Moyra's Max

 1

Moyra’s Max

    Moyra blew her nose fiercely. “She’s unsuitable for him in every way!”

    The assembled Jacksons looked at her limply. Apparently Moyra had come out all the way from England just to tell them how unsuitable her son’s new girlfriend was. Well, she certainly hadn’t talked about anything else since she got here, apart from complaining about the food on the plane. Not on the very small one that she’d booked herself on from Auckland to Taupo before anyone could warn her not to chuck her dough away and offer to collect her, but the big one, from London to Auckland. The Jacksons had assumed that airline food always was frightful, so no-one had managed to say much in response to that. And as none of them had ever set eyes on Moyra’s Max, let alone his latest girlfriend, there wasn’t much they could say about that topic, either.

    Finally Shannon offered feebly: “Um, have you got a picture of her, Aunty Moyra?”

    Moyra put her handkerchief into the large leather purse of a design which none of the Jackson women had laid eyes on before, though Felicity claimed to have seen it in a Vogue. A real one, not a Vogue Australia. “Not ‘Aunty’, Shannon, dear: it’s so ageing, I always think, and after all your mother and I are only cousins, aren’t we?” she said sweetly.

    Yeah, but the Jacksons had referred to her as “Aunty Moyra” all their lives. They looked at her numbly—except for Felicity, who looked superior, having told them so.

    “Um, righto,” said Shannon feebly, not daring to call her just “Moyra”—the purse apart, Felicity reckoned that silk suit was an Armani. “Um, have you?”

    Moyra opened the purse again, produced a spotless, creaseless leather wallet that exactly matched it, and found a photo. “That’s Max, of course, and that’s her.”

    The Jacksons already knew that Cousin Max looked quite like the tall guy that was in Bridget Jones’s Diary—though Dan and Sean weren’t vitally interested in the fact—so they didn’t blink at this phenomenon, but looked, avidly in the case of the females and without interest in the case of Dan—Sean wasn’t present, he’d taken one look at Aunty Moyra and headed for the hills—at the snap of a smirking and very up-market blonde. Yep, she looked as if she’d be quite unsatisfactory for the up-market Max Throgmorton. Not.

    An appreciable time later, when Moyra had given in and accepted Katy Jackson’s suggestion that a nap before dinner would help her get over the jet-lag and gone off to the spare room, so-called, Dan Jackson tottered out to the kitchen and croaked: “What did she come for?”

    “Dunno,” replied his helpmeet cheerfully. “Ta,” she said as he dumped the cake plate in the sink.

    “Katy, she’s your bloody cousin, ya must have some idea!”

    “Not really. I think it’s just a holiday.”

    Dan, in his blindness, had been quite looking forward to meeting one of Katy’s English relations. That had been BM—Before Moyra, quite. “Why here? With us?” he said wildly. “I wouldn’t’ve said there was a five-star hotel in the whole of the country that’s good enough for her!”

    “I wouldn’t have said there was a hotel in the whole of New Zealand that’d fall within her definition of five-star,” replied his wife calmly.

    “Why didn’t you warn me?” he cried.

    “Ssh! How was I to know what she’d turn out like? I haven’t seen her since I was fourteen!”

    “No wonder your mum and dad decided to emigrate, if they’re all like that,” he croaked.

    “Eh? Oh—Mum’s lot? I suppose they are,” she said vaguely.

    Dan Jackson was an easy-going man, but at this he breathed heavily.

    “I couldn’t tell her we didn’t want her, Dan,” said Katy in her usual placid tones.

    “Don’t see why not,” he returned brutally.

    She swallowed. “I suppose she’s got feelings like anyone else.”

    “Not like anyone else in this country!” replied Dan with feeling.

    “Bullshit. She sounded exactly like Julia Roberts when Marsha wanted to marry the boy from the fish and chips shop.”

    Mrs Roberts, pace the name, was about sixteen stone, customarily dressed in bright floral frilled creations that were exactly what you’d expect with the orange, rigidly regimented hairdo that according to the martyred Mr Roberts was what most of his hard-earned went on, and was normally to be seen officiating at the counter of the local service station, what time Mr Roberts grovelled in the lube bay in the obligatory oil-drenched filthy overalls. So it was possibly not surprising that Dan Jackson at this point croaked: “Eh?”

    “Mm: a service station is several cuts above a fish and chips shop, you see,” said Katy, beginning to wash the cake plate by hand.

    “Put it in the ruddy dishwasher, whaddelse did I buy it for?” he groaned.

    Katy’s eyes twinkled. “To shut Felicity up?”

    “Yeah,” he admitted, grinning. He came up very close behind her and, never mind they’d had their silver wedding, put his arms right round her and pressed himself against her bum. After some time he said in a dreamy voice: “That was a great cake.”

    “Cupboard love!” retorted Katy with a chuckle.

    “If that’s what ya think, I’ll proceed with my next remark!” replied Dan smartly. “Where’d ya get it from?”

    Unmoved, Katy explained: “Jan. It’s the sort she makes for fancy afternoon teas at the ecolodge.”

    Dan coughed. True, Pete McLeod’s and Jan Harper’s place—originally a fishing shack, then a sort of motel-cum-fishing lodge—had been renamed Taupo Shores Ecolodge some years back, the feeling being that since there was a bandwaggon going Pete and Jan might as well be on it, since they had to eat, but that didn’t mean the locals were wholly reconciled to the fact.

    “It’s a new recipe,” Katy explained. “Her friend Polly got it off a friend in Auckland. You put some sort of fancy passionfruit liqueur in the filling as well as the passionfruit.”

    “Uh—yeah,” said Dan weakly. The ecolodge was doing quite good—well, fair number of up-market suckers around that fancied gourmet cooking on top of yer genuine bush walks—Pete’s dump was reasonably extensive and as no-one had done anything to its vegetation for the last several generations the bush walks were genuine, all right—but he, Dan Jackson, happened to know that this so-called friend was actually married to a bloke that was rich enough to buy up the whole of the rest of the country. “Not overextending herself in ’er culinary eagerness, is she, love?”

    “Eh? They do get their cream from those organic nutters next-door to them, but it’s not that much dearer than the commercial stuff, and they charge the guests through the nose—”

    “No, um, this fancy liqueur muck,” he said feebly. “I mean, that Polly female’s husband’s a ruddy billionaire!”

    “Jan said she considered importing the real stuff from Guadeloupe, but decided it’d be more convenient to use the passionfruit liqueur from the wholesalers in Taupo,” replied Katy with a laugh in her voice. “You know: down the back, between the blackberry nip and the kiwifruit liqueur they make up in Henderson!”

    “Yeah, hah, hah,” he acknowledged. “Well, I’m glad to hear it.”

    “Pete was saying you can make it yourself, if you’ve got enough passionfruit going begging.”

    “Eh? For cripes’ sake! I know he’s a do-it-yourselfer since his cradle, but it’s not like homebrew, the muck has to be distil—”

    “No, you nit!” said his wife with a laugh. “You make it with vodka!”

    “Oh,” he said, sagging. He released her, and went and sagged on the bench.

    Katy passed him a tea towel. Dan didn’t say anything more about the expensive dishwasher he’d put in, he just got on with it.

    “I think you add sugar as well—um, well, Jan did say something about over-proof rum, but you can’t get that here and evidently Polly’s friend just uses vodka and it turn out just as good. Or maybe it’s her husband that actually makes it,” she added on a dubious note.

    Only if they were like the rest of the country, never mind the flaming 21st century. Only, if they were friends of this billionaire type, maybe they weren’t. True, the type was an old mate of Pete’s, he’d known him since he was just ordinary, back in the Dark Ages, but…

    “What’s up?” said Katy in mild surprise.

    “Uh—nothing. Polly’s husband drives that ruddy great silver Merc, right?”

    “Mm. Anyway, it’s a wonderful way of using up passionfruit and then they don’t go to waste!” she beamed.

    Er—yeah. Well, Jan did have a vine that bore like billyo—yeah. Whereas Katy’s spindly, fussed-over thing had had two fruit—count ’em, two—last year, and looked on course to have at least half that number this year. “Uh, she wouldn’t have a miraculous recipe for using up banana passionfruit, I suppose?”

    “You think you’re funny, but she has, see!” retorted Katy smartly.

