Up The Inlet

8

Up The Inlet

    Sol Winkelmann leaned heavily on the counter of his boating-supplies store in trendy Kingfisher Bay, and sighed. “Yeah, well, something like this was pretty much bound to happen, honey, in the circ—”

    “But she’s ruining it, Dad!” cried his thirteen-year-old daughter.

    “—circumstances,” Sol finished numbly. Boy, they never let you get a word in edgewise, did they? Three, thirteen, or sixty-three, in his exp— “Huh?”

    “You’re not listening, Dad!” complained Grace loudly.

    “Sorry, Grace, honey,” he said meekly. “Go on.”

    Grace explained at length how Polly was ruining Jake’s artistic minimalist décor that he’d had their bach up at the far end of Carter’s Inlet done up in some years back, deaf to Polly’s objections that she liked it the way it was. Not that it had been scruffy, then, either. But rumour had it that way back when, before Sol came out here—he was from Florida, but he’d been settled in New Zealand for nigh on twenty years, now—way back then, like round about the time Jake and Polly got married, it had been genuinely scruffy. Nothing much in it apart from a nice big double bed, kind of thing.

    “Grace, honey, me and Michaela have tried to explain to you that when someone real close dies, people often do, uh, what seem like uncharacteristic things,” said Sol cautiously.

    His thirteen-year-old daughter eyed him tolerantly. He had, yeah. Mum hadn’t, she wasn’t into that sort of verbal garbage—or anything verbal, much.

    Sol cleared his throat. “Ya see?”

    “This isn’t like going off to Europe without telling anyone or turning the house into a children’s hospital, though, Dad.”

    “Uh—same category, surely?” he groped.

    “No! It’s...” Grace frowned over it. “More personal,” she produced. “Um, I don’t mean that, exactly, but, um—more hands-on?” she said dubiously.

    “Look, if she’s getting that grey stuff off of the walls of the main room with her own fair hands, in the first place it’s therapeutic, and in the second place I’ll go up there hold her coat myself, if no-one else is volunteering!”

    Grace’s jaw dropped. “I thought you liked it?”

    Sol sighed. She was a bright kid, but Jesus, explaining something like the dichotomy that could exist—all too often existed, certainly in his case and, he had a notion, in Polly Carrano’s, too—between your aesthetic sensibilities and your, uh, well, natural inclinations? Temperament, maybe?—explaining that, to a thirteen-year-old?

    “I admired it aesthetically, yeah, sure. Like one of the severer Rothkos, or them plain grey pots your Mum had a fit of making ’bout three years back.”

    “Five,” she corrected.

    Sol had to swallow. Gee, time sure flew when you were getting on, yourself. He hadn’t been young when him and Michaela had had her, true. “Uh, yeah, was it, sugar? Okay, five. Wal, that main room of Jake’s bach was like that, huh?”

    She nodded her auburn head hard.—She had, thank Christ, inherited Michaela’s gorgeous deep red hair and likewise, Michaela’s delightful straight nose: the thought of any girl getting the Winkelmann nose was jest too dad-blamed horrible to— “Huh?”

    “Da-ad!”

    Sheepishly he confessed: “Talking of things aesthetic, I was just thankin’ God standing that you inherited your mom’s nose and not the Winkelmann schnozz. Uh—sorry, what was that, Pumpkin?”

    “I said that to Polly, that it was like a Rothko, and she agreed, and I thought she liked it, too! So why’s she ruining it?”

    “Therapeutic, like I said: you’re old enough to understand that, Grace,” he said levelly. “And besides that—and I won’t blame you if you can’t understand this side of it—a person can admire—truly admire—something aesthetically, but it can still be all wrong for their, uh, temperament.”

    Grace stared at him in a baffled way. “But don’t your aesthetic tastes arise from your temperament? You can’t separate them!”

    “You can in human beings,” said Sol heavily.

    “Don’t patronise me, Dad!” she shouted.

    “I don’t think he was,” said a dispassionate contralto voice from the doorway. Michaela came in, pushing back the hood of her heavy yellow slicker. “It’s still pouring,” she reported.

    “Has that dad-blamed shop doorbell broken down again?” returned Sol heatedly.

    “Dunno. It didn’t tinkle,” replied his wife, still dispassionate. “I don’t think he was patronising you, Grace,” she said mildly to their daughter. “That wasn’t his patronising voice.”

    In any other person the morphological variations on the word “patronise” would not only have been deliberate, they would have gotten right up your nose, Sol acknowledged silently, his eyes starting to twinkle. But with Michaela, both things was equally impossible. Even to a thirteen-year-old with the bit between her very obstinate teeth.

    And sure enough, Grace merely replied: “I think he was, a bit, Mum. Wouldn’t you say that a person’s aesthetic tastes have got to arise from their temperament?”

    “I don’t think I’m sure what temperament is, really,” Michaela admitted, wrinkling her wide brow over it.

    Grace looked dubiously at Dad, but for once he didn’t mouth “Potter” at her. “Oh,” she said weakly to the potter. “Um, well, I suppose it means the, um, well, your feelings, and um, well, the way you are, um, psychologically?” she floundered. “Um, I mean, a person can have a—an excitable temperament or—or a placid one...” She ran down. “Did you mean temperament, Dad?” she asked weakly.

    Sol scratched his head. “I think so, honey. Wal, without gettin’ into the mediaeval concept of the cardinal humours—”

    “No, don’t,” said Michaela calmly. “What was it about, anyway?”

    “Huh? Oh! About!” He cleared his throat. “Grace has found out that Polly’s abolishing that minimalist, Rothko-esque décor that Jake did out their bach in.”

    “Only the main room. Rothko in his gloomiest mood,” corrected the potter calmly.

    After thirteen-plus years of marriage Sol was used to her. “Right. That. Jest before he committed suicide.”

    “I wouldn’t go that far. It was very elegant, with those dark grey walls.”

    “Yes!” cried Grace aggrievedly. “And I thought Polly liked it! So why’s she getting rid of it, Mum?”

    With her usual mildness, Michaela replied: “I wouldn’t say she liked it. Not to live in. She admired it. It’s different.”

    Boy, that said it all, didn’t it? A certain silence fell in Sol’s Boating & Marine Supplies. Eventually its proprietor managed to croak: “I hope you-all are admiring this here tremendous restraint of mine.”

    “No, I’m wondering why you don’t shut the shop, you’re not gonna get any more custom in this weather,” replied Michaela with horrid frankness.

    “Um, yeah, it’s pouring cats and dogs, Dad,” agreed Grace somewhat weakly. “—I think I see what you mean, Mum.”

