She was still asleep, her head turned away on the pillow and her skin as pale as wax. Having spent five minutes entirely absorbed by the miracle of Matt actually loving me back, it was a fresh shock to see her. I moved her water glass within easy reach and smoothed a pillow and then, because I really couldn’t put it off any longer, I went slowly back down the hall to the kitchen.
‘Josie,’ said Kim, prodding my cooling lasagne in distaste, ‘why are you having jellymeat for tea?’
‘Dinner,’ her brother corrected, and smiled at me over her head with an expression that nearly made me throw myself back into his arms regardless of the audience.
‘Isn’t it the same thing?’ Andy enquired, crouching down to scratch Spud between the ears.
‘Aunty Rose always corrects us,’ I told him. ‘And she makes us say “white” not “wite”, and “milk” not “moolk”. If you really want to wind her up you just have to say “youse guys”.’
‘How is she?’ Kim asked.
‘Asleep.’
‘Does she know about you two?’
‘No.’
Kim looked speculative, and Matt said, ‘Wake her and die, Toad.’
‘I wouldn’t,’ she protested, all wounded dignity.
‘Come on,’ Andy told her, standing back up. Spud nosed his ankle hopefully in case he might start scratching again. ‘I’ll take you home.’
She made a face. ‘Nah, let’s hang out here for a bit.’
I sympathised; being chaperoned by the lovely Hazel would have to be fairly painful.
‘I’ll pay you to take her away,’ Matt said to Andy. ‘I don’t care where – your place is fine – just anywhere that isn’t here.’
Andy grinned. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Let’s go, Kim, I think we’re kind of in the way.’
‘Fine,’ said Kim. ‘I can take a hint.’ She bounced up on tiptoe to kiss my cheek. ‘Be gentle with him, Josie.’
I put my arms around her and hugged her. ‘Sometimes I’m not at all sure why I like you, Kimlet.’
‘Sometimes I’m not sure if I like her,’ Matt said.
The two of them pulled up their collars and went out into the wet dark, and then Andy poked his head back round the door to say awkwardly, ‘I won’t – um – do anything.’
‘Good luck with that,’ said Matt, trying not to smile and failing completely.
Andy muttered something inaudible and pulled the door closed.
I wondered briefly what sort of state Andy’s new flat was in. When I lived with him the dirty socks had tended to mount up in the corners of his room and fester, and Kim is a fastidious sort of girl. And then Matt pulled me back into his arms and I stopped thinking about anything except him.
‘I’ve wanted to do this ever since you came home,’ he said at last.
‘Then what on earth were you doing with Cilla?’ I asked.
He winced. ‘It wasn’t serious,’ he said. ‘And I didn’t think you’d be interested. You were damn near married to that pillock.’
I shivered. I was damn near married to Graeme – last year we had been talking in a half-hearted way about starting a family. And Graeme superintended my wardrobe and was snobbish about the wines he drank and when we went out for dinner he used to send back his meal two times out of three. And he sneered at Dolly Par-ton. No, Chrissie was welcome to him. ‘What a horrible thought.’ I leant my head into the comfortable hollow of his shoulder.
The dogs outside launched into their welcome chorus and I realised that the wind must have dropped for us to be able to hear them. ‘Why can’t everyone just piss off?’ I said savagely.
Matthew smiled and released me. ‘You need to eat something, anyway,’ he said. ‘Go and sit down.’
WHEN HIS MOTHER opened the door I was forking up mouthfuls of lukewarm lasagne while Matt pulled clean washing out of the machine in the opposite corner of the kitchen.
‘Hello, dears,’ she said, brushing the rain from the shoulders of a very smart red woollen coat. ‘I’m just on my way home from my Reiki class, and I couldn’t pass without popping in to see Rosie.’
‘She’s asleep,’ said Matt. ‘She’s had a pretty awful day.’
‘Oh,’ said Hazel vaguely. ‘Oh dear. I’ll come over in the morning. Perhaps she’ll feel better by then.’
Neither of us said anything in response to this – what planet was the woman inhabiting? Matt finished putting clean sheets in the washing basket and began to load dirty ones into the machine.
