‘Not that woman with the Dobermans that are trained to kill on sight?’ said Mike.
‘That dog hardly touched you! But no, it’s not her. This one’s a nice old bird; she’ll probably give us tea and cake.’
Mike sighed.
‘Margaret, I’ve got tickets for Bon Jovi in Auckland next month,’ said Hugh at the other end of the table. ‘Would you like to come?’
Mum clasped her hands. ‘Jon Bon Jovi,’ she said solemnly, ‘was my first true love. Hugh, you’re a wonderful man.’
‘I thought MacGyver was your first true love,’ I said.
‘No, no. He was merely a passing fancy.’
‘Do you think Hugh likes Bon Jovi, or does he just know your mum does?’ Anna asked Rob softly.
‘I’d say he knows Mum does,’ my brother said.
‘That’s so sweet.’
Mike pushed back his chair abruptly, got up and went inside.
Chapter 8
At three o’clock the next afternoon I crossed the café dining room with a coffee in each hand. ‘One flat white, and one moccachino,’ I said, putting them down on the table in front of their respective owners. ‘Can I get you ladies anything else?’
‘Artificial sweetener, please,’ said one.
‘I’m sorry, we haven’t got any. Sugar?’ I slid the bowl towards her across the table, and she eyed it as if it were filled with earwigs.
‘No, thank you.’ She sighed and took another forkful of caramel cheesecake, and I mused, as I retreated towards the kitchen, on the reasoning behind forgoing fifteen calories of sugar in your coffee while consuming three hundred and fifty in your cheesecake.
‘Did you make the mustard sauce?’ Anna asked, lifting her head for a second from the chocolate scrolls she was piping onto a baking sheet.
‘Yes. It’s in the little fridge. What else have we got to do?’
‘Baked feta’s done, pavlova roll’s done, we can’t glaze the ham till tomorrow, the chicken wings are marinating in the fridge . . . Jersey caramels.’
‘Right,’ I said wearily, getting out the recipe and a glass mixing bowl. ‘What time are you due at your parents’?’
‘Six thirty.’
* * *
We closed at four. Anna went home and I began, with minimal enthusiasm, to mow the lawn. I had fertilised it the previous autumn, on the advice of the gardening column on the back page of the local paper, and regretted it ever since. Cutting an acre of lush dense grass once a week may be just what you want if you’ve got nothing else to do, or if you’re struggling to find enough work for that second under-gardener, but I felt I could have done without it.
Still, it was exercise, and it was a nice afternoon. And it was summer, so the lawn would become a desert wasteland soon enough. I had just finished and was pushing the mower back uphill to the garage when Rob’s ute came around the corner of the house and stopped on the gravel outside the kitchen door. He and Mike got out, rather stiffly.
‘Rob, what are you doing here?’ I said, wiping my hot face on my sleeve. ‘You’re supposed to be in Browns Bay!’
Rob frowned.
‘For Christmas Eve dinner. At half past six.’
‘Oh shit,’ he said.
‘What’s the time?’
He looked at his watch. ‘Five thirty.’
‘Where’s your phone?’
‘Flat.’ The phone in the kitchen began to ring. ‘Is that her?’
I nodded.
‘Aren’t you going to get it?’ Mike asked me.
‘No!’ If I answered that phone and admitted Rob was here, Anna would be even madder at him than she was already, and also I would become an accessory after the fact. I made shooing motions. ‘Go, go!’
Rob sighed and got back into his ute.
‘Poor sod,’ Mike said, shaking his head as the ute vanished around the bend.
‘Poor Anna,’ I said firmly. ‘The man would try the patience of a saint. What took you guys so long?’
‘Digging post holes through a metre and a half of rock. And then we hit a water pipe, just for fun.’
‘Beer?’ I offered.
‘God, yes.’
I pushed the lawnmower into the garage beside my car, and started back towards the house. ‘We’ll need it. Next we have to go and put up Mum’s Christmas tree.’
‘Well, that shouldn’t be too hard,’ said Mike. Poor fool.
* * *
Mum met us at the door of her house, stripy hair piled atop her head, pruning saw in one hand and loppers in the other. ‘I’ve found the perfect tree,’ she announced. ‘It’s just up Gresham Road, on the left. I’ve had my eye on it for weeks.’
