A Jolly Downunder Yuletide

13

A Jolly Downunder Yuletide

    Postman saw the jumps, and his ears pricked. He quickened his pace. Grinning, I leaned over his neck, urging him to a full gallop.

    “Come on, then, old boy! Come on, Postman!”

    Behind us my sister said angrily: “I knew it!” and my mother said: “Oh, dear!”

    Postman flew over the jumps like a bird, and seemed ready to go on forever. I let him have his head for a bit, then slowed, and finally returned to the others at a gentle trot.

    “Alex, I thought you’d stopped jumping!” cried Mum.

    “Huh!” snorted Sarah.

    “That wasn’t a competition,” I replied mildly.

    Dad cleared his throat. “Alex, in this instant a soft answer isn’t going to turn away wrath, and you know it. Just don’t do it, old man, mm?”

    “Er—no. Sorry. But these jumps are nothing, really,” I offered weakly.

    “And I dare say that leg of yours is nothing, either!” said Sarah tartly.

    “Is it still sore, Uncle Alex?” asked Molly, perched on dear old Milly’s back with Cassie, who’d been leading them, hanging firmly onto the reins. Not that there was the slightest chance of Millicent Rose’s bolting: she was the best-mannered, sweetest-natured mare I’d ever had my leg across.

    “No, it’s not sore at all, Molly,” I replied. “And your Granny had a look at it this morning to make sure it was okay, and it is.”

    “Alex—” protested Mum faintly.

    “You said yourself it was healing nicely,” I reminded her.

    She’d also said the scar looked revolting and I should be very careful with it until the doc said those last stitches could come out. And not on any account to use “those horrid machines” in the basement. I’d have said a bit of mild exercise-bicycling would do the leg good, stop the muscles from wasting way entirely, which at the rate I’d been forced to go lately they must be doing. However, I’d merely pointed out that a bit of arm stretching wouldn’t hurt the leg. Mum had then dubiously tried the “arm stretcher”, found she couldn’t budge it, and said: “Good Heavens! This place is like a—a Mediaeval torture chamber, Alex! You can’t possibly enjoy all this stuff! Why don’t you get rid of it? Donate it all to a community centre, dear!” And gone off to commune with Stella. Far from becoming rivals as I’d feared, they’d happily joined forces, completely in accord over everything, but especially my foolhardiness.

    “Alex, it won’t go on healing if you tear it open again! –Say something, Charles!” she ordered Dad.

    “Your mother’s right, Alex, but you know that, don’t you?” he said in his usual mild tones.

    “She always is,” I acknowledged.

    “Alex, that isn’t funny!” cried Sarah crossly.

    “Never mind, dear,” said Mum heavily. “He’ll go his own way, whatever we say.”

    “Cheer up, Belinda, darling: you saw for yourself there’s no infection there,” Dad offered kindly.

    From high on Ring-a-Ding’s back Gavin contributed eagerly: “Yeah, it’s miles better! Hey, ya shoulda seen it when he come back from the Cup! It was all kinda puffy, and there was loads of pus, it looked awful! Gran, she put mercurochrome on it and made Cassie ring the doctor. Only I never saw what he done, I hadda go to rotten school,” he ended on a resentful note.

    “A lifelong grudge,” I remarked. “I have told you before, Gavin: he just had a good look at it, gave me a shot, and wrote some prescriptions, and, um, well, cleaned it out a bit.”

    “Yeah, ’r’an I missed it!” he said with the customary redundant R of the demotic.

    “Ghoul,” noted his aunt conversationally.

    “It would’ve been good, though,” my nephew conceded. On discovering that “everyone else” was going to ride, Ben had let old Fred put him up on Pounder, an ageing eventer who had once belonged to Jenny Crozier. He’d come with the stables. These days he was capable of walking the fair distance to the jumps Jenny had used for schooling her eventers, including him, presumably, but had shown no eagerness at the sight of them. He was a chestnut and wouldn’t have been bad-looking in his day, but now was distinctly stout. Ben hadn’t yet started to get his growth and his short legs stuck out, rather, on either side of the fat old slug, but nobody else appeared to find this worthy of note, and I just bit my tongue. Ben could stick on okay, he had quite a good sense of balance, but a horseman he was not and would never be. He hadn’t minded that Dad had led him all the way, whereas Molly had protested vociferously that she could ride by herself. A protest to which Cassie had sensibly been deaf.