‘Goodness, Josie, that’s a hearty plateful!’
‘I’m very hungry,’ I said, feeling like a beefy peasant wench. ‘How was Reiki?’
‘Marvellous. So calming. It’s a great comfort.’ She smiled wanly. ‘Kimmy’s home, is she?’
‘She’s at Rachel’s place,’ said Matt with no hesitation at all. ‘She rang and asked me to let you know.’
‘That will be nice for her. It might take her mind off poor Rosie.’
‘I hope so,’ I murmured, seeing that Matt wasn’t going to bother to reply.
‘Matthew, love,’ said his mother, ‘I’ve got a leaking kitchen tap. Could you pop up and have a look at it?’
‘How about you call a plumber?’
‘I’m sure it will only be a teensy little job,’ she said. ‘I wake and hear it in the night and it’s so annoying.’
‘Mum,’ he said tightly, ‘I got up at four-thirty this morning, I had ten minutes for lunch and I’ve got to go and check a heifer before I go to bed. Call a plumber.’
Hazel’s lip trembled ominously. I didn’t think we could bear her broken-hearted sobbing tonight – I had been doing quite enough sobbing as it was.
‘It’s shattering, isn’t it?’ I said sympathetically. ‘You lie there waiting for the next drip to fall and you can’t get back to sleep. But if you put a facecloth in the sink underneath you can’t hear it anymore.’
Matt rolled his eyes, picked up the wood basket and vanished outside.
‘He doesn’t realise how much it hurts me when he’s so curt,’ his mother said sorrowfully.
‘He doesn’t mean it,’ I said. ‘It’s just calving. I expect every dairy farmer in the country is being rude to his mother just now.’
‘It’s Rose, too,’ she told me. ‘He’s such a dear boy, Josie; it’s tearing him apart to see her so unwell. Perhaps –’ she paused and looked at me with a Madonna-like expression of patient and loving reproach – ‘perhaps it might help if you didn’t expect him to dance attendance every spare minute, hmm?’
My hand clenched on the handle of my fork as I considered throwing it at her like a spear. I’ve got pretty good aim – I’d probably be able to get her in the side of the head from here. But the consequences wouldn’t be worth the fleeting satisfaction. I dropped my eyes to my plate and nodded.
‘You’re a sweet girl. I know you don’t mean to be selfish.’ Matt opened the door again and she stretched up to kiss his cheek, which must have been particularly annoying when he was holding an enormous load of very dense, heavy gum wood. ‘Goodnight, darling. I hope you feel better in the morning.’ And off she trotted.
‘Am I not feeling well?’ he asked, putting down the wood basket.
‘You mustn’t be, to be so curt with your adored and adoring mother.’
‘Ah.’ He opened the door of the stove and slung in a few more bits of wood, and Spud thudded his tail up and down on the floor in approval.
‘We’d better ring Kim and tell her she’s at Rachel’s so she can get her story straight,’ I remembered.
‘I’ll send her a text from across the road.’ He yawned widely. ‘I’d better go and look at my calving heifer. Will you still be up in an hour if I come back?’
‘I expect so,’ I said. ‘But you should go to bed – you’ll fall asleep on the tractor or something awful.’ I got up and went to put my arms around him.
‘I could come back and sleep with you,’ he said very quietly into my hair, and I shivered.
‘How much sl
eep d’you think we’d get?’
‘Some,’ said Matt cautiously. Then he sighed. ‘Better not. It’s not our house.’ He kissed me again, in a serious sort of way. ‘Oh, well. See you tomorrow.’
‘’Night,’ I said, somewhat unsteadily. And then, as he went out the kitchen door, ‘Matt?’
He turned and looked back at me. ‘Yeah?’
‘I love you.’
He didn’t say anything but smiled slowly, a smile of pure uncomplicated happiness. Then he pulled the door closed behind him.
AT TEN, WHEN I pushed open the door of Rose’s bedroom, she was lying awake with Verse Worth Remembering open beside her, looking at nothing in particular.
‘Hello, love,’ she said.
‘Hello.’ I pulled up a kitchen chair that stood against the bedroom wall for visitors to use and sat at her elbow. ‘You couldn’t eat something, could you?’
