Artistic License (7 page)

She slanted a glance up at Mick. His face showed nothing but interest as he took in the crops and outbuildings of the vineyard. He had been prepared to drop her and run, but his meeting wasn’t for another couple of hours and there wasn’t much to do between here and the Kawarau estate.
She
had insisted that he stay, so she would just have to make the best of it. It would only be awkward if she allowed it to be.

And any day now pigs would fly and she would be given academic tenure in Calculus.

The interior of the Cheesery was blessedly cool and quiet, experiencing a temporary lull in sales while people were out getting happily sloshed in the sunshine. The young woman behind the counter looked up from the commercial scales, where she was weighing a wedge of the signature Leigh Blue, and smiled at her.

“Hey, Sophy.” She turned her head and called into the kitchens, “Marion! Sophy’s here.”

There was an inaudible response, the mumbled words pleased and light in pitch, and then Sophy’s mother appeared through the staff doors, pulling off her latex gloves and looking delighted.

“Hello, darling,” Marion said, glancing at her watch as she hurried forward to envelop Sophy in a hug. They’d met up for lunch in Arrowtown only a week ago, but her mum didn’t ration her affections. She’d always been equally pleased to see her daughter whether she was returning home from a term at boarding school or returning home from a trip to the shops. “You made good time. I wasn’t expecting you and Dale until closer to dinnertime.” Her eyes had gone over Sophy’s shoulder to where Mick waited in polite silence. “And you aren’t Dale,” she finished cheerfully.

Mick came forward and shook Marion’s outstretched hand. His posture was regimentally upright, his handshake firm and crisp. Sophy half-expected them to stamp one foot and salute one another.

“Mick, this is my mother, Marion James. Mum, this is Mick Hollister,” she said a bit warily, in response to her mother’s expectant look. “He works for the Ryland Curry Security Corporation and he’s been kind enough to pose for me this week.”

“Hades,” Marion surmised, taking in the breadth of Mick’s shoulders with an evaluating stare that actually brought a faint reddening to his cheekbones. Her eyes twinkled at his slight embarrassment. “I’m very pleased to meet you, Mick. I hope you’re going to join us for a late lunch.”

“Oh.” Mick looked a bit at a loss. “That’s extremely kind of you, but…”

Accustomed to struggling in social situations, Sophy found it equally difficult to watch other people flounder.

“Do stay,” she said quickly, reaching out with a light touch to his hand. His fingers briefly flexed into a fist as his gaze shot to hers. She couldn’t read the expression there. She smiled a bit too brightly. “Mum makes the most amazing barbequed ribs.”

“It’s true,” said Marion sapiently. “I do.”

Mick looked from one woman to the other, the corners of his mouth twitching.

“Amazing, huh?” he said at last.

“Epic poems have been composed in their honour,” Sophy replied solemnly.

“Jamie Oliver would fall at my feet and weep,” confirmed Marion.

Waving her arms like a farmer herding recalcitrant sheep, she hustled them toward the back door, where a private pathway led to the family home. Mick gave in gracefully, obviously amused. Sophy was glad to see that he looked considerably happier than he had when he’d arrived at the art school that morning. Walking slightly ahead with Marion, she felt her mother’s eyes on her and looked up to encounter a quick, pointedly curious stare. She flushed.

She was apprehensive that the barbequed ribs would be accompanied by a delicately probing interrogation, but was spared any mortification by her mother’s tact and her father’s single-minded cheese obsession. He came in directly from the storerooms, where a batch of their prizewinning aged cheddar had just reached maturity, and was so excited about it that he accepted Mick’s presence at the table without question. He’d brought Carl Hanning, one of the owner-operators of Silver Leigh, with him, and the three men were soon engrossed in a conversation that spanned the rudimentaries of aging cheese and the intricacies of grape harvests. She was taken completely by surprise when Mick revealed that he had a stake in a vineyard in California. What a London-based security consultant wanted with a winery investment in Napa, she had no idea. There was apparently no end to the man’s hidden depths.

Sophy watched Mick’s blunt features become progressively animated and lively, and thought again how attractive he was. Their eyes met when he was midway through a sentence and he faltered for just a second. As he regrouped, tugging a pen and notebook from his pocket and drawing a series of quick diagrams for his engrossed companions, he sent her a sexy flashing grin.

He so rarely smiled that way that she was starting to feel quite proprietary of those dimples.

Marion cleared her throat softly. Sophy ceased ogling Mick long enough to find her mother watching her with an expression that passed over speculation and landed straight on smug. 

“Soph, why don’t you give me a hand with the pudding?” Marion suggested, smiling blandly.

Mick immediately broke off his conversation and started to rise, but she waved him down.

“No, please, don’t get up. We won’t be a minute. Sophy.”

Sophy had heard her name spoken in that particular tone countless times throughout her life and it acted directly on her well-trained arms and legs. They tended to move in the direction indicated without waiting for the rest of her to concur. Stifling a resigned sigh, she followed her mother through the patio slider and into the kitchen.

“Which is the pudding?” she asked, going directly to the fridge and opening it. “Is it the pavlova or is that for the weekend? Oh. Please tell me it’s the brownies.”

“It’s the brownies,” said Marion, leaning back against the table, relaxed and watchful. “The pavlova is for tonight. Megan Custer is coming for tea.”

