Haere Mai

4

Haere Mai

    “There! Isn’t that them?” exclaimed Jake Carrano, pointing.

    Polly Carrano, who was rather sleepy, and rather keen to get back to her three-month-old twins, jerked to attention. “Where? Yes, it is; thank goodness!” She smiled and waved; way back in the far purlieus of the Auckland International Airport Hamish spotted her, and waved back.

    “Crikey!” she added with a sigh of relief. “I was beginning to think they weren’t on the plane!”

    Jake looked at her narrowly; she was feeding the twins herself, with a supplementary bottle: they were greedy little buggers, and although she claimed to be fit as a flea, she did get pretty tired—poor old milch cow! “Tired, sweetheart?”

    “Just a bit—I could do with a nap.” She leaned on his solid arm and added cheerfully: “The old udders are feeling a bit full, too—it’s about time for the next feed.”

    If they’d been alone Jake would have said something pretty ripe in reply to that one; and maybe done something, too, for his Pol in milk, he had to admit, turned him on like Hell; but with this bloody crowd milling round them... Not to mention Pol’s funny little cousin, gawping at the appendages in question with her eyes on stalks!

    Mirry was used to the extreme modesty, not to say prudishness, practised by her older sisters in such matters; she wrenched her eyes away from Polly’s breasts and said weakly: “They must be just about the last ones off.”

    “Yeah; the last, I reckon,” agreed Jake.

    Trembling inwardly, Mirry looked in the direction of the Macdonalds, and said: “They’ve got an awful lot of luggage.” She was in an agony of embarrassment. She hadn’t known what to say when Polly had buttonholed her after dinner at their place and said she must come with them and meet Hamish and his family at the airport, because she’d got on so well with Hamish when she’d met him last year, hadn’t she? Polly of course hadn’t the faintest idea what Mirry’s casual report last March of Aw, yeah, Hamish was at the house, and they’d got on okay, he was okay, really, wasn’t he? had masked.

    Mirry had been terrified of arousing Polly’s suspicions by turning down the invitation. She felt sick, and very trembly; on top of this was an awful fizzing excitement which if anything was making her feel sicker. She hadn’t had any breakfast, she hadn’t been able to force a thing down—besides which, they’d had to get up at the crack of dawn, practically, to drive all the way from Pohutukawa Bay to the airport. And then the plane had been late: Jake had got awfully cross, and made her and Polly sit down, and got them both coffee and croissants; but she hadn’t been able to face her croissant, so Polly had eaten it as well as her own. –It had been really weird: first she’d removed the slices of cheese and ham from the croissants, and put them on the side of her plate, then she’d eaten the croissants like gingernuts: dipping them in her coffee! And making an awful mess. Mirry had looked sideways at Jake, but he’d seemed totally unmoved by his wife’s extraordinary behaviour.

    The arriving passengers were cordoned off from those meeting them by a huge array of barriers, apathetically manned by an elderly airport security man. Jake looked at him of the corner of his eye. Was it worth taking the chance of nipping over the barriers to help the Macdonalds with their luggage? Better not: last thing a lactating mum wanted was bloody great headlines shouting “Latest Carrano Scandal: Millionaire Arrested By Airport Security!”, or some such bloody thing. On the strength of it he gave her a bit of a squeeze.

    Polly swallowed a little sigh. Part of the reason she’d asked Mirry to come with them was that she felt she’d need some support when she had to meet Sylvie Macdonald: she knew, though none of their mutual relations did, that Hamish had married the woman on the rebound from an affaire in Paris. She and Hamish had both been in Paris that year: he’d been on some sort of visiting fellowship and she’d been there basically because their mutual relatives were bats. Old Uncle Jack Mitchell had left her a bit of money and Aunty Vi had thought it’d do her French good to have a few months over there staying with her own old friend Mlle Duplessis, that she knew from their mutual days as Unesco typists in the Dark Ages, only then the old bird had dropped off the twig. By this time Polly had had almost a year at varsity but she was still just short of her eighteenth birthday. Aunty Vi had done her nut and tried to say that she mustn’t go after all, only Aunty Mary, Hamish’s mum, had immediately written to say that Hamish would be over there on a visiting fellowship that year and of course Polly must stay with him! Mum was just as innocent as Aunty Mary, she hadn’t raised objections, though she had earlier had a bawling fit at the idea of “little Polly” going overseas. Polly would have gone anyway, but having somewhere to stay jacked up made it a lot easier. So she’d done it. Hamish had treated her as if she was about fourteen and dumb with it, but who cared? Anyway, she hadn’t seen much of him, because he’d taken up with an extremely glamorous Frenchwoman who was a political scientist like him, and had spent very little time at all at the flat, leaving her to the tender mercies of the two gay guys who also shared it—the initial arrangement for a different flat entirely having fallen through at the last moment. Polly hadn’t cared: her and Jean-Claude and his friend Thierry had a great time, all of them fervently agreeing that Hamish and the girlfriend were too stuck-up for words.

