by Gloria Bevan
‘But how could that be?’ Tracy asked wonderingly. ‘You have so much here, all the luxuries of modern living.’ Her gaze moved to a Samoan woman of generous proportions who was making her leisurely way along the pavement, a woven basket of banana-palm swinging from a plump hand. Loosely fitting cotton frock, flowing dark hair, bare brown feet in rubber thongs, there was no doubt that the Island women appeared cool and comfortable and carefree, but—Aloud she said: ‘They seem to have so little. Compared with Europeans, I mean.’
‘You reckon?’ He shot her a swift sideways glance. ‘They can show us a few things, all the same!’ All at once the chill note was back in his low tones. ‘They’ve got something that we Europeans seem to have lost somewhere along the way. To the people of the Pacific a little thing like quality of life is highly valued. People are more important than property, if you get what I mean. They know how to laugh and play and enjoy themselves.’
Tracy couldn’t help thinking that he could well do with some advice in that direction himself, but immediately she caught herself up. He had good reason for his bitterness.
‘I don’t blame the Islanders for coming here, even if it does mean leaving their tropical home.’ Her gaze shifted to the green hills around them, clear cut against the blue in the fresh atmosphere. She laughed lightly. ‘I’ve always heard that New Zealand was a pleasant place to live, a very friendly country—’ she broke off. Friendly! Oh lord, she thought, I hope he won’t think I’m getting at him! She stole a quick glance towards him, caught once again the glimmer of amusement in his eyes, the lifting of the mobile lips, and felt the pink mounting in her cheeks. Well, it was his own fault. He deserved the unintentional rebuke, considering the cool greeting he had accorded her this morning. She said hesitantly: ‘Where are we going? The Valley Vineyards, you said?’
‘That’s right. It’s a bit out of town ... used to be the end of the earth just about before they put the northern motorway through. It’s pretty quiet out there, just hills ... bush ... you’ll see. We’ll hit the motorway pretty soon now.’ They were sweeping past the green slopes of a golf course and now the wide road was lined with timber houses, fresh and gay with their pastel tonings. Each home was surrounded by green lawns and colourful with flower beds and blossoming shrubs. Tracy had no idea that there were so many shades of hibiscus blossoms, flame, burgundy, scarlet, salmon, cream. Everywhere was greenery, shrubs, bushes, the graceful foliage of tall evergreens. It was all so pleasant, even more attractive than she had envisaged. If only ... Unconsciously she sighed, then turned her attention to the highway. They were swinging into the wide lines of a smooth bitumen road built on a causeway and in spite of herself her spirits lifted. Everything was so new and different. Even the light seemed to possess a special luminous quality that made colours of the landscape seem deeper, more intense. On either side lapped the waters of the harbour and in an inlet ahead she glimpsed modern ranch-style homes clinging to the cliff edge. Below, pleasure craft varying from kayaks to dinghies, catamarans to keelers rocked at anchor in the sheltered bay. The graceful arc of a bridge spanned the harbour and beyond, guarding the entrance and visible from every angle, rose the almost perfectly symmetrical twin peaks of a volcanic cone.
‘What a beautiful harbour,’ she spoke her thoughts aloud, ‘so blue and sheltered. It’s that sparkle on the water that makes it so lovely.’
He nodded. ‘That’s what the Maoris thought when they called it Waitemata—“dancing waters”. They had quite a knack for naming, those old-time warriors.’
She laughed lightly. ‘Hadn’t they! But Auckland, that’s not a Maori name, of course?’
‘You’ve got me there! Though the Maoris had their own name for the isthmus. It was known as a contested land—Tamaki-makau-rau, “Tamaki of a hundred lovers”. You’ll see why it was so sought after when you’ve been around here for a while. It’s got a lot going for it, Auckland has—bush, endless sandy beaches, a couple of big harbours, not to mention a sub-tropical climate, outdoor living.’ He grinned. ‘You could say that the Polynesian way of life has rubbed off quite a bit on the rest of us. Might even get into the way of it yourself, if you stick around for a while.’
