Over The Sea To Canberra

Part I. AUSTRALIA, 1994

1

Over The Sea To Canberra

    Mrs Holcroft had decreed that Lalla could stay with Aunty Barb and Uncle Tom. Lalla had just looked at her in despair, not even trying to argue. She’d never even met Aunty Barb and Uncle Tom. Aunty Barb wasn’t even a real aunt, she was a cousin of Mum’s, and Uncle Tom was something high up in the Australian public service: they lived in a huge house with a giant swimming-pool and were reliably reported to have one of those vacuum cleaners that kind of were the whole house, at least you plugged them into the whole house, Lalla wasn’t sure what you called them let alone how they worked, and they were so rich that they owned another house—not a bach, a real house, complete with another giant swimming-pool even though it was on a river or possibly an inlet of the sea, Lalla wasn’t sure, somewhere in New South Wales which Mum had said scornfully was nowhere NEAR Canberra, didn’t Lalla know any geography at all? Lalla hadn’t pointed out that she didn’t, and that as Mum had chosen the subjects she’d done at school this was probably Mum’s fault, not hers, because she knew from long experience that even if Mrs Holcroft listened to her, highly unlikely, she would put forward a cogent and logical argument that would completely rubbish Lalla’s. Even if Lalla hadn’t really been trying to argue in the first place.

    You might have thought that at the age of twenty-four Lalla Holcroft would have got past letting her mother order her around, especially when, as in the case of the trip to Canberra, it was something that related to her work, not even to her private life; but Lalla never had been able to stand up to Mum, and she saw no reason to suppose she ever would. Her way of dealing with Mum was largely not to be there: it was why she’d taken a job down in Wellington when she finished her degree. Unfortunately after a peaceful year working for the Head Office of QuotaCorp in Wellington, at the other end of New Zealand’s North Island from Mum, up in Auckland, QuotaCorp had gone bust very spectacularly. The Carrano Group had bought out the bit of it that Lalla was with and all of the staff in Lalla’s office had been offered nice packages except for Lalla, who had been offered a job with the Carrano Group at their head office. Back in Auckland. Some people would have said to Hell with it, and insisted on being offered a nice package, too, and looked around for another job in Wellington, or Christchurch, or even Dunedin, in fact anywhere out of Mrs Holcroft’s range; but Lalla was the sort of person who always took the line of least resistance. Not to say the sort of person that couldn’t do “enterprise bargaining” or “assertiveness” or any other of the things you apparently had to do in New Zealand these days to stay off the dole queues, so she’d meekly accepted the job in Auckland.

    Mrs Holcroft hadn’t welcomed her back into the parental home, she’d found Lalla a nice flat with Lalla’s cousin Jean Christie. Jean wasn’t married, either, so that would be nice for both of them, wouldn’t it? Lalla had revealed to no-one, least of all Mum, that she’d hated Jean ever since she could walk. She’d meekly gone flatting with her. There was nothing wrong with Jean, really, as Lalla quite recognised, except that she was the sort of person who every Saturday morning gets up at seven-thirty, raises all her bedroom furniture to a level of approximately three feet off the floor—by superhuman means if necessary—and spring-cleans the entire room. Then going on to do the bathroom and the sitting-room on the alternate weeks when it’s her turn. Lalla wasn’t that sort of person at all but she went meekly along with this mad weekly flat spring-cleaning, because Jean, without ever actually saying so, appeared to expect her to. Jean was a nurse, in fact she was a Ward Sister at Middlemore Hospital and had done very well for herself, it was the best orthopaedic hospital in the country, but Lalla didn’t blame this furniture-raising and vacuuming obsession on that, she’d met some of Jean’s nurse colleagues and they were quite normal. Well, they drank sweet New Zealand white wines like fishes and smoked like chimneys, but compared to Jean that was restfully normal.

    An outsider might have suggested that part of Lalla’s trouble was that Mrs Holcroft was only just twenty-one years her daughter’s elder: a very smart, brisk, slim, strawberry-blonded figure of forty-five. Normally clad in a conservative version of the latest styles for nice ladies: medium heels, every hair in place, just enough jewellery, make-up and nails not overdone but not too restrained... Lalla, however, knew in her heart of hearts that their relative closeness in age had nothing to do with it: Mum would have been like that if there’d been sixty years between them. She just was like that. And she, Lalla, was a disappointment to her in every way. True, Mrs Holcroft had never said that Lalla was a disappointment to her, but then she didn’t need to: Lalla had never got married, in fact she had never even been engaged, in fact to Mrs Holcroft’s knowledge she had never even had a boyfriend.