    She looked gloomily at the crowds that still separated them from the Macdonalds. What made it worse was that she knew that Hamish had been not-quite-engaged to Sylvie that year. Ugh. He’d only gone back to her because the glamorous and sophisticated Francine had rejected out of hand a suggestion that she might like to relocate to Edinburgh—the man was nuts, of course: French people couldn’t think of places outside France as real, for one, and for two, she had a really good job in Paris. Ruddy Hamish was the sort that had to get stuff off his conscience—regardless of what the other person might feel about it, naturally—and so he’d confessed all to Sylvie, into the bargain informing her that Polly knew all about it. Ouch. Then of course he’d written to tell her what he’d done! Funnily enough she'd have been much happier not knowing that Sylvie knew that she knew about the affaire.

    It might have been supposed that Polly’s very solid, handsome husband could have provided her with more than enough moral support; but she was uneasily aware that Jake, though he had seemed to like Hamish when he’d met him last year, was a bit jealous of him: no doubt because Hamish was a good ten years younger than him, and a fellow academic that he imagined she must have more in common with than she did with him, the twit! His supposed intellectual inferiority was an idée fixe with Jake, who’d left school at fifteen and made his first million by the time he was thirty; Polly knew there was no use trying to talk him out of it, so she didn’t try.

    “Here we go!” said Jake cheerfully. Hamish had abandoned his wife and child and their trolleys of luggage and was approaching the tiny gap in the barriers with the third trolley. Jake began to force his way through the still-milling crowd of Rabbit’s friends and relations to help him. Polly and Mirry followed silently in his wake.

    “...and you’ve met young Mirry, of course, haven’t you?” said Jake cheerfully, putting his arm around the cringing little figure.

    Hamish turned from Polly’s friendly hug. His heart was thumping ridiculously hard and his mouth felt dry. “Aye—how’re you?”

    “Hullo, Hamish,” said Mirry in a little squeaky voice, going scarlet. She was absolutely sure he must be thinking that she’d come on purpose, that she was chasing him, or something!

    But Hamish, being only a simple male creature after all, thought nothing of the sort; he looked into the slanted brown eyes, listened to the fizzing in his blood, and went scarlet, too.

    Fortunately neither Jake nor Polly noticed anything: Jake was busily rearranging the pile of luggage in the trolley in a more manageable fashion, and Polly was peering past Hamish, trying to see whether Sylvie was looking as cross as she’d thought she was... Yes, she was. Oh, dear!

    “Hullo, Polly,” said Sylvie drily, once she and Elspeth had been liberated from their trolleys. “It’s been a long time.” She didn’t offer an embrace.

    “Hullo, Sylvie, how are you? You’re looking well,” said Polly untruthfully. Help, she looked terrible! Of course it had been a long flight, and she had on a tweed skirt and a woolly jumper in the appalling humidity of the airport, but... She never used to be that yellow-looking, did she? she thought with some dismay and not a little pity. Of course, she was a bit older than Hamish, she’d be about forty-four by now, but still...

    Sylvie made a dry Scotch noise in reply to this conventional remark and added in a voice that didn’t sound as if it were paying a compliment: “You haven’t changed, Polly.” Privately she was thinking that it was a pity she hadn’t changed—that get-up; and that hair! How old was the woman, for Heaven’s sake? She must be in her thirties, surely?