    Eh? No-one in the entire world had a recipe for using up banana passionfruit! The things grew like weeds and fruited like—like vegetable rabbits—and no human being over the age of ten would eat the bloody things! Well: tasteless when underripe, sicky when overripe, and for the two minutes between these two normal states, sort of vaguely sour and vaguely sweet? As well as crammed with bloody seeds, of course. Needless to state their front fence was smothered in the things—smothered. Dropped off and littered the bloody verge, and, according to bloody Ma and Pa Young from down the road, encouraged vermin. Pa Young had also recently informed him with a virtuous smirk on his ugly dial that the things were a noxious weed and you weren’t allowed to sell them. The obvious answer to that was who’d wanna buy the bloody things, but Dan hadn’t bothered. They weren’t the only ones to have a heavily-fruiting noxious weed: Jan’s also bore like billyo and was rampaging up some of that famous native bush of theirs, but at least three-quarters of the punters that thought that an ecolodge sounded green, environmental and organic managed to convince themselves that it was a native clematis. It and its pink flowers, yep. And the rest were even more ignorant.

    “Go on, tell us,” he croaked.

    Katy laughed suddenly. “It’s terrifically simple! You just juice them! Their guests think it’s the cat’s whiskers! Really organic, see?”

    “Right,” he said groggily. “What did happen to that bloody juicer I bought with me hard-earned?”

    “Um, well, Felicity used it when she was into that homemade face-cream thing and we couldn’t get the smell out of it. So I said she could have it for the flat.”

    “Uh—no, love, think you’re talking about the blender,” he groped.

    “Oh, am I?” said Katy placidly. “Well, I suppose the girls lost interest, Dan. It’s probably around somewhere. Leap up and forage in the cupboards, by all means.”

    “I ruddy well will! I’ve been waiting all me life for a way to use up those bloody banana passionfruit and do Ma and Pa Young in the eye!” He leapt up and began fossicking in the cupboards.

    Eventually Katy said in a weak voice: “Dan, it won’t make them taste better.”

    Dan paused with his head in a cupboard. “Oy, when did we buy a slow cooker?”

    “I think it was an idea of Felicity’s that winter she was down here after she broke up with Mike—or was it Kyle? Um, no, it might have been Gary, come to think of it, because she chucked the job in. It did cook things nicely, only you had to remember to put it on first thing in the morning, and who thinks about tea at that hour?”

    No, well, she certainly didn’t: half an hour after everyone was roaming around looking hungrily at the bare table was more her style. Grinning, he shoved it to the back of the cupboard. “What was that you were saying?” he asked vaguely, investigating another box.

    “Um, juicing them doesn’t make them taste better. It is nice and fresh, but Jan admits herself that fresh is all you can say of it.”

    From his perch on the kitchen steps Dan looked down at her sadly. “Ya mean it stays sort of mildly sour and mildly sweet?”

    “Mm. She was reading in some magazine—was it an Aussie magazine? I think it might have been—about these really fancy fruit, star-fruit they’re called, that you jazz up with a dash of lime, and she’s tried Polly’s tip of putting a squeeze of lime on paw-paw and it really works! So she added a bit to the banana passionfruit juice, but she said nothing happened.”

    “At which point she gave it up, I sincerely trust? Do you know what limes cost?”

    “No, but Jan said it was a lot. Mind you, Polly’s got a lime tree.”

    “Polly’s husband is a billionaire!” he shouted.

    “Yes, but that wouldn’t make any difference—well, only if he built a glasshouse round it, I suppose. But they live in Auckland, up the Hibiscus Coast: they don’t get the frosts that we do.”

    “No. Um, maybe we could put something else in it—you know, mix it with something.”

   “The girls used to like carrot juice,” replied Katy vaguely.

    Dan blenched. “Watermelon?” he suggested feebly. “Apple?”

    “I can’t see the point in buying expensive apples in summer just to make juice to mix with banana passionfruit that nobody wants, Dan,” said his partner in life mildly. “Watermelon might be all right, I suppose, but it’s very bland, isn’t it?”

    Sighing, Dan descend the steps. “I can’t find the ruddy thing anyway. Hang on: I know! We can sell them to Jan for the suckers!”

    “Over my dead body,” replied Katy calmly, opening the fridge.

    “But she could use them!”

    “Yes. You can give them to her, but you’re not selling them to her. She wouldn’t let me pay for that yummy cake.”

    “I am an autonomous human being!” he said on a huffy note.

    “Rats. This is the liberated 21st century, you’re a liberated New Age man, so what I say goes,” replied Katy in the voice of one bent over peering into the bowels of the fridge.

    Dan came over and whanged her bum on the strength of it.

    “Ow! Just for that you can flaming put the rubbish bin out. –Did I buy a roast?”

    Dan cleared his throat. “Dunno.”

    “I meant to,” she said, peering into the fridge.

    “Pizza?” he suggested.

    “Not on Moyra’s first night, Dan!”

    “Technically her second,” he corrected.

    “Yes, but she was zonked out with jet-lag last night, you can’t count that. You couldn’t nip round to work and poach a trout or two, could you?”

    Dan worked for a firm that sold New Zealand trout eggs all over the world. Not for the benefit of anyone the Jacksons knew—no. Mind you, it gave a few locals employment. On the other hand, presumably it undermined New Zealand’s fly fishing and trout farming industries, giving their overseas rivals advantages they would not otherwise have had, but theirs not to reason why. He’d even read a piece in The Farmer that reckoned the morons were selling our improved kiwifruit genetic stock back to China—where the things originated, right?—so there you were.

    “Very funny,” he returned mildly.

    “Um, maybe Felicity could make her paella,” said Katy weakly.

    Dan was just about to rubbish this one soundly, not to say remind her that Felicity had lately taken to calling the muck “pie-yah”—approximately—when the back door burst open and Jan Harper gasped: “You left your roast at our place!”

    “Oh, that’s where it got to,” replied Katy with her usual calm. “I thought I bought one. Ta, Jan.”

    “What she told me was,” said Jan to Dan, handing him the wrapped roast, “she spent a whole hour in the bloody supermarket looking for stuff she thought her cousin might like.”

    Dan’s heart-rate had now slowed to the point where he was able to reply: “Waste of effort: she’s one of those five-star-hotel-type Pommy dames. –I’m presuming she told ya this before the pair of you got started on the passionfruit liqueur muck?”

    Jan grinned. “We just had a taste so as she could see I wasn’t kidding.”

    “Right. Now, before I get down on me knees and thank you humbly for rescuing our dinner, Jan, not to say saving the family face in front of Moyra, can ya just tell me whether it’s been sitting in the full sun on that ruddy side verandah of yours all arvo?”

    “No, she put it in our fridge because she didn’t want it to spoil in the car.”

    “It isn’t a verandah, it’s a patio,” said Katy.

    “All right, a patio. A hot patio.”

    “That was once!” replied Katy indignantly to the sub-text. “And it wasn’t meat!”

    “No, but an economy-size bottle of Coke that sends Coke all over the kitchen when that young cretin, Sean, goes and opens it after specifically being told not to isn’t something you forget in a hurry!”

    “Apparently not,” said the two women in chorus. They looked at each other and grinned.

    Dan smiled. They didn’t look alike at all, but they had the exact same expression on their dials! Jan was a squarish, solid woman in her sixties, with a face that could only have been called homely, and short, wavy grey hair in the sort of cut that in Dan’s dad’s day was called “short back and sides” and only sported by the dustbin putters-out; while Katy, a good ten years her junior, was still very pretty, with a round, pink-cheeked face and masses of silvering fair hair that could look really smart when Felicity had been having a go at it but was usually just worn pinned up in a big clip.

    “Go on,” prompted Jan.

    “Eh?” he groped.

    “Get down on your knees to me.”

    Katy collapsed in agonising giggles.

    “I just might,” he threatened, dumping the roast on the bench and turning the oven on. “See, I’m turning this switch on, ’cos now the magic electricity’ll come through the wires and make the oven hot, and it’ll cook the meat,” he said to his partner in life. This had no effect whatsoever, so he said to their visitor: “Fancy a belt?”

    “No, I’ve got to get back to them,” replied Jan, grinning. “I’ve got that ruddy filo quiche thing on the menu tonight.”

    “Just a beer?”

    “Beer has been known to leap up and prevent the roast being put in the oven, but go on, ya talked me into it.”

    They all sat down in the kitchen and had a beer, though Dan did note pointedly that Katy didn’t deserve one.

    “Oh,” he remembered: “you can have our banana passionfruit, Jan, we’ve decided we won’t bother, and in any case I can’t find the juicer.”

    “Didn’t one of your kids use it for something weird?”

    “No, that was the blender,” explained Dan. “Face-cream.”

    “Not Felicity. I think it was Sean. Um, something to do with cars.”

    “Not Sean, Ran,” groaned the Jacksons in chorus.