She shook her head. ‘I’ll eat in the morning. Promise.’
‘Had your pills yet?’
‘Not just yet. I wanted to find a poem first.’
I tucked my onesie-clad knees up under my chin. ‘Something all deep and meaningful, like “Crossing the Bar”?’
‘Never could bear Tennyson,’ she said weakly. ‘What a dreadful thing to admit. No, “The Walrus and the Carpenter”. My grandfather used to read it to me when I was small.’
‘I remember you reading it to Matt and me.’
‘Yes.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘You did so many nice things for us.’
‘I always wanted to make pleasant memories for you children. Things are so much more magical if you discover them when you’re small.’
We had hunted Woozles and made gingerbread houses and pricked barbary flowers to make the stamens close up and put grass straws down penny-doctor holes, waiting for them to tremble before carefully pulling out a small indignant insect.
‘You did,’ I said, and felt the tears prickle at the back of my eyes. ‘Aunty Rose, you said you didn’t want to be remembered like this. But we won’t – we’ll remember digging Heffalump traps and licking cake bowls and gin and tonic without the tonic.’
‘Good,’ she said, and closed her eyes.
‘Take your pills first,’ I suggested. ‘Are your pillows okay?’
‘Fine.’
She accepted the tablets and I settled back to wait while she went to sleep.
‘Go to bed, Josephine,’ she whispered a few minutes later.
‘I will in a minute. Aunty Rose?’
‘Mm?’
‘It turns out Matt’s in love with me too.’
She moved her head sleepily against the pillow. ‘Of course he is,’ she said. ‘Has been for years. Foolish children.’
Chapter 29
DURING AMBER’S LUNCH break the next day I was sitting behind the front desk in a warm, pink-tinged frame of mind that even the weather did nothing to dispel. The hiss of car tyres through the puddles was such a pleasant, cosy sound, and Heather Anne’s sign next door creaked in a friendly fashion as it swung on its rusted hooks. Aunty Rose had managed nearly a whole bottle of yoghurt for breakfast, and the district nurse, a good friend of hers, was due this afternoon. And tonight I would see Matt. Not even the unfortunate fact that Amber had spilt nail polish remover through the stationery drawer on her way out could take the sheen off my day.
I looked at the clock on the wall – it was ten past twelve. I thought for a moment and then picked up the phone.
Matt answered on the third ring. ‘Hello?’ I could hear the clatter of the bale feeder behind the tractor, slowing as he turned it off so as to be able to hear the phone.
‘Hey,’ I said. ‘It’s me.’
His voice warmed in an extremely gratifying manner. ‘Hey, you. What’s up?’
‘I was just wondering if there was any chance you’d have time for a lunch break today.’
‘Only four calves this morning,’ he said. ‘And no disasters yet, so it’s not impossible.’
‘Should I bring you a pie at about ten past one?’ I asked.
‘Two, please.’
‘Mince and cheese?’
‘Of course.’
‘Custard square?’
‘Need you ask?’
‘Very good,’ I said. ‘See you soon.’
As soon as Amber opened the door I leapt to my feet and bolted from the building. I had to wait an interminable two minutes at the bakery while the woman in front of me hunted through her purse in a futile search for the correct change – it was all I could do not to shout, ‘Eftpos! Have you not heard of eftpos, you stupid tart?’ I bought two mince and cheese and one potato-top pie, a custard square and an apple turnover, pretended not to see Clare strapping a small child into a pushchair on the other side of the street and dived back into the car.
It was sixteen past one when I got to Matt’s place. He opened the back door as I came across the lawn.
‘Hello,’ I said, handing him the lunch bag and feeling, quite suddenly, completely terrified.
‘Hello.’ He took my hand and pulled me inside out of the rain.
I hadn’t been inside this house for about twenty years. Back then it was rented to an elderly couple who kept Angora rabbits on the lawn – they used to let us feed the rabbits and then give us Nice biscuits and plastic beakers of tonic water, which I thought was delightfully exotic.