    Polly in fact had had her thirtieth birthday three days after the birth of her twins, and had been feeling chirpy enough not only to thoroughly enjoy the enormous fuss her doting husband had made of her, but to insist on his dismantling the huge bank of flowers he’d had installed in her private room for the occasion and distributing them amongst the other nursing mothers. Knowing how hot the airport always was, she was wearing a sleeveless white broderie Anglaise blouse over a pair of baggy denim shorts. Her long tanned legs were bare, and charmingly taut and shapely above a pair of high-heeled pink sandals. The long, glossy, sun-streaked brown hair was swept up in a huge pink plastic clip, and tumbled in a mass of careless curls down her left shoulder. She wore no make-up except a lip-gloss and her honey-tan, oval face was highlighted by a perfectly natural peachy flush. Tiny green earrings completed the picture. It was small wonder that the hot, tired, cross and nervous Sylvie looked at this vision with sour resentment, and told herself acidly, noting the way Polly’s bosom was straining at the lacy blouse’s buttons, that that garment was scarcely decent! She was so absorbed in her critique that she didn’t even notice the small, nervous figure of Mirry by Polly’s side, and jumped when her husband’s voice said: “And this is Elspeth.”

    Taking her cue from her mother, Elspeth glared at Polly.

    “Hullo, Elspeth, it’s nice to meet you,” said Polly serenely, not offering an embrace.

    Elspeth was now nine and, as the three New Zealanders instantly registered, old enough to know better; she uttered a whimpering noise, and shrank against her mother’s tweed skirt.

    A wave of irritation swept through Sylvie. “Stand up straight and say ‘How do you do’ to your Aunty Polly!” she snapped.

    Elspeth was so stunned at this sudden about-face of her ancient ally that she did.

    In the big silver Mercedes she looked about her with interest. “Look, what’s that funny writing?”

    Sylvie, lying back in the back seat with her eyes closed, didn’t respond. Elspeth turned to interrogate her father.

    “Daddy—look at that funny writing! ‘Here mai’.” She gave a scornful giggle. “That’s not how you spell ‘here’!”

    “Eh?” Hamish twisted to peer somewhat blearily at the sign that had just sped past them on the airport road. “Oh—no: it’s ‘Haere mai’; it’s Maori; it, uh, it means ‘Welcome’, I think.”

    He was then brought to the rather horrifying realization that not only did his nine-year-old daughter not have the faintest idea of what “Maori” meant, she didn’t have the faintest conception of what a foreign language was. She resisted crossly his attempt to explain that in different languages words were not pronounced the way they looked in English.

    From the front passenger’s seat the linguist said with a tiny choke of laughter: “Never mind, Hamish; she’s a bit young to understand; she’ll get used to the idea when she starts going to school.”

    Sylvie, almost asleep, jerked herself awake at that and said sharply: “What do you mean?”

    Polly replied in mild surprise : “She’ll learn about Maori language and customs, of course; they have quite strong Taha Maori courses in the primary schools these days.”

    Sylvie’s mouth tightened. Privately she determined that her daughter was not going to attend any school where they encouraged the children to waste their time on that sort of primitive nonsense.

    Elspeth, now bored with the whole subject, had resumed her study of the view along the airport road. “Ooh, look: a horse!”

    Polly agreed tranquilly that it was a horse, and pointed out a cow on the other side of the road.

    Elspeth wriggled and goggled. “What’s it doing?”

    “Eating grass.”

    “You can’t eat grass!”

    “Cows can: they’ve got special stomachs.”

    There was silence in the back seat.

    Sylvie drifted off into a doze again; Hamish went on thinking about Mirry, not knowing if he was glad or sorry that she’d volunteered to go in the taxi that Jake had hired to take the bulk of their luggage, and show the driver the way.

    “Look, Elspeth,” said Polly, “there’s a goat.”

    It was on a long chain at the side of the road, gnawing away at the long grass of the verge.

    “It’s eating grass, isn’t it?”

    “Yes; goats like grass.”

    “Why is it tied up like that?”

    “So as it won’t run away. It might go on the road and get run over.”

    Elspeth giggled. “Silly goat!”

    Polly giggled too. Encouraged, Elspeth undid her seatbelt, half stood up and leaned her elbows on the back of Polly’s seat.

    “OY! You—Small Change! Siddown and do up that seat-belt!” rumbled the driver in his deepest bass.

    Flushing and furious, Elspeth subsided, thinking crossly that Uncle Jake was awfully bossy. Her father came out of his reverie with a start, and did up her seatbelt tightly, scowling.

    “You see, Elspeth,” Polly explained kindly, twisting rather uncomfortably in the grip of her own seatbelt: “if Jake had to stop suddenly and you didn’t have your seatbelt on you might be thrown right through the windscreen.”