    “No, it was Sean, I remember now, because Ran told him he was a cretin and it’d never work. Some recipe for car wax, that was it! Um, hang on: it was the blender, though.”

    “That explains where it’s gone, then,” replied Dan calmly.

    “Then where’s the juicer?” asked Jan.

    “We don’t know,” explained Katy kindly.

    At the same time Dan said: “One of those great unsolved mysteries of modern life, Jan.”

    Jan got up. “Yeah. Well, ta for the beer.”

    “No, thank you for bringing our dinner round!” replied Dan fervently.

    “You’re welcome. I’d do some veges with it, if I was you. And a nice green salad, if she’s an up-market Pommy dame. See ya!”

    “Hang on!” cried Dan as she went out. He dashed after her. “Do ya want some banana passionfruit? I mean, have them!”

    “Okay—ta. I’ll come round and get them as and when. Maybe you better tell Ma and Pa Young it won’t be a banana passionfruit thief, it’ll be me,” said Jan on a dry note, getting into the 4WD that bore the strange device “Taupo Shores Eco odge” on its driver’s door. “See ya!”

    “See ya,” agreed Dan. He went back indoors, shaking his head. “Thinks we’re a pair of nongs,” he reported.

    “So what’s new? –I’ve been thinking.”

    Dan collapsed onto a handy kitchen chair. “Go on,” he groaned, upending the nearest beer can over the nearest glass. “Bugger,” he said, as nothing came out.

    “Ya know this new fancy ecolodge that Pete and Jan reckon that Pommy firm’s gonna put up on Bob Meldrum’s place?”

    “It may never happen.”

    “No, but if it does maybe I could do some big wall panels for it!”

    Katy did fabric printing. It had started off as a hobby back in the days when she’d been an art teacher at a secondary school and gradually, in the intervals of having four kids, had developed from the odd batch of silk scarves that with luck found a bit of a market at the odd crafts shop up in Auckland or the more up-market boutiques in the tourist hotels in the thermal region surrounding Taupo, into giant things to be lightly framed and hung on walls. And thence into giant wall panels. Consequently moving off the kitchen table and into a large shed which had once, a very long time ago, been intended as the family garage.

    “What, on environmentally-friendly native silk spun by the glow-worms from Waitomo? Or on linen woven from the so-called native flax?”

    “It’s not flax,” said Katy, frowning over it.

    “That’s my point. Think those flax farms they had down near Levin a hundred years back never managed anything more delicate than sacking: that’d look ethnic, all right.”

    “What are you on about, Dan?”

    Dan made a face. “From what Pete was telling me, these Poms are going for your gen-yew-wine accredited—possibly Yank-accredited—ecolodge that has to be made from all native materials by the hands of native artisans.”

    “Maoris?” said Katy dubiously.

    Dan had to swallow: sometimes he overlooked her literal mind. “Well, first choice, undoubtedly, but no, in the case of a country like ours think it’d only mean local, love.”

    “Well, I’m local.”

    Sort of. She had been born in England. “Yeah, but your fabrics, I mean the stuff you print on, aren’t made in New Zealand, are they?”

    “There are still some woollen mills, I think, but we don’t produce silk or cotton here,” said Katy in a puzzled voice.

    Dan wouldn’t have taken a bet on the woollen mills, either. Not these days. “Mm. That’d disqualify your panels, you see.”

    ‘That’s mad,” said Katy in a bewildered voice.

    “Yes,” agreed Dan succinctly. He looked at her fallen face. “Pete said these real ecolodges are. That bloke that came out from England, he showed them some stuff they’d got off the Internet. Well, he sounded like quite a decent bloke, actually. His word was potty.”

    “So if it’s made locally it doesn’t count?” she said sadly.

    “We could ask, but it really didn’t sound like it to me, love.”

    “Blow. I thought it’d be a new market. You know: for something really big.”

    Dan sighed. “Yeah. Well, uh, get Jan to speak to her mate Polly? Sounds as if she’s into buying art and stuff, she might know the right places to try. And I think their house was architect-designed, maybe she’ll know the right firm to get in touch with, eh? You’d only have to land one commission for a poncy palace like those millionaires’ holiday homes on the far side of the lake and we’d be laughing all the way to the bank. Probably be able to take a proper holiday in an ecolodge somewhere really ethnic—Belize, or Chad.”

    “What?”

    “Well, it was definitely Belize, but I might be making the Chad bit up,” he admitted. “This Pom showed Pete and Jan the pics he had on his laptop of the one in Belize, and Pete’s still not over the shock. Thatched cottages in the middle of the jungle with ensuites, ceiling fans and hot and cold running Jacuzzis—spas to us yobs.”

    “How can that be environmentally friendly?”

    Dan eyed her drily. “That was Pete’s question, too. Um, there was some mention of original artworks, but—uh, well, I haven’t a notion what Belize jungle art might be but my money’d be on clay figurines of the vaguely pre-Columbian sort, preferably rude.”

    “Mm.”

    “Well, shall I ask Jan to speak to Polly?”

    “Could you, Dan? You could make it sound more business-like than I could.”

    Well, maybe. Not that Pete and Jan were yer high-powered corporate exec types, either—but she’d been a chartered accountant in another life, before she took up with him, and it was her that had got the ecolodge up and running, Pete had only been offering fishing holidays, and only getting a handful of mad-keen fishermen for them, because guess what? Mad-keen trout fishermen were not keen to spread the word of great fishing spots around their fishermen mates.

    “Yeah, okay,” he said mildly. “You wanna do a few veges to go with this roast?”

    “Yes. We’d better just have boiled potatoes: she doesn’t look like a roast-potato sort of lady, does she?”

    “No.” Moyra was tall and very slim and looked as if the subject closest to her heart—after the wonderful Max, too good for any female as yet born—was dieting. Actually she didn’t look like a roast-lamb sort of lady, either, but too bad, Katy had actually remembered to buy it and good old Jan had brought it over, so they were having it. And if Moyra didn’t like it he’d eat her share.

    “Uh—where have Sean and Ran got to?” he said as Katy foraged in the vegetable bin at the bottom of the fridge.

    She stood up, very flushed. “Carrots?”

    “Yeah, good-oh. Where are your two middle kids?” he said clearly.

    “They’re yours as well, and they are grown up.”

    Right: Sean was twenty-four going on two, and Ran was twenty-three going on, depending on the occasion or the subject, variously two or seventy-two. He opened his mouth.

    “Sean was gonna take the boat out,” said Katy quickly.

    “Uh-huh. And Ran?”

    “I think she went over to Stan Wilson’s,” she said in a vague voice.

    “The man is FIFTY-FOUR!” he shouted terribly.

    “Ssh! You’ll disturb Moyra!”

    “He is doing her, ya know,” he warned bitterly.

    “According to old Pa Young—yeah.”

    “It was circumstantial enough,” Dan reminded her sourly.

    “I suppose it was,” said Katy with a sigh. “But it’s no use shouting at me, Dan: there’s nothing I can do. And she did say it wasn’t serious.”

    “How can it be serious, the man’s got a wife and three grown kids up in Auckland!” he said bitterly.

    “Mm. She reckons she’s only doing it for the experience,” said Katy warily.

    Sure enough, Dan retorted angrily: “Experience! She’s talking through the little hole in the back of her neck! That’s the way for a stupid kid to get really hurt!”

    “You didn’t like Bobby Wilson, either,” said Katy, beginning to peel the carrots.

    Dan sighed. Bobby Wilson was Stan’s nephew, about Ran’s age and thick as two short planks. Whereas Ran, if she applied herself, was quite bright. “How true. Come to that, I didn’t like that yuppie Peter Newbury, either—and don’t tell me she was doing that for the experience as well!”

    “I think she might have been. Well, girls have to experiment, Dan. And it’s no use hoping she’ll go back to Wiremu Heather: she’s outgrown him. And last time I saw Marama Heather she said that he and that Kathleen girl from Tokoroa were probably gonna get engaged.”

    “He could make something of himself, ya know, he’s very bright. That Kathleen’s a dumb little tart: she’ll drag him down,” said Dan, frowning.

    “Being bright and wanting to make something of yourself aren’t the same thing,” replied Katy with a sigh. “He’s happy mucking about with his blessed fish eggs, he doesn’t want anything else. Lots of Maori boys aren’t ambitious: I don’t think it’s merely social disadvantages, before you start.”

    “No, all right,” said Dan heavily. He leaned on the bench, sighing. After a while he said: “I suppose you’re right and she’s gotta experiment. –Tell ya what: let’s award her to Moyra’s Max, and then we can all be really miserable!”

