Long Weekend

6

Long Weekend

    Nobody at RightSmart had imagined for an instant that Gail would forget about the threat to send Laurie off for a long weekend at Springer House B&B up at Potters Inlet, which was just as well, because she didn’t.

    “How was it?” asked Jase with a grin, on the martyr’s return to work on the Tuesday.

    Laurie hunched over her computer. “Shove off.”

    “No, honest! How was it?”

    Laurie gave him an evil look. “How do you think?”

    Jase leaned in her doorway gazing dreamily at her slightly cracked ceiling—the building was starting to show its age, not to say its jerry-built construction. “Piles of matching towels and little guest soaps in every ensuite, roaring log fires in every centrally heated room?”

    “Right, you goddit, so shove off!”

    Jase collapsed in sniggers, gasping: “Cripes, was it really like that?”

    “YES! And shove off or I’ll ring Annette and tell her how lovely it was!”

    The sniggers were cut off in midstream. “Shit, no, don’t do that!” he gasped.

    “See? Why should I be expected to enjoy the bloody place any more than you?”

    “Well, uh, right demographic: female, white-collar, over forty, um, female?” the male wanker offered feebly.

    “Male wanker,” replied Laurie with evil satisfaction.

    “Well, um, was the food all right, at least?” he asked feebly.

    “Actually it was bloody marvellous, so up yours. No horrid swirls or dots of olive oil.”

    Jase was of the generation that accepted these curious plate adornments as cuisine, likewise the strange little piles of lukewarm food that went with them: he smiled weakly. “Come off it, Laurie. What did you have?”

    “Starting when?”

    “Eh? Um, well, with your first meal, I suppose.”

    “Lunch on the Saturday. I know she gave me Friday arvo off but there’s no afternoon bus, if any of you fossil-fuel gobblers had bothered to notice, in between the sneering.”

    Jase was now very red. “Shit, Laurie, why didn’t you say?”

    There were several reasons Laurie could have given him, not in any order of priority, really, but one was certainly that while she was forty-seven she wasn't immune and Jase Durrant was a well-set-up, hetero guy of forty-two and the human spirit could only take so much. It wasn’t that she imagined herself in love with him, she was well past that sort of nonsense, but, her co-workers’ very obvious assumptions to the contrary, she wasn’t actually past sex. If it had been offering. Which it wasn’t.

    “I’m not incapable, that’s why. I got the morning bus on the Saturday.”

    As expected, a relieved expression came over his face and he didn’t ask when it left. When it left was at crack of dawn: six-thirty. Got you to Barrabarra around nine-thirty. There was no public transport whatsoever between Barrabarra and Potters Inlet, forty K further out. Since the wanker didn’t ask about that, either, Laurie didn’t reveal that Bob Springer, the B&B’s owner, had got it out of her that she was planning to take the bus and insisted on collecting her in his elderly station-waggon. He was a very nice man but it had been very, very embarrassing. As the bus had had two passengers left on it besides her (neither of whom got off in Barrabarra), Laurie’s gloomy impression that she was the only person in Australia who didn’t drive had been confirmed.

    “So what did you have for lunch?”

    Okay, the wanker had asked for it, so she let him have it. What made it better was that it was perfectly true. “Hot stuffed aubergines for starters, with ham and a bit of cream cheese mixed with the aubergine flesh, the chef said it was based on a Turkish recipe but not to hold that against him. The main was a Spanish dish that he often does in the cold weather. A stew of dried broad beans with potatoes and chorizos and I think a ham hock, in other words ambrosia. Possibly done in wine, who knows? Possibly with real Spanish paprika, before you start telling me what you and Annette saw on that foodie programme on SBS. It didn’t need any vegetables, but there was a side salad of the crispest, freshest curly endive ever, don’t knock it until you’ve tried it. I didn’t have room for pud so I just had a cup of real Greek coffee—the chef’s half-Greek, did I say?—and one of those little crescent-shaped almond biscuits that Lucullus used to serve up as a snack.”

    “Annette reckons they’re Lebanese.”

    “These were half-Greek.”

    “Hah, hah. Well, sounds okay, but I don’t much like dried beans. What did you have for dinner?”

    “Before dinner I had a nice lie-down to sleep it off. Let me see: Saturday... I had the baked salmon as my main because the spit-roast lamb or the spanakopita would probably have been too filling after that lunch. It was baked very, very simply, he often does it like that, he told me, with a little bit of fennel and a little bit of Riesling. Baked whole, of course, he doesn’t go in for nasty little packets of mutilated fish like on the foodie programmes.”

    “I never mentioned—”

    “No, but I’ve seen at least five with mutilated fish this year, Jase. Since you’re not asking I only had a bit of steamed fennel with the salmon; anything else would have insulted it. I was glad I’d only had the cold mushrooms for a starter. A la Grecque, I think. Then I had the salad course, since the miracle at lunchtime had given me an idea it might be rather good.”