    Elspeth looked with interest at the windscreen and said: “Would I be killed?”

    Hamish opened his mouth to say something euphemistic and soothing: Sylvie didn’t believe in exposing those of tender years to the more unpleasant facts of life—or, come to that, to any of the facts of life.

    “Yes, probably,” replied Polly calmly.

    Hamish looked quickly at Sylvie, but she was asleep, with her mouth open.

    “Dead?”

    “Dead as mutton!” rumbled the driver cheerfully.

    Elspeth giggled; and to her father’s surprise attempted neither to undo her seatbelt again nor to argue with her host and hostess.

    “Are we going over that bridge?” was next.

    “Yes,” replied Jake, “and we’ll be going over a bigger one, later on.”

    “Ooh!” She peered about her eagerly. “That’s a river, isn’t it?”

    “No, it’s the sea,” replied Polly.

    Elspeth glared at the tranquil inlet before her and said aggressively: “Where are the waves, then?”

    “Round on the coast: that’s where the beaches are,” said Polly simply.

    Hamish had opened his mouth angrily to order his daughter to stop asking silly questions. He shut it again.

    “Look—there’s a ship over there at the wharf,” put in Jake.

    Elspeth stared, wriggled, and asked him what sort of a ship it was. Jake replied with a succinct lecture on the economic geography of the Manukau Harbour. Elspeth subsided.

    They had crossed the low bridge, which was really more like a causeway, and were running through some pleasant suburbs, when Polly looked at her watch, sighed, and said: “I’m awfully hungry.”

    “Wanna stop for an ice cream, sweetheart?”

    “Mm—if you don’t mind, Jake; it seems absolutely ages since breakfast.”

    “Poor old milch cow!” he returned, laying his left hand fleetingly on her right knee.

    Polly gave a tiny, happy sigh. Unexpectedly a wave of jealous misery swept through Hamish: the Carranos’ very obvious happiness was such a contrast to the bitter sterility of his own marriage... Scowling horribly, he glared out at the lush suburban gardens.

    Elspeth pulled at his sleeve and hissed: “Daddy—he called her a cow!”

    Jake laughed. “That’s because she’s full of milk for her babies!”

    Elspeth ignored the reference to milk, which she didn’t understand, and said to Polly: “Have you got babies?”

    “Yes, I’ve got twins.”

    “Where are they?” she demanded, glaring suspiciously.

    “They’re at home; a nice lady’s looking after them; you’ll see them when we get there.”

    “Don’t ask so many questions, Elspeth,” said her father feebly.

    “I don’t mind, Hamish; if she doesn’t ask, she’ll never learn, will she?” returned Polly mildly.

    Quickly Elspeth asked Polly: “Are we going to live in your house?”

    Why the Hell hadn’t her mother told the poor little brat what was going on? “Just for a while; until you find a house of your own.”

    Jake was slowing down near a little clump of shops; Hamish said weakly: “You’ll/ like it at Polly’s house, Elspeth; they’ve got a swimming-pool in their garden,”

    Elspeth gave a scornful laugh. “People don’t have swimming-pools in their gardens! You’re silly, Daddy!”

    “She’s only ever been to the public baths,” Hamish explained to his cousins, flushing.

    The grinning Jake drew up outside a dairy and said to Elspeth: “Lots of people in New Zealand have their own swimming-pools; you’ll see!”

    “Are we in New Zealand now?”

    Eh? Why the Hell hadn’t her parents told the poor little sprat what was going on? “That’s right!” he responded cheerfully. “Come on—you want an ice cream?”

    Elspeth had just opened her mouth to whine for one. She shut it abruptly, and nodded convulsively.

    The traffic was heavy going over the Harbour Bridge; Sylvie, who had woken for long enough to disclaim crossly any desire for an ice cream, was asleep again; Polly and Jake, after an unsuccessful attempt to draw Hamish out about the journey, were telling him about accommodation up the Hibiscus Coast; Elspeth, very much accustomed to being the centre of her tiny world, began to pout.

    “Look: there’s a ship! Aunty Polly, there’s a ship!” she burst out.

    “Yes; but don’t interrupt Uncle Jake,” responded Polly calmly.

    “Aye; go on, Jake,” added Hamish grimly.

    Elspeth’s lower lip quivered.

