Dinner at Rose's (26 page)

MATT FELL INTO
the kitchen out of the driving rain just before seven, shaking his head like a wet dog.

‘Dear boy!’ Aunty Rose cried. She turned and waved a spatula at him, and drops of orange sauce flew across the kitchen. I sighed internally – the clean-up tonight was going to take me
hours
. ‘You’re right on time. Does that mean the cows are behaving themselves?’

He smiled, clearly pleased to see her in such fine form. ‘Yep. There’s only one that looks like calving tonight, and they’re in the Pine Tree Paddock so there’s heaps of shelter.’

‘Marvellous.’

‘So,’ he said, ‘you’re cooking tonight.’

‘I am,’ said Aunty Rose.

He looked wary. ‘Ah.’

‘Matthew King, there is no need to take that tone. You’ll frighten Stuart.’

‘Never,’ I said. ‘He’s very brave. Stu – Matt.’

‘Nice to meet you,’ said Matt. He wiped his wet face on his sleeve, put his work boots in the corner beside the wood stove to dry and held out a hand to Stu, who was standing at the kitchen table wrestling with a champagne cork. ‘You must have had a fairly exciting drive up from Wellington.’

‘It was,’ Stu confirmed. He transferred his corkscrew briefly to the same hand as the champagne bottle so as to shake hands. ‘Jo assures me this weather isn’t normal, but I’m not sure I believe her.’

‘I usually don’t believe her just on principle,’ Matt said, and got the table between us before I could kick him.

‘Aunty Rose,’ I said, ‘are you quite sure Matt is going to be an asset to this dinner party?’

‘No,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Throw him out.’

‘Don’t you dare,’ said Stu, delicately levering out his cork. It hissed gently, and with the precision that I imagine he uses in surgery he began to pour out the champagne. ‘I have been simply
pining
to meet Jo’s first love.’ He minced across the kitchen to present Aunty Rose with a champagne flute. ‘Gorgeous glasses, Rose. And the champagne will go beautifully with your codeine.’

I looked at Matt and grimaced apologetically.

‘JD, angel, don’t tell me I’ve embarrassed you. I shall never forgive myself,’ said Stu.

There’s no point in getting cross with Stu. He just thinks it’s funny.

‘Yes,’ I said resignedly. ‘I can see you’re crushed by remorse.’

Dinner that evening consisted of a Moroccan chicken dish (delicious), served with mashed potato (not authentic, but also delicious) and a vegetable medley that seemed to be flavoured mostly with vinegar and was utterly inedible.

‘Never mind, Aunty Rose,’ I said consolingly. ‘Two out of three’s pretty good.’

‘I don’t understand what went wrong,’ she said. ‘I followed the recipe to the letter.’

‘You’ve never followed anything to the letter in your life,’ Matt told her, helping himself to more chicken. ‘You’ve been at a conference, haven’t you, Stu?’

‘Indeed,’ said Stu, inserting a heaped forkful of vegetables into his mouth and then becoming temporarily incapable of further speech.

‘My dear boy,’ said Aunty Rose warmly. ‘That is above and beyond the call of duty. The scrap bucket’s under the sink if you’d like to spit it out.’

Eyes watering, Stu shook his natty dark head and swallowed. Then he picked up his wine glass and took a large gulp. ‘N-no,’ he managed. ‘I’m good.’

‘That was a superhuman effort,’ I told him. ‘So how was your conference?’

‘Just the usual,’ he said. ‘Drug reps schmoozing and buying you expensive drinks – that sort of thing.’

‘That’s probably due to your boyish charm,’ Aunty Rose put in.

‘JD, your aunt is a woman of remarkably good taste,’ said Stu. ‘There were a few good lectures – some new techniques for getting into hip joints – and I found a
fabulous
pub on the waterfront.’

‘Stu always finds a fabulous pub,’ I explained. ‘He’d discover a divine little wine bar in downtown Ruatoria. It’s pretty much his only skill.’

‘Well,’ said Matt, ‘that’s not a bad skill.’

‘You should be nicer to me,’ Stu told me. ‘I’ll have you know I retrieved your iPod
and
some extremely fetching lacy knickers.’

‘My pink knickers?’ I adore fancy bras and knickers, especially when they come in matching sets. It’s probably due to having spent my whole professional life wearing sensible sports clothes. I’m very fond of sensible sports clothes and even fonder of sports shoes (Graeme felt that my obsession with sparkly sneakers was a reasonably major character flaw), but I do like to compensate with impractical undies. ‘
Thank
you.’

‘You’re welcome. Your erstwhile boyfriend –’

‘Good word,’ Aunty Rose put in. ‘Sorry, do continue.’

‘Thank you,’ said Stu. ‘He asked after you – he looked all wistful. I get the feeling that life with the lovely Chrissie’s no bed of roses.’

‘Good,’ I said. ‘I hope she’s insanely high maintenance and drives him up the wall.’

Stu gave a little snort of laughter. ‘An enormous bunch of flowers arrived at the nurses’ station the other day –’ Chrissie is a theatre nurse; I first met her at one of Graeme’s work functions – ‘and she rang him up and screamed down the phone because they were the wrong colour.’

‘Far out,’ I murmured. ‘I
never
got flowers. He said they were a big waste of money because they just died.’

‘Once again, Josephine, I ask myself what you were doing with this pillock,’ Aunty Rose said, shaking her head.

‘He’s a doctor,’ Matt reminded her.