    “All right, I’ll buy it. What was it?” said Jase heavily.

    “Ooh, yes, what? The salmon sounds lovely!” chimed in Christie from behind him.

    “Do come in,” said Laurie cordially.

    Not grasping that this was irony of the highest order—or possibly not caring—Christie came in and perched on the visitor’s chair, looking expectant.

    “Uh—actually you won’t believe it, so skip it,” said Laurie on a feeble note.

    “No!” cried Christie in anguish. “Tell us!”

    “It was diced beetroot and witloof. Well, David, the chef, he called it endive but Bob, the owner, he reckoned that was on account of his non-Greek half is English. Um, those pointy white things, Christie. Very bitter,” she said kindly.

    “Ugh, yes, I know! My friend Valda Mackie, well, she had a buffet-style banquet for her engagement party—see, Sean’s got a huge family and they couldn’t of left anyone out—and there was a beautiful mixed salad, with like a peacock centrepiece.”

    “Were the witloofs part of the tail?” asked Jase.

    “Yeah; they were bitter as anythink, Laurie, ya can’t of liked them! Valda said she should of warned me they were only for decoration.”

    “These were for eating. You might think the sweetness of the beetroot cancelled them out, but it didn’t. They sort of... balanced each other.”

    “You’re pulling our legs,” decided Christie. “She’s pulling our legs, eh, Jase?”

    Gail came in, looking bland. “No, she isn’t, Fee’s parents had the same thing. Her mum didn’t like it but her dad said it was the best thing he’d tasted since the chef’s spit-roast lamb. Did you have that, Laurie?”

    “Not that night, but I did on the Sunday. It was fabulous. Tender as anything.”

    “With garlic?” asked Jase.

    “Garlic, rosemary, ambrosia...” sighed Laurie blissfully.

    “I told you the food’d be bloody good,” said Gail calmly.

    “So you did. –Come in, Drew, I’m barely halfway through the report,” she groaned.

    Drew came in and, since Jase was leaning in the doorway, Christie had the visitor’s chair and Gail was leaning on the filing cabinet, perched a hip on the corner of the desk. “Go on.”

    “You asked for it. There was a separate cheese course on the Saturday night and don’t ask me why, but the chef advised me to have it after the salad, not last, so I did. French Brie. Nobody ever mention King Island in my hearing again, thanks.”

    “Annette does reckon that King Island Camembert’s disappointing,” admitted Jase.

    “Fancy. I did manage to squeeze in a little pud after that, as it was very light and delicate.”

    “The baked Alaska?” asked Gail.

    “Ooh, does he do that? No, this was a cold pudding. Starting in ice and ending in cream.”

    “What sort of ice cream?” asked Christie immediately.

    “I’m waiting for them to stick their necks out, Christie,” explained Laurie dulcetly.

    “Fee’s dad said the kiwifruit ice cream was a million times better than his wife’s kiwifruit anything but the pineapple was five million times better than that,” offered Gail.

    “Nope. It was only the one flavour, you couldn’t possibly have combined anything with it, does that help?”

    It didn’t and after various footling suggestions had been put forward, Laurie admitted that it had been lavender-flower and nobody need say anything: it had been like eating a poem.

    Nobody did say anything, in fact they were all looking rather stunned, even Gail.

    “I’ll skip an account of brekkie next morning,” decided Laurie, “’cos it was only ruby grapefruit and fresh croissants with a big bowl of hot milky coffee to dip them into.”

    “Hah, hah,” said Gail weakly. “Did you do anything between any of the meals?”

    “Not much, the weather was about the same as back here.”

    “All right, what was on for Sunday lunch?” asked Jase on a grim note.

    “I can’t remember all what was on, Jase, but what I had was homemade pâté with homemade brown bread, to die for, just a little grilled trout ’cos I decided to save room for dinner, and just a smidgen of hot nectarine meringue, you wouldn’t’ve liked it if you don’t like nectarines.”

    “Okay, Fee’s right: we oughta bite on the bullet and go. We don’t need to talk to the other guests, after all,” admitted Gail.

    Laurie had thought that that’d get to her: Gail adored nectarines and in fact she and Fee had almost come to blows over whether they should move from their pleasant but gardenless flat to a much trendier flat with almost a view of the harbour, if you went out on its minute balcony and hung off the end of it, or a slightly less trendy townhouse in a newish but up-market development halfway to Outer Woop-Woop with a slip of a garden in which a nectarine tree might be planted. The townhouse had won but only because the development was very near a motorway which would get Fee and the Porsche to work in double-quick time.

    “In that case, Gail,” she advised kindly, “don’t go into the lounge-room at all, don’t hang round in the passage, and don’t go on the verandah. I think that covers it. Aw, no: don’t go over to the crafts centre. And ask for your own table for meals.”

