Lalla Back Home

Part II. AFTERMATH

9

Lalla Back Home

    Four years and nine months had passed since Lalla’s visit to Canberra and Petey Holcroft was now four years old.

    Well—yes. When the news had to be broken to her parents Mrs Holcroft claimed bitterly, not necessarily in this order, that Lalla was an idiot and that she couldn’t count. Mr Holcroft was secretly quite pleased at the idea there might be a grandchild but he didn’t have any say, of course. Jean, Lalla’s cousin and flatmate, waxed unexpectedly supportive—perhaps because, as a nurse, the medical aspects of an unplanned pregnancy appealed to her—and propounded a woman’s right to choose, the safeness of legal abortion these days, and the availability of maternity leave these days, not quite in that order but near enough. Though only to Lalla herself, not to Mrs Holcroft. Jean’s friends Sherrie and Tanya, also nurses, were even more supportive and decided that this was the time for a group of women to show their commitment and support and something else long-winded that Lalla didn’t take in, and rally round. What Lalla did take in was that Jean, Sherrie and Tanya were now all well into their thirties with no permanent boyfriend amongst the three of them and with at least seven failed romances with doctors amongst the three of them, at least two of which were real rather than almost wholly wishful thinking. Real, that was, to the extent of having involved actual dates at the male’s initiative as well as intercourse, not real to the extent of the male’s ever having suggested they share his flat, meet his parents, or even come away on holiday with him.

    Perhaps naturally the nurses assumed that Lalla had thought out her options—which they had certainly all explained very clearly to her—and made a reasoned decision that she wanted the baby. But of course Lalla hadn’t. She didn’t much like the idea of an abortion, true, but she wasn’t opposed to it on principle—and she liked the idea of labour even less. But when it came to the crunch an abortion just seemed completely out of the question. It would be Peter’s baby: getting rid of it was unimaginable.

    When Lalla admitted she was going to have the baby, the nurses decided that the flat she and Jean were in would never do: it was much too small and didn’t have a garden; and the flat Sherrie, Tanya and another nurse were sharing would never do: it was on the first floor and it’d be impossible to get a pram or pushchair up and down the stairs, and it didn’t have a garden either; and what they ought to do was rent a whole house with a proper garden! They didn’t need to specify one-storeyed because ninety-five percent of New Zealand houses still were, even though clumps of two-storeyed townhouses were springing up like rashes for retired couples and young married couples, and being deserted in droves as the latter discovered how inconvenient they were once you had a child and as the former discovered how inconvenient they were once the limbs stiffened up. The house of course would need to be near to work, because although they were all long since qualified and Sherrie, in fact, was a ward sister, they still all had shift work. Jean had left Middlemore and joined Sherrie at Auckland Hospital, the biggest public hospital, and Tanya was at the Mater, which wasn’t that far away, so something relatively near to them both would be ideal. Unfortunately what was mostly near to them both, if you discounted Mt Eden Gaol, was up-market Grammar Zone suburbs where all the roomy old villas had long since been restored and all the gardens were now lovingly cared for by so-called landscaping firms while the inhabitants drove off separately in their two-car-family vehicles to their professional occupations.

    However, they had a tremendous piece of luck: Tanya’s old uncle died, leaving a rambling house in One Tree Hill—well, it was that postcode, if it was rather near to Manukau Road—to his three sons, none of whom wanted it because, although its roof was sound and it had regularly had a fresh coat of white paint, the old man had never modernised it, and it was still the basic Fifties box he and his wife had moved into when they were first married back in 1957, plus the additions they’d had a builder stick on the back as the family grew during the Sixties. Stick on the back without benefit of an architect or an actual plan. As a result the room that had been Jack’s in his teens opened directly onto the open back porch and the room that had been Malcolm’s in his teens opened directly onto the patio beyond the back porch. They were both large rooms but of course when the additions had been made no-one had ever heard of ensuites, so they couldn’t have been said to be exactly convenient. The main part of the house had a poky sitting-room, just big enough for the really horrible late Sixties suite—varnished wooden arms, square foam slabs of backs and seats, nubbly wool and nylon mix in a hearty orange not toned down enough by the scattering of brown and turquoise in the weave—a reasonable-sized but not large master bedroom, a small second bedroom, and a minute dining-room and kitchen which anyone in their senses would have thrown together into one. In fact most houses of that generation had long since had the sitting-room, dining-room and kitchen thrown together. It was still an extremely sound structure but it would have cost a fortune to do it up to the standard that anyone wanting to buy in the area would have deemed acceptable, so the brothers decided they’d let it pay its way.

