At three o’clock the next afternoon I crossed the café dining room with a coffee in each hand. ‘One flat white, and one moccachino,’ I said, putting them down on the table in front of their respective owners. ‘Can I get you ladies anything else?’
‘Artificial sweetener, please,’ said one.
‘I’m sorry, we haven’t got any. Sugar?’ I slid the bowl towards her across the table, and she eyed it as if it were filled with earwigs.
‘No, thank you.’ She sighed and took another forkful of caramel cheesecake, and I mused, as I retreated towards the kitchen, on the reasoning behind forgoing fifteen calories of sugar in your coffee while consuming three hundred and fifty in your cheesecake.
‘Did you make the mustard sauce?’ Anna asked, lifting her head for a second from the chocolate scrolls she was piping onto a baking sheet.
‘Yes. It’s in the little fridge. What else have we got to do?’
‘Baked feta’s done, pavlova roll’s done, we can’t glaze the ham till tomorrow, the chicken wings are marinating in the fridge . . . Jersey caramels.’
‘Right,’ I said wearily, getting out the recipe and a glass mixing bowl. ‘What time are you due at your parents’?’
‘Six thirty.’
* * *
We closed at four. Anna went home and I began, with minimal enthusiasm, to mow the lawn. I had fertilised it the previous autumn, on the advice of the gardening column on the back page of the local paper, and regretted it ever since. Cutting an acre of lush dense grass once a week may be just what you want if you’ve got nothing else to do, or if you’re struggling to find enough work for that second under-gardener, but I felt I could have done without it.
Still, it was exercise, and it was a nice afternoon. And it was summer, so the lawn would become a desert wasteland soon enough. I had just finished and was pushing the mower back uphill to the garage when Rob’s ute came around the corner of the house and stopped on the gravel outside the kitchen door. He and Mike got out, rather stiffly.
‘Rob, what are you doing here?’ I said, wiping my hot face on my sleeve. ‘You’re supposed to be in Browns Bay!’
Rob frowned.
‘For Christmas Eve dinner. At half past six.’
‘Oh shit,’ he said.
‘What’s the time?’
He looked at his watch. ‘Five thirty.’
‘Where’s your phone?’
‘Flat.’ The phone in the kitchen began to ring. ‘Is that her?’
I nodded.
‘Aren’t you going to get it?’ Mike asked me.
‘No!’ If I answered that phone and admitted Rob was here, Anna would be even madder at him than she was already, and also I would become an accessory after the fact. I made shooing motions. ‘Go, go!’
Rob sighed and got back into his ute.
‘Poor sod,’ Mike said, shaking his head as the ute vanished around the bend.
‘Poor Anna,’ I said firmly. ‘The man would try the patience of a saint. What took you guys so long?’
‘Digging post holes through a metre and a half of rock. And then we hit a water pipe, just for fun.’
‘Beer?’ I offered.
‘God, yes.’
I pushed the lawnmower into the garage beside my car, and started back towards the house. ‘We’ll need it. Next we have to go and put up Mum’s Christmas tree.’
‘Well, that shouldn’t be too hard,’ said Mike. Poor fool.
* * *
Mum met us at the door of her house, stripy hair piled atop her head, pruning saw in one hand and loppers in the other. ‘I’ve found the perfect tree,’ she announced. ‘It’s just up Gresham Road, on the left. I’ve had my eye on it for weeks.’
‘Mum, we can’t cut down a tree in the forestry in full daylight.’
‘It’s not in the forestry, Aurelia,’ she said, sounding as hurt as if that would have stopped her for a second. ‘It’s a seedling on the side of the road.’
Her pine tree of choice was indeed on the side of the road. It was also in the middle of a blackberry bush and up a four-metre bank.
‘Isn’t it a lovely shape?’ Mum said, shading her eyes with her hand and gazing up at it admiringly.
I leant back against the car. ‘Gorgeous. Just how do you propose we get it?’
‘Lia, I wish you wouldn’t use that sarcastic tone of voice.’
Oh. ‘Sorry, Mum,’ I said.
‘That’s alright, darling. Now, I think the best approach will be from behind.’ And holding up her skirts she began to pick her way through the gorse twenty metres down the road, where the bank tapered to knee height.
‘I’ll do it, Maggie; you’re not really dressed for the job,’ said Mike.
Mum smiled at him graciously and withdrew to the side of the road, from where she could supervise his progress.
He did reach the tree eventually, although a lesser man would have turned back. I lobbed up the pruning saw and he cut the tree down, then pushed it trunk-first down the bank.
