Queen of beauty, p.22
Queen of Beauty, page 22
Hugh bent over to push the passenger seat forward and untangle the belt. The yellow rose bud pinned to his lapel dropped onto the driveway.
Nobody noticed.
There wasn’t much to it, really. Alice didn’t know why there’d been so much fuss.
Tim had been wrong, as usual. First was best, even if you weren’t all that sure about how fast to walk or where you were supposed to stop or which way you were supposed to look once you got up there.
The ground was still wet and made nasty chocolate-coloured smears on her yellow shoes. (Lemon, her mother said. Mrs Croft called them primrose, and she preferred the sound of that.) She’d walked up the aisle, past all those rows of white wooden chairs, past all those people she didn’t know, holding her flowers, counting under her breath. It was supposed to be fourteen paces, that’s what they said during the practice, but she did it in ten.
Her legs were getting quite long.
Nick was up there already, looking sick, and he had wet grass stuck to his shoes and his black hair looked as damp as the ground. The violins were playing, but it wasn’t the normal wedding song. The men standing with him shifted from foot to foot, the way rugby players do on TV when they’ve forgotten the words to the national anthem.
Then the two bridesmaids came up the path, with silly looks on their faces. Their dresses were blue and their bare arms stuck out like chicken wings. She could see their elbows knocking, and wondered if they were twins.
Then Virginia, who looked straight ahead and smiled at her with very pink lips.
Then Julia in her long, tight, shiny white dress and a cut-off veil that flapped in the breeze, holding onto Dad.
His eyes were red and he looked a bit soppy.
Alice took Virginia’s hand and swung around to find her mother, who was wearing the biggest hat by far – much bigger than Heather’s and Mrs Croft’s and Auntie Lizzie’s; Nick’s mother wasn’t wearing a hat at all, she noticed, just a long feather, curled like a dog’s tail.
There were the vows, when everyone looked serious and almost annoyed, and then it was over, just a few minutes later, everyone kissing and crying and laughing. (‘That’s it,’ Virginia whispered to her; Alice couldn’t believe it happened so quickly.) The violins started up again, and they all walked back down the path higgledy-piggledy to the trees where there were girls in men’s shirts holding out trays of champagne.
That was it, really.
Mrs Croft was sitting at a little table. She was wearing a floaty green dress and wide, high-heeled shoes, her hat balanced on tight curly hair. She winked at Alice and took a neat sip from her champagne glass.
Alice slipped away from the big group.
‘Do you know what that song is?’ she asked, leaning against Mrs Croft’s knees.
‘This one? Let me listen.’
‘No, the one before. When we walked up the path at the beginning.’
‘The aisle, not the path. It was ‘Where Sheep May Safely Graze’. I remember your granny playing that, years ago. Your Dad’s mum, Mary. She played the piano beautifully. It would have sounded much better on an organ, mind, today. Much nicer in a church.’
There was plenty of room for an organ here in Nick’s uncle’s vineyard, Alice thought. She wondered why Julia had chosen the violins instead. They sounded like mosquitoes.
‘The grandmothers!’
The photographer, whose voice was squeaky, was shouting for Mrs Croft.
‘Don’t you be drinking this,’ she said, getting up. She winked at Alice again and walked away.
Alice picked up the glass with both hands and gulped.
He was good at speeches. Virginia had forgotten that. Your father can always rise to the occasion, Heather once said, whacking at Rob and Tim with a rolled-up magazine when they started tittering (I didn’t mean it like that, she said, horrible rude boys).
Today, Jim wasn’t nervous or ponderous; he didn’t mumble or pause for too long. He was used to giving lectures, of course, but that was different. That was commerce. This was personal.
Absent friends, he said, and now he had everyone sniffling, raising their glasses. He was supposed to toast the bride and groom, but first there was a line of ghosts hovering unseen in the folds of the creamy marquee: Nick’s grandfather (pneumonia, Julia told her, the year before last) and their own grandpa, Archie (cancer, everywhere) who died the Christmas before she left. Granny and Granddad Seton, who Tim couldn’t remember and Alice never knew (Granddad in his sleep, after months of sickness, and Granny just like that, alone in the big soft empty bed in the house on Glasgow Street, not long after).