    “She’s probably still upset, too,” added the potter kindly. “Anyway, you can ask her: she’s coming to tea tonight.”

    This wasn’t as extraordinary as it might have sounded to the uninitiate—not that there were many of them in Carter’s Bay and environs! Lady Carrano was Michaela’s second cousin.

    “Uh—well, she’s welcome any time, of course,” said Sol a trifle weakly. “But I was just planning on franks, honey.”

    “Mum’ll do her silverbeet salad!” offered Grace instantly. She collapsed in giggles.

    Yeah, well, that was thirteen for you, mused Sol, watching her with a smile. One minute they was all psychological, next they was giggling at their own brilliant wit. “Uh—what?”

    “I said, I could,” repeated Michaela patiently. “There’s plenty of silverbeet in the garden.”

    Abruptly Sol collapsed in giggles of the most agonising kind.

    “Dad won’t be long,” explained Grace half an hour later, opening the French door of the Winkelmanns’ little A-frame house on Carter’s Inlet to a gust of wind and rain. “He’s just hanging on for the last customer wanting a tube of Selley’s.”

    Polly smiled. It didn’t sound as if Grace realized that that phrase was verbatim Sol, and in fact one of his jokes! “I see. I hope I’m not too early, Grace. But I finished painting the walls and the smell was getting to me, so I just came on down the Inlet.”

    “In your runabout?” replied Grace, peering past her into the murk of Carter’s Inlet on a wet July afternoon.

    The aluminium dinghy was pulled up onto the narrow strip of sand of the soi-disant Sol’s Cove, but as it was teeming, you couldn’t really make it out even from a distance of thirty feet or so. “Yes; I’ve dug the anchor well in.”

    “Um, yeah. Not that; Dad said we’re in for a stormy night. I mean,” she said awkwardly, as Polly just looked blank, “it might not be safe for you to sail back.”

    “Let her in!” boomed Michaela’s contralto from the hinterland.

    “Yeah! Sorry!” gasped Grace, coming to and standing back to let the visitor in. “Hey, Mum, Polly came down the Inlet in her runabout!” she cried.

    Michaela appeared from behind the bank of bookcases, as to the outer side, and kitchen cupboards, as to the inner, that partitioned off the kitchenette from the big main room that served as a combined living-dining room and bedroom. “Don’t worry, if it’s too rough to sail back Sol can drive you.”

    “Yeah, but Mum, she doesn’t like the painty smell!” gasped Grace.

    “Then you better spend the night, Polly,” said Michaela with her customary placidity.

    The A-frame didn’t include a spare room, though they had now built on a wing, also A-frame in shape, with a room for Grace and a full-size bathroom to replace the very elementary facilities that Sol and Michaela had lived with for years.

    “No, that’s okay, thanks, I’ve got a room at the Royal K.”

    “Ugh!” cried her relatives in horror.

    The Royal Kingfisher, the multi-storey tourist hotel on the point at Kingfisher Bay, was pretty ugh, true, at least as to its décor and the over-priced muck it served in its main dining-room, but it was comfortable enough. “I don’t eat there, it’s only to sleep,” said Polly mildly.

    The two female Winkelmanns didn’t look convinced, but Michaela admitted: “That’s not too bad. What about breakfast, though?”

    “Their breakfasts aren’t as putrid as the rest of their food. I mean, you can just have toast and Vegemite, or cornflakes or muesli, you don’t have to have their revolting so-called Eggs Benedict or the ruddy croissants stuffed with ham and cheese.”

    “I like ham and cheese,” replied her cousin dubiously.

    “Mu-um! Not in croissants! –Dad says that’s a perversion,” Grace explained earnestly.

    “He’s right,” Polly agreed drily. “Um, Michaela, I’m dripping wet, maybe I better dump my coat outside.”

    “That’s okay, there’s six coats of polyurethane on the floor. Bung it on the coat stand.”

    Polly looked dubiously at the fancy brass coat stand—it’d be a recycled one from the Seventies, in fact quite probably bought at Goode as Olde, the so-called recycling yard, read junk shop, in Carter’s Bay, further down Carter’s Inlet. But as it already had two wet yellow plastic raincoats on it, added hers.

    “This is for you,” she said, picking up the carton she’d just put down. “If you can use the stuff. Otherwise, sell it or give it away, whatever you like.”

    Michaela and Grace exchanged dubious glances. If whatever-it-was had come out of Jake’s bach it could be anything from a genuine Russian ikon to an original Don Binney painting—Grace was going through a stage of declaring they were too pretty-pretty, but Michaela had always liked his stuff, though realising he wasn’t one of New Zealand’s greatest artists—to something tinned that would prove not to be edible to anyone but gourmets of the most refined tastes. One awful time Polly had given them six tins of snails because Jake had got several cartons of the things off a French business mate, and though Sol had claimed he knew how to do ’em properly the results had been horrible, and he’d had to use them for bait. The local snapper seemed to appreciate them. Or it could well be wine, in which case Sol’d go into his wine-tasting bit and be impossible for weeks. Getting out all his books on the subject and interminably looking crap up on the Internet and telling them about vintages and trying to teach them to taste it...

    Her mother was silent, so Grace croaked: “It’s not wine, is it?”

    “No; would you like some?” she said eagerly. “’Cos—”

    “No!” they both cried.

    “I’ve still got loads,” she reassured them. “The cellar at the house is still full of the muck.”

    “No, um, the thing is, Polly, if you give us fancy wine Dad goes into his awful wine-buff thing,” Grace explained awkwardly.

    “Mm,” Michaela agreed glumly.

    “Good grief, does he really?” They both nodded glumly and Polly admitted: “I’m awfully sorry: I thought he was immune to that particular male gene.”

    “No,” they said in chorus.

    “Oh, dear: feet of clay!” she gurgled. “Well, I’ll send some more down to Pete and Jan, she doesn’t really mind if he’s a bit of a wine buff. This is just some kitchen stuff. I’ll take it through, shall I?”

    Michaela and Grace followed her out to the kitchenette, again exchanging dubious glances.

    Phew! Not snails. Though it was pretty bad. Michaela picked up a pristine, deep blue frying-pan. Deep blue, in fact a glowing blue, as to the outside, that was: the inside was sparkling white—never been used, right. “Polly, this looks expensive, I don’t think we should—”

    Polly sighed. “Everything Jake ever bought was expensive, Michaela. It’s French, it’s very good quality, and we didn’t need it, he only bought it to go with that fake Mittel-European peasant décor in the bach’s kitchen.”

