Preliminary Skirmishes And Family Skeletons

3

Preliminary Skirmishes And Family Skeletons

    Veronica Cohen, who was never called Ronnie for short, was tall, blonde, handsome, thirty-five, and very bored. She looked round her smart little Sydney flat, made a hideous face at its trendy trelliswork, industrial glass tiles and leather upholstery, turned off the main light switch, turned off the switch that controlled the neon wall sculpture, and marched out, giving the door a good slam, ostensibly in order to make sure the latch caught, but actually to relieve her feelings. It was half-term, and as the prospect of going home to New Zealand to spend a week with her doting parents and Goddawful sisters was only a fraction more frightful than staying in Sidders and being taken out on boring dates by creepy males who started mauling you with their sweaty paws before the pudding course was over, meanwhile telling you how their wives didn’t understand them, she had shrugged, and decided she might as well do her duty and get it bloody over with.

    There’d been a frightful row when she hadn’t managed to get over for her nephew’s Bar-Mitzvah last term: as he was the only grandson after a generation of daughters followed by seven granddaughters, Sir Jerry Cohen had naturally expected the whole family to attend. Dad didn’t seem to have the faintest idea, Veronica had said sourly to herself, that since this crucial family celebration had coincided with the busiest period of his youngest daughter’s teaching year at the university she adorned “over there”, she couldn’t possibly get away for it. Not that Sir Jerry was religious himself: he only went to Temple on what Veronica, to her mother’s distress, referred to as “high days and holidays”—and not always then; although when it came to putting his hand in his pocket for anything the synagogue might need he wasn’t behind the door. No, organized religion, in Sir Jerry’s unexpressed but very firm opinion, was expressly invented to give the women something to keep them busy.

    Veronica had actually had a third choice for half-term, which was to go and stay with Tony Hamilton and his wife. But Tony, apparently on the grounds of being her very-much ex, after eighteen matrimonial months of rows a good ten years back, now seemed to see her as the fount of all sexual wisdom, and although Veronica quite liked his rather wet little Glenda she didn’t at all fancy being stuck in their little suburban box of a house doing the marriage guidance bit for a week. Moreover, Tony’s career as something not very exciting in Broadcasting had apparently stood still since those days ten-odd years back when he’d been very much the bright young boy, with a winning, shy smile and a mop of soft yellow curls; while Veronica’s had taken off, so that after her stint ten-odd years back as a very obscure junior tutor (with specs), she was now a Senior Lecturer in Political Science (with soft contact lenses), well published, in demand at conferences both in Australia and all round the Pacific Rim, and much called upon by Broadcasting for expert comment on matters political in the Pacific. Tony was now rather bald, and the still-boyish smile now sat rather oddly on his plumpish, fortyish features.

    As she knew that the admiration for her accomplishments expressed by both Glenda and Tony covered a certain amount of jealousy, Veronica refused their too-frequent invitations to little dinners, barbies, and trips to the zoo with the kids as often as she could without seeming too frankly brutal. She would have been astounded to learn that wet little Glenda referred to her as “poor Veronica”, and considered sadly that “She hasn’t got anything in her life, really, has she?”—comparing Veronica’s carefree bachelor-girl existence very much to its detriment with her own cosy, mortgaged little house, two hardy little scoundrels of boys, ageing Holden station-waggon, and plump, comfortable husband—in spite of the fact that the latter was going through what Glenda tactfully called “a difficult phase” and what Tony had gloomily described to Veronica in a downtown pub after several brandies as “can’t always bloody get it up when I need to”.

    “Well, this is nice!” Sir Jerry beamed round his laden table at the assembled multitude.

    On his right, Veronica thought sourly to herself that it was bloody awful; on his left, her sister Patricia Shapiro looked sourly at the very low-cut black taffeta dinner dress that Veronica apparently considered suitable for a family occasion, and wondered where she’d got it and how much it had cost and whether Dad’d spring for a trip to California for her next birthday. On Veronica’s right, her brother-in-law Nat Weintraub looked furtively down the black taffeta bodice and agreed, with his hearty laugh, that it was very nice indeed—lovely to see the family all together for once, wasn’t it?

    Further down the table, thirteen-year-old Damian Rosen pulled a ferocious face at his thirteen-year-old cousin Melanie Weintraub across the table. Melanie, who considered Damian far too young to be interesting, naturally received this overture with lofty scorn, and twitched importantly at the quite-low blue lace bodice stretched tightly over her rather new bust. Next to Damian sixteen-year-old Allyson Shapiro was sulking because she had to sit next to a stupid little boy and her own sister, for Pete’s sake! How she had hoped to avoid this sort of situation in a gathering of twelve females and four males not even she could have explained. On Allyson’s other side her older sister Susan was sulking because she had to sit next to her stupid sister, and beastly Grandma had said before dinner that she mustn’t eat any of the chocolate pudding, Susan dear, it’d give her more of those nasty spots.

    Appetites were gradually satisfied during the enormous meal, but tempers, on the whole, were not improved. Helen Weintraub, on her mother’s left, spent most of her time peering up the table in an effort to see what Nat was up to, next to Veronica: he was drinking far too much of Dad’s red wine and his laugh was getting louder and louder—and if you asked her, Veronica was encouraging him! Most of the time that could be spared from this frustrating activity she spent keeping an eye on Melanie, who was their Benjamin, ten years younger than her next sister, and not to be trusted not to disgrace herself in one way or another—why on earth Mum hadn’t put her next to the child—!

    Lady Cohen, who of course had separated Helen and Melanie precisely in order to give the poor child one evening of peace, ate her way serenely through her large menu, addressing the occasional gentle remark to Helen, who mostly ignored them, and listening with half an ear to Becky’s Jim, on her right, tell a series of long, complicated stories about his used-car deals. –Becky had married beneath her: Nat was in the business with Sir Jerry, and Patricia’s ex was a senior partner in a very big law firm.

    Becky, who was normally the happiest of souls—the more so since it was she who, after two girls in what her older sisters didn’t hesitate to condemn as far too rapid succession, had then produced Sir Jerry’s only male heir—ate her dinner in almost total silence, wondering for about the millionth time since her visit to that eminent gynaecologist Sir John Westby yesterday morning how on earth she was going to break the news to Jim that she was pregnant—after all this time! It must have been that weekend at Rotorua when they’d left the kids at Mum’s. Jim’d go spare—they’d had to take out that huge second mortgage to finance the new yard... Of course, there were the kids’ trusts, but they couldn’t touch a penny of those, naturally; and she just couldn’t ask Dad to help them out again: it was too... The word “humiliating” hovered on the edge of her consciousness, but she didn’t voice it to herself, for she was very fond of Jim—having long since forgotten her despair fifteen years ago at the arranged marriage to a much older man. Red-haired, vivacious, fifteen-year old Carol wasn’t Jim Rosen’s child; but nobody knew that except her and Jim, and Mum and Dad—at least, so Becky fondly imagined.

    Carol and her sister Rosemary, who lived in a world of their own, cheerfully ignored everything going on around them and began to initiate their cousin Melanie, between them, into the mysteries of eyeliner, nail polish, and kiss-proof lipstick; they were comfortably aware that their own square-shouldered, mini-skirted creations in respectively fluorescent lime green and screaming orange were far more fashionable than that gruesome pale blue lace thing of poor old Melanie’s; as they’d inherited their mother’s good nature they nobly refrained from voicing this evident truth.

    Next to Pat Shapiro her oldest niece, Helen’s Lindy, brooded silently and picked at her grandmother’s excellent food. Why couldn’t Mum and Aunty Pat and Grandma leave her alone! Nag, nag, nag: “Now you’re twenty-five, dear... Mustn’t leave it too long...” Nag, nag! Why couldn’t they understand that she didn’t want to get married, she wasn’t interested in men, she just wanted to be left alone!

    Down at the other end of the table her sister Pauline brooded silently next to Uncle Jim and picked at her grandmother’s excellent food. She was pretty bloody sure she was preggy... She’d better go to the doc and make sure. Mum and everyone’d have a fit! He wasn’t Jewish, he was married to a Catholic who refused to divorce him; he wasn’t even that keen on their current live-in arrangement; and he already had five kids. It was quite on the cards that he’d walk out on her the minute he heard the bad news. Gloomily she wondered if Aunty Veronica would help out—maybe she could nip quietly over to Sydney and get rid of it; only in this bloody family you never could do anything quietly: look at Aunty Becky, everyone knew about Carol...

    Veronica went on encouraging Nat to flirt outrageously with her.

    After dinner Jim Rosen looked cautiously at his father-in-law, beaming expansively round a big cigar in his huge leather armchair, and at Nat Weintraub, sprawled on a couch with a big cigar in his mouth and the dregs of a huge glass of brandy in his fist, and wondered glumly if, since Nat seemed to be well away, he’d better pick up his cue for him. But Becky was still here... He coughed slightly, and laid his own cigar down in what he hoped was an unobtrusive fashion in the ashtray at his side.

    “Becky,” he said cautiously, “don’t you want to go and look at your mother’s fabric samples?”

    Lady Cohen, in spite of the fluffily feminine manner she had had ever since her days as a pint-sized blonde, was not at all stupid; after dinner, knowing her husband had important business to discuss with Veronica, she had quietly led off her two older daughters to the little upstairs sitting-room that she called the boudoir and that Veronica, for unfathomable reasons, called “the sulkery”. She was thinking of having the bedroom and the boudoir redecorated: would the girls like to come and look at fabric samples? Helen and Pat knew their cue when they heard it: they had put down their coffee cups and risen as one woman.

    Now Becky looked round vaguely and said: “I’ve seen them...” and returned to her unseeing contemplation of a magazine. Her husband eyed her in baffled annoyance.

    The grandchildren were well out of the way: Becky’s Carol and Rosemary had dragged Melanie off to a spare room where, disgorging half a chemist’s shopful of cosmetic accessories from their bulging handbags, they were now giving her hair a totally new look, which would shortly infuriate her mother. Damian had immured himself in Grandpa’s study with the computer and the stack of mind-bogglingly boring shoot-’em-down, blow-’em-up computer games that the doting Sir Jerry kept there for him. Helen’s two eldest had gloomily condescended to accompany their teenage cousins Susan and Allyson to the so-called sunporch, actually a charming little enclosed area sporting a window-seat and several luxuriant indoor plants, where they were now all watching a video of Casablanca (Lindy and Pauline having rejected out of hand a suggestion of Romancing the Stone) with breathless attention.

