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to see you.'
'You've seen me several times lately. It hasn't done either of us much
good, has it?'
'We can't talk with Holly around, and you know it.'
'Where is she now? With your mother?'
'My mother?' He seemed nonplussed. 'My mother died.'
'Shock washed over her. Her eyes dilated, staring at him. 'Died?'
'Soon after you left she had a heart attack, and from then on she was
never well. She had another attack that killed her about six months
later.'
'But I thought that she ... I thought you would have ... She wasn't old.
Oh, Drew, I'm so sorry! I didn't know anything about it...'
His glance flicked over her coldly. 'No, well, you took good care not
to, didn't you? Look, we can't talk here. Come on, let's go to my car.'
Still mentally reeling from the unexpected news, she allowed him to
take the parcel from her arms and lead her to where his car was
parked. He threw the materials on the back seat and said, 'Do you
want to go home, or shall we find some neutral territory?'
'What do you mean?'
Impatiently he said, 'It's a bit early, but we could go somewhere for a
couple of leisurely drinks, and then dinner.
Neutral ground sounded like a good idea. A nice public bar and
restaurant where a civilised discussion couldn't turn into something
more physical, and social convention prohibited raised voices.
She said, 'All right, but I don't want to be out very late, I have some
work to do.'
He seemed surprised at her acceptance, but quickly hid it and started
the engine, asking, 'Any preferences?'
Karen shook her head. 'I'll leave it to you.'
'How remarkably amenable of you,' he murmured.
'If you're going to spend the time sniping at me, perhaps we should
call the whole thing off right now,' she retorted.
He swung the car into the stream of traffic. 'I'll try not to. Only I'm
afraid it's a little difficult to refrain when you're around.'
'Then I don't understand why you want to be around me.'
He glanced at her and said under his breath, 'Maybe you're not the
only one.'
'What?' she asked, wondering if she had heard right.
'Never mind.' A bus thundered past them and nearly clipped the front
bumper as it roared into the lane ahead of them, then came to a halt in
front of a red light and sat panting and belching puffs of black smoke
from its exhaust. Drew swore quietly, and she firmly closed her lips
to allow him to concentrate on negotiating the rush- hour traffic.
At this time of the day, the city was noisy and reeked of petrol
pollution, and the denizens of the offices and shops were anxious to
shake its dust from their feet or rather, from the tyres of their
Skodas, Fords and Mitsubishis. But in the morning they would be
back in their offices, glancing up now and then to look out at the
sunshine dancing on the harbour, with the gently sloping hump of
Rangitoto drowsing in the distance, perhaps to wish that they were
aboard one of the yachts cavorting daintily about in seemingly
aimless fashion between the island and the graceful bow of the
Harbour Bridge. When she had first come to Auckland, Karen had
been lonely and heartsick, and short of money. She had welcomed
the low-paid job she managed to obtain in a clothing factory because
it brought her a wage that provided the bare necessities of food,
clothes and first a hostel bed and then a dingy one-room flat. She had
been intimidated by the size, the speed and the impersonality of the
city, but had wanted the camouflage of anonymity that it gave her.
She had been only going through the motions of living, enveloped in
a shroud of depression that threatened to engulf her. After those first
few years of simply gritting her teeth and forcing herself to work, eat,
and at least make an attempt at sleep each day, spending her spare
time locked in her spartan room giving in to her obsession with
planning impossible reunions, she made a conscious decision to pull
herself out of the slough and forge some kind of normal life for
herself.
First she discovered the public library. Reading was something she
had always enjoyed, and a good book had the power to make her
forget herself and her painful memories for minutes at a time. She
was to find that the span became gradually longer. Then she began
taking long walks at the weekends, exploring the Domain gardens
that surrounded the imposing, white, classical- style building of the
War Memorial Museum, a favourite venue for family outings and
tourist trips. Sometimes on a fine day, she would sit for hours
watching a succession of children throwing bread scraps to the ducks
on the pond, but that was morbid and eventually she stopped going
there. She tried visiting some of the city's smaller parks, and the
grassy slopes of the dormant volcanoes on which many of the older
homes were built, and the waterfront drive which ran for miles
around the bays and beaches. Always there were children, but she
gradually hardened herself to their presence until she was able to
ignore them.
Occasionally she treated herself to a bus ride to one of the further
suburbs, many of them fronting pleasant beaches which were a
summertime paradise, or a ferry trip to the north shore of the harbour
where more tree- shaded suburbs and more beaches awaited. Once
she took a day trip to Rangitoto and climbed to the summit to eat her
lunch overlooking the other islands that lay strewn on the Hauraki
Gulf. And later, when she had left the factory for a better job in a
high-class clothing shop, she explored the inner city and discovered
the cluster of secondhand bookshops in High Street, the delicatessens
and vegetarian food shops springing up nightly like mushrooms
crammed into spaces between offices and department stores, and the
boutiques that were producing overseas fashions within days of their
appearing in shows in Paris, London, and New York. She spent
numerous Saturday mornings in the multiethnic shopping centre of
Ponsonby Road, and among the classy speciality merchants of
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