Auntie June (and here Auntie Lizzie started to cry and, on cue, Heather and Virginia, and then Leeander and Julia, and women sitting at each of the long tables, women who had never met June, had never heard her name before: it was the crack in Jim’s voice). My sister June, he said. Auntie June, run down by a bus in Symonds Street in 1972, though of course he didn’t give the details, gory and banal and obscure: nothing but the names, left hanging, one by one, in the afternoon air, drifting through the table legs and the arms of empty suit jackets and the spaces between people’s shoulders, dissipating over ranks of waving vines into the grey and breezy afternoon.
He’d leave the telegrams to the best man, he said, and by that he meant the people still alive but unavoidably detained elsewhere, on holiday in Fiji or on business in Hong Kong, or grounded by an air traffic controller’s strike in Melbourne or laid up with a broken leg in Queenstown.
Absent friends.
She thought of Bridget, reduced now to a disembodied voice on the telephone (calling to say bon voyage, report on their new place, complain about the weather), urging Virginia to get an e-mail address so they could keep in touch; it was the only way, it seemed, to dam up their friendship against a trickling away into occasional calls, holiday cards and vague, half-meant invitations.
And Jake, heckling in the background, already content with being one step removed.
And Arthur.
She’d call him tomorrow, perhaps, to report on the wedding. Steal the phone from its basket and wander into the garden. She’d tell him all about Leeander’s satellite-dish hat, about Alice running down the aisle looking worried and shy, about the blue hills and the sky that turned the colour of wet sand, about everything that had happened so far and everything still to happen, the speeches and the toasts and the cake and the dancing.
About the way her dress was so slithery that she was afraid of sliding off her chair, about the cold looks of narrow-eyed appraisal she’d been getting from the other two bridesmaids, about the way the pale champagne had gone straight to her head.
About the list of forbidden songs allegedly given by Julia to the band, which was still setting up at the end of the marquee: no ‘Eagle Rock’, no ‘Cheryl Moana Marie’, no ‘Ten Guitars’, no ‘Summer Loving’, and absolutely, positively no ‘Macarena’.
About seeing everyone and hearing everyone again: the young cousins she could barely recognise, handsome and awkward and distant; old Joe Blair and his paper-thin wife Serena; Uncle Stuart’s stolid, unsmiling kids; all the cousins they called Hotere, though none of them were, grouped and labelled under their mothers’ maiden name because that was the way Jim still talked about them. Eru Te Puni, who’d invited himself; beaming Auntie Lizzie and big, round Uncle Tahu just a few feet away; Rob’s girlfriend Lia, wearing glasses with shiny purple frames, and a pansy-print wrap dress with an uneven hem, neither of which seemed to go with her intense, almost puzzled expression; Rewi French, her father’s cousin and old partner in crime, who’d smuggled Virginia away to the sidelines as soon as the ceremony ended to drink and gossip, much to the photographer’s annoyance; even Andy Simich, spotted from behind, and – no doubt about it, Julia was right – looking quite, quite bald.
Virginia wished that Arthur was here, right now, sitting next to her at the top table, looking out at all these faces. Arthur slapping at the fluttering tablecloth, peering critically at the wine bottle, harassing the waiter for more oysters, irritably loosening his tie. Making her laugh, getting on her nerves.
Absent friends.
Dinner over, the sea of guests dispersed and regrouped around the marquee’s white flanks. Rob waved Virginia over to a cluster of chairs in the corner, where Uncle Tahu was holding court away from the noise of the band. She squeezed in next to her cousin Errol Tucker (one of the Hotere clan, all grown up and athletic, glossy chocolate-brown, glinting with hair gel and perspiration).
‘Your cousin here’s working for the Waitangi Tribunal,’ said Uncle Tahu, and Errol gave Virginia a brief, serious smile, as though he’d just won something at a school prize-giving, ‘and your brother here is making a name for himself in the legal profession.’
‘Rob says you’re working for a writer?’ asked Errol. ‘What kind of work?’
‘I’m her researcher. She’s a historical novelist, and I do all the running around for her. She’s just finished a book that we’ve been working on all year.’
‘Lot of research to be done here,’ said Uncle Tahu. ‘Lot of history to uncover. Maybe you’re on the wrong side of the pond. Lot of opportunities here now for a nice coffee-coloured girl like you.’