    Nat’s attempt to lure Veronica to the big basement games room and get her leaning over the billiard table so as he could goggle at her boobs had failed dismally. Whence the brandy.

    Veronica herself was stretched out at her ease on another couch with her feet up, smoking a very black cigarillo, to her father’s loudly expressed disapproval. Veronica had countered this with a pointed stare at his own cigar, and a loud: “What do you expect me to do while you lot are smoking those things? Sit here slowly choking to death?” At this point Jim had silently asked himself if he had the guts to get up and go and join young Damian in the study, and answered himself gloomily that No, he hadn’t, since old Sir Jerry had vigorously expressed his wish that his sons-in-law give him their support through the interview with Veronica.

    He gave another cautious cough; Becky came out of her brown study and said anxiously: “Are you feeling all right, dear?” Jim, unlike the usual picture of a second-hand car dealer, was tall, thin, and nervous, with a weak chest.

    “Yes, I’m fine—don’t fuss!”

    Silence fell. Jim fidgeted; Nat, Veronica and Sir Jerry smoked and drank; and Becky turned the pages of her magazine with a series of loud flapping noises that began to drive her husband crackers.

    When his glass of Cherry Heering seemed to have restored Sir Jerry’s normal good humour—only Veronica or the mention of a capital gains tax could really make him lose his temper—Jim coughed again, and said: “Uh—have you told Veronica about your new scheme yet, Sir Jerry?” –He had refused sourly to be called “Father” by his sons-in-law; Nat had once addressed him as “Pops”, with horrible consequences; as neither of them dared to call him “Jerry”, which he would actually not have minded, they had both perforce fallen back on “Sir Jerry”. Pat’s ex had never called him anything at all; during the marriage he’d referred to him behind his back as “that old wind-bag”, a custom which he’d seen no reason to relinquish since.

    Maddeningly, Veronica ignored this ploy. Jim and Sir Jerry looked at each other somewhat helplessly. Finally Sir Jerry coughed loudly, and said: “Veronica!”

    “Eh?” said Veronica vaguely.

    “Got something to tell you!”

    “Oh, yeah? What?” said Veronica, even more vaguely, looking critically at the nails of her left hand.

    Repressing an urge to tell her to pay attention while her father was speaking, Sir Jerry stumbled out an account of his planned Institute, hindered rather than otherwise by Jim’s well-meaning but inept interpolations.

    Becky, who being a mere woman hadn’t been privy to this scheme, listened in some surprise. “Ooh, Vronny! Isn’t that exciting?”

    Veronica looked sardonically at her father’s red, flushed features and at Jim’s thin, anxious, hang-dog ones. “Not very.”

    Becky flushed, and began to look as anxious as Jim. Veronica had actually exercised huge restraint: she’d recognized that this plan was one final, extravagant, last-ditch attempt to draw her back into the family fold. She gave an elaborate and wholly artificial yawn, and said: “Think I might turn in—must be jet-lagged, or something.”

    “No!” said Sir Jerry ill-advisedly.

    Veronica raised a mocking eyebrow at him.

    Now almost a purple colour, poor Sir Jerry mumbled: “Like your advice—whatcha think about this Macdonald feller, eh?”

    Veronica had stood up, carelessly stretching her magnificent torso—to Nat’s unconcealed, goggling admiration. She gave him a mocking look, but sat down again, poured herself more brandy—Sir Jerry with difficulty holding back a glare—and said: “Thought you said you’d already appointed him?”

    “Yes, yes; but we can always pay him off if you don’t think he’s the right man!”

    Not bothering to point out that if he’d wanted her advice he should’ve asked for it before he appointed his Director, she said: “H.G. Macdonald from Edinburgh, didja say? Yeah, he’s okay—quite a sound bloke: met him at a conference in Canberra—uh—few months back, musta been.”

    Actually, she’d made a heavy pass at him, which Hamish, causing his libido considerable anguish, had fended off, being still under the old-fashioned impression that it ought to be the man who approached the woman. Veronica had been annoyed but not offended: she’d simply put him down as the sort of puritanical Scot who won’t betray his wife; as, indeed, apart from one exceptional lapse about four years earlier, he had been, until the encounter with Mirry.

    Unnoticed by all of them, Becky looked up with a tiny gasp at the phrase “H.G. Macdonald from Edinburgh” and went an odd greenish colour. No, she told herself, heart hammering frantically—it couldn’t be; the name was just a coincidence! After all, there must be hundreds of “H. Macdonalds” in Edinburgh, mustn’t there? Sweat broke out on her hands and forehead; she continued to follow the conversation with breathless attention.

    “Written quite a few books, hasn’t he?” pursued Sir Jerry laboriously.

    “Yeah,” replied Veronica laconically.

    Sir Jerry gave Jim a look of anguished appeal.

    Jim swallowed hard. “Er—do you reckon he’s the right choice, then, Vronny? –I mean Veronica,” he amended lamely.

    Veronica sipped brandy and looked at him tolerantly. “Yeah; like I said, he’s a pretty sound scholar; dunno why the Hell he’d want to leave Edinburgh, though.”

    Bristling chauvinistically, Sir Jerry launched into the standard self-justificatory Kiwi “haven’t got anything better overseas—good as those lazy Brits any day—wonderful country to bring up children” diatribe. After a while, aware that his daughter had raised her eyebrow again, he spluttered to a halt.

    Jim rashly put in: “Besides, Edinburgh—the climate’s awful, isn’t it? And it isn’t a very well-known university, is it?”

    Veronica gave a shout of laughter.

    Suddenly Nat, who reckoned he had a bit more nous than poor old Jim, joined in the conversation with: “Put your foot in it there, eh, mate?”

    The thin, scraggy Jim went very red and looked more anxious than ever.

    Unexpectedly Veronica felt sorry for him. “Where didja say you were planning to build, Dad?” she asked pacifically.

    Expansive again, Sir Jerry began to tell her in great detail all about the advantages of the Puriri site. Veronica smiled tolerantly, not listening; Nat scratched his crotch and began to wonder how soon they could decently get off home; and Jim stealthily poured himself a second, very small, Cognac. Becky still listened breathlessly but nobody noticed her.

    When Sir Jerry ran down, Veronica stood up in a definite sort of way, and said: “Yeah; well, it sounds okay; dunno what Hamish Macdonald’ll make of being stuck up in Puriri, though.”

    Before Sir Jerry could splutter out a reply Becky said, very loudly: “Did you say Hamish Macdonald?”

    Sir Jerry frowned; Jim and Veronica looked at her in mild surprise. Nat reached over and grabbed the brandy decanter back from Jim’s side of the coffee table.

    “Yeah, that’s right,” agreed Veronica blankly.

    “A political scientist? From Edinburgh?”

    “Yeah,” said Veronica, staring.

    “How—how old is he?” asked Becky in a trembling voice.

    “I dunno. Fortyish, I s’pose—why?”

    “OH!” cried Becky, clapping her hands to her cheeks in horror. She shot to her feet with an hysterical laugh and dashed out of the room.

    “What the Hell’s the matter with her?” demanded her sister.

    Nat uttered a coarse laugh. “Time of the month?” He swallowed a great gulp of brandy.

    Jim coughed and said weakly: “She’s been a—a bit off-colour lately.”

    “Out of her tree, more like,” muttered Veronica. All three of her male relatives were now giving her that helpless, expectant look of the Kiwi male that meant: “This is woman’s business: go and handle it.” She glared at Becky’s husband and said loudly: “Well, shall I go and see what the matter is? Since I’m a woman.”

    Jim, poor dreep, didn’t get the point; just looked at her like a helpless spaniel and whined: “Would you, Vronny? –I mean Veronica.”

    Nat gave a snort of laughter as his sister-in-law, breathing very hard through flared nostrils, stomped out of the room.

    Upstairs Becky, not too shaken to retain her sense of self-preservation, shot into a bedroom at the opposite end of the house from her mother’s boudoir, threw herself on the bed, and burst into tears.

    Veronica climbed the stairs very slowly. She tried the bogs first but they were empty.

    “What the Hell’s up?” she demanded, coming into the spare bedroom and closing the door firmly behind her.

    Face down on the bed, her sister sobbed: “Go—’way—Vron—nee!”

    Veronica sat down beside her. “Come on, old cuckoo: you can tell me.” Whatever it was, it couldn’t be anything too frightful: since the conception of Carol in the dim, distant past, Becky’s life had been completely blameless.

    “No-o!” sobbed Becky.

    “Look,” said Veronica kindly, “whatever it is, you can tell me, I’ve heard it all before.”—Silence.—“Come on Becky, what is it? A man?”—Silence.—“Debts? Is that it—are you afraid to tell Jim?”

    “No!” gulped Becky.

    Veronica took a deep breath and said: “Are you sick? Come on, Becky—tell me.”

    “No, I’m not sick,” said Becky in a muffled voice into the pillow.

    “Is it Jim—or one of the kids?”

    “No.”

    “Not up the spout, are you?” she asked doubtfully: she didn’t think poor old Jim had it in him any more.

    Becky seized on this as a lifesaver. “Ye-es!” she wailed, sitting up and throwing herself into her sister’s arms.

    Over her renewed sobs Veronica said: “Well, that’s not so bad, is it?” Becky continued to sob. Puzzled, Veronica said uncertainly: “It is Jim’s, is it?”

    Becky was so shocked by this that she gasped: “Vronny! Of course it is—how could you?” and sat up and attempted to mop her eyes with an inadequate lace-edged hanky.

    Relieved by this sign of revival, Veronica returned with a coarse chuckle. “No ‘how could I’ about it—what about your Carol, eh?”

    Becky still cherished the fond belief that her little sister, who’d been nearly twenty at the time, had no idea of her fall from grace. She dropped the handkerchief, went scarlet, and gasped: “Do you know?”

    “Known for years!” replied Veronica cheerfully.

    To her horror her sister gave a wail, and cast herself into her arms again with another burst of sobs. Dimly Veronica perceived the words “him”, “that man”, and “die of shame” amongst the sobs. After a bit, when the sobs seemed to have died down, she said cautiously: “Look, Becky, what is all this? I thought you said it was Jim’s?”