    “You’re a ghoul, too,” I noted.

    Ben just grinned.

    Mum sighed but said: “Well, shall we have our picnic? We’d better sit under a tree, it’s getting very hot.”

    “Heck, it’s not hot, Mrs Cartwright!” cried Gavin.

    “It is to those straight out from an English winter, Gavin,” said Dad. “They were predicting snow when we left.”

    “Snow! Heck! –Hey, what happens, like, at Heathrow, when it snows?”

    Dad was flummoxed.

    “You’d never know you’d spent your working life in the aeronautical industry,” I noted. “If it’s really bad the planes are grounded, Gavin. One can’t fly with ice on the wings, it makes the plane too heavy.”

    “And not aerodynamic,” added Ben unexpectedly.

    “Yes, that’s right, Ben,” I agreed. Gavin was looking blank, though not admitting he hadn’t understood, so I went on: “That means the wing is the wrong shape for taking off. The air has to flow over it at a certain angle, and it won’t work if there’s solid ice piled on top of it.”

    Gavin’s eyes narrowed. “So the plane would crash?”

    “Yes, but no pilot’d be stupid enough to take off when his wings are iced up.”

    “No; but sometimes they run the risk of ice on the wings when they’re flying in really cold weather,” my nephew contributed.

    Thanks for that, Ben, I thought, my eyes meeting Dad’s. Next thing Mum and Sarah would be combining to order me to give up flying my Cessna.

    “Yes,” he said. “That is a hazard of flying in bad weather, but then, no sensible pilot flies when he knows he’s likely to encounter weather that bad, either.”

    “That’s right,” said Mum on a brisk note. “I hope everybody likes pork pies, we got some lovely ones at the supermarket in town, didn’t we, Cassie? Just fancy! Real pork pies in Australia! Now, come along, Molly, let Cassie help you off the horse, dear.”

    “She’s not ‘the horse’, Granny,” Molly reproved her: “she’s got a name.”

    “Off Milly, then,” said Mum weakly. From the look on her face she was wondering if Molly was destined to be a girl jockey. –Well, why not? Girls could do anything these days!

    So we adjourned to the nearest tree that was large enough to cast shade, hobbled the horses, not that they showed any inclination to wander, but there was a fair bit of empty Australia out there if they should feel a sudden desire for freedom, and settled down to an Australian picnic. Genuine little English-style pork pies, optionally with Christina Evans’s mango and marrow chutney (English vegetable marrow with tropical mangoes: the combination did create a certain feeling of disconnect, yes), slightly leathery fresh “baguettes” from the supermarket, cherry tomatoes which Mum thought the children would prefer to big ones, crisp cos lettuce from the Trethewin veggie garden, Aussie mousetrap which was every bit as bad as the English version, pea sprouts because Mum had found them in the said supermarket and been fascinated by them, and genuine English-style Heinz Salad Cream which Mum had been astounded to find in the ditto. Washed down with spring water for all, because Mum and Stella hadn’t bought any Coke, being in accord that it was bad for growing children and they shouldn’t be taught to expect it. Words to that effect. There were only bananas for pudding because although the nectarines in the shop had looked nice, they hadn’t been ripe (Mum) and they never were (Stella), and the pineapple was destined for Stella’s pineapple upside-down cake. No strawberries, no, Molly, you know too many strawberries give you a rash, dear, and you had some last night. “But I’m growing out of it, Granny!” Nevertheless. Have a banana.

    The three kids ate bananas which naturally had first had to be inspected narrowly for the dreaded black spot—presumably the belief that one spot meant the things were rotten was common to the youthful mind on both sides of the world. Cassie stuck to spring water, but Dad and I had recourse to the thermos of black coffee and Mum poured for herself and Sarah from the thermos of tea. Just like a picnic at home, really.

    When we got back Dad wandered into the bedroom I was now using up at the house, looking vague, and murmured: “Did you have to jump in front of them, Alex?”