I propped my chin in my hands and looked at him thoughtfully. ‘Once, long ago,’ I said, ‘I kicked you square in the balls. I could do it again if you like.’

He grinned at me. ‘Tempting,’ he said, ‘but I’ll pass.’

IT WAS AROUND
ten before the party broke up and Stu and I began to tackle an enormous pile of dishes.

‘I don’t know how the woman does it,’ I said. ‘I swear she can dirty every pot in the house just boiling water.’

‘I won’t hear a word against her,’ said Stu severely. ‘She’s pretty fabulous, isn’t she?’

‘Yep,’ I said. ‘You should have seen her six months ago. She had long flowing grey hair and a bust like the prow of a ship.’ I pressed the heels of my hands to my eyes to suppress the tears.

‘If I ever get some fatal disease,’ he said, ‘I hope to be able to carry it off with one-tenth her style.’

‘You’d better tell her that. She’ll like it.’

There was a companionable silence while he swilled dinner plates under the hot tap and I dried them, broken only by Spud’s gentle snores from his position in front of the stove. At length I asked, ‘So, are you seeing anyone?’

‘No,’ said Stu glumly. ‘I have taken most unwillingly to celibacy.’

‘Apparently it’s a virtue.’

‘That’s just what people who aren’t getting any tell one another to make themselves feel better.’

‘You may well be right,’ I said. ‘If it’s any consolation, your love life can’t possibly be any worse than mine.’

‘Why on earth aren’t you shagging the divine Matthew?’ Stu demanded. ‘He’s
highly
shaggable.’

‘Matt?’ I said lightly. ‘That would be almost incest.’

‘You’ve done it before,’ he pointed out. It is very dangerous to tell your close friends your secrets during late-night conversations over a bottle of wine – they remember them.

‘We were young and stupid then. Anyway, he’s got a girlfriend.’

‘Really?’ Stu asked sceptically. ‘If I was her I’d be feeling very insecure.’

‘What do you mean?’ I picked up a plate, examined it and tossed it back into the sink because it seemed to still have about half a chicken stuck to it.

‘JD, don’t be dense. The man obviously thinks you’re the bee’s knees. Didn’t you see him prick up his ears when I mentioned your knickers?’

I hadn’t, and I very much doubted Stu had either. ‘Ah, but you should see the girlfriend,’ I said. ‘She looks like a little china doll, but she can talk about feed conversion efficiency and calving spreads with the best of them.’

‘I hate her,’ said Stu promptly.

I sighed. ‘Yeah,’ I admitted. ‘Me too. When are Graeme and Chrissie getting married?’

‘Who would know? Chrissie’s still trying to decide between an intimate ceremony on a tropical island and a huge sit-down dinner followed by a masquerade ball.’

I laughed, but it didn’t sound very convincing. Stu put down his dish brush and slung a consoling arm around my shoulders. ‘You didn’t really want to marry him, did you?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I said slowly. ‘But it’s a bit depressing that after five years he’d go and get engaged to someone else at the drop of a hat.’

‘I doubt very much it was his idea,’ said Stu drily. ‘But I know what you mean – it’s not great for the self-esteem.’

‘It is not,’ I said with feeling.

‘The last bloke
I
was interested in decided that after all he liked girls,’ said Stu comfortingly. ‘Maybe being squashed flat will give us stronger characters.’

I picked up my tea towel again. ‘Just how strong do our characters need to be?’

Chapter 24

‘H
OW DID YOU
sleep?’ I asked Stu when he came into the kitchen the next morning. It was still raining, but only in a half-hearted drizzly sort of way, and the wind had dropped. Outside everything looked grey and sodden and miserable.

‘Fair to middling,’ he said, stretching his arms above his head and yawning. ‘Something came and cleared its nasal passages under my window at about two . . .’

‘Percy,’ I explained, passing him a mug of plunger coffee.

‘An elderly local rustic?’

‘Aunty Rose’s pet pig.’

‘You’ve lifted a weight from my mind. And then I ran into an enormous pot when I went for a slash in the middle of the night.’

‘That’s for the leak in the toilet ceiling.’

‘Of course. Good coffee.’

‘Thank you.’

‘And you were right – I did want the gloves as well as the beanie.’

‘Sorry about that,’ I said. ‘I’ve been meaning to buy an oil heater.’

‘No, no,’ said Stu. ‘I’m glad I’ve done it. I feel like that chap who wanders around the mountaintops drinking his own urine.’

‘If you like, you can have urine instead of coffee to complete the whole survival experience,’ I offered.

‘I have to save
something
for my next visit.’

I smiled at him. ‘Thanks for coming. I’ve missed you.’

Stu smiled back. ‘You’re welcome,’ he said. ‘Want me to tell Graeme you’re having a wild affair with your sexy childhood friend?’

I was a little bit tempted – once, in a moment of extreme sleepiness, I did call Graeme ‘Matt’ in bed, and he brought it up in every argument for about the next three years. But knowing my luck Graeme would then ring Aunty Rose’s to tell me the house had fallen over or exploded or something equally expensive, and Matt would answer the phone, and I would be revealed as a delusional liar. ‘Nah,’ I said. ‘Just tell him that I’m perfectly happy and I look like a goddess.’

STU LEFT FOR
the airport mid-morning. ‘Thank you for having me, Rose,’ he said, picking up his overnight bag.

Aunty Rose got to her feet, resplendent in her satin dressing-gown and, today, a peroxide-blonde wig. ‘Dear boy, it was a pleasure.’

‘I’ll see you next time I visit.’