    “What? Oh, that!” said Becky, scornfully dismissing the subject over which she’d been torturing herself for several weeks. She gave a rending sniff.

    Veronica got up abruptly and opened the top drawer of the chest of drawers. Sure enough, there was a cache of neatly ironed guest hankies there. She grabbed some, and thrust them at her sister.

    “Well, if it is Jim’s, what’s all this crap about ‘that man’?” she said heavily, sitting down again.

    Becky blew her nose, and mumbled, not looking at her: “Not this one—Carol.”

    “Eh?”

    “Carol—he—that man—it’s him!”

    Had an unexpected pregnancy at the age of thirty-eight driven the nervy Becky over the edge? “What the Hell are you talking about, Becky?”

    “It must be him—Carol’s father,” she whispered.

    She had gone over the edge. “Who must?”

    “That man...” She looked Veronica desperately in the face. “Hamish Macdonald!”

    “Wha-at? Geddouda here!”

    In the midst of her misery Becky couldn’t help reflecting that Helen and Pat had a point when they said Veronica had got very coarse since going to live in Australia. “Don’t be like that, Vronny,” she said miserably. “It’s true; it is him.”

    The tone of quiet misery had Veronica almost convinced. She looked doubtfully at her sister’s damp, red face, drowned brown eyes, and ruffled mop of short dark curls, already showing a touch of grey here and there, and said: “But I thought—didn’t you always say you never knew who he was? Never knew his name, I mean.”

    “I couldn’t tell them,” whispered Becky.

    “No-o; but look—good God; I mean—was he married or something?”

    “No!” said Becky with a little sob. She looked down at her hands and began to twist a guest hanky round and round.

    Veronica’s mouth tightened and her nostrils flared. “I see!” she said grimly. “Ditched you, did he?” She bounced up. “Right! I’ll settle his hash for him, the creep! Director of the bloody Institute I don’t think!” She stomped over to the door and opened it.

    “No, stop!” cried Becky. “It wasn’t like that! Stop, Vronny!”

    Veronica paused. “What was it like, then?”

    “Lock the door,” whispered Becky hoarsely.

    Veronica closed and locked the door.

    “Put the radio on,” she whispered.

    Refraining from pointing out that they weren’t in a spy movie, Veronica turned on the radio thoughtfully provided by Lady Cohen for guests. She sat down on the bed again. “Go on.”

    Becky looked round her in a fearful sort of way and whispered: “You won’t tell them, will you, Vronny?”

    Rightly interpreting the “them” to refer to their parents and sisters, Veronica replied bracingly: “Not Pygmalion likely! Come on, Becky: spit it out!”

    Haltingly at first, then in a great flood of release, Becky began to tell Veronica just what had happened during that long-ago time down in Taranaki, when she’d been on a working holiday and he’d been taking a break from his Ph.D. and convalescing on his father’s farm after a bout of pleurisy.

    Veronica looked at her dazedly. “Why on earth did you tell him you were on the Pill if you weren’t?”

    “I—I thought it’d be okay... And I was shy!” she burst out.

    “Eh?” said Veronica blankly, never having been shy in her life.

    “I—I know it sounds silly; but he—when he asked me if I was on it... Somehow I just couldn’t say I wasn’t! Um, and then I did go to the doctor, but—”

    “Too late,” said Veronica grimly. “Why the Hell didn’t you tell bloody Macdonald you were pregnant?”

    “I couldn’t,” she whispered.

    “But Becky—”

    “It was awful, Vronny!” she wailed. “He suh-said—right at the beginning—that it was just a—a physical thing with him; and—and that we both had to agree on that. He suh-said it wuh-wouldn’t be fair on me on—on any other terms!” She collapsed against her sister’s generous bosom and wept.

    “Well, sod the shit!” said Veronica through her teeth.

    Gulping, Becky said weakly: “He thought he was being honest. Um, honourable, I suppose.”

    “That’s not what I’d call it,” said Veronica in an alarmingly grim voice.

    Becky sat up, sniffed hard, and added in the voice of one producing a triumphant clincher: “And anyway, he went back to Scotland and I didn’t know his address!”

    Eh? But she had known he was at the university— Oh, forget it!

    “You won’t say anything, will you?” she quavered.

    “No—I told you.”

    Becky blew her nose again and added in a trembling voice: “How can I ever look him in the face?”

    “Don’t see why you should ever have to meet him.”

    In a crushed voice her sister rejoined: “But you know what Dad is with his pets—always inviting them round.”

    “Uh—yeah,” agreed Veronica, shaken.

    There was a pause. Becky blew her nose again. Then she said thoughtfully: “Of course, I could always say I wasn’t feeling well—with the baby and everything—if Mum invited us round when he was going to be here.”

    “Yeah,” agreed Veronica, reflecting wryly that her sister had all the typical cunning of the weak—forgetting an earlier awed thought that she herself wouldn’t have had the strength to hold out against Mum and Dad and say she didn’t know who the brat’s father was.

    “And Dad’s enthusiasms do wear off.” She gave a little sigh. “And I have changed a lot—I don’t suppose he’d even recognize me.”

    “No,” agreed her sister with brutal frankness.

    “I wonder if he’s changed much?” said Becky in a thoughtful voice.

    Veronica got up abruptly and said very drily: “Well, if he looked like an ugly, bony, ginger-haired Scot then I’d say he hasn’t changed at all!” She went over to the door and unlocked it. “I’d wash my face, if I was you. I’ll send Jim up to you—you’d better tell him about the baby.”

    She walked out to the sound of her sister’s startled: “Oh! Um—yes.”

    It was raining cats and dogs again. Peter Riabouchinsky looked mournfully out of his office window in the cold, draughty old wooden house that had been classed as a Historic Building, and decided that he’d better take a taxi down to the Cohen Building downtown. Not that he couldn’t afford it, exactly—he was quite well paid; but he had expensive tastes in food and drink; and a taste for ladies who shared these tastes. Sighing, he picked up his phone. As usual, the departmental secretary, an incredibly inefficient woman who ran the office exactly as she wished, deaf to her ostensible superiors’ requests that she establish a more workable system, was not there. After some time a breathless, adenoidal voice said: “Yee-us?”

    Peter repressed another sigh, and asked the department’s typist (also incredibly inefficient, a chronic sufferer from menstrual blues—for which she refused to consult a doctor—and an incurably indiscreet gossip) to get him a taxi.

    “When for?”

    Repressing yet another sigh, Peter responded: “Now, please, Beryl.”

    “It’ll take ages,” she replied doubtfully. “You know what they’re like when it’s raining.”

    Peter bit back a sharp request to get on with it, then, and replied in his vaguest voice: “Yes... Thank you, Beryl.”

    The handsome blonde woman sitting an armchair in Sir Jerry’s palatial office looking bored got slowly to her feet when Sir Jerry introduced them and said: “Peter Riabouchinsky? Oh, yeah; I’ve read your article on ‘C.E.R. and a possible correlation with polling patterns in the New Zealand urban electorates.’” Her tone was neutral; Peter, who was aware that the article in question was total bullshit, shot her an uneasy glance.

    Veronica observed the unease with enjoyment; she shook his hand briskly and released it. She also observed the appreciative look which both preceded and followed the unease; as she was quite used to this from stray males she ignored it, and sat down again.

    Sir Jerry was fluffing around, telling Peter to find himself a seat, and opening his liquor cabinet. Peter, the momentary unease now having been driven quite away by appreciation, looked happily at Veronica’s plain, straight, broad-shouldered, hip-hugging dress in thin turquoise wool and decided his first impression had been quite correct: she wasn’t wearing a bra.

    Veronica crossed her legs—Peter with difficulty restraining a sigh of admiration—and said: “Been out here long?” As he formulated a conventional reply to this query she opened the dark green and turquoise leather clutch-bag which harmonized perfectly both with the dress and with the huge, polished but otherwise uncut piece of dark greenstone that was its only ornament, and produced a thin silver case. Peter, who as has been mentioned, favoured women with expensive tastes, noted appreciatively that the small claws unobtrusively holding the big greenstone brooch in its setting were also silver. “Mind if I smoke?”

    Peter jumped. “No, no; not at all—please!”

    He wasn’t usually this inept with women—in fact he was usually perfectly at home with them, and rapidly took charge of any tête-à-tête in which he found himself—but beneath the admiration he was now experiencing considerable disorientation: what on earth was the glamorous creature whom Sir Jerry had introduced gruffly as “me daughter Veronica” doing reading his own totally obscure little article in the totally obscure and pot-valiantly named Journal of Pacific and Australasian Political Studies? Being entirely a Kiwi organ, it fulfilled its promise of “Pacific” content with an article once every few years on “Cook Islands polling-booth patterns of 19-(whatever)” by the gentleman who had cornered this not-very-exciting sliver of the academic market. “Australasian” was simply a misnomer: their big cousins over the water, having much more erudite publications of their own, wouldn’t have a bar of the J.P.A.P.S.

    He squinted at the long, capable tanned fingers manipulating the silver case (registering approvingly that her nails were short and varnished a pale peach) and noted that her only ring was a huge lump of roughly-worked silver on her right hand. Veronica Cohen, then. Oh, God!

    Veronica offered him the open case. Weakly Peter, who’d almost given up, took a cigarillo. She produced a heavy silver and greenstone lighter from the clutch-bag, leaned forward—even in the midst of the crashing embarrassment that had overtaken him, Peter noted with relish the swing of the bra-less breasts—and competently lit it for him.

    As she lit her own and released a stream of smoke with a little sigh, he said weakly: “I think you must be V.S. Cohen, of Pacific Politics in the Wake of the Rainbow Warrior—no?”

    “Yeah,” said Veronica laconically. Why on earth had the plump little Russian gone as red as a beet?

    “We prescroibe it as a Second-Year text,” said Peter miserably.

    “That right?” She gave him a considering look and added: “Whaddabout New Zealand Pacific Policy and Internal Politics: An Alternative View?”

    Beginning to pull himself together, Peter replied: “That is one of our Masters texts.”

    “Jesus, is it?” Grinning broadly, she added: “Thought my name was mud over here after that one!”

    Now almost himself again, Peter gave her a definite twinkle and replied: “Da: only, you see, I am just an ignorant foreigner!”

    Veronica gave a shout of laughter.