    Katy laughed, but hissed: “Ssh!” and looked nervously over her shoulder. “I can’t see what was wrong with that Angela girl, she sounded exactly his type.”

    “Precisely. Stuffed shirt and a mamma’s boy, plus the plum in the mouth: what a combination!”

    “I only meant she was posh and English, you ape. He might be quite nice,” said Katy without any conviction whatsoever.

    Dan snorted and stole a piece of carrot. “Better steam these,” he noted.

    “Uh—oh. Yeah. I was sort of automatically chopping them up for a stir-fry.”

    “Yeah. Never mind, they’ll steam quicker. Tell ya what, I’ll dig some potatoes, they’ll cheer Moyra up, if anything can!”

    “Ooh, lovely!” she beamed.

    Dan went out, unaware there was a huge smirk on his face.

    Katy sagged all over the bench, “Well, I suppose there’s a silver lining if it’s made him agree to let us eat some of his blessed potatoes at last!” She sliced carrots carefully. “And those blimmin’ peas won’t be ready by Christmas,” she warned the taps.

    “Not unless a miracle occurs,” said a voice from behind her.

    Katy screamed and leapt. “Don’t do that,” she said feebly, turning round.

    A shortish, wideish, fair-haired figure clad in wrinkled black jeans, giant black boots and a giant black leather bikie jacket was standing in the back doorway. Not Katy’s son in this instance—no. Miss Miranda Julianne Jackson, known as Ran for historical reasons to do with two years old and Dan’s sentimentality, and more latterly because of exposure to some grainy old Japanese film at the University Film Society. Put it like this: she hadn’t been going to give up the nickname anyway, but the film had reinforced it.

    “Sorry, Mum,” said Ran cheerfully. “It’s Christmas, day after next, it’d take a miracle for those peas to get any bigger.”

    “Exactly. Um, we couldn’t eat them whole, could we, do you think, Ran?”

    “Nah, Aunty Moyra’d spot they’re the wrong sort,” replied Ran calmly.

    Katy winced. “Mm.”

    “Stan sent you some corn,” she said, dumping a great bag of sweetcorn cobs on the kitchen table.

    Katy looked at it dully. “That’s nice. –Your father won’t like it, Ran.”

    “Thought he loved corn?”

    “No, you seeing Stan again.”

    “I dunno about again, I hadn’t stopped,” replied Ran calmly.

    “No, I mean now he’s down here for his Christmas holidays instead of just popping down for the weekends. Where’s Mrs, or don’t I dare ask?”

    “Noumea. Club Med,” said Ran succinctly.

    Katy gulped.

    “They are splitting up officially, now that Tanya’s had her twenty-first—three years after legally becoming an adult,” she noted by the by—“only ya needn’t tell Dad: he’d get it into his head I want to marry him, and I don’t.”

    “I dunno whether that’s good or bad, frankly,” admitted Katy.

    “Stan’s all right, but he’d be ruddy boring in sustained doses.”

    “Most of them are,” replied Katy drily, getting the steamer out.

    “I’ve noticed,” agreed her twenty-three-year-old daughter calmly. “That’s a steamer: weren’t you gonna stir-fry those carrots?”

    “No, we’re having a roast.”

    “Uh-huh.” The haunch of lamb was sitting on the bench in all its naked glory. Ran went over to the sink, rinsed her hands, got out the roasting pan, put the roast in and shoved it in the oven. “Now we are,” she remarked.

    “Your father started to do it but got distracted. Largely by the topic of you and Stan. Oh, and I made the mistake of telling him about Wiremu Heather and that Kathleen girl.”

    “Her sister Kiri reckons she isn’t preggy yet. He won’t marry her until she is, they never do, ya know,” said Ran detachedly.

    “Heathers in general, or just Maoris?” replied Katy in a steely voice.

    “Drop the Seventies non-racist garbage, Mum, it was a perfectly valid sociological observation which at need can be backed up by statistics,” said Ran in a very bored voice.

    “It isn’t garbage!” she snapped, very flushed.

    “Of course it is. On the lines of calling a blackboard a chalkboard. Got nothing to do, either historically or etymologically, with anything relating even remotely to racist concepts. It’s as misguided, not to say ignorant, as that bloody neologism ‘herstory’. –Have you made any pudding?”

    “No! Make some yourself if you’re that keen!” replied Katy crossly.

    “I was just going to.” Calmly Ran investigated the fruit bowl, the vegetable crisper, and the cupboards.

    “Fruit salad?” said Katy on a very weak note.

    “You got a better idea? I’m open to suggestions,” replied Ran equably.

    “Um, no.”

    “Go and have a sit-down, Mum. Recruit your forces—have a sherry. You’ll need it.”

    Smiling weakly, Katy went over to the passage door, “Um, Ran?” she ventured.

    Ran was peeling an orange with great concentration. “Mm?”

    Katy lost her nerve. “Um, don’t do any potatoes, your father’s digging up some of the sacred relics from the garden.”

    “Thought he was saving them for Christmas? Next Christmas.”

    “Well, yes. Nevertheless.” She opened the door. “Um, Ran?”

    “What?” said Ran mildly.

    “Do us a favour and don’t wear that jacket tonight, dear.”

    Ran eyed her tolerantly. “If you say so. But don’t imagine she’ll award me the marvellous Max on the strength of it!”

    “Hah, hah,” said Katy very weakly indeed, going out quickly.

    Ran smiled to herself as the sound of her mother’s sniggers came from behind the closed passage door.

    The phone rang at four in the afternoon of Christmas Day, as the whole family—even Moyra—was sitting round in the sitting-room, stonkered. The weather had cleared, Moyra—who seemed to have thought she was coming to a South Pacific paradise of endless blue skies, must’ve been reading the tourist brochures—had brightened correspondingly, and even Ran was out of the bovver boots and bikie jacket. Whether the sleeveless black dress over the black jeans was an improvement was, however, a moot point. Well, the absence of the boots certainly was, she was a clumper at the best of times, but with the boots on she sounded like a cross between the crack of doom and a herd of elephants. The thick fair hair that was normally in a big fat plait was today in two plaits, so that she looked like, as her father had not failed to point out, a cross between something out of the Addams family and Heidi.

    “Get that, Morticia,” he groaned, apropos.

    Technically, Sean was nearer the door, but Ran didn’t point this out: his method of answering the phone, with three sisters, was to grunt: “She’s out,” and hang up.

    “It’ll be Granny, she’ll wanna speak to you, if she can remember who you are,” she noted, nevertheless going out to the passage. “Hullo, Granny. Merry Christmas,” she said in a bored voice.

    The phone was silent for a moment. Then a strange man’s voice said: “I’m sorry; is that the Jackson residence?”

    “It might be. Which Jacksons didja want?” replied Ran cannily.

    “Er—the Dan Jacksons,” said the voice. It was a Pommy voice of the plum-in-the-mouth variety: Ran made a face at the phone on the strength of it.

    “Uh—ye-ah…” she said cautiously. “Who’dja want?”

    The voice replied with a definite smile in it: “I think you must be one of the daughters, mm? This is Max Throgmorton: Moyra’s son.”

    Sturdy creature though she was, Ran gulped. “Oh, hi, Max,” she said weakly. “She did say ya might ring but I think she thought it wouldn’t be until this evening. I’ll get her for you.” She hesitated. “Um, maybe I oughta warn you: she’s a bit pissed,” she said in a lowered voice. “She’s drunk a lot of Aussie fizz that Dad got down the wholesalers on these coupons that they were giving ya if ya bought enough beer, and a huge slug of this weirdo passionfruit muck that our neighbours mixed up, like it’s mostly vodka only he bunged some white rum in as well—”

    “Great Heavens! Maracudja!” he said with a laugh.

    “Eh?” replied Ran feebly.

    “The weirdo passionfruit muck: I’m in the West Indies, I’ve just been to Guadeloupe, it’s a local specialty there.”

    “Yeah? It seems to be a local specialty round Taupo way this year, too,” said Ran on a weak note. “Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you. Hang on.”

    Max Throgmorton smiled, and said to Angela Coulton-Whassett, who was sitting on the edge of the bed in their palatial hotel room looking very bored: “One of the daughters. She’s fetching her: seems to be half-seas over,” to which Angela responded with a shrug and a pout.

    “Darling! Where are you?” screamed in his mother at that point.

    Still smiling, Max held the receiver a little away from his ear and said: “Merry Christmas, Mummy, darling. I’m in Jamaica, like I said I’d be, of course.”