    Also, to name but one, Lalla had tried piano lessons and failed miserably, while Mrs Holcroft, by contrast, was an exceedingly competent amateur pianist and, being in some sort a product of the Sixties, also an extremely competent guitarist. From the old newsreels of the Sixties that Lalla had seen she had decided that her mother must have been a pill-box and Chanel-suit sort of Sixties person, there was no way she could have been a beads, long hair and jeans one. Lalla was rather muddled as to what constituted the Sixties ethos and what the Seventies but then, so was the rest of New Zealand and, indeed, the rest of contemporary Western civilisation, so it hardly mattered. Of course Mrs Holcroft had the correct number of snapshots dating from the period, but with the best will in the world you couldn’t fairly deduce anything from blurred snaps of the family on the back lawn in a heat wave in bathing-suits with the sprinkler on, their dad’s new car with a blurred elbow that might be their dad beside it, the family at the beach in bathing-suits and sunhats, a group of friends and family down at the Franz Josef on holiday squinting against the glare coming off the ice, Aunty Pauline’s complete record on coloured slides of her trip to Honolulu (mid-Seventies: bathing-suits and sunhats and lots of waves), and glassy smiles dead straight into the camera above the apricot satin bridesmaids’ frocks. So as Lalla was an extremely fair-minded person she hadn’t allowed herself to be influenced by these primary sources. One way or the other.

    Lalla’s subject for her degree, as may perhaps now be apparent, had been history, against which Mrs Holcroft had fought unremittingly from the moment Lalla had signed on for History I. That had been back in the days of Professor Maurice Black’s reign at the History Department and Lalla had stuck with it partly because, like ninety-nine point nine repeating percent of his female students, she had fallen madly in love with him at first sight, partly because Maurice Black was the only academic amongst those who taught Lalla, and for all she knew in the entire university, with a solid research record behind him, partly because he was an inspiring teacher, and partly because she hated all her other subjects even more than she hated history. Especially the law subjects which Mum had made her take so that she’d at least end up with a combined B.A., LL.B. that might do her some good. Lalla had sailed through law, it was easy, all you had to do was remember where to look stuff up and learn stuff off by heart, not much different from school; but she hadn’t distinguished herself at history. Well, she had distinguished herself once in front of a very crowded History III class by bursting into tears when Professor Black handed her back a paper with “Piffle!” scrawled on it. But it was doubtful if anyone noticed: everyone except the two class brains had been too busy going red over their own awful marks and hoping their neighbours weren’t looking over their shoulders at them.

    Lalla’s combined degrees had apparently qualified her to go and do legal research for QuotaCorp, so that was what she had done. Needless to say it was the first job offered to her. Even though she had had several other interviews lined up for several other jobs which might have been more interesting, Lalla had taken it. Legal research hadn’t turned out to be too bad, it was mostly company law but as QuotaCorp was involved in the “offshore” transactions which were to lead to its downfall—nothing to do with oil and gas wells sited physically offshore, which it had taken Lalla a while to realise—as, then, QuotaCorp was involved in these, Lalla had had to get into international law, and she had really quite enjoyed that. And it was for this expertise that the Carrano Group had hired her. –Some might have said, snapped her up, and in fact several of Lalla’s erstwhile colleagues had done so, but as even Lalla had perceived that they were dead jealous of her being offered a job at what was now, with all the crashes of the Eighties and post-Eighties, by far the biggest corporate entity in the country, she had believed they were merely getting at her and hadn’t argued with the Carrano Group for higher pay, better fringe benefits, a company car, a company parking-slot, longer holidays, a mobile phone, or indeed, anything at all. The exec who’d interviewed her had found it very restful, really. And as Sir Jake Carrano in person had told him to hire her, he did. Without letting on to Lalla that the Word had come down from the Top, of course.

    Sir Jake Carrano insisted that every so often his more valuable staff members be offered a few little perks such as unnecessary junkets to conferences in Canberra to keep them happy, so this was what Lalla was due to go on. It called itself an International Conference on the Law of the Sea, but when Lalla looked at the programme she could see perfectly well it wasn’t international at all: all the keynote speakers were Aussie academics except for one person with a Japanese name but American degrees, and the whole thing was organised by an Aussie professional association in combination with an Aussie university anyway; but even Lalla was not so green as to turn down a free trip to Canberra for that sort of reason. Even if it did mean staying with Aunty Barb and Uncle Tom instead of at one of the nice hotels the conference brochure suggested.

    Lalla travelled Business Class to Canberra. Well, to Sydney and then on to Canberra: there didn’t seem to be any direct flights between New Zealand’s largest city and the federal capital of its big neighbour. Lalla was going Business Class because Sir Jake habitually supplied Business Class tickets for lower and middle management on the assumption that they would trade them in for Tourist Class tickets and pocket the immense difference, thus creating a nice little perk for themselves while at the same time believing they were putting a mild one over on their employer. And also because the Carrano Group, with interests in Canada, South America, and various parts of Southeast Asia and Melanesia containing tracts of uncut rainforest, and offices in Tokyo and London to name but two, flew so much anyway that it had more Frequent Flyer points than it knew what to do with. And also because it was a bigger sum to write off against the relevant sort of tax in your corporate accounts and—well, that sort of reason. Lalla wasn’t actually a manager, but she was on the bottom rung of the lower management salary scale, so she qualified.

    There was no-one next to Lalla in Business Class. Some people of course would have found themselves next to a burly, handsome, sophisticated man with lots of silvering dark curls and the sort of yummy shirt that managed to look both smart and soft at the same time and a wonderfully subtle tie and that sort of lovely scent that you noticed when you accidentally got into the lift before you realised that the man in it was Sir Jake himself and now you’d have to ride all the way down with him, yikes, and What If He Spoke To You? And of course this fabulous man would turn out to be unattached and fall madly in love with—well, with some people. And whisk some people off to a mad passionate affair in Honolulu or Bali, or the Hong Kong Hilton—or just a nice hotel in Sydney, would do. But naturally this sort of thing didn’t happen to Lalla Holcroft on aeroplanes.