    During this peculiar conversation Sir Jerry, disconcerted to find his favourite bottle almost empty, had been fussing around crossly getting his secretary to nip down to the boardroom and grab the sherry from there. Now he beamed at them and said: “Glad to see you two getting along!”

    Veronica grinned. “I think he thought I was a bloke—didn’tcha?”

    “Eh?” said Sir Jerry blankly: no-one in their right minds—in spite of the cigarillos, the drinking, and the Language—could have taken the tall, curved Veronica for any such thing.

    “Yes,” Peter explained with a shamefaced chuckle: “she wroites as ‘V.S. Cohen’, you see.”

    “Veronica Sarah,” said Sir Jerry blankly.

    Veronica laughed.

    “Hmf! Well, how about a drink? Dr Riabouchinsky? Sherry?” He hesitated; in spite of his wealth he was not a sophisticated man. “Or wouldja prefer a vodka?”

    Peter smiled his very nice smile. “Not a vodka, thank you, Sir Jerry, it’s a bit early in the day for me; but I h’would love a sherry.”

    “I’ll have a Tio Pepe, Dad.”

    “Hmf!” Sir Jerry poured her a small Tio Pepe. “There’ll be some Bristol Cream in a moment, if that girl stirs her stumps,” he said to Peter. “Or do you like this dry muck?”

    Peter laughed his very pleasant laugh and admitted: “I’m afraid so; I loike its peppery taste: it remoinds me—just a little, you know—of peppered vodka.”

    Veronica, who had noticed the very nice smile, now registered both the very pleasant laugh and the pleasant but determined refusal to play her father’s game, and looked at Peter with the first stirring of actual interest. Well, at least he wasn’t a bloody crawler like most of the creeps Dad usually had round him!

    Handing Peter a large Tio Pepe, Sir Jerry sank into his big chair and began happily telling him about his grandfather, who had also had a taste for peppered vodka, and his great-grandfather, who’d come out from Riga as an ordinary seaman on a Russian whaler, and jumped ship.

    Veronica listened to this recital in goggling disbelief: Dad never talked about his ancestors outside the family! And it couldn’t be because Riabouchinsky was Jewish, or Russian: though he’d permitted his wife to marry off three of his daughters to approved Jewish suitors, Sir Jerry, as Veronica well knew, didn’t give a bugger what a feller’s race or creed was, so long as he put in a good day’s work; and if anything, he rather disliked Russians.

    By the time Sir Jerry, having awarded himself a large Bristol Cream, had said “mensch” twice and “goy” once, and laughed heartily at something the Russian had said in what could have been Russian or Yiddish or Timbuctooish as far as Veronica could tell, her knees felt quite weak. She got up and poured herself a second, and huge, Tio Pepe; and sat down again quite shaken when her father totally ignored this action.

    Peter had observed it out of the corner of his eye; he now turned his charming smile on her and said: “Sir Maurice Black is late, da? That is not loike him; I think he must have got stuck in traffic?”

    “Yeah,” replied Veronica weakly.

    By the time Sir Maurice had bustled in, rather flushed and cross, and full of apologies—he’d got stuck on the Harbour Bridge—Veronica had almost forgotten that the only reason she’d agreed to this bloody lunch meeting in the first place was that she had a hankering to see old Maurie again: she’d had a Helluva crush on him in her undergraduate days.

    Sir Maurice eyed the tall, curved blonde figure in its narrow turquoise dress with complete approval. Upon her informing him that: “You won’t remember me, Sir Maurice—I did History under you about a million years ago,” he retorted swiftly: “Nonsense, my dear! I remember you perfectly: three years of straight A’s in History with us, and then you went and dumped us for Political Science in your Honours year, didn’t you?”—and embraced her fervently on the cheek.

    Stunned, Veronica—who had been plumpish, spotty and bespectacled in those days—allowed him to grip her elbow and lead her to a large leather couch, where he sat very close and interrogated her narrowly about her current job and its prospects for promotion—refusing a sherry but accepting a whisky and water.

    Peter accepted another Tio Pepe and watched this masterly performance with great appreciation, wondering how long it would be before it dawned on the gorgeous V.S. Cohen that Sir Maurice must have popped up to varsity and looked up her academic record.

    “Come along, now, Veronica,” said Sir Jerry briskly at The Royal—having started on the lunch project he was, of course, keen to push it through: “What are you going to have?”

    “Jesus!” replied his daughter, looking in horror at the items on the huge menu.

    Sir Jerry frowned; Peter, who’d patronised The Royal twice—once to sound it out, and a second time to give it the benefit of the doubt—swallowed hard and managed: “The flounder’s quoite good—if you ask them to serve it without the loime zest and raspberry sauce...?”

    “Not after Doyle’s,” replied Veronica firmly.

    Maurice always ordered the same thing everywhere he went—and if they didn’t have it, didn’t go back. He closed his menu in a definite sort of way.

    “Why on earth do you come here, Dad?” asked Veronica, continuing to read the menu with an expression of glazed horror.

    “It’s the best hotel in town!” replied Sir Jerry huffily. He didn’t recognize it himself, but in fact he patronized the hotel because he enjoyed the grovelling servitude of the waiters and the plush comfort of the décor—and it was handy to the office.

    Although he was hungry, Peter’s stomach had curdled at the menu’s flowery language; so he was very glad when Sir Maurice said firmly to the slavishly-bowing waiter: “I’ll have the fillet steak—rare, thanks, without the sauce; and caviar and brown bread to start.”

    “Yessir. With the chef’s dilled sour-cream dressing,” he agreed confidently.

    “No. Without. Manage that, can ya?”

    “Um, yessir.”

    “Me, too—no, hang on,” said Veronica. “I’ll have the fillet steak without the sauce, too—never heard of raspberry sauce with steak, before,” she remarked to the ambient air. “I might have the caviar. What sort of brown bread is it?”

    It was the Hotel’s own bread, madam.

    “Has it got those ghastly lumps of wheat in it?” she asked suspiciously.

    “Um, ’tis a kibbled bread, yeah,” he admittedly weakly, lapsing into the vernacular.

    “Then I’ll just have the crudités,” said Veronica firmly—thus switching from the dearest to the cheapest starter in one easy breath.

    Unwisely the man tried to assure her of the deliciousness of the bread. A patient expression came over Veronica’s face. When the waiter had run down she said: “What are you gonna have, Dad?”

    Sir Jerry embarked on the sort of happy chat with waiters that he loved, finally rejecting the sweetbreads blanketed in a white wine and Morello cherry sauce in favour of the chef’s “Spécialité Tahitienne”, which when it came proved to be a hollowed-out half pineapple filled with chunky pieces of unrecognizable substances in batter. “What on earth’s that, Dad?”—to which Sir Jerry, removing a yellow flower from one end of his pineapple, replied that it was fish and bits of banana and pineapple, and the sauce was kind of a curried thing, with coconut in it. “Hot?” asked his daughter weakly. “Yeah, ’course,” returned her father indistinctly. “You should’ve had it.” He removed a red flower from the other end of the pineapple.

    “Mm,” replied Veronica, vanquished.

    Peter had plumped for the Boeuf Stroganoff for his main course; he looked at it mournfully. “What’s that green curly thing?” asked Veronica with interest.

    “I do not know,” he replied simply.

    All in all, it was not an entirely successful luncheon; though Peter thoroughly enjoyed the extreme delicacy of Sir Maurice’s flirtation with their host’s daughter, which managed to draw the line nicely between the sort of appreciation which was very much the luscious Veronica’s due (and to which she was obviously accustomed) and the restraint required in her father’s presence. Peter recognized with some amusement that the canny Sir Maurice would go no further: the first lot of papers had been signed, and Sir Jerry would have to pay both the University and Dr Macdonald a considerable lump sum if he were to pull out of the project, but final papers were a long way off yet: there was a lot of what Gavin Wiley pompously referred to as “planning preliminaries” but what Sir Jerry prosaically called red tape to be got through yet. Sir Maurice would never dream of sacrificing the interests of his university to a casual affaire.

    Peter recognized in himself what was rather more than a casual interest; but since he had no intention of appearing to curry favour with Sir Jerry by courting his daughter, and was well aware that the Dr V.S. Cohen would undoubtedly consider any advances of his to be made with this ulterior motive, he treated her with a mild, pleasant courtesy only, chatting easily with her father, and keeping himself in readiness to pour oil on any troubled waters between the two of them—having discovered in himself something amounting almost to affection for the simple-hearted Sir Jerry.

    Dressing for yet another Goddawful family dinner that evening—this time at her cousin Philip’s, where at least the food would be decent—Veronica paused in her panties before the big mirror in her bedroom and stared at herself. A tall, wide-shouldered, wide-hipped, deep-bosomed and narrow-waisted vision looked back at her. It should have struck her as thoroughly satisfactory; but Veronica scowled horribly, and muttered: “What the Hell’s wrong with you, Cohen?”

    Lunch with two charming men had resulted in nothing; zero; nada; bugger all. Well, okay—maybe old Sir Maurice was a bit past it; but hadn’t there been a distinct look in the Russian’s eye, back in Dad’s office? Veronica scowled more than ever. She must have imagined it: getting bloody vain in her old age, thinking that everything in trousers fancied her. She was damn sure he wasn’t gay, though. Oh, well—maybe she just wasn’t his type.

    Suddenly she flopped down onto the bed. An awful need to bawl her eyes out swept through her. Defiantly she told herself that he wasn’t her type, anyway—too fat, too foreign, and if the bloody awful stuff he’d published was anything to go by, too bloody dumb... But Peter Riabouchinsky hadn’t, in the flesh, struck her as at all dumb. She gave a rending sniff, and wiped the back of her hand across her eyes. She always got bloody depressed at Mum and Dad’s, she told herself crossly, and got up to grab a guest hanky out of the top drawer.

    “Aren’t you coming to bed, Donald?” Heather Freeman hovered in the doorway of her husband’s study in the tiny, smart townhouse in a block of two that Donald had designed himself. The room was actually the second bedroom, but they’d decided to wait until he got established...

    “What?” muttered Donald, peering into his screen at the expensive architectural design program he’d indulged himself in after receiving the commission for the Pacific Institute of Political Studies building.

    “It’s very late; aren’t you coming to bed?” said Heather faintly.