    “I thought you said it was fake Spanish peasant décor?” returned Michaela seriously.

    “Whatever. No, well, he did say that at one stage, but I was talking to someone not long since—I can’t remember who—anyway, they’d read a magazine article about, um, possibly not Mittel-European, come to think of it: Eastern European. I get all those Balkan countries hopelessly mixed up, especially since they’ve all changed their names.”

    “What about them?” asked Grace logically, frowning over it.

    “What? Um, just that they definitely go in for that sort of brightly painted wooden furniture in those parts, Grace. Um, I think the article showed painted tin stuff, too. Um, watering cans, that sort of stuff.”

    Grace brightened. “Hey, Mum, I could do that!”

    “There’s special techniques to it,” replied Michaela in a vague voice. “How to hold the brush to do flower petals, and stuff.”

    Grace looked dubiously at their relative.

    “Yes,” said Polly, nodding. “This lady I was talking to— I remember! It was in Swadlings’—I mean the old dairy in Carter’s Bay, not their new shop in Kingfisher Bay. It was Anne Harris: she’s really into that sort of thing. You know: she lives out on the Point: they’ve got the house next to the Parkinsons’ old house,” she reminded Michaela.

    “Oh, yeah. She tried to sell Ida some of her rag rugs for the craft store, but they weren’t up-market enough for the clients, so she wouldn’t take them. She doesn’t need the money, mind you.”

    “Obviously not, Mum, if they live out on the Point!” cried Grace scornfully.

    “Yeah. Anyway, she goes to lots of classes, she’ll probably know someone who could teach you to do the petals and things properly,” said Polly kindly.

    Mrs Harris was probably about sixty-five and Grace, of course, was only thirteen. At that age Polly would have been terrified of marching up to a strange lady’s house—or any lady’s house, really—and asking her anything, but the determined Grace Winkelmann just nodded and said: “Right, I’ll ask her! Ta, Polly. –Have the frying-pan, Mum, we can do with another, ours is as old as the hills, Dad musta bought it when he first came out here.”

    “The blue does go with Polly’s kitchen, though,” Michaela objected.

    “Yeah, but she’s not using it. –Ta, Polly, it’s a nice one,” said Grace firmly, stowing it away in a cupboard. She unwrapped another newspaper package. “Ooh, a matching jug!”

    It was an electric jug. Michaela hadn’t even known they came in blue. She gaped at it. It looked horribly, horribly expensive, even more expensive than the pan!

    “This is great: thanks, Polly,” Grace was saying happily. “Our old jug went bang last year and scared Mum to death. Dad reckons he’s fixed it, but shit, it’s older than I am! What’s the betting it’ll go again?” She investigated the innards of the bright blue metal electric jug. “Neato. I’ll just rinse it out, eh?” She suited the action to the word, then refilled it, unplugged their old jug, emptied it, and dumped it in the kitchen tidy. “We’ll have a cuppa, eh?” she said happily, plugging the new jug in. “Go on, Mum, unwrap one!”

    Limply Michaela unwrapped another newspaper parcel. A large tin of, um...

    Capably Grace took it off her. “Jackfruit and palm nuts: gee, this looks interesting!”

    “Are you sure you don’t want it, Polly?” asked Michaela weakly.

    “Yes, I don’t like palm nuts, they’re rather slimy. But I thought you might like to try them.”

    “Sure!” Grace assured her breezily. “Dad’ll know what do with them! –Hey, this is a funny shape!” She unwrapped it. “What is it?” she croaked, goggling at it. It was kind of... boat shaped? Fish shaped? Metal. Maybe thirty centimetres long?

    “It’s for making stupid pâté en croûte,” said Polly sourly. “Or a raised pie, I suppose, if you want the English version. Um, like a mould, Grace.”

    Michaela examined it doubtfully. “Wouldn’t the jelly run out?”

    “No, when it’s done you pour it into the— Oh! No, it’s not a jelly mould, Michaela. You put the pastry in when it’s together, you see, lining the walls with it, and then you put the filling in and the pastry top on, and when it’s cooked you let it cool and then undo it, like this,” she said, suiting the action to the word.

    “Aw, neato!” cried Grace.

    “Yes, but I’m past the stage in my life,” said Polly with a smothered sigh, “when I want to spend hours in the kitchen fiddling around with fancy food that’ll only get eaten.”

    “I bet Dad’ll know how to use it!” decided Grace, not seizing the implications of this speech.

    “He’s getting on, too,” said Michaela uneasily. “He’s older than Polly, Grace. I know he did that fancy thing for my birthday, but last Christmas he didn’t even want to do Gracie’s easy cake, ’member?”

    “Um, you do have to slice it right across, I suppose it is a bit fiddly,” said Gracie Rosenberg’s namesake on a dubious note.

    “Is this your grandma’s rum cake?” asked Polly with a smile.

    “Yes,” Michaela agreed, nodding. “You buy a sponge and slice it across twice. You know: to make layers. Then you—um, I forget what comes next, but it’s got cream in it, and you soak it in rum and sometimes he puts fruit in it. But he said it was too fiddly and he couldn’t face it.”

    “Then we’ll spare him—and you!—the stupid pâté mould,” said Polly, grabbing the mould back. “It can go for scrap, or maybe Rab and Avon could sell it at Goode as Olde. Talking of pâté, those are just some tins of hare pâté: when he found out I love it Jake went overboard and imported two dozen cases of it from France.”

    Michaela had been looking dubiously at the lifelike picture of a hare on the oddly-shaped tin’s label but at this she dropped it. “Cases?”

    “Yeah, so she’ll never get through it, eh?” concluded Grace jauntily. “Thanks, Polly.” Swiftly she put a dozen tins of pâté de lièvre in a cupboard.

    “It’s nice on toast. Um, well, any time, really, if you don’t want to eat it as a starter,” said Polly, eyeing her second cousin uneasily. “We sometimes used to have it for Sunday tea if we were up here at the bach.”

    “Won’t the kids want some?” said Michaela faintly, retrieving the one she’d dropped. Capably Grace took it off her and put it in the cupboard.

    “They don’t like it.”

    “They must of eaten it, though, if you had it for tea,” objected Grace logically.

    “No. They usually had mousetraps for Sunday tea; or boiled eggs, if there were enough eggs.”

    Grace nodded. “And if ya didn’t have enough cheese. Hey, know what? Dad didn’t know what mousetraps are!” she reported gleefully.

    “I’ve seen him eating them,” said Polly dazedly.

    “Yeah, he knows now, but I mean, when he came out to New Zealand!”

