Dinner at Rose's (33 page)

‘Ah.’ He opened the door of the stove and slung in a few more bits of wood, and Spud thudded his tail up and down on the floor in approval.

‘We’d better ring Kim and tell her she’s at Rachel’s so she can get her story straight,’ I remembered.

‘I’ll send her a text from across the road.’ He yawned widely. ‘I’d better go and look at my calving heifer. Will you still be up in an hour if I come back?’

‘I expect so,’ I said. ‘But you should go to bed – you’ll fall asleep on the tractor or something awful.’ I got up and went to put my arms around him.

‘I could come back and sleep with you,’ he said very quietly into my hair, and I shivered.

‘How much sleep d’you think we’d get?’

‘Some,’ said Matt cautiously. Then he sighed. ‘Better not. It’s not our house.’ He kissed me again, in a serious sort of way. ‘Oh, well. See you tomorrow.’

‘’Night,’ I said, somewhat unsteadily. And then, as he went out the kitchen door, ‘Matt?’

He turned and looked back at me. ‘Yeah?’

‘I love you.’

He didn’t say anything but smiled slowly, a smile of pure uncomplicated happiness. Then he pulled the door closed behind him.

AT TEN, WHEN
I pushed open the door of Rose’s bedroom, she was lying awake with
Verse Worth Remembering
open beside her, looking at nothing in particular.

‘Hello, love,’ she said.

‘Hello.’ I pulled up a kitchen chair that stood against the bedroom wall for visitors to use and sat at her elbow. ‘You couldn’t eat something, could you?’

She shook her head. ‘I’ll eat in the morning. Promise.’

‘Had your pills yet?’

‘Not just yet. I wanted to find a poem first.’

I tucked my onesie-clad knees up under my chin. ‘Something all deep and meaningful, like “Crossing the Bar”?’

‘Never could bear Tennyson,’ she said weakly. ‘What a dreadful thing to admit. No, “The Walrus and the Carpenter”. My grandfather used to read it to me when I was small.’

‘I remember you reading it to Matt and me.’

‘Yes.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘You did so many nice things for us.’

‘I always wanted to make pleasant memories for you children. Things are so much more magical if you discover them when you’re small.’

We had hunted Woozles and made gingerbread houses and pricked barbary flowers to make the stamens close up and put grass straws down penny-doctor holes, waiting for them to tremble before carefully pulling out a small indignant insect.

‘You did,’ I said, and felt the tears prickle at the back of my eyes. ‘Aunty Rose, you said you didn’t want to be remembered like this. But we won’t – we’ll remember digging Heffalump traps and licking cake bowls and gin and tonic without the tonic.’

‘Good,’ she said, and closed her eyes.

‘Take your pills first,’ I suggested. ‘Are your pillows okay?’

‘Fine.’

She accepted the tablets and I settled back to wait while she went to sleep.

‘Go to bed, Josephine,’ she whispered a few minutes later.

‘I will in a minute. Aunty Rose?’

‘Mm?’

‘It turns out Matt’s in love with me too.’

She moved her head sleepily against the pillow. ‘Of course he is,’ she said. ‘Has been for years. Foolish children.’

Chapter 29

D
URING AMBER’S LUNCH
break the next day I was sitting behind the front desk in a warm, pink-tinged frame of mind that even the weather did nothing to dispel. The hiss of car tyres through the puddles was such a pleasant, cosy sound, and Heather Anne’s sign next door creaked in a friendly fashion as it swung on its rusted hooks. Aunty Rose had managed nearly a whole bottle of yoghurt for breakfast, and the district nurse, a good friend of hers, was due this afternoon. And tonight I would see Matt. Not even the unfortunate fact that Amber had spilt nail polish remover through the stationery drawer on her way out could take the sheen off my day.

I looked at the clock on the wall – it was ten past twelve. I thought for a moment and then picked up the phone.

Matt answered on the third ring. ‘Hello?’ I could hear the clatter of the bale feeder behind the tractor, slowing as he turned it off so as to be able to hear the phone.

‘Hey,’ I said. ‘It’s me.’

His voice warmed in an extremely gratifying manner. ‘Hey, you. What’s up?’

‘I was just wondering if there was any chance you’d have time for a lunch break today.’

‘Only four calves this morning,’ he said. ‘And no disasters yet, so it’s not impossible.’

‘Should I bring you a pie at about ten past one?’ I asked.

‘Two, please.’

‘Mince and cheese?’

‘Of course.’

‘Custard square?’

‘Need you ask?’

‘Very good,’ I said. ‘See you soon.’

As soon as Amber opened the door I leapt to my feet and bolted from the building. I had to wait an interminable two minutes at the bakery while the woman in front of me hunted through her purse in a futile search for the correct change – it was all I could do not to shout, ‘Eftpos! Have you not heard of eftpos, you stupid tart?’ I bought two mince and cheese and one potato-top pie, a custard square and an apple turnover, pretended not to see Clare strapping a small child into a pushchair on the other side of the street and dived back into the car.