    Lalla’s erstwhile crush on Professor Black had, obviously, more or less metamorphosed itself into a milder sort of crush—after all, she was no longer eighteen—on Sir Jake Carrano, but perhaps fortunately he was very happily married to a woman twenty years his junior. And in any case had too much sense to get involved with junior employees in his own company, even if—though Lalla might not have believed it—on those odd occasions in the lift he had noticed her, and he did know who she was, and even thought she looked a bit like his own wife: same sort of oval face, nice gentle mouth. Not as pretty, though. As Lady Carrano was quite spectacularly pretty, this was not precisely to damn Lalla with faint praise. Sir Jake had also noticed that under the Goddawful baggy blouses she habitually wore, his Miss Holcroft had a pair of really good ones, also not unlike his wife’s; and that the hair, if she’d only brush it or wash it, could be really pretty. Almost as long as his wife’s and probably—though without the washing, not to say a decent conditioner, you couldn’t tell—probably about the same shiny, sun-streaked brown. Nice little curly wisps round the ears, too. Being, after all, a mere man, Sir Jake was happily unaware that these wisps were the bane of Lalla’s existence: Mrs Holcroft didn’t have any wisps at all.

    Unlike Lady Carrano, Lalla Holcroft wore her brownish hair tightly plaited and doubled under (with more wisps sticking out of the plait). She would not have been capable of styling her hair the way Lady Carrano did, and, more than that: she had no faith that it would have any effect on the opposite sex if she did. Lalla of course had not met her employer’s wife: she had merely glimpsed her briefly on such occasions as leaving presentations to persons who had been with the Group for years, or enormous so-called cocktail parties which all persons of management level were expected to attend, or giant Christmas parties which the whole Building was expected to attend and for which the Group normally hired a giant ballroom at the largest and shiniest of the Auckland hotels. Lady Carrano’s hair was sometimes loose and flowing, and very, very shiny, sometimes in an ultra-smart (and very shiny) big bun under a smart (yikes) little silk pill-box. With either giant black pearl earrings, which Lalla didn’t recognise as such, or giant diamond drops which even Lalla recognised: the whole Group knew that they were the ones He had smuggled (how, unspecified) out of South Africa. Lady Carrano, in short, was a very feminine lady. Lalla Holcroft wasn’t—or she believed she wasn’t, which for all practical purposes most certainly amounted to the same thing. The fact that her knees went wobbly when she was alone in the lift with the very masculine Sir Jake had never suggested to her that perhaps she might be.

    Since Air New Zealand Business Class did not feature a neighbouring handsome businessman in a cloud of Saint Laurent Pour Homme—or even a bored-looking, fat businessman like those in the seats surrounding her—by the time they were halfway over the Tasman even Lalla had dared to haul out her briefcase from under her feet and put it on the seat next to her. Though admittedly in the expectation that a superbly-groomed air hostess would wiggle up to her and, without meeting her eye, order her to remove it. As this didn’t actually happen until they were about to land at Kingsford Smith, Lalla felt she could chalk one up to herself.

    Across the aisle from Lalla there wasn’t even a fat businessman, there was a cross-looking little boy with a brownish skin and rather slanted eyes; possibly he was Malaysian or something, but he had a strong American accent and he kept ringing for the hostesses and ordering Cokes, the whole way across. Lalla didn’t try to talk to him: he neither looked nor sounded like any of the little boys in the Holcroft extended family. Or any of its neighbours. Quite apart from the lordly manner and the accent, he was wearing a suit. Yikes.

    Lalla herself wasn’t wearing a suit, though she had one: it was in her case, probably now at forty degrees below zero in the bowels of the plane. Lalla was wearing old, soft jeans and a very old, soft tee-shirt. With a cardy in her briefcase in case the plane was freezing, which they often were, and you couldn’t see where the freezing draught was coming from and twist the knob to make it go away. Lalla had travelled overseas (or, more trendily, “offshore”) before, and she now knew that no matter what she wore, her clothes would end up crushed and droopy, her hair would always go wispy, her lipstick would always get eaten off, and the air hostesses would always ignore her. If they absolutely had to notice her, like that awful time she’d tipped her tray of plastic lunch onto the man next to her as it was being handed to her (a grandfather, he’d already told her all about his grandchildren)—if, then, something as drastic as that happened and forced them to notice her, they merely sneered. Sort of a competent sneer, not in the least a bothered or an interested sneer. Yikes.

    Curiously, though Lalla did not in the least want to be like any of these hostesses, they still made her feel inferior. Even though she could see they were all brainless and that not only did their job entail being endlessly servile to all the men on board, even drunken rugby teams, they actually enjoyed it. Mrs Holcroft had once made her go to Assertiveness Training and Women’s Group, and even though Lalla had never been quite sure which she was at—they were on alternate Tuesdays, and held at the same place and featured almost exactly the same women—she now was capable of realising it must be her cultural brainwashing that was making her feel inferior to these hostesses. Realising this didn’t help in the least. Not in the least. So really, all those Tuesday evenings had been a complete waste of time and she might just as well have been home soaking up a different sort of cultural brainwashing. Re-runs of Minder, mostly. Lalla still regretted those re-runs.

