After The Ecolodge

 8

After The Ecolodge

    Hill got back to his hotel in Auckland to find several messages waiting for him. His impulse was to respond to the one from Polly Carrano without delay but he fought it down and picked up the one from Erin Arvidson. They were where? He couldn’t pronounce it: what if he rang and a voice just said “Hullo?”, as he had had more than time enough to learn voices did, on New Zealand phones, and he had to say was this Wairarapa Glen Lodge? He gave in and called Jim. The reaction was “Ya don’t wanna go down there!” but he got him to calm down, admit it was sort of near Wellington, well, over the other side of the hills, no direct access, took ages to get there, and a real dump, and got an approximation of the pronunciation out of him. Just as well: the voice did say “Hullo?” It thought they’d gone out for the day, but hang on, they could of come back. Nobody tried to put him through to anybody: there was some shouting in the background and eventually the voice said: “Are you thee-are?” They had come back and hang on, she was just coming. And Erin came on the line, panting. No, she admitted to his probing, it wasn’t an ecolodge like they’d thought, only a boarding house, but very nice! And she’d told them about a lovely B&B website that would be ideal to host their page! Finally he managed to get the actual message out of her. There were lots of places in Australia where you could have a lovely ecolodge, but Queensland was very popular and the rainforests and the Barrier Reef were superb: almost unspoiled in spite of all the frightful tour operators and so forth, and as it happened their little friend Dot had been involved only last month in making a film up there: perhaps Hill had heard of it: The Captain’s Daughter, starring Lily Rose Rayne—and of course she was an Australian, and as a matter of fact, little Dot’s cousin!

    “Er—yes, Erin?” he said cautiously.

    “Well, it may not appeal, of course, but the place does have the advantage of easy access to the wonderful rainforests. Unfortunately the motel owned by Dot’s friends has got the best site—that’s where they made the film, you see—but the farm is just up behind it, and once one got rid of the crops and allowed the land to revegetate naturally, I think it could be rather wonderful! And of course everything grows so fast in Queensland, you’d have no time to wait for the native vegetation to regenerate!” And blah, blah, blah…

    He finally rang off with the details. Well, sort of: Erin had dredged up the contact details of the motel but she didn’t have those of the farm which she thought Dot had mentioned was up for sale. After some thought he rang Jim back and asked him if he fancied a trip to Australia, suss out some sites— Ooh, yeah! Falling over himself. Hadn’t the bastards even offered him the standard induction course at home? No, they bloody well hadn’t. Jesus! He’d been sitting on his ownsome in that damned rabbit hutch of an office—in a large building on a very good site downtown, yes, but YDI South Pacific consisted of a reception area and Jim’s office, with access to the shared loos—for months, hunting for sites that might show some signs, however unlikely, of becoming ecolodges once fortunes had been poured— Yeah. Well.

    He plugged the laptop in and sent off some very rude emails to Head Office, not asking them but telling them. Then he had a whisky.

    Then he looked at the message from Polly Carrano again…

    “I’ve got your hanky!” she said with a giggle.

    Mm-hm. “I’ve missed it.”

    Polly giggled again. “Well, if I give it back, I could take you up the inlet where we’ve got our bach, that’s like a holiday house—”

    “Really? I was under the impression that they were more like shacks.”

    “No!” she said with a giggle. “He’s long since super-duperised it.”

    “Air conditioning?’

    “No, he hasn’t gone that far, but there are a couple of lovely Persian rugs and some nice pieces of modern pottery. And the last innovation was a pot-bellied stove with a wetback to heat the water: he only had to tear out a wall to put that in. It is very cosy, now.”

    “Mm, I can imagine it.”

    “Anyway, the inlet’s quite a way north of Auckland but it’s gradually being developed, because that’s where the Sir George Grey Enterprise Corporation has put up Sir George Grey University.”

    “Isn’t that where you’re working?”

    “No. I was: I was helping set up the Department of Linguistics, but it was very boring, all administrative stuff, so once we’d appointed the staff and set up the curriculum I gave it away. I don’t need the work and it was keeping me from my own research.”

    “I see. Wouldn’t taking me up this inlet keep you from your own research?” he asked politely.

    “Definitely! No, well, there’s quite a variety of modern architecture, mostly large houses owned by professors and so on: the sort of environmentally-conscious people who’d fancy your ecolodges, Hill, so I thought you might like to have a look at them, see what the local affluent styles are. The grounds are interesting, too: the sections on our side are still in five-acre lots, up until the stretch that His Sir Jacobness in gonna hang onto in perpetuity or until the government decides to build something frightful over the bird sanctuary and offers him five mill’ or so for it.”

    Hill had to bite his lip. “Polly,” he said very cautiously, “have you and Jake had a row?”

