Ecolodge

 7

Ecolodge

    “This is it,” said Jim Thompson on a cautious note. “Fern Gully Ecolodge.”

    In the back of the four-by-four old Vern Reilly made a choked noise.

    Hill got out of the four-by-four in silence and looked at it. Mr Reilly’s choked noise was fully justified, in fact why the Christ had Jim ever imagined— Possibly the owner was a close relative? Or, as Mr Thompson had until very lately been in real estate rather than in the brand-new “South Pacific” office of YDI, possibly he had an arrangement with the owner?

    The so-called Fern Gully Ecolodge stood in a small, rutted clearing which featured, immediately under Hill’s feet, an amount of the local gravel, unlike any gravel he had hitherto encountered and in actual fact, as Mr Reilly had laconically informed him, “road metal”. What they dumped on the road before they put the one layer of tar-seal over it; well, if they were doing it on the cheap, ya know? Hill’s experience thus far of New Zealand roads had suggested forcibly to him that they always did it on the cheap, when they bothered at all, so yes, he did have a fair idea. Coarse, dull grey, and very, very sharp-edged. Though this was, at a guess, not the reason why both Mr Thompson and Mr Reilly were wearing serviceable wellies. No: the thick, oozing, oily greyish-brown mud that featured largely in the rest of the clearing would explain them—at a guess. In amongst the scattering of gravel and the stretches of mud were scattered some tallish clumps of dull green grass. At the edges of the clearing there was an amount of scraggy dull green foliage of some sort. Hard to tell what: the New Zealand so-called bush, as Hill had had more than time enough to discover, was a uniform dull green, and very, very, very wet. In fact dripping.

    The soi-disant ecolodge itself was— Actually it was very hard to think of a single phrase which would characterize it. Unspeakable? Small? Scruffy? Totally unsuited to YDI’s needs? Utterly and completely off-putting? Unlikely to appeal as accommodation to any but those who had just endured the rigours of the north face of Everest? A bloody dump? Some of those, yeah.

    Hill drew a deep breath.

    “They kind of built it out of bit and pieces,” offered Mr Reilly, at his elbow.

    Trying not to jump—the gravel didn’t crunch, it had sunk too far into the mud for that, and Mr Reilly’s approach in his wellies had been inaudible—Hill managed to reply: “You don’t say, Vern.”

    Mr Reilly sucked his teeth a bit. “See, originally it was only a bach. Um, do ya have that word in England?”

    “No,” replied Hill coldly, “but I gather it’s a synonym for shack?”

    “Pretty much, yeah,” conceded Mr Reilly just as Mr Thompson came up to Hill’s other elbow and said: “No!”

    There was a short silence.

    “The family usedta come down here for holidays—bit of fishing, you know,” offered the wizened Mr Reilly without visible emotion.

    “By family, I gather you mean the husband and the sons, not the wife, the daughters, or the daughters-in law?” replied Hill sweetly. “In fact especially not the daughters-in-law?”

    “That’s right,” Mr Reilly agreed stolidly.

    In other words the bloody place was a fishing shack! Hill breathed hard.

    “We could go in,” offered Jim. “I’ve got the keys.”

    Keys? For that? You’d have to be desperate, or just off the north face of Everest, or escaping from prison, to want to go in there. However, once he was actually inside perhaps the error of Mr Thompson’s ways would dawn on him. Grimly Hill followed him over the mud and gravel, up the creaking flight of wooden steps, which gave every appearance of giving the lie to Sir Maurice’s claim that it was Australia, not New Zealand, that had white ants, over a small, saggy, unpainted porch, Mr Reilly remarking by the by that young Bob, he’d built the verandah on when they’d decided to turn it into an ecolodge, and into the small, one-storeyed, unpainted grey wooden structure.

    Inside it wasn’t quite as bad as Hill had expected. It did have furniture. And a fireplace. Most of the furniture was drawn up round the fireplace, which was on the left-hand wall. The main piece was a flat-armed, brown vinyl-covered podgy couch of the sort that had been very popular in the Eighties, though usually in very pale grey rather than dark brown. Someone had done their best with it by draping a crocheted afghan over it: the traditional granny squares in a variety of bright yarns on a black background. It was a nice afghan but it had nothing in common with the couch. The couch’s close relative, a podgy brown vinyl armchair of the sort that takes up three times the floor space of your normal easy chair, was at the fireside. Someone had honoured it with a woolly cushion in what Hill thought was probably also crochet, but as it was in shades of dull gold, tan and brown—the country effect, yes—it was possibly not the same someone who had created the couch’s afghan. The twin armchair was missing: opposite the podgy chair was another sofa. This was much, much more interesting: a plain, wooden-framed, wooden-backed affair which might have been a genuine colonial piece, dating from, uh—well, before the War? Something after the style of a settle. Its long seat cushion was much more recent: very obviously a squared-off piece of plastic foam. It and the three limp, sagging cushions against the settle’s back were covered in a bumpy fabric in an unpleasant dark red shade that hinted at, but did not quite approach, maroon. The sagging curtains at the two small, bleared front windows and the small, bleared side window in the fireplace wall matched. Possibly the stuff had been on sale because there was no other colour it could conceivably have gone with? It certainly didn’t go with anything else in this room. The right-hand wall didn’t have a window, and against it were set four bunk beds: two sets of two. They only just fitted, in fact they looked as if they might have been built in situ, which would make the depth of the room a bare twelve feet. A scratched, laminated oblong woodgrain table surrounded by four mismatched chairs was set against the back wall. The flooring was an unlovely tan vinyl in an unconvincing pattern of tiles, partly shielded as to the fireplace area by an unlovely strip of excruciatingly thin-piled carpet in a striped weave. Possibly including a little green and yellow as well as the tan, fawn and brown which predominated, though as it was very worn it was hard to be sure. The fireplace itself was not actively unpleasant: a lumpy affair in natural terracotta brick. However, the picture above it, in a bright gold plasticized frame, was. It was a garishly bright autumnal landscape like nothing Hill had seen so far in New Zealand. Or, indeed, anywhere else on the planet.

    After a moment he said: “Where are the mattresses?”

    “Um, you bring your own sleeping-bag,” replied Mr Reilly, sounding uneasy for the first time since they’d met. –Mr Reilly was a local: that was, he came from the Taupo area in which the ecolodge was situated. He was not, as Hill had unconsciously expected when Jim had said he’d be coming to show them the way, a handsome brown hulk with the odd blue tattoo here and there and a wide Polynesian grin—though they had seen one or two of them in the town. No, he was a plain, pale, skinny character who so far hadn’t smiled at all, and thus extremely characteristic of the majority. Possibly if Maurice had ever set foot in the dump instead of gaining his impressions from a video containing an excerpt from a New Zealand Tourism Office promo and another excerpt from that daft Lord of the Rings film, put together by an ideas-person from Head Office, he would have realized that pale and unsmiling was what the majority was, that the place was not a South Seas paradise begging for the entrepreneurial touch of YDI, and that their clientele would not want a holiday, however gloriously ecological the hotel, in endless rain and endless mud!

    “Yeah,” agreed Jim. “Um, they had a choice of catering, I think, didn’t they, Vern?”

    “Yeah—well, until Bob’s wife left ’im—yeah. You could do your own, or they’d do breakfast, or they could do the whole bit, for a price.”

    “Trout?” replied Hill expressionlessly. He had now discovered that, never mind if the damned fish spawned like crazy in New Zealand’s innumerable rivers and lakes, if you weren’t a fisherman you had very little chance of ever tasting it here.

    “Well, if you’d been lucky that day, yeah,” admitted Mr Reilly. “Gayle had this real fancy recipe, used to muck it up with cream and, um, some green muck, forget its name. Tasted like aniseed: revolting. Plus white wine, think it was.”

    “Er—not basil?” ventured Hill in spite of himself.

    “Nope, I know that,” replied Mr Reilly calmly. “The wife grows that.”

    “Fennel,” said Hill flatly.

    “Could of been—yep. –The kitchen’s through there,” he added helpfully.

    “What about the bathroom?” replied Hill expressionlessly.

    “You do have to go through the kitchen, but it’s quite nice,” said Mr Thompson quickly.

    Grimly Hill went out to the kitchen. It was a very narrow room, about five feet across. The offensively tan vinyl continued from the door to the back wall but reached only halfway across the room. Over to the right it was replaced by offensively blue tiling-patterned vinyl. There were several cupboards but the floor space wasn’t big enough for another table.