‘Mum, we can’t cut down a tree in the forestry in full daylight.’
‘It’s not in the forestry, Aurelia,’ she said, sounding as hurt as if that would have stopped her for a second. ‘It’s a seedling on the side of the road.’
Her pine tree of choice was indeed on the side of the road. It was also in the middle of a blackberry bush and up a four-metre bank.
‘Isn’t it a lovely shape?’ Mum said, shading her eyes with her hand and gazing up at it admiringly.
I leant back against the car. ‘Gorgeous. Just how do you propose we get it?’
‘Lia, I wish you wouldn’t use that sarcastic tone of voice.’
Oh. ‘Sorry, Mum,’ I said.
‘That’s alright, darling. Now, I think the best approach will be from behind.’ And holding up her skirts she began to pick her way through the gorse twenty metres down the road, where the bank tapered to knee height.
‘I’ll do it, Maggie; you’re not really dressed for the job,’ said Mike.
Mum smiled at him graciously and withdrew to the side of the road, from where she could supervise his progress.
He did reach the tree eventually, although a lesser man would have turned back. I lobbed up the pruning saw and he cut the tree down, then pushed it trunk-first down the bank.
‘Lovely!’ said Mum. ‘We’ll put it on the roof and, Mike, if you drive, Lia and I will hold it.’
‘We can’t put that on the roof,’ Mike protested, staunching the blood trickling from one of his deeper scratches with a handkerchief. ‘It’s bigger than the car. And it’ll scratch the paint.’
‘Of course we can! We do it every year. We’ll just take it nice and slowly.’
‘Come on,’ I said, hoisting the three-metre-high tree. ‘There’s no point in arguing with her; she’s an unstoppable force. We’ll go home around the back roads. We probably won’t be arrested.’
Mike sighed.
Twenty minutes later Mum’s little car, almost invisible beneath its load, crept down her driveway and stopped. ‘There,’ she said happily. ‘Now, if you two bring the tree along I’ll run and get a bucket to stand it in.’
It took us another half hour to place the tree according to her minute but contradictory directions, by which time both Mike and I were losing the will to live.
‘I think you need to pull it another inch to the right, Lia,’ said Mum.
‘I can’t,’ I said from the mantelpiece. ‘It’s tied both ways.’
‘We-e-ll . . .’ She stepped back and looked at it through narrowed eyes. ‘I suppose it will have to do. Let’s have some dinner before we start decorating.’
Expecting to be the one cooking it, I slid down and followed her into the kitchen. But she took a salad and a pile of snapper fillets out of the fridge and waved me away. ‘Sit down, I’ve got it all under control. Now, what would you both like to drink? There’s half a bottle of that rather gorgeous merlot Hugh brought last night in the pantry. It doesn’t go with fish, but who cares?’
‘Hugh would care,’ I said, sitting down on the window seat and prodding my bad knee. It ached, and the joint was fat and puffy. I would have to dig out my knee brace.
Mum smiled as she divided the rest of the bottle between three wineglasses. ‘He’d be appalled, wouldn’t he? Never mind, what he doesn’t know won’t
hurt him. Mike, I’ve been meaning to ask you how Gina is.’
Gina is Mike’s older sister. She had left home by the time Rob and I were born, so we never knew her very well, and the little we knew we didn’t much like. She viewed us as the embarrassing result of a paternal lapse in judgment, and it’s hard to warm to someone who wishes you’d never been born.
‘Fine,’ Mike said. ‘Unfortunately.’ He took two wineglasses, passed one to me and sat down sideways on a kitchen chair.
I looked up from my sore knee in mild shock. Mike is ridiculously nice; if he can’t say anything pleasant he says nothing. It makes him a very poor source of malicious gossip, but nobody’s perfect.
‘Why unfortunately?’ Mum asked.
Mike looked moodily into his wineglass. ‘She’s been pointing out to Dad that I’m forty-four, I’m single, I’ve got no children and at this late date I’m not likely to have any. So if he wants to found a dynasty, he’d better leave the farm to her and her kids.’
‘What?’ Mum cried. ‘And what about the twenty years – no, it’s longer than that, the twins were just crawling when you came to help on the farm . . .’ She paused to count on her fingers. ‘The twenty-seven years of work you’ve put into the place?’