    It all worked out very well, because Lalla and the baby could have the front bedroom, Jean could have the smaller bedroom next to it (and next to the bathroom), and Tanya and Sherrie could have the two back rooms; and Bob, Jack and Malcolm agreed to put in a door between these two rooms and enclose the back porch for them!

    Even though Mrs Holcroft hadn’t intended to be supportive she was very annoyed to find any decisions she might have made for Lalla suddenly pre-empted. Mr Holcroft was rather disappointed that Lalla and the baby would be so far away: on his retirement they had moved up to the Hibiscus Coast and their smart retirement unit was nearly two hours’ drive away, even with the motorways. But of course his opinion didn’t count. Lalla’s brothers, Bill and Kevin, just kept their heads well down throughout. Her sister-in-law, Marlene, was very sympathetic but not in front of Mrs Holcroft, so much.

    Lalla was grateful for the nurses’ support and she didn’t dislike them—even Jean, she’d realized since being forced to live with her, had her good points—and as no-one else was offering anything approaching practical support—though her father pushed a handful of notes into her hand with a muttered “Don’t tell your mother”—she was very glad to move into the house in One Tree Hill. Fortunately there was a supermarket just round the corner on Manukau Road, and lots of buses up and down it, serving the much less affluent suburbs to the south, so even though she didn’t have a car and in fact couldn’t drive, she didn’t find it an inconvenient place to live. And there was, as the nurses carefully explained to her, an actual hospital bus! See, it went the rounds: Cornwall Hospital, and the Mater, and— Lalla looked politely at the map, not admitting that she couldn’t make it match up in her head with the pretty tree-lined streets of that bus route, or at least the part of it that Tanya had kindly taken her on as far as the Mater, and agreed that that was really great.

    Everything went very well, and what with the houseful of nurses and all the prenatal classes and all the approved prenatal exercises they made her do, Peter Christie Macdonald Townsend Holcroft was born without too much effort—certainly none of the horrors his maternal grandmother had predicted—at that very Cornwall Hospital that was on the bus route.

    Mrs Holcroft was very annoyed because, not necessarily in this order, her late father’s name hadn’t been included as one of his names, the three nurses’ surnames had been included as his names, and, of course, because Lalla still wasn’t letting on who the father was and refused to have it on the birth certificate! What sort of legacy was that to leave your child? Possibly she didn’t mean legacy but everyone knew what she meant and no-one wanted to argue with her anyway, so they let it go. The nurses were all thrilled to have their surnames included, so that was all right.

    And Lalla’s cousin Coralie and her daughter Bernice, both of whom Lalla had thought would be solidly on her mother’s side, turned up at the hospital with huge bunches of flowers and hand-knitted bonnets and bootees for him, plus (from Bernice) a large, fuzzy white bear. Not really a teddy, more a… Well, a large, fuzzy white bear. With a bright tartan bow round his fat, fuzzy white neck. Tanya suggested he was a Christmas bear but Bernice snapped: “NO!” to that one. The bear was set in pride of place on Lalla’s chest of drawers amidst all the flowers from the nurses and their friends, and Bill and Marlene, and even Aunty Jan (not from Mrs Holcroft, naturally). What on earth could she call him? He simply was not a “Teddy”. But after he’d been there for a while it came to Lalla. He was very blond and he had a wide, round, vacuous face, very amiable-looking. A dead ringer for Davey Sale, in fact! So she called him Davey White. Fortunately Bernice accepted her feeble explanation of “He just looks like a Davey.”

    Mr Holcroft was secretly very disappointed that the baby hadn’t been given his name, Neville, as one of his names, but successfully concealed the fact. Though not the additional fact that he was completely and utterly bowled over by Peter Christie Macdonald Townsend Holcroft.

    Lalla had been able to take a year’s maternity leave. And the ladies at the Carrano Group who had the happy hours had even held a baby shower for her! Wasn’t that lovely of them? Frighteningly, Sir Jake himself had called her into his office after she’d applied for the maternity leave. Yikes. Was he going to tell her it wasn’t on, or, um… what?