    “But Max, darling, isn’t it the middle of the night over there?”

    “Yes. Well, technically it’s just Christmas morning!” said Max with a laugh. “Listen.” He held the receiver out at arms’ length for a moment. Then he put it back and said: “Mixed mariachis and steel drums—horrid! The hotel’s big Christmas Eve dance.”

    “Oh. Well, where are you, darling?”

    “In our room with the French doors open onto the balcony and a tropical breeze blowing!” said Max with another laugh.

    “Yes, and I’m shutting them and putting the air conditioning on, it’s frightful!” said Angela loudly at this point.

    Moyra heard the sounds of doors slamming. “Oh, Lor’, is she is in a mood, Max?”

    “Naturally,” he agreed smoothly.

    “Darling, I did warn you it might be very humid.”

    “Uh-huh. What’s it like there? How are the relations?”

    “Um, well, actually, darling, it’s ra-ather humid here, too. Well, it is their summer, of course. No, well, it was ghastly up in Auckland—that’s their largest city, it’s where the plane landed,” she explained to her thirty-two-year-old son.

    Max’s eyes twinkled but he merely murmured: “Mm?”

    “But Dan says we’re about a thousand feet above sea level here—which is odd, actually, because there’s a huge lake—and further inland, so it doesn’t get so humid. Would that be right, darling?”

    “Sounds likely, mm.”

    “Yes. Well, anyway, it hasn’t been so bad here, thank God, but I was positively dripping in Auckland—I was only at the airport to change planes, but of course I had to go through Customs and collect my bags—darling, they have this strange agriculture inspection, it’s so odd! One has to swear one isn’t carrying strange exotic fruits or been on a farm! But I said to the man: ‘I’ve come straight out from London, as you can see from my ticket, why on earth would I have exotic fruits? And the last time I was anywhere near a farm was that frightful week Benny and I spent up in Scotland with Hubert Tarlington, and I really don’t think the Scottish heather is going to contaminate your lovely New Zealand countryside, but by all means look at my shoes!’ But I hadn’t brought my brogues in any case. But as I was saying, positively dripping, it was dreadful, I began to wonder if I’d be able to stand it—you know, darling, envisaging sleepless nights and rashes, like that ghastly time I let Jimmy Somerton talk me into Thailand—and I’m quite sure they don’t feed those elephants enough, the poor creatures were positively stunted! –Where was I? Oh, yes: the humidity. Not so bad at all, though Katy says it’s much hotter over where they have all the geysers and mud pools. The heat comes up out of the ground as well, you see. But there’s a lovely mineral spa quite near, we thought we’d go the day after tomorrow—she said it might be closed on Boxing Day: isn’t that odd?”

    “Mm, very. And what are they like, darling?”

    “Well, they live very simply, of course,” said Moyra on a dubious note. “Darling Katy’s hardly changed at all. Still completely delightful, very vague, and only really interested in her art!” She laughed. “Though it’s all screen printing on fabric, these days—she’s got some wonderful pieces. Well, the children are grown up, you see.”

    “Uh-huh. So who was that who answered the phone?”

    “That was Ran: Miranda, darling—a funny little thing.”

    “I see. How old is she? Is she the youngest?”

    “No, she’s one of the middle children, dear. An unfortunate position, I always think—though of course there’s only the one boy, it hasn’t affected him so much. He must be quite bright, he’s doing a Ph.D., but really, darling, one has to admit,” said Moyra in a very much lowered voice: “quite yobbish. Such a pity, because Dan’s rather delightful. A very wry sense of humour—you know?”

    “Mm. And Ran?”

    “Well, she’d be about twenty-three, I think, Max. Actually she’s rather like Katy, though a lot more boyish than Katy ever was. Only manner, though, darling; in fact poor Dan’s given me a very bitter account of all the unsatisfactory men she’s been mixed up with!” She paused. “Why are you interested?”

    “Mm? Oh—well, she answered the phone, thought she sounded rather unusual,” said Max in a bored tone. “So you’re getting on well with them, are you, Mummy?”

    “Of course, darling!” she carolled.

    Max raised his eyebrows. She’d had the jitters at the last minute—rather unlike Moyra, actually. God alone knew why she’d been so determined to go, but even the jitters hadn’t stopped her. “Well, that’s good. If you get bored and decide to come home early I’ll be back in London on the 6th, remember: give me a bell and I’ll collect you from the airport.”

    Assuring him that of course she wouldn’t get bored and Katy and Dan were giving her a lovely time, Moyra warned him for the umpteenth time to use plenty of sunscreen, those humid overcast skies could be so deceptive, adjured him to ring her without fail every other day, she didn’t want to spend her holiday worrying that he’d been drowned scuba diving, thanked him effusively for the lovely present, reminded him that as it was Christmas Day he could open his, waited while he opened it, thanked her for it and told her how lovely it was, and, finally, rang off.

    “Got over the jitters long since; having a lovely time!” he reported cheerfully.

    Angela gave him a sour look. “You do realise that all that daft present-opening’ll be on your phone bill, do you?”

    Max didn’t ask her what the matter was: he knew bloody well what the matter was: she wanted him to ask her to marry him. He had no intention of doing so: admittedly she was worse when she wasn’t getting her own way, but he’d known Angela most of his life and she always had been spoilt, selfish and discontented. For very short periods at a time her keenness in bed and her stunning figure compensated for these drawbacks. For longer ones they didn’t.

    “Never mind, Christmas comes but once a year,” he said lightly. “Talking of presents, want to open yours?”

    Angela gave the gift-wrapped box on the dressing-table a sour look. It was a jeweller’s box, yes, but it wasn’t the sort of cube shape that she wanted, it was a longish, flat shape. “No.”

    “Bed, then, darling?” said Max with his most charming smile.

    The smile failed signally.

    “No, I’d rather go down and dance.”

    “They’re all drunk,” he pointed out mildly.

    “Good! So will I be in half an hour, with a bit of luck! Come on!” she said angrily.

    Shrugging slightly, Max came on.

    The Jacksons stuck it out nobly until very early on the 28th, at which point Dan rang Pete McLeod in desperation.

    “Yeah?” said the phone laconically.

    “If this is the Taw-pyoh Shores Ecolodge Ay’d layke to book a suite for His Royal Hayghness and Camilla P.-B. for a dirty week—”

    “Sod off, Dan, ya not funny.”

    “Whassup? Been drinking yer own passionfruit muck?”

    “Yeah. Did you want something? ’Cos if not I’ll get on with milking the goats, since it’s crack of dawn and I seem to be awake,” replied Pete evilly.

    “Don’t you usually get up at crack of dawn to take the suckers on them ten-mile bush walks of yours round and round the property in ever-decreasing circles?”

    “The ten-mile one leaves the property, ya fool, and today they’re not scheduled for it!” he snarled. “Which is why I was having a sleep-in!”

    “Oh. Sorry,” said Dan lamely. “Um, the thing is, we’re desperate for something to do with her, Pete! We’ve got Rotorua scheduled for New Year’s Day, but meantime…”

    The phone was silent.

    “Um—sorry,” said Dan lamely. “I’ll leave you in p—”

    “I’m thinking, ya birk!”

    “Oh.”

    “Nodda walker, is she? Some of ours were sorting out their suede safari boots—”

    “No.”

    “Right, National Park’s out, then. The other lot thought they might fancy the gentle stroll down the Pohutukawa Trail this arvo. That’s our short one: a mile. Two and a half K, about.”

    “One of that lot wouldn’t have a walker, would he?”

    “Eh?”

    Dan cleared his throat. That hadn’t come out right. “Um… A walking-frame! That’s it!”

    “No, the bloke’s pretty decrepit but not that bad. The two old dames with ’im are pretty hale and hearty. Well, one of them told Jan all about her weak stomach but she ate like a horse last night, so we concluded it was a hobby—yer get a lot of that in our line of business,” Pete told him kindly.

    “Yeah,” said Dan weakly. “Um, well, it wouldn’t be beyond her but I don’t think she’d fancy being classed with them, Pete, ta all the same.”

    “Mm. Lake cruise?” he suggested laconically.

    Dan swallowed. Old Pete did have a large launch, yeah. It had belonged to his granddad. Real wood. Any day now he was gonna paint it up to look real smart.

    “Looks like it’s gonna be a lovely day,” Pete advised him. “Take a picnic lunch? Jan’ll put one up for ya, no sweat.”

    “Y— Only if you’ll let us pay you for it,” said Dan.

    “Go on, you’ve twisted me arm. Mates’ rates.”

