The Older Man (17 page)

The next day she took the children for a long walk to a neighbouring bay, partly overland and then along the beach while the tide was low. Grant offered to come along, but she told him coolly that she could manage, and that she was sure his mother would appreciate his company. Grant looked faintly bemused, but acceded readily enough to the suggestion.

In the afternoon, while his mother rested, Grant said he would watch the children and Rennie could have some time to herself.

“I’m being paid to look after them,” she reminded him. “And they didn’t drown or break any limbs this morning, did they?”

Grant’s brows went up. “You’re entitled to some time off,” he said. “Take it this afternoon.”

She bowed her head. “If you say so.”

She took her book and climbed the headland, finding a place in the shade of a large windblown native shrub, where she could alternately read or sit staring at the sea, or lie back against the harsh, dry grass and drowse.

“Feeling better?” Grant enquired when she returned to the house.

She gave him a deliberately surprised stare. “I feel fine, thank you. How was your afternoon?” she added politely.

“No problems. Ellen had a nap. She and Toby are sorting out their collection of shells and stones in their room, now. Finish your book?”

“Nearly. I didn’t spend all the time reading. Did you know there are gannets here? I’ve been watching them dive for fish.”

“Yes, I’ve seen them. Spectacular, aren’t they, the way they go straight into the water. What are you reading, anyway?” He plucked the book from her hand when she held it out to him, and looked at the cover picture of a young man and woman fleeing hand in hand from a man with a gun.

He looked up at her, smiling quizzically. “This is what you like?”

“Sometimes,” she said, taking the book from him. “It’s very well written.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“You can borrow it when I’ve finished, if you like.”

“Thank you, but I don’t think so.”

Rennie shrugged. “Please yourself.” Obviously he thought her taste in literature was beneath contempt. Snob, she thought angrily, as she went to put the book away in her room.

Most of the houses along the beach were occupied for the holidays, and during the day there were usually a couple of dozen people sunning themselves or swimming, and a few more fishing from the rocks that bounded the bay. Toby and Ellen made friends with another family who regularly rented a large house for the summer holidays.

The Townsends had a ‘combination’ family. The three olive-skinned youngsters whose ages fitted neatly around Ellen’s and Toby’s had a blonde step-brother and step-sister of about Rennie’s age. They obviously got on very well with their father’s young Maori wife, and treated her more like another sister than a stepmother. Their father, a tall, balding man with kind blue eyes, offered to take Grant fishing in his aluminium dinghy. Grant accepted the offer, apparently surprising his mother, and that evening he brought back a couple of snapper for dinner. Even Toby, in spite of his professed dislike of fish, tucked into his father’s catch with relish.

Afterwards Grant started to help Rennie wash up, but she said shortly, “You must be tired. I can manage these.”

“I don’t mind,” he said. “You must be tired, too, after having the children all day on your own.”

“It’s what you’re paying me for,” she reminded him. “Why don’t you go and supervise their showers? They’re likely to have water all over the bathroom.”

He put down the tea-towel he was holding and gave her a long look. “Okay,” he said finally. “If that’s what you’d prefer.”

After the children had gone to bed, Grant seemed restless. He switched on the radio for the first time, and twiddled with the knobs, but in less than ten minutes had switched it off again. The reception wasn’t good, and the choice of stations limited. He stood up and went to the window to look out at the fading sunlight on the sea, and then picked up the paper, shuffled through the pages and put it down again.

“Why don’t you go for a walk, Grant?” his mother suggested at last.

“Yes, I think I will.” He stood up. “Come with me, Rennie.”

She looked up, startled. “I don’t think — “

“Come with me, Rennie,” he repeated, making it sound like an order.

“The children — “

“My mother can keep an eye on the children, can’t you, Mother?”

“Yes, dear. Of course.” She looked almost as startled as Rennie, her glance going from one to the other of them.

“Come on,” Grant said peremptorily. “You needn’t change. It’s still warm outside.”

Rennie rose, her cheeks a little flushed. She wore a T-shirt and light cotton pants, and her feet were bare. For walking on the sand, she never wore shoes.

He stood back to let her go down the stairs first, and she took a quick peek at his face as she passed him. He looked grim.