    He looked at her very hard, ooh, heck, was he gonna say that a baggy tee-shirt over the bulge wasn’t approved maternity wear for work? Then he said: “Look, Miss Holcroft, I know it’s none of my business, but you do want this kid, do you?”

    “Um, yes!” gasped Lalla, very taken aback.

    “Good,” he said, scratching his chin. “Being a solo mum’s no sinecure, you know.”

    “Um, no. Um, I’m flatting with my cousin Jean and her two friends. They’re all nurses. They’re being very… Um, I forget the word,” said Lalla in a small voice. “Very kind. Helping me. Telling me things.”

    “Supportive, yeah. I am familiar with that syndrome. –Well, Hell, I do live in the real world!” the billionaire entrepreneur said loudly as Lalla looked at him in surprise. “Look, they mean well, but it won’t last. They won’t mean to let it, but the gilt’ll wear off the gingerbread, and their own interests’ll start to take precedence. And if a bloke comes along for any of them, that’ll be all she wrote, ya know.”

    “I do know that!” said Lalla with a little laugh.

    “Yeah. Good. Look, the job’s yours for as long as you want to hang onto it, and you can always put the kid in the Group’s crèche, but if ya get fed up or it gets too much for you, some friends of ours run a kind of motel—well, they’re calling it an ecolodge these days, but it’s a motel with bush walks and a dining-room—they can always do with a bit of a hand. You and the kid could live in, you see.”

    “Thank you,” said Lalla limply. “Where—where is it?’”

    He scratched his thick, silvering dark curls. “Down Taupo. Bit of a change from the Big Smoke. But it’s very laid-back and they’re really decent people. And they can genuinely do with the help: find it hard getting anyone to stay for more than a couple of months over summer.”

    “I see. It sounds lovely,” she said shyly.

    He brightened. “Yeah, it is. Me and Polly get down there at least once a year. Spent our honeymoon there, actually!”

    Lalla gaped at him. The whole of the Group was under the impression that he’d taken her to Paris. Where he’d showered her with jewellery and mink coats—yeah.

    “No!” he said with a laugh. “Not the flaming Paris jaunt, our real honeymoon! Spent a couple of days at our own bach, that’s up the boo-eye on Carter’s Inlet—just north of the Hibiscus Coast, ya might not know it—and then went on down to Pete and Jan’s. Polly had to get back to work the week after.”

    The whole of the Group knew that Lady Carrano was a statistical linguist (though it was fair to say that not many knew exactly what that was) and lectured at the university, and had written several books, mostly in French, so Lalla nodded politely.

    “Well, I’ve said it, so maybe she won’t bite me head off!” he said, grinning suddenly.

    Lalla was rather flushed anyway, but at this she turned absolutely puce. Lady Carrano had told him to speak to her? She had, of course, only glimpsed Sir Jake’s wife at those very large staff gatherings where she would wear her fabulous earrings. The senior execs were always all over her but the mere workers never had a chance to get near her—and Lalla would have been too shy to speak to her if she had got near her.

    “Um—yes! Thank you, Sir Jake!” she gulped.

    “That’s okay. And this is from Polly personally. She said to tell you she knows you’ll be embarrassed but there are some things that are more important than embarrassment.” He handed her an envelope. “Go on, open it.”

    Uncertainly Lalla opened it. It contained a card, not a rich person’s one but the sort of greeting card that you saw everywhere. It had a picture of a stork carrying a baby in a bundle and the message: “Congratulations on your coming event!” Inside it Lady Carrano had written: “Dear Lalla, Please accept this for the baby, with very best wishes, Polly Carrano.” And someone else had added, very large and shaky: “+ Katie Maureen Carrano.” Also in the envelope were ten fifty-dollar notes and five ten-cent pieces.

    “I can’t!” she gasped.

    “Yeah, ya can. It’s for the bub. Don’t argue. –I’da made it five thousand, if ya wanna know, but she said you’da died of the embarrassment,” he said on a glum note.

    “Um, yes!” gasped Lalla, not really knowing what she was saying. “It—it’s very kind of her—and of your little girl, too!”

    “That is her own cash,” he said with a little smile. “Out of her moneybox. ’Course, the temptation is to spoil them rotten, ’specially since I was over fifty when the twins were born, but we do make it a policy not to give them more pocket money than the local kids get.”