    Jase’s eyes had begun to twinkle somewhere near the beginning of this speech. “Who did you sit with, Laurie?”

    “Mr and Mrs Fowler, they’d been there before, so they were able to tell me all about the lovely landscapes for sale at the crafts centre, the lovely screen-printed silk scarves for sale at the crafts centre, and the lovely china painting lessons at the crafts centre. –Oh, and the quilting sessions, did Fee’s mum overlook those, Gail?”

    “She’s already a quilter,” replied Gail unemotionally.

    “Beg ya pardon.”

    “Yeah,” she conceded, grinning. “Well, that’s why we haven’t been.”

    “Annette’s mum’s a quilter, too. I’ll tell them about it,” decided Jase.

    Drew had a choking fit.

    “Now tell us that Stewart’s mum doesn’t go in for quilting!” he snapped.

    “No, she’s a real artist, ya twit,” said Drew feebly, wiping his eyes. “She’d like the food, though, but I dunno that she’d be capable of keeping her mouth buttoned all weekend.”

    “Gee: funny, that,” said Laurie sourly.

    “Did you end up by insulting these Fowlers? –Fowler by name and fouler by nature!” Drew discovered.

    “Feeble,” said Laurie weakly. “Um, no, but the strain of not insulting them ruined my weekend.”

    “I don't see what was wrong with them,” said Christie on a defiant note.

    “Uh—bit expectable, Christie,” said Drew weakly. “Go on, Laurie, what was next?”

    “Choice of liqueurs and TV in the lounge-room, or sleeping it off in my room.”

    “Hang on!” said Gail with a startled look on her face.

    “No, the concert was on the Sunday,” said Laurie heavily.

    “Oh! Right! –Cripes, if we do go we’d better take something to read,” she muttered.

    “Quite,” said Laurie sweetly. “Either that or just eat yourselves into a stupor. –It’s not hard,” she said kindly.

    “No,” agreed Gail weakly. “Go on, you might as well tell us the rest.”

    “Ruby grapefruit and croissants again for brekkie, was it?” said Jase with a tolerant smile.

    Laurie eyed him balefully and prepared to wipe it off. “Do me a favour! Fresh passionfruit on fresh pineapple. Really sweet and ripe, before anyone starts.”

    “They’d have been those Woolworth’s pineapples,” Drew conceded. “The supermarkets were full of them last week. Didn’t think passionfruit were in season. Might’ve been from the Territory. Well, yeah, lovely.”

    “Mm. Wouldn’t have done your system any harm, either,” noted Gail drily. “Or did you clog it up with more croissants?”

    “They are lovely, but about a million calories!” shuddered Christie.

    “Yeah—no, had a bit of cream in my coffee, though. After that it was a choice between a walk in the drizzle or a lovely sit-down in the lounge-room with Mr and Mrs Grahame with an E from the Banksia Room: the Fowlers had already driven off in their silver Lexus in search of the lady who makes lovely goats’ milk soap.”

    “There’s a really nice horse-trekking place next-door, you could have gone for a ride,” noted Gail.

    “Leave it out, the things are fifteen foot tall, with huge teeth, and they huff at you! And that’s only the riders,” she muttered.

    “Yeah, all right. Spare us the morning with the Grahames with an E: just skip to lunch.”

    “You’re the boss. I was planning on the spit-roast lamb for dinner, of course, so I had a minute helping of the bottled artichokes—he does his own—with sliced bocconcini, nobody tell me they’ve had the combo anywhere else, because you couldn’t possibly, David’s tastes like food. Spanish omelette for a main, I can only say that it makes you take a vow never to combine eggs and potatoes again, because it would be sacrilege. And if anyone was thinking of telling me what they saw on SBS,” she said, fixing Jase with a basilisk stare, “don’t, because David’s remarks on that were unprintable.” She switched the basilisk stare to Drew. “Unprintable.”

    “Yeah, Stewart’s mum’s were, too,” he said mildly.

    Laurie gulped. “Aw. Right.”

    “What else did you insult the omelette with?” drawled Gail.

    “Nothing, see. I just went into the lounge-room and had a coffee and a sip of brandy, until Mr Fowler came in and started telling me about the mileage he’d got out of, or possibly in, the Lexus. Then I discovered an urgent need to put in a private phone call to my invalid aunt in Birmingham.”

    “Birmingham, Alabama, or Birmingham, England?” asked Drew with a grin.

    “Either.”

    Drew and Jase collapsed in guffaws.

    “Ignore them,” said Gail kindly to Christie.

    “I am. A Spanish omelette sounds all right. I’d of had one of the lovely puddings, though.”

    Gail would have too, actually. “Too right. –Oy, Gutser!”

    “You’re the one that sent me up there,” responded Laurie. “What?”