    “No. We don’t have serious rows. But he’s sixty-seven and he hasn’t got the energy to fit in all the activities he used to,” she said serenely.

    He swallowed hard. “Um, look, there is someone at home. Well, she won’t look at me, in fact she won’t spend more than five seconds in my company, but—”

    “I see,” she said sympathetically. “Well, not if you feel you shouldn’t, Hill, of course.”

    Hill did feel he shouldn’t but gee, part of him felt he should! Without delay, what was more. And Hell, Hattie was off at the other side of the world giving every indication of being determined to hate him until Hell froze over, and Polly Carrano was the most luscious thing he’d laid eyes on for years, and ready and willing, and obviously preferred it uncomplicated…

    “I shouldn’t, but I’m up for it,” he said blandly.

    “Well, I thought you might be: I couldn’t help noticing, at Pete and Jan’s. –Did she warn you off, by the way?” she asked with a smile in her voice.

    “Er—well, yes. Quite tactfully, but it was bloody clear.”

    “Yes. All Jake’s old cobbers feel he needs protecting. They don’t understand that I’d never leave him and I’d never want to be married to anyone else. But sometimes a lovely little play is just a nice change, isn’t it?”

    Hill’s jaw had sagged. “Where have you been all my life?” he managed to croak.

    “Oh, round and about!” said Polly with a contralto gurgle. “Shall I come there?”

    “Yes, why don’t you? Then if you feel like it we could both come here, and then we could go up and look at these houses, and then we could come again, if your bach is warm enough.”

    Gratifyingly, Polly collapsed in giggles. “Yes!” she gasped. “Okay! –Um, let’s see. I’ll have to get the kids off to school… Well, quarter to ten tomorrow morning?”

    “Super!” said Hill with a laugh. “I can’t wait!”

    “Me, too, neither! See ya!”

    What he should do, of course, Hill reflected as he hung up the receiver, was ring her straight back and tell her he was sorry, but it was N.B.G. after all. What he actually did do was ring Jim and ask him if he and Caitlin fancied a nice nosh house tonight and to name it, if they did. Actually they would, and Caitlin was dying to have a meal at the hotel, um, would that be all right? Dazedly Hill agreed that he’d be happy to feed them at The Royal if that was what they really— It was.

    The food was quite as bad as it had been on the other occasion he’d tried it, but Jim and Caitlin had shining morning faces and she thought the frightful décor was lovely, so he just sat back and let them order whatever they liked. Wine as well, since they were getting a taxi—oh, would Caitlin like champagne? She’d love it, if Hill was sure—? Hill was sure, so they had it. Non-vintage Bollinger at a hundred and eighty dollars a pop. New Zealand dollars, but— Well, who cared? It could go on the company credit card, it’d compensate for the second motel room he hadn’t made Jim book in Taupo. He skipped the pudding course: after that dream of a fluffy meringue of Jan’s he couldn’t face any of The Royal’s gluey, sauce-dotted little lumps of this, that and the other, carefully arranged by far too many human hands. The Presentation school of la kweezine modyerne: quite.

    “Um, yes: send her up,” he croaked next morning just after nine-thirty to the desk’s enquiry.

    “Hullo, Polly,” he said weakly, opening the door to a vision in brown mink over blue jeans. He had time to register that Jesus, she wasn’t bothering to be anything that could be called discreet, was she, and then he just sort of peeled the fur jacket off her and sort of just crushed the tits against his chest and put his tongue in her mouth. After that the mink, the footwear and the jeans were on the floor, Hill’s dressing-gown that was all he was wearing just in case she really had meant it after all was on the floor and they were both on the bed that Hill had neatly smoothed out just in case she hadn’t been kidding after all. And he was lying on top of her—ooh, all squidgy!—panting, and tangling his tongue with hers, and nibbling those neat little pink ears, and nibbling that creamy neck and panting and getting his hand— No, sitting up and wrenching that fuzzy jumper thing right off, why was she bothering with a bra, for God’s sake, even a soft one, and getting that off and burying his face— Ooh, good! “Ultra-squidgy!” he gasped, mumbling his face between them.

    “Yes, good!” gasped Polly, writhing like mad.

    Then he was somehow kneeling up again and wrenching the lacy panties right off her and shoving his face—GOD!

    “Oh, Hill! Oh, Hill!” she gasped.

    “Good, eh?” said Hill in a very muffled voice.

    “Oh, Hill! Oh, Hill!” she gasped, writhing like mad.

    Gee, she must like it. He did it for as long as he could without actually exploding, then knelt up, panting—she was staring at it, that really helped—and hauled on a condom, explaining with supreme delicacy: “Gotta come!”

    “Mm,” she murmured, spreading her legs.

    This was so discouraging that he hurled himself on top of her, kissed her once wetly and shoved it up there. And sort of kept on shoving—Jesus—Jesus—Jesus!