    Hill looked expressionlessly at the stainless steel sink bench. Double. Had it originally been intended as twin bathroom basins? The sinks were round, not oblong.

    “Fell off the back of a truck,” said Mr Reilly neutrally, following his gaze.

    “Mm.” There was a decent-sized refrigerator, fairly new-looking. One would have to stand to its side rather than before it to open it, and in fact Jim Thompson, who was now opening it, was doing so. “Nice and clean,” he said on a proud note.

    The fridge light hadn’t come on but Hill didn’t bother to ask whether the electricity was off or where they got the electricity from, or anything, because the place was a dump and not big enough to swing a cat and, in short, Mr Thompson was not only hopelessly over-optimistic, he was hopelessly over-optimistic and potty!

    The bathroom was completely lined in pale green plastic laminate—“Formica,” explained Mr Reilly helpfully—which of course swore at the blue vinyl. The room contained a shower cabinet, a plain white toilet and a miniature stainless-steel handbasin.

    “Fell off the back of the same truck?” ventured Hill.

    To his astonishment the elderly Vern Reilly actually broke down and grinned. “Something like that! One of Bob’s mates knows a bloke that works at the factory up in South Auckland where they make them. Think these little wee ones might be for campervans.”

    Hill’s guess would have been for long-distance coaches, but same difference. “Right, got it. Dare I ask whether the water’s piped from the lake?”

    Mr Reilly gave a smothered snicker but admitted: “Not any more. Usedta be, back in Bob’s granddad’s day. Strictly illegal, of course. Nope, they got a tank. Bob and Gayle used to put in crates of bottled water for the tourists to drink.”

    “Uh-huh. And the plumbing?”

    “It works!” said Jim on a huffy note.

    “Yeah. Not that,” returned Vern. “Septic tank, Hill.”

    “I see. Not mentioning the putative capacity of New Zealand septic tanks, and entirely without prejudice, if we did set up some sort of a tourist hotel here, would reticulated plumbing be possible?”

    Mr Reilly pulled his ear slowly. “It’d be the Council, and they might make ya cough up for the pipes, but yeah, it’d be possible. Theoretically.”

    Hill waited for Jim to tell him that Mr Reilly was a Councillor, but gee, he didn’t! “Mm. Some of the literature the firm’s ideas-people gave me to read on the plane coming out was about eco-friendly toilets.”

    “Eh?” replied Vern blankly.

    “Er—composting toilets?”

    “Aren’t they illegal here?” ventured Jim. “You ever been to Ayers Rock, Hill? That’s in Aussie,” he explained kindly.

    “No, but I think one of the articles did mention an example—” Jim was shuddering, so he stopped. “What?”

    “Me and the wife went, year before last. Her idea. Beginning of March, it was, she reckoned it wouldn’t be too hot: think she got that one off the ruddy travel agent.”

    “It’s usually bloody warm here in March,” contributed Vern.

    “Yeah. Anyway, we went. Stayed in Alice Springs, boy is that a dump!” said the Aucklander with cheerful scorn. “Reckoned she wanted to look at Aboriginal art or something, but it was all tourist trap muck, ya wouldn’t give it the time of day.”

    “Bad as plastic tikis?” asked Vern stolidly.

    “Worse. Tell ya what, ever seen those faked-up carved ones, quite big, that they paint red? Not the ones round the mud pools and them at Rotorua, the ones they sell. ’Bout on that level, only more colours. All Dulux high-gloss, though.”

    Mr Reilly went into a painful choking, wheezing fit.

    “Yeah,” acknowledged Jim, grinning. “Anyway, we booked on a bus tour to the Rock—see, that’s what they call it,” he explained kindly to Hill. “Well, it’s got an Aboriginal name, too, half the brochures had it, only I can’t remember it. Anyway, the brochure reckoned it was gonna be a one-day tour from the Alice, see, only the bus left at six in the morning, so I suppose we shoulda been warned, eh? –Got back at two, next morning,” he explained kindly. “So we get there at around twelve—stopped for an early lunch, some place they give you a dinkum Aussie farmhouse lunch, dunno if it’s supposed to be for the Yank tourists or what, but anyway, steak and chips was what it was, take it or leave it, too bad if we’d of been vegetarians, eh? –Makes ya wonder how it goes down with the Japs and Chinese,” he added in a thoughtful aside. “Mind you, they were really decent people running the place. Anyway, like I say, we got to the Rock around twelve and the bus driver drove us round it for a bit—it’s like a sort of a national park, it’s all managed by the Aborigines these days,” he explained kindly. “There was only three other couples besides us on the bus, a middle-aged Yank pair, they were staying at some flash dump near the Rock, they weren’t gonna come back with us, and a pair of, um, think they were Swedes, skinny types, fortyish, and some really thick honeymooners, come up from Tazzie. He reckoned he was gonna climb the Rock, see? So soon as we drew up at this, um, information centre or whatever it was—unbelievably fancy, the government musta poured megabucks into it—all the females hadda use the facilities and Caitlin’s never let me hear the last of it! See, theoretically these composting toilets’d be a good idea if someone was in charge of shoving loads of green stuff down them after anybody had been and putting the lid on. Only like I say, the Aborigines were running this joint, and nobody was bothering, see?”

    “Stink, did they?” said Vern kindly.

    “Stink wasn’t the word! Knock you over at fifty paces!”

    “I’d say composting toilets are out, then,” said Vern kindly to Hill.

    “Yeah,” agreed Jim. “Um, well, the Swedish guy, he tried to say they could work good, only his wife started screaming at him in their own lingo. –Shit, ya not taping this, are ya, Hill?”

    “Why not? I’ll give it to the morons at Head Office verbatim!” replied Hill with a laugh. “Thanks, Jim! Well, that puts paid to one of their bright ideas.”

    “Ya don’t like it, do ya?” spotted the percipient Mr Thompson sadly.

    “Uh—well, I like it, in fact it strikes me as bloody ideal for a quiet fishing holiday with loved ones far, far away.”

    “’Specially the wife,” put in Vern stolidly.

    “Exactly! But our clientele expect heated spa baths, massages with scented oils, and five-course three-star meals with a wine list as long as your arm. Not to mention genuine inner-springs to collapse onto as they stagger back from a two-day hike through the untamed wilderness in their laced suede safari boots and goose-down anoraks, complete with their Arctic-quality sleeping-bags as trialled by NASA.”

    “Antarctic, it’d be, here,” said Vern stolidly to Jim’s fallen face. “And untamed bush.”

    “Yeah. But ya could have all that, Hill!” he wailed.

    “Well, not immediately, Jim, could we?”

    “No, but it’s the ideal spot!” he wailed.

    Hill scratched his jaw. “Mm. Uh—how near is the lake?”

    Eagerly Jim led him out and showed him. Pointing out, after they’d pushed their way bodily through a considerable stretch of dripping undergrowth, that it had a view, too!

    Gosh. It had a view, all right. The day was still overcast, but the rain clouds that had shrouded the entire countryside had lifted, or possibly rained themselves out—whatever—and they were looking at a round pewter lake, the sort of size that would need a bloody sea-worthy vessel to cross it, backed by a peak of shimmering diamond.

    “Ya can’t build down here,” said Vern, reading his mind. “Think it might be technically part of the national park, eh, Jim? Anyway, ya can’t build right on the shore in these parts.”

    “What about those millionaires’ palaces we looked at this morning?” replied Hill feebly.

    “Yeah, but that’s on the other side,” he said, waving vaguely, “and anyway, they won’t allow commercial development.”

    “Mm.” Hill turned his back on the wonderful view and looked thoughtfully at the mud, the dull green foliage and the general dampness from which they had come. The terrain was quite flat, hereabouts.

    “A skyscraper wouldn’t be very ecological,” noted Vern stolidly.

    “Hah, hah. No, but a couple of storeys? How high are the trees likely to grow?”

     “Eh? This is mainly tea-tree,” replied Vern on a weak note. “Um, what ya see is what ya get, pretty much, Hill.”

    “Uh-huh. Where are the ferns?” They looked blank, so he added: “As in Fern Gully Ecolodge.”