    “Postman wanted to: he’s still keen as mustard. Seemed too mean to deny him the treat.”

    “Right. Whereas you couldn’t possibly have got up at crack of dawn to take him over the jumps.”

    I gulped. I hadn’t realised anyone had noticed me creeping out early.

    “Dad, I’ve been going bonkers for lack of exercise!”

    “Ssh, the monstrous regiment’ll hear you. You’re a benighted ass,” he sighed.

    “Yes.”

    He sighed again and wandered over to the window, staring out vacantly while I finished getting changed.

    Finally he turned and said reluctantly: “What is the picture with damned Anson, Alex?”

    “Vanished into the wild blue yonder. Well, evidently the New South Wales cops have had umpteen so-called sightings and Hawkes Investigators have had a number, too, but no likely leads.”

    “Mm. Look, old son, I really don’t like the sound of this last attack.”

    I didn’t know that I did, either.

    “I’ve done my best to play it down for your mother, but it’s only by the grace of God that you woke up, Alex.”

    “Yeah.”

    “I think you’d be a lot safer if you came home, old chap.”

    I sat down heavily on the edge of the bed. That point had already dawned, actually. Although…

    “If I did, all he’d have to do is change the colour of his hair, let his whiskers grow, and hop on a plane as one of his bloody aliases.”

    “Would he bother, though?”

    “I don’t know. I didn’t think he’d bother to come back to Trethewin,” I admitted.

    “No… Was there something here he was trying to get rid of, do you think?”

    Besides me, was this? “The only thing that springs to mind is the fake Munnings of the two ponies that was in the hall. It would have been one of the first things to go up. But I can’t see why that’d worry him: by that time he must’ve known that we’d discovered umpteen other fakes.”

    “Mm. Nothing special about it, then?”

    “No. It was no better or worse than the one that Marie-Louise Sale bought in Melbourne. And if he did particularly value it—say for instance something had been hidden behind it—he would have grabbed it before he did a flit, wouldn’t he?”

    “Yes. Er—unless he only found out about it later?”

    “Like what, Dad?”

    “We-ell… I did think of engraving plates belonging to his father, concealed under the backing, but I’m sure Mr Crozier would have noticed the weight of the thing was all wrong.”

    Yes, well, Dad’s mind was like that. Talk of thinking five contradictory things before breakfast!

    “Mm.”

    His eyes twinkled. “You thought of that two minutes after the fire started, didn’t you?”

    Something like that. “My best bet was an old passport of his father’s, either fake or a genuine one in someone else’s name: he was very like him as a young man. But I really don’t think anything like that’s feasible, Dad. And if there was anything valuable or incriminating concealed behind it, why wouldn’t his father have retrieved it long since? Straight after he got out of clink, really.”

    “Presuming he’s still alive, which hasn’t yet been proven, has it?”

    “No-o… I think I’d better get on to Lexie or perhaps Pete, see if they have any way of checking the age of the paint on the fakes.”

    “The experts from Melbourne? Yes, good idea. Might as well know what you’re up against,” he agreed. “It’s possible that Anson—Andrews, I suppose one should call him—recently found a whole cache of his father’s stuff. Possibly he died some years back and the mother’s just died or perhaps been put into a nursing-home, and he was sorting out her things.”

    I raised my eyebrows. “And in this cache—as well as the paintings he’s been selling all over the country—was a vital piece of information indicating just how dangerous the Trethewin fake Munnings was to Master Andrews?”

    “Very well, Alex, you thought of that weeks ago, too,” my father sighed.

    “Mm,” I admitted.

    After a moment he said: “The safe’s in the study, did you say?”

    “Yes. Other side of the house. Empty. Anyone with half a brain would have realised that Ralph Crozier must have emptied it after the old man went.”

    “I got the impression that this Ralph chappie has only half a brain, Alex.”

    Trying not to laugh, I admitted: “He’s not that bad. Just sat upon by the frightful wife.”

    “Mm…” he said, his eyes vague.

    After a moment I said resignedly: “Go on.”

    “We-ell… The fire got you out of the house, didn’t it? Half destroying it meant that it was unusable, standing empty. Perhaps the thing he was after was in the half he didn’t souse with petrol, Alex.”

