Hearts in the Land of Ferns

by Jude Knight

  “There are worse places than Valentine Bay to be beached.” Nikki had taken the drying cloth from Dave’s hand, had dried the last of the pans, and was putting them away, clearly familiar with Becky’s kitchen.

  “There are few better,” Zee said. And the place was improved by having her in it. New Zealand had a worldwide reputation for scenic wonders, and she was certainly that!

  They carried the food through to the dining room, where the table was already set for four—Dave and Becky at either end, and Zee facing Nikki between them.

  Dinner conversation at the Mastertons’ was always wide-ranging. The couple had lived all their life in Valentine Bay. They’d married young and started having babies almost immediately, and Dave had apprenticed for his father straight from school, then taken over running the family firm. But they were both intelligent people with an active curiosity about the world, and a determination to leave at least their corner of it a better place for their growing family.

  Zee had soon found his opinions needed to be well founded, and had changed his mind on quite a few things after a few polite but incisive questions from Becky or friendly derision from Dave.

  The first course passed quickly as they talked about people the current whereabouts of people Nikki had once known.

  “John Fallon and his family have gone to be missionaries in Vanuatu, Niks,” Becky said about one of their former classmates. “John was president of the AOG youth group, Zee, so it was no surprise.”

  “He married a Wellington girl,” Dave offered. “Met her at Vik.” Vik was Victoria, one of the big New Zealand universities.”

  “Pokey Kenworth is still around, though,” he added.

  “More’s the pity.” Becky wrinkled her nose. “That’s uncharitable, I know, but he is just the same, Niks. Anything for a dollar, and nothing unless he gets something out of it.”

  In Zee’s opinion, that summed the man up, though it was a surprise that he’d been a classmate of these three; he looked much older. Too much of the drink taken, Grandma O’Neal would have said.

  “He’s behind this hotel project you wanted me to look into.” Nikki made it a statement, rather than a question. “Or,” she amended, “he is the New Zealand front man for the project.”

  “Can we go somewhere with that?” Dave asked, but Nikki was shaking her head. “Maybe under the new Act, but the paperwork all seems to be correct. And if the council has approved it...”

  “Because Pokey’s father is a councillor,” Becky groused.

  “Nothing we can do about that. He’s only one councillor, and proving undue influence would be a problem, I reckon. Even if we all know it’s true,” Dave said.

  Nikki put her knife and fork neatly together on her empty plate. “I need to brush up on the New Zealand legislation and regulations, and I haven’t had time yet.”

  “Well, we’re not giving up.” Becky gave a sharp nod of the head. “But no more about that tonight, Niks. I’m not spending your first night home making you work.” She stood and began collecting the plates. Dave and Nikki both made as if to help her, but she waved them down. “I’ve got this.”

  Nikki turned to Dave. “I haven’t thanked you for intercepting Snoopy and Pokey at Gran’s funeral. I don’t think I could have borne to hear them pretend compassion. In fact,” she held out her hand to Becky, who put down the hot bowl of apple crumble and disentangled her own hand from the pot mitt in order to clasp her friend’s, “thank you for coming to both funerals, and so close together.”

  “Of course, we came to the funerals. Best friends forever, remember? I wish we could have stayed more than the day, Niks. I hated having to leave you there with them.”

  Nikki clearly knew who ‘them’ referred to. “It wasn’t so bad. Sarah is nervous around me. I never realized that but, now I know, I find her much easier. And I enjoyed spending time with Julia and Xander. My family, Zee. My half-sister lives with my mother Sarah in Brisbane, and my half-brother is in Sydney.”

  “Australia, right?” Zee confirmed. He knew perfectly well that both cities were Australian state capitals, but New Zealanders persisted in believing that Americans were ignorant of anything beyond their borders.

  “Julia is a sweet girl, and Xander has a sensible head on his shoulders for a twenty-one-year-old. I’m sorry, Zee. You can’t be interested in the complicated relationships in my family.”

  Zee doubted Nikki had anything to teach him about complicated relationships. The O’Neals took them to new heights, with his grandfather’s three marriages, his father on his fourth and two of his siblings on their second. And that didn’t count assorted uncles, aunts, and cousins.