    “You aren’t giving us enough intel on the puds.”

    “Sorry. Um, well, I can’t remember what they were at Sunday lunchtime, but the ones at dinnertime are very clear in my mind, even though the concert was after dinner.”

    “She must be mad!” said Gail unguardedly.

    “No, the idea is, the guests’d all be thinking about their rumbling tums if they don’t serve dinner first: Bob Springer explained it to me, Gail. They only have one sitting in the restaurant on concert nights, of course.”

    “Right. Well, go on, put us out of our misery.”

    “I can see that menu as clearly as I can see you,” said Laurie dreamily. “Starters: leeks à la Grecque,”—she managed to ignore the chorus of ughs—“char-grilled calamari, or the chef’s own chicken liver pâté. Mains: spit-roast lamb or mushroom moussaka. Salad: cos lettuce vinaigrette, in other words food of the gods, don’t ask me what he did to it but I could have died happy there and then. The other B&B guests skipped it, more fools them, but the foodies that had booked out the rest of the restaurant lapped it up, I’m glad to say. Cheese: something Greek or something blue, I dunno what the blue was but it was extra. Pudding: choice of three. Christmas pudding with hard sauce, chocolate mousse, or blackcurrant liqueur ice cream, don’t ask me how he got the liqueur into it but there was a pool of cold sauce as well as the ice cream itself and I have never eaten anything like it.”

    “You could have died happy,” recognised Jase, grinning. “Well, yeah, sounds great!”

    “We’re definitely going,” said Gail. “The concert good, was it?”

    Laurie sighed deeply. “Worth all the preliminary yatter from the Fowlers and the Grahames, Gail. There were some Swiss people came over from the ecolodge for it, and they said you’d have to pay megabucks in Europe for an Antigone Walsingham Corrant concert!”

    “Well, yeah, you’d have to pay megabucks at the Opera House, too,” recognised Gail drily. “Swiss, eh? Look up-market, did they?”

    “So up-market I didn’t recognise a single garment any of them had on, yeah. All hung round with discreet bits of gold, too. –The women as well as the men,” she assured her.

    Gail choked slightly but said: “Well, that’s reassuring, if Blue Gums Ecolodge is gonna hire our contractors.”

    “Manage to sleep after that, did you?” asked Jase kindly. “Or hang on: was there a supper?”

    “Just little nibbles,” said Laurie on a lofty note, not revealing that she hadn't been able to cram any in. “One was expected to mix with the performers while one nibbled.”

    “What’s she like, Laurie?” asked Gail curiously.

    “Quite tall, but not as big as what she looks on the stage in full panoply in a very wooden Australian Opera production of Samson and Delilah.”

    “That dress was a disaster,” she recognised. “I really meant personality-wise.”

    “Well, nice English voice, um, either aware of what she owes to her public or too kind-hearted to cut morons like the Fowlers down to size.”

    “Gracious?” asked Gail, cocking an eyebrow.

    “No!” said Laurie crossly.

    Gail blinked. Okay, the world-famous operatic contralto Antigone Walsingham Corrant hadn’t been gracious. “I suppose Daffyd Owens didn’t turn up as half-promised?”

    “You suppose wrong, then,” said Laurie smugly.

    “Oh, shit, Fee’ll kill me if she finds out; I was positive it was a bloody rumour and I never mentioned it to her!”

    “Well, I won’t tell her, but I won’t guarantee The Australian won’t, ’cos someone told me that one of the men in the foodie lot that came up specially for it writes rev—“

    “Don’t go on,” she groaned, covering her face with her hand.

    “Maybe she won’t see it, Gail,” said Christie kindly.

    “Uh—not unless the bottom falls out of the stock market or Bush starts another war; she always reads the reviews. Oh, well, tell me what he was like and get it over with, Laurie.”

    Laurie was rather pink. “I’m not musical, you know that, Gail. I thought he sounded wonderful. I did save the programme for you, only his songs weren’t on it, they weren’t sure he’d get there in time or how tired he’d be. Um, someone said his plane had a following wind from New Zealand. Um, there was a bit from The Marriage of Figaro and the other Figaro one that Mozart didn’t write, and a bit of Papageno from The Magic Flute. Most of the other stuff was German.”

    “Just tell me now if there was anything from Die Meistersinger and then you can take me out quietly and execute me.”

    “Ooh, can I watch?” said Jase with a laugh. “That’d be Wagner, would it?”

    “Mm,” agreed Gail faintly. “—Well?” she snarled.

    Laurie jumped. “I don’t think any of it was Wagner. Um, David said afterwards they usually make it fairly light and pretty for the B&B’s punters.”

    “Would this be David the chef, or Ms Walsingham Corrant’s brother, David Walsingham, the composer?” asked Gail very, very faintly.