‘Milky coffee,’ said Virginia, smiling down at her glass.
‘Been away too long, haven’t you, Miss Virginia Ngātea Seton?’
(How long is too long; how far is far enough?)
‘Time to change sides, perhaps,’ Uncle Tahu continued. ‘You think about it.’
‘It’s a political decision,’ said Errol, eager and earnest, waiting to jump in.
Rob nodded.
‘Home or overseas,’ he said, gazing down at his clasped hands.
‘Māori or Pākehā,’ added Errol.
‘Pork or puha,’ said Tim behind them, passing out beer bottles over Virginia’s head. ‘What do you want to drink, Jinxie? More champagne?’
‘Whatever.’
‘What do you say?’ said Uncle Tahu, winking at her. He was looking old, Virginia thought, rangy and creased, though his laugh was as abandoned and full-bodied as ever.
‘You mean about coming back, or about being Māori or Pākehā? I’m not sure about the first, and as for the second, I don’t think it’s a choice, really. I’m both.’
Uncle Tahu roared with laughter. ‘I meant, what do you want to drink?’
‘No one’s a Pākehā any more, you know,’ said Tim. ‘They’re New Zealand Europeans or just New Zealanders. That’s what lots of people prefer.’
‘And what does that make Māoris?’ Uncle Tahu sniffed. ‘Chopped liver? Since when does New Zealander just mean white people? I’m a New Zealander, aren’t I?’
Errol and Rob nodded in unison.
‘When I’m at home – I mean, in America,’ said Virginia, wondering, as she spoke, where home was exactly: the house on Adams Street with its new tenants and, in all probability, shiny new Christmas wreath, or Arthur’s place above Kingfish, with all her belongings in plastic bags stuffed behind the sofa? ‘I’m just a foreigner with a strange accent. Nobody knows what a New Zealander is, let alone a Māori or a Pākehā. So I can be whatever I want to be, I guess,’ Virginia finished. ‘I can be both.’
‘Or neither,’ said Rob, raising an eyebrow at Errol – making sure his point didn’t go unnoticed, she thought. ‘You can hide whatever you want to. You can be invisible.’
‘The invisible Māori. This country’s full of them,’ said Uncle Tahu.
Heather, her face flushed, walked towards them followed by Rewi French who had three empty glasses in his hands.
‘Mum.’ Tim leaned back in his chair. ‘Would you call yourself a Pākehā, or a New Zealand European?’
‘I’d call myself mother of the bride,’ she replied, squeezing past. ‘And don’t let your grandmother see you drinking beer straight from the bottle.’
Rewi bent down towards Virginia, resting the cold wine glasses against her bare shoulders.
‘Don’t listen to these angry young men,’ he murmured. ‘Or old Tahu, for that matter. Those Wairarapa Māoris think they’re the real thing.’
‘One last question for you,’ said Uncle Tahu, waving Rewi and Heather away. He took Virginia’s hand in his and tickled the palm with his fingernails. ‘This book you’ve been working on all year, the one you’ve done the research for. What’s it about?’
‘The quadroon balls.’ Virginia looked into her uncle’s hazy green eyes. She didn’t know how to begin explaining it. ‘It’s this New Orleans thing, very particular to the city and its … history. It’s a long story, actually.’
‘Nothing like a good long story, eh?’
‘Jinx,’ hissed Tim. ‘Come and dance with me. I’ve requested “Eagle Rock”, to piss Julia off. Rob, where’s Lia?’
‘Talking to Nick’s cousin about getting a deal on a car, last time I saw her.’
Rob scraped back his chair and set off at a brisk pace towards the dance floor.
‘Your brother tells me you come up with stories for that writer, too. Some juicy ones in our family, all right.’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Virginia, wanting to wriggle away. Her work was boring, she thought; it bored her and, by the looks of it, everyone else too. There was something about it, as well, that made her feel a little ashamed.
(How long is too long; how far is far enough?)
‘Off you go and dance,’ said Uncle Tahu. ‘But later on, I’ve got a story for you. It’s a good one – true. Don’t forget.’
Virginia promised him she wouldn’t.