  He told her what Grandma O’Neal had told him when he arrived in the O’Neal family as an eleven-year-old, grieving for his mother and bewildered by his change of status and name. “You get one year off from caring about what anyone thinks. When you lose someone close to you, I mean. We all need to make allowances for you, Nikki.”

  Becky approved. “I like that. One year to grieve and to bite everyone else’s heads off if they don’t let you. You’ve eleven months to go, Niks. Are you going to visit them while you’re out here? Your brother and sister?”

  Nikki was silent for a moment, intently studying the dessert Becky had just passed to her. “I don’t know what I’m going to do. I might not go back.”

  “You’re going to stay? Here in New Zealand? In Valentine Bay?” Beks waved her hands in spontaneous celebration, and the serving spoon in one hand flicked a spot of apple crumble crust onto Zee’s cheek. Dave sent him a commiserating grin, but Becky was intent on her friend and didn’t notice. “But you love what you do.”

  “I loved it. But...” She trailed off, clearly searching for the words to explain.

  “Is this about Tyler Russo?” Becky directed a glare at the spoon in her hand, then served Zee his bowl of dessert. The fiancé, and Pat’s accomplice.

  “Perhaps a bit,” Nikki agreed. “The ex, Zee,” she explained in an aside. “He’s part of it, Beks, but only because he is typical of what people become in that pressure cooker. Anything to win. Anything to get what they want.”

  Zee nodded. “I know what you’re saying. That’s what drove me out. I don’t believe—I don’t want to believe—that the only way to win is to make someone else lose.”

  “Too much of law is like that,” Nikki said, “but I thought we were working together as a team; trying to catch the corporate robber barons who don’t care what they break or who they hurt as long as there is money to be made.”

  Zee had a sudden urge to plant his fist in Tyler Russo’s face to make him pay for the regret that shadowed Nikki’s voice.

  “So, what will you do here in New Zealand?” he asked, hoping to bring the lightness back into her voice.

  “I don’t know. I don’t even know if I’ll stay. But there must be some way to use my skills that doesn’t involve trying to win at all costs.”

  “Cook at the takeaway,” Dave suggested.

  “Ptomaine poisoning,” Becky teased. “You know Niks doesn’t cook. How about gardening, Niks? We could do with a landscape gardener for our spec homes.”

  They made several more suggestions, each more ridiculous than the last. Laughing took Nikki from gorgeous to spectacular, Zee decided, as he helped carry the plates through to the kitchen where Becky filled the dishwasher and Dave topped up their glasses.

  In the comfortable Masterton living room, Zee resumed the conversation on a more practical note. “You’re a lawyer? There must be plenty of work for a lawyer.”

  Nikki shook her head. “I’m not registered here in New Zealand, though they’d recognize my qualifications if I applied and did the appropriate courses.”

  “Even without that, I imagine a lot of employers would want someone with your training,” Zee insisted.

  “Her degree is from Columbia,” Becky told him, her pride in her friend evident. “Anyone would be lucky to have her.”

  “My legal trainin
g has come in handy the past six months,” Nikki admitted, “while I’ve been looking after Gran and Poppa. Start a sentence with ‘In my experience as a lawyer,’ and the healthcare funders suddenly find they can do what they’ve just been saying they can’t do. But enough about me. What do you do, Zee?”

  Zee shrugged. “Dave gave me a job. I potter about here and there.” He and the Mastertons had kept his investment in Masterton & Son under wraps, but it had let the company expand their design side, with Zee supervising a couple of draughtsmen and building relationships with contractors and suppliers all over the region.

  “He’s too modest,” Dave told Nikki. “He is qualified in architectural and interior design—just not here in New Zealand. He’s none too bad a builder, either, but mostly we use him to measure up and plan the work.”

  “I need to talk to you about a measure and quote some time, Dave,” Nikki said. “Whether I stay or not, keep the house or sell it, it needs work.”

  Becky lifted her glass of lemonade—the next little Masterton was harboured within her, so wine was off limits—in a salute to her friend. “A lot of work.”