    “No, the same what you charge the tourists,” said Dan, swallowing.

    “You’ve gotta be joking! Look, it’ll be cold chicken left over from last night—the new lot omitted to tell us they’re vegetarians when they booked—and some tomatoes and lettuce from out of the garden!”

    “And that marvellous home-made crusty bread of Jan’s? –Right,” he said as Pete agreed. “We’re paying the full rate. And for the hire of the launch.”

    “Bullshit.”

    “No, honestly, Pete—”

    “Bull-shit. Fill ’er up, if you like: that’ll do it.”

    Feebly Dan agreed. Well, heck, they had to do something with ruddy Moyra, and they themselves only had a dinghy with an outboard, usually occupied by Sean’s horrible body and ponging of fish.

    … “Righto,” said the wiry, elderly Pete at a somewhat advanced hour of the morning. “I’ll take it from here, Dan. You two girls coming, are ya, as well as yer mum and aunty?” he said to Ran and Shannon. “Okay, pop aboard. These here are Doug and Marti. Albuquerque, that’s where they’re from, they got ecolodges in them parts as well,” he said without a flicker, putting a strong hand under Katy’s arm and helping her aboard the launch without meeting her eye. “See ya, Dan!”

    “See ya,” whispered Dan feebly, escaping. Glory be! A whole day to himself! He could get all those odd-jobs done! He drove straight back home and got started. After a bit Sean appeared from nowhere—been skulking in the bushes until he was sure Moyra had actually gone, sly little sod—and sitting down beside him on the front verandah, began to help him.

    “Aah! Thass better!” He examined the label on the can. “Why’dja wanna get Foster’s, Dad?”

    “They had that special offer on it: buy enough to fill up yer card with coupons and ya get half a dozen Aussie fizz,” Dan reminded him. “Meant I didn’t have to spend my hard-earned on bad Aussie fizz that yer mother and sisters’d only drink.”

    Sean sniggered meanly. “And her,” he noted.

    “Yeah; funny, isn’t it? I’d’ve put her down as a real Bollinger or nothing lady.”

    “Yeah. Didja buy a couple of bottles of the real French stuff this year, Dad?”

    “Yeah. They’re in the shed, I’m waiting until she goes.”

    “Good one,” he conceded placidly, opening another for him without asking if he wanted it.

    “Hullo, again, Ran,” said Max with a smile in his voice. “It’s Max Throgmorton. How are the holidays going?”

    “Um, good, ta,” said Ran feebly. “Um, sorry, your mum’s just having a shower, it’s gone har’ past eleven, here.”

    “I’m sorry, is it too late to ring?”

    “Nah, thass okay, me and Dad and Sean are usually up. Is it the morning where you are?”

    “Mm: we’re scheduled for a scuba-diving trip.”

    “Heck, ya better not tell her that, she’s been having kittens at the idea!” said Ran in horror.

    “No, I’ll tell her we’re just going boating,” he said, smiling.

    “Good. Hold on, I’ll get her.”

    Silence reverberated in Max Throgmorton’s receiver. Oddly, he felt very, very dashed.

    “Are ya there?” she gasped.

    Smiling, Max said: “Yes, I’m here, Ran.”

    “She said to say she’ll be a minute. Hey, there’s something I better tell you.”

    “Pissed again, is she?” said Max cheerfully.

    “Um—no! I mean, they did have that champagne and orange juice muck but there wasn’t that much of it. I can never remember what they call it, it’s got some fancy name.”

    “Buck’s Fizz. Where was this? Been dining out?”

    “Nah, it was at lunchtime, on a faked-up lake cruise that Dad and Pete jacked up. Um, sorry, Max, that just came out,” said Ran miserably.

    “That’s all right! But how was it faked, Ran?”

    “Um, see, Pete and Jan, they run the ecolodge not far from us—”

    “Yes, Moyra’s told me a lot about it,” he assured her.

    “Oh, right. Well, Pete’s got this old launch, but he doesn’t do cruises as such, because the launch isn’t very up-market. He uses it for fishing trips. Only Dad thought your mum might like to see the lake—it was a lovely fine day, ya see—and, um, well, Jan packed a lovely picnic lunch, and that was quite up-market if you didn’t know—” She broke off.

    “What?” asked Max, grinning.

    “That the chicken was left over from last night: some of their guests are vegetarians,” said Ran glumly.

    Max broke down in splutters.

    “Yeah, hah, hah,” said Ran in considerable relief. “She’d done it in the oven with lemon and crumbs and stuff on it, it was ace, actually. And I think your mum really enjoyed herself.”

    “Well, that’s super, Ran!”

    “Yes,” said Ran weakly, wishing he hadn’t said that: it was silly, because Poms actually sounded very silly when they said “soow-pah,” not sexy at all, but it had made her tummy suddenly feel all swoopy. “Only—well, did she tell you why she decided to come out here?”

    “Well, no, other than that she was dying to see Katy and all of you, Ran!”

    Ran licked her lips. “Mm. I think she’s plotting something as well!” she hissed. “Are you an architect?”

    “Yes,” he admitted, trying not to let his mind whirl in horrid speculation.

    “Well, I dunno what it is, but it’s something!” she hissed. “Here ya go, Aunty Moyra!” she said loudly.

    Max’s mother predictably replied: “Thank you, Ran, darling, but just ‘Moyra,’ mm?” Then she came on the line and said loudly: “Darling, do you have any idea what the time is here?”

    After the usual exchanges he managed to say lightly: “Darling, what are you up to? You’ve given little Ran the impression that all this cruising round their lovely lake has some ulterior motive.”

    “Oh, pooh!”

    Max could almost see her tossing her head. Oh, shit. She was up to something. “Moyra, if you want to settle out there in one of those dream-homes on the lake’s edge—”

    “Darling, most of them are frightful! And only holiday homes, of course, one doesn’t live there!”

    “That’s good, because as I was about to say, I wouldn’t be able to pop over and see you at the drop of a hat. At most, every six months, and I couldn’t promise to make it more often than my annual hols.”

    “You’re absolutely horrid, Max! How can you say such a thing to your own mother?”

    Very, very easily. “It’s halfway round the world, and then halfway round the world again to get home, that makes it the equivalent of a round-the-world trip, I’m not made of money!”

    “Sometimes I think you’re as mean as your grandfather,” she said tearfully.

    “Good,” replied Max brutally. “If you don’t want to settle there, what is it?”

    “Nothing! Though I must say, if you ever fancied the trip, dear, those places are worth a second glance: that darling Pete was telling me the architects charge positive fortunes for them! And it isn’t just local gossip, he knows Sir Jake Carrano!”

    Max was blank for a moment. “Uh—Oh! The chap who’s head of the Carrano Group? I’d forgotten he was a New Zealander. Well, yes, dare say he could afford the most luxurious of holiday homes—ten of ’em, probably, and never notice— No?”

    “No! He told Pete he wouldn’t be seen dead in any of them! No, but a close friend of his owns one and the architect did very well out of it. And it’s such a nice ambiance, dear.”

    “Eh?” replied Max feebly.

    “You know what I mean! The beautiful lake with the fabulous view of the mountains at the far end of it”—Max blinked in spite of himself: mountains hadn’t been mentioned heretofore—“and the wonderful calm and the pure air! One can breathe!”

    “Very well, Mummy,” he said with huge resignation: “I’ll build you a holiday home out there—a small one, within your budget—if that’s what you want.”

    “N— Well, it would be lovely, darling, but such a long way to come! But there is opportunity, you see, and it’d get you away from those horrid industrial sites and all the dirt and grime of the cities.”

    “My last project was a light and airy modern factory complex—”

    “Birmingham!” wailed his mother.

    “Just out of, yes.”

    “And that thing you put up in Germany was even worse!” she retorted viciously.

    “The firm was very lucky to get that contract.”

    “Max, you’re wasting your talent!” she wailed.

    “Nonsense. I can assure you that designing holiday homes for the filthy rich would pall very, very quickly.”

    “No, because you’d have trips to such glorious locations, darling!”

    “Moyra, can we possibly end this potty conversation? It’s not my ambition to design holiday homes. Yes, the designs may be interesting— They’re not leading-edge!” he shouted as she tried to tell him they were. “They’re peripheral! Stop blathering, Mummy!” He hung up on a wail about lovely ecolodges.

    Angela had come out of the ensuite and was looking at him sardonically.

    “Don’t ask,” he said heavily, passing his hand through his curls.

    “I wasn’t going to,” she retorted with acid pleasure. “Are you ready, at last?”

    “Mm.”

    They went.