    Lalla wouldn’t have half minded a drink: the men in Business Class were sopping the stuff up like anything, and the little boy had had so many Cokes that he’d had to go to the toilet five times by her count. But she was under no illusion that with the tired jeans, the droopy tee-shirt and the wispy hair—not doubled under today, but in a plait over her shoulder, much more comfortable for travel—she would ever work up the nerve to ring for a hostess and ask. True, periodically one of them wheeled a laden, rattling trolley past her. Also true, whenever this happened the trolley never paused by Lalla’s seat and Lalla never worked up the guts to yell: “OY! Stop! I wanna drink!”

    Lalla lay back in her seat, not daring to let it back too far: there was a businessman behind her and what if she knocked his drink over or something with her seat? –This regardless of the fact that the businessman in front of her had set his seat back as far as it could go when Lalla was in the middle of her lunch and had missed squashing her strange, pale brown, tasteless meat by a whisker. She closed her eyes and imagined a scenario where not only would she be wearing a fabulously smart black suit that did not crease with a smart white silk blouse that did not crease, and exquisite shoes like the ones that Lady Carrano had had on the day Lalla had seen her in the pill-box and the smuggled diamond drops, but also she would order not just a malt whisky, neat, triple, but a cigar, and smoke it. Lalla had no real wish to smoke a cigar: their smell made her feel sick and she was not a smoker, but it was a nice fantasy. It would certainly be mud in the eye for the blimming hostesses. And what was more—since she was off in the realms of fantasy anyway—she would not have a single wisp out of place! Hah!

    Lalla did drink whisky, when she could work up the guts to ask for it, which was very seldom indeed. Usually she fell back on a nice sweet sherry, which she hated, because that was what the other ladies were having. Or a nice sweet New Zealand white wine, because that was what Jean’s friends the nurses were having, or a gin and tonic because all the ladies from the Group had that when they went to the pub together on Fridays for half an hour after work, and on the very rare occasions when they’d remembered to ask Lalla along she’d thought she’d better conform or she’d never get asked again. Not that she really wanted to go: she couldn’t talk to them, they were all in Accounts or the Pool, except for the handful of really smartly dressed ones that were PAs, and it was all highly reminiscent of her Seventh Form year at School, when all the girls except her had sat round and talked breathlessly about make-up, hair, clothes, nails and boys. More or less in that order. Though sometimes the nails had taken precedence. Lalla liked these ladies from the Group and was humbly grateful to them for sometimes being included in their “happy hour”, but that didn’t mean she could talk to them. Not even on the topics of microwave ovens and mortgages, which sometimes almost ousted the hair and the nails. And this not only because Lalla possessed neither a microwave nor a mortgage.

    Lalla drank whisky because during that year in Wellington with QuotaCorp she’d had a lover who’d taught her to drink it. Not that she’d needed much teaching: she had a natural affinity for this unfeminine tipple. He had been a much older man and though Lalla had recognised at the time that she was doing it slightly because of her Maurice Black thing and slightly because no-one else had asked her, nevertheless she had ended up very much in love with him, and it was all pretty painful when he’d decided he couldn’t really leave his wife of thirty years and that the age gap was too big, and it wouldn’t be fair to Lalla. He actually used those words, but Lalla hadn’t shouted loudly that it wasn’t fair to her anyway, what the fuck was he on about, she’d just said: “All right, then. We’d better stop. You can go home now.” And let him go. And not opened any of the three letters he’d subsequently sent her.

    Her mother was not aware of either the whisky or the lover, as Lalla had taken pains to conceal the facts of both from her. Possibly Mrs Holcroft might have been relieved to know that her unmarried daughter had had even such an unsuccessful affaire with a man as this, but this point had never dawned on Lalla. It was not simply that she was incapable of conceiving of Mrs Holcroft as a human being like herself: it was more that she was incapable of conceiving of Mrs Holcroft as a non-judgemental human being.

    There was, however, some excuse for her. The episode of the hair was pretty typical—though in Lalla’s opinion, all were typical. She had been caught—they had both felt it to be “caught”—combing out her just-washed hair very slowly before the bathroom mirror. Mrs Holcroft had said nastily: “What is this, budding narcissism?” And Lalla had been duly crushed, to the point of not even thinking of pointing out—though it occurred to her later—that her mother habitually spent a full half-hour in front of the mirror every morning before work, and untold hours at the hairdresser getting that well-disciplined strawberry-blonde just-off-severe cut just right. Part of Lalla’s guilt had been due to the fact that she had felt it to be a self-indulgent exercise as she admired the sheen of her hair under the forty-watt bathroom light-bulb and felt the silkiness of it as she combed it. There was no-one in Lalla’s life to tell her that she had as much right as the next woman to a helping of narcissism. Even the Women’s Group hadn’t got that one over. And even if they had, it would have been too late: Lalla would have grasped it intellectually, all right: she was far from stupid. But she wouldn’t have been able to make the concept make any contact with her feelings. She did, however, realise that we all carry, more or less, our burden of cultural brainwashing with us through life. And she certainly spent very little time brooding on her own. What she mostly did was shove the whole notion to the back of her mind and ignore it. It was just a bit harder to do when she was within Mum’s orbit.