He opened the door at the bottom of the stairs, and they walked side by side over the short, springy buffalo grass to the little incline that led to the beach. Usually Rennie jumped it, but tonight she took it more slowly. There was a dinghy with an outboard motor heading out to sea, a night fisherman, no doubt. And a couple of Maori women with a bucket were digging for shellfish at the edge of the water, while some children with a dog played about nearby.

Grant touched her arm to lead her in the other direction, towards the dark rocks under the headland. “So. What’s it all about, Rennie?” he asked her as they reached the firm sand bared by the receding tide, leaving their footprints on its smooth surface.

“What’s all what about?”

“Don’t play games with me! You’re sulking, and I want to know why.”

“I’m not sulking!”

He stopped, so that she had to stop too. “What would you call it, then? All this cold shoulder. You’re hardly speaking to me, quite apart from the Jane Eyre act.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

He quirked an eyebrow, and she mumbled, “Well, I thought that was what you wanted.” She hunched her shoulders and turned to continue walking.

“Is this all because I kissed you and didn’t follow it up?” he demanded.

“No, it isn’t!” She turned on him. “It’s because — “

“Well?”

“Because you — you don’t give me credit for anything! Not for looking after your kids, or — “

“What do you mean, I don’t give you credit? You told me not to keep saying that I was grateful!”

“I suppose you are. Any port in a storm, and you were pretty desperate, weren’t you?”

He frowned. “This is nonsense. How can you think that I don’t appreciate — “

“I heard you talking to your mother,” she said. “As if I’m some kind of stop-gap, a second-best solution until you find something better!”

He shook his head, looking resigned but enlightened. “I didn’t mean it to sound like that, Rennie. All I meant was that the arrangement is a temporary one, and I’ll have to find a permanent solution before you return to university. My mother thought you were too young for the job before she even met you, as soon as I mentioned you were a student. I suppose I was feeling defensive.”

“I’m not that young,” Rennie said. “Even teenagers have birthdays. And they don’t stay teenagers for ever.”

“You’ve had a birthday?”

“I will have. On New Year’s Day.”

“Congratulations,” Grant said. “So you’ll be nineteen.”

“Twenty.”

“Twenty?”

“Legally adult.”

“Legally.”

“That’s right. So you can stop treating me like a child, okay?”

“Maybe,” Grant said. “That depends on whether you’re going to act like one, doesn’t it?”

“For instance?” she challenged him, stung at the accusation.

“For instance, sulking.”

“I told you I was not sulking! I was trying to remember that you’re my boss. I thought you wanted some … distance between us.”

“Oh, I do,” Grant said softly. “I need some distance, Rennie.”

“Well,” she said, looking him in the eyes. “There you are, then.”

He sighed. “You don’t know anything about half-measures, do you?”

“I’ve never had much time for them,” she said scornfully.

“All or nothing at all?”

“Yes.”

The sea lapped at their feet, but neither of them noticed. The light was dying, leaching the colour from the water. Along the sand the dog barked, a car door slammed, its engine roared and it took off. The beach was deserted now, except for them. Grant said, “It can’t be all, Rennie.”

She nodded, then turned and looked out at the ocean, her hands jammed in her pockets. “Okay.” She was trying hard to sound indifferent. “If that’s what you want.”

“Rennie — ” He tried to take her arm, but she shook him off.

“Don’t!”

“This is silly!” he said angrily. “I know your feelings are hurt, but we can be friends!”

“No, we can’t,” she said. “And you may be years and years older than me, but you don’t know anything! Not about me! So don’t even try, okay? I’m your employee, you pay me to do a job for you, which I’m doing and I’m damn good at it, too! I’m not being paid to be your friend, as well. And my feelings are none of your business. So just do me a favour and leave me alone. That’s all I ask.”

Grant stepped back, tightlipped. He spread his hands in capitulation. “I won’t argue with that. You have every right — I just wish it could have been different.”

“So do I,” Rennie answered him bleakly. “May I go back to the house, now? I’m tired.”

He pointedly stepped aside, watching her stride past him with her head held high, her bare feet leaving emphatic imprints in the sand.