    Jim gave Vern an agonised look. Ignoring him, the local man replied calmly: “That was just one of Bob’s mad ideas. Well, get further in the bush, few pungas around—yeah. Not round here, though. Too much pumice in the soil. Very dry in the summer, all this stretch gets.” He bent and picked up a stone. “See?” he said, handing it to Hill.

    Taken completely by surprise, Hill nearly dropped it. It was feather-light. “It bloody well is pumice!”

    “Yep. Spewn out by Ruapehu,” he said, waving his hand vaguely.

    “Sorry?” replied Hill weakly.

    “There,” said Vern, grasping the ignorant foreigner’s arm hard and pointing. “Rue-a-pay-hoo,” he said loudly.

    “’Tis active,” admitted Jim. “Well, not today,” he said, peering at it.

    “What?” croaked Hill.

    “It’s like dried lava or something,” Jim explained kindly.

    “Ye—Um, yes, I understand that pumice is spewn out by volcanoes, Jim, but—but is that one of your active volcanoes?” he croaked.

    “Yeah. Ngauruhoe usually puts on a better show, eh, Vern? Well, generally, though when Ruapehu goes up she can really go up! Only ya can’t see it from here, must be the angle or something.”

    “Didn’t you look at the map?” asked Vern neutrally.

    “I—yes.” Hill gaped at the active volcano. Suddenly the placid pewter lake seemed well on the eerie side of menacing.

    Vern sniffed slightly. “See, what I thought, load ya tourists up in your 4WDs—paint ’em pale fawn with camouflage splodges, they like that—and drive ’em round National Park.”

    “Is this Tonga—um, sorry—Tonga-something National Park?”

    “We just call it National Park, but yeah, ’tis,” allowed Vern.

    “Tongariro,” said Jim kindly, putting a hard “g” in it where Hill’s reading had told him Maori words possibly didn’t.

    “Mm. –Well, yes, that would appeal. Can one get close to the volcanoes?”

    “Eh?” replied Vern, staring at him.

    “It’s not like Hawaii,” said Jim kindly. “You see that programme, Vern? Good, eh? Not as good as David Attenborough, mind you. –Thing is, Hill,” he explained kindly, “if ya drove ya tourists up to Ruapehu’s crater, that’d be the day she chose to go up.”

    “Added to which no-one here’s mad enough to spend that much money putting a four-lane highway up a bloody volcano,” noted Vern.

    “He’s got a point,” agreed Jim. “But you can go skiing on it, of course.”

    “On the volcano itself?” said Hill very, very weakly.

    “On Ruapehu, yeah. Best ski-fields in the country, or so they claim,” noted Vern. “Flash hotel, too: they call it The Chateau.”

    “Ordinary people can’t afford to stay there,” explained Jim.

    “That’s right; your tourists could pop over there when they’d had enough of the eco stuff and the composting toilets,” said Vern on a sly note.

    “Yeah,” Hill agreed with a silly grin. “Er—well, how close to the mountains can one get by car?”

    “Desert Road’ll take you straight past them. You can drive a fair way up Ruapehu, mind you,” he conceded. “Wanna go?”

    Hill looked uneasily at his watch.

    “It’s not the skiing season, there’ll be nowhere to get any lunch,” warned Jim.

    “Er, yes. And aren’t we due to meet your friend Pete and see his ecolodge at teatime, Vern?” added Hill uneasily.

    “They don’t usually have it till gone seven, because of the tourists,” explained Vern kindly.

    “Er— Oh!” The man had meant dinner. “Well, drive back to the township, grab some lunch, then head out to see the mountains?”

    They did that.

    Hill hadn’t thought that they had deserts in New Zealand but as they drove over the “Desert Road” he realized they did. It was rather like what one imagined the Gobi to be. Very flat, dark and stony. There was some vegetation, of a sort, all in shades of dark brown and very dark grey-green. Giving up, he fumbled his fucking laptop open and read the stuff Head Office had given him. Gosh, established in 1887, the fourth oldest national park in the world. About three hundred square miles, blah, blah… Help, named after yet another volcano… The only thing it said about the vegetation was that the mountains were forested with hardwood trees and varieties of beech. This here was certainly not that. At best, clumps of something that Jim said was their native flax—it wasn’t anything like flax, but never mind—and at that, “planted up quite recently”, unquote. Giving up, he said weakly: “It all looks rather dark and dead, don’t you think?”

    “Yeah, it’s a volcanic plateau,” said Vern comfortably.

    Right—got it. Where in Hell had the Head Office morons got this bumf from? Well, off the bloody Internet, clearly.

    They drove on. “See?” said Jim mildly.

    Hill had seen. He just sat there with his mouth open, goggling at the most perfect snow-covered cone in the world.

    “The wife reckons that Ruapehu’s more massive, only there’s nothing to beat Ngauruhoe,” said Vern.

    “Yes,” said Hill on a sigh. “She’s right. Isn’t it incredible?’

    “Pretty good when it goes up, too. It’s one of those volcanoes that kind off huff and puff,” offered the local. “Come past it at night and it glows.”

    Hill could see that instead of being ice-white right to the top, the cone was black-tipped. He swallowed. That’d be the heat of the crater, then. Gosh.

    “Think the scientists reckon it's a different type from Ruapehu,” offered Jim.

    “Mm? Mm.”

    Mrs Reilly was right and Ruapehu turned out to be massive—impressive in its way but nothing like the stunning beauty of the cone. You could drive a fair way up it: certainly as far as The Chateau. Hill didn’t suggest they go in, his companions weren’t dressed for luxury hotels, not even the local version, but he made a mental note to look at it some time: Maurice would want the details.

    The third volcano, mentioned in his bumf, had pretty well blown its top, the two New Zealanders explained kindly, and it was just a mass of tumbled crags. Over there—yeah. Jim then embarked on a long, involved story about the one that had really blown its top well within living memory, over at Rotorua. He meant, Hill eventually worked out, since European settlement. Pretty bad, yeah, he allowed. Not as bad as Krakatoa, no, but getting on that way. You could see the buried village, he added.

    “A Maori village,” said Vern stolidly. “Nothing to it. Where ya wanna take them is out to the lake—Tarawera,” he explained. “Look right across it, see what’s left of Tarawera—the mountain,” he explained. “Like Jim says, blew its top right off. Turns ya soul to stone.”

    Hill swallowed.

    “Um, yeah,” admitted Jim uneasily. “Pretty much—yeah, Hill.”

    “Go: you’ll see,” advised Vern stolidly.

    “You can fly over it, too,” offered Jim.

    “Well um, how long would it take?”

    “Dunno. Couple of hours, maybe? It’s just a small plane.”

    “Um, no, Jim, I meant the trip to this Tarawera,” said Hill feebly.

    “Oh! Do it easy in a day!”

    Hill opened his laptop again… Useless.

    “You looking up the Internet?” asked Vern, peering over his shoulder.

    “No, just the stuff the morons at Head Office gave me. I think it did come off the Internet, though.”

    “Yeah. Pull up, wouldja, Jim?”

    Jim pulled up and Vern got out the real map and showed Hill. Jim was right: you could do it easy in a day and you wouldn’t even get back at two in the morning as Jim had done in Aussie. New Zealand was, Hill belatedly began to realize, very small. Well, very small across, it was quite long.

    “See? Lots of tourist attractions,” said Jim on a hopeful note. “Our big tourist area, Rotorua is. Well, all the thermal area and National Park, really. Wanna go to Rotorua tomorrow?”

    “Well, yes, Jim, I would like to, actually,” said Hill slowly.

    Jim brightened terrifically and launched into a long, complicated version, how authentic Hill would not have liked to hazard a guess, of the Maori legend about the three mountains of Tongariro National Park. Hill didn’t listen, though he got out his tape recorder for the benefit of the cretins at Head Office. There might be some possibilities in the ecolodge idea, after all. The site wasn’t bad. They’d have to check out the regulations about clearing the native bush: it’d be better if they could make a lawn sloping down to the view of the lake—well, an eco-lawn, studded with native grasses and the odd rock and, um, those clumpy things that looked like feather dusters, the New Zealand naturescape seemed to feature a lot of those.