    Kingsford Smith was duly reached—what with tail-winds and so on they seemed to have made up the half-hour they’d spent sitting on the tarmac at Auckland doing nothing, or perhaps the pilot was lying when he told them the time, Sydney-time—one or the other—and the Aussie Agriculture authorities in their sexy shorts, presumably their summer uniform, though Lalla had never seen them in any other guise, came aboard and sprayed the humans on the plane with deadly noxious fumes regardless of the fact that New Zealand’s quarantine regulations were even more rigorous than theirs and that there were even fewer contagious animals and plant diseases over there, and certainly no fruit flies or foot-and-mouth; and finally everyone was allowed to queue for hours to get off and queue for hours for their bags and queue for hours to get to the man that looked blankly at the little card you’d sweated blood over and then said indifferently: “Holiday, is it?” Even though you’d filled in the slot which said “Other”, there being no slot which said “Conference.”

    “No. Conference.”

    “Aw, yeah?” he said indifferently. “Business, then.”

    “Yes,” said Lalla limply. It had only taken her half an hour’s agonised indecision to get to the point of making up her mind that putting a tick or cross, whichever it was you were supposed to, against “Business” would not be a strictly honest declaration of her purpose in visiting his country.

    She waited for him to tell her that she’d put a tick instead of a cross, or that she had to tick (or cross) the “Business” slot, but he waved her on.

    Then, since the Carrano Group had cannily allowed her two hours for the change at Sydney, she just about had time to run madly through the huge echoing halls of the International Terminal with her briefcase and suitcase, get hopelessly lost, ask three desks the way, and finally scramble into the right Domestic Terminal and fall onto her Canberra connection. Business Class again. Well, up at the front, anyway. The bit that falls off when it fails to take off at the far end of the runway!

    What with all the running and this brilliant thought about the bit that falls off, Lalla was so stimulated that she smiled at the grey-haired woman next to her and said: “Hullo.”

    This was a mistake, of course: the woman was a grandmother (though she must have been an up-market sort of grandmother to be travelling Business Class—could you have executive grandmothers? wondered Lalla madly), and she told her about her grandchildren all the way to Canberra.

    At Canberra Lalla got frightfully muddled and looked round for the Customs and Agriculture inspections but of course there weren’t any, only Baggage—hollow groan—Claim. Fortunately it wasn’t that big an airport and you only had to walk down two miles of echoing carpeted tunnel and get hopelessly lost and go through an electronic gateway and get hopelessly lost again before you found it. And there was Mrs Whatever-Her-Name-Was, the grandmother, right beside it, all bright and perky and already with two bags: how did they DO it?

    “Look, dear!” she said brightly as Lalla came up, panting. “That’s you, isn’t it?”

    Lalla looked blankly at a huge hiking kit and a giant brown-paper-wrapped unidentified flying object of the sort she’d always believed you weren’t even allowed to have as luggage, going slowly round the otherwise empty baggage-claim thingy.

    “No, dear: over there: Holcroft!” she said brightly. “That’s you, isn’t it?” –Naturally this grandmother had got Lalla’s name out of her. Possibly she had imparted hers in return but if so Lalla had missed it.

    “Um—what?” she fumbled.

    “Over there, dear!”

    Behind a sort of semi-natural barrier consisting of a potted palm and the corner of a staircase leading nowhere or possibly to what Lalla’s dad called a sky-hook—he might have had a sense of humour if Mrs Holcroft hadn’t kept him permanently squashed—there was a clutch of persons bearing banners. With strange devices: quite. Most of them, on second thoughts, looked like official drivers and Lalla reminded herself silently that they were in Paul Keating country now. The only surprising thing, in fact, was that none of them was bearing a banner which said—

    “Sorry, what?” —Paul Keating for King.

    “Over there, dear!”

    “Oh.” Sure enough, one banner, well, piece of bent cardboard, said “Holcroft.”

    “Um, that can’t be me.”

    “Isn’t that how you spell your name, dear?”

    “Yes,” admitted Lalla, looking out of the corner of her eye at the immense pile of higgledy-piggledy baggage which had suddenly materialised on the baggage-claim thingy.

    “Didn’t you say your uncle was expecting you, dear?”

    “Yeah—um, that can’t be him. I mean, I’ve never met him, but he’s, um, quite old,” said Lalla weakly, looking from the banner-bearer’s youthful person and zoot-suit to the grandmother’s well-sprayed silver curls.

    “Oh, it won’t be him, dear! He’ll have sent a car for you!” –The grandmother had got out of Lalla not only the name and the occupation but the actual address, Lalla having to produce her address book from the side pocket of her handbag in order to achieve this. The suburb was something unpronounceable and Australian but apparently it was awfully near to where Paul Keating lived. Or possibly the Governor-General, if that wasn’t the same thing these days.