    “Uh… It’s a big house, Dad. He could have nipped up any night and nicked whatever it was, I wouldn’t have been any the wiser. And then, fires are notoriously uncontrollable, aren’t they? An Australian, of all people, would know that!”

    “Would he?” he replied blankly.

    Oops. I took a deep breath and said: “Not a word to Mum or Sarah, Dad.” And retailed the good gen on bushfires.

    “Jesus,” he said numbly. “I had no idea… I mean, one sees various snippets on the news…”

    I nodded feelingly.

    “Er—look, I’d agree with your conclusion in general, old son, but in this particular instance? Head full of spite, inclined to arson anyway? And possibly, if he bothered to weigh anything up at all, he decided he’d rather run the risk of losing whatever it was in the fire than let you of all people discover it.”

    “Yes,” I said heavily.

    Dad sighed. “Okay, Alex, you’ve thought of that one, too.”

    “It’s hard not to mull it all over.”

    “Mm. Well, bloody Christmas is almost upon us, switch your mind to that.”

    I grinned. “Where did that ‘bloody’ come from, Dad?”

    He made a face. “It’s the thought of hot roast turkey with the trimmings in this heat, Alex!”

    “Yeah,” I agreed wryly. “Well, I gather that the Aussies don’t go in for all the trimmings, and there will be salad—with cherry tomatoes—and ice cream for pud, but with Mum and Stella jointly on the job, turkey is inescapable, alas.”

    He sighed.

    “Just thank your lucky stars,” I said heavily, “that Corey Mincey knew that it’d be impossible to get fully-ducted air conditioning restored in the time available—South Australian suppliers of anything you care to name have no commercial acumen whatsoever: convinced they have a captive market, you see—and on top of that, he knew where to go to physically obtain room air conditioners—‘reverse-cycle’ to the cognoscenti—and kindly hauled them up here at only intense pain to my hip-pocket.”

    “Yes. –Surely the things don’t reverse anything, Alex?”

    “Been there, done that, Dad,” I replied drily.

    “Got it,” he acknowledged. “Come on, then: ‘once more unto the breach’.”

    And we girded up our loins and went downstairs…

    “They’ve come! They’ve come! Alex! They’re here!” shrilled a high-pitched voice.

    I roused groggily in my cane chair on the side verandah or loggia. “Voggia”, according to Dad. I was never going to get that one out of my head if I lived to Grandfather’s age! The more so as, with its heavy lines and the redundant stonework railing, preserving one from nothing but the side lawn and a view of the shrubs and flowers planted round its rim, it clearly was.

    Gavin was jumping up and down on the lawn. “Alex! They’re here!”

    Uh… It was a very warm afternoon. The house wasn’t set square in relation to the four points of the compass, but at a slant. The side verandah faced southeast, getting the morning sunshine and warmth, but as the sun moved in the northern part of the sky in the Southern Hemisphere, by lunchtime it got only a minimal amount. It was the ideal place to cool off in the afternoon—that was, provided the ambient temperature wasn’t hitting thirty-six Celsius or more, at which point, to my unaccustomed physiology, anywhere was too hot.

    “What?” I said groggily.

    “They’re HERE!” he screeched.

    Uh—oh. Not, presumably, the monstrous regiment returned from yet another venture to the shops, together with Cassie, poor darling, but Perry and his family with their campervan.

    “Y— Uh— Where’s Dad?” I groped.

    “Down the winery! Wake UP!” he bellowed.

    “I am,” I sighed. “Where are they?”

    “Gone round the back! Come on!” he gasped, dashing off towards the garage block.

    Okay, they’d gone round the back. Trethewin’s driveway would have been a real handicap in a wetter climate, but presumably here it had worried no-one that, supposing one had driven up to the front door, which I didn’t think Perry would have done in any case, but supposing, if one wished to garage the car one then had to retreat to the point where the main drive forked, and turn off, skirting the side lawn to link up with the so-called back drive up from Cassie’s house and the stables, and thus reach the garage block at the rear of the house. Had old man Crozier always had a chauffeur? Perhaps he had. Or perhaps he hadn’t minded dumping the Roller on the front sweep—there was plenty of room—and letting the burning South Australian sun do as it listed.