    Lalla nodded hard. She knew that the twin boys were at school, they’d be six, now, going on seven, and the little girl was two years younger. Printing already! She must be very bright—but then, with two very intelligent parents that wasn’t surprising, was it?

    “Wouldn’t like to tell me who the father is, wouldja?” added Sir Jake out of the blue.

    “No,” said Lalla very, very faintly.

    “Look—!” he said loudly. He broke off, and took a deep breath. “Like I say, it’s none of my business, but does he know?”

    “Whuh-who?” quavered Lalla.

    “Peter Bloody Pommy Up-Himself SALE, that’s WHO!” he shouted.

    “It—it needn’t necessarily be his,” said Lalla in a wavering voice.

    “Look, Inoue Takagaki saw ya with him in Canberra, and the pair of us can count!”

    “Yes. It was an accident,” said Lalla very, very faintly. “Um, actually I can’t count. So it was all my fault. So I haven’t told him. And we were never engaged: he just made that up to annoy the British High Commissioner’s wife.”

    Sir Jake stared at her in a baffled way. Lalla had always thought of him as a very handsome man without really noticing his Maori heritage, except to register that he looked a bit like that handsome Maori politician who was often in the news. Whether the politician was only part Maori she didn’t know, but Sir Jake obviously was: he had grey eyes, not brown, and his nose was very straight but not a Polynesian nose at all. Now, as his nostrils flared, the scowl deepened, and the wide mouth turned down lugubriously, she had a sudden frightening vision of that dark face, with the addition of indigo tattoos, peering out from the dense, dark green bush. New Zealand must have been a terrifying place when the first Europeans arrived, and why on earth they’d imagined it was fit for settlement, goodness only knew!

    “He could afford to look after you and the kid properly,” he said at last.

    “No,” said Lalla in a strangled voice. “It was an accident, and it wasn’t his fault. It wouldn’t be fair.”

    He ran his hand through his curls. “All right, it’s your business. But listen. If you ever decide you really need help—I mean, no-one can tell what might happen in the future—you come to me, see? And I’ll help you get hold of him.”

    Lalla couldn’t imagine any sort of scenario where she would need that sort of help. After all, she wasn’t unique, loads of women were solo mums these days. But she didn’t like to contradict Sir Jake. She promised she would, thanked him politely, and was allowed to escape.

    In her wake Jake Carrano thrust his hand through his curls again and said sourly to himself: “Okay, Polly and Inoue were right, bugger them: I made a flaming balls-up of that. But at least I tried. And she took the money, one small mercy.” He picked up the phone, stabbed at buttons and when someone answered said without preamble: “All right, you were right, the engagement to fucking Sale was never a goer and she did say it wouldn’t be fair to him to wish the kid on him.”

    “Exactly,” replied Mr Takagaki imperturbably.

    “Get in here, Inoue!” he shouted.

    Inoue Takagaki came in looking sedate. His employer and old friend glared at him.

    “I have told you everything, Jake,” he said mildly.

    “Yeah. She won’t admit in words of one syllable it’s his, but it’s bloody clear it is. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to her that maybe the man has a right to know he’s got a kid on the way!”

    Inoue just looked at him.

    “All right, the bloke’s a supercilious, holier-than-thou, poker-faced Pommy SHIT!” he shouted. “And DON’T tell me ya never said so!”

    “I never said so because I do not have the required grasp of the vernacular,” his old friend and sparring-partner replied primly. “But you’re right—that is, he may not be that, but he most certainly gives that impression: to such an extent that it would not occur to any modest, unassuming young woman from a humble background—”

    “Yes. Will ya shut up?” he groaned.

    Mr Takagaki shut up.

    “Don’t look like that,” said Jake at last. “I’ll do my best to keep an eye on her, but if she chucks in the job, it may not be easy.”

    “I think you had better tell Polly that, rather than me, Jake.”

    “Yeah. Look, just tell me this: did it occur to you— Scrub that. Whilst admitting that Sale, depending on one’s criteria, not to say ethical standards, might be said to have a right to know he had a kid on the way, did you get the impression that he might actually want it? Being as how,” he added nastily, “you’re not one of these modest young women from humble tra-la-la.”

    “You started good, Jake,” said Inoue with a twinkle in his dark almond eye. “No, I’m afraid not.”