    “Oh—um—yeah!” gasped Lalla, making a dive for her bag. Yikes, it wasn’t hers after all! Reddening, she shoved it back onto the baggage-claim thingy.

    “I’ll go and speak to him, dear: you keep an eye out for your bags.” She bustled off.

    Lalla looked numbly at the bags going slowly round and round and round, wondering why the grandmother was so keen: did she expect a ride, or an introduction to Aunty Barb and Uncle Tom, or possibly a sight of Paul Keating’s back yard over her relatives’ back fence, or— Goodness knew what.

    “Here we are, dear!” she beamed.

    “Miss Holcroft, is it?” said the young man in the zoot-suit. He looked very like the yuppies from the Group that mostly worked on the Ninth or the Eleventh Floors and even though these floors were nowhere near the real seat of power, Sir Jake’s own office, Lalla felt immensely inferior when in the fleeting company of these smart young men in the lifts or the lobby of the Carrano Building. Surely Uncle Tom wouldn’t have sent a zoot-suit to meet her insignificant self?

    “Um, yes,” she said, forgetting, or rather overlooking, a vow taken not long ago to be “Ms” from now on, because it was ridiculous that at twenty-four she couldn’t be assertive to that extent! Not that she was firmly convinced of the rightness of that usage, either. “Um, yes, I am, only are you sure it’s me you want?”

    “Yeah: Holcroft. That’s right,” he said cheerfully. Though at the same time Lalla felt he was giving her an odd look. She couldn’t define it, but it was odd. Well, probably it was the tee-shirt. Or the jeans, or the wisps.

    “Oh,” she said limply. “Good. Um—I’ve only got one bag.”

    They waited the usual eternity for Lalla’s bag, which as usual was The Very Last. By this time Lalla was so overcome with horror at the realisation that she’d have to drive all the way to Aunty Barb’s and Uncle Tom’s (wherever it was) with a zoot-suited yuppie that she was past speech. But it didn’t matter, the grandmother had taken over: she was sure Lalla wouldn’t mind—Canberra was so small, really, Lalla would be surprised, especially after Sydney! Lalla didn’t say she’d only ever seen Sydney’s airport, she didn’t dare. At least it was only a lift the woman seemed to want, not a sight of the Keating gold-plated, ermine-lined dustbin.

    The yuppie wasn’t even driving himself: he had an actual chauffeur in an actual peaked cap and mirror sunglasses, and Lalla was so overcome she just sank speechlessly into the back seat without even wondering if this was what the soapies called “a stretch limo” and not even caring if at the back of the car the yuppie was kidnapping her suitcase.

    The drive into the city was very pretty but odd: not at all what Lalla had expected, more sort of English—not that she’d ever been to England—but not like Adelaide, where she’d been to two conferences, and which was sort of historic Victorian in the middle of the city but horrendously yellow and ugly in the suburbs, at least those of them near the airport. Miles before she’d expected it they were in the city. It was all hideously new and shiny but the buildings were so tall it must be the genuine Downtown. Yikes, thought Lalla, is this all there is? Two minutes later they were dropping the grandmother off at her hotel. It called itself The Lakeside though you couldn’t actually see a lake from its front door. Then they went over a low bridge and Lalla was transfixed by the prettiness of the lake. Not struck dumb by its beauty, for it was not beautiful. There was nothing you could put your finger on: but it was most definitely pretty and most definitely not beautiful, in fact it was so pretty it verged on the saccharine.

    The yuppie said something obscure and she said “What?” and after the usual sort of confusion discovered he’d been saying the name of the lake, it had a man’s name. Lalla wasn’t too sure if it was a double-barrelled surname or a surname plus a Christian name but it sounded very silly, whichever it was. “Windermere” was all right for a lake, and if you were Scotch “Loch Ness;” and “Waikaremoana” was all right at home; but naming a lake after a man? The driver then explained that it was an artificial lake but Lalla was past taking much of that in. They passed some large, shiny and hideous modern buildings, possibly office buildings, and turned off somewhere and there were quite a lot of trees but very, very wide roads and the buildings—still office buildings—were set right back in large grounds, looking as if they were all ignoring their neighbours; and then they drew up in front of a lowish sort of clutch of buildings that sort of looked like a flash holiday resort, not a house, and the yuppie said: “Just a tick, gotta get ’is Lordship’s messages,” with the I’s all very long like the Aussies did, and shot inside. Lalla waited limply.

    “Nearly there!” he said, getting back in with a handful of envelopes. –It didn’t look like a post-office, though. It was all very odd. “Hates hotels,” he said informatively as they shot down another tree-lined street.

    “Does he?” said Lalla weakly. “I suppose he doesn’t need to stay in them much.”

    He laughed and said: “He can afford not to!”

    Lalla murmured: “Mm,” thinking of the house that was a vacuum-cleaner.

    Then the car drew up in front of a set of huge fancy wrought-iron gates in a big white-painted concrete wall and Lalla realised that this was It and closed her eyes, it was even worse than she’d imagined from the way Mum and Aunty Jan had gone on about it: it was a flaming palace! All white-painted concrete. Stucco? She thought so: not real stucco, of course, but what you had to pretend you thought was or people looked at you as if you’d gone mad. Like remembering not to call ladies who spelled their name E,V,E,L,Y,N “Eve-lyn”, like Evelyn Waugh, but “Ever-lyn.” Well, like not calling Evelyn Waugh “Eve-lyn”, either, actually.