    Donald punched a function key, and scowled horribly at the result. He turned round in his swivel chair, gave her a nasty look, and snarled: “What the Hell for?”

    Heather’s eyes slowly filled with tears. Looking at the slight form, swaddled in its heavy pink woolly dressing-gown, with the rollers in its rather thin, ash-blond hair, Donald thought irritably that she looked like a damned white mouse, with her pink nose, almost colourless eyebrows, and washed-out face. Poor Heather, being a natural blonde, didn’t tan well; and since it was now midwinter she’d long since lost what colour she had managed to pick up last summer.

    Heather had her period, and she refused resolutely to let him touch her body during this time. Donald had told her forcibly, more than once, that she was living in the Dark Ages, no-one took any notice of that, these days, for God’s sake! But Heather had only sniffled, and retorted miserably that it wasn’t nice—whatever anybody else might do, nice girls from Meadowbank certainly didn’t do that; in fact they didn’t even talk about it; and her young husband’s not unnatural curiosity on the subject had shocked and horrified her. During the almost two years of their courtship-cum-engagement, she had, of course, let him make love to her, because even nice girls did, these days—and she was terrified of losing him if she didn’t; but, unnoticed by the simple Donald, she’d always managed to avoid being anywhere near his flat at those times. They hadn’t been living together; Heather was an “only”, still at home with Mum and Dad up to the day of her wedding.

    After they were married Donald put up with her prudish carry-ons for several months. Then he thought he’d cracked it: he got a large brandy into her, two even larger ones into himself, and before the unsuspecting Heather could turn out the bedside light, whipped back the bedclothes, tore open his pyjama pants and, thrusting his very engorged member suggestively towards her, invited her to masturbate him. In so many words. Shocked out of her wits as much by his language as by the sight of it in full light (they always did it under the bedclothes with the curtains drawn, and if it was at night, which it nearly always was, the lights off), Heather went scarlet, and burst into tears. Donald gathered, through the storm of sobs, that he was filthy, and disgusting, and “How—could—you?” He promptly lost his temper, and yelled at her. Still sobbing, Heather got out of bed, grabbed her pillow and the duvet, and went off to sleep on the couch. Donald yelled at her some more. In the living-room Heather cast herself face downwards on the couch, sobbing. Donald slammed the bedroom door shut and hurled himself back on the bed. Neither of them slept much that night.

    That had been two months ago, to the day; the subject hadn’t been mentioned between them, since.

    What made it worse was that Donald was slowly coming to the realization that not only did she not like him touching her “then”, she didn’t much like it at any other time, either. What the Hell was he doing wrong? He wasn’t doing anything different to what he’d done before they’d got married; and she’d always seemed to like it all right, then, hadn’t she? Well, at any rate she’d always let him do it.

    He’d imparted these ruminations only last week over a drink to his best mate and business partner Larry McGrath. They shared a reception room and a secretary in a run-down old concrete structure that was due for demolition in another ten months, on the edge of the city’s business area. Their talents complemented each other very nicely: Larry did domestic, and had also recently discovered he had a real flair for interior design—which he was a bit ashamed of, it was usually gays who went in for that sort of thing, but it was very lucrative—and Donald did mainly commercial, but tended to lose interest a bit when it came down to the finer details of colour schemes for his clients’ offices.

    Larry, who was dark, stocky, ruddy, and fancied himself as an expert on women, looked at his old friend’s thin, anxious face and hopeful light sherry-coloured eyes with an air of tolerant superiority. Ask him, poor old Don’s wife had about as much sex appeal as a piece of filleted orange roughy, and probably about as much desire for it! It was glaringly clear to him that if she didn’t like it now, Heather couldn’ta liked it then, and had just been playing the old game of stringing him along till she had his ring on her finger.

    “Have ya tried getting a slug of booze into ’er before you go to bed?”

    “Yes,” said Donald miserably.

    “No go, eh?”

    “No.”

    Larry ate a few salted peanuts and, as he was genuinely fond of poor old Don, tried not to let his mind wander towards the subject of his dinner. “Whaddabout—well—varying the technique a bit?”

    “What?” said Donald blankly.

    “Well—you know...” Going rather red, and giving what he fancied was a very manly, off-hand laugh, Larry suggested: “Have ya tried a bit of the old sixty-nine? That sorta thing.”

    Donald opened his mouth to ask “Sixty-nine what?”—went very red, and shut it again. He fiddled nervously with a peanut.

    “Eh?” said Larry.

    “No,” replied Donald hoarsely in what was little more than a whisper. “She doesn’t—she wouldn’t... She thinks that sort of thing’s—well...”

    Larry’s dark brown eyes looked at him expectantly—rather like a well-behaved black Labrador that’s too polite to actually beg, but knows it’ll get given a titbit in a minute. Fleetingly Donald wondered if his best friend was enjoying this; then his misery swamped him all over again, and he ended: “—dirty, I s’pose!” and gave a mad little laugh.

    Larry had only been enjoying his own evident superiority; he now looked at Donald with genuine pity, grabbed up their glasses, said: “Hang on, I’ll get ’em in again,” and shot off to the bar.

    When they’d both absorbed the best part of a third double whisky Larry leaned forward confidentially across the little table of their booth, and said, cautiously lowering his voice—unnecessarily, since the bar was filled with the roar of post-work masculine conviviality: “I suppose she does like it—the basic thing, eh?”

    Donald just looked at him blankly. Somewhat irritably, Larry elaborated: “You know, mate—stick work!” Donald went on looking blank; crossly Larry, leaning across the table, growled: “A good fuck!”

    Donald had been blank not because he hadn’t understood his friend’s remark, but because he’d been thinking. Now he said, in a voice of extreme misery: “I don’t think she does, now I come to think of it, actually.”

    Larry drained his whisky, said abruptly: “’Nother?” and, when Donald shook his head, bolted off to the bar. At the bar he had second thoughts and got himself a lager.

    Coming back with it, he took a deep swallow, wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, and looked cautiously at his friend. Donald had arranged three peanuts in a little pattern on the table. Picking up one peanut, and carefully starting to draw shapes round the other two with it, he mumbled: “I don’t think she’s ever really enjoyed it; she always used to say it was all right for her, but...”

    Larry grunted.

    After a bit more careful drawing, Donald: “She hardly ever even lets me do it, these days.”

    As he’d already said that, Larry could only reply helplessly: “Yeah—you said.”

    Donald looked up at this, and elaborated urgently: “Yes; but I mean— Only on Saturday nights!”

    “Ya mean only once a week?” said Larry faintly.

    “Yes.”

    “Jesus!”

    Silence fell. Donald re-arranged his peanuts again and finished his whisky; and Larry tried to imagine what the Hell it’d be like, only getting it once a week—and sometimes not even then! Larry, like Donald, was twenty-eight. He had strings of eager girlfriends, most of them hoping for marriage, blissfully unaware of the existence of their rivals, and in total ignorance of the fact that he’d decided not to tie himself down till he was thirty-four or -five, at least. He’d have felt very hard-done-by if he hadn’t got it twice a night on at least five nights out of the seven.

    Eventually he finished his lager and said cautiously: “Don...”

    “What?” replied Donald glumly, not looking up.

    With a cautious cough, Larry said: “Look—if she doesn’t like—uh—jig-jig; well, in my experience—well, if she doesn’t like that, you oughta try a bit of the old sixty-nine, mate!”

    “I told you...”

    “Yeah, but listen, mate!” said Larry, getting quite urgent, and leaning right over the table again: “They often like it better; it turns them on, ya see?” Donald stared at him miserably; he added hurriedly: “Even if they don’t, well, come like that; well... it gets ’em going—gets the old juices flowing—you know!” He gave what Donald registered with a spurt of annoyance was a dirty little laugh, and sat back against the buttoned maroon vinyl of the booth, looking quite pleased with himself.

    Donald’s experience of sex was limited to Heather and a couple of quick, fumbling pokes at unresisting but unenthusiastic female bodies in his undergraduate years. He hadn’t the faintest notion that his friend’s “gets the old juices flowing” was anything but a metaphor. He looked at Larry’s square, ruddy face with its wide, sensual mouth and strong blunt nose, and experienced a surge of resentment. Leaning forward across the table in his turn, he said quite loudly: “I told you—she doesn’t like that sort of thing. For God’s sake—she won’t even hold it for me!”

    “Eh?”

    Reddening in a mixture of irritation and embarrassment, Donald hissed: “She won’t bloody well even jerk me off!”

    “Oh,” said Larry. “I see!” Donald was scowling at him; hastily he added: “No, look, mate—I didn’t exactly mean...” His voice trailed off; he’d thought it was all quite clear. Old Don was starting to look sulky; since they’d known each other at primary school and then all through Grammar, Larry knew this was a bad sign, so he explained hastily and hoarsely: “Not the full sixty-nine, necessarily!” Donald just looked blank. Red and scowling, Larry growled: “Come on, Don! The old cunnilingus, mate!”

    “Oh—yes,” said Donald quickly, turning puce. The subject hadn’t been discussed between them since Larry had found a Book at the age of sixteen; Donald had at first refused to believe a word of it, and it had taken Larry some time to get him to admit that since it was a scientific Book, by a Doctor, it must be right.

    “Girls like it,” added Larry, in an anxious voice not unlike that of the Larry of twelve years before.

    “I don’t think Heather would,” said Donald simply.

    Shortly after this Larry had pushed off in his Porsche and Donald had gone gloomily home, where he was duly berated for his lateness, selfishness, lack of consideration, and drunkenness. The evening had ended with Heather flouncing off to bed and locking him out of the bedroom, and Donald trying unsuccessfully to sleep on the couch, an enormous trendy sectional in pale puce wool that tended to develop gaps in the wrong places when you were just drifting off.

    Now Heather replied to his “What the Hell for?” with a snuffle and: “To sleep: you ought to get some rest.”

    “Go away,” said Donald, turning back to the screen and hunching his shoulders defiantly.

    Heather gave a tiny sob.

    “For God’s sake, woman!” he shouted, swivelling round violently and glaring at her. “Stop bawling like a baby! You’re twenty-three, not three, for Chrissake! Why don’t you bloody well grow up?”