    “Ah, ah, aah!” she squeaked, writhing like mad under him and shoving herself right up on his old man in way that was really quite—

    Hill was about to say he thought he might come but God! “AAA-ARGH! Uh—AAARGH!” he bellowed at the top of his lungs.

    “Ai-eeh!” she screamed—something like that, he wasn’t concentrating. “AIEEE-EEE-EEAH!”

    About ten centuries later he thought that was it, then, and managed to sort of twitch the old feller as a first move towards making the huge effort to roll off her but she clenched like fury on it and screeched: “Aii-eeeee!” or words to that effect. Crumbs.

    “That it?” he said finally, as she was just panting.

    “Mmf!” she panted.

    “Me old man's gonna fall out of you, I th—Uh! Thanks,” he said feebly as one last clench expelled it. With a terrific effort he rolled off her and onto his back. “Do you often do that?”

    “Mm.”

    Hill rolled onto his side and snuggled his face into her upper-arm—ooh, squidgy!—and murmured: “Want finger up there?”

    “Mm.”

    So he obligingly slid it up there. She didn’t do anything, how disappointing. So he bit her ear.

    “OH!” she cried, just about taking the finger off.

    “Thought so,” he said smugly.

    Quite some time after that he said: “Okay if I withdraw me finger now?”

    “I think so.”

    Well, she was capable of speech, at any rate. So he did.

    “How did you know to do that, or shouldn’t I ask?” said Polly weakly.

    “How did you?”

    “It’s involuntary, you clot!” she said with a laugh.

    “Mm. Well, mixture of experience and—uh—experience?”

    “Yeah, I thought it might’ve been,” she said with a deep sigh.

    “Mm.” He propped her head on his shoulder and then just lay back with a deep sigh…

    “Fuck, did I go to sleep?” he gasped.

    “Yes. In that order, too,” replied Polly, smiling serenely.

    “Jesus, mid-morning? I’ve never in my life— Um, sorry.”

    “That’s okay.”

    “Um, didn’t sleep all that well last night,” admitted Hill, clearing his throat. “Haven’t had it for a bit.”

    “I see,” she said, looking at him sympathetically.

    Somehow he found he was telling her all about Hattie.

    “Mm…” said Polly thoughtfully. “Hill, how old is she?”

    “Uh—well, I don’t know. Doesn’t look any older than she did back on the course, really.”

    “Mm… How old were the skinny lady execs? In her group, I mean.”

    “Well, uh, they were all much of a muchness, the entire time I was there… Um, mid-thirties? The middle management type, upwardly mobile in the company—you know.”

    “Yes,” said Polly slowly. “Did you assume Hattie was the same age?”

    “Well, I…” Hill found he’d gone rather red. “I suppose I did. Didn’t really think about it.”

    “Yes. You know, if she was a lot younger, and hadn’t had very much experience of men…”

    “Don’t go on,” he said, swallowing hard.

    “Did she mention any jobs she’d had before that one in London?”

    “What? Uh—no. Um, told me quite a lot about the subjects she’d taken at school, and, er, adult education courses—they were in her last year at school, but I think she might have gone on with them—and a bit about the subjects she took for her degree, and quite a lot about the cretinous university curriculum…” His voice trailed off.

    “Yes,” said Polly. “That’s the sort of thing that people who’ve just finished their degrees tend to talk about, don’t you find? I did, in my early twenties.”

    “Mm,” he agreed, wincing horribly. “But, um… How long does a degree take, Downunder?” he asked with a bleak attempt at humour.

    “Usually three years. –They tend to make them stay on at school in Australia until they’re eighteen,” she added kindly.

    Shit, Polly, eighteen and three were still only— In fact nineteen and three were still only— Shit, shit, shit! Hill swallowed hard. “I see. She did say something about her mum being sure she’d find a job in Britain…”

    “Well, I think if she wanted her to go over there and take the responsibility for the grandfather off her shoulders she’d have said that anyway, but you could certainly read it as a parent trying to give a kid who’s just finished their qualifications a bit of a push and buck-you-up.”

    “Yeah. Shit!”

    “I might be wrong,” she said kindly.

    “I’m bloody sure you’re not! Her skin’s completely unlined, and—uh, well, the neck’s perfect.”

    “Yes, necks are a real giveaway,” said Lady Carrano serenely.

    “Christ, she’s probably still under thirty!” He sat up and stared bleakly out of the window at a view of windy sky and the tops of office buildings. “What the Hell would be the best tack to take, then?”

    “I don’t really know, Hill. I’m a very different type—always have been. Um, well, probably not try to get into her pants?”

    “I am only human,” he said sourly. “So, uh—damn. How can I offer her friendship when she’ll barely speak to me?”

    “I’m not sure… I think it may take some time,” she said kindly. “It does sound as if she really wants you, though. I mean, it doesn’t sound like indifference, to me.”