    The dump Jim had shown him would have to be pulled right down, however. Why in God’s name Maurice had ever believed the man’s claims—! Er… perhaps he hadn’t. Perhaps it was just that he had noticed a certain lack of keenness in Hill about further projects, specifically about the old pub in Suffolk that was slated to feature beers of Olde Merrie Englande, and more generally about YDI itself. Hill had finished the project he'd been working on over in Norfolk and the Chipping Abbas project was only in the very preliminary planning stages—that was, Maurice was waiting to find out exactly what death duties Hill would be socked with before he made an extremely low offer for the lease, meanwhile unfortunates from YDI were checking things like the state of the foundations, the roof, and the plumbing in order to bring the price down even more. Understandably the firm didn’t want Hill involved in the early costing stages, though Maurice seemed to think he’d want to manage the actual conversion. Jody Carmichael had got the beer palace project, with the warning that it was going to be the flagship of the firm’s new range of houses, in England and the Continent, and fingers had better be pulled out; and Maurice had suggested tactfully that Hill might like to take the leave he hadn’t used up in summer and combine it with a trip to their new South Pacific office during September.

    Hill had hesitated before agreeing to this suggestion. Never mind that it was “only a day away,” once he got there he was in very little doubt that Maurice’d find all sorts of other things he could “just check out” for the firm while he was there. “There” encompassing the whole of the South Pacific, yeah. Well, not Fiji, Maurice was off Fiji because some friends of his had been caught there in the last coup or possibly the last but one, and not Hawaii, Tahiti or New Caledonia because the Yanks and the Frogs had them completely sewn up, and not Melanesia because it was too fucking HOT, had Hill ever BEEN there? But the Cook Islands were a possibility, and Samoa—not the American bit, cretin!—and possibly Tonga, seemed to be peaceful enough though in the past they’d terrorised the entire Pacific: cannibals—and definitely New Zealand because there was a lot of international awareness in the wake of the filmmaking there, and it did have wonderful scenery, though he had heard the infrastructure wasn’t much to write home about, and parts of Australia, why not? It was big enough. NOT Indonesia or Malaysia, thanks: nothing Muslim, they didn’t want to ask for trouble! This still left a pretty large area, geographically speaking. However, Hill had given in and agreed. It was better than sitting around at home wondering if Hattie would ever look at him with more than complete loathing.

    Vern’s mate Pete’s ecolodge wasn’t called anything as silly as “Fern Gully Ecolodge” with no ferns in sight, it was called “Taupo Shores Ecolodge” on the score of being about as close to the lakeshore as the former. It was a longish, low structure of unpainted wood, but in its case the wood seemed to have been treated with, uh…

    “Creosote,” said Vern laconically.

    “Oh.”

    “They built on the bit with the verandah,” he added laconically.

    The long verandah was wider than the other one’s but about as plain. When you got closer, the thick road metal crunching uncomfortably under your feet as you did so, you could see that the verandah supports and the timber trims had actually been painted, but in a null, matte fawn that was very hard to see unless you looked for it. The place had a corrugated steel roof painted a null, matte green that merged with the surrounding foliage and was very hard to see unless you— Oh, right: very eco-friendly. Paint was paint, so for all the good it was doing the environment, they might just as well have used royal blue or screaming yellow. However. A row of French doors opened onto the verandah from what were presumably the guest rooms, but these were all firmly closed—hardly surprising, in this weather. It was nominally spring down here. Presumably icy cold and very wet was what spring was, in these parts. Hill wasn’t claiming it was any better in Britain, but he was claiming Maurice Bishop was potty. Vern had already told him cheerfully that they often got a lot of rain in December, too. January wasn’t usually so bad. February and early March were probably the best parts of the year. That made two and a half months out of the twelve which would offer the eco-tourists something to see—because, as Hill had already empirically determined, when it rained in New Zealand it rained. Came down in buckets. You couldn’t see a yard in front of your face. And what good, pray, was the most marvellous view if it was invisible?

    He had incautiously mentioned the Yorkshire war gaming shit—well, in addition to the Gobi, that desert of theirs did call the more infertile bits of the Yorkshire moors to mind—and Jim had eagerly told him how popular tramping was out here, they might call it hiking where Hill came from. Then they had actually caught sight of two hikers. Er, trampers? Bent double under gigantic packs two-thirds the length of their bodies, the larger figure with an extra load strapped to its front as well, and slogging along with their eyes fixed on the road metal at their feet. Jim had replied to Hill’s prompting that they wouldn’t want a lift but had humoured the mad foreigner and pulled in and offered them one. He was right and the mad foreigner was wrong: they were heading for the Something Track—just over there. Sure enough, as they drove on into the desert the two might have been observed to turn off the road and slog off, bent double, eyes down, over the volcanic plateau. Would well-off eco-tourists fancy slogging off across that with only, if Hill’s maths was correct, a slightly more than twenty percent chance of seeing anything? Er, well, genuine local colour, yeah…

    “They got trails,” noted Vern laconically.

    Hill jumped. “For hiking, Vern?” he said lamely. “Sorry, tramping.”

    “Well, walking,” replied Vern temperately. “See?” He pointed.

    Oh, yes. On a very eco-friendly post—a small tree-trunk or possibly piece of branch with its bark intact—was an almost eco-friendly signpost. “Rewarewa Trail (5 K).” Pokerwork?

    “Bush walking, they call it,” he added neutrally.

    “Mm.” Hill had already realized that the locals didn’t have a clue what most Maori place names meant so he said very cautiously: “And does the name of the trail mean anything?”

    “Eh? Aw, see whatcha mean. They named ’em all after trees or plants or something. –Oy, Jim, is rewarewa native honeysuckle? Think my dad once said it was.”

    “Dunno. Look, there’s another one,” he said to Hill, pointing.

    So there was. “Pohutukawa Trail (2 K).”

    Obligingly Vern read it out. “Pohutukawa Trail. That’s the real easy one. Well, a pohutukawa’s a tree, but they’re more common on the coast than round these parts.”

    “They grow really big up in Auckland,” volunteered Jim. “Christmas trees, we sometimes call them: they flower at Christmas. Well, sometimes,” he amended cautiously.

    “Er—yes, I see,” said Hill feebly.

    “Red blossom,” said Vern. “You can get them at the nurseries, these days: look, Jan planted one. Don’t think that spot suits it.”

    If the tiny, spindly thing beside the signpost that he was pointing at was it, it couldn’t do, no.

    “Rimu Trail,” said Jim helpfully, pointing. “Over there, Hill: see? –Only get them in the deep bush, eh, Vern?”

    “Yep. They do a guided tour along that one that ya can sign up for, includes lunch.”

    Hill nodded: this trail was shown as “16 K.”

    “Mind you,” added Vern laconically, “the first 2 K of it’s on Pete and Jan’s place but that five-barred gate ya gotta open’s a dead giveaway.”

    Jim gave a snicker and he then looked as if he wished he hadn’t.

    “See, they drew up a plan—quite nifty, really, it was Jan’s idea, Pete woulda just walked from A to B—and the shorter trails kinda wind round and round on the property, with just enough bush between ’em for one lot not to realize the other lot’s there. Only if ya wanna go ten mile or so—’bout 16 K to you—a couple of ten acre lots don’t offer that much scope.”

    “I see,” said Hill feebly. “So who owns the next-door property, Vern?”

    “The forestry?” ventured Jim.

    “Eh? No, that’s over thataway, Jim,” he said, waving vaguely. “Well, dunno, really, Hill. The other side—further up a bit—that’s the old Wilson place. Usedta run a few dairy cows back in my dad’s day. Some longhaired weirdoes have got it now. Vegetarians. Well, with a few chooks. Some kind of organic gardening, they go in for—hang on, there is a special name for it.”

    They looked at him expectantly.

    “Nope, it’s gone again,” he said, shaking his head.

    “Permaculture,” drawled a laconic voice from behind them.

    They all jumped and swung round to face the house again.

    A stringy, thin-faced man of sixty-odd was lounging in the doorway, looking at them expressionlessly. He was dressed in ancient jeans and a sagging brown jumper—hand-knitted, by the look of it, with the type of sleeves that run from the armpit to the point where the shoulder joins the neck, thus doing their best to disguise the fact that the wearer has any shoulders at all. However, as Vern’s was almost exactly the same, if with more elaborate cabling along the joins, and Jim’s, under the expensive padded waterproof anorak and over the neat checked Viyella shirt, was only different in being newer, cleaner and less droopy, Hill managed not to be surprised by this phenomenon. Though he did register that those hugely expensive, natural wool Fairisle and Aran hand-knits in the boutique in his Auckland hotel must, as he had assumed, be only for the tourists.