    “No,” he said heavily. “Right.”

    There was a short silence. Inoue looked at Jake fixedly.

    “Well, push off,” said the billionaire airily, avoiding his eye.

    Those who knew Inoue Takagaki well would now have discerned that he wasn’t too pleased. He replied in cool voice: “My plane leaves at—”

    “I know you’re going back to Tokyo, Inoue, I don’t mean push off without saying goodbye!”

    “Then I shall see you later,” he said sedately, going out.

    Sir Jacob thrust his hand through his curls again. “God! What the fuck more could I have done?”

    As the answer was blindingly obvious, he got up and poured himself a glass of the Scotch his wife had forbidden him to knock back during the day. He drank half of it. “Fuck him, and ’is ruddy Japanese principles! Could of told Sale ’imself, come to that! If he’s too culturally brainwashed to tell ’is boss to go to Hell, ’e can get knotted!” He finished the glass of Scotch. “Well, more ’is boss’s wife, to be strictly accurate,” he noted sourly. “It was that bloody women’s group: brainwashed ’er into believing men aren’t human!”

    He slammed the glass down on the antique kauri sideboard, heedless of its French polish, and returned to his desk, where he looked sourly at the phone for quite some time. It was a dark green one, toning quite well with the room’s décor of dark green combined with lots of well-polished old kauri. And a Goldie of an elderly tattooed Maori chief that Lady Carrano had not failed to remark His Sir Jacobness was growing more and more like every day. Jake had picked it up for a song back in the early 1960s when the art aficionados had considered Goldies representational Victorian rubbish. Sotheby’s could now have got him a small fortune for it.

    “No,” he said finally with a sigh. “I can’t see it. He’d throw money at it, dare say—well, after the flaming DNA test, poor girl—but want it? No.”

    Thus, quite some years down the track, Peter Sale still had no inkling that Peter Christie Macdonald Townsend Holcroft had ever been born. Lalla and Petey were no longer living in the house in One Tree Hill: the predictions of such worldly-wise persons as Sir Jake Carrano had of course proven accurate.

    Tanya Macdonald was the first to desert the ship. Not one of the extremely up-market surgeons who graced the Mater with their fleeting presence in between the extortionate consultations in their up-market consulting rooms in Remuera or Parnell—no. Ron White from down the road from her mum and dad’s place, and in fact from her dad’s bowling club. Mrs White had left him some four years since, the two White kids being now grown up, in order to find herself. Find herself with the aid of a lot of misshapen modelling clay and a Lesbian lover in a done-up two-storeyed house in Ponsonby which featured a small art gallery of the esoteric and extremely expensive variety on the ground floor, the gallery’s two gay owners upstairs, and the Lesbian and her enormous and almost featureless white canvases in the spacious attic. According to Ron White the reason the cow—meaning his ex’s lover—could afford to live there was the well-off banker she’d taken for megabucks in alimony when she’d divorced him for running off with his secretary that he’d been driven to get it from because he wasn’t getting it from her, the cow. Words to that effect.

    Tanya, who was thirty-seven by this time, had known Mr White, who was fifty, ever since she was fifteen and the Whites bought their house down the road, in fact she’d baby-sat the kids when they were little, but Ron was a decent bloke, and as she said, her biological clock was ticking, and no-one else was offering, were they? This wasn’t quite accurate: she was an attractive, vivacious brunette and more than one of those up-market surgeons were offering. Though as the offer didn’t include divorce from their even more up-market wives, Tanya had decided to reject them. Relatively recently, but all her flatmates were much too sympathetic to her point of view to remind her of this. And Ron was keen on starting a second family! He looked besotted enough, certainly, if not precisely eager for a second round of nappies and broken nights, and the other nurses appeared actually to believe this statement, so Lalla didn’t voice any doubts. And Tanya got on very well with her parents, so the idea of living in their street didn’t give her the sort of horrors it would have given Lalla in her place.

    The flatmates threw a huge kitchen evening for her, and for the wedding present they all clubbed together to get a really, really nice Royal Doulton dinner-set to replace the horrible pottery-look thing that Mrs White had chosen and that still graced the house she’d deserted.