    He sagged. “Doesn’t it? Oh, good. Er, sorry to dump my troubles on you.”

    “Don’t be a clot,” she said amiably, getting out of bed. “Shall we go?”

    “Why not? The bathroom’s through there. Fancy a coffee?”

    “Their coffee’s dreadful, but a cup of tea would be nice, thanks,” she said, vanishing into the ensuite.

    Hill was left to his reflections, which included the one that if she knew their dreadful coffee she must’ve been here before. Well, it had been pretty obvious from the moment of setting eyes on her that she was that type. Took one to know one: quite.

    “Left hand down a bit!” cried Polly with a loud giggle.

    “Shut up.” Lady Carrano had driven up to this inlet of hers—something over forty-five minutes’ drive north of the city on a series of motorways—in a silver-blue 2000 Rolls Royce Corniche convertible. Right: when it came out, the most expensive vehicle ever produced by Rolls Royce—and the last model produced before BMW bought them out. At a sufficiently upmarket marina up there she had left the car by the roadside and got into—not a forty-foot luxury yacht, no. Not a mighty motor launch fitted out like the QEII, no. An aluminium dinghy. Not as old as Pa’s Coot or Swallow, but even scruffier. Dented as well as scratched. He’d eventually managed to convince her that he was used to this type of outboard motor and she’d agreed that he could steer the thing.

    He did go leftish, in order to gape at the cuboid white Thing on the low, dull olive green shore of the placid, grey-green inlet under a pale windy sky. There was quite a pleasant green slope to its left, which no doubt sheltered it from the endemic New Zealand winds… What had possessed them? In this setting?

    “The owners are a pair of high-ups on the admin side at Sir George Grey University. She’s English and he’s French but I don’t think that’s got anything to do with it.”

    “No,” he managed to croak. It was all cubes: cubes stuck on other cubes. And blazing white. Possibly it would have looked okay under a scorching Mediterranean sky in midsummer on a Greek island but here it looked…

    “Personally I find it grotesquely out of place, but they love it!” she said cheerfully.

    “Right. Good for them,” he croaked. “Just tell me now, Polly: is there worse further up?”

    “Not worse, no.”

    “Just as grotesquely out of place?” he whispered.

    “Um, I think that would depend on your tastes and your conception of the norm, Hill! Don’t tell anybody, will you, but I find the English plants and flowers that people stuff their gardens full of out here quite terrifically incongruous. Though it’s much worse in Australia: the land formations there just cry out for the unique Australian flora. –Not for clipped ranks of standard roses or ‘English’ cottage gardens,” she explained drily, with horrid emphasis on the “English.”

    Hill swallowed.

    “It is the colonial inheritance, of course: one can perfectly understand its history. Just not why the brainwashed local morons still do it,” she said brutally.

    “Yeah. Do you favour all the visiting firemen with this sort of opinion?” he whispered.

    Placidly Polly replied: “No, and certainly not the locals themselves. Only those I think can take it.”

    Flattering. And that was no doubt one more thing Carrano saw in her—lucky bastard. He headed on up the inlet… Er, west? “West?” he ventured.

    “Yes. The sun’s moving in the northern part of the sky—when you can see it behind those clouds—because we’re in the southern hemisphere,” she said kindly.

    “Oh, good grief! Er—yes. Thanks. I still feel disoriented but at least I know why!”

    “Mm.”

    They pottered on…

    “Hell!”

    “Well, yes. That’s Sir George Grey. Don’t look at it,” she advised kindly.

    Shuddering, he averted his eyes from the high-rise educational architecture on the right-hand bank and they pottered on…

    Two unobtrusive little A-frame structures with what looked like flourishing vegetable gardens to their rear had been passed, each nestled in its little cove, and they rounded another low point to discover another little co—

    “Well! This looks more like it!” Eagerly he drew in to the end of the low, split-level house’s little jetty. “Are those all native timbers?” he asked eagerly.

    “No.”

    At around about this point in time it occurred to Hill Tarlington that he just might be about to make an almighty tit of himself in front of one of the most intelligent, charming women he’d met in a very long time. So he said meekly: “I’ll just shut up, Polly, and you tell me the horror stories, okay?’

    Considerably to his relief she laughed and said: “Well, okay! I do like the house, but after we’d talked to you I looked up ecolodges on the Internet and by no stretch of the imagination—! Though I admit this owner is the most environmentally conscious. If we’d come up the road I could’ve shown you his letterbox, it’s really environmental.”—Hill gave her a hard look.—“Very like those signposts of Pete and Jan’s.”—He choked.—“Well, the house is mainly Canadian cedar. But that’s okay here: it doesn’t entail cutting down trees.”

    In spite of that vow to just shut up he found he was croaking: “Eh?”