    Max’s phone rang around half-past seven on the morning of the 7th of January. The day after he’d got back to London—yes. It was Saturday, into the bargain. “Hullo?” he sighed.

    “Um, hi, Max, it’s Ran Jackson here,” said a small voice.

    “Jesus, is Mummy all right?” he gasped.

    “Yes. I’m awfully sorry, I didn’t mean to give you a fright,” said Ran in an even smaller voice. “Maybe I should have emailed you or written you a letter, only I haven’t got your addresses and I didn’t want to, um, alert her, by asking her.”

    “No, that’s quite all right, Ran. What’s she done?” asked Max fatalistically.

    “Um, nothing!” said Ran with a startled laugh. “Well, not done, as such,” she added cautiously.

    “God. Go on.”

    “Um, it’s just that we’ve more or less worked out what she’s up to. Um, well, she has told you about the ecolodges, hasn’t she?”

    “Yuh— Uh, one, yes. Pete’s and Jan’s, yes?”

    “Mm. The thing is, there’s another one—um, well, it’s not open at the moment, Bob and Gayle Meldrum started it only then they split up. It’s a dump, actually, just a bach. Um, sorry: Moyra said you haven’t got that word, only I don’t think there is an English word. I mean, if I called it a holiday home it’d give you the wrong impression entirely. I mean, before Bob and Gayle decided to turn it into an ecolodge Bob’s dad only used it for fishing.”

    “A fishing shack?” suggested Max delicately.

    “That’s it! Well, no-one could possibly turn it into anything, you’d have to be mad, only you see, this Englishman was out here last September, I think it was. I wasn’t here, I was up in Auckland, working, but I think it was round about then. He works for some big firm that runs a lot of fancy hotels, and they want to expand into ecolodges. He thought the site wasn’t bad; it would have a view if, um, the bush was, um, well, not cut back, I think that might be illegal these days, but, um, you know.”

    “Allowed to undergo the forces of natural attrition?” suggested Max smoothly.

    She gave a startled giggle. “Yeah! Exactly! A few builders’ machines grinding over it for three months and that’d be all she wrote—like that. Pete hasn’t heard anything definite but he got the impression that it was going to go ahead, and, um, your mother said”—she swallowed—“that she knows a man that’s the uncle of the man that came out.”

    “Uh-huh.”

    “Like, would a man like that own a castle in Scotland?” asked Ran cautiously.

    “Uh—oh, good God! Not old Hubert Tarlington?”

    “I think she did call him darling Hubert, but I don’t think she mentioned his surname.”

    “Mm. She does know one or two other people who own dumps in Scotland that with a certain stretch of the imagination could be called castles, but last autumn she was certainly up at old Hubert’s dump watching him and his idiot pals slaughter innocent feathered creatures.”

    “Do they still do that?” asked Ran in tones of unalloyed horror.

    “Well, yes.”

    “But what about the Animal Righters?” she cried. “I thought Britain was full of them?”

    “Yes, ’tis—well, fairly—but the north-western coast of Scotland’s a bit far for them to go. Much easier to protest the fox hunting in the southern counties, you see, and far, far more likely to get your effort into the nationals—sorry, Ran, the newspapers.”

    “Yes. Heck, aren’t they your native fauna?”

    “Mm.”

    “That’s terrible. Um—sorry, losing track. Um, well, I’m awfully sorry, Max,” said Ran apologetically, “but I think the plan is, once she’s sussed it out she’s gonna get the firm to head-hunt you. Like, to design the ecolodges for them,” she ended miserably.

    Max Throgmorton made a rude noise.

    “Yes,” said Ran glumly. “She wasn’t very clear about what you’d built but I finally worked it out and I looked up the industrial complexes you did outside Birmingham and Bonn on the Internet. I can see that ecolodges aren’t your bag at all—I looked them up, too, they’d make your hair stand on end, though as far as the principles go you can’t help approving. But it’s like all mad enthusiasts: they take the thing to extremes, there’s no middle way. But I must say I don’t see how you can have an ensuite in the middle of the jungle without using bathroom porcelain!”

    Max gulped. “Uh—no. Me, neither. What the Hell did they use?” he croaked.

    “It very carefully didn’t say, so my bet is the people that assign the, um, rankings, deliberately don’t include that in their criteria. Um, it’s like stars, you know: like five-star hotels; only it’s green leaves—”

    Max went into a helpless choking fit.

    “Yes,” said Ran with a smile in her voice: “Dad almost choked to death, too. But it’s not apocryphal, honest!”

    “I’m sure it isn’t,” he agreed, wiping his eyes. “God, that did me good! –I wish like Hell you were here, Ran,” he said without thinking: “I could dash out for some lovely rolls or crumpets and we could have a super breakfast together!”

    “Um, yes. I’m on the other side of the world,” said Ran in a shy little voice.

    Max swallowed. “Of course you are. Well, thank you so very much for telling me, Ran, I’ll be on the look-out for head-hunters from—uh—well, anybody. I have met old Hubert’s nephews, but one of them’s a farmer and last time I saw him, the older one was doing some daft war-gaming thing in York—”

    “That’s him!” she cried. “I knew it was something weird!”

    “—Yorkshire,” finished Max feebly. “Hill Tarlington. Was the firm’s name mentioned?”

    “No. I did ask Pete and Jan but they couldn’t remember. I think your mum might have deliberately avoided it. The thing is, Max, I don’t think she realises how much she’s let on.”

    “No, quite. –What are you having for breakfast?” said Max with a smile in his voice.

    “Um, we’ve just had our tea,” replied Ran shyly. “Dinner, your mum calls it.”

    “Uh—you would have. Okay, what did you have this morning?”

    “Um, me or the rest of them?”

    “You, Ran,” replied Max, smiling very much.

    Ran’s tummy had gone all swoopy again. “Um, well, the thing is, Felicity’s a bit hard to take, and she’s busted up with that smoothie lawyer we all thought she was serious about, so she’s been worse than usual, and Mum’s pretty easy-going but she’s starting to drive her mad, you see, and her way of handling that sort of thing is just to get vaguer and vaguer and that makes Felicity worse. So I got out of it before they were up: I went over to Pete and Jan’s. I mean, they did say to come any time, and Jan can always do with a hand. So I just had what they were having.”

    “Mm?”

    He heard her swallow. “None of the guests were up: the keen ones had been on a really big tramp, um, hike, yesterday and they were all exhausted. Um, well, trout.”

    “Ooh, yum!”

    “It was absolutely delicious,” said Ran with a deep sigh.

    “I bet! Straight out of that wonderful lake of yours, was it?”

    “Not the lake, a special little stream… Only he could have gone to jail if he’d got caught.”

    Max’s ears hummed. “You mean this Pete chappie poached it?”

    “Them, not it. Yes,” said Ran glumly. “He’s like that. If it’s not nailed down he’ll have it. And if it moves, it’s food, you see. He’s about seventy and, um, he’s always been like that.”

    Max broke down in hysterics. “I wish I’d come out with Mummy!” he gasped.

    “Yes. Well, no: they don’t serve them to the guests!”

    “No, no, I quite understand! Most favoured friends only! It sounds like Paradise on Earth, frankly, Ran; no wonder Moyra’s so keen.”

    “I see; you sometimes call her Moyra,” said with Ran with interest. “Um, no, I don’t think anywhere is really Paradise on Earth, is it? Though I must admit Pete and Jan’s relationship is about as near to it as you can get. But he was married twice before and they were both disasters, and the last one walked out leaving him with a huge mortgage and the goats, and Jan must have been over forty when she met him ’cos she’s over sixty now, and that would have been twenty years back. What I mean is, it took her forty years to find him, and him about fifty before he met her. And actually it rains a lot in New Zealand. And—well, it depends what you want. It’s a pretty down-home lifestyle. The ecolodge is pretty fancy but Pete did most of it himself, most of the wood is what you’re supposed to call recycled, but—”

    “Not nailed down!” said Max with a laugh. “Got it!”

    “Yes. One summer him and a couple of mates nicked a whole house, bit by bit. It was derelict, but it must have belonged to somebody. But what I was gonna say is, if you don’t want lots of shiny consumables and two cars as well as a great big cabin-cruiser—um, sorry, Max, that’s a launch, Aunty Moyra didn’t know what I meant when I said that—well, if you don’t want that sort of thing, you could be happy living round here, but if you’re not working in the tourist industry there aren’t many jobs. The district has a lot of forestry—it’s all exotic wood, that means not native, they call it a renewable resource these days ’cos they’re supposed to replant them, and if you fancy driving forty K to work every day there are jobs, but only for ordinary people that don’t mind sawing up logs in clouds of dust all day.”