    “Look, wait in there, will ya, I’ll see if he’s free,” said the yuppie, ushering Lalla into an immense front hall or maybe you would have had to call it a lobby, and waving towards a room on the right.

    Limply Lalla crossed the parquet and went into the room on the right.

    It was dreadful, it was a flaming palace, all right! Well, objectively it was dreadful, she realised groggily: rich but tasteless, sort of bright and light and modern and hideous, with lots of giant bulgy sofas and chairs swathed in white with bows right round their legs over the material, and over the windows enormous great bunches of blue and yellow shiny material sort of, well, bunched up, and giant metal Thingies that must be sculptures, horrible, and a white piano, it must be a baby grand though to Lalla’s knowledge she’d never laid eyes on one before so she couldn’t have said how she knew, and mirrors everywhere, and huge glass vases on glass tables holding enormous spikes of bird-of-paradise flowers—but no leaves, it must be the latest In Thing. Well, it must all be the latest In Thing, and none of it looked as if a human being could possibly live in it! Yikes.

    Then a Pommy male voice said: “Miss Holcroft, is it?” and Lalla jumped a foot and a man came in from another room that she hadn’t realised was there. He only had a sort of dressing-gown on but nevertheless he looked expensive and Lalla’s heart sank right down into her sneakers. He was not very tall, perhaps five-foot-ten in the old measurements which Mrs Holcroft and perforce the rest of her family still used, and brown-haired and sort of cold-looking, really, and not at all how she’d imagined Uncle Tom. For one thing he was slim. And she was almost sure Uncle Tom wasn’t a Pom: to have acquired an accent like that he must have gone to that posh Aussie boy’s school that they sent Prince Charles to for a year. Yikes.

    “Yes—um—it’s Lalla!” she gasped, knowing she should address him politely as “Uncle Tom” but quite unable to.

    “Lalla?” he said, smiling.

    Lalla was mesmerised: at first he didn’t strike you as particularly good-looking, in fact if anything, as unremarkable: very—very medium: understated or something; but then you noticed the mouth and realised it was perfect. Rather wide, but not full, the top lip deliriously bowed—that didn’t put it well, but it was—and the lower not full, but just full enough. When he smiled you wanted to nibble this lower lip very softly— Help! What was she thinking of, he was her uncle by marriage!

    “That’s an unusual name, isn’t it?” he said. “Or isn’t it, in these parts?”

    Lalla didn’t quite get that, maybe he was English, then? Only wouldn’t Mum or Aunty Jan have mentioned it? Neither of them liked Poms. “Ye— Um, I don’t know!” she gasped. “Mum got it out of an English kids’ book, she never told me but Aunty Jan let it out!”

    “I see.”

    Lalla gulped. “Something about skaters,” she said lamely. “I think.”

    “Oh, good Lord!” he said, smiling that smile again. He had very white teeth, the top ones very straight but the lower ones a little crooked, that was comforting, somehow. “My sister had that!”

    “Um, did she?” said Lalla very limply, even though she was the sort of person who had to read every book in the house and certainly had read all of her brothers’ books. “I suppose she would have: it’s the same generation, isn’t it?”

    “Er—undoubtedly.”

    Now what had she said? Blimming heck, if he was Aunty Barb’s husband he was Mum’s generation, what was wrong with that? Lalla swallowed and looked at him uneasily.

    “Well, sit down; I suppose we’d better talk about it,” he said.

    Lalla sat down numbly, wondering what there was to talk about. Maybe they didn’t want to put her up after all? Given that every single thing in the room barring him and her and her clothes was less than three months old, that was understandable. But on the phone Aunty Barb had said they’d love to have her. Well, correction: she had reportedly said they’d love to have her, of course Lalla hadn’t been allowed to talk to her in person. She wasn’t sure if this was because she was considered too young to make her own arrangements for accommodation with relatives she’d never met, or because she’d never met Aunty Barb, or because Mum didn’t want to waste the cost of a trans-Tasman call on letting her, Lalla, speak. All three, probably.

    There was a somewhat sticky silence. Lalla looked at him with an expression of humble expectancy—though not of very much. Inwardly hoping that she wouldn’t have to traipse round Canberra looking for a hotel, it was an awfully hot day. Though the palace was cool, it must be air conditioned.

    Finally he said: “You’re not what I expected.”

    Lalla didn’t know what she was supposed to say to that. Finally she said: “What did you expect?”

    “Oh…” He shrugged. He was awfully elegant, thought Lalla glumly, even in that sort of dressing-g— Ooh, it wasn’t a dressing-gown at all, it was a terry-claath robe! She had only ever heard the expression on the soapies, which was why she said it in her head in strong American.

    “Um, sorry, what?” she said, jumping.

    “I said,” he said with a frown, “that I expected something—er—lipsticked and hair-sprayed, or whatever it is they do nowadays. Gel, is it? And—well, high heels, junk jewellery.” He shrugged again.