    “Oh, right,” said Polly, smiling at her and not mentioning croques monsieur or that ruddy pair of American tourists. “They aren’t an American thing, at all.”

    “Nah,” she agreed happily, hauling out the last thing from the carton with some difficulty. “Hey, look, Mum!” she panted.

    Michaela looked weakly at the large two-handled saucepan.

    “It’s technically a stock pot: use it for soup,” said Polly briskly.

    “Yeah, or Dad’s chilli, if he’s making a big lot!” beamed Grace. She investigated the cupboard under the sink. “Blow, no room.” Carefully she set the large pot on the stove.

    “Polly, won’t you need it?” objected Michaela weakly.

    “That amount of soup? It’d go off before I could get through it! Anyway, I’ve given up making soup: it’s too fiddly, chopping all the stuff and then it tastes horrid and runny if you don’t put it through the blender, and that’s more ruddy washing up! –You don’t want a blender, do you?” she added on a hopeful note.

    “No!” said Michaela quickly, going very red.

    At the same time Grace cried: “Yeah! Gee, can we really?”

    “You’re more than welcome to it.” Michaela was looking very dubious, so she added: “Jake bought it for the bach, so now I’ve got two. My old one’s still down at the house. I might use it some time—for shakes in summer, something like that,” she conceded without enthusiasm. “Anyway, have the other one: I don’t need it.”

    “Great, I’ll collect it tomorrow,” decided Grace firmly. “Ours broke down. Well, it was a second-hand one but Dad reckoned he’d fixed it up, only it went bang and fused the electricity—eh, Mum?”

    “Yes. It was quite scary,” Michaela admitted. “And nothing would work, we had to get the candles out.”

    “That was all right,” Grace conceded. “Only we couldn’t find the old tin-opener, Dad had a mad buying fit and got this swept-up electric one, he reckons it’s almost as good as the American ones.”

    “It was only at a Farmers’ sale,” Michaela excused this extravagance.

    “Yeah, but the point is, there was nothing to eat!” Grace explained to their relative.

    “There was stuff in the garden,” said Michaela mildly.

    Gasping: “Silverbeet salad!” Grace collapsed in giggles.

    Polly smiled. “I like your silverbeet salad,” she said kindly to her cousin.

    “It’s all right with Sol’s salad dressing on it,” its maker conceded fairly. “Um, are we gonna have a cuppa?” she added meekly.

    The swept-up blue jug had certainly boiled, in fact it had already switched itself off, so Polly agreed: “Yeah, let’s.” And switched it on again.

    “So Ida Grey’s still at the craft shop, is she?” she said, when they were sitting down sipping tea.

    Not betraying any surprise at the sudden return to the last topic but forty-two—and one only mentioned in passing, at that—Michaela and Grace both nodded, and Grace added: “She hasn’t found anyone sensible to replace her yet. Well, they gotta know about what they’re selling, ya see.”

    “Yes,” said Polly uneasily. “Um, Bob Grey’s pretty frail these days, you know. He’s older than Jake: I don’t know exactly how old, but I remember when I wanted Jake to give up driving himself all the way home from work and let Bob do his chauffeur bit instead, he said he was. Ida should really be home with him.”

    “Yes; she worries about him,” said Michaela simply.

    “You could do a bit, Mum,” suggested Grace. “I mean, not selling stuff, but you could tell the customers about the stuff.”

    “I’ve helped out before; I can work the credit card thingy,” Michaela assured Polly.

    “You can’t do change, though,” noted Grace swiftly.

    “No, but every little helps. Maybe if Ida or Sol can come up with someone to do the business side of it?” suggested Polly. “Just the shop side, not selecting the stock. Just as a stop-gap.”

    “Dad could do the actual accounts,” noted Grace.

    Sol was half-owner of the crafts business next to his boating-supplies store on the waterfront in little Kingfisher Bay. It was officially named Galerie 2, though not referred to as such by the residents of the greater Carter’s Bay area. Originally the other half had been owned by old Sir Jerry Cohen, who was somewhat tenuously connected to Sol by marriage—one of his daughters and Sol’s much older half-brother. Sir Jerry was long gone, and the half-interest in Galerie 2 had not reverted, as the other partner in the enterprise had feared, to the giant CohenCorp, which owned most of the bits of New Zealand industry that the Carrano Group didn’t, but had gone to Sir Jerry’s granddaughter Susan, with whom Sol was great friends, so that was okay. But as Susan and her husband Alan ran an orchard not far south of Carter’s Inlet and its adjoining settlements of Carter’s Bay and Kingfisher Bay, and Susan into the bargain had a flourishing law practice further south in Takapuna, she didn’t have any time to spare for the crafts boutique.

    “He doesn’t need more work,” Michaela objected.

    “In the meantime, Mum!”

    Polly bit her lip. “It’d be the thin end of the wedge,” she murmured.

    “Yes. I don’t want him to,” Michaela decided.

    Her mother rarely made a definite statement. Grace gave in. “All right, Mum. Um, Mrs Bates was saying that Teddi, she’s real fed up with that office job at Sir George Grey.”

    “She told me that she really needs it because of the divorce,” said Michaela uncertainly.

    “She needs the work, yeah!” retorted her thirteen-year-old daughter swiftly. “But she’s fed up with driving round to the other side of the Inlet every day. See, her house, it’s real near the roundabout: she could be here in ten minutes!”

    “I thought she was on the far side of Carter’s Bay, the waterfront side?” ventured Polly.

    “Nah, you’re getting mixed up,” replied her thirteen-year-old relative tolerantly. “See, Teddi an’ him, they took on her old uncle’s place—he’d of been Mrs Bates’s brother, I think.”

    “Nup: close but no cigar,” drawled an American voice from the doorway. Sol came in, shuddering and dripping in his yellow slicker. “Boy, it’s cats and dogs out there! –No,” he said, hanging it up on the stand: “the old guy, he was old Ada Corcoran’s brother, he’ve been Teddi’s great-uncle—that is, iffen we are talkin’ ’bout Teddi Bates that was?”

    “Yes, of course,” said Polly, trying not to laugh.

    Sol winked at her, removed his footwear, and came over to where they were clustered round the pot-bellied stove that thank God he’d taken the advice of those who knew the northern New Zealand winters and put in the A-frame. Had a wetback, an’ all. Saved ’em megabucks in electricity, over the years. True, in the muggy northern New Zealand summer a huge great stove in your main room was what you did not need, whether or no it heated your water efficiently.

    “Still is, she’s gone back to it, she said she never wanted to hear the name Cartwright again,” reported his daughter.