    “Yes, I mean, both. I mean, sorry, Gail, it’s him. I thought you knew.”

    “What?” she croaked incredulously.

    “Yes, he said that serious composing doesn’t bring in the shekels and he’s always loved cooking.”

    “David Walsingham is the bloody B&B’s CHEF?” she bellowed.

    “Yes. I thought you knew,” repeated Laurie lamely.

    “I did not know! Look, Laurie, I have to say it, this sounds completely barmy!”

    “He said a lot of people think that. But he and his wife love it up there in the hills. They’ve got a little girl and they’re expecting another baby later this year.”

    “It’d be quiet enough, for his composing,” she said dazedly. “Potters Inlet?”

    “Mm.”

    “Did he play his cello?” demanded Gail tightly.

    “No. Bob Springer told me he only plays that for very small informal groups, like when his sister sings for them at Christmas. They’ve got an upright piano, it’s new. He played that for some of the songs, and Daffyd Owens played his guitar for some.”

    “Daffyd Owens never plays his guitar in public,” she said dazedly.

    “Oh. Well, it wasn’t a huge group, Gail, it was only in the lounge-room. Five B&B guests, they’ve only got the three double rooms, you see, and about eight people from the restaurant, and the Swiss ecolodge guests and some of their neighbours. There’d only have been about twenty.”

    “Fee is going to kill me. More especially when she cops a gander at the price on those tickets that were all I could manage to get for Owens’s concert at the Opera House.”

    “You should’ve gone up there instead of me,” said Laurie drily.

    “Yeah,” agreed Christie. “Stop blaming her, Gail, you could of rung them up and asked if this man was really gonna be there.”

    “Only if I’d believed the rumours,” said Gail dully. “Oh, well. Did they sing any duets?”

    “Um, yeah.”

    “Well, what?”

    “I dunno, Gail,” said Laurie miserably.

    “Look, let’s just agree she isn’t as musical and you and Fee, she just knows what she likes, and leave it at that, shall we?” said Drew lightly. He slid off the desk. “I’ve gotta get on with it, I’ve got the Braithwaites with a catering crisis—not another daughter’s wedding, their anniversary, this time—and Dr and Mrs Protheroe left in the lurch by their chauffeur again—not one of ours, thank God—and Morgan Colosimo Liebowitz asking for six competent tax accountants for private clients that are too small for the partners or the associates to bother with and too rich to be ignored, all of them guaranteed to have kept no accounts or to have kept them in a shoebox.”

    “Paul Field,” suggested Gail.

    “Mrs Field’s dragged him off to Club Med Noumea, he is nominally retired, Gail.”

    “That nice chap who’s doing manager for some private school—Jim Somebody.”

    “Jim Argyle; yes, I’ll get onto him. –You can tell me the rest over that mineral water and crispbread you’ll be having for lunch, Laurie,” he said kindly, exiting.

    “Hah, hah,” said Laurie feebly. “Anyway, the food on the Monday was just as glorious and the Fowlers and Grahames were just as foul.”

    “With an E,” agreed Jase, dragging himself off the doorjamb. “I’m looking for a replacement landscape gardener who won’t mind being told exactly what to do and what he’s doing wrong by Mrs V.J. Kumar.”

    “Who let her into the country?” asked Gail drily.

    “John Howard: her dad’s something very high up in the Trade section of the Indian High Commission and her husband owns that giant Merc dealership downtown where they asked you to please not touch the cars!” replied Jase with a loud laugh, disappearing.

    Christie was very pink. “Serves ya right. Honestly!” she said crossly to Gail, disappearing.

    “What in Hell was that about?” said Gail blankly to Laurie.

    “She thought you were being racist,” she sighed.

    Gail gulped.

    “You wanna wise up to yourself,” her employee advised her.

    “Yeah,” she said feebly. “I’ll watch it, in future. Got that programme?”

    “Mm? Oh—here.” Laurie delved in her battered handbag. “Not that. ...No. Um, what's this?” She screwed it up and biffed it in the bin. “Um... old bus timetable. They never come, anyway.” She biffed it in the bin. “Receipt for— Aw, yeah,” She biffed it in the bin. “Hang on... No, that’s Saturday’s menu.”

    “I’ll have it,” said Gail quickly.

    “All right,” replied Laurie, looking mildly surprised. “Hang on. No... No... Um—oh.” Reddening, she stuffed it away again. Too late, however.

    “Almost undoubtedly the only female in the movie-watching world still to carry a pic of Bogie,” noted Gail to the ambient air.

    “Shuddup, you had a crush on Jodie Foster!” she snarled.

    “When I was about twelve, yeah. That reminds me, Fee’s mum’s got a spare DVD of Sirocco, if you’re—”

    “Ooh, yeah! Where’d she get it?” she gasped.