If ... but she refused to allow him to spoil things for her. It was true that after what had happened since she’d left London, her stay here would be brief, but for all that she made up her mind that while she was here she would see all that she could of the district, learn something of the culture and way of life of the country.
‘That mountain that seems to rise out of the sea—’ she couldn’t seem to take her mind from the shadowy peak, bush-covered, shading to violet where long cloud shadows slanted across the dense vegetation, ‘doesn’t anyone live there?’
‘On old Rangi?’ For a second his glance moved over the waters of the harbour. ‘Rangitoto’s part of Auckland, the first thing you look for when you come back from a trip overseas. It’s quite a place! Don’t know if you’re interested, but it’s the most recently active volcano in the country, and that’s saying something in a place that happens to be a city of extinct craters.’
‘Recent?’ her glance slanted up at him.
‘Give and take a few hundred years! Old Rangi’s just one big lava rock. Boy, you’ll soon find that out if you take a walk over the scoria tracks to the summit. It’s a terrific view up there, though, well worth taking on the rough paths! There’s a fern grotto on the way up with vegetation that they tell me grows nowhere else in the world.’
‘Could anyone go up there? I mean, could I—’
‘Sure. There’s a launch takes off from the wharf steps most days. There are a few baches there—week-end cottages to you—hidden away in the bush. It’s only a short spin over to Rangitoto.’
Her gaze was still fixed on the misty blue-grey slopes. It was the first landmark she had noticed on her arrival in this unknown land. ‘I’d love to go there one day,’ she murmured, then immediately regretted the words, for he would think she was asking him to take her to the island. Worse, his silence made it all too clear that he was avoiding the trap. Nevertheless, between them they had managed so far to avoid any personal conversation on the drive to the vineyards, which was something. He can only be nice to me when he forgets, she thought unhappily. Forgets what? That I’m Alison’s cousin and deep down I’m just like her, or so he imagines, wealthy, spoiled, demanding. Or could it be that he dislikes me because I’m not Alison? If only she knew the truth of it all!
Presently they left the high-speed lane of the winding motorway to swing into a smooth suburban road lined with gaily painted timber houses set among spacious lawns. As they went on homes became more scattered, giving way to orchard areas where fruit trees, heavily laden, stretched away behind avenues of tall native trees. At roadside entrances Tracy caught glimpses of notice boards:
Fruit for Sale Peaches, Apples, Pears, Weeny Grapefruit Melons, Passionfruit.
Ahead a heat haze shimmered on the hot bitumen of the roadway and all around rose what Tracy thought must surely be the smell of summer—a blending of dried grasses, the aromatic perfume of white daisies that raised their tall stems from the grassy verge, smoke drifting from tea-tree logs smouldering in a nearby paddock.
Then they were sweeping up into hills thickly covered in dense native bush, sombre in the shadowed valleys, glinting with lighter green where umbrella-like fronds of pungas were bathed in sunlight. Occasionally she caught the gleam of a brightly painted roof amid surrounding greenery. Then all at once through a gap in the hills she glimpsed a wide harbour, the tranquil depths reflecting bush growing to the water’s edge in deep inlets far below.
‘So that’s Auckland’s other harbour? The one you told me about?’
He nodded, his eyes on a sharp bend ahead. ‘That’s the Manukau, and mighty different it is from the Waitemata. It looks peaceful enough today with all those reflections, but don’t let it fool you! There’s a treacherous bar at the entrance and parts of it are pretty rugged ... heavy surf, reefs
. All the same, it’s got something—’
‘You mean it’s a sort of challenge?’ She couldn’t resist the teasing shaft. ‘Great for fishing, surfing—’
‘You’ve guessed it!’ She was surprised to see that he had lost his grim expression. For a moment he looked younger, more carefree, as though, she thought with an odd little pang, they were any couple anywhere, a man taking his girl for a drive on the most perfect of days. Suddenly she was swept by happiness, piercing and sweet, that took her utterly by surprise. It’s this first glimpse of a new country, she told herself, where everything is so different, so unexpectedly fresh and lovely. It’s always this way they say when you travel overseas. There’s never anything to equal the first impressions ... exciting, stimulating, almost... like falling in love. She took herself in hand, brought her roving thoughts back to Stephen Crane’s vibrant tones.