On New Year’s Eve the Townsends were having a party. “Some of Huia’s relations are coming over,” they told Rennie. “They’re going to put down a hangi near the beach. And we’re having a barbecue as well. Tell Grant you’re all invited. The kids, too.”

Toby and Ellen, of course, knew all about it from their young friends, and watched as Huia’s relatives dug a pit for the hangi, tipped in some rounded beach stones, and lit a roaring fire to heat them, before the foil-wrapped food was placed on top and the pit covered over with sacking, corrugated iron, and sandy earth.

All through the afternoon the children kept dragging Rennie back to the site to feel the slowly warming earth over the pit, asking her when the pork, chicken, fish and vegetables they had seen go into the umu would be cooked.

Grant had run out of reading matter, he said, politely rejecting his mother’s offer of one of her library books. He looked at Rennie and said casually, “You offered me one the other night — have you finished it?”

“Yes. I’ll fetch it.”

He settled with it on one of the loungers set on a terrace overlooking the sea. When Rennie and the children returned from their fourth check of the hangi, he had read a quarter of the book and seemed engrossed. By the time the party started, he was half way through, and reluctant to leave it.

Somewhat smugly, Rennie said, “Enjoying the book?”

He shrugged. “It’s fast paced and action packed. I must admit I have to keep turning the pages. It’s okay for whiling away a holiday afternoon.”

“I thought that was exactly what you wanted.” Rennie was slightly nettled by the faint praise.

Grant raised his brows. “Did I say different?” he queried. “It’s fine. I’m enjoying it. Is that what you want to hear?”

Something like that. She smiled at him innocently. It wouldn’t do him any harm to relax now and then with something that wasn’t a book of statutes. She didn’t think she’d ever seen him reading fiction before. Perhaps he thought it was slothful.

Even Mrs Morrison joined the party, sitting on a chair which Grant carried down from the house for her. Picking at steamed pork, potatoes and cabbage from the hangi, and a small piece of barbecued steak, she smilingly but firmly refused the offer of a bite of Ellen’s sausage wrapped in a slice of bread and dripping with tomato sauce. The children sat among their friends, eating with their fingers from paper plates and thoroughly enjoying themselves. Rennie wiped their greasy faces and hands with paper towels and shook her head when Grant suggested she might like to join the teenage contingent who were gathering round the barbecue fire on the sand with a tape player and a guitar.

Grant shrugged and said, “I’m taking my mother up to the house.”

When he returned, Ellen had fallen asleep against Rennie, and Toby, although he protested for form’s sake when his father suggested it, looked ready for bed, too.

“Stay there,” Grant told Rennie, as he lifted his daughter into his arms. “I can manage them.”

“I’ll come, too — “

“I said, stay here!” Grant repeated softly, but with an edge to his voice. “And that’s an order.”

There was no doubt he meant it. Rennie subsided to the sand, wondering if he intended to come back.

Everyone was drifting over to the fire, now. “Rennie!” Larry Townsend called from the group of young people, waving her over to join them. He was a goodlooking young man, with longish curly hair and a gold ring adorning one ear. “Come on! You don’t want to sit there by yourself.”

She joined the circle, Larry shifting over to make room for her.

When she saw Grant next, she was singing along with the others, swaying from side to side in time with the song, and Larry’s arm was casually draped about her shoulders. Grant was standing outside the circle talking to Larry’s father. He lifted a hand to her and went on talking.

The guitarist laid aside his instrument and got up, stripping off the sweatshirt he was wearing with his shorts. “I’m going for a swim.”

“Coming?” Larry asked Rennie. Several of the others were following.

“Yes, okay.” The water would be warm, and with a group of them going in, perfectly safe. Rennie stood up and unbuttoned her cotton skirt, letting it drop to the ground, then tugged off the big T-shirt that hid her bikini.

As she tossed it down on top of the skirt, she noticed that Grant was standing alone now. And he was watching her. She couldn’t see the expression on his face, he was outside the circle of firelight, but there was a tenseness in his stance that made her self-conscious. She put a hand to her hair, pushing it back, and saw him make an abrupt movement. Then he turned away.