Leeander had blown everyone away. Of course she had: the hat, the outfit, the cake, all just as gorgeous and original as they could be. She’d certainly get more business out of it, from this rich Dally vineyard set. Nick’s uncle had talked with her for nearly forty-five minutes about the Tuscan-style tasting facility he was planning in Kumeu (so much more than a café and shop: she understood that). She could see it now, every inch of dripping pergola and terracotta-coloured wall and rough-hewn slate floor, every last glazed Morris & James tile, every arched doorway and woven chair seat and grape-green bottle of olive oil. She could smell the rosemary, the lavender, the char-grilled shallots. She’d design a magnificent cake for the opening and do all their special functions (and the words ‘special’ and ‘private’ and ‘corporate’ and ‘function’ danced around in her head like so many angels on a hat pin) and soon she’d be the last word in cake design and the word ‘Confection’ (the name of her shop: Jim’s suggestion, actually) would linger, sweetly, on the lips of every single taste-maker from here to Huka Lodge.
And one day, if everything went according to plan, she’d have her own Friday-night show on TV, the kind where she would be in Melbourne one week and on the Kapiti Coast another, loyally and avidly watched, doing everything from selecting the very best in local feta cheese to interviewing (no, profiling) the owners of small chic luxury hotels on Great Barrier Island.
That was the long-term plan, of course. There were more immediate goals to achieve, like expanding the place on Jervois Road and persuading all those Remuera matrons to venture a little further afield for their dinner-party dessert needs. She’d taken a risk in setting up shop in Herne Bay rather than Parnell, in opting for the gay media set rather than society’s hostesses, but she’d had a hunch (her instincts, as ever, gave her the edge) that being fashionable and talked about was a more persuasive calling card than simply expensive and nearby. So far, it was playing out just as she’d expected: her ongoing conquest of the Eastern suburbs, her culinary crusade, was progressing slowly but surely, one cake at a time.
But today here she was, way out West, and making the best of it as usual. Very nice wedding, really, with everyone looking more or less tasteful and picturesque, especially darling little Alice. Not that many hats, but you couldn’t expect that these days, not in this shy little country and especially not out here. Not many truly great ensembles either: a lot of linen dresses and big bracelets, a few floaty scarves. Something chic and semi-transparent from Zambesi on one woman (one of Nick’s relatives, of course) and some smart little dresses on the younger guests, the ones who seemed to have exercised away every last bit of tit and hip and thigh. Even old Heather, the very wrong side of fifty, was looking almost presentable in that creamy shapeless pastel number, if you liked that sort of thing.
And Julia was really quite beautiful. Tightly strung as a fiddle bow, of course, but you couldn’t expect leopards to change their spots (and speaking of spots: what on earth was that awful Fleur wearing?) just because it was their wedding day.
Time for more lipstick, Leeander decided, and then maybe a dance with her husband – last seen singing with his cousins around the outside bar; it sounded like they were howling to the moon – and maybe a whirl with Hugh (who would have guessed he was such a dancer?), and then a few more circuits of the room. Business and pleasure: where did one end and the other begin?
Virginia felt a little drunk.
Not so drunk that she couldn’t have another drink, especially after a few more dances, but drunk enough to wish that she was dancing breast-to-chest with Nick’s cute brother Jason, and being pulled up onto the stage, as Tania had been ten minutes ago, squealing and protesting, to take the Olivia Newton-John part (diffidently at first, but, halfway through the second verse, with some gusto) in ‘Summer Loving’. Almost drunk enough to think that Andy Simich wasn’t that bad-looking, really, even if he was known, apparently quite comprehensively, as the Nissan King.
Quite drunk enough, right this minute, to feel like having a doze in this cool, quiet toilet cubicle, or at least just sitting here for a few more minutes before getting embroiled in any more serious conversations.
It was her dress, you see: it seemed to cling to her and grab at her and twist all around the place, so she felt half-naked without underwear, and it was all wet and sticky where someone had spilled their drink down her left leg. It was so uncomfortable.
Doors clanged open and closed, and she could hear waves of women’s voices, footsteps, bursts of running water, the whiz of zips, ripping paper, laughter and swearing and an occasional cough. Virginia sat quietly, her breath steady, and leaned her head on to the cold wall of the cubicle. A pleasant chill blew onto her scalp from the slightly open window set high into the wall. She could hear the band in the distance. Wasn’t that ‘Cheryl Moana Marie’?