‘The Maoris—’
‘I know,’ she cried, laughing. ‘You’re going to tell me that they thought up exactly the right name for each of the two different coasts? A sort of double-barrelled inspiration that fitted perfectly?’
‘You guessed it.’ He swept around a bend obscured by overhanging ferns. ‘The east coast, where you landed this morning, they named that Tai-Tamahine, “the sea for girls”, but out here on the west coast, that was Tai-Tamatere—’
‘I know! “The sea for men”!’
‘You almost got it! “The man-like ocean”, actually. It took a pretty strong warrior to man the canoes on the dangerous rip. Not many Europeans could handle a craft on this coast in the way those old seafarers did in their curved canoes!’ He turned towards her and something in his swift gaze made her feel confused. There was something definitely disturbing about him, call it a personal magnetism, that made her voice oddly tremulous. ‘I must admit they had a point there.’
She pulled her thoughts together, made her tone light and impersonal. ‘Have we far to go now?’ They were climbing up into the mountains studded with bright roofs where homes were hidden in the bush. From the roadside the boles of giant kauri trees rose straight and tall to pierce the blue and fern and punga trees enclosed them in a world of cool shadows.
‘No distance. We’ll hit the valley road any minute. There’s the signpost—’
‘Where? Oh, I see.’ A faded board nailed to a massive tree trunk and almost entirely hidden by spears of thickly growing flax loomed up before her. She could just make out the weathered black lettering, Valley Vineyards. An arrow pointed apparently in the direction of dense bushland ahead.
Like everything else on this unpredictable day, however, it was the unexpected that happened. They rattled over rickety planks of a one-way bridge spanning a creek below, swung around a hairpin bend and Tracy found herself on a rise overlooking acres of terraced grapevines. Verdant under the sun the long avenues of vines with their unbroken masses of black and golden green stretched row after row in the sub-tropical valley.
‘But how funny,’ she was speaking her thoughts aloud, ‘all this way up into the hills—“mountains” they’d call them where I come from—and then, almost at the top of the range, to find a valley—’
‘It’s quite something, isn’t it?’ It seemed that at last she had hit on a subject that really interested him. A look of pride crossed the dark face. ‘You don’t expect to see a thing way up here in the bush, then Wham! You swing around the bend and it hits you!’
Pulling up to the side of the road, he waited while a truck piled high with crates of wine lumbered past on the narrow track with an inch to spare. From the cab a stockily built man of middle age with furrowed, deeply tanned skin and intensely blue eyes grinned down at them and Stephen raised a hand in a gesture of greeting.
‘One of your trucks?’ Tracy inquired.
He nodded, reaching towards the starter button, but it was clear that his thoughts remained on the sunsplashed valley below. As they came nearer Tracy discerned women pickers, moving along the long avenues of vines as they harvested the grapes. In spite of the heat, it would be not unpleasant work, she mused, out there in the fresh, bush-spiced air, gathering the clustered grapes and filling the wooden boxes. Her gaze moved over the picturesque surroundings. ‘What a lovely place ... hidden among the bush ... and so sheltered, by those tall pines and gum trees.’
He guided the car along the narrow path. ‘Guess that’s what old Grandfather Crane decided when he arrived in this country from England and started looking around for somewhere to invest his fifty pounds of capital.’
‘Fifty pounds! That wouldn’t go far, even in those days!’
‘It didn’t! But he had something else that was worth a lot more than money, as things turned out. He had a French wife, one of a family of wine-makers for generations back, and it was she who put the idea into his head. They looked around for somewhere to get started and decided that this was it. Folks told them they were crazy. The land wasn’t suitable, too poor, they said, only good for gum-diggings, and how about the heavy native bush? How were they going to clear that, for a start? They just took no notice, got stuck in, cleared the land, dug out the ground for a cellar. They tried out the different varieties of vines that Grandmother de Thierry had brought out with her from France and in the end found just the right ones that suited the soil. Only half an acre for a start—’
‘Goodness!’ Tracy’s gaze moved beyond the cleared valley to a sea of tea-tree, the green growth laced with creepers and ropes of black supplejack, fern, flax. ‘They had no modern machinery in those days. Whatever would they use to clear such heavy bush?’