     “—interested,” said Gail limply. “I think Fee said she found it for her on the ABC Shop’s website, strange though it sounds. It’s a very feeble rip-off of Casablanca, or so I’m told, but not feeble enough to rate the ABC actually showing it at dead of night after Parliament Question Time.”

    “Dunno why they imagine anyone’d wanna watch those wankers shouting at each other at gone twelve-thirty,” noted Laurie by the by. “No, you’re right, they’ve never screened it. Can I really have it?”

    “Yes, she doesn’t need two copies,” said Gail kindly.

    “Great! Um, I’ll pay Fee back for it, of course.”

    “No, you won’t. Found that programme yet?” returned Gail genially.

    “Hang on.” Laurie scrabbled in her handbag again.

    Gail watched her with a very mild expression on her face, not letting on that she’d now realised that the DVD could have been one of the expensive overseas ones Fee had bought her mum online—with difficulty, evidently DVDs of ancient movies that you’d think the sellers would be only too glad to get rid of had to match Australia’s whatsit, and a lot of them only matched the American or European whatsits. Which was very odd, because she, Gail Vickers, possessed a locally purchased copy of Das Boot which was playable on an Aussie player but which contained, as well as a truly horrible American soundtrack which didn’t match the lips, the original German soundtrack plus English and German subtitles— Forget it, the world was mad.

    “Ah!” she said, as Laurie held up the programme in triumph. “Um, she did sing these, did she?” she ventured, somewhat belatedly.

    “I couldn’t swear to it,” replied Laurie calmly.

    No. Right. Sighing, Gail conceded: “Well, at least you enjoyed the concert. And the food.”

    Laurie was rather flushed but the building was very warm and what with that and the Bogie incident Gail didn't notice.

    “Yeah,” she agreed. “The bed was extra-comfy, too.”

    “Good,” allowed Gail, going out.

    Laurie’s flush didn’t abate for some time and instead of getting on with her work she just sat in front of her computer staring vacantly into space. Inevitably—Laurie wasn’t so far gone that she didn’t tell herself wryly it was inevitable—the long weekend up at Potters Inlet had resulted in a hopeless and overwhelming crush on Daffyd Owens. Now in his early fifties, the singer was still, as the entire opera-loving world knew, the perfect Papageno, he was burly, broad-shouldered, and muscular, with a mop of untidy dark curls—and, it dawned on meeting him in person, very bright blue eyes with huge curled lashes that no man of that age had any right to—and he was very, very masculine. Besides having a voice like Fischer-Dieskau at his peak.

    “Okay, just shoot me now,” decided Laurie with a deep sigh. She got up the job file for Judge and Mrs Anderson’s cook-housekeeper. Mrs Anderson had been very pleased with the temporary cook RightSmart had provided when theirs had let them down badly—the woman had had a huge Lotto win and told them where to put it, and good on her! But of course to the Andersons of the world the battlers had no right to anything, let alone the choice of whether or not to work. The temporary cook, one Julie O’Donnelly, had reported that she’d been grateful for the job but she wouldn't work for the old bat permanent if her life depended on it, and did Laurie realise she called him “the Judge” all the time? Perfectly understanding this meant when the cow was speaking to her social inferiors, Laurie considerately hadn’t put Julie forward for the job with Dr and Mrs Caswell, because she called him “Doctor” all the time.

    According to the job file, Mrs Anderson had asked Julie to prepare, amongst others, finger-food for a party of fifty, roast quail for a dinner party of eight, salmon steaks for a dinner party of twelve—“Nasty little packets of mutilated fish,” muttered Laurie—and a cold chestnut mousse thing called “Nesselrode Pudding” which was so up-market it had only been served on an evening when “the Judge” had invited the Attorney-General. The nasty little piles of calorie-less stuff Julie had been expected to serve when Ma Anderson had her cronies to lunch were of course completely expectable. Laurie’s favourite in the Gruesome Up-Market Stakes was the salad of rocket leaves and sliced star-fruit lightly dotted with balsamic vinegar and lime zest. Sushi was also popular with the lady lunchers: three tiny rolls of rice in seaweed per person, topped with a few globules of salmon caviar, beautifully presented on small, square, deep blue plates with a few strands of chive laid carefully on the side. With it the ladies drank Pellegrino, which according to Julie woulda cost more than the rest put together—given that the greater portion of the salmon eggs would go into the fridge to be served up later in the week for a dinner party of six, with half a fanned avocado per person and the remains of the chives from the same bunch. True, you never had to worry whether the avocados were ripe when you did the shopping for Mrs A...

    Laurie found she was staring into space again. “Rats!” she muttered crossly. “Forget him, you’ll never see him again! –Unless you’ve got a hundred and twenty-odd to fling at the flaming Opera House,” she conceded sourly. “—For the cheap seats,” she noted viciously.