    I was about to scream after Gavin’s disappearing back: “Where are the other kids?” but at that moment Ben and Molly surfaced, panting, from the bushes.

    “People—come!” he gasped.

    Molly nodded violently. “Big van!” she gasped.

    Fifi appeared silently, not panting, and came up to Molly’s side. We had discovered that she had appointed herself the children’s guardian in the absence of grown-ups. No-one, as far as I knew, had urged her to do so. Perry and his ute had gone off to meet Junie, Tanya, and the giant campervan somewhere halfway between here and Brizzie. I had looked up the distance online, and shuddered, but according to Perry, Junie was used to driving the campervan.

    Fifi had also taken a great shine to Dad—and vice versa—but Mum, thank God, was terrified of her, otherwise she’d have been stuffing her with titbits. Sarah was likewise, though not admitting it.

    “There you all are!” I said in relief. “Come on, round the back.”

    “Come on, Fifi!” cried Molly, and off we went.

    Fifi greeted her family rapturously, Tanya reciprocated, and as expected, the three kids who had been so eager to meet the newcomers just stood and goggled silently.

    I welcomed Junie and Tanya to Trethewin, Junie thanking me and assuring me it was very good of me to have them, and introduced everybody, what time Perry just stood by, grinning.

    “Your mum still shit-scared of Fifi?” he then asked.

    “Yes, thank God.”

    “She doesn’t have to be, Alex!” said Junie in astonishment.

    “Fifi’s a good dog!” Tanya informed us generally, putting her arms round the big creature’s neck for the second time.

    “Yes, of course she is, Tanya, sweetheart,” I agreed. “She takes care of everybody, doesn’t she? She’s been guarding Gavin and Ben and Molly.”

    “Good-oh,” Perry recognised. “Nah, well, if ’is Mum wasn’t scared of ’er, Junie, love, she’d be stuffing ’er with cake and rubbish: that sort of woman.”

    Junie bit her lip, trying not to laugh. “I see.”

    “Well, come on in the house and relax,” I urged them. “Have you come far, today?”

    Perry and Junie exchanged glances and he admitted: “Nah. Stopped off last night at her parents’ place. Well, I say at, but strictly speaking parked the campervan in the flaming retirement complex, having to swear our souls away in the process—no parking except for residents. The ute hadda go in the street.” He shrugged.

    Gavin burst into speech. “Gran and Gramps, they got a retirement complex! Only see, they’re staying with us for Christmas!”

    Something like that. Perry’s eyes met mine. “That’s right, Gavin,” I agreed feebly. “A good old-fashioned family Christmas, eh?”

    “Yeah! We’re gonna have turkey!” he informed the Hawkes family.

    “Just like home, eh?” Perry said to me, the sardonic bastard.

    I took a deep breath. “Come on, come inside, we’ll all have cold drinks.”

    “C’n we have Coke, Alex?” Gavin asked instantly. “Since it’s like, a special occasion?”

    Oh, why not? You could only die once and as far as I was concerned, the sooner the better. “Yes, definitely Coke, Gavin.”

    “Yay!”

    “Um, is Fifi allowed inside, Alex?” ventured Junie as we adjourned to the house.

    “Yes! –Hell, I’m so sorry, Junie: didn’t mean to shout. There’ve been certain, um, discussions on the subject.”

    “His mum, she said big dogs didn’t oughta come in the house and she doesn’t look safe,” Big-Mouth Forrest immediately volunteered.

    “She never calls her by her name,” Molly contributed. “She always says ‘that dog’.”

    “Doesn’t she know—” Perry broke off.

    “The riposte to that query is definitely in the negative, Perry,” I explained. “Nor does my sibling.”

    “Goddit.”

    “Grandpa likes her,” volunteered Ben, eyeing Tanya sideways.

    “Yes, ’course!” cried Molly.

    “My Pop doesn’t like her, he said thank Heavens we hadn’t brought her,” little Tanya offered.

    “One of the disadvantages of advancing age is that the vocabulary develops amazingly, not to say the tendency to run off at the indicated orifice,” noted Perry to the ambient air.