    “Canadian trees don’t count, Hill, they’re what we call exotic.” As he was still gaping dumbly at her she clarified kindly: “Not native.”

    “Look, just shoot me and drop me overboard now!”

    “I couldn’t do that, this homeowner is shit-hot on not polluting the inlet. –See that big rock by his—um, I always forget what those things are called. Not a patio, is it, when it’s wood, but last time I called it a balcony Jake shouted at me.”

    “Uh—deck?” produced Hill feebly. Was she genuine?

    “Oh, yes! Deck!” she beamed. She was genuine, by Jesus. He just sat back and listened, after that. Every single visible item in the chap’s environmentally friendly garden had been trucked in at huge expense. The boulder from parts unknown, but directly from a landscaping firm. Likewise the turf. The decorative flax bushes were natives, but cultivars, put in by the landscaping f—Quite. Likewise those and these, and these and those. You could get a lot of cultivars in the nurseries these days. Those were nice when they were in flower. White and a range of pinks, through to a lovely dark shade. Hill had brought the laptop so he opened it and made her type it in. He peered at it. First she’d written “tea-tree.” Then she’d written “Sometimes ti-tree, but that’s wrong: ti means cabbage tree (don’t plant them, the flowers stink, worse than privet, really sicky.) The Maori name is for tea-tree is manuka.”

    “Is it all this complicated?” he croaked.

    “Worse, there are at least three ways of pronouncing it, but let’s not go into that.”

    “Go on, tell me the rest,” he sighed.

    Inside, according to Polly, the house featured fireplaces and pillars of hugely environmental river stones: big ones, about the size of well-grown cantaloupes, of a lovely shade of grey. Trucked in at huge expense from somewhere down south because the northern rivers didn’t have— Quite. The floors were mainly recycled kauri, the staircase was recycled rimu, and the back wall—the south wall—was all recycled brick. At this point that exchange of Vern’s and Pete’s in re the Southern Stars Motel came back sharply to Hill and he choked.

    “Want more?”

    “I don’t think I can take any more, Polly! Uh—no, hang on: I was wondering about furniture. I mean, if one’s read the ecolodge bumf it’s almost impossible to conceive of how they manage to furnish the dumps at all.”

    She nodded. “I have a feeling they don’t count that. Well, the more visible things in the pictures on the Internet seem to be hand-woven cane bucket chairs, they’re very ethnic, aren’t they, but unfortunately the Maoris never invented the chair.”

    “No. So what’s he got in there?” he whispered.

    Those huge greenish eyes twinkled. “Rawhide sofas, tourist-style Navaho rugs and genuine pueblo pots, Hill. He lived in America for twenty y—” She didn’t need to go on: he’d collapsed in streaming hysterics already.

    “Is he a Yank?” he said feebly, wiping his eyes with the handkerchief she had thoughtfully returned to him washed and ironed.

    “No, but round this way they’ll tell you there’s no discernible diff—”

    “Don’t start me off again,” he said weakly.

    “He’s married to one of my cousins, actually; we could pop in, if you like: she won’t mind. And if you laugh at his Southwestern décor she won’t mind that, either. But I think you’ll like the effect,” she said with that seraphic smile of hers.

    Meekly Hill accompanied her onto the jetty, across a very eco-friendly crazy-paving path, possibly slate (trucked in—yes) and, in consideration of his being a foreigner, as she carefully explained, not up to the sliding glass doors but round to the back door—technically a side door.

    It was opened by a pretty, buxom young woman with the most glorious cloud of auburn hair Hill had ever seen. She was balancing a small child on one hip and really, what with the tight pale blue tee shirt, the very tight jeans that emphasised the width of the very generous hips as opposed to the narrowness of the waist, and the pearly-pink sheen of the skin, she’d be a front runner in the perfect modern Madonna and Child stakes.

    “Hi, Beth,” said Polly cheerfully. “This is Hill. We’ve just been admiring Jack’s native garden.”

    “Huh! You can have the bloody thing!” replied Beth with bitter energy. “He made me plant some stupid native clematis last month, and I told him that spot was too dry for it, the stuff grows in the depths of the bush, for Pete’s sake, and now it’s dying and he’s trying to claim I did something wrong!”

    “That’s Jack all over,” Polly explained calmly to Hill. “Can we come in, or isn’t it convenient?”

    “Eh? Oh.—No, come in. Sorry I shouted,” she said to Hill, pinkening. “Polly said you might be interested in our interior décor. Don’t look at me, Jack did it all, I haven’t got any taste.”

    This seemed to pass for introductions, so he came in. As a matter of fact the house was as lovely inside as it was out: Jack certainly had taste. It was all immaculate but Beth adjured him not to look at her: Mrs Manning came four days a week, she’d told Jack it was a waste of money, since she was home with the baby anyway, but he hadn’t listened to her. Beth and the baby, however, weren’t using the lovelier parts of it, they were in the kitchen, to which Beth led the visitors as a matter of course once the tour was over.