  “You’re not wrong, Beks,” Nikki agreed, “but it could be fun to bring it back to life again.”

  2

  Nikki walked along Beach Street, arm in arm with Becky, who had joined her on a cupboard-stocking expedition. “One last day of freedom before Jill leaves for Thailand,” she explained.

  The shape of the harbour had given Valentine Bay its name: a heart on its side. A gap at the eastern point provided entrance to the harbour. On the western side, directly opposite, the wharves and moorings of the fishing port occupied a rocky promontory between two gently curved beaches. North Beach was currently undeveloped farm and bush land, though the planned hotel would change that. On the shores of South Beach, the settlement spread from the fishing port around the curve of the southern lobe of the heart and beyond, stretching partway along the road that led to the historic lighthouse at the harbour entrance.

  Most of the shops in Valentine Bay lined one side of Beach Road or the other. That hadn’t changed. The shops themselves had—in her childhood, there’d been half a dozen businesses offering services and products to the locals and the rare visitor. A dairy, a fish and chip shop, a general store, a bakery, a book shop that also sold stationery and gifts, a garage with petrol pumps out the front and a workshop out the back. If any of those survived, they had gone upmarket to match the twenty or so others that now extended the shopping area far beyond the boundaries she remembered.

  On the coast side of the road, the shops, cafes and restaurants backed onto the beach reserve, a wide stretch of lawn with picnic tables and public barbecue stations scattered among the pohutukawa trees and plantings of tough flax and ornamental grasses.

  The businesses on the other side backed into the hill, no longer half farmland, but split up into residential lots with an eclectic mix of houses: Victorian villas cheek-by-jowl with modern beach extravaganzas and little square mid-20th century holiday houses, or baches as they were known here in New Zealand’s North Island.

  “There’s been a lot of building,” Nikki observed.

  “Business has been good,” said the builder’s wife, with satisfaction. “When Dave and I first married, he and his Dad used to travel all over the district to get work. Now, we have three times as many builders, and as much as we can handle right here in the Bay.”

  “How many of them are holiday homes?” Nikki wondered.

  “Around two-thirds, I’d guess, but half of those are weekenders. With the new road, we’re close enough even for people up from Wellington. We’ve got three weekenders on the fundraising committee for the school, and a lot of them made submissions against Pokey’s development. Let’s go in here, Niks. They make a seed loaf to die for, and you should try their focaccia.”

  ‘Here’ was Maggie’s Bakery and Tea Shop, with several tables inside and more on the extended skirt of the footpath. Nikki stopped just inside the doorway to absorb the visual and olfactory impact of basket after basket of baked delights. “What to choose!”

  “One of everything,” Becky joked.

  Nikki grinned, recalling their mantra when they were children at the sweets counter of the dairy. “Not hardly. Just what one woman can eat in a few days. I don’t have a freezer yet, remember.”

  “Best to buy fresh, each day,” offered the shopkeeper. She was a comfortably padded woman in her sixties, her lilac gingham dust jacket with lace-trimmed collar toning beautifully with the wisps of purple hair that had escaped the confines of her white cap.

  “Margaret,” Becky said, “this is my friend Nikki Watson.”

  Sympathetic hazel eyes met Nikki’s. “You’re the Watsons’ granddaughter. They used to speak of you, Ms Watson. I am so sorry for your loss. They used to come here to buy their bread when they were in the Bay. Your grandfather loved my cheese rolls, and your grandmother always bought an apple and cinnamon bun. She said she could never get them the same anywhere else.”

  “Well then,” Nikki decided. “I’d better have one of each.”

  Margaret bagged Nikki’s selection, while Becky hovered over the display case full of delicate cakes and robust slices.

  “Go you halves on a custard square?” Nikki suggested. They ordered a pot of tea to go with the treat, and took their plates to one of the outside tables.

  “What’s next?” Becky asked, craning to look at the notebook in which Nikki had written her shopping list. “Fruit and veg we can get at the superette. Just enough for the next two days, Nikki, because the weekend market is the best place for that. We’ll leave the meat till last. In this heat, you’ll want to get it home as fast as you can.”