‘I’ve been paid wages.’
She pointed a fish slice at him like a weapon. ‘You’ve been paid a pittance!’
He smiled crookedly. ‘More fool me.’
‘I’ve never heard anything so unfair!’
‘Well, the old will wasn’t fair either,’ he said. ‘It meant I got a three-million-dollar farm and everyone else got five-eighths of bugger all.’
Mum cast aside her fish slice and sat down at the table. ‘You can’t do fair with family farms, if you want them to stay in the family,’ she said firmly. ‘Either one person inherits, or you sell up and split the money. And it’s not as if you’re being given a cheque for three million dollars. You get a lot of hard work for a very modest return.’
‘And Gina and Rob and I have all had help with loans and house deposits and stuff,’ I said. ‘And you’ve had to stay home and put up with Dad. I’m not sure a three-million-dollar farm is enough.’
‘Neither am I,’ said Mike grimly, taking a swig of merlot.
‘Has Gray actually changed his will?’ Mum asked.
Mike shrugged. ‘You know what he’s like. He likes to keep everyone guessing. But even if he doesn’t, I’ve been the boy since I was seventeen, and I’m not all that excited at the thought of being the boy when I’m sixty. I should have left twenty years ago.’
He should have, of course. But as lovely as Mike is – and he’s quite lovely – he does tend to follow the path of least resistance. He’s just not the line-in-the-sand, courage-of-your-convictions type. Mum smiled at him a bit sadly, leant across the table and covered his hand with hers.
Chapter 9
I had excellent intentions for Christmas morning. I would start with a couple of painkillers and a run, and then a bracing early-morning dip in the sea. Then home to call Dad, glaze the ham and make fruit salad. It was a virtuous little plan and, had I carried it out, would have given me a pleasant glow of self-satisfaction. But alas, it came to nothing.
Instead of getting up when I woke up, I lay in bed feeling guilty, which is a terrible waste of a sleep-in. And when at length I did prise myself out from under the covers, I drifted around in my pyjamas drinking coffee and leafing through a murder mystery a backpacker had left behind the week before. It was about a gorgeous, brilliant, crime-solving arts student with the libido of a cat on heat, which prompted her to ignore leads in order to have improbable sex with strangers in restaurant toilets, and it irritated me intensely. Just what, exactly, is so cool about letting the murderer slip out a back window while someone bends you over a wash basin?
‘Good for you, sweet pea,’ I said aloud, closing the book with a snap. Then, as I looked up at the clock, ‘Crap!’
I scored the fat on the ham too deeply in my haste, and had to pin it back on with cloves. Once it was in the oven I squared my shoulders, took a deep breath and rang my father.
‘Yes?’ he said, picking up the phone.
‘Hi, Dad. Merry Christmas.’
‘Lia.’
‘How are you going?’ I asked.
‘Could be worse.’
Talking to my father on the phone is a bit like playing tennis with someone who catches the ball and stuffs it into his pocket rather than hitting it back to your end of the court.
‘How’s Nana?’
‘Senile,’ he said flatly. ‘You get that with dementia.’
‘Ah,’ I said. ‘We’ve been really busy at the café these last few weeks.’
‘That’s good.’
‘Are Gina and Nigel and the kids up for Christmas?’ I asked.
‘No, they’re with Nigel’s family this year.’
I pictured him eating tinned spaghetti for Christmas lunch with the National Programme on the radio for company, and, despite his treatment of his eldest son, felt a small twinge of pity. ‘Are you going out for lunch?’ I asked.
‘Merv and Gillian Copland have asked me up there,’ he said.
‘Oh, that’s nice.’
Dad snorted. ‘She’s not much of a cook.’
All in all, it was not an inspiring conversation, and I was further depressed after searching high and low for my favourite white singlet top and eventually finding it scrunched into a musty-smelling wad in the bottom of the washing machine. I was feeling a little frayed when I let myself into Mum’s kitchen just before twelve, fruit salad bowl balanced precariously on top of the ham.
The place was a hive of industry. Mike was arranging strawberries on top of a trifle and Anna was icing chocolate éclairs. Mum sat cross-legged on the window seat polishing the family silver (six teaspoons and a cream jug) and Rob, who prefers whenever possible to adopt a supervisory role, was leaning against the bench eating scraps of stuffing off the bottom of the roasting pan.