    Tanya had had the room which adjoined the now enclosed porch, and Sherrie had had the back room, which was convenient when you came home late, or late with a friend, because of its outer door, but inconvenient because you had to go through the room in front of it and across the porch to get to the bathroom. So she took over Tanya’s room. The back room was taken very quickly by two more nurses from the Mater: Kerry and Gina. They were younger than the others but not all that young, so they fitted in quite well. And of course they had shift work, it wasn’t as if you had to listen to the music from The Lion King every evening.

    Kerry disappeared first: she went to try her luck in Canada. Possibly this decision had something to do with young Dr Andy Graves (four years her junior), who hadn’t been as keen as Kerry had, but nobody said anything. They clubbed together to get her some really smart matching luggage as a going-away present. Her place was taken by Chris, who was a physiotherapist, not a nurse, but she and Gina were old friends with similar tastes.

    Less than a year later, Gina got married. She had been engaged for ages, but everyone was secretly astounded that it had come off: Gina was quite pretty, with short, bubbly black curls, a scattering of freckles, and wide hazel eyes: but even her closest friends had to admit she was awfully bossy, and the entire Mater Misericordiae Hospital (or certainly its entire nursing staff, with the possible exception of Matron) had been under the impression that, what with the shilly-shallying over setting a date and the sudden trip to Europe last year with a couple of old school mates, and the return to his mum’s house after this trip, the good-looking but characterless Rodney was gonna break it off. Added to which, in his absence Gina hadn’t exactly let the grass grow under her feet, singles’-bar-wise and crashing-other-people’s-happy-hours-wise and clubbing-wise. However, the flatmates rallied round and gave her a nice kitchen evening, that unfortunately not all her friends managed to get to because of the short notice, and clubbed together to get her a decent microwave as a wedding present because it was one of the more expensive items on her list that she really needed. The more so as, after Rodney had taken off for Europe she, Chris and another physio, Jenny, had blown large amounts of their savings on a trip to Club Med in Noumea.

    Julie from Cornwall Hospital came to join Chris: she was a just-qualified nurse but Chris had been at school with her sister and assured them she had her head screwed on. Whether she did or not wasn’t apparent, as she only used the place to sleep and wash her uniforms.

    To everyone’s astonishment, six months later Jean upped and announced she was getting married! Not to the dishy but uninterested Dr Grey from Middlemore Hospital who’d been the reason for her transferring to Auckland—no. Not to Dr Matthews, the anaesthetist from Auckland Hospital, no: he’d recently got engaged to a young woman surgeon. Not to nice Garry Rushmore, the X-ray technician that for some time everyone had been hoping she’d settle for—no. Certainly not to Mr Carewe, the orthopaedic surgeon who occasionally graced Middlemore with his presence and who had been, to Lalla’s certain knowledge, the object of Jean’s hopeless passion for years—no, not even though he did sometimes condescend to operate at the Mater, which was a private hospital, for megabucks, and Jean had bumped into him there when she popped in to see a friend on the surgical ward who was thinking of taking the back room if Julia and Chris took off for a working holiday in England. No: Jean, who was now thirty-six, was engaged to Roger Cowdray, who was twenty-nine and a paraplegic. Even Chris, who knew him better than the others did, as she’d given him his physio after the accident, didn’t manage anything but stunned silence when Jean made her announcement. Lalla eventually plucked up her courage, and got her cousin alone and asked her in a trembling voice if she was sure about it. To which Jean replied grimly that she wasn’t getting any younger, and it was all right for Lalla, she had Petey. And Roger needed her. He probably did, yes, and he was a nice guy, but—heck. Lalla didn’t dare to say anything else, except, very faintly, that Petey really loved Jean and neither of them could ever repay her for everything.

    Although it was very sudden and there wasn’t that much time to arrange anything, and Jean and Roger didn’t want a big fuss, the flatmates then rallied round and threw a lovely intimate kitchen evening for her, with a blue theme, since Jean loved blue, and clubbed together to get her something she really needed as a wedding present. Which was quite a difficult choice, as Jean already had loads of kitchen appliances and linen and a lot of furniture, in fact most of the furniture the flatmates were using was hers, apart from the stuff that their landlords had left in. In the end they asked her what she’d like. The answer was a winter-weight duvet with a blue cover and a set of matching bedlinen for the new king-size bed that Roger’s parents were giving them. Even Chris, an ebullient and outspoken personality, was reduced to silence by this one. Though she did say to the others afterwards: “Well, it’s their own business, and there’s loads of good books on paraplegic sex these days, I don’t mean that, but you realise he has to wear a nappy? I mean, the inconvenience—!” However, the duvet and its linen was duly purchased and Jean was thrilled with it all.