    “Yeah, that’s it,” responded old Vern.

    “Ya got here, then,” said the thin-faced man expressionlessly.

    “Yeah,” agreed Vern.

    “Hullo,” said the thin-faced man expressionlessly to Hill and Jim.

    “This is Jim, what I told you about, and this is Hill Tarlington, he’s come out from England,” explained Vern. “This is Pete. –We’re a bit early, started to pour on our way back from The Chateau,” he excused them to Pete.

    “Had a bit here, too,” agreed Pete. “Staying at The Chateau, then, are ya, Hill?”

    “No, we’re at a motel in Taupo,” replied Hill evenly.

    “Southern Stars,” put in Jim.

    “Aw, yeah. Usedta live round that way; remember when they put it up: wanted to call it the Southern Cross only some other types had used that and threatened to sue them. Solid concrete block, one layer throughout: hear every syllable from the next-door unit. Ya lucky it’s not the tourist season. –It still painted that poncy pale yellow?” asked Pete with friendly interest.

    “Nope,” said Vern before either Jim or Hill could answer. “Gone all la-de-da, smothered it in that render muck, ’bout ten years back. Looks all right from the front,” he conceded with a faint sniff.

    “That south wall always was damp,” said Pete thoughtfully.

    “Flaking off like buggery!” revealed Vern, collapsing in sniggers.

    Pete grinned. “Right. –Ya better come in, then,” he added.

    They went in.

    Gosh. There was no reception area, as such, in Pete’s ecolodge: the front door opened straight into a fair-sized lounge. The far wall was warm, dark brick, featuring a large fireplace, its mantelshelf composed of one huge, shining slab of timber about two inches thick and six foot long, in an amazing soft, golden shade that had nothing whatsoever in common with the horrid varnished knotty pine of the Southern Stars Motel’s poky little office. The floorboards, Hill registered dazedly, seemed to consist of more of the same—well, possibly not as thick, but the same glorious fine-grained, golden shade. Against one wall was a solid-looking dresser of the farmhouse variety in the same wood. It held a collection of beer mugs, steins, and similar. Most of the furniture was plain, squarish sofas and chairs covered in a dark forest-green linen-look fabric, but drawn up before the blazing fire in the fireplace was an ancient brown chesterfield in real leather, flanked by two large armchairs of the La-Z-Boy sort, upholstered in Black Watch tartan. Over to the far right the fireplace wall abutted a wall of glass—it must be the end wall of the building—and this gave a view, past a couple of bronze-leaved flax plants in giant coiled pots and over a meandering eco-friendly lawn, of the huge pewter lake. The remaining walls were plastered and painted a neutral oatmeal shade. They didn’t need to be any fancier because above them—Hill gaped—was a gabled ceiling composed of narrow slats of more of the golden wood, supported by giant beams of the same.

    By his elbow Pete cleared his throat. “Went a bit overboard with the ceiling. Kauri. Got most of it out an old station over—well, never mind. Down a spur line. Been derelict for over fifty years. A mate put me onto it. See, by that time our floors were already in, so I hadda think of somewhere else it could go.”

    “It’s great, Pete!” breathed Jim, tilting his head back.

    “Wonderful!” agreed Hill.

    “Nobbad, eh?” conceded Pete modestly.

    “Did you do it yourself, Pete?” asked Hill.

    “Yeah. Well, with bit of help from a few old mates. –Hey, JAKE!” he suddenly roared.

    A door off to their left opened and a burly, silver-haired, good-looking brown-skinned man of about Pete’s own age ambled in, chewing. “Wha’?” he said with his mouth full.

    “You remember how many of us there were, that summer we lined this ceiling? Old George Parker came over, and that dim nephew of his, he wasn’t much help, but besides them, there was you and me and Ron; anyone else?”

    The burly Jake swallowed. “Um, Wal?”

    “Uh—did he have that poncy palace of his over the other side by that time?”

    “Yeah. That was the summer he was breaking up with… Uh, can’t remember whether it was Suzanne or Leila, actually, but I do remember he come over here and foisted himself on us the whole summer.”

    “It must have been Suzanne, he was breaking up with Leila the summer we got engaged,” said a musically deep contralto with a smile in.

    Hill just goggled as a tall, beautiful brown-haired woman came in and took the burly Jake’s arm, smiling. Gosh. She’d be well into her forties, but what a stunner! Huge greenish eyes, lovely oval face, perfect peachy complexion, great bone structure. Lovely straight nose. As for the figure—! Elle McPherson eat your heart out, thought Hill feebly, goggling at the luscious curves in a tight, pale green fuzzy sweater with stretch pants in a deep, um, not purple—violet, that was it! A deep violet stretch fabric with a velvet surface, simply begging to be stroked. The hair was very like Hattie’s, which didn’t actually detract from the whole effect. In a big thick plait, with golden highlights—well, probably tinted it a bit, but who cared?

    “Hullo!” she said to them, twinkling. “Has anyone introduced anyone to you poor things, yet?”

    Before anyone else could speak—one of them was certainly making up his mind what polite lie to formulate—Jake said on an impatient note: “It’s obvious who they are, ya dill!”

    “Which is which?” she asked drily.

    “That one’s the Pom: he’s wearing a tourist jumper, for Pete’s sake, are ya blind?”

    Hill cleared his throat. “Well, yes. The boutique in the hotel waylaid me. And I hadn’t expected it to be so chilly at this time of year.”

    “More like brass monkeys, ya mean,” said the burly Jake.

    Quite. He himself was wearing, just to be different, a giant hand-knitted brown jumper with those bloody peculiar sleeves. Since he had very decent shoulders indeed it didn’t have the usual effect. Surprisingly enough, he also had on very tired, saggy jeans.

    “Um, yeah,” put in Pete on a feeble note. “This here’s Hill and this is Jim—toleja about him, didn’t I? These are Polly and Jake.”

    “Yeah, and don’t take any notice of a blind word she says,” grunted Jake.

    “Specifically with reference to the environment,” added Polly sweetly.

    “Or contrariwise, with reference to capitalist developers,” he noted grimly.

    “Yeah,” admitted Pete. “Mind you, she’s not all bad, she thinks them permaculture nongs next-door are mad, too.”

    “Rabid vegetarians,” said Polly, favouring Hill with a ravishing smile. “Where they imagine we got our eye-teeth from, goodness knows!”

    “Er—yes,” he agreed feebly.

    “Ignore her,” said Jake. “Dump ya stuff; come on over to the fire.”

    Feebly they did that. Pete then wondered if anyone might fancy a beer but after Polly had told him loudly it was freezing, offer them a hot drink, for Heaven’s sake, Pete, and after Jake had told Pete to ignore her, and after Polly had asked Vern, Jim and Hill nicely if they needed to go to the toilet after that drive across the Desert Road and after Hill and Jim had given in and been—Vern must have a bladder like a camel, never mind he must be older than any of the rest of them—and after a broad, grey-haired, weather-beaten woman in a floral apron over a beat-up brown jumper and tired jeans had come in, greeted the new arrivals nicely, introducing herself as Jan, and weighed in on Polly’s side, Jake got up, looking entirely amiable, and accompanied her out to the kitchen to make hot toddies.

    “I don’t know what he does to them,” said Polly confidentially to Hill, “but I can use exactly the same ingredients and they come out nothing like his!”

    “Too mean with the rum,” said Pete on a tolerant note.

    “No, I’ve watched him, I use the same amount.”

    “Too mean with the sugar and lemon, then.’

    “Perhaps that’s it. It’s my Scotch Presbyterian ancestry showing!” she said, smiling.

    Pete scratched his thin grey hair. “Thought your lot were Anglicans? Didn’t yer old aunty want the two of you to get married in the cathedral?”

    “That’s going back a fair way!” said Polly with a laugh. “Poor old Aunty Vi! Yes, she did, but she only turned Anglican to spite Grandma Macdonald: all the rest on that side are Presbyterian.”

    “I getcha,” he acknowledged.

    “They had a garden wedding, actually,” said Jan, coming back in with a plate of nibbles. “It was lovely—a very hot day, mind you. Early March. Up in Auckland, this was,” she said kindly to Jim and Hill. “These are vegetarian,” she added drily, “so leave them if you don’t fancy them.”