    I gave in and grinned. “You said it! It’s not confined to the distaff side, either! Well, beer? Whisky? Oh, and there is something called Bundy—”

    “Shuddup, ya Pommy so-and-so!” he choked, clapping me on the shoulder. “Lead on, Macduff!”

    Smiling, I led on.

    Merry Christmas. Words to that effect. We were all crammed round Trethewin’s big kitchen table. The winery contingent had come up for it, and so had Christina Evans. There was a huge range-hood in the kitchen which made a noise like a Boeing taking off as it ducted out the steam and heat from the cooking and it had been on all morning, and it was now gone two-thirty, but… Quite.

    Stella had insisted on doing avocado halves filled with prawns in mayonnaise for starters: traditional in Australia, apparently. Seafood? In this weather? True, they came out of the refrigerator chilled to the bone, so perhaps we wouldn’t all be poisoned. Ben and Molly were plainly bewildered by them. It possibly didn’t help that Sarah tried to tell them those were shrimps, dears, at the same time as Stella was telling them those were prawns, loveys. Gavin ate his prawn pieces and merely poked at their concave eau-de-nil support…

    Turkey, stuffing balls, gravy, cranberry sauce, cranberry jelly… Roast potatoes, roast sweet potatoes, roast pumpkin? I looked dazedly at old Fred. He was tucking into it as if it was normal. Real peas? Where had they— Okay, planted up “yonks back”, good for Fred. I took a spoonful of real peas. The older kids were refusing them in horror. Molly then embarked on a piece of roast sweet potato (Stella, of course; I don’t think Mum even knew what the things were). “Funny potato,” she said in confusion. Immediately Gavin enlightened her. “Nah, ya nong, that’s sweet potato!” Er, well, in his accent it came out “Swede puhtaydah” but it didn’t seem to impede the communication process. Immediately his grandmother reproved him for calling Molly a nong…

    I looked cautiously at Dad’s plate. Fred, who had carved, had piled it with slices of turkey, Mum had passed him the gravy, Miranda had passed him the cranberry sauce, Christina Evans had passed him the cranberry jelly (whether tongue-in-cheek I couldn’t tell), and Stella had helped him generously to the three roast veg. Cassie passed him the peas. He took a spoonful, smiling at her, and ate a few with a very small portion of turkey without condiments of any kind. Quite.

    All of the kids had refused the salad of cos lettuce, cherry tomatoes and cubed cucumber, but Stella had served them anyway. I speared a cherry tomato very carefully: prior experience had taught me that the things were apt to shoot ignominiously off one’s plate if attacked incautiously. Beside me Mike was tucking in, apparently voraciously—well, true, it was a busy time of year at the winery, with the vintage not so very far off, but— Oh, well, he was used to the climate.

    I ate some lettuce and a small piece of turkey and looked cautiously across the table. Little Tanya was sitting between her parents: Junie was wiping her chin and assuring her that no-one minded drippy gravy at Christmas. Try this lovely cranberry jelly with the meat, darling. Obediently she ate a very small portion of turkey with a cube of cranberry jelly. Now, some nummy peas! Tanya ate them but looked surprised—why? Oh: used to the frozen ones, of course, just like all of Britain’s kids. I ate some peas. Delicious. If only we could just have had the peas, perhaps some plain boiled potatoes, and a few slices of cold turkey…

    Christmas pudding? But Mum hadn’t brought any! I’d explained to Dad in words of one syllable about the notorious Australian Customs officials who grabbed anything that even looked like food that unwary foreigners tried to bring into— Oh. Stella. Made it ages ago, had she? Mm. Mercifully she didn’t seem to have heard of hard sauce—not that I had any objection to it, in a freezing northern winter. Christina and Miranda had both brought large platters of “pavlova”: towering meringue topped with mountains of whipped cream. Miranda’s was laden with strawberries. Christina’s was laden with strawberries and blueberries. They would go well with the GIANT fruit salad prepared by Stella from the (apparently) traditional Adelaide Hills cherries, plus strawberries and, er, mangoes? Okay, chunks of fresh mango in amongst the traditional European fruits of summer… Oh, brought down from Queensland by Junie, eh? That expl— Though of course, Stella informed us brightly, the supermarkets were full of them at this time of year!