    Part of Heather’s trouble, though she didn’t realize it herself, was that she was twenty-three and had been wanting for at least the last eighteen months, since they got “officially” engaged, to have a baby. In fact, this was why she’d got married in the first place—though she wouldn’t have believed it if anyone had pointed it out to her, believing quite firmly as she did that she was “in love” with Donald, who—as she’d started to tell her breathlessly interested girlfriends—was “cruel” to her. That there could be much connection between being in love and Donald’s “dirtiness” and “cruelty” she didn’t believe, her conception of marital bliss being based entirely on romantic fiction and the women’s magazines of the knitting-pattern, lovely-story-about-the-Royal-Family variety that, following slavishly in her mother’s wake, she’d consumed since the age of about thirteen. Mrs Warburton referred to such volumes as “books”; it was only when she got to Teachers’ College that it gradually dawned on Heather that this usage was not common to the whole population; even now, to Donald’s annoyed embarrassment, she sometimes called them books when she wasn’t watching her tongue.

    “You’re mean!” she sobbed. “Mean and ho-horrible!”

    “Yeah,” said Donald, appearing to lose interest in the quarrel and turning back to his computer.

    “I wish I’d never married you!” screamed Heather.

    “So do I,” said Donald in a conversational tone, not turning his head.

    Maddened, Heather screamed: “I’ve got a good mind to get a divorce!”

    “Oh, yeah? What’d your grounds be: non-consummation, I suppose?” His tone was still conversational; there was a little pause, and then the penny dropped.

    “You’re revolting!” Bursting into a storm of sobs, she rushed out.

    The bedroom door slammed. Wait for it, thought Donald.

    “OH!”

    He’d unscrewed the whole lock from the bedroom door. There was a rending crash, as of some object being thrown violently against a door.

    “HUH!” roared Donald in a huge explosion of scorn. He got up to close the study door. From the direction of the main bedroom he could hear the storm of sobs continuing.

    When he sat down again he was disconcerted to find that his hands were shaking. He sat there, quite blank, for some time; then slowly, pushing his keyboard away from him, put his elbows on the real-wood surface of his trade-rates but still expensive workstation, and leaned his head in his hands.

    By the end of that winter he’d started working late at the office, his excuse being that he had several other commissions to finish before he got started on the big project of Sir Jerry Cohen’s Institute. This was quite true but, as he and Heather both knew, he could just as easily have worked on them at home.

    By the end of that winter Larry had almost worked himself up to the point of suggesting that old Don try one or two of the numbers in his own little black book.

    “Mum,” said Veronica.

    Lady Cohen looked up from her knitting—a jumper for Damian, in a highly elaborate Fairisle pattern—in mild surprise at the sheepish tone. “Yes, dear?”

    “Could I borrow your mink?”

    “Yes, of course, dear,” returned her mother placidly, appearing to concentrate on her knitting. Every fibre of her being quivered to strained attention. It was highly unlike Veronica to admit by word or deed that her own fashionable wardrobe was inadequate for her needs—or to take this much trouble over a date which she’d described, in an off-hand way, as being “just with a joker from the Pol. Sci. Department here—no sense in putting his back up, I s’pose”. Now her mother reflected that she should have been suspicious from the start: since when had Veronica bothered about putting up any man’s back? Let alone a local academic’s!

    “Thanks,” mumbled Veronica.

    “Oh—wait on, Veronica,” said Lady Cohen as her daughter’s dressing-gowned form prepared to depart from her boudoir. “It’s a different one.”

    “Eh?”

    “Your father bought me a new one,” said Lady Cohen, holding the jumper up and looking at it critically.

    “Oh,” said Veronica blankly. The old one couldn’t have been five years old—if that.

    “Mm; he felt I needed a new one; so I gave the old one to Becky.”

    “I see!” said Veronica, in the tone of one who did, indeed. Her mother met her eye and said serenely: “Yes, dear.” Veronica chuckled.

    “Besides,” added Lady Cohen vaguely, looking at her knitting pattern, “it wasn’t my colour, really—not at my age.”

    It had been a perfectly delightful dark mink and pink-cheeked, fluffy-haired Belinda Cohen had looked delightful in it. Veronica eyed her suspiciously and demanded: “What’s the new one, then?”

    “Blond,” returned her mother placidly, starting to knit again. “Go and get it, dear: let me see how it looks on you.”

    As Lady Cohen wore her coats rather long, it made a perfectly acceptable three-quarters mink on the five-foot-eleven Veronica. Lady Cohen looked at her daughter’s flushed, honey-tan features and chin-length, club-cut blond hair emerging from its generous collar, and said placidly: “Very pretty, dear; how are you going to do your hair?”

    Veronica looked at herself in the cheval glass and said without thinking: “He’s a bit short.”

    Calmly Lady Cohen returned to this apparent non sequitur: “Then I wouldn’t wear it up, dear.” Noticing with tremendous interest that Veronica had gone scarlet, she looked back at her knitting and murmured: “One, two, three; drop yellow...”

    Veronica went on staring rather blankly into the big mirror. The blond mink did look “very pretty”; only she wasn’t awfully sure that she wanted to look pretty; she’d rather thought of looking intimidatingly smart, which she certainly would have done in the old coat. Rather doubtfully she pushed a lock of hair behind her ear. “Sometimes I kind of brush it back,” she murmured vaguely.

    “Mm-m?—Seven, eight; drop black.—That sounds nice,”

    “I might do that!” she said with decision. ”Um, what do you think I should wear, Mum?”

    She had rather thought of wearing the black taffeta, which was not only intimidatingly smart but also terrifyingly sexy: not in order to knock Peter Riabouchinsky’s eye out, but to show him what he’d been missing over the last two days and make him squirm. Peter, exercising a terrific restraint which had caused him two very broken nights, had waited two whole days before ringing her to ask very casually if she fancied dinner the following night with a fellow political scientist, if she wasn’t doing anything more exciting. Veronica, heart racing as she accepted, had told herself she’d damn nearly said she was doing something more exciting.

    Suppressing a feeling of tremendous triumph, Lady Cohen laid her knitting down slowly and said calmly: “Well, let’s see what you’ve brought with you, dear.”

    All of Veronica’s after-five wear was spread out on her bed but fortunately her mother didn’t seem to think this was odd at all, just said: “Now, let’s see...”

    The black taffeta was a bit too smart for the occasion and the deep green silk slashed with lime was really more of an evening dress—the more so since it made Veronica’s huge, forget-me-not blue eyes look a sort of murky grey. That left the strapless bright turquoise chiffon, the black velvet pirate pants with their yellow satin blouse, and the as-yet unworn, forget-me-not Indian silk. Belinda Cohen couldn’t think of any reason for rejecting the pants except that they weren’t feminine; but fortunately Veronica said in a growly voice: “Not the pants.”

    “These are both lovely, Veronica.”

    Veronica revealed in a growly voice that the blue silk was new. Her mother picked up the chiffon and urged her to try it on. Veronica went very red and growled: “I wore turquoise the other day.” Correctly interpreting this to mean “he’s seen me in turquoise”, Lady Cohen said: “Well, what about the blue?”

    Veronica got into the forget-me-not blue Indian silk. It was slightly ruched all the way down its tight skirt—which, her mother noted approvingly, wasn’t a mini, but reached halfway down her daughter’s well-shaped calves; a long flare of a sash depended from the right hip. It had a low-cut bodice in the shape of the top of a heart: the “sweetheart” style that used to be popular in the Forties; Belinda Cohen, who was sixty-six, didn’t reveal that she’d had a dress with just such a neckline when she was about twenty-two.

    They looked at the reflection in the bedroom mirror with identical expressions of approval: Lady Cohen noticed how it brought out the blue of Veronica’s eyes, and Veronica noticed with relief that it didn’t make her look sallow, as a powder-blue would have done.

    After only a token resistance she agreed to borrow her mother’s sapphire earrings, but rejected the matching brooch as “a bit over the top”; Lady Cohen put it away again with a tiny smile.

    Sir Jerry came home rather late, rather cross, and very hungry; so he was in the dining-room when Veronica shot out to her taxi and, perhaps fortunately, missed the picture of his youngest daughter in her mother’s brand-new mink. Lady Cohen, placidly serving him beef stew and ignoring his grumble of “don’t want all that broccoli stuff” decided to wait until he’d finished his tea before interrogating him about Peter Riabouchinsky. She sat down and began to consume her own, rather smaller portion of stew, wondering how long she should wait before tactfully letting him know that the mink didn’t really suit her after all, and wouldn’t it be a good idea to pass it on to dear Veronica...

    Peter leaned over the table so that his nice but very ordinary face was rather close to Veronica’s and murmured: “Now you will have some real food.”

    “That right?” she replied neutrally. She looked round at the unexciting fawn décor of L’Oie Qui Rit and its unexciting middle-aged customers. Well, at least it wasn’t full of smoking yuppies, and the music they were playing was really quite pleasant—and not too loud, either. “What is that—Bach, or something?”

    “Mozart,” replied Peter, realizing rather sadly that the gorgeous Veronica wasn’t musical.

    “Yeah?” She smiled at him and added: “Nice, isn’t it?”

    Peter smiled back weakly, dazzled only slightly more by the smile, which was the first proper one she’d awarded him, than by Veronica’s calm insouciance in the face of her own cultural ignorance. After a moment he began to chat cheerfully about Sydney, which he knew quite well, and Veronica, suppressing a totally ridiculous impulse to tell him she hated the place and was homesick as Hell there, began to chat cheerfully back.

    A little elderly waiter came up and asked them quietly if they’d like cocktails; he actually said “like”, not “care for”, and Veronica took a second look at him and her surroundings with dawning approval. The napery was spotless white: quite a contrast to the pale puce napkins and silver-grey tablecloths of The Royal. The unexciting middle-aged customers had now been supplemented by a handsome, dark, stocky man of perhaps fifty, and a very pretty brown-haired woman who was rather pregnant. Veronica looked at them with interest; Peter, following her gaze, said: “Ah! But that is Polly!”

    “Do you know them?”

    Replying that he knew her, she was with the Department of Linguistics, Peter began to tell her about Polly Mitchell and Jake Carrano.

    “Oh,” said Veronica: “that property developer, isn’t he?”

    Peter replied vaguely that he thought Jake did something like that; anyway, he was a millionaire, or something; and began an anecdote in which the words “Polly Mitchell” figured rather more largely than Veronica thought was quite desirable when a man was addressing his dinner date.