    Hill’s eyes twinkled. You could see that the kitchen had started off as lovely, too. Varnished wooden cupboards, presumably recycled, the wood had that glorious soft, golden glow and very faint deckle in the grain that he was coming to recognize as the hallmark of New Zealand kauri, acres of grey granite benchtops, acres of blue-grey slate underfoot, and what was visible of the walls for the charming wooden cupboards immaculately plastered and, at a guess, whitewashed. The old wooden table was very possibly a genuine kitchen table, but stripped and polyurethaned within an inch of its life: you could have put a steaming coffee mug down on its gleaming surface quite safely. Round about there, however, the décor part of the kitchen ended and the Beth part began. For a start the four charming old wooden chairs—plain farmhouse ware of the type that was like hens’ teeth in Britain—were decorated with plump seat cushions. Two of them looked as if they had been bought as seat cushions, but the others were just ordinary square cushions. They were all covered in cheerfully bright crochetwork in a variety of designs and colours. The immaculate table top was semi-veiled by a large plastic tablecloth, laid diagonally—it was rather smaller than the table. It featured a cheery design of pink and yellow flowers on a lightish but sufficiently bright blue background. In the middle of this abortion stood a mauve plastic flowerpot with a mauve chrysanthemum in it. Ouch.

    “Ooh, your chrysanth’s still going!” spotted Polly in tones of, apparently, unalloyed admiration.

    “Yes, it’s done well,” replied Beth happily.

    As if this visual cacophony wasn’t enough, she’d decorated the beautiful slate floor with a selection of rag mats in a variety of shades. Er—possibly the sort that were sold as bathmats? They were certainly that size. Not carefully crafted artefacts from the hands of modern artisans—no. Against what was possibly meant to be a feature window near the back door—it was about a foot wide and floor-length—was a stack of plastic stacking trays, the large economy size. Red, orange and yellow, with one bright green one. The bottom ones held a tangle of old boots and sneakers—well, handy if you’d just come in from the garden, yes. The middle ones held onions and apples. The top one was favoured with a large mother-in-law’s tongue in the sort of black plastic pot in which garden centres sell such plants. Certainly this pot was a cousin of the mauve thing on the table, but neither of them had a thing in common with the glorious—glorious—pottery artefact on the breakfast bar. Hill just tottered over to it and looked at it silently.

    “Our cousin Michaela made that,” said Beth. “She’s a potter.”

    “I’ll say!” he agreed fervently. It was a coiled pot: about two feet high and perhaps eighteen inches in diameter at its widest. Just perfectly balanced, and the most extraordinary colour, or perhaps texture—oatmeal very slightly speckled with brown might have described it if you had no aesthetic sense whatsoever. Gosh. Why in God’s name had she stuck a screamingly bright pink feather duster into it?

    “Um, sorry, that’s not meant to be there!” said Beth in a strangled voice, leaning past him and grabbing it.

    “Your Mrs ’Arris left it there, did she?” said Hill with his nicest smile.

    “Um, no,” she said going very pink.—though not as pink as the duster, nothing organic could have attained that shade. “She doesn’t do the pelmets, so I— But she gives very good value, really.”

    “Not all of the windows have pelmets but those that do have very environmentally-friendly ones,” said Polly, coming up and putting her arm round her shoulders. “Michaela does sell her work, but I’m afraid that one’s Beth’s.”

    “Then I’ll just hanker after if for the rest of me natural!” said Hill with a laugh, wondering how many cretins she’d shown it to in the past that had asked if they could buy it.

    “Good,” replied Polly brutally, drawing her cousin away. “You sit down, Beth, I’ll make a cuppa.”

    “Ta,” said Beth, sinking into the final horror of the kitchen. Hill had been trying not to look at it for some time. Talking of ethnic hand-woven chairs! It was a basket chair, of the sort generally seen dying a slow death at village cricket matches or on one’s elderly aunt’s back lawn. Left in out in the rain for three decades on end: quite. It had a selection of cushions: on the seat granny squares in bright shades on a harsh royal blue background, and against the back a cotton print of faded roses arguing with a smart crochet chequerboard in brown and fawn.

    Take it for all in all, he reflected as Polly opened the door of the giant industrial-size, industrial steel double refrigerator—liberally decorated with fridge magnets, notes headed “REMEMBER” and “TUESDAY: LUNCH MONEY” and such-like, and hideous paintings by an inartistic, youthful hand—it was one of the most humanised kitchens he’d ever seen.

    “Reminds me of my sister’s kitchen when her two boys were little,” he said, smiling at Beth. “She had a frightful ma-in-law who was always criticising her housekeeping, so she finally decided the sitting-room could stay pristine for the visitations, and they’d live in the kitchen. She did a lot of baking over those years, it was a lovely warm place to be!”