    At this point Mike kindly refilled my wine glass. He’d chosen the wine, so it was extremely potable. I drank gratefully…

    Out on the voggia many, many hours later Dad and I lit up the traditional illicit Christmas cigars…

    “It could have been worse,” I murmured.

    “Oh?”

    “Er—yes. Brace yourself. Christina told me that not only are the prawns traditional at Christmas as a starter, they often add other seafood as well. Large chunks of rock lobster in particular, one gathers.”

    “Alex!”

    “Sorry,” I said glumly.

    He sighed. “I still can’t believe the amount Fred put away…”

    “Used to the climate.”

    “Something like that,” he sighed.

    Silence fell. We puffed slowly…

    “Er, Alex…” he ventured.

    I winced. “Yes?”

    “You—uh—God, I don’t know that I’ve got the strength… You did check that opals are the bloody birthstone for October, did you, before selecting that lovely ring for Sarah?”

    Sarah’s birthday was on the first of October—just squeaked into the category of the stone that Australia was famous for. “Yes. Several websites. The stones for the other months varied quite a lot, but they were unanimous that opals are the October stone.”

    He sagged. “Thank God!”

    “I did have quite a job finding a decent stone set in platinum, though. Opals set in gold look frightfully tacky, and of course silver tarnishes.”

    “Mm.”

    We smoked…

    “Your mother loves the amethyst brooch, anyway,” he said.

    “Yes: good.”

    “Are they South Australian stones, old chap?’

    My shoulders shook slightly. “Yes; don’t worry!”

    “Oh, good.”

    More smoking…

    “That koala you gave Molly…”

    “Don’t go there, Dad.”

    “If I don’t ask I may burst. It’s not—uh—”

    “No. Rabbit.”

    In the dark I could feel him sag. “Thank Christ!”

    “Perry sourced it for me. There’s a woman up in Queensland who makes them from real skins. Er—rabbits are pests in Australia. A scourge, in fact.”

    “I thought they’d had some sort of, er, prevention campaign with an introduced disease.”

    “Yes. Two. So far it’s Australia two, rabbits three.”

    “I see.”

    We smoked…

    “The gravy,” he said slowly.

    “Mm?”

    “The worst thing, old chap.”

    “Oh. Not the stuffing balls?”

    “No, they just sat there stolidly. And solidly.”

    This was true. “Sorry, Dad, I’ll trump your gravy with a full hand of bloody prawns in commercial mayonnaise.”

    “You never have liked crustaceans,” he said mildly.

    Or commercial mayonnaise, actually. “No, well, all were bad,” I sighed.

    “Except for the peas,” he amended.

    This was true. “Mm. Excellent.”

    We smoked…

    “Don’t chuck your stub into the garden, Dad, there’s always the risk it’ll start a—”

    “Oh, yes,” he acknowledged, stubbing it out on the voggia’s railing instead. “Could head inside to that brandy bottle that’s sending out loud ‘Drink Me’ signals?”

    We did that.

    … “Was it worse,” he wondered some time later, “than the year Sarah came down with a violent rash and we couldn’t determine the cause?”

    “I still maintain it was that peculiar so-called port that the neighbours forced on you.”

    “Could have been, mm…”

    “The year of the hideously oversalted sprouts to the point of inedible was good,” I noted.

    “True…”

    “Unproven, but my money’s always been on Ben.”

    “Uh-huh.”

    “No, I think the year Mum broke a tooth on one of the bloody coins she insisted on putting in the pud, Dad.”

    “Yes, hard to top that. Though the year she burnt the bloody turkey was extra-good.”

    “I don’t remember that!”

    “No, I think you were only three… That’s right, Sarah wasn’t even on the way. Actually, she was a sort of, er, consolation prize for that Christmas,” my father admitted.

    I broke down in startled sniggers.

    He picked up the bottle. “Might as well finish it?”

    We did that. Cognac, I will worship You forever. Amen.

Next chapter:

https://deadringers-trethewin.blogspot.com/2025/07/minutiae.html