    After a little—perhaps feeling the eyes of the tall blonde woman in blue on her—the pretty brown-haired woman looked round, spotted Peter, and smiled and waved.

    “She’s waving at you,” said Veronica, in what to her horror came out as a very grumpy voice.

    Peter looked round, smiled and waved; the lady said something to her companion, and they both got up.

    “Hi, Peter! I wondered if we might see you here!”

    Beaming all over his face, Veronica’s dinner-date scrambled to his feet and—in a very foreign and affected manner—kissed the woman’s cheeks. She was really quite pregnant; Veronica tried to tell herself that the long, deep gold silk tunic over narrow matching trousers wasn’t that attractive. The double row of pearls over it was undoubtedly genuine, however; but when Peter, laughing and smiling, introduced “Polly Mitchell—or I suppose I should say Polly Carrano when you’re off-duty, should I, Polly?” she decided that the big rose-cut yellow stone on the hand that was held out to her was definitely only a topaz. She hardly even noticed handsome, well-muscled Jake Carrano for worrying that Peter might invite them to make a foursome.

    Back at their own table Polly Carrano rubbed her right hand with her left and, grinning at her husband, said: “Heck, that Veronica Cohen’s got a grip like a navvy!”

    Jake picked up the little paw gently, turned it over and dropped a soft kiss on the palm. The ring had got slightly twisted; gently he readjusted it so that the rose-cut yellow diamond was centred.

    L’Oie Qui Rit did, indeed, serve real food: from their terrine through their limited but entirely delicious mains—Veronica had the estouffade de boeuf à la Provençale and Peter had the canard aux navets, observing that since it wasn’t Monday they couldn’t expect Madame’s splendid selle d’agneau—their separate salad course and their real French cheeses with real French bread to their tiny choice of superb desserts. Peter chose the gâteau de marrons au chocolat with its liberal topping of whipped cream—which certainly explained the tum, thought Veronica involuntarily—and she, feeling rather full and reflecting guiltily that she’d been neglecting her jogging a bit, had the compôte d’abrigots de Madame, which was merely stewed apricots flavoured with a little wine—and quite delicious. The wines were certainly real and so was the “You have not had this? I think you must try it; just a little, da?” –Armagnac.

    When they were sipping their Armagnacs the little elderly “Madame” herself came out from the kitchen: more cheek kissing from Peter and a lot of chat in French. Then the little old waiter came up and joined in, cripes.

    “I never knew about this place before,” she said dazedly when they’d pushed off; and Peter, smiling smugly, said no, not many people did; and as Madame was very strict about not letting people smoke in the restaurant she had a rather limited clientèle: which suited her and “l’oncle Julien” nicely.

    Veronica was very glad she’d left her cigarillos at home.

    She began to wonder what he’d suggest next: there were no decent nightclubs, the hotels would’ve closed by now... There wasn’t anywhere to go on to, really.

    Mr and Mrs Carrano had stood up, preparing to go; the old waiter was bowing over her hand, and she was smiling—then she kissed him on the cheeks! Veronica gawped.

    Peter looked, and laughed a little. “Ah, qu’elle est sympa, la belle Polly! Oh; I am sorry, moy dear; I mean—”

    “I know what you mean,” said Veronica drily.

    Then they came over to say goodbye and Veronica was quite mollified by Polly’s envious: “I’ve been admiring your dress, Veronica—Sydney, I suppose?”

    “No, Mr John’s—you know, in Remmers?”

    “Oh!” she gulped, looking at her husband.

    He put his arm around her, gave her a squeeze and said with a wide grin: “Aw, right: that the place Joanie had that run-in with when you were looking for a wedding dress, eh?”

    Polly gave a little choke of laughter which to Veronica’s envy managed not to be a snort and yet not to be silly or girlish, leaned into her sturdy husband’s side and, explaining that Joanie had been her matron of honour, told Veronica all about the run-in at Mr John’s. Veronica was able to reply with a story of a much worse run-in of her own at a ghastly boutique in Double Bay.

    As the Carranos exited, his arm still tightly round her, her still leaning into his sturdy side, the glamorous Dr Cohen’s handsome face wore a wistful expression which the quietly watchful Peter Riabouchinsky realized had nothing at all to do with Polly’s charms, or her jewels, or indeed with her handsome husband—as such. Unexpectedly his heart began to beat rather hard and he had to remind himself very sternly indeed that there was going to be no hanky-panky; not now; not yet.

    And indeed, he kept his promise to himself—with considerable difficulty, once he had Veronica installed on his very ordinary fawn sofa in his very undistinguished flat. He sat down in a big fawn armchair opposite her, twinkled at her, and said, waving his hand towards the record cabinet and the record he’d put on: “This is Mozart, too.”

    “Oh,” she said, looking round her somewhat dazedly at his boring fawn décor.

    “Terrible, is it not?” he said gaily. “I have no talent for interior decoration: I’m afraid all moy taste is in moy mouth!”

    Involuntarily Veronica looked at his nice mouth—just a trifle cynical, and what she had inwardly decided could only be called “curly”—and suddenly went very red.

    Peter put down the tiny liqueur glass he’d just picked up without tasting any of the Grand Marnier it contained, leaned forward, and said earnestly: “Veronica—”

    Veronica took a very large sip of liqueur and said, in what she was furious to find was a stupid, shaky sort of voice: “Yes?”

    “You must know,” said Peter, still terribly earnest, “that I am very much attracted to you.”

    Trying to ignore the fact that she’d gone very red, she replied in what was supposed to be a woman-of-the-world voice but which came out more as a growly sulk: “You could’ve fooled me.”

    Peter’s nice mouth curved very cynically indeed, and he said in a very dry voice that she hadn’t heard him use before: “Oh, come, moy dear: you are not a little girl; and I think it is sufficiently obvious—da?”

    “Well, what the Hell are ya doing over there, then?”

    “That is what I am troyink to explain!”

    “Are you married, or something?”

    “No, I am not married, or even something; but I am...” He hesitated.

    Suddenly she felt as if she was going to vomit. “You’re not ill, are you?”

    Peter had been looking gloomily at the fawnish rug between them. He looked up quickly. “Moy dear—no; I am perfectly healthy.”

    Veronica heard her own voice say loudly “Thank God!” Colour flooded up her neck and she took a gulp of her liqueur. Her legs felt as if they’d turned to water. Defiantly she crossed them, hitching up the narrow skirt in order to do so.

    Peter very nearly forgot his good resolutions. Shakily he said: “Moy dear—it’s just, with this damned institute business of your father’s...”

    Veronica was so relieved to know he was perfectly healthy that she just replied mildly: “What about it?”

    “Well, you know all the jobs there will be up for grabs very soon: and I do not h’want to—to seem to be currying favour with Sir Jerry boy makink up to his daughter.”

    “That’s daft!”

    “No, it is not daft,” said Peter with a sad smile. “I would quoite loike to feel that I have got my job—if I get one, which is quoite open to doubt, you know—on moy own merits.” He gave a tiny, not very happy chuckle, and added: “Such as they are.”

    “Dad wouldn’t take any notice of anything I said, anyway,” said Veronica weakly.

    Peter’s mouth looked a bit cynical again and he said: “Oh, I think he moight, moy dear, in this instance. He does respect your ability, you know.”

    “Coulda fooled me,” she growled without conviction.

    “Besoides—” said Peter hesitantly.

    “Besides what?” she said quickly, looking into his face with dawning hope.

    The curly mouth firmed and the well-shaped nostrils of the aquiline nose flared.

    Veronica swallowed: she’d been reminding herself for quite some time that she'd never admired that Semitic look, but hadn’t convinced herself that she didn’t admire it in him.

    “I suppose,” Peter said slowly: “that it is already quoite clear to you that your father very much hopes you will apploy for one of the jobs at his institute.”

    “So what?” said Veronica blankly.

    Peter gripped the arms of his chair and said: “He has already spoken to me, asking me if I would help to persuade you.”

    Veronica began to come out her daze of frustrated desire. “Oh...”

    “I do not intend to persuade you in bed!” said Peter, more loudly than he’d intended, hands clenched feverishly on the chair arms.

    “No,” said Veronica thoughtfully. Suddenly she gave a little laugh and said: “But to give Dad his due, he wouldn’t’ve thought of that angle!”

    “No,” he agreed with a smile. “But I have thought of it.”

    “So have I,” said Veronica with the frankness that had scared off more than one bloke who’d fancied her blonde, blue-eyed good looks.

    Peter Riabouchinsky was made of sterner stuff than these spineless types: he immediately gave her a look that went right through her, down to the tips of her toes. Veronica sat there shaken and scarlet, heart thudding wildly, breast heaving, sweat starting on her palms.

    “Well, now that that is settled,” said Peter with a tiny laugh in his voice, “perhaps I should also add that I also would loike very much for you to take a job with the institute; but if you do, I want it to be entoirely your own choice.”

    “Eh?” –Boy, wasn’t that just like a man: first they went and got you so excited that you couldn’t think, and then when they saw that had worked they came out with something that you couldn’t possibly concentrate on!

    Peter gave what was definitely a laugh this time, and repeated what he’d just said.

    Frowning a little, she murmured: “I dunno if it’d be the right career move...”

    “Exactly!” he agreed with a sort of sad triumph.

    Veronica had been looking at his ghastly mushroom-y rug; she looked up and said hopefully: “But couldn’t you come over to Sidders from time to time?”

    Peter’s mouth twitched sardonically and he just looked at her.

    “Not until the bloody institute thing’s settled, I suppose that’s what you’re gonna say!”

    “Quoite.”

    “But Peter—”

    “No buts.” The nostrils flared and the curly mouth firmed; and it dawned forcibly on the wilful, independent Veronica Cohen that this nice, plumpish Jewish-looking fellow had a will that was quite as strong as her own—if not stronger.

    “Anyway,” she said sourly: “those appointments won’t be down to Dad: Hamish Macdonald’ll be in charge of them, and he’s a puritanical Scot; I can’t see him letting anyone influence him, one way or the other!”

    Peter had revealed to no-one the interesting fact that on a warm March day he’d spotted Hamish Macdonald in a café in town with a very choice little morsel indeed. He didn’t express his thoughts on the subject of Macdonald’s Puritanism, however. Instead he said briskly: “Good; let’s hope that is so!”