It was sixteen past one when I got to Matt’s place. He opened the back door as I came across the lawn.

‘Hello,’ I said, handing him the lunch bag and feeling, quite suddenly, completely terrified.

‘Hello.’ He took my hand and pulled me inside out of the rain.

I hadn’t been inside this house for about twenty years. Back then it was rented to an elderly couple who kept Angora rabbits on the lawn – they used to let us feed the rabbits and then give us Nice biscuits and plastic beakers of tonic water, which I thought was delightfully exotic.

It hadn’t changed a lot. Matt’s gumboots and overalls were in a pile beside the door, and a row of coats and hats hung from nails hammered into the wall. The washroom led into a poky kitchen, the benches tiled in those nasty little olive-green tiles that form an uneven surface almost impossible to keep clean, and through the kitchen doorway I could see one corner of an equally small lounge papered in orange geometric designs. The seventies produced such awful home furnishings.

‘You were lucky,’ I told him, kicking my shoes off. ‘I got the last custard square.’

‘Thank you.’ He began to unpack the lunch. He had set the table with two plates, two knives and a plastic billy of milk, and a pair of mugs with the teabags already in place sat waiting on the bench beside the kettle. A great pile of accounts and Livestock Improvement folders that almost certainly covered the table a foot deep when he wasn’t entertaining had been stacked on the floor in a corner. Touched by this thoughtful hospitality, I slid one hand sideways along the kitchen bench and hooked my little finger over his.

He promptly turned and put his arms around me, and I relaxed against him with a little sigh of happiness. He pushed my chin up and kissed me for quite a long time. ‘Jose?’

‘Mm?’

‘Are you very hungry?’

‘No,’ I said dreamily. ‘Oh – have you talked to your mother yet?’

‘Not yet.’

‘I haven’t called Cheryl either. We’re very slack.’

‘I agree, but can we not talk about it right now?’

‘Sorry,’ I said, and kissed him again. His stubble was almost past the prickly stage – shaving, in calving season, is for special occasions only – and when he slid his hands up my bare arms the calluses on his palms were rough against my skin. Graeme had soft smooth hands with carefully maintained fingernails, and I wondered irrelevantly how I had ever been able to bear it.

‘When do you have to go?’ he asked several minutes later.

‘Hmm? Oh – quarter to, I suppose.’

He moved an arm to look at his watch. ‘One-twenty now,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘That’s a reasonable amount of time.’

I smiled. ‘A reasonable amount of time for what?’

‘Bed,’ said Matt succinctly.

I LATER DISCOVERED
that his bedroom was as small and dingy and horribly wallpapered as the rest of the house. But that day I never even saw it. He had removed my Waimanu Physiotherapy vest and shirt by the time we reached the doorway, and I was trying, with hands that shook in an extremely frustrating way, to undo the zip on his jeans. We fell backwards across his unmade bed and tried to kiss and wriggle out of our clothes and same time.

‘Hang on,’ he said breathlessly, rolling away from me. ‘Hang on, we can do better than this.’

‘
I’m
enjoying it,’ I protested.

He laughed and sat up. ‘I’ve been thinking about this for a really long time. I want to do it right.’ He slid both hands behind my back to find the catch on my bra.

‘I don’t think there’d be a wrong way to do it at this point.’ I ran my hands up his lean brown forearms, over all the little sharply defined muscles and tendons. To be honest, if he’d jerked his chin at me and barked, ‘You there! Legs apart!’ that would have been just fine.

‘At least –’ he broke off to kiss the hollow of my throat, which you wouldn’t have thought was a particularly sensitive spot, but it made me want to writhe and moan like someone in a tacky B-grade movie – ‘I want to take all your clothes off and look at you properly. You’re so lovely.’

I looked up at him and my heart contracted painfully. Of course I had loved Graeme – you don’t move in with someone you don’t care a lot about, or at least you shouldn’t – but this scruffy friend of mine with his slow voice and lazy crooked smile was the kindest, most attractive,
best
man I had ever known. ‘Whatever you want,’ I whispered. ‘Just say, Matt, I’ll do whatever you want.’

His pupils dilated abruptly, so that his eyes looked almost black. ‘God, Jo,’ he said, and pulled me tightly against him.

‘
WHAT TIME IS
it?’ I asked weakly.

‘Don’t know,’ Matt said. He sounded at least three-quarters asleep. ‘Can’t see, can’t move . . .’

With a truly heroic effort I pulled my left arm out from under his shoulders and squinted at my watch. It was, apparently, one fifty-two. ‘
Crap!
’ I leapt to my feet like an Olympic high-jumper and began to hunt feverishly for clothes.