  “I don’t have a lot of confidence in Gran’s old fridge,” Nikki mused. “I should probably do what Margaret suggested for the bread; shop for the day.”

  “Nicola Watson! Thought you’d have headed back to the bright lights of New York by now.” The speaker grabbed a chair from one of the other tables, and turned it back-on to Nikki’s and Becky’s table before straddling it. “Checking out the old home town, eh? Quite a bit bigger than when you were here last.”

  Pokey Kenworth. Sunglasses hid his eyes, and a cloth sunhat masked his bald patch, but if she hadn’t seen him at the funeral, she still would have recognized the raspy voice that hadn’t changed since he’d done his best to make her life miserable in high school.

  Thank goodness for dear friends, who had turned tables on him. When she’d refused him a date, he’d told the whole school that she’d been abandoned by her mother and didn’t know her father. She’d laughed that off—it was true, after all—but only until she heard his outrageous claim that he’d dated her back in Valentine Bay, had sex with her, and then dropped her because she cheated on him with anyone who would pay her fee. That story was around the school before she heard it.

  Becky and Dave took the lead in the revenge. Becky came up with some creative storytelling about the origin of Pokey’s nickname, linking it to the size and function of an appendage most male teenagers don’t want to have questioned. Dave, the captain of the first XV rugby team, enlisted his team mates to spread the tale in a whisper there and a snigger here. Since Kenworth was not much liked, people were happy to spread the tale and soon most of them believed he’d lied about Nikki in order to cover his own inability to perform.

  By the end of the school year, she almost felt sorry for him, and she was relieved when he did not return the following year. He joined his father’s real estate firm and their paths didn’t cross again. She’d heard he spent considerable effort over the next few years finding females with whom to demonstrate the falsity of the rumours.

  Thirteen years later, he headed the firm, since his father had retired to focus on duties as a district councillor, so Nikki was not surprised when he said, “I guess you need to sell the old house before you leave. Put it in my hands, and I’ll get you a good price, for old times’ sake. Of course, it n
eeds a lot of work, but I’m sure I can find someone in the market for a fixer upper.”

  “Thank you for the offer,” Nikki told him, “but I doubt I will sell.”

  “Keeping it for a rental, are you?” Pokey nodded, pursing his lips, his eyes narrowed as he considered this. “Not a bad idea. Valentine Bay is on the move, and the new hotel is going to put it on the map. You’ll need to do some work before it’s fit to live in, even if the rent’s cheap. Here, take my card. We manage property rentals. No need to worry your pretty little head about the place while we’re looking after it. In fact, I have some builders you can use—much cheaper than the Masterton & Son.”

  Becky enquired sweetly, “Cheap like the apartments in Brayden Street?”

  Pokey ignored her, continuing to address himself to Nikki. “You just give me a ring, Nicola. Or drop me an email.” He dropped his voice and leant towards her across the back of the chair. “I’m happy to make myself available to you at any time.” He waggled his eyebrows to underline the suggestive nature of the offer.

  Thirteen years had not improved the man. It had, however, taught Nikki the futility of arguing with people like him. “I haven’t made a decision, Mr Kenworth. But thank you for the card. Good day to you.”

  “Mr Kenworth? No need for such formality between old friends.” Pokey went to pat Nikki’s arm, caught her glare, and changed his mind. “Call me Pokey, like you used to.”

  Margaret emerged from the shop with their tea on a tray: a teapot under a knitted cosy, two cups on saucers, a small jug of milk, and a bowl of sugar.

  Pokey sneered. “You won’t appeal to the young crowd with that old-fashioned stuff, Maggie. You need decent sized mugs and a good barista. Yes, and a coat of paint to brighten the place up. If you’d accept my offer—”

  “Thank you, Margaret,” Becky interrupted. “That’s perfect.”

  Pokey tapped Margaret on the arm. “You might as well fetch me a cup.”

  Nikki decided to be firm. “I am sorry, Pokey. Becky and I were having a private conversation, and we’d like to continue it. Thank you for stopping by.”