    They were on the next stretch of motorway and Hamish, who’d forgotten just how far it was to Pohutukawa Bay, was feeling thankful that he’d had that ice cream—fattening and full of cholesterol though it undoubtedly had been—and wondering uneasily how Elspeth, who’d burst into tears at the sight of Air New Zealand’s breakfast of odd, thin sausage, reconstituted-looking scrambled egg and bread roll, was going to hold out without food for the rest of the way, when she began to whine: “I want to go to the lavvy; Daddy, I want to go to the lavvy...”

    “Well, you can’t: I’m on the motorway,” said Jake calmly. “You’ll just have to hang on.”

    “But I’m desperate!” wailed Elspeth.

    “You wanna go on the grass? I could pull in for a bit,” he suggested helpfully.

    Elspeth stared out sulkily at the fields on either side of the motorway.

    “Elspeth!” said her father sharply. “Answer your Uncle Jake!”

    Elspeth burst into tears, amidst which they dimly perceived a sobbing explanation that people didn’t go on the grass; horses and cows and animals did! Polly, who was a country girl, attempted unsuccessfully to repress a snort of laughter.

    The red and perspiring Hamish said desperately to his host: “I’m sorry, Jake; she doesn’t—I mean—she’s not used to—”

    “I’ll stop in Albany,” returned Jake, grinning. “’S not far.”

    The silver Merc slid to a halt outside the big, sprawling house. Sylvie woke up with a start.

    “Is this your house?” asked Elspeth suspiciously.

    “Yes, this is our house,” said Polly happily.

    Elspeth and her mother stared at the low sprawl of pale stone and terracotta tiling with identical expressions of unbelieving distaste.

    “Where’s the swimming-pool?” demanded Elspeth aggressively.

    “Round the back,” replied Jake mildly.

    “Can I swim in it?”

    “Can you swim?” he returned with a grin.

    “Sort of,” she said sulkily.

    “Then you can swim in it so long as someone else is with you,” he said, fishing in the glove compartment for the remote control.

    “She doesn’t like the water,” put in Sylvie.

    “Yes, I do! I do! I want to go in the swimming-pool!” cried Elspeth, beginning to work herself up into a state.

    “Well, you won’t be going into it if you carry on like that,” said Uncle Jake grimly; unseen by his courtesy-niece, the wide mouth twitched.

    Sylvie had opened her door; Jake said quickly: “No, don’t get out, Sylvie: we’ll go into the garage and through into the house from there.”

    Sylvie’s sallow cheeks reddened; mutely she shut her door as the big garage door swung up.

    “Ooh!” cried Elspeth. “Look! It goes up all by itself!”

    “No,” said Hamish crossly, “of course it doesn’t, silly: Uncle Jake did it.”

    Red and pouting, Elspeth opened her mouth to contradict him;

    Hurriedly Jake explained how the remote worked. “You wanna try? Look, I’ll close it again for you.” The door swung silently down.

    “Can I undo my seatbelt?” said Elspeth in a small voice.

    “Eh? Aw—yeah, it’s all right now,” he conceded, smothering a laugh.

    Ecstatically Elspeth undid her seatbelt, stood up, leaned right over the front seats, and made Uncle Jake’s garage door go up and down several times, until her mother said in an exhausted voice: “That’s enough, now, Elspeth; let’s all get inside, for Heaven’s sake!”

    Very red and pouting, Elspeth flopped down onto her seat again.

    “Never mind, Elspeth: you can work it some other time,” said Polly in a dreamy voice.

    Suddenly Hamish put his arm round the stiff little figure.

    “Can I really, Daddy?” she whispered.

    “Yes, of course; Aunty Polly doesn’t say things she doesn’t mean.”

    “Oh,” said Elspeth thoughtfully.

    Sylvie sat limply on one of the twin beds while Hamish investigated the adjoining bathroom that Polly called “the ensuite”.

    “I think I’ll take a shower,” he announced, emerging and starting to open a case.

    “Not that one—that’s mine!” she said crossly.

    Silently Hamish investigated another case. It was full of household linen. He opened the third case. Elspeth’s winter clothes. “Damn!”

    Sylvie looked at him listlessly. “You’ll just have to wait until the rest of the luggage arrives.”

    “The Hell with that!” A white terrycloth robe was laid neatly at the end of each bed; he grabbed one. “I’ll wear this.”