‘Lovely!’ said Mum. ‘We’ll put it on the roof and, Mike, if you drive, Lia and I will hold it.’
‘We can’t put that on the roof,’ Mike protested, staunching the blood trickling from one of his deeper scratches with a handkerchief. ‘It’s bigger than the car. And it’ll scratch the paint.’
‘Of course we can! We do it every year. We’ll just take it nice and slowly.’
‘Come on,’ I said, hoisting the three-metre-high tree. ‘There’s no point in arguing with her; she’s an unstoppable force. We’ll go home around the back roads. We probably won’t be arrested.’
Mike sighed.
Twenty minutes later Mum’s little car, almost invisible beneath its load, crept down her driveway and stopped. ‘There,’ she said happily. ‘Now, if you two bring the tree along I’ll run and get a bucket to stand it in.’
It took us another half hour to place the tree according to her minute but contradictory directions, by which time both Mike and I were losing the will to live.
‘I think you need to pull it another inch to the right, Lia,’ said Mum.
‘I can’t,’ I said from the mantelpiece. ‘It’s tied both ways.’
‘We-e-ll . . .’ She stepped back and looked at it through narrowed eyes. ‘I suppose it will have to do. Let’s have some dinner before we start decorating.’
Expecting to be the one cooking it, I slid down and followed her into the kitchen. But she took a salad and a pile of snapper fillets out of the fridge and waved me away. ‘Sit down, I’ve got it all under control. Now, what would you both like to drink? There’s half a bottle of that rather gorgeous merlot Hugh brought last night in the pantry. It doesn’t go with fish, but who cares?’
‘Hugh would care,’ I said, sitting down on the window seat and prodding my bad knee. It ached, and the joint was fat and puffy. I would have to dig out my knee brace.
Mum smiled as she divided the rest of the bottle between three wineglasses. ‘He’d be appalled, wouldn’t he? Never mind, what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him. Mike, I’ve been meaning to ask you how Gina is.’
Gina is Mike’s older sister. She had left home by the time Rob and I were born, so we never knew her very well, and the little we knew we didn’t much like. She viewed us as the embarrassing result of a paternal lapse in judgment, and it’s hard to warm to someone who wishes you’d never been born.
‘Fine,’ Mike said. ‘Unfortunately.’ He took two wineglasses, passed one to me and sat down sideways on a kitchen chair.
I looked up from my sore knee in mild shock. Mike is ridiculously nice; if he can’t say anything pleasant he says nothing. It makes him a very poor source of malicious gossip, but nobody’s perfect.
‘Why unfortunately?’ Mum asked.
Mike looked moodily into his wineglass. ‘She’s been pointing out to Dad that I’m forty-four, I’m single, I’ve got no children and at this late date I’m not likely to have any. So if he wants to found a dynasty, he’d better leave the farm to her and her kids.’
‘What?’ Mum cried. ‘And what about the twenty years – no, it’s longer than that, the twins were just crawling when you came to help on the farm . . .’ She paused to count on her fingers. ‘The twenty-seven years of work you’ve put into the place?’
‘I’ve been paid wages.’
She pointed a fish slice at him like a weapon. ‘You’ve been paid a pittance!’
He smiled crookedly. ‘More fool me.’
‘I’ve never heard anything so unfair!’
‘Well, the old will wasn’t fair either,’ he said. ‘It meant I got a three-million-dollar farm and everyone else got five-eighths of bugger all.’
Mum cast aside her fish slice and sat down at the table. ‘You can’t do fair with family farms, if you want them to stay in the family,’ she said firmly. ‘Either one person inherits, or you sell up and split the money. And it’s not as if you’re being given a cheque for three million dollars. You get a lot of hard work for a very modest return.’
‘And Gina and Rob and I have all had help with loans and house deposits and stuff,’ I said. ‘And you’ve had to stay home and put up with Dad. I’m not sure a three-million-dollar farm is enough.’
‘Neither am I,’ said Mike grimly, taking a swig of merlot.
‘Has Gray actually changed his will?’ Mum asked.
Mike shrugged. ‘You know what he’s like. He likes to keep everyone guessing. But even if he doesn’t, I’ve been the boy since I was seventeen, and I’m not all that excited at the thought of being the boy when I’m sixty. I should have left twenty years ago.’
He should have, of course. But as lovely as Mike is – and he’s quite lovely – he does tend to follow the path of least resistance. He’s just not the line-in-the-sand, courage-of-your-convictions type. Mum smiled at him a bit sadly, leant across the table and covered his hand with hers.