    “Here,” said Gail kindly, handing her a huge, shiny document a couple of weeks later. “Thought you might like to see— What’s the matter?”

    “Nothing!” gasped the puce-faced Laurie. The document was the souvenir programme, so-called, of Daffyd Owens’s concert at the Opera House. It might well have been a souvenir but it was hardly a programme. Most of it seemed to be shiny, coloured ads for up-market crap that only Opera House season-ticket holders could afford—help, this one was for a Ferrari shop!—and the rest was polysyllabic blather...

    “There’s nothing in it, of course,” said Gail, eying her uncertainly. “There is a list of songs, but it’s not the ones he did the other night as such, it’s all the ones he’s doing on this tour. Fee’s marked the ones he actually sang.”

    Laurie turned over feebly.

    “Further on,” said Gail unemotionally.

    “Yeah. Um—this can’t be right.”

    “No, it isn’t, that’s the middle. Crap about Mahler, though his name doesn’t appear in it except in the very, very small print where they acknowledge who they ripped it off from—though not where, could have been published anywhere at all. Not that we wanted to know. Further on. –He didn’t sing any Mahler, by the way.”

    Feebly Laurie turned over. More blather and a big, shiny, very old but very familiar photo. “Um, Richard Bonynge wasn’t conducting, was he?”

    “No. Further on.”

    “Um, did this other man conduct?”

    “No. Further on. Ignore that crap about Wagner completely, Fee got so steamed she threatened to rip the page out. –Joan Sutherland’s got nothing to do with it,” she warned as Laurie turned over dazedly. “Ignore that. Think Daffyd Owens once sang with her, when he was just getting started. Or not, the article doesn’t say, but Fee had a vague memory of it.”

    Finally Laurie found the list of songs, wedged between a huge ad for Chivas Regal and another huge ad for a humungously expensive jewellery boutique in Double Bay. The titles Fee had ticked weren’t together, they were all over the show. Um, the list wasn’t in alphabetical order, so... No, it wasn’t in order of the composers, either. “Um, I see. Well, thanks,” she said feebly. She closed the document, inadvertently looked at the front cover again, and turned puce once more.

    Gail’s eyes began to twinkle. “Good-looking guy, isn’t he? Astoundingly enough that photo wasn’t taken thirty years back. Or forty, in the case of Mr Bonynge. Or fifty, in the case of La Stupenda, of course.”

    “Shut up, you said yourself that Fee’s got an old recording of her doing the Waldvogel that you bawled over!”

    “A fifty-year-old recording—mm,” agreed Gail drily. “Well, if you’re that struck by Owens you can keep it— Shit,” she muttered as tears began to trickle down her employee’s cheeks. “Come on, Laurie, this is silly, it’s only the bloody menopause,” she said kindly.

    “I know,” said Laurie, trying unavailingly to stop. “He was awfully nice to everyone at the B&B and he’s got a lovely smile and a real sense of huh-huh-humour!” she wailed.

    “Jesus,” said Gail under her breath. She came round the desk—with some difficulty, all of RightSmart’s offices were distinctly cramped—and got her arm round Laurie’s shoulders. After quite some time, during which Laurie used up the last of the tissues in the box placed on her desk for candidates, she said mildly: “The fault, dear Brutus, is in our stars, because we were born underlings. At least you met him, I’ll never even have the chance to meet Jodie Foster.”

    “No,” agreed Laurie soggily. “Thanks,” she said as Gail gave her a hanky. She blew her nose hard.

    Gail just patted her shoulder a bit. After some time she said: “Feeling better? Wanna talk about Dr and Mrs Caswell?”

    “Ugh! The sublime to the ridiculous,” admitted Laurie. “Um, yeah, thanks, Gail, I’m fine.”

    Managing not to give a relieved sigh, Gail went back round the desk and took the visitor’s chair. “Not Julie O’Donnelly, I presume?”

    “Nah, she calls him ‘Doctor’ all the time. Like, ‘We’d better see what Doctor feels like for dinner’—before we go ahead and cook what we were gonna do regardless!”

    “They’re all like that,” she murmured. “So who’ve you put forward?”

    “Andrea Gorton, she’s young but she’s on the same wavelength as Ma Caswell, nasty frondy Japanese salad greens-wise and bottles of imported water-wise, and Rosalie Sullivan, she doesn’t mind putting up with their crap, it’s all water off a duck’s to her, and she’ll do the housework without skimping. I did think Erin Teasdale might be interested but she’s doing twenty-five hours a week at the Greek patisserie place round the corner from her.”

    “Eh? She’s not Greek!”