    “You will not! What will they think of you?”

    He looked with distaste at her yellow, sweating face and sticky woollen jumper. “That I’ve got a damn sight more sense than you have.”

    Sylvie ignored this. “Well, get on with it, then; and then go and find Elspeth, for Heaven’s sake!”

    “She’s all right: she’s with Polly,” he replied, vanishing into the bathroom.

    The fact that she was with Polly was, of course, precisely what was disturbing her mother: the twin boys’ proud father had dragged his visitors into the nursery to view his offspring before letting them escape to their own rooms to wash and change before lunch.

    Elspeth had stared, and said loudly: “Are those your babies?”

    “Yes,” said Polly happily, picking up Johnny. “Aren’t they lovely?”

    “Come and look at them; they won’t bite ya!” said Jake cheerfully, picking up Davey, who made a gurgling noise. “This is Davey, and that’s Johnny!” He kissed his eldest son’s head gently.

    Elspeth approached in unwilling fascination. Her mother hovered grimly by the door.

    Jake held his son’s plump fist and waved it at Elspeth. “Hullo, Elspeth!” he said in a squeaky voice. “I’m Davey!”

    Elspeth smiled reluctantly and touched the tiny paw. The little fingers closed round her forefinger.

    “He’s holding my finger!” she said in an awed voice.

    Hamish came up behind her and said: “Yes—he is human, you know!”

    Ignoring this rubbish, she said to Jake in an important voice: “I know a baby.”

    “’Z’at so?”

    “Elspeth!” said her mother in exasperation. “Don’t tell such tarradiddles!”

    “I do, too!” said Elspeth indignantly. “It belongs to Mrs Macrae in our street!”

    Polly had sat down on a low chair. She kissed the soft fawn fuzz on Johnny’s head and said: “Is it a boy or a girl?”

    “It’s a girl, and it wears a wee pink bonnet, and it’s name’s Margaret!” said Elspeth defiantly.

    “That’s a nice name,” said Polly dreamily, beginning to undo her blouse.

    Sylvie looked at her in horror. “Come along, Elspeth, we’ll away to our rooms—leave Aunty Polly in peace!”

    But Polly gave her a dreamy smile and said: “She can stay if she likes, Sylvie.”

    From behind Sylvie the housekeeper said: “Yes; probably she’d like to see Polly feed the babies; my kids always love to watch.”

    “Ah! Got the bottles, Daph?” exclaimed Jake, before Sylvie could respond to this scandalous remark—and from the housekeeper, too! Well, she’d always thought that Polly Mitchell was dead common. But really!

    “Yes, here we are,” replied Daphne Green, bustling past Sylvie—without a by-your-leave—with two feeding bottles.

    Elspeth said to Polly: “Mrs Macrae’s got a bottle for her baby.”

    “Has she?” Polly replied dreamily, undoing her nursing bra and releasing a big, round, honey-coloured breast with a huge nipple.

    Elspeth stared, grey-green eyes enormous in the little pale face.

    Sylvie couldn’t stand it a minute longer. “Well, I’ll away to my room if you don’t mind—if you wouldn’t mind showing me, Mrs Green?”

    “Yes, you go, Daph, we can manage,” said Jake, sitting down with a baby tucked in the crook of his muscular right arm. He picked up a bottle in his left hand. “Come on, now, Davey...” Davey thought Mum was a lot nicer than bottles: he gave a protesting whimper.

    Doing her best to look neutral, the partisan Daphne Green led the cross-looking little Scotswoman off to her room.

    Sylvie was fortunately out of earshot when her daughter said in a horrified squeak: “He’s eating you!”

    Polly looked up with a start. The thin little face had gone scarlet: tears of shock had sprung to the wide eyes.

    “No, he’s just sucking; he’s drinking my milk; I’ve got milk in my—uh—breasts.” Goodness knew what little Scottish girls might call them in their vernacular! “Doesn’t Mrs Macrae feed her baby like this?”

    Elspeth had only ever encountered friendly young Mrs Macrae in the street, but wasn’t going to admit it. She shook her head.

    “Look,” said Polly gently: “you come and sit by me—bring that little stool over, eh?—and I’ll show you.”

    Timidly Elspeth squatted beside Polly and listened to a rather simplified explanation of how mothers with new babies made milk in their breasts—is that what you call them, in Scotland?