    “Hah, hah,” returned Pete placidly. “Planted up these flaming eggplants, see, ’cos she reckoned I’d never get ’em to grow—next-door’s, they’ve got half an acre of the things. Came on like blazes. Hadda get on the blower to Polly to find out what the Hell to do with the things.”

    “Yes,” agreed Jan. “I did have a book but it told you to do stupid things like blackening them under the grill and peeling the skin off. These are grilled and then bottled in oil. The tourists think they’re really yuppie. Um, that’s goat’s cheese, Hill, from our own nannies: not everyone likes—”

    “Yum, yum!” replied Hill with a grin.

    “Oh, good,” she said, sagging.

    “It’s a bit like feta, Jim,” Polly was explaining kindly.

    “Oh, yeah! Caitlin buys that!” he said happily, munching ambrosia in the form of home-preserved aubergine with homemade goat’s cheese finished with just a suggestion of garlic. Hill was conscious of a strong impulse to find out whether Jan could supply YDI’s ecolodge with ingredients of this quality—because there was no way, he recognised very clearly, having sampled the culinary delights of Taupo the previous night, that they were going to get ’em from anywhere else in this neck of the woods.

    “The permaculture lot’d probably be able to let you have as many organic eggplants as ya like, Hill,” said Pete kindly.

    Hill jumped where he sat. “Uh—yeah. Would they? Good,” he said feebly. “Actually I’d be very interested in seeing over their place: my brother’s into organic farming.”

    “Permaculture’s more like a religion,” said Polly, smiling the smile at him again.

    “Mm,” he agreed feebly, smiling feebly.

    “Cripes, they’re not one of those sects, are they?” asked Jim in alarm.

    “No, Jim,” she said nicely, awarding him the smile, “they’re just completely rabid about using everything on the land and planting and composting everything so as you get a miniature little ecosystem going.”

    Light appeared to dawn and Jim launched happily into a story about a mate of his brother-in-law’s who’d tried that, only the neighbours had complained to the Council…

    During the rest of the pre-prandial period Pete and Polly managed to show Hill and Jim over the rest of the ecolodge while Vern, Jim and Jake remained in a male huddle round the fire with the rum bottle and Jan vanished to the kitchen. Then, as Polly went off to lay the table and check whether the two sets of guests currently in residence had returned from their trips, Jan, while showing Hill the kitchen arrangements, managed to let him know that Jake had long since hung a “Keep Off the Grass” sign on Polly, even if there was twenty years between them, and that, with a cheerful laugh, that gear she was in today was her version of grubbies, you’d never guess her dad had been a backblocks farmer over towards the East Coast, would you; and that Taupo Shores Ecolodge had absolutely no interest in the very up-market end of the tourist market and Hill was more than welcome to it. Not all of this information was crystal-clear to Hill but enough of it was.

    He drew a deep breath and said: “Who are they, Jan?”

    Jan handed him a large, handsome pottery platter. “Hold this, would you, Hill? –Ta. Well, Pete’s known him since they were in their early twenties, of course. He’s Sir Jake Carrano.”

    A sort of faint, sneaking suspicion that something like this might be the case had been creeping over Hill ever since he’d got a look at the giant green rock surrounded by not-small diamonds on the third finger of Polly’s left hand, but— He gulped.

    “Did you notice her engagement ring? –Yes,” said Jan sympathetically. “He picked it up in South America. Pete reckons it was a part-payment for some deal the Carrano Group did over there: see, there wouldn’t of been anything on paper for the Tax Office to get a look at. He’s always been like that. Polly does her best to put the brakes on him, mind you. Well, there’ve been a few episode of crates of this and that appearing out of the blue—we still don’t know how he got all that Russian vodka into the country—this was before perestroika and so forth—but the last time he really stuck his neck out personally was when he brought these huge diamond earrings in for her in his pocket without mentioning them to Customs, and that was a few years back, now!”

    “I see,” said Hill faintly. Jesus! Sir Jacob Carrano could buy and sell bloody Maurice Bishop and YDI several times over, in fact the Carrano Group was worth almost as much as the Gano Group itself, which owned YDI amongst a huge number of other enterprises worldwide. What was he doing in a—well, quite a nice ecolodge, yes, but in terms of his income bracket a dump, which didn’t even lay claim to one star and whose current guests were apparently a nice middle-aged couple from Adelaide, Australia, who were into tramping and campervanning and had recently done the trek up Kilimanjaro, and two New Zealand office girls taking a bit of their annual leave.

    Jan took a large saucepan off the heat. “Um, well, you can see for yourself they’re quite unpretentious,” she said uneasily.

    “Yes,” said Hill quickly, smiling at her. “They struck me as very nice, actually, Jan.”

    “Yes,” said Jan in relief. “They are. They came here for their honeymoon, actually: Polly didn’t want anything fancy. He insisted on taking her to Paris and doing his best to shower her in mink and diamonds that May, mind you.” She must have noticed his puzzled expression because she added: “She was teaching at the university, you see. They still had May holidays, back then.” She tipped the steaming contents of the saucepan into a large metal colander over the sink.

    “Er—oh! I see! She couldn’t get away in March, then?”

    “No, but they managed a long weekend down here. We hadn’t met her before,” she said with a cautious eye on the door, “and frankly, we were expecting anything. Well, the papers and the TV had been going mad—you know. But of course as soon as soon as we met her we were pretty sure it was gonna be all right!” She picked up the colander, shook it briskly, and emptied its contents onto the pottery platter he was holding. Small new potatoes. Out of the garden or, he, Hill, was a Dutchman in his clogs.

    “Ta,” she said, dumping the colander in the sink and taking the platter from his palsied hands. “I’ll just bung these in the oven.” He watched numbly as she bent to it. That smell coming from it was suspiciously like roast lamb… Yes. A whole side. Gosh.

    “Do you like broad beans?” she said straightening and smiling at him.

    “Uh, yes,” croaked Hill numbly. “Love them.”

    “They’re still very small so I thought we’d have them in their pods. Polly’s given me a couple of lovely recipe books that tell you how to cook them whole. You never see the small ones in the shops, of course—in fact these days you never see them in the shops at all. I did wonder about doing some of the tops as a vege, because the books say you can and one of them’s a New Zealand book, so our ones must be safe, but I’ve never heard of anyone eating them, have you?”

    “Nuh— Uh— Yes, Jan,” he said very, very feebly. “A rich old uncle took me to a very, very posh restaurant in London once for a special celebration and it served broad bean tops. I’ve no idea how much they were, because Uncle Hubert wouldn’t let me get a sniff of the menu, but I am quite sure they would have been extortionate.”

    “Yes,” said Polly’s voice from behind them. She came into the kitchen, smiling. “Silly, isn’t it, ’cos most people grow them as a green manure crop,” she said tranquilly. “The Arvidsons are back, they’re just having a shower, Jan, and Holly and Sheena have been back for bit, they were watching TV in their room, I think they were feeling too shy to come into the sitting-room.”

    “But I told them it was for everyone!”

    “Yes. We’re all ancient, you see,” said Polly with her lovely smile.

    “Oh, dear,” said Jan in dismay. “I did try to tell them when they booked that it might not be very exciting for them.”

    “Turning away custom—yes!” said Polly with a giggle, looking at Hill’s face. “Actually they seem to have had a lovely day: they went to that place with the thermal springs that Wal likes.”

    “Is this thermal bathing?” asked Hill cautiously. He’d got the impression from Head Office’s bumf, not to mention from Jim, that that was all done over at Rotorua.

    “Yes, that’s right. Hot pools,” she said, smiling at him.

    “It’s all volcanic around here, Hill,” added Jan. “The actual lake’s a giant crater.”

    “I don’t think he wanted to know that, Jan!” said Polly with a giggle. “It’s all right, Hill, that was the sort of volcano that goes up once with an almighty boom and then it’s dead.”

    “The active ones are kind of like safety-valves,” said Jan kindly.

    “Mm.”

    “The tourists love it,” said Polly kindly.

    “Yes,” agreed Jan in a strained voice, heaving the roast out. “Oof!” she said, setting it down on the old scrubbed wooden table. –Possibly the New Zealand health authorities didn’t inspect the kitchens of ecolodges much, if at all. The table was obviously scrubbed a lot, the wood was positively white, but Hill had a strong feeling it wouldn’t have satisfied an English health inspector, used to stainless steel everything. And Maurice would throw ten thousand fits at the mere thought of it. Well, up his. All the same, it rather put paid to that vague idea of—if the project ever got off the ground—asking Jan to supply them, didn’t it?

