t believe that their kids had to have everything that opened and shut they wouldn’t find them so expensive. She swallowed a sigh and just murmured: “Mm.”

    “I could maybe paint it, though. Say I painted the sitting-room a nice pale cream, like Joanie’s; whaddaya think?”

    As she quite agreed that pale cream would be a good choice, Polly agreed. Phew! This seemed to strike the right note, and Teddi seemed to cheer up again, and chatted on about décor without any prompting being needed. Which gave Polly plenty of time to reflect that, nice young woman though she was, if she had to spend very much more time in her unadulterated company she’d go stark, raving barmy.

    “Whassup?” asked Sol, finding Polly alone in Galerie 2 are just after closing time, sitting gloomily on the floor down in back with a lot of packing materials strewn round her. “Goats’ cheese lady didn’t cough up any more quilts after all?”

    “No—I mean, she didn’t, but I wasn’t really expecting her to.”

    “Uh-huh.” He’d seen Teddi leaving, so he then added: “Surfeit of Teddi Bates, then?”

    “All right, you do know it all,” she groaned.

    “Uh-huh.” Sol pulled up a handy stool, hand-woven in some fibrous substance, and squatted on it. “So what was it, exactly?”

    “Look, just shut up,” she sighed.

    “No, I really want to know!”

    “All right, then,” she said grimly. “She didn’t fancy the cheese—well, you can’t blame her for that, but she wouldn’t even try some—and she wasn’t keen to try the soap, even. Then we went to Joanie’s, and she gave us lunch,” she said heavily.

    “Huh? This that nice blonde lady? The Baptist lady? What she do? Try to talk Teddi into attending church?”

    “No, you idiot, she’d never thrust her religion down anyone’s throat! No, actually they got on very well and she persuaded her to try a slow cooker-rr.”

    The articulated R would have alerted a slower man than Sol Winkelmann, even without that there evil look she was giving him. “What in Hell’s wrong with that?” he said weakly.

    “Nothing, except that at first she called it a crock pot and Teddi didn’t recognise the term, but she did recognise slow cooker! –The term ‘cooker’ doesn’t even exist in Standard English, which is what New Zealand usage is based on!”

    “Yeah, okay, this generation’s all been brainwashed by the American media.”

    “Quite. Anyway, it worked, and she let her give her a cookery book, too.”

    “That sounds okay, Polly.”

    “It was; well, boring but okay. Then on the way back she was telling me how much she liked the way Joanie’s done up the house—it’s a nice old bungalow.”

    “Yeah?” he said foggily.

    “I mentioned the words ‘Sanderson linen’, and ’William Morris’ and got nothing, Sol!”

    “Right. Which pattern?” he asked with interest.

    “Uh—Honeysuckle, if it’s relevant. Not the wishy-washy greens, it’s a dark brown background, and the honeysuckle yellows really stand out.”

    “That sounds great. No, well, we were all into William Morris in the Seventies, but Teddi’s generation won’t ever have heard of him.”

    “It’s not just the generation, but the class thing. I started to feel as if I was Michael Caine with a flaming beard, at about that point! –Wake up, Sol! Educating Rita.”

    “Oh! That thing. Thought it was dumb, myself. Why is an uneducated but spunky working-class gal considered a more interesting character—think I even mean more praiseworthy—than the same gal with a bit of an education under her belt?”

    “Dunno. Something to do with the manner being toned down? The manner that the sort of person that makes that sort of film could never put up with in real life for more than half an hour,” she noted sourly.

    “You said it,” he agreed mildly. “So you don’t got an urge to educate Teddi?”

    “No.”

    “Wal, she ain’t completely dumb, I think she’ll pick up a fair bit from just working with you.”

    She gaped at him. “Did you do it on purpose?”

    “What? No! It was all Grace’s idea, if you cast your mind back! No, well, once the two of you were working together, the thought inevitably sprang to mind, Polly.”

    “Mm. Well at least she likes Ian Peters’s pots, that’s a start. And she admired that huge pot that Dan sourced for us.”

    “And that we ain’t never gonna be able to sell, it’s too huge,” said the co-owner of Galerie 2 mournfully.

    “Probably not, but it looks really good up there near the door, it’ll draw them in,” she said placidly.

    Sol broke down and grinned. “My thought exactly. Added to which, if the guy actually goes out and finds a real talented potter for us, do we want to discourage him?”

    Polly gave him a dry look. “My thought exactly.”

    “Yeah,” he acknowledged, getting up. He held out his hand to her. “You feeling strong enough now to tackle this heap of packing stuff? What in Hell is it off of, anyroad?”

    Polly allowed him to haul her to her feet. “Ta. It’s a set of articulated, um, figurines, I suppose, from some sculptor that Ida sourced.”

    “Sculptor? How fine-artsy are they?” he asked in a hollow voice.

    “See for yourself.” She delved into the carton that was sitting in the middle of the piles of packing materials.

    “Oh, wow,” said Sol slowly.

    “Yeah, not bad, eh?”

    The figurine was a fish, about thirty centimetres long. Semi-skeletal, you might’ve said. Metal. Any shinier and it might’ve been kitsch, but it managed not to be. Polly demonstrated how you could set it to any configuration you liked: its backbone and fins were moveable.

   “That’s a bit different,” he approved. “They all fish? Wal, we’re by the sea: can’t be bad.”

    “Fish and birds. I think they’re only seagulls, but they look good.”

    They sure did. “Good. Tell you what, you could re-do that window display tomorrow, put these in. I’m sick of the sight of that stuff in there.”

    “I’ve never done window displays, Sol,” she croaked.

    “Time you started, then.”

    “But—but what would go with metal fish and seagulls?” she faltered.

    “Dunno! Come on, you wanna come home for dinner?”

    “Um—what day is it?”

    Mildly Sol told her what day it was. Polly sagged. “I’d love to, Sol, thanks. I was afraid it was today Phoebe and Ralph Overdale asked me for, but that’s tomorrow.”

    Sol didn’t fall around Galerie 2 laughing himself sick, but nigh to. Phoebe was more than okay—in fact back in the bye and bye him and her had had a thing—but Ralph was real hard to take, in fact you wondered why in Hell she’d taken up with him. Only thank God she had, meant he’d been free to take up with Michaela. Sir Ralph, if you please, was EnZed’s top cardiac surgeon, but that didn’t say it all, by a long chalk. Smoothest snake what ever crawled out from under a stone. Very up-market. Never let nothing less than real French burgundy pass his lips, kind of thing. Polly appreciated his brains and taste, sure—and his education, talking of which: very well-read man, Sir Ralph—but that was as far as it went.

    “Oh, well, at least he can cook,” she allowed heavily.

    “Aw, yeah, forgotten that. So he can. You’ll enjoy the meal, anyroad,” he said kindly. “Mind you wear something pretty for him, now!”

    She scowled. “The weather’s freezing, Phoebe’ll be in a caftan over a jumper, ya nit.”

    “Yeah, but a Sir Ralphie-approved caftan, Polly.”

    “All right, Sol, instead of decorating the shop window I’ll spend tomorrow driving down to the house to choose something really appropriate to wear to an up-market dinner!”

    Naturally this didn’t phase him: he just replied mildly: “You could do that as well.”

    Polly gave in. “Yeah. What is for dinner, anyway?”

    He laughed. “I was working up to mentioning it tactfully! Slow-cooker stew.”

    She choked.

    “It’s got red wine in it, though,” he added proudly.

    Somehow this really did it, and Polly collapsed in helpless giggles. And gratefully went home with him to slow-cooker stew, and lovely Michaela and dear, bright little Grace.

Next chapter:

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