He grinned. ‘They had what it took! Guts, plus an axe and a slasher! They burned off the heavy stuff, grubbed out tree roots, cut away undergrowth and fern. Grandmother de Thierry helped too. That first year they had a little shed on the property and installed two wine vats. The next year they added a lean-to and pulled out an acre of vines. Before long Grandfather was crushing the grapes in a backyard cellar in a little kauri-studded handpress he made himself. It was pretty poor stuff they made at the start, but,’ once again she caught the note of pride in his tones, ‘a lot of wine has flowed since those days. They say it takes three generations of wine-makers to get results, and if that’s true, I guess I qualify.’
‘And now,’ she prompted, ‘you’ve got a market for it all?’
‘Just can’t make enough of it.’
‘So it’s easy?’
‘Easy?’ he threw her a rueful look. ‘Last year a farmer over on the next hill was spraying his gorse by light aircraft when there was a wind change and our vines copped it. It didn’t take much of the poison to put finish to the crop. The year before I’d sent the pickers home, decided to leave the harvest until the next week. That way I figured I’d get not just wine but very good wine. That week we got heavy rain that took the sparkle off the grapes.’ He shrugged broad shoulders. ‘It was a calculated risk, of course, it always is. I just happened to lose out that time.’ He sent her the quick smile that illuminated the dark face. ‘I’d do the same thing again, too, take a chance on the harvest, maybe, but on the quality of the wine—never. For all the risks it’s a game that happens to suit me, the only game I know.’ There was no mistaking the enthusiasm colouring his tones. ‘It’s only a small place as vineyards go around here, but I’m hoping to make Valley Vineyards a name that stands for something worthwhile in good matured wines.’
‘But wouldn’t your grandparents find that there was a big difference between grapes grown in France and the same vines grown here in New Zealand?’
‘They found out all right, but it didn’t stop them pushing ahead. Why should it? Grandmother de Thierry used to say that they had the same father, the sun, but a different mother, the earth. They had the right idea that New Zealand wines should be judged on their own merits, like the rest of the wines from the new world—there’s the house, up on the hill.’
They swept along a path and all at once they were on a winding drive. Tracy looked eagerly ahead, her glance taking in the
sprawling modern timber home standing high on a rise, its wide plate glass windows overlooking the terraced vineyards. On the flat ground below were garages, a sign ‘Office’ and steps leading down to a cellar. ‘Your brother Cliff, was he dedicated to wine-making too?’
‘Not really.’ There was a subtle alteration in his tone. ‘He wasn’t all that wrapped up in the game. To him it was just a job, something to keep him going financially between expeditions. It was the mountains he liked. He was pretty keen on climbing. Working here in the office was just a fill-in. The accident put finish to all that, of course.’
Now she was certain of the bitter note in his voice. She could have bitten out her tongue for having introduced the subject of his brother. A mountaineer with leg injuries. It didn’t require a super brain to work out who Stephen Crane was holding responsible for that! Just another black mark against Alison and, indirectly, herself!
They were approaching the house now. She could see blossoming shrubs that made splashes of colour on the lawns, a long flower garden running alongside the path. Then they were pulling up at the entrance and Stephen was opening the car door for her.
‘Hello there!’ A slender figure came running down the steps towards them. ‘You’re Tracy, aren’t you?’ Tracy felt the warm grasp of a small age-freckled hand and for the first time since her arrival in New Zealand was aware of a genuine friendliness.
She smiled. ‘I’ve heard about you from Alison.’
‘Oh—Alison.’ A shadow passed over the soft brown eyes with their carefully pencilled brows, but the next moment it had gone. ‘Yes, of course. I thought you were never coming!’ She had a bright smile and a youthful voice. ‘I’ve had coffee on the perk for ages. What happened, Steve?’ She swung towards Stephen who was lifting Tracy’s luggage from the back of the car. ‘Couldn’t you find her?’