It hadn’t changed a lot. Matt’s gumboots and overalls were in a pile beside the door, and a row of coats and hats hung from nails hammered into the wall. The washroom led into a poky kitchen, the benches tiled in those nasty little olive-green tiles that form an uneven surface almost impossible to keep clean, and through the kitchen doorway I could see one corner of an equally small lounge papered in orange geometric designs. The seventies produced such awful home furnishings.
‘You were lucky,’ I told him, kicking my shoes off. ‘I got the last custard square.’
‘Thank you.’ He began to unpack the lunch. He had set the table with two plates, two knives and a plastic billy of milk, and a pair of mugs with the teabags already in place sat waiting on the bench beside the kettle. A great pile of accounts and Livestock Improvement folders that almost certainly covered the table a foot deep when he wasn’t entertaining had been stacked on the floor in a corner. Touched by this thoughtful hospitality, I slid one hand sideways along the kitchen bench and hooked my little finger over his.
He promptly turned and put his arms around me, and I relaxed against him with a little sigh of happiness. He pushed my chin up and kissed me for quite a long time. ‘Jose?’
‘Mm?’
‘Are you very hungry?’
‘No,’ I said dreamily. ‘Oh – have you talked to your mother yet?’
‘Not yet.’
‘I haven’t called Cheryl either. We’re very slack.’
‘I agree, but can we not talk about it right now?’
‘Sorry,’ I said, and kissed him again. His stubble was almost past the prickly stage – shaving, in calving season, is for special occasions only – and when he slid his hands up my bare arms the calluses on his palms were rough against my skin. Graeme had soft smooth hands with carefully maintained fingernails, and I wondered irrelevantly how I had ever been able to bear it.
‘When do you have to go?’ he asked several minutes later.
‘Hmm? Oh – quarter to, I suppose.’
He moved an arm to look at his watch. ‘One-twenty now,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘That’s a reasonable amount of time.’
I smiled. ‘A reasonable amount of time for what?’
‘Bed,’ said Matt succinctly.
I LATER DISCOVERED that his bedroom was as small and dingy and horribly wallpapered as the rest of the house. But that day I never even saw it. He had removed my Waimanu Physiotherapy vest and shirt by the time we reached the doorway, and I was trying, with hands that shook in an extremely frustrating way, to undo the zip on his jeans. We fell backwards across his unmade bed and tried to kiss
and wriggle out of our clothes and same time.
‘Hang on,’ he said breathlessly, rolling away from me. ‘Hang on, we can do better than this.’
‘I’m enjoying it,’ I protested.
He laughed and sat up. ‘I’ve been thinking about this for a really long time. I want to do it right.’ He slid both hands behind my back to find the catch on my bra.
‘I don’t think there’d be a wrong way to do it at this point.’ I ran my hands up his lean brown forearms, over all the little sharply defined muscles and tendons. To be honest, if he’d jerked his chin at me and barked, ‘You there! Legs apart!’ that would have been just fine.
‘At least –’ he broke off to kiss the hollow of my throat, which you wouldn’t have thought was a particularly sensitive spot, but it made me want to writhe and moan like someone in a tacky B-grade movie – ‘I want to take all your clothes off and look at you properly. You’re so lovely.’
I looked up at him and my heart contracted painfully. Of course I had loved Graeme – you don’t move in with someone you don’t care a lot about, or at least you shouldn’t – but this scruffy friend of mine with his slow voice and lazy crooked smile was the kindest, most attractive, best man I had ever known. ‘Whatever you want,’ I whispered. ‘Just say, Matt, I’ll do whatever you want.’
His pupils dilated abruptly, so that his eyes looked almost black. ‘God, Jo,’ he said, and pulled me tightly against him.
‘WHAT TIME IS it?’ I asked weakly.
‘Don’t know,’ Matt said. He sounded at least three-quarters asleep. ‘Can’t see, can’t move . . .’
With a truly heroic effort I pulled my left arm out from under his shoulders and squinted at my watch. It was, apparently, one fifty-two. ‘Crap!’ I leapt to my feet like an Olympic high-jumper and began to hunt feverishly for clothes.
‘What time is it?’ Matt asked, not moving at all.
‘Ten to two. Matt, help me, I’ve lost my shirt.’
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