    Shortly after Jean’s wedding Chris and Julie, together with Chris’s old friend Marion and Julie’s older sister Bev, took off for England on their working holiday. It sort of drove home the fact that the old group was falling apart, even though Chris hadn’t been with them all that long and hadn’t been part of the original group. Only Sherrie and Lalla were left—and Petey, of course.

    Sherrie Townsend at this point in time had been a ward sister at Auckland Hospital for quite some years. She was a tall, busty woman with masses of curly yellow hair, helped along a bit, and the loud, cheerful personality that seemed somehow to match the hair. She was very, very kind as well as loud and practical, and honestly, the men must have been blind not to have picked her! When you thought of some of the awful girls who did get married! It gradually began to dawn on Lalla, as Fiona and Kath, two youngish but sensible nurses, even if they were smokers, came to join them—or rather to sleep and wash their uniforms, they had even busier social lives than Julie had had, or Gina during Rodney’s trip—that Bob Maddock, the oldest of Tanya’s cousins who owned the house, thought so, too. Oh, dear. He was coming round an awful lot, on very flimsy excuses. And he was a married man, with two daughters in their early twenties—one of them was married—and a son doing a Tech Institute course.

    It went on for over a year. Then Bob and Sherrie fronted up to Lalla. Going to live together, Sherrie had never seen herself as a home-wrecker, but Bob’s marriage had to all intents and purposes been over ages ago. His wife had gone to stay with her sister down in Christchurch last year and hadn’t come back, and she’d just let Bob know there was someone else down there. Which sort of explained all those holidays she’d had down there over the past eight years or so at times when he couldn’t get away. The area where the Maddock boys had grown up was now occupied almost entirely by affluent people of the professional or semi-professional classes, but Bob Maddock was a butcher. It was a very nice shop with an up-market class of clientèle: the sort of shop that provided dainty so-called “racks” of lamb, more like tiny hands, already prepared, and chops with cuffs on that it called cutlets, and organically raised poultry at sixteen times the price of a frozen chook from the supermarket. Bob was very comfortably off, but no conscientious butcher would have deserted his premises the week before Christmas, or just before a long weekend, times both favoured by Mrs Maddock for popping down to Christchurch. Lalla looked at pleasant, smiling Bob Maddock and wondered wildly what was wrong with people? If Mrs Maddock had liked him enough to marry him in the first place… He was very nice, and he couldn’t have changed all that much in the last twenty-odd years! He was, of course, quite a bit older than Sherrie, but even at a casual glance you could see the two of them were made for each other.

    It was a bit awkward with Fiona and Kath not having been with the flat that long, though they had known and worked with Sherrie for a while, but fortunately they were terrifically keen on doing something for Sherrie and Bob, even though they couldn’t get married for a while, so they had a party for them, with several of Bob’s butcher mates present, the younger ones eagerly chatting up Fiona and Kath, not to mention the oblivious Lalla, and clubbed together to give Sherrie something really nice as a going-away present. It wasn’t easy to decide what, especially since Fiona and Kath, never mind the claims that had been made about being sensible, were the sort that chuck their wages away on clothes and shoes and then end up having to put the holiday on the plastic, and Lalla of course had to be careful because although she was on quite a good salary from the Carrano Group there was Petey’s future to think of. And of course Bob was well off, he had everything that opened and shut and though he was selling the done-up, five-bedroomed house and splitting the proceeds with Mrs Maddock there wasn’t much in the way of household stuff that he didn’t have.