    “Yes,” she said, smiling shyly at him—adorable, wasn’t she? Different colouring, but she reminded him very much of Hattie, and it wasn’t just the lovely big tits, either.—“I’m not much of a cook but I do sometimes bake some biscuits, or do a roast, and it’s lovely in here with the oven on.”

    “Polly,” said Hill weakly when they were back in the runabout, Polly clutching a jar of homemade chutney that Beth had warned her might be horrible, and to throw it out if she didn’t like it, “how in God’s name did that lovely young woman come to marry the chap that built that—that monument to suburban environmentalism?”

    “It’s a long story!” said Polly with a laugh, “But he isn’t all bad, poor Jack, just hyperactive. They suit each other very well. She’s quite a placid person, but she’s got the strength of character to stand up to him when he goes overboard about another mad idea., Added to which, she doesn’t really care how super-duper he makes the place. She’s made a little nest for herself, you see?”

    He did see. And he found he was blowing his nose rather hard.

    The next exhibit was a pole house. “That’s a pole house,” he croaked.

    “Yes. It’s rather nice, isn’t it?”

    It was, actually. “Mm, ’tis. What are the bits between the poles?”

    “Radiata pine. It’s not a native but it grows like mad in our climate. Almost the whole country’s built of radiata pine and concrete block.”

    Hill had also noticed some really horrible yellow brick on the way back from Taupo, but in essence she wasn’t wrong. “Would you call it a renewable resource?”

    “I wouldn’t, no!” she said with a laugh. “But they do replant the commercial forests, yes.”

    “Mm…” The owners had utilised that huge cavern underneath it to hang out a few towels and tee-shirts. “Er, do pole houses have to have that huge space underneath them?”

    “I don’t know, but most of the ones I’ve seen do have. You’d have to think about insurance, Hill: what if one of your rich Yank clients slipped on the steps?”

    Exactly. Nevertheless it was an idea. “What have they got inside, do you know?”

    “Varnished knotty pine with some white plaster. It looks good: it’s a very causal, airy effect. Though I dunno that it’d fall with the definition of eco-anything.”

    “No,” he agreed heavily.

    “I think I ought to warn you that we’re approaching a little patch of suburban Bonn,” she warned as they pottered on.

    Ulp! She was right. Possibly not as mad as the cuboid thing further back, but… Long and low, flat-roofed, stark white walls, shaven lawns… He was one of the professors, was he? An agricultural economist, really? Giving in, Polly laughed and admitted that he was German.

    After a moment Hill said thoughtfully: “Plaster over the endemic concrete block, would it be?” and she collapsed in splutters, nodding madly.

    Smiling, he headed on up the inlet.

    Ugh! Just as silly, but different: square pillars and ’orrid archways, all in pale terracotta render over guess what. He shuddered and headed on westwards.

    The next two houses were merely a-building. One featured a lot of radiata pine and a lot of sweating workmen having what his companion helpfully informed him was a smoko, out here, and if he went on site and didn’t call it that the blokes would think he was mad. The next featured a lot of concrete block and a lot of sweating workmen having their smoko. It must be, it couldn’t be their lunch break, because for lunch they’d all go down to the old pub at Carter’s Bay, out on the coast. –No: DB on tap: it was an old pub, not a trendified thing selling boutique beers—and no-one out here had ever heard of real ale, for Pete’s sake!

    So far all the houses had been on their left: the right had only featured the university complex and a lot of unidentifiable scruffy shrubs. But lo! Now a giant jetty appeared, backed by a giant, dark, woodsmanly mansion.

    “He’s Canadian?” he croaked.

    No, he was English. Okay, Polly: he was English and potty: those down there at the bottom of the larger wing and almost all over the higher but smaller wing were log-cabin logs. Had one’s brain been capable of it, at this point it might have wondered why he’d combined ’em with that very dark brick.

    “Inside—”

    “I don’t want to know!”

    “Yes, you do, Hill. The logs are split, you see, and inside he’s sanded them down and polyurethaned them. The effect’s very—”

    “Don’t dare to say it!”

    “All right, I won’t,” she said obligingly. “But it is.”

    After a moment he asked grudgingly: “Is that brick local?”

    “It must be, there’s loads of it around. Whole suburbs were built of it in the Eighties, though I don’t know why.”

    It was quite attractive in its way, but combined, as it was, with an unrelieved view of low dark scrub… Or almost unrelieved, someone had done their best with a few silver-leaved plants, a large, eco-friendly rock, a crazy-paving path, and some clumps of native “flax”. (It wasn’t flax: Hill had been driven to look it up after seeing innumerable examples of it around the Taupo area.) And on the giant deck, some pots of what looked suspiciously like geraniums.