‘Yo, sis,’ he said, relieving me of the fruit salad.
I put the ham down beside him. ‘Hey, guys. Merry Christmas.’
‘Merry Christmas, love,’ said Mum. ‘Robin, leave that ham alone.’
Rob had lifted a corner of the tin foil covering the ham, and he smiled at her with great charm as he broke off a crispy bit of glazed fat. ‘Quality control,’ he said.
Mum gave him a Stern Look (her preferred method of discipline for about the last fifteen years, despite very mediocre results). ‘I’ve just had an idea,’ she said. ‘If Mike can possibly stay till Wednesday the shops will be open again, and you can both go to the suit hire place and be fitted. It’s much better to go in person than just give them your measurements.’
Mike looked bemused. ‘What?’ he said.
‘For the wedding,’ said Mum.
‘But I’ve got a suit.’
‘Yes, but you’ll want to be matching.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, it’s – it’s customary, isn’t it?’
‘Um, yeah, I may not actually have asked him, yet,’ said Rob, taking another bit of ham.
‘Robin Leslie,’ Anna said, more in sorrow than in anger, ‘you are, without a doubt, the most useless individual I’ve ever met.’
‘Asked me what?’ Mike asked.
‘To be best man,’ said Rob.
‘At your wedding?’
‘That’s the one. Assuming she’s still going to marry me, that is.’
‘But what about your friend Eddie?’
‘What about him?’
‘Rob, would you just ask him properly?’ I said, tiring of a flippancy that seemed excessive even by my twin’s standards.
Rob made a face at me, but said obediently, ‘Please, Mike, would you be best man at our wedding?’
Mike looked more appalled than gratified by this request. ‘Would I have to make a speech?’ he asked.
‘The speech’ll be a piece of piss,’ said Rob. ‘Just tell a couple of g
rubby jokes and say the bridesmaids look lovely.’
‘Anna, love,’ said Mum, screwing the lid back on the jar of silver polish and getting to her feet, ‘if you decide not to marry my idiot son I assure you I’ll understand.’
* * *
We had lunch in the sunny kitchen, with all the windows open and the air fragrant with Christmas lilies and good things to eat. Then we retired to the sitting room for present opening and tree appreciation before drifting outside to doze and eat cherries and Jersey caramels in the dappled sunlight of the top lawn.
It was a truly excellent afternoon. No stress, no rushing up and down the country to spend time with relatives you’d prefer not to have to see, good food, nice company, beautiful surroundings . . .
Sometime around three, Rob, who had been sleeping peacefully with his head in the shade of the apple tree and his feet in the sun, yawned and sat up. ‘Ready to go, love?’ he asked.
‘Mm-hmm,’ said Anna, removing one of Mum’s straw gardening hats from over her nose and stretching like a cat. ‘Thank you, Maggie, it’s been a gorgeous day.’
‘Beautiful, aren’t they?’ Mike said, watching them wander off hand in hand.
‘And deliriously happy,’ said Mum as she struggled out of her new Christmas hammock. ‘Although I wish Anna would eat more. Would you two like a cold drink?’
‘Sounds good,’ Mike said.
I put down Daddy-Long-Legs, with which I had spent a pleasant hour, and stood up. ‘No thanks, I think I’ll go down to the beach. Anyone want to come?’
They didn’t, and I went down the garden, let myself through the gate in the camellia hedge and turned up the estuary path towards the coast. People lay in deckchairs on the lawns of the houses I passed and the McKinnon extended family was playing rounders on the smooth hard sand at the mouth of the estuary.
I skirted the rounders game and walked along the edge of the sea, little waves foaming and hissing around my ankles. It was a lovely day, I didn’t have to be anywhere but here, and I was the proud new owner of a state-of-the-art running top, a sleek chrome iPod docking station and Jill Dupleix’s latest cookbook. Life was good.
The south end of the beach was crowded but, since ninety-five per cent of beachgoers never go further than fifty metres from the car park steps, I had a good two-kilometre stretch to myself. Selecting a promising bit of sea, I checked my underwear to make sure it wasn’t the see-through-when-wet kind, left my skirt and top in a little heap on the sand and ran out into the surf.
The Pretty Delicious Cafe Page 6