    “Uh—wouldn’t she hear it every time one of her kids is referred to officially, honey, like by the school, and so forth?” he croaked.

    “Nah, she’s had their names changed to Bates, too.”

    “Boy, she knows it all, huh?” he said to the older females present.

    “She’s got ears,” replied Michaela with a sort of mild repressiveness that was all the more effective in that it gave you the impression she didn’t really mind which way you reacted to it. Or iffen you reacted to it. As a matter of fact in this instance her second cousin’s reaction was to collapse in those contralto giggles of hers.

    “Yeah,” said Sol, grinning. “Okay, Pumpkin: I apologise.”

    “Ta,” replied Grace in surprise.

    Sol sat down in his big chair and stretched out his stockinged feet to the stove. “Ooh, that’s better! –What about Teddi Bates, Grace?”

    Eagerly Grace explained that maybe Teddi could manage the craft store!

    Sol scratched his narrow jaw. “Yeah, well, she’s got good office skills, she could do the paperwork okay, and she’s a people person, she’d be okay with the customers. But—uh—”

    “She’s got no taste,” said Michaela placidly.

    Polly looked uneasily at Sol, but he just nodded calmly in agreement with this pejorative statement and said: “That is what I was thinking, yeah.”

    “Yes,” she agreed in relief, smiling at him. “She’s right.”

    Sol twinkled at her. “After fifteen years, I’m not gonna start in to squashing her for rushing in where p.c. angels wouldn’t, Polly.”

    She pinkened. “No, of course not.”

    Sol shook his head. “It’s men: you jes’ cain’t trust ’em to (a) notice and (b) do the right thing iffen they have noticed.”

    “Honestly, Dad!” cried Grace, bright red.

    “I didn’t get that,” said Michaela calmly, “but if you’re getting at Polly, you can stop.”

    “It’s all right,” said Polly weakly. “He’s spot-on, as usual. –Fifteen?”

    “Yeah, Grace is nearly fourteen,” he reminded her.

    “My birthday’s in August!” Grace reminded the company eagerly.

    Any other parents would have squashed her for being so blatant, especially in front of her rich relative, but, not to Polly’s surprise, neither Sol nor Michaela did. Sol just said: “Yeah, time flies, huh?” and Michaela said: “Is that next month or the month after?”

    When that one had been sorted out Sol brought them back to the subject of Teddi Bates managing the crafts store, pointing out that they still had the problem of someone to choose the stock and talk knowledgeably not only to the customers but to the suppliers. Because the wrong person could sure enough alienate your average craftsperson real quick.

    “Yes,” Michaela agreed seriously. “Some people expect you to produce work regularly.”

    “Uh-huh, that’s it. Wal, part of it. Or they try ordering you to make goddamn coffee mugs and fat clay birds, because for they haven’t understood either how a potter works or the type of clientèle we get from the Royal Kingfisher Hotel.”

    “I think that was that lady he had helping out before he got Ida,” Michaela explained.

    “That’d be disastrous,” Polly agreed.

    “Yes. You could do it, Polly,” Michaela suggested placidly.

    Admittedly Sol had had the same notion, but he’d been gonna work up to it very, very slowly and tactfully. Like, maybe over the next two months? His jaw dropped.

    Grace was crying joyfully: “Ooh, yeah! Great idea, Mum! You’ve got lovely taste, Polly!”

    “Uh—now, hold on,” he croaked.

    “I—I’ve never done anything commercial,” said Polly numbly.

    “You were married to Jake for yonks, though: some of it must of rubbed o—”

    “Shut up, Grace, sweetie,” said Sol quickly. “It wouldn’t be the commercial side of it at all, Polly, if you did fancy it. There’d maybe be a bit of keeping track of what type of stuff was in stock and what needed bolstering up, but that’d be it, for that side of it. I guess the most of it would be liaising with the suppliers. Ida did a lot of that, but me and Michaela helped out a bit, huh, honey?”

    “Yes; I know some of them,” said Michaela, nodding her head.

    Those glorious thick, dark auburn waves that she just wore chopped off in a simple, chin-length bob were starting to show streaks of silver at the temples, Polly registered consciously for the first time. The hair was very like Mum’s, and she’d gone pure silver very early, so it wasn’t exactly surprising. Nevertheless it brought Polly up short. Michaela had always seemed ageless, somehow. Perhaps because she was always the same. Very focussed on her pots, but pretty vague about everything else, but that wasn’t it, really. Some people claimed she was naïve, but that wasn’t quite right, either. She was the sort of person that you wouldn’t in your wildest dreams imagine ever developing into the sort of managing, middle-aged suburban moo that New Zealand was full of.

    Somehow Polly found herself saying: “Um, I could sort of give you a hand for a bit. I don’t want to work full-time, though,” she added quickly.

    “No, I didn’t mean that,” Michaela agreed. “That’d be good. Pauline Wilson rang up the other day, she’s found a new lady. Only she said we might not like her stuff, we’d better check it out.”

    “What does she make, hon’?” asked Sol.

    “Didn’t I say? I thought I told you. Papier-mâché.”

    “Like the 19th-century papier-mâché stuff?” asked Polly cautiously.

    “I think it’s that basic technique, and she uses lacquer, but she doesn’t do flower sprays. Mind you, some of those pieces were very pretty, we had a book from the library about them. Sometimes they used inlaid mother-of-pearl, too.”

    “Um, yes, I’ve got a pretty little papier-mâché side-table in my bedroom. Jake got it at an auction the last time he was in London, I don’t think you’d have seen it.”

    “Nah. You mean, like, at the house?” asked Grace.

    “Mm. So what style of thing does this lady make, Michaela?”

    “Small pieces of furniture. Coffee tables and small cupboards, and she sometimes does boxes, only usually they’re just to try out ideas. Pauline said they’re sort of Art Deco in inspiration.”

    As all of those present were aware that Pauline Wilson, who was an old friend of Michaela’s who taught at the School of Art at Auckland University, had always been fond of Art Deco, there was a dubious silence.

    “Um, but modern,” added the potter.

    “That sounds okay!” decided Grace brightly.

    “Worth checking out, anyroad,” Sol conceded. “Did Pauline give you her contact details, Michaela?”

    “That’s the expression!” recognised the potter pleasedly. “I couldn’t remember it. –No.”

    Polly had to swallow, but Michaela’s immediate family didn’t react, except for Sol creaking to his feet in order to ring Pauline right away, you had to strike while the iron was hot in the crafts business.