    “Um, Polly, how old would you say those girls are?” Jan then asked, looking thoughtfully at the roast.

    “Young enough to take one look at that and regress to childhood in their grannies’ kitchens!” replied Polly with a laugh. “They’ll probably ask for second helpings!”

    “Eh? No, not that. If they’ve gone into the sitting-room those idiots are probably giving them rum.”

    “I think they’re over eighteen, Jan. And the girls all drink rum and Coke these days!”

    “Shit, they all drank it in my day, come to that!” she said with a robust laugh. “Well, if you say so. –Her kids are in their teens. The boys are nearly sixteen,” she explained to Hill.

    “Yes. Well, Davey’s nearly sixteen going on two and a completely irresponsible maniac, and Johnny’s nearly sixteen going on forty-two and a budding Scrooge, but yeah!” said Polly with a grin.

    Hill smiled. “Twins, Polly?”

    “Yes. Don’t worry, we haven’t left them home alone. My brother Bob and his wife, Bet, volunteered to come up and stay for few days and keep an eye on the monsters. Bob’s about as hopeless as they are, mind you, but Bet won’t let them get away with a thing.”

    “Bet’s relatively new,” said Jan with a smile.

    “Yeah, Bob played the field for years. No, well, first he got married far too young and busted up very acrimoniously, and then he played the field for years. You know: a succession of glamorous bird, getting exponentially younger as his hair got thinner on top. He was fifty when he met Bet, and Mum and Dad had completely given him up as a bad job.”

    “And what’s she like?” asked Hill nicely.

    Polly’s and Jan’s eyes met, They both broke down in giggles. Finally Jan wiped her eyes with the corner of her floral pinny and said feebly: “Know emus, Hill?

    Polly broke down in more giggles.

    Hill was flummoxed for moment. “Uh… Oh! Emus! Those Australian birds?”

    “Right: tall, scrawny, small heads on long necks.”

    “Don’t!” howled Polly.

    Hill was now grinning all over his face. “I think I get it, Jan!”

    “Yeah. Well, she is a really nice woman, isn’t she, Polly?”

    “Yes,” said Polly feebly, patting at her sides in a helpless sort of way. Smiling, Hill gave her his handkerchief. “Ta,” she said, blowing her nose hard and mopping her eyes. “She’s so completely different from any of the girlfriends! But there’s no doubt they suit each other down to the ground.”

    And they took the plates and the dinner through to the restaurant, chatting amiably about Bet and Bob, the former an agricultural scientist, it was how she met Bob, who’d been a Farm Advisor for years and was now working for one of the big fertiliser companies…

    “Whaddaya reckon?” said Jim cautiously as, having dropped Vern off at home, where Mrs Reilly didn’t appear to be waiting up for him—there were certainly no lights on—they returned to the Southern Stars Motel. They had a twin room: Jim had  seemed to think it was the thing, and Hill hadn’t objected: it would be a saving for YDI.

    “After that glorious fluffy meringue with the real farmhouse cream on it, Jim, I’m incapable of reckoning anything!” he replied with a laugh, collapsing onto the side of his bed.

    “Pavlova,” said Jim, grinning. “Mum makes that. Caitlin’s hopeless at it, though. And she reckons all that cream’s bad for yer cholesterol.”

    “Nonsense, it was mainly air!”

    “Right, I’ll leave it to you to tell ’er that one,” he replied drily, sitting down and hauling his boots off. “No, but what do ya?”

    Hill swallowed a sigh. “I’ll have to look at all the figures very carefully, Jim, and no matter what I recommend the decision will be up to Head Office, you know.”

    “Yeah, but they’ll follow your recommendation!” he said brightly.

    “Not necessarily: they have their own agenda. And the Gano Group—that’s the parent company—certainly has its own agenda.”

    “They must want to go ahead down here, though, or they wouldn’t of set up the Auckland office!” he said happily.

    Maybe. “Yeah. Well, the site itself isn’t bad, though we’ll need to find out how much of that bush we can hack down and just how near to the shore we can build. But the main thing will be finding enough for the tourists to do, Jim. If it rains, at a conservative estimate, nine months out of twelve, that doesn’t seem to me to leave much scope.”

    “It can be lovely in May,” replied Jim on a weak note. “Me and Caitlin came down for a week at Rotorua in May, once. It was really lovely. Bloody nippy at night, mind, but lovely clear blue days. The weather was much nicer than back home, actually.”

    “Yes, well, I’m glad to hear it. Nevertheless, think of some activities that won’t be affected by the rain, Jim.”

    Jim thought. Finally he said: “There’s the glow-worms.”

    “Pardon?”

    “Think there’s two lots, actually: Caitlin reckoned there was a tour round Orakei Korako or those parts you could do with glow-worms as well. No, I mean Waitomo Caves, Hill.”

    He then more or less managed to explain this and Hill got the map out.

    “That’s miles away!”

    “No, um, those are K, Hill. Killer-metres,” he clarified.

    “Oh—yeah,” Hill conceded sheepishly. “Right.” The dreaded killer-metres, uh-huh. Polly Carrano had actually let “kilometres” pass her lip at one stage during the evening but no-one else in the entire country appeared able to pronounce the word.

    “Nice bus tour, see?”

    Er—mm. Their clientele didn’t generally relish bus tours, though the one they ran to Salisbury Plain from the Boddiford Hall Park Royal was quite popular. No, safaris in those camouflage 4x4s as described by Vern were the go. Er, fleet of 4x4s up to these glow-worm caves? Well, that’d be possible. And these days they were all air-conditioned and heated, even more comfortable than a tourist coach.

    Jim then told him eagerly all about the geothermal power station but though Hill had to admit he was right, it did sound fascinating, unfortunately there was no way their clientele would be interested in something that man-made and scientific. There were, looking at the map, stacks of other tourist delights in the area, ranging from the famous mud pools and geysers over in Rotorua itself, to a horde of little mineral springs dotted here, there and everywhere but, again, in the rain?

    “Look, Jim,” he said as Jim showed signs of getting carried away, “don’t get carried away. We’re going to have to look at this in detail and work out very, very carefully just how many hours can be spent carting the clients round in camouflaged four-by-fours, as opposed to getting out in the safari boots and actually doing something.”

    Jim got carried away anyway. Blast!

    They did go over to Rotorua the next day and as it was a pale blue spring day with no rain in sight Hill pretty much got carried away himself. Though realizing that Jim’s claim that “she” (the big geyser) always performed better in spring, got topped up by the winter rains, ya see, was undoubtedly true. The more touristified bits of the place were hideous but the actual natural wonders were, well, extraordinary. The whole place stank of sulphur but that would only make it more of yer genuine ethnic, back-to-nature, eco-experience for the clients. The buried village, quite a drive out of the town, was about as exciting as he’d been warned but there was a very pretty thermal area nearby, about a million times prettier than Rotorua, and the view across the sullen Lake Tarawera to the brooding, dark grey, broken crags that were all that were left of that Mount Tarawera that had blown its top well within recorded history was everything that Vern had said of it. Turned your soul to stone and then some. Even Jim was completely silent for at least four minutes as they stared at it.

    “Yes,” said Hill as he burst into speech. “Definitely, Jim. And the flight over it.”

    “Ya gotta book for that,” he said, looking through the ring binder that his original handful of brochures had metamorphosed into once it dawned that Hill might be serious. “And I don’t think it’s on all year round. –Hey, listen, in winter they could have some skiing as well!”

    Mm. It was a bit far from the ski fields—not in terms of the map, but the map didn’t indicate the amount of travel in a vertical direction that was involved after the horizontal trek across the desert. “I’ll think about it. Logistics might be bit difficult.”

    “That Jake guy, he was saying ya might do a deal with one of the ski lodges. Sounded as if his company, they got one for the employees, eh?”

    Er—not quite, no. Hill took a deep breath, led him back to the car and there initiated him gently into just who that Jake guy was. And the undoubted but sad fact that that’d be his own ski lodge, or at the very least, owned as part of a syndicate.

    Poor Jim’s face was very, very red. “Sorry, Hill! I shoulda guessed!”