    “Titties,” said Elspeth, who had spent more time with “common” children than her mother had any suspicion of.

    Jake gave a snort of laughter. Hamish, who’d been a helpless bystander during the whole scene, suddenly said: “Aye—that’s right: titties. Your mummy had milk in her titties when you were born, you know.”

    Knowing perfectly well that Mummy didn’t even let you say that word, Elspeth looked at him very, very doubtfully.

    “Yes, that’s right!” said a cheerful voice from the doorway. Daphne Green, having disposed of Sylvie as fast as she decently could, had returned to the nursery. “I’ve got three children,” she explained. “Two boys and a girl; I fed them all myself.”

    “Like that?”

    “Yes, of course.” She smiled at the anxious little face—good Heavens, she was a thin little thing, wasn’t she? Her own Chrissy was skinny enough, but this little Scotch girl! What on earth did they feed them on, over there? “Would you like to come down to the kitchen and help me with the lunch?”

    Elspeth looked doubtfully at Polly and said in a very small voice: “Can I stay?”

    “Yes, of course, darling,” said Polly dreamily; Johnny was well glued on, so she put her free arm round the skinny little thing. Jake looked on in amusement: Polly wasn’t much given to casual endearments; she musta gone into a nursing mode!

    Sylvie, now lying on her bed with a damp cloth on her head, greeted her daughter’s subsequent breathless recital with annoyance. “That’ll do, Elspeth!”

    The taxi of luggage had at last arrived: Hamish was unpacking his case. He straightened. “Come on, Elspeth: we’ll go along to your room and find you something cooler to wear, shall we?”

    Elspeth looked doubtfully at her mother.

    “Oh, go on!” said Sylvie in irritation. “Just leave me in peace!”

    Still looking dubious, Elspeth took Hamish’s hand. “Why is Mummy cross?” she said in the passage.

    “Oh, well,” he said weakly, “she’s just tired, I suppose.”

    “I wasna telling fairy stories!” she said suddenly. “The babies did each have a turn!”

    “Aye, that’d be right,” he agreed.

    Clinging tightly to his hand, Elspeth didn’t reply; but she gave a sudden little skip.

    In bed that night, sturdy Jake Carrano said to his tall, voluptuous wife: “Miserable little scrap, isn’t she, eh?”

    “Elspeth? Yes, poor wee thing.”

    “Have to feed her up a bit,” he rumbled.

    “She is naturally slight; she does ballet, Sylvie said.”

    “Needs a bit more meat on her bones, though,” he murmured, cuddling up.

    “Yes; we’ll have to see she gets plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables,” agreed Polly. She’d been horrified to see Elspeth’s pouting refusal of the huge salad platter that Daph had prepared for lunch before hurrying off to collect her two little boys from Play Group. The array of fresh fruit presented for dessert had also been spurned; Elspeth had ended up consuming a quantity of white bread and butter and a huge helping of the ice cream that Polly had offered her as a last resort. The fact itself had been bad enough—but that her mother had let her get away with it! Still—her first day in a foreign country... Perhaps Sylvie was just letting her settle down.

    “Bit pale, isn’t she?” he rumbled.

    “Ye-ah; but they’ve come straight out from Scotland; and Hamish’s skin is awfully pale...”

    “That reminds me! Did you see ’im when young Mirry gave him ’is drink out on the patio, this arvo? Went as red as a beet! You reckon he fancies her?”

    “Maybe,” agreed Polly thoughtfully. Hamish had said, from his position on the sun-lounger “What is it?”—to which Mirry had replied, in a funny voice, now she came to think of it: “Rum and pineapple juice.” It was at that point that Hamish had gone as red as a beet. “She wouldn’t stay for tea,” she added.

    “Ya reckon she fancies him?”

    “I hope not,” said Polly, with a sigh.

    “Why not? Do ’im good!” chuckled Jake, beginning to nuzzle her.

    “I wouldn’t like to see Mirry made unhappy,” replied Polly seriously.

    “Dare say it won’t come to anything. Wouldn’t think he’d have the guts to make a pass.”

    Polly yawned. “No-o,” she replied doubtfully.

    “You’re tired,” he decided sadly. He rolled away from her and turned on his side.

    “Not that tired, dopey!” she said with a little laugh.

    He turned over quickly, but said doubtfully: “You sure, darling?”