    The confab with Pauline having proven satisfactory and Grace having capably fetched his slippers, he then went off to the kitchenette to start on the franks.

    “I’d be hopeless at that,” said Polly in a low voice to her cousin.

    “You need to have something by the phone to write the details down, and all you have to remember,” said Grace, ticking them off on her fingers, “is to get name, phone number, address, and email, if any. –Some of the craftspeople are still living in the Middle Ages,” she explained kindly, “but most of them have email these days, and a lot of them have websites.”

    “Um, yes. I suppose one could always have a list. Um, not that, though, Grace. I mean striking while the iron was hot. I don’t think,” said Polly on a wan note, “that I’m that sort of person.”

    “Nor am I,” agreed Michaela.

    Grace had opened her mouth. She closed it again. After a moment she said in an unconvinced voice: “Lots of people reckon it’s only a matter of trying, Mum. Like, you can do it if you try—y’know?”

    “Lots of people are morons, too,” noted Polly sourly.

    Michaela gave her a concerned look. “Mm. She doesn’t understand, Polly. She’s like Sol, he’s good at striking while the iron is hot.”

    “Well, um, Dad could do that side of it, then, and, um, tell you when to go and meet someone, Polly,” ventured Grace.

    “That might work. Unless you forgot,” Michaela allowed.

    Polly smiled feebly. “Yeah. Um, well, I don’t think I’d forget, I’m not artistic like you, my mind wouldn’t be on my art. Um, yes, that’d work okay, I think, but isn’t it giving Sol more work, that we didn’t want to?”

    “It’s only making phone calls, and he does lots of that anyway,” said Grace logically.

    “Mm.” Polly got up and went round to the kitchenette. “Did you hear all that?”

    “Most of it, yup. That’d be okay by me. –Couldn’t swear exactly who was talkin’, mind: you and Michaela sound very alike,” he added with a little smile.

    “Yeah. We’re alike in more things than that,” she admitted with a little sigh. “Being married to Jake, I suppose I sort of... got into the habit of relying on him to do the pushing.”

    “Uh-huh. Direct opposite to most marriages, then,” noted Sol calmly.

    Polly gulped. “Um, yes. Most women do seem to turn horribly managing after a few years of marriage, don’t they?”

    “Sure, and most guys, they’re content to just sit back and let them take over where their moms left off. But there ain’t an actual law that says we all gotta be like the great suburban majority, Polly!”

    “In this country? Ya wanna bet?”

    Sol investigated a packet of white sliced Tip-Top from Swadlings’ dairy. “You fancy white bread with your franks instead of the rolls I was planning to have, like because someone seems to have eaten those? Musta been that ad hoc lunch we had yesterday, when I decided to come home for a bite and closed the dad-blamed store—it was pouring even worse than what it is today.”

    “If you ate the rolls, why didn’t you eat the franks?” asked Polly logically.

    “Because for I was saving ’em for dinner tonight, Polly.”

    “Hah, hah.”

    “Wal, do ya?”

    “What?” she asked weakly.

    “Fancy white sliced wrapped round your franks.”

    “Oh! Yes, of course: we used to have chipolatas like that. The twins always loved them.”

    “Good. –There is the point,” he said cautiously, “that you don’t have to stay here and put up with the suburban norms, Polly.”

    “Don’t be silly. I like living here, I just don’t like the suburban norms. Same as you and Michaela!” she finished with a smile.

    Sol was glad to hear it. But gee, she’d been living with Jake in that Goddamn great mansion of his on the cliff top at Pohutukawa Bay for more than twenty years, was she really gonna give the high life away and settle down to their sort of scruffy lifestyle up the Inlet? Could but try, he guessed. And at least, unlike most people that had made a change in their lives, she could afford to do the other thing if she found it didn’t suit after all.

    “So, um, do you think it’d work?” she pursued uneasily.

    “Huh? Just roll it round the frank, first makin’ the heart-wrenching decision whether to put the mustard and/or ketchup on first or carefully anoint the end of the thing onct it’s—”

    “Not that, you clot! You sort of managing the craft store’s, um, enquiries and, um, timetabling me, I suppose is what I mean.”

    “Sure it’ll work. For a start, anyroad; then we’ll get Teddi trained up, huh? Ida’s got a book for keeping track of the phone stuff. The person’s details go into the computer, of course, but it’s real easy just to leaf through the book and see that you need to get on out the Hell and gone down Manukau City somewheres, contact the goats’ cheese lady what makes them miraculous patchwork quilts.”

    “Um, yes. Clevedon. Alison Hollister. They are miraculous but, um, she can’t produce them to order.”

    “There you are, see? You know the suppliers! You’ll be ideal in the job!”

    “Devious bastard,” replied Polly unemotionally.

    Sol smiled. Sometimes you forgot how sharp she was. “Wal, yeah, thought you knew her. You ever meet the glass-blower lady that used to live not far from her?”

    “Um... sort of.”

    He ceased staring into his franks pot to turn and gape at her. “Why all the hesitancy? Something wrong with her? Or her work?”

    “Um, no. Um, I do know her, but she’s living down in Taupo now and nearly all of her work is sold through the crafts shop her husband is running. And, um, their business partner is a very with-it lady that owns several souvenir shops and, um, I’m afraid she’s got Molly’s output all sewn up.”

    “Wal, damn, thought that was gonna be another useful contact,” he said cheerfully. “Oops, think these are done!” He scooped them out hurriedly. “If so be as you did happen to know another glass-blower, though, we could use their work.”

    “I only know of one down in the South Island.”

    “Mm-hm?”

    “Um, there’d be shipping costs, Sol, and you know what the local carriers are.”

    “You’re right, that’s a real no-no. Wal, maybe start tomorrow with this papier-mâché dame, then?”

    “Tomorrow?” said Polly very weakly indeed.

    “Sure! Why not? Saturday’s just another working day to most craftspeople. –HEY! DINNER!” he bellowed, sticking his head round the end of the divider. He drew it back. “Grace’ll go with you, if you want your hand held.”

    “Ooh, yeah!” cried Grace, popping into the kitchenette. “Where, Dad?”

    Sol rolled his eyes. “Anywhere at all, apparently. Grab the mustard and the ketchup, Pumpkin. –Well, uh, wherever this new craftsperson lives, uh... I wrote it down, anyhoo,” he ended sheepishly.

    “So much for American efficiency!” noted his daughter gleefully, marching out with the condiments.

    “Yuh.—That’s right Polly, honey, you bring the bread.—It wasn’t any place I recognised,” he admitted.