    “Not for snobs like me, you mean?” drawled Max.

    “I do mean that, yeah,” replied Ran grimly. “And the outside work, in the forests themselves, is even harder yacker.”

    “I’m sorry: what was that?” said Max feebly.

    “Oh. Hard yacker means hard work. They say it in Australia, too. Um, sorry.”

    “No, don’t be, it’s fascinating! Er—what about in the town itself? I mean, Moyra said Taupo is a fair-sized town?”

    “Yeah. I suppose the population’d be about twenty-two thousand, now. Well, Jan’d be a case in point. She’s a qualified accountant and she tried to set up here but it was bloody hard, ’cos the local small businesses all went to their usual firm, see? There are a couple of building firms, but ordinary people don’t want their houses to be architect-designed, and even if they did want it they couldn’t afford it. And there’s nothing much to do. No theatres or, um, ballet or opera like what Aunty Moyra said you go to a lot. It’s just ordinary. Like I say, there’s no such thing as Paradise on Earth. Though most people that come here for a holiday do have a lovely time.”

    “Mm. But what about you, Ran? What do you do?”

    “I’m a— Oh! I don’t work in Taupo, you nit! Though I did once have a holiday job in one of the motel offices. It was mostly giving the tourists free toilet paper and trying to convince them that if they’d used up their daily quota of coffee and tea they couldn’t have any more free. I’m a legal research assistant at CohenCorp, up in Auckland. That’s a big, shiny downtown firm, and the actual lawyers are all very shiny people in frightening suits, so why they gave me the job, I dunno!” said Ran cheerfully. “Because I’d done a combined B.A.-LL.B., I suppose. It can be quite interesting when they’re involved in international stuff, but it’s mostly pretty boring. But it was that or come home and help clean the bogs for Jan, geddit?”

    “Mm,” admitted Max on a rueful note. “I’m sorry, Ran.”

    “Don’t be, Auckland isn’t that bad a place to work,” said Ran with a smile in her voice. “The climate’s pretty mild and there’s a lovely art gallery and quite a decent public library and I’m a member of the university library, too.”

    “Er—yes. Theatre, music, opera?” said Max feebly.

    “And ballet, ya mean?” replied Ran with a laugh. “There is a small professional theatre company, they’re not bad, if a bit amateurish. We get a reasonable number of touring shows, sometimes ballet. Um, well, there’s not much classical music: the orchestral performances are usually very middle-of-the-road—draw in the widest audience, you see—and the varsity groups are usually so avant-garde that to my ear it’s not music at all! But there is a lovely early music group. And every year,” she said with a laugh in her voice, “the University Drama Club puts on an outdoor Shakespeare production. First week in March, the weather’s usually lovely then.”

    “What is it this year?” asked Max faintly.

   “They’ve embarked on a round of history plays, so as it was a really bad Henry IV Part II last year—”

    “Omigod! Don’t go!”

    “I’ll have to go, one of my flatmates is in it!” said Ran cheerfully. “Well, if I get any more intel I’ll ring you, okay?”

    “Er—yes, of course. Thank you very much, Ran,” said Max on a weak note.

    Saying cheerfully: “No problem! See ya!” Ran rang off.

    “See ya,” said Max sadly to a receiverful of empty space. He looked blankly round his tasteful modern bedroom in his smart modern flat with a view of the river and said crossly: “Bugger!”

    As he hadn’t invited Angela Coulton-Whassett to join him in the flat after the West Indies trip there was no-one there to ask him what the matter was—not that Angela would have bothered. And certainly no-one that would have been able to understand if he’d been able to explain it. Which, as he didn’t really understand himself what he was feeling, he wouldn’t have been, on the whole.

     Moyra blew her nose fiercely. “I might have known he’d never take me seriously!”

    Well, no: not her on the subject of designing ecolodges up the boo-eye, certainly. The assembled Jacksons looked at her limply and failed to come up with any appropriate response to this complaint.

    Finally Shannon offered feebly: “Never mind, Aunty Moyra, ya had a lovely holiday.”

    “But it could all have been so perfect! He could have built me a darling little chalet!”

    Why she was now calling the purely imaginary holiday home this none of them knew, but as the use of the word “little” was a great step forward, no-one queried it. And in fact Shannon offered gamely: “He still could. You can still get sections for a really good price. And you could have a little car, and even a runabout, if you liked.”

    “Y— Well, yes, darling, one’s little car would just be a runabout, of course: one wasn’t envisaging anything along the lines of a Bentley!” said Moyra with a titter.

    “No; out here a runabout’s a little boat,” said Ran very firmly. “And you could still do it: you are an autonomous human being, you know;”—her father swallowed hard—“not joined to blimmin’ Max at the hip!”

    “Umbilical cord,” corrected Sean thoughtfully.

    “Shut up,” said Dan quickly.

    “Darling Ran, why are you so down on Max all of a sudden? I thought you liked him!” wailed Moyra.

    Ran went very red. “I don’t even know him. What I’m saying is, think of yourself for a change, Aunty Moyra, not about what he wants or doesn’t want!”

    Moyra smiled mistily. “Isn’t she adorable?” she said to the assembled Jacksons. “Too young to understand, of course! Ran, dear, I’m thinking about what’s best for Max in the long run. Of course at the moment he can’t see past the London life with the frightful girlfriends and the stupid fast cars and that ghastly flat that he paid far too much for—and if his Grandfather Throgmorton could see what he threw his inheritance away on he’d be turning in his grave, I can tell you!”

    The inheritance motif was a new one on the Jacksons, and they goggled at her.

    Not noticing, Moyra swept on: “But what about the future? Is he still going to be carrying on with these frightful lipsticked creatures in his forties?”

    Moyra was never seen outside the house without lipstick and very seldom inside it, either, so the Jacksons goggled at her.

    Not noticing, Moyra swept on: “Designing lovely ecolodges would show him there’s another, healthier side to life, with far more variety and ultimately far more challenge than putting up one frightful industrial thing after another—and I ask you, what has Europe got left to offer? Filth and immigrants and endless traffic jams in the choking smog?”

    The choice of expression was fairly deplorable but as the Jacksons pretty much agreed with the underlying sentiment, no-one protested, and in fact Sean nodded his head hard.

    Moyra swept on: “And even if he marries one of them, it’ll be a disaster, that sort of girl is out for what she can get! One child at the most, and divorce before the poor little thing’s five years old!”

    The Jacksons goggled at her. How old had Max been when she’d divorced Throgmorton?

    Moyra blew her nose fiercely. “He’s so obstinate!”

    Uh—was that the end of it, then? It did seem to be, so Katy patted her hand, Felicity gave her a dry hanky, and Dan poured her a fresh cuppa. Well, stewed, but freshly out of the pot.

    Perhaps it was the proportion of tannin and caffeine to water which inspired Moyra to burst out, having gulped it down fiercely: “And why shouldn’t he marry one of your girls?”

    Shannon dropped her slice of cake. “Eh?”

    Felicity was very flushed. “I really don’t— I mean, we do all have our own lives, Moyra.”

    Moyra looked hopefully at Ran. “You liked him, Ran!”

    Ran stood up, bright puce. “You’re fantasising, Aunty Moyra. I’ve merely spoken to him on the phone a few times.”

    “But he loves blonde hair and before he persuaded himself that that fashionable skinny figure nonsense was what he wanted he really liked well-built girls!” she wailed.

    Sean collapsed in sniggers. “Go on, have ’im! Him and ’is granddad’s fortune!”

    “Shut UP!” shouted Ran, clumping out.

    Dan looked limply round the remainder of his assembled family. Felicity was still flushed and frowning—very possibly, since she fancied herself a cut above her relatives, she had secretly harboured the notion that Max Throgmorton’d do her just nicely. Shannon had joined Sean in the sniggers. And Katy was looking extremely vague. Sighing, he took the last piece of cake.

    “I just want to see Max happy and settled,” said Moyra tearfully.

    “He could come out for a holiday: why not?” offered the valiant Sean. “In your summer, Aunty Moyra.”

    Dan goggled at him in horror over the cake. Couldn’t the cretin see the subject needed to be dropped?

    However, it hit the spot. “Of course he could, Sean, dear! I’ll work on him!” she beamed.

    And that seemed to be that. Max Throgmorton was gonna marry Ran and settle down to build ecolodges up the flaming boo-eye in the EnZed backblocks. Not.

Next chapter:

https://theecolodgesbythelake-anovel.blogspot.com/2022/01/head-hunting.html