    “I don’t see how you could possibly have guessed, Jim, the man’s a billionaire, and he came across like the chap next-door, didn’t he?”

    “Um, yeah,” he gulped, “only he is a Maori!”

    Er… yes? Actually he had grey eyes, so he must have mixed blood, but he had the typical bullet head and the square, wide-mouthed, heavy face that typified the older Maori men. “Um, there’d be a fair few of them in the country, though, Jim,” he said kindly.

    “No, I mean Jake’s not that common a name!” he gulped.

    Right. And the country wasn’t very big. And it had been clear they came from Auckland. He refrained from saying that he didn’t think Polly was a very common name, either, in the 21st century.

    “Forget it. Nobody expects to bump into a billionaire at a down-home ecolodge at the back of beyond. Not that it isn’t very nice, of its kind,” he said with a smile.

    “Yeah. So you aren’t envisaging something like that?” said YDI’s South Pacific rep sadly.

    “Er—not exactly, no.” Somewhat reluctantly—he thought they were all completely bloody—Hill showed him the examples of approved styles the ideas-persons had dredged up.

    There was a fair amount of gulping, poor Jim. Finally he said in a very small voice: “That underground one, it wouldn’t be right for our climate.”

    “No,” agreed Hill kindly, not pointing out that it’d fill with water in their climate.

    “Um, heck, Hill, wouldja even get planning permission?” he said on a wild note.

    “For which one, Jim?”

    Jim gulped again. “Well any, really. I mean, heck!”

    “Mm. Well, there aren’t any bluffs on the property, fortunately, so that cantilevered thing’s out of the question.”

    Swallowing hard, Jim managed to utter: “American.”

    Most of them were—certainly the more frightful exhibits—but there were a few Scandinavian ones and a totally absurd Italian one—not an ecolodge, a billionaire’s holiday home in this instance, but the ideas-persons weren’t wrong in assuming their clientele’d really go for it.

    “Yeah,” he agreed.

    “Um, well, which do you like?” asked Jim sadly.

    “None of them, Jim, I think they’re all putrid, but it’s not up to me. Sir Maurice just sent me out to scout out possibilities, suss out the opposition, and have a look at the local styles.”

    “Mm. Um, well, the Council might wear that pole house one: pole houses usedta be quite popular here, a bit back.”

    “Um… this one?” Hill looked at it dubiously. What were the poles for? Well, to act as structural supports, obviously: they ran basement to ceiling. But the building was more or less slung between them, leaving a huge open area underneath it. For what? Air circulation? He sincerely doubted you’d need that, in New Zealand! The wind hadn’t stopped blowing since he’d got here.

    “Um, though I think ya gotta use treated wood, and, um, I think they use cyanide,” said Jim, going very red.

    “What?”

    “Um, something like that,” he muttered. “Turns the wood kinda green,” he muttered.

    Hill peered at the laptop. The wooden poles in the picture were merely wood-coloured—well, given the inadequacies of a laptop screen, they were. But possibly in New Zealand they were greenish. “Look, check it out when you get back to the office, would you, Jim? Even if the authorities here allow it, no way are our clientele going to wear anything that environmentally unfriendly.”

    “No, right: what I thought. I will,” he agreed.

    Idly Hill looked through the files until he found the one on construction ratings for ecolodges. He winced. No, well, it wasn’t law anywhere—and they didn’t want to attract mad Greenies, they wanted to attract the wealthy eco-conscious, but, er… The top rating (five green leaves: exactly) required the ecolodge to be built of all recycled materials, already felled trees, or scrap materials, “in a manner indigenous to the region” (he thought of those fake Maori houses in Rotorua with the carved posts slathered in, as Jim had so rightly indicated, Dulux high gloss, and winced, and of the perfectly genuine buried village, and winced again), and constructed by local contractors and workers. Well, YDI could manage that last: it was their general policy in any case. Plus and the thing had to be built “in an extremely innovative manner”—no definition of what the Christ that might mean—“to take advantage of its natural surroundings for ventilation, heating, cooling, shade, sun, etc.” Did that mean solar power? Or merely through-draughts? The three-leaf level sounded a bit more possible, requiring merely renewable resources and local materials and allowing the use of “live trees”—yes, that did mean that Level 5 didn’t—so long as they were replanted. Local contractors and workers again and “consideration” given to natural surroundings and “how best to take advantage of them.” We-ell…

    “Shit,” said Jim, peering over his shoulder.

    “Mm. Um, you mentioned the forestry earlier today, Jim.”

    “Eh? Well, yeah, there’s loads of that round this general area. Well, over to Kaingaroa—here.” Hill goggled at an enormous area which seemed to be a state forest, unless the map was lying. “Up Kinleith—oh, yeah, Vern mentioned that. Tokoroa… Loads of places.”

    “Er—yes,” said Hill weakly. Most of the Rotorua-Taupo area, then. Sections of the roads around Rotorua had been lined by huge, dark trees, true. Possibly his mind was still affected by that extraordinary volcanic plateau in the middle of the country. “I gather there won’t be much trouble in getting timber, then?”

    “You gotta be joking!” he choked, evidently finding this enquiry exquisitely funny.

    “Mm… Whole tree trunks?”

    “S’pose that’s what they use for the pole houses. Well—stripped.”

    “Uh-huh. I meant with their bark still on, Jim.”

    “Eh? That’d look like a log cabin!” he croaked.

    Hill eyed him drily. “Quite.”

    Jim swallowed. “Well, uh, have to get onto the forestry office, I think… Well, yeah, I suppose they’d supply them, if you were ready to pay enough, but they’d think you were cracked, Hill!”

    “Eco-friendliness is pretty well cracked. Well, I’ll get Head Office to check out the website where they found this crap, but if it’s an up-market one, that’s where we’d want to be listed, see?”

    “Yeah.” He thought it over. “Those Aussie guests, the Arvidsons, at Taupo Shores, they were pretty up-market, eh?”

    They clearly weren’t in the income bracket of most of YDI’s affluent customers, but they weren’t short of a few bucks, as their Arctic-quality anoraks had more than indicated. Not to mention their tales of all the eco-friendly places they’d “backpacked” unquote, over. Iceland, the Serengeti, the Himalayas, deepest Thailand complete with elephants, the deepest Sahara complete with air-conditioned campervan—well, not short of a buck, no. Back home their very own air-conditioned campervan that had taken them through the Australian Outback times innumerable was equipped, as Erin Arvidson had not neglected to explain over Jan’s miraculous roast lamb, with not only a fridge (which everyone present at the table had seemed to take for granted, though Hill fancied he’d spotted a twinkle in Polly’s sapient grey-green eye), but also a washing-machine and, if you please, a dishwasher! There were only the two of them: Jesus! Though judging by the spotless jeans, sharply-ironed denim shirt and immaculate hand-knit Aran sweater Keith Arvidson had been wearing at dinner, Erin was probably kept pretty busy during their treks with the environmentally-friendly washing powders, pre-rinse soakers, in-rinse spot removers, et al.—yeah. Erin, if clearly a groupie of the most slavish type, and ’orribly over-keen, the type that gushed with the buck teeth well to the fore, hadn’t struck Hill as all that bad but Keith Arvidson was, frankly, a prick of the first water.

    “Yeah, they were,” he agreed. “Their good opinion’d be a pretty good gauge of whether we were on the right track. They certainly approved of all Pete’s recycled timber, didn’t they?”

    “Yeah.” Jim hesitated. “Wouldn’t say he thinks of it as recycling, exactly, mind you.”

    At this Hill—he had been holding it in for quite some time—collapsed in helpless, streaming hysterics. “No!” he gasped finally, groping for his handkerchief. Damn—gone missing. He wiped the back of his hand across his eyes and accepted a box of the motel’s tissues from the now broadly grinning Jim. “Thanks. –Isn’t he priceless? Anything that’s not nailed down—!”

    “Yep, real character, isn’t ’e? And he’s got a claw hammer, too,” added Jim in a prim voice.

    It took a minute and then Hill collapsed in further helpless, streaming hysterics. Not unaware as he did so that Jim Thompson was terrifically relieved to discover that the Pom from YDI’s Head Office wasn’t an up-himself la-de-da shit with a ramrod up his arse, after all.

Next chapter:

https://theprojectmanager-anovel.blogspot.com/2022/01/after-ecolodge.html