    Once they’d sorted out that it was too cold over at the table and they’d just sit round the pot-bellied stove and Sol had provided the adults with beer and Grace with a Coke, since it was Friday, and the first round of franks had almost disappeared, he produced his note.

    “No wonder you’d never heard of it,” said Polly limply. “Paeroa?”

    “It does ring sort of bells,” admitted Michaela. “Is it a place, though?”

    “Yes. Oh! I know what you’re thinking of! Lemon and Paeroa!” she gurgled.

    “Huh?” said Sol. He looked at Grace. She was looking as blank as he felt.

    “They changed its name—heck, ages and ages back: I think I was still at school. And commercialised it: now it tastes just like horrible white fizzy lemonade,” Polly explained clearly. “L&P,” she added helpfully.

    “That’s it!” recognised Michaela pleasedly. Sol and Grace were still looking blank, however.

    “Maybe they don’t sell it any more. The thing is, it used to be made with real mineral water, from the springs at Paeroa, you could taste it. And maybe even real lemons, though lemon essence has been around for about a hundred and fifty years.”

    “Uh-huh. So where is it, Polly?” asked Sol.

    “On the road to Waihi. Not as far. Um, you turn off just before Pokeno.”

    “Nup,” he replied simply.

    “Drive down the southern motorway, Sol. Pokeno’s only about 50 kilometres from Auckland.”

    “Auckland’s a pretty big place. From which part of it?”

    “I was going by the map. The Hooded Elbow of Pohutukawa Bay used to make me hold it—I won’t say navigate. The measurements are always from the Central Post Office, Sol.”

    “Oh! Right downtown, practically on the waterfront? Gee, that’s not far at all.”

    “No, but you turn off the main north highway and then it’d be, um, well, it’s another hundred kilometres to Waihi, so I think it’d be around seventy or so to Paeroa. By road.”

    Firmly Grace pointed out: “A hundred and twenty K, that’s not far.”

    “Honey, from the Auckland waterfront? You gotta get down there, first! All up it’ll be about a hundred seventy, from up here!”

    “It’s motorway practically all the way,” said Grace indifferently. “We can take the flyover when we get to town, too.”

    It seemed to be settled, then, apart from the small point that someone would have to ring this Paeroa lady tomorrow and ask if it was okay to turn up.

    Funnily enough when the morrow rolled round Grace hadn’t forgotten all about it. Nor had she forgotten that she’d promised—threatened would be a better word, yes, reflected her father drily—to get on up to Polly's bach and grab her blender. And what about Polly’s runabout?

    Sol had driven down Polly down to the Royal Kingfisher after tea, the weather really had been too nasty last night for her to take the little boat down, so he replied: “It’s moored safely out there in Sol’s Cove. If it come through last night okay it won’t—”

    Grace had a brilliant idea: she would take it up to the bach and collect the blender!

    “And walk back five miles to our place with the blender,” Sol noted flatly.

    “Aw. Blow.” She thought about it. “I know! You could drive me up to the bach and when we get back here I can collect the runabout and sail it down to the marina!”

    “And then she’ll have her runabout down to Kingfisher Bay while she sleeps over at the Royal K, this is true. What if the weather’s bad, Sunday?”

    Grace looked blank.

    “She won’t want to sail all the way up to the head of the Inlet in that tin bath!”

    “Yes! She’s used to it, Dad!”

    “Look, shut up, Grace. We are not gonna encourage her to go drown herself. She’s been running around doing a load of dad-blamed silly things since Jake died, in case you haven’t noticed! Now just let me think!”

    Grace glared, but shut up.

    “Okay. This is it. I drive down to collect Polly from the hotel—shut up,” he warned, “meantime you take her runabout back up to the bach. Then I drive her on up to the bach and she collects her car,” he said loudly and clearly. “Geddit?”

    “Yes! You can be rilly mean, Dad!” shouted his thirteen-year-old daughter in the vernacular.

    “Yeah. And while I’m on the topic, you could take a leaf out of her book—your mother’s, too, come to think of it—and learn to speak like a little lady.”

    Michaela had been in the garden, and had come back inside just in time to catch this last. “They used to nag us at school. We had stupid elocution classes,” she noted. “What did she say?”

    “Rilly, in this instance. More generally, K.”

    His female belongings goggled at him. Finally Michaela produced: “Kay Who?”

    “Uh—no. K for killer—” Sol broke off. “Kilometres,” he said slowly and clearly. “Not K, geddit? And not killer-metres!”

    “I suppose Polly does say kilometres,” Michaela agreed placidly. “She said it last night, didn't she? More than once.”

    “Exactly,” groaned Sol.

    “You’re mad, Dad! Everybody says K!”

    “Yes. –I thought you reckoned people can’t help their, um, something,” finished Michaela weakly. “It means the way they talk.”

    “Dialect?” offered Grace.

    “NO!” he shouted.

    They stared at him.

    “Uh—sorry,” he muttered. “Letting it get to me. I think I mighta said ‘vernacular’, honey. No, they can’t. I’m real sorry, Pumpkin. You say K as much as you like.”

    “What’s up?” asked Michaela simply.

    Sol made a face. “Guilt feelings. Think we mighta jockeyed Polly into something she isn’t ready for.”

    Unwisely Grace began: “She can always—“

    “She CAN’T!” he shouted.

    “Sol,” said Michaela, biting her lip, “she is only thirteen. Polly isn’t that sort of person,” she explained to the glaring, red-faced Grace. “I know she looks very sophisticated when she’s all dressed up, and she’s done loads of glamorous things, going to Paris and all that, but that doesn’t mean she’s very good at standing up for herself.”

    “No,” agreed Sol with a sigh. “Just try to think of her more as Michaela with a fur coat and diamonds worth a king’s ransom, okay?”

    “He means it!” said Michaela quickly.

    “All right,” she growled.

    “Yeah. Come here: give your stupid old Dad a hug, okay?”

    Grace looked sulky, but came. Sol hugged her tightly, leaning his cheek on her untidy auburn head. “Think me and you both need to cut people some slack a tad more, sweetie. You’re too like me, that’s what, in spite of this here gorgeous hair like your mom’s. Guess that’s partly why I find it hard to think of you as only thirteen, too. Keep unconsciously expecting you to be as old as me, I guess.”

    “Old and silly,” said Michaela with considerable satisfaction. “Actually I think she’s gonna sell all the diamonds. She’s taken all the jewellery that was in that stupid safety box of Jake’s in Zurich to Sotheby’s.”

    Sol raised his head and gaped at her. “Sotheby’s?”