    Well, that wasn’t her, that was for sure, but was that good or bad? Lalla couldn’t for the life of her tell. His tone seemed to suggest he didn’t approve of lipstick or gel or etcetera, but then he wasn’t looking at her as if he approved of her, either. Anyway, what did it matter? If they had posh guests coming she could always lurk in her room.

    “Um, I could always find a hotel,” she offered in a squashed voice.

    “No, you’re here, now,” he replied, frowning.

    Lalla looked at him limply. If that meant she could stay, it was about as far from the red carpet as—well, talking of high heels, as her elderly sneakers were from the high-heeled gold sandals with glittery bits on the front that Jean’s friend Noreen often wore. Not when she was on duty at the hospital, of course. More when she was knocking back the sweet white wine.

    “Um, look,” he said, scratching his head. The hair was very thick, a neutral brown, streaked just a little, Lalla thought naturally, with paler bits—Cleo from Accounts had artificial streaks in her hair and they were nothing like these—and a little receded at the temples. Short and extremely neat: very short at the back and over the ears and brushed back on top, Lalla would have said it a was a conservative cut, but come to think of it for Dad’s generation conservative was curling all over your collar like Uncle Geoff’s as you bored the younger generation solid with tales of how you’d marched in protests against the Vietnam War and something to do with rugby tours and almost gone to Woodstock that year you’d almost gone to America. Anyway, it was very neat and just slightly wavy, and although he was a light-skinned man he wasn’t in the least like Paul Newman, whom Lalla had always considered too good-looking, a bit sickening, really. She didn’t know any good-looking brown-haired, fair-skinned men in real life, so there was no-one else she could think of to compare him with. Added to which, he wasn’t really handsome, his face was oval and rather shallow-jawed, though the chin itself was very well shaped, and his nose, though not really big for a man’s nose, was a little too beaky.

    “Look, I don’t know if Shane explained things to you fully?” he said.

    “Um—no-o. Um—oh: the yup—” Lalla broke off with a gasp.

    “The yuppie—quite,” he said in a voice which could only have been described as acid. “Shane is the given name, by the way.”

    Lalla bit her lip. “Mm.”

    “So he didn’t tell you anything?” he said.

    She shook her head mutely. Cripes, what was he supposed to have told her? That Aunty Barb and Uncle Tom were expecting Paul Keating to dinner? That they were expecting the Governor-General? No, silly her: they were expecting the Queen and President Clinton!

    “Well— Damn,” he said as there was a sort of purry ringing noise and Lalla leapt a foot where she sat. “That’ll be— GET THAT!” he suddenly bellowed at the top of his voice, sounding very annoyed indeed. The purry ringing sound ceased abruptly.

    “I’m expecting an overseas call,” he said, getting up and going over to a sort of chest of drawers thing only lower, that Lalla hadn’t registered. Possibly because it was white like the wall behind it and because on top of it stood a gigantic square glass pot with three enormous bird of paradise spikes in it and she’d assumed whatever was under them was there for the purpose of holding them up. He opened a drawer and took out a piece of paper. Saying: “If that’s—” he came towards her, just as the yuppie burst in, panting.

    “’Scuse me, sir: it’s London, they—”

    “Yes,” he said with a horrific scowl. “I’ll take it.”

    The yuppie Shane cowered in his zoot-suit, and Lalla couldn’t blame him. It was a bit like being disapproved of by a combination of the Empire State Building, the Duke of Edinburgh, and Captain Bligh. What in God’s name must he be like when he was in an actual suit instead of a terry-claath robe? And admittedly Aunty Jan was a silly hen, but to say he was “just ordinary, really” was— Well, honestly!

    “Look, read it over, and we’ll discuss it: I won’t be long,” he said, thrusting the sheet of paper at Lalla and walking out. The cowed Shane tottered in his wake.

    Automatically Lalla spread out the sheet and began to read. It was a letter. On letterhead. It started: “Dear Miss Holcroft—” Eh?

    … Oh, God.

    Yikes, in fact.

    He wasn’t Uncle Tom, the palace wasn’t Aunty Barb’s house, and she, Lalla, was most certainly the wrong Miss Holcroft!

    Admittedly it wasn’t a den of white slavers. Well, that was something. But it was sort of almost as bad. Well, almost. He must be MAD! …It was a lot of money, though. Crikey, no wonder he’d expected something lipsticked and hair-gelled, he’d been expecting an actress!

    It was a lot of money, an awful lot of money. And what was more, it was Aussie dollars, they were worth a lot more than ours. And for two weeks’ work? Two weeks during most of which she, Lalla, was supposed to be at a pointless conference that no-one was going to read her report on, and that anyway she could write up a report on in half an hour from the pre-conference hand-outs residing snugly in her briefcase at this moment…

    No: she was mad: the other girl would turn up any minute. And anyway, she wasn’t nearly pretty enough. Let alone capable of… Well, heck!

    He must be mad, all right…

    Whether or not he was mad, Lalla sat there chewing her lip, very, very tempted to do what his letter suggested. And not merely because of the money.

Next chapter:

https://thelallaeffect.blogspot.com/2024/01/nobodys-uncle.html