“Oh God, is she?” asked Sophy, momentarily diverted by dismay. She pulled out the pan of brownies, dropped it on the counter and began to sift through the bulging freezer compartment for ice cream. “Great. Last time I talked to her, she asked me if I encountered more depravities at the bar or in my “work”, in inverted commas, as an artist.
And
she criticised me for not doing more volunteer work, which I think is bloody cheek considering that the most she does for charity is to donate her husband’s old shirts to the Salvation Army.”

“Mick seems very nice,” said her mother, totally disregarding her tirade.

“Jesus, Mum,” said Sophy, picking up a knife and beginning to mark an even cutting grid on the brownies. “Subtle.”

“You could have given me a bit of warning,” Marion complained lightly. “If I’d known you were bringing someone, I would have made something special.”

“Your food is always special,” Sophy said absently. She cut a careful slice, eyed it with dissatisfaction and began to make amendments. “And you thought I was bringing Dale.”

Her mother made a rude noise. She had been a primary school teacher before she’d had Sophy and the first time she’d met Melissa’s new boyfriend, she’d said that she recognised the type and they never changed. They would be charming trouble from the new entrants’ classroom to the retirement home.

“I had no idea you were seeing someone,” Marion pressed. “Sophy, give me that knife before you chop off a finger. Brownies are square; they don’t need to be sculpted. You didn’t mention it when I saw you last Monday.”

“I hadn’t
met
him last Monday,” said Sophy, surrendering the knife and going to hunt out the dessert bowls. “And I’m not
seeing
anyone. I met Mick last week; he’s been the perfect model and I hope we stay friends. End of.”

“Hmm,” said Marion. She said nothing further, but her silence communicated volumes.

When the dessert bowls had been scraped clean, she wasted no time in deflecting both Mick’s move to do the dishes and her husband’s offer to take him on a tour of the storerooms.

“You would lose track of time and he’d miss his meeting,” she said firmly to Gregory, and smiled at Mick and Sophy. “Why don’t the two of you take Jeeves for a walk by the stream? It’s a gorgeous day outside. No need to spend it cooped up in the factory.”

She was going to have words with her mother later. Where they landed on the scale between “butt out” and “thank you” remained to be seen.

“Great family,” Mick said as they walked beneath the weeping willows, following the winding path of the stream through the back paddocks of the vineyard. It was achingly hot and Sophy wished she’d thought to change out of her dress and into a pair of shorts. Mick wore long pants with his tee, but he was apparently one of those people who remained cool and clear-skinned, could likely wear linen on a boiling day and still emerge unwrinkled, and probably never sweated through his deodorant. It must be genetic. Sophy was most like her dad in appearance – her mother was a tall blonde with less boobs and butt – but she had definitely inherited Marion’s intolerance for extreme temperatures and her propensity toward untidiness. It was a bit cooler under the melancholy droop of the trees, however, and she enjoyed the feeling of being at home. She supposed a childhood home would always offer a feeling of sanctuary, if a person were very lucky.

Jeeves’s habit of waiting until she’d switched his lead to her other hand before he weaved back to the opposite side forced her to tread an uneven path to avoid tripping over him. The third time that her hip and hand had brushed against Mick’s side, he’d hesitated before wrapping his large palm around hers in a firm clasp. She had been too embarrassed to look at him, but her fingers had given his a momentary squeeze in return. They walked on now, hands swinging lightly between their bodies. Ever insensitive to atmosphere, Jeeves vetoed the idea of an idle ramble and strained against his lead, only pausing to do unappetising things with rabbit droppings.

“I couldn’t ask for better parents,” Sophy said simply, scowling back at Jeeves as she pulled him away from his unsavoury snack. “I occasionally used to wish that I had a sibling, but the cousin I live with, Melissa, is the same age as I am and we grew up together. I can’t imagine being any closer to a blood sister or brother.”

“You might be considerably worse off,” said Mick coolly, and she glanced at him, startled.

At least six different questions hovered on the edge of her tongue, but she bit them all back. She’d decided it was best to keep things as casually friendly between them as possible, which necessarily meant keeping her nose out of his most intimate business.

Friends held hands, didn’t they?

She and Melissa had used to hold hands all the time.

Admittedly it had been on the walk to and from kindergarten.

“Did you live here when you were a kid?” Mick asked, reaching with his free arm to pull a hanging branch out of her way. “It must have been a great place to grow up.”

“My parents bought the Cheesery and the house plot when I was seven,” Sophy answered. “Before that, we lived just down the street from the house in Queenstown. I remember our first house, just, but I think of Silver Leigh as home. I always used to arrive back for school holidays, come out here by the stream and just
breathe
.”

“You didn’t go to the local high school, then?”

“No, Melissa and I both went to boarding school in Dunedin.” And there was five years of her life she would never get back. “Unfortunately.”

Mick raised an eyebrow.

“That bad?”

“To be fair, at thirteen the image I had of boarding school was entirely based on old Enid Blyton books from the fifties. You know, midnight feasts, pranks played on teachers, lots of sandwiches and lemonade, the odd game of lacrosse. So I wasn’t completely opposed to the idea and several of my friends from primary school were going. There are more options for secondary schools in Dunedin.”

“But your illusions were shattered?”