    “It’s a big art and antiques auction house, Sol,” said his unfocussed wife calmly. “They’ve got branches all over the world. They’re gonna sell it all for her and send the money to Oxfam.”

    “All the money?” asked Grace.

    “Yes.”

    “But how do they make their money, then?”

    “I think it’s like selling on commission, at the store. They take a percentage,” said Michaela with the utmost calm.

    “Yes,” whispered Sol. “They sure do. Boy, what a put-down! Guessed I deserve it, an’ all.”

    “Yes, well, maybe you better deserve yourself to work. I dunno what the time is,” she noted, looking at the grey murk outside their windows, “but it can’t be that early.”

    “Help, I gotta get up the Inlet, too!” gasped Grace, looking at her watch. “Come on, Dad!” She rushed over to where her gumboots were handily placed by the coat stand.

    “Michaela, did Pauline give you any idea whether this papier-mâché lady,” said Sol, eying this operation sideways, “might jes’ be a ladylike papier-mâché lady, of the sort what says—maybe not kilometres instead of killer-metres. Dinner, instead of tea, maybe?”

    “No,” Michaela replied mildly.

    “Uh—right. Okay, she’ll have to put up with them there genuine EnZed gumboots.”

    “Shut up, ya twit. –By the way, Polly’s runabout’s still here.”

    “We know, we know, we know,” he groaned. “It’s already precipitated one row, and it’s not gonna precipitate another!

    “Good. –I think I’d hang on to those big diamond drop earrings if they were mine,” said the potter thoughtfully.

    Sol looked wildly at her big, nay giant pilled and fuzzy jersey, kind of a nasty almost-khaki shade, acquired at the Puriri Emporium—not what you might think, it was a seconds shop, well, seconds and assorted cheap junk—and her very, very, very rubbed corduroys, bought second-hand at a Carter’s Bay Primary School Fair. Above these travesties of garments Michaela’s huge limpid grey-green eyes stared back at him placidly.

    “Yes,” he said very weakly indeed. “Me, too. Give us a big kiss, hon’, and I may feel strong enough to face the day.”

    Oops. As he and Polly finally approached the little old creosoted structure at the far end of the Inlet Road a small, huddled figure could be discerned crouched on the back step. Well, maybe technically the front step, as it faced the road, but actually the Carranos’ little holiday home was built with its main entrance overlooking the Inlet. “Waiting for us, huh?” he croaked.

    “Mm.”

    Possibly because he didn’t want to advertise the place as his Jake had never super-duperised the bach’s road frontage, and there was only a rusty five-barred gate hitched to the creaky old posts that supported some very, very old and saggy barbed wire. The traditional EnZed style, true, but it could be a shock iffen you’d just been exposed to them trendy professors’ houses on their giant sections further back. Like before the seal ran out.

    “What stopped the County Council from continuing the macadam all the way up to here?” he wondered as Polly got in again after opening the gate.

    “The men ran out of tar. They got a layer of gravel down and then the tar ran out. I was up here that day, and I went down to see how they were getting on. Jack had just rung me up absolutely ropeable because he couldn’t get his cars in or out.”

    “He wouldn’t have been able to—no,” he croaked. Jack Perkins, his neighbour, could be real irascible, ’specially when the system broke down—or rather when what he thought shoulda been a system broke down and he discovered that, like most of EnZed, it wasn’t a system at all. Though he had mellowed some, since marrying Beth, another of Michaela’s and Polly’s cousins. “Uh—hang on. Did they start at the Kingfisher Bay end of the road and work themselves into a corner up here?” he croaked.

    “No. They were going to do one side of the road that way and then work back down the other side, but the first side took more tar than they’d worked out, you see, and so they realised they wouldn’t have enough if they started again from up here. So they decided just to work back from where they’d got to, just past the big patch of bush, where the last of the official sections are. At least, they were just going to, but I caught them in time.”

    “And?” he groped. She sure hadn’t managed to make them do her end of the road, it was rough as Hell. Murder on your tires.

    “And made them some afternoon tea, of course,” she said sunnily.

    Sheesh! Sol had seen that work team. None of ’em woulda weighed in much under two hundred forty pounds. Most of ’em Black as your hat, too—well, sure her husband had been part Maori, but there was a Helluva difference between a man who had made a colossal fortune by a mixture of hard work and brains, and giant louts from families what had never risen above working on the roads, iffen they worked at all— “Huh?”

    “The gang boss, I suppose you’d call him: Rewi Henare, he’s Julie and Huia’s uncle. And Kyle’s, of course.”

    “Who?” he groped.

    “Julie and Huia used to work for the Collingwoods at The Blue Heron down at Puriri. In the motel office. You must have met them!”

    “Uh—did stay there when I first come out. Oh, yeah: pretty Maori girl.”

    “Mm. It’s the same family. Kyle works at Sir G.G., he’s one of the security men.”

    “Right. I guess them old Florida prejudices are coming back to haunt me,” he said sheepishly.

    “I guess they are, yes! They’re all hard-working blokes.”

    Sol had driven right up to the house—there was no real driveway, but at some stage some gravel had been flung onto the mud—and Grace was now leaping up and down and shrieking at them. “She wants your blender,” he said limply.

    “I know,” Polly got out. “Hi, Grace.”

    They went inside, Grace jabbering nineteen to the dozen.

    Sol just sagged. Yes, well, Polly was a country girl, sure—and okay, he had more of that red-neck Florida prejudice than he’d ever realised. Maybe—just maybe—she would settle down and be content with this here scruffy life up Carter’s Inlet. Excluding them professors’ houses on their giant ten-acre lots, of course.

    He had a think, and then got out of the car. Sure enough, they were in the tiny but very smart lean-to kitchen, Polly trying to foist more consumer junk on the far from unwilling Grace. “Polly, who owns all this undeveloped land next to your place?” he croaked.

    “Me. Jake bought it up about ten years back.”

    “Oh, good! Uh—both sides of the road?”

    “Yes, he bought the other side ages ago, when he wanted to take over the old camping ground for his ruddy helicopter landing strip. It was all one big block, they wouldn’t subdivide it.”

    “Great!” cried Grace. “Now it’ll always be the same!”

    Sol eyed Polly warily.

    “Yes,” she said sunnily. “It is good, isn’t it? I’d have felt mean, trying to buy it up myself. But now I don’t have to!”

    Yeah, thought Sol Winkelmann limply as his little daughter agreed naïvely with this statement. That said a fair bit, huh?

Next chapter:

https://anothercountry-apuririchronicle.blogspot.com/2023/08/arts-and-crafts.html