The Girl Below(80)

I had been doing neither. In fact, I could hardly bring myself to go down to the harbor and look, such was my contempt for anything to do with the enterprise.

A hundred yards out from the restaurant I identified Ludo, sitting on the terrace in a beige linen suit. The restaurant he’d chosen was all white, even the floor, and at midday already full of red-faced gents sucking oysters from their shells and trying to chat up their waitresses. I’d come straight from the office, where we spent all day on the phone, and felt scruffy and incongruous in sneakers and an ill-fitting shirt. As I approached my father, the jerks at the next table openly appraised me, and I tossed my hair and scowled at them to let them know how little I appreciated it.

“You look different,” said my father, shaking my hand, formal as ever, and pulling back my chair in a show of chivalry. “Have you had your hair cut?”

“I dyed it. Supermarket red. You look younger. Have you had work done?” Hard as I tried to temper it, my sarcasm was always out of control around Ludo.

He ordered a dozen shucked oysters and ate them in front of me, washed down with champagne, pausing at regular intervals to ask if I was sure I didn’t want one.

“No thanks. They taste like snot to me.”

He didn’t like it when I was vulgar, but I enjoyed the look on his face when I was. “Order whatever you like,” he said. “It could be a taste of things to come.”

“What does that mean?”

He sipped his champagne and winked. “You’ll see.”

That sounded ominous, and I perused the menu while waiting for the charade to come undone. Unless I’d done something wrong, or they needed collecting from the airport or a last-minute babysitter when they were in town, I never heard from Ludo or Rowan. I’d received no invitations to spend Christmas with them since the time four years earlier when I had failed to turn up with Lily’s present and arrived the next day with such a foul hangover that I’d passed out at the dinner table after one too many of my father’s aperitifs (apparently, Rowan had held my head over the toilet while I spewed, though I did not remember, or subscribe to, that part). When I came round, Dad and I had a huge row over the past, a continent he refused to revisit, and the argument had ended with me hurling a framed photograph of his children at the wall. The frame had smashed, and I had left the house immediately, hitching all the way into Hamilton at two in the morning. Ludo had gotten in touch with me a few months later to say we ought to meet on neutral territory from then on, which I understood to mean that Rowan had finally banned me from the ranch. So this was how it was: a few times a year he took me to lunch. Once or twice I’d seen my father cruising the streets of Auckland in his late-model four-wheel drive—he came up for business all the time—and though I’d thought about waving to him I never did.

The restaurant menu was convoluted seafood, and I ordered something prawny with pink lobster mousse that said it came in a basket with fish-egg decoupage. Waiting for this impossible creation to arrive, I asked politely after Rowan and the children and my father’s business and listened to the latest installment of their mishaps and triumphs. Rowan had fallen from her horse in the last round of dressage at an event in Christchurch—she was competing again—and Simon had taken up rowing and was already trying out for the New Zealand under eighteen team. Lily apparently had developed “weight issues” and did nothing all day except sit in her room and listen to “God-awful head-banging music.” Out of all of them, she was the one I could most relate to.

Ludo wanted to know what I’d been up to, and I gave him the abridged version: work was the same, but someone on the community newspaper I worked for was leaving, and I hoped to get a promotion by the end of the year.

“Good for you,” he said. “It’s great to have a taste of a career before you settle down. That way you can pick it up again later if you get bored.”

I had long suspected that my father measured my worth, if he measured it at all, in the proximity of wedding bells and booties, and even though I knew his attitude was deeply sexist, it still hit me where it hurt. His frequent attempts to matchmake for me with blockheads he worked with only made things worse. During dessert, he even hunched his shoulder toward the jerks at the next table and with a wink said, “Gee, there sure are a lot of hunks at this place.”

“Dad,” I said, as one of them turned and looked in our direction. “Please don’t.”

But he either hadn’t heard me, or was determined to humiliate me, and before I could stop him, he was waving at the men and smiling in my direction. “You see?” he said, when they waved back. “It’s the easiest thing in the world to meet a guy.”