I DIDN’T KNOW HER NAME but I remember seeing her in Toad Hall, a tiny hole-in-the-wall, hot muffin and caffeine joint on Bowen Street that legendary Wellington restaurateur Jeff Kennedy opened in the ’70s. It was opposite Parliament, where I worked, and down the street from the Reserve Bank, where she worked as a junior accountant. From the privacy of my booth I took note of a beautiful, willowy girl in her early twenties making her friends laugh out loud. She was radiant. She didn’t see me, or if she did she didn’t recognise me. Come to think of it, I had cut small peepholes in my newspaper and all she would have seen would have been newsprint.
It turns out she was a fan of my columns, delighting once to read that we shared the same three favourite books—The Wind in the Willows (Toad Hall was a sign!), Three Men in a Boat and Catch-22. I finally got to meet her at 3 p.m. on the afternoon of 8 October 1992 in the French farmhouse kitchen of Rob and Jenny Fenwick’s Remuera home. When I am completely gaga and can barely remember my own name I will never forget this date—it started the best years of my life.
It could have been six months earlier. Jenny had been insisting for months that I should meet a friend of hers called Averil—I would just adore her. She was gorgeous, funny and clever. To this end she organised a dinner party in her own home and invited us both. I duly flew up from Wellington and knocked on the door at the appointed hour, clutching wine and roses. Jenny let me in ruefully, biting her lip. Single for a year, Averil had met someone the night before. I hardly spoke to the poor woman who came off the subs bench and returned to Wellington wondering what might have been.
Months later Jenny rang me, very excited. Averil had broken up with this guy. If I was coming up to the Auckland launch of Sir Edmund Hillary’s book Sagarmatha she would arrange for Averil to come as well, and we could all meet beforehand at her home.
In the end Jenny was strategically absent and I was on my own when Averil walked into their kitchen and into my heart. Lithe and lovely with a confident physical grace, she wore a natty linen trouser suit with a belt tied like a judoka dan at the waist. (This was years before Hillary Clinton almost singlehandedly destroyed the concept of the trouser suit for women.) I felt at ease with her instantly and if I wasn’t madly in love with her at the beginning of the joke she told, I was at the end …
I forget the precise preamble, but a man in a bar is telling his friend that he’s had one of those dreadful days where his tongue wasn’t working properly and everything he tried to say came out sounding wrong. His mate nods sympathetically. ‘I know how you feel. I was sitting with the wife at the breakfast table this morning and I meant to say, “Could you please pass the marmalade, dear,” and it came out, “You fucking bitch, you have ruined my life!”’
We both started laughing and Averil blew a blob of mucus out of one nostril and had to dash for a paper towel, which reduced us both to hysterics. We rocked up to the book launch in Parnell in good spirits.
Mark Sainsbury of course was both thrilled for me and insanely jealous at the same time—exactly how I would have felt if the roles had been reversed.
‘How is that rash? Is the cream working?’ he asked loudly. ‘Has the VD lab managed to isolate the pathogen yet?’ and ‘I would sue Regaine if I were you. It’s clearly not working!’
At dinner later in a restaurant next door it was Lady Hillary’s turn in the barrel when she asked what we were doing later.
‘Well, unlike some people, June,’ boomed Mark, ‘we’re young with our whole lives ahead of us!’
‘You cheeky bugger!’ exclaimed June, joining in the laughter.
Afterwards Averil drove me back to Rob and Jenny’s place, where I was staying. She parked her old dunger VW in the drive and we talked, laughed and even got damp-eyed at one point. I didn’t want to go inside. She didn’t want to leave, but she had to. She had to go to work in the morning. A demure goodnight peck seemed only right and proper. Our lips touched lightly. The taste of butterscotch flooded my senses. Things that you never thought would come to this, as Hot Chocolate sang, started with a kiss.
Twenty-one days later in the Your Birthday Today section of the Dominion horoscopes there was this prediction:
A romance you think temporary could prove surprisingly durable.
I cut this prediction out and put it in my wallet as well. I never read horoscopes now. I decided to quit while I was ahead. They are mumbo-jumbo, voodoo and superstition, but when I read that prediction my heart skipped a beat.
AVERIL AND I HAVE BEEN together ever since. For a short time we lived in two cities—Auckland and Wellington. Then, Averil and her bright, delightful son, Will, and her extraordinary, lovely mum, Claire, came to live permanently with me and Shaun in the big house in the forest on the side of the hill. The house filled like a tidal pool on the weekends Sam and Rosie came to stay too.
Averil adored my children and they adored her in return. It was the same with Will and Claire. Six-foot-five Shaun and tiny Will, bookending the whānau, formed a special bond that was magical to observe. One day Will told Shaun a joke that reduced them both to helpless laughter, Will laughing for much longer than Shaun.
‘Hang on there, Shorty,’ boomed Shaun. ‘You’re not as funny as you think you are.’
Will grinned back. ‘Aaah, you may be right, but you don’t know just how funny I think I am!’ Guffawing as only he could, Shaun threw in the towel. Will was seven.
Shaun’s guffaw can remove wax from ears at four hundred paces. One time, flying back from a family trip to Sydney to celebrate Rosie’s birthday (she was living there at the time), he sat across the aisle from Averil, Will and me, thank God, and watched a Mr Bean movie, laughing and rocking so violently the pilot had to come on and ask people to buckle their seats securely as we were experiencing some turbulence.
Will recently married Sanae, his beautiful, super-smart, utterly delightful Japanese girlfriend, on Australia’s Gold Coast, a halfway point for both families. He made a point of asking big Shaun, who had flown directly from London with his knees tucked under his chin, to sit at his elbow at the wedding breakfast, a spot traditionally reserved for the best man. As a consequence, honestly, I don’t know who was most radiant on the day, Shaun or the bride.
AVERIL’S FIRST JOB IN WELLINGTON was managing a personnel company. I used to pick her up most evenings. One night she was still finishing up and she suggested that I sit a short multiple-choice personality test while I waited. I scoffed—what could that possibly prove?
Averil giggled when she looked at the results. I was the client from hell. I was unemployable. No jobs matched my personality profile. I was good for nothing. The algorithm concluded that I should work on my own or if I worked with others I had to be in complete control. I was Hitler. In the corporate world I had to be CEO of ExxonMobil or the self-employed guy who came in once a week to wax the leaves of the aspidistras in the boardroom. Essentially, I marched to the beat of a different drum and I was most probably out of step with that as well.
There was no denying it. It was true. Apart from brief stints in the freezing works and teaching I have been self-employed all my working life. I like working my own hours and not being beholden to anyone. I hate being ordered around. In that regard I am identical to my father, though I never took it to his lengths of refusing to pay for high-school uniforms if they were compulsory.