    “So don’t you think, Peter—?” she said huskily.

    “Please do not go on about it, Veronica. It’s killink me, as it is.”

    “It’s ridiculous!” She scrabbled in the little blue handbag that she’d paid an exorbitant sum for in Remuera Road—telling herself that she was an idiot, she could have got it for less than half the price in Sydney, but determined to have it, it went perfectly with the new blue dress that she’d rushed out and bought immediately after receiving Peter’s invitation. She blew her nose hard.

    “Please don’t croy.”

    “I’m not!” She gave a loud sniff, and glared at him. “I don’t know what the Hell’s the matter with me! You’re not even my type!”

    “No,” said Peter simply.

    She flushed. “Do you mean that I—that you don’t usually... I know I’m too tall for you,” she ended ridiculously.

    “No, no!” said Peter, mouth twitching. “I have always greatly fancied tall, beautiful blondes; you are very much moy toype, moy darling.”

    At the unexpected endearment Veronica went scarlet all over again and mumbled, twisting her hanky fiercely: “Must be a bloody atavism, or something—I must be reverting to type, or something.”

    “I think that is so,” he said sedately. He stood up. “Come along; I think I had better take you home.”

    Veronica got up a little uncertainly and took a step towards him.

    Peter flushed a dusky red; she saw him swallow.

    “Aren’t you even going to kiss me?” she said in a very small voice.

    Saying nothing, Peter put his hands on her waist. Veronica put her hands on his upper-arms and stooped a little. The curly mouth touched hers. The world whirled...

    “I think we’d better go,” he said huskily at last.

    “Yes,” agreed Veronica meekly, allowing him to help her into the blond mink and shepherd her out without another word.

    “Do you want to tell me about it, dear?” said Lady Cohen placidly on the Saturday afternoon—Veronica was due to fly out on the Sunday morning

    Veronica looked up quickly from where she was sprawling in a blue-flowered little easy-chair in the “sulkery.” “About what?” she said aggressively.

    Lady Cohen knitted peacefully on the window-seat in a patch of sun. “About whatever it is that’s the matter.”

    Veronica opened her mouth to deny that anything was the matter, gulped, and burst into noisy sobs. Her mother waited until the worst seemed to be over, produced a clean, ironed hanky from her cardy pocket, and said: “Come over here, Veronica.” Meekly Veronica came and sat down beside her and accepted the handkerchief.

    She blew her nose, sniffed, looked up, said: “It’s awful, Mum!”—and burst into sobs again.

    “There, there, dear,” said Belinda Cohen in some satisfaction. “Tell me all about it, mm?”

    With a lot of mumbling, sniffing and growling the story was got through; since Lady Cohen had already gathered from Sir Jerry that Peter Riabouchinsky was “quite a decent sort of a chap”—an accolade not lightly bestowed—she wasn’t altogether surprised by his self-restraint and the evident principles that this revealed; though she was surprised that such a man had fallen, in what was clearly a very serious way, for her bossy and rather unprincipled youngest daughter.

    “He’s such a prude!” declared Veronica crossly.

    “Nonsense, Veronica!” said her mother sharply. Swiftly she delivered herself of a lecture—which she’d been saving up for quite some years now—on what constituted decent behaviour in men and what did not. Since she allowed her daughter to perceive quite clearly during this recital that she had no objection to extra-marital sex as such, only considerable objection to opportunism, self-seeking, and thoughtless self-indulgence, it was no wonder that Veronica by the end of it was scarlet, scowling, and very, very thoughtful.

    After a while she said: “But Mum, it’s ridiculous; I wouldn’t try to talk Dad into giving a bloke a job, whether or not I’d been to bed with him!”

    “I don’t think you’ve quite got the point, Veronica.”

    “Eh?”

    “My dear, isn’t it obvious? It’s not just that he doesn’t want to seem to be influencing your father through you; it’s that he doesn’t want you to end up feeling that he’s only been using you to get at your father.” Smiling serenely, she picked up her knitting.

    Dazedly Veronica admitted: “I hadn’t thought of that... “

    After thirty-five years Lady Cohen was well aware that poor Veronica had no grasp whatsoever of the niceties of civilized behaviour that were perfectly clear to persons of greater sensibility. She rejoined calmly: “No, dear; I thought you hadn’t;” and knitted a whole row of Damian’s jersey which she later had to unravel.

    After a while, twisting Lady’s Cohen’s hanky round and round very tightly in her lap, Veronica mumbled: “Those jobs at the institute... it’ll be a whole year, at least!”

    “Yes, dear,” agreed her mother.

    “How can I wait?” she burst out.

    Lady Cohen bit back a remark about self-restraint which would only have put her liberated daughter’s back up, and rejoined placidly: “It’s just as bad for him, Veronica.”

    “He hasn’t even asked me—if—if I will wait!” She gave a cross laugh.

    Sighing, her mother replied: “Oh, Veronica; can’t you see? He’s not the sort of man to put you under an obligation; he wants you to come to him of your own free will, not because of some promise he’s extracted from you!”

    Unexpectedly at the old-fashioned phrase “he wants you to come to him” Veronica found herself flushing to the roots of her hair; her heart thudded madly. “I see,” she muttered humbly.

    There was quite a pause; Lady Cohen, knitting blindly, saw that she’d gone into a sort of daze. After allowing the daze to continue for some time, she said gently: “Veronica—”

    Her daughter looked round with a start.

    “Veronica, don’t do—” She hesitated. “Anything silly, will you?”

    “Eh?” said Veronica, puzzled.

    Pinkening, her mother elaborated: “Don’t—well, go with some other man in Sydney just because it seems a long time, or—or just because you’re cross with Peter, will you, dear?”

    “No,” she growled, twisting the hanky again. “I’m sick of them all!” she added abruptly.

    “Good.”

    Silence fell again; Veronica was again in a daze.

    “Are you going out with him again tonight, dear?”

    “Mm,” said Veronica dreamily.

    Lady Cohen said thoughtfully: “I wouldn’t wear that black dress...”

    “No. Maybe the pants?”

    “That’d be nice,” returned her mother placidly.

    When Veronica had gone back to Sydney Peter Riabouchinsky threw himself into his work and surprised his very wide circle of friends and acquaintances by no longer being his gregarious self, and refusing more invitations than he accepted. Several married ladies who’d fancied they meant more in his life than he did in theirs got horrid shocks; and a couple of liberated career women turned very nasty indeed at work, making their unfortunate subordinates wonder what the Hell was up with her, and why did she have to take it out on us?

    The J.P.A.P.S., which it was his turn to edit, turned down all the articles on New Zealand polling-booth patterns which it was its wont to publish, and wrote letters to Hamish Macdonald and to all the departments of political science around the Pacific Rim, notifying them of the planned new institute and soliciting contributions; of which, rather to its new editor’s surprise—and to the stunned amazement of its erstwhile contributors—it subsequently got enough to fill three issues straight away—some of them by doctoral students, but still…

    Peter went on a diet, stopped smoking entirely, and took up walking. Not perhaps surprisingly, by the time summer came round he was a good stone lighter, fighting fit, and randier than ever. Since he wasn’t an inhibited Anglo-Saxon, he cried a lot into his pillow at night. He wrote Veronica a lot of letters, all carefully cheerful and ironical in tone, saw rather a lot of her mother and her sister Becky behind her father’s back, and stunned Sir Jerry by telling him outright that he had no intention of helping him talk his daughter into anything, now or in the future. Sir Jerry, huffing and puffing, was terribly impressed by this and told his wife repeatedly what a good chap that Peter Riabouchinsky was, and why on earth didn’t she ask him to dinner a bit more, eh? He began to lard his speech more and more with words like “mensch” and “goy”, and got his solicitor to haul out his will and Veronica’s trust for his perusal.

    When Veronica got back to Sydney she threw herself into her work, brutally rejected all her previous boyfriends’ confident invitations, and spent rather a lot of time with Glenda Hamilton and her two little boys, eventually bursting into tears in Glenda’s cosy lounge-room at afternoon tea and revealing how Hellishly miserable she was and how much she missed him, and how he hadn’t even been to bed with her, and it was killing her! Glenda often felt the same way about Tony’s difficult phase: she listened sympathetically, and saw nothing surprising in Veronica’s decision to apply for a job at the new institute after all.

    After that Veronica did a lot of jogging and tennis, lost half a stone, and wrote Peter more and more letters that got hotter and hotter in tone, until he rang her up and begged her not to, it was driving him out of his mind.

    “But I love you!” said Veronica hoarsely, with a tiny sob.

    “Yes: I love you, too: that is whoy I ask you—not—to...”

    “Peter? Peter—are you crying?

    Peter sobbed down the phone; Veronica, cradling her smart blue receiver to her bosom, forgot her own misery and, swept by a wave of tremulous sweet tenderness the like of which she’d never experienced in her life, whispered: “Darling; darling Peter—don’t cry; don’t cry.” When he stopped crying he revealed that her parents had asked him to accompany them on a visit to Sydney over the long vacation.

    The family usually went down to their bach at Taupo in summer; Veronica blinked. Then she admitted in a croak that she didn’t know if she’d be able to stand it.

    “Nor I,” he responded shakily; “but I’m very glad you feel loike that, too.”

    The subsequent visit over the Christmas break wasn’t altogether a comfortable one; though Belinda Cohen, observing the parties behaving with admirable restraint, was very satisfied with it. She was also very pleased, if a trifle stunned, to observe Veronica’s meek reception of Peter’s trenchant criticism of an article she was preparing: expressions such as “doesn’t hold water” and “you have not made this point strongly enough” came up more than once. At the end of this session Veronica heaved a sigh, and said: “You must be a bloody good teacher,” and Peter, who had no false modesty, replied simply: “Yes.”

    When the visit came to an end in mid-January Veronica was grim-jawed and dry-eyed, Peter had bags under his eyes and was rather blue around the lips, and the petite Belinda Cohen, in spite of the humid Sydney heat, was perkier than ever.

    Until they’d dropped off a monosyllabic Peter at his city flat and driven home to Remuera Lady Cohen merely chatted about Sydney, but once they were comfortably ensconced in her boudoir having a nice cup of tea she leaned forward and spoke to Sir Jerry at length.

Next chapter:

https://themembersoftheinstitute.blogspot.com/2023/01/haere-mai.html