    “Old Mrs Iannopoulos got too old, she’s in her nineties, and her granddaughter Karen won’t do it, she said it’s slave labour, and Mrs Iannopoulos Junior’s had a row with her sister, Mrs Carides, ’cos they’ve decided to move to Coffs Harbour. I mean, Mrs Carides is still there, she wants to work until they move, only Mrs Iannopoulos won’t take on the lady she recommended. So they tried out some stupid boy, I think he’s a grandson, but I’m not sure whose, but anyway, he burnt the pastry cases and let the custard cream go off, and Mr Iannopoulos threw him out. So Erin thought, nothing venture nothing win, and she took in some of her cream horns and Mrs Iannopoulos hired her on the spot! She’s getting on like a house on fire with Mr Iannopoulos, she said it’s easy, all you have to do is do what he tells you and agree with him, and you can’t not agree with him, he's the best pastrycook she’s ever met!”

    Gail eyed her drily. “Including her stint at The Hyatt, would this be?”

    “Especially including that!” said Laurie with a laugh

    At least she seemed to have cheered herself up. “Good. Well, not good for us, that’s Erin off our books, but good for her! Did you just put the two forward to Mrs Caswell?”

    “Yes; I didn’t want to put all our eggs in one basket. I’m putting Kath Keane and Grace Macdougall forward for the permanent job with Judge and Mrs Anderson. Kath’s just a plain cook but she can follow orders and she’s a very conscientious housekeeper, and Grace likes doing fiddly finger-food and that sort of crap, though she doesn’t clean a bathroom up to Ma Anderson’s standards. See, if one of them rejects both her candidates, I’ll put one of the others forward.”

    “Good. Um, you’d better warn them it won’t be permanent, of course: the Judge is the skinflint type that sacks his staff when he goes off on extended tours of Europe.”

    “They’ve been to Europe, they’re planning to go to China for the Olympics next.”

    “Okay, warn them about that.”

    “Um, last happy hour I was talking to one of the placement consultants from that Reilly’s branch three blocks over,” said Laurie on a cautious note. “She came over looking for the post office, only it’s not there any more, of course. She reckons they just pass on whatever the client says, they don’t warn them if it might not really be permanent if the client reckons it’s permanent, ’cos then they might go off and look for something really permanent through another agency.”

    “That’s how the big boys operate, yeah. I’ve found that being up-front with our contractors means we keep them on our books for their entire working lives. –I hope you didn’t make that point to this Reilly’s type?”

    “No.”

    “Good. Don’t: it might just sink in,” she warned, going.

    Laurie picked up the souvenir programme and looked at the photo of Daffyd Owens again, swallowing hard. What she hadn’t let on to Gail—or anyone, not that there was anyone to let on to—was that nice Bob Springer had jacked up a lift home for her on the Monday evening, so as she wouldn’t have to take the bus and miss out on dinner, which was included in the price. Or such had been his claim: on thinking it over Laurie had decided it couldn’t possibly have been, because she hadn’t booked in for the Monday night! The lift had been with some musical people who’d come up for the concert; they were also giving Daffyd Owens a lift into the city. It had been a large car, a five-seater, but nevertheless Laurie, in the back seat with the baritone, had been so overcome by the proximity that she’d been unable to utter more than a sort of squeak or croak for the entire three hours’ run into Sydney. Fortunately the musical couple had happily talked music with Mr Owens all the way. He had tried one or two innocuous topics on her, mainly wasn’t David’s food lovely, that sort of thing, but as Laurie had been unable to utter more than a strangled “Yes” in response, had given up and let the others hold the floor. As well as being very, very nice and having a lovely smile he also, Laurie had discovered in the car, smelled wonderful. Well, presumably it was Mr Ralph Lauren or, um, M. Saint Laurent or some such, rather than the actual Daffyd Owens, but— Yeah. It had sort of been the last straw.

    “Complete torture,” she muttered, as Daffyd Owens’s lapis lazuli eyes stared up blankly at her from the programme. “Never mind the food, that was the longest bloody weekend of my entire life. Jesus, why couldn’t I at least of said— And I did know what those pseuds were on about! Well, not all of it, but some. Shit. Well, me all over.”

    She opened a job file but then lapsed into a complete fantasy in which she’d taken over as cook at Blue Gums Ecolodge—they had a permanent chef who seemed very happy there—and Daffyd Owens (who as a matter of fact had been overheard saying to the famous contralto that the ecolodge sounded horribly poncy) came to stay there and, having been completely seduced by her wonderful cooking—it wasn’t, she knew a lot about food and could do a few dishes quite well—fell hopelessly in love with it and her and swept her off to luxury and his villa on Corfu and his chalet in the Austrian alps—Mr Owens had been overheard admitting he skied in Austria but that was as far as it had gone, Corfu hadn’t rated a mention—

    Idiot. Laurie put the souvenir programme in her bottom desk drawer and got grimly on with work. Lady to help Mrs Gutteridge in the house—or, slave. Yeah.

Next chapter:

https://temps-anovel.blogspot.com/2022/11/rightsmart-second-round.html