At this time of year, with winter barely giving way to a cool spring, Blythe rarely saw anyone but the occasional lone fisherman or family party of locals on the beach. Sometimes surfers turned up to try the waves, but most of them preferred Apiata.
Jas Tratherne was wearing white sneakers or maybe his running shoes—not boots anyway, she noted—and he didn’t have a dog at his heels. But he strode along the sand with a look of preoccupation, his head bent and one hand swinging a crooked driftwood stick, the other tucked into the pocket of a light parka.
He was walking near the water’s edge, skirting the white-flecked waves thumping onto the sand in a flurry of foam. As Blythe descended the sandy slope he looked up.
Blythe raised a hand in a half-hearted wave.
He returned the gesture, then resumed his walk.
Okay, she thought. He didn’t want company and that was fine. She headed off in the other direction.
That night music drifted in through her barely open bedroom window with the night breeze. As she hovered on the edge of sleep the poignant notes entered into her dreams, and the next morning she had the feeling that the music had gone on for a long time. Hours.
When she drove past the house to the store at Apiata, the detached wooden garage was open, what looked like a station wagon parked inside.
On her return she parked the van in her garage next to the tunnel house and took her paper, mail and milk up the steps and inside.
Sitting with a sandwich and coffee at the long table under the corner windows, she opened the newspaper. It wasn’t warm enough today to use the lounger on the high, enclosed deck outside.
After two cups of coffee she folded the paper and fetched her kete. She had woven the traditional-style Maori carrier bag herself. Mrs Delaney, matriarch of the large, boisterous family who had grown up in the house now occupied by the solitary and anti-social Jas Tratherne, had taught Blythe along with her own daughters the ancient art of flax-weaving.
She pulled on a hooded red sweatshirt as she left the porch, awkwardly transferring the plaited handles of the kete from one hand to the other and starting down the steps before she had fully donned the sweatshirt.
When she looked up she saw Jas Tratherne approaching, his hair stirred by the wind. He wore lightcoloured cotton trousers, sneakers and the nylon parka.
Fixing a smile on her face, Blythe paused as she reached the foot of the steps. ‘Hi.’
He didn’t smile, but nodded. ‘Good afternoon—’ and with a glance at the kete ‘—Red Riding Hood.’
‘Hardly.’ She parted the handles. ‘No goodies, see?’ She saw he’d shaved today, and the planes of his face were more sharply defined, adding to the impression that he’d recently lost weight.
He seemed to be debating whether to continue the conversation. After a moment he said, ‘So why are you carrying an empty basket?’
‘I’m gathering stuff from the beach.’
‘Stuff?’
As they were obviously headed in the same direction they really had no choice but to walk together. ‘Leaves, stalks, seedheads, driftwood—’
‘Shells?’
‘Mm, maybe. It’s not a great beach for shells. The surf’s too rough, and most of them get pounded to bits. Sometimes I pick up a nice piece of beach glass or some interesting stones.’
They walked on a few steps before he asked, ‘So what are you going to do with all this stuff?’
She suspected he wasn’t really interested but that he felt obliged to be polite. ‘I make notions.’
‘Notions?’
‘Arrangements of driftwood or flotsam and my own dried flowers. For some of them I weave flax containers or wall hangers.’
‘I’d have thought it would be too sandy here for flower-growing.’
‘The gully’s sheltered from the sea wind, and the soil on the bottom is quite peaty. And,’ she added, ‘there’s plenty of seaweed for mulch and fertiliser. The right flowers do very well.’
‘Like…?’
‘Strawflowers, statice, lavender—I use some and the rest go directly to florists.’
They went up the little rise between the hills, and the breeze blew strands of hair across Blythe’s eyes.
‘You’re running a business—on your own?’
‘Yes.’ Half closing her eyes against the wind, she shook back her hair. ‘It’s all mine.’
‘Yours?’
‘Why not?’
He studied her smooth skin and wide, questioning eyes. ‘You’re far too young!’
Blythe laughed and started down the slope. ‘I’m twenty-one,’ she said. Her lack of height, and the winsome prettiness that nothing she did with her hair or clothes or even make-up could efface, was deceptive.
He frowned, and a tinge of colour entered his cheeks. ‘You live alone up there?’ He glanced at the cottage behind them.
‘Since my grandmother died last year.’ A shadow crossed her face. ‘I moved in with her after Grandad’s death, because she was getting a bit frail and we didn’t like her being on her own. I’d been working at a nursery and taking night classes in horticulture, so it was an ideal opportunity to try setting up for myself, and at the same time it helped Gran.’ She lifted a hand to peel wind-blown hair away from her mouth. ‘Everyone thought I was crazy, trying to grow things here.’
‘Really.’ He was looking down at the uneven ground, his hands thrust into the pockets of his parka.
‘Too far from the city, they said, and too close to the sea. But it’s just over an hour from Auckland, and it’s turned out to be ideal. Only…the market for dried flowers is being taken over by the artificial sort. So I’m trying a new crop this year—sunflowers.’
‘Sunflowers.’ He looked at her and laughed. It was a brief laugh and sounded unpractised.
‘Is there something funny about sunflowers?’ she demanded, angling her head so that the wind pulled her hair away from her forehead.
‘No.’ His eyes looked suddenly glazed. ‘No—they’re very…interesting.’
She’d been going on about her family history and her work, and he was either being gently sarcastic or trying hard to pretend he wasn’t bored. ‘Well,’ she said awkwardly, backing from him, ‘I’ll…um…see you later.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Uh…good hunting.’ And he swung away and strode off along the sand.
Scavenging the tide-line, Blythe kept her eyes on the sea-wrack delivered by the bountiful waves, refusing to allow herself to peek at her unsettling new neighbour.
When she made her way back to the cottage the wind had grown wilder and carried fine, stinging rain with it, and Jas Tratherne had gone.
The rain intensified, thrown against the windows. Blythe lit a fire in the wood stove in a corner of the kitchen-cum-living room, and sat down to sort her new treasures, and wire some of the flowers that she had drying in nets strung from the ceilings of every room.
When the light started to fade she got up from the table. Through the rain-blurred window a glimmer at the other end of the gully drew her eye. She could make out a distant square of light, and a shadow that flickered