    Fiona thought maybe a really smart nightie from one of the nice shops, what about going to Remuera? Only Kath didn’t think so and Lalla went puce with embarrassment at the mere idea. Kath thought a new, modern microwave, only Fiona pointed out that the nice ones were too dear and Lalla went puce and nodded dumbly. What about luggage? was Fiona’s next idea. Sherrie’d have to pack her stuff, and he’d be sure to take her somewhere nice on holiday! Sherrie already had rather a lot of smart luggage and Lalla pointed out dubiously that they’d given Kerry that when she went to Canada: it didn’t seem… appropriate, somehow. Kath reminded them that Sherrie had always wanted a cat; only with that awful bulldog next-door she’d never dared to have one, but now—! And she knew a really nice pet shop! Down Dominion Road, it wasn’t dear at all! Well, its kittens weren’t. It was a lovely idea but it didn’t seem enough, somehow: Lalla and Fiona looked at her dubiously. But at long last the decision was made: two presents, jointly from all of them. The kitten, or a young cat if the shop didn’t have kittens, and a really nice vanity case. A proper one, like the model-girls always had! Whether or not the model-girls did, the up-market shop Fiona favoured certainly had them. So they chose one in a very new colour which the younger girls were sure Sherrie would like. It was sort of… dark pink? With a funny all-over pattern of sort of… not checks. Small lozenges? Anyway, the shop lady and the girls all claimed happily it was the latest thing. Kath did admit it wasn’t a Never-Heard-of-It but it looked just as good and anyway nobody out here could afford them, the shop just had those ones in for show. As Lalla had never heard of them she didn’t argue, though she did reflect that probably Lady Carrano could afford one. If she wanted it. Sherrie, however, was as thrilled with the vanity case as the two girls were and wept tears of joy over the little cat, so that was all right!

    That left Lalla in the front bedroom, Petey recently installed in Jean’s old room next to it, and the two girls rattling around in the two big rooms at the back. So Kath and Fiona recruited Alison and Diane to share the room that Sherrie had had. They were a bit younger, but very sensible.

    In Alison’s case the “sensible” bit turned out to be horribly true: she instituted a strict kitty for all consumables, and appointed herself to get the cash out of Kath, Fiona and Diane and to check every shopping docket brought into the house with a fine-tooth comb, into the bargain checking Lalla’s change after she’d been to the local greengrocer, who didn’t give dockets. Not because she thought Lalla might be cheating them but because she suspected she was spending too much of her own money on vegetables and fruit they all ate. Which was, of course, true. Petey was most intrigued by Alison’s cash book and decided to decorate it with pictures of veges (large scribbles) in coloured crayon. Which didn’t go down too well. Alison also thought the girls were doing too much washing in relation to the amount they paid for electricity and detergent, and began to monitor the number of times they rushed home, dumped their uniforms and undies in the machine, set it going and rushed out again. Which didn’t go down too well.

    Fiona couldn’t take it: she decided to go back to her mum and dad’s while she saved up for an overseas trip, since Scott, the house surgeon she’d been having a thing with for some time, had dumped her for a lady house surgeon and she was fed up with George, the public service clerical officer she’d been having a thing with during the periods Scott was on duty at the hospital, away skiing with his doctor mates, on holiday in Bali with his doctor mates, or spending the weekend at his up-market parents’ place in up-market Titirangi (she being a doctor and he a professor).

    Kath stuck it out alone for nearly two months, trying unavailingly to get a fellow nurse or physio from work to share with her—they all knew Alison—and finally gave up and agreed to share Dave Gregg’s flat. He was only a garage mechanic, not  even self-employed, but he was okay and didn’t spend too much time with his mates down the pub like most of them and she thought she’d give it a go.

    That left Lalla in the front bedroom, Petey in Jean’s old room, and Alison and the meek and virtually characterless Diane in Sherrie’s old room. Alison pointed out they could manage the rent amongst the three of them and she and Diane could turn the back room into a sitting-room! Diane rather liked joining Lalla and Petey in the small front room with the horrible Sixties suite and watching Petey’s choice on the small and rather grainy TV that Jean had very kindly left behind, since Roger had a much bigger, newer one. However, she was too far under Alison’s thumb to raise much of an objection. Lalla could see it wasn’t really fair, because if there were only the three adults she’d have to pay a larger share of the rent without getting anything out of it. However, she didn’t say anything, and in fact when Alison pointed out that it would be much fairer, because she and Diane would have a sitting-room and Lalla and Petey would also have a sitting-room, meekly agreed that that was logical. Though unable to stop herself wondering when Alison would decide that, since Lalla and Petey had two bedrooms and a sitting-room to the girls’ one of each, their share of the rent should be more…

    It was at about this period that Sir Jake Carrano’s kindly mention of his friends at Taupo with the motel that they called something else began to recall itself to Lalla’s mind with ever-increasing frequency.

Next chapter:

https://thelallaeffect.blogspot.com/2024/01/down-to-taupo.html

 

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