    “Are those geraniums?” he said feebly.

    “Yes.”

    “Is that deck Canadian cedar?” he said feebly.

    “Yes.”

    Hill subsided.

    “Global vi—”

    “Just don’t,” he warned.

    Giggling, Polly stopped.

    There was nothing else up at the head of the inlet except the bird sanctuary (native bush, no birds visible) and, once again on the left, the isolated little creosoted house that was the Carranos’ bach. About the size and layout of Fern Gully Ecolodge, but so much nicer inside that you’d scarcely believe they were on the same planet. Its French doors gave onto the verandah and thence the view of the inlet, and the big main room contained a king-size divan bed, nicely positioned so that you’d wake up to the view of the tranquil water, some big padded window-seats, a magnificent antique kauri sideboard, and a couple of dark Persian rugs that were undoubtedly worth more than the whole bach. Each, very probably. Off to one side was a narrow slip of a child’s bedroom which Polly explained their daughter used: the boys had their own room over the garage that Jake had recently added.

    “We used to have white painted hessian walls in here, and the bedding in shades of navy with a bit of crimson to tone with the rugs, but Jake decided it was looking shabby and in any case navy wasn’t my colour.”

    He just nodded feebly. The room was a visual poem, but it wasn’t exactly cosy. The woodwork of the window-seats, the skirtings and architraves was painted white and the bedding and the seat cushions were all plain black cotton. The walls were washed a pale grey over plaster. This meant that the only colours in the room were the deep crimson of the rugs and the golden glow of the floorboards and sideboard.

    “Hang on.” Polly vanished through the door in the back wall. He heard water running. Then she reappeared with a pot of cyclamen in each hand. One was pink, and one a glowing puce. She put one on each of the bedside cabinets. “There!” she said happily. “Jake insists on having the blinds down in here when we’re not up here, so I put these in the kitchen.”

    The cyclamen were in really lovely china bowls which Hill had a strong suspicion might have been Victorian. They made all the difference to the beautiful but austere room.

    “Yes,” he said limply. “It really looks habitable now, Polly.”

    “Yes. I told the clot it was too severe, but he got carried away. Want some lunch?”

    “It’ll do for a start,” he admitted weakly.

    The kitchen of the Carranos’ bach was about the size of Fern Gully Ecolodge’s. Okay, got it, this was how they built New Zealand baches. The hand of the decorator hadn’t spared it: it was a small nightmare of a Spanish country kitchen. Walls slathered in glorious painted tiles, a heavy old white sink—recycled, the brass taps likewise—copper pots ranged on a decorated dresser which almost entirely filled one end wall… “Fake; a local woman does them. Underneath all that shiny black enamel and those really ethnic flowers it’s only radiata p—”

    “Stop!” he choked.

    The narrow table matched except that it was blue. Likewise the chairs. Radiata—he didn’t need to ask, really.

    So they insulted it all by settling for bangers, baked beans and toast, eating in the kitchen and ignoring the pot-bellied stove back in the main room, since Polly assured him there would be hot water without it.

    After that they tried out the nice big bed for size. Ooh, gee, it fitted! A few other things fitted, too. After quite a nice long play she got on top of him and edged down—it was very like that last time with Lindy, actually. The tits were certainly about the same size. Funnily enough she thought she could come like that, so Hill just raised his bum and gave her a couple of strokes—no, more than a couple, oh, God! Oh—Jesus— She let out a shriek to raise the dead and just pulsed all round him and funnily enough he found he was yelling his head off and pulsing into her.

    “My God,” he concluded limply, lying back panting with the sweat running off him.

    Polly lay back panting with the sweat running off her. “You’ve got a very nice cock.”

    Hill found he was smirking fatuously.

    They were, now, of course, miles north of the city. And she lived, it turned out, about a third of the way between here and there, and her kids were due home from school before long. But he wasn’t to worry, he could drop her off at home and take the car! What? All other considerations apart, it was quite possibly the most distinctive car in the entire city!

    “Just tell Michael, that’s the commissionaire, that I’ll collect it.”

    Okay, she’d done this sort of thing before. And he was a tit to think it might have meant slightly more than just a day’s fun with a chap that had a nice cock.

    “Don’t look like that. You have got your Hattie at home,” she murmured.

    He bit his lip. “Not got, but—mm. Sorry: thinking of the might-have-been or some such.”

    “Don’t do that,” she said, squeezing his arm. “Think about your ecolodges instead!”

    “Er—yes. Those places you showed me have given me some ideas—thanks.”

    “Good!” she said, smiling that seraphic smile.

    So he ended up driving the silver-blue Corniche back to the hotel. The commissionaire evinced no surprise at all when he said could the car be parked, Lady Carrano would collect it, just replied cheerfully: “Right you are!”

    Yes, well.

Next chapter:

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