    “’Course I am—come on!”

    “I’m dying to,” he mumbled, kissing her neck. “I was dying to earlier, too: when you were giving the babies their lunch.”

    “I noticed!” said Polly with a chuckle.

    “Is it still safe?”

    “Aw... I dunno.”

    “Jesus, Pol!” He sat up in exasperation and switched on the bedside lamp. “Where the Hell’s that bloody calendar?” He retrieved it from the bedside table, counted laboriously, breathing hard, consulted the date on his watch, and heaved a sigh of relief. “Yeah. ’Bout three days till your period.”

    “I’m sorry, Jake; I keep losing track.”

    He laughed. “Poor old milch cow!”

    “I feel all warm and dopey all the time,” she explained.

    Jake Carrano, very red in the face, got on top of his beautiful wife without further ado and shot his sperm furiously.

    “You’ve been bottling that lot up for a while,” she concluded in a thoughtful voice.

    He’d got back from an unavoidable three-day business trip to Wellington very late the night before—too late to disturb a snoring nursing mother. He laughed unsteadily at this echo of one of his own phrases. “Want me to—?”

    “Yes, please, darling!”

    Mrs Jake Carrano then got some of the very satisfactory “one way or another” that her little cousin Mirry had learned about in that very house, almost a year before.

    Exhausted after the sleepless flight across the Pacific, Sylvie lay on her back, snoring.

    In the other twin bed Hamish tossed and turned. Whenever he closed his eyes he got a ghastly sensation of roaring through the night in a jumbo jet; and her snoring didn’t help! After a while visions of Mirry that he’d so far almost successfully repressed surged their way into his consciousness. He struggled silently with them for quite some time, heart thumping, skin starting to sweat—in spite of Jake’s air conditioning, which kept the big house at quite a pleasant temperature—and getting stiffer and stiffer.

    Outside in the Reserve across the road a morepork called. Hamish jumped. Sylvie’s snoring stopped abruptly, then started up again—irritatingly, on a slightly different note. Stealthily he got up and got himself a glass of water from the ensuite bathroom. His pyjamas were clammy and horrible; crossly he discarded them. Let her say what she liked, tomorrow morning: he didn’t give a damn! He went slowly back to bed, removed the light blanket, and crawled under the sheet. Sylvie was still snoring. Hamish jammed the pillow over his head and eventually drifted off into an uneasy sleep, where nightmare jumbo jets chased him down unending corridors in some dark, unknowable castle.

    In her pretty little room further down the corridor Elspeth slept deeply, thumb in her mouth, curled on her side, clutching a very old teddy bear that Aunty Polly had said was her own Teddy when she was a little girl, and Elspeth could borrow him—just for a loan. At her feet was an old grey cat whose name was Grey. Aunty Polly said he liked sleeping on little girls’ beds. Next to Grey was the fuzzy cat nightie-case that Daddy had bought her. Aunty Polly had found it in her suitcase and known at once what it was, and put it in the right place.

    She slept from eight o’clock in the evening to ten o’clock the following morning, slight form scarcely raising the pretty yellow blanket that matched the curtains and the flowers on the wallpaper, worn out by her travels and the bewildering host of new impressions that had been thrust upon her in what was, as Uncle Jake had assured her as she peered from an upstairs window at his extensive property, “still New Zealand.”

    The hostel on Puriri Campus was almost empty, because term didn’t start for another two weeks. Mirry ate her dinner listlessly in the company of a couple of Malaysian students who kept asking questions about the local tourist attractions, and a fat-faced, spotty boy from Te Awamutu, who kept trying to tell her just why he’d decided, after a terrific struggle with his conscience, not to go to Theological School after all.

    After tea they all watched TV. The Malaysians kept complaining that the reception was terrible, and trying to tune the set in; the boy from Te Awamutu explained virtuously why his parents wouldn’t have one in the house. Annoyingly, he had red hair. Mirry got crosser and crosser. Finally she said loudly and angrily: “What are they? A couple of weirdoes, or something?” and marched off to bed. There she had an extensive crying jag, and finally fell asleep about two in the morning, having come to the decision that she hated all men, and she hated him, and she was never going to have anything else to do with him as long as she lived! The “him” in question not, of course, being the red-haired boy from Te Awamutu.

Next chapter:

https://themembersoftheinstitute.blogspot.com/2023/01/setting-up.html