Marion Lennox - The Last-Minute Marriage

‘I tied it for him,’ Harry said behind her. ‘He had his hands all covered in yuck stuff and said “find an apron” and that’s all Auntie Hattie had.’

‘It’s a very nice apron,’ she managed. ‘It’s a very nice bow. Well…well done, boys.’ She fought a bit more for control. ‘Um… Is that curry I can smell?’

‘It is.’ Marcus beamed at her as if a protégée had just proven herself incredibly clever. ‘Harry said he liked curry.’

‘How… Did Auntie Hattie have curry powder?’ She was fascinated.

‘You don’t make curry out of curry powder,’ he told her.

‘No?’

‘No. You really don’t cook, do you, Mrs Benson.’

Mrs Benson…

The label came out unexpectedly and hung. She bit her lip and tried desperately to ignore it.

‘When I was eight years old, I had a very sensible grade teacher,’ she told him. Somehow. ‘Mrs Canterbury was Yooralaa’s answer to Emily Pankhurst. One day she took us girls aside and said if we were ever to amount to anything we should never learn to type, never learn to sew and never learn to cook. I followed her advice to the letter.’

‘Well done, you,’ he said faintly, obviously bemused. ‘And here you are, amounting to lots. But hungry. Curry powder, huh?’

‘So how do you make curry without curry powder?’

‘You take the little bottles of herbs Hattie has in a collection labelled Gourmet Delight. It looks as if it was bought for decoration rather than use but she has everything. Coriander, cumin, turmeric, cardamom, you name it. Nothing’s ever been opened so it’s still good. Then you lift the cute little ornamental chilli plant off the veranda where it’s obviously been placed because it clashes with pink. You pick two chillis. You take a hunk of frozen lamb, a can of tomatoes, a few lemons from the tree outside, and voilà.’

‘Voilà? Is that Indian for delicious?’

‘Of course it’s Indian. And absolutely it’s for delicious. Hungry?’

Was she hungry? She smelled again and the smell did things to her insides she found extraordinary.

No. It wasn’t just the smell, she thought. It was the whole experience.

A man in Hattie’s house.

A man in her life!

There were enough men in her life, she told herself desperately. She had four brothers whom she loved. She’d coped with a neglectful father and a violent cousin. Six men. She didn’t need any more. Ever.

But Marcus was holding the chair for her to sit. No one had ever held a chair for her. Marcus was smiling at her. No one had ever smiled at her…

Was she crazy? Of course people had smiled at her. All the time!

No one had ever smiled at her like Marcus.

She was home, she told herself. Life had to get back to normal. This was some crazy two-week aberration-a man cooking for her-a man acting as if he cared. It’d go away. He’d go away and then her life could go on as normal.

Could it?

They sat across the table from him, Peta and her little brother, and they ate his curry as if they’d never eaten such food. They savoured every mouthful.

Marcus’s cooking was his secret pleasure. His mother had never cooked. For the first few years of his life he’d lived on hamburgers and Coke. Then one of his mother’s boyfriends had wooed her by hiring a chef for the night. Marcus had been sent to bed while the two had a romantic tête à tête, but the smells had been tantalising. The next day the leftover ingredients filled the kitchen. He’d investigated, then had a long discussion with the lady in the next door apartment.

The result had left him delighted. It had been the start of a skill that until now had never been shared. But sharing…

It was great, he thought. His food was being consumed with total enjoyment and it added to his satisfaction tenfold. Peta and Harry discussed the curry with absolute fascination; they ate every scrap and the three dogs under the table were left to eye each other disconsolately.

‘Where did you learn to do this?’ Peta demanded and he told her. That felt odd, too-talking about the past to a woman who looked as if she was really interested. Who looked as if she really cared.

She didn’t. She couldn’t, he told himself. This farm was her life and she had no part in his. He knew that, but as the last of the curry was finished and she rose to go, he was aware of a sharp stab of loss.

‘I’ll make coffee,’ he told her but she shook her head.

‘I have milking in the morning. Five a.m. I need to go to bed. And it’s back to routine for Harry. He has school.’

‘Aw…’

‘Come on, Harry.’ Peta hauled Harry to his feet and whistled the dogs. ‘Come on, guys. We need to go home and let Mr Benson get his sleep.’

‘It’s just after eight o’clock,’ Marcus said, startled. ‘Even Prince Charming got a better look-in than that.’

‘You left Cinderella in New York,’ Peta said firmly. ‘And she’s staying there.’

THE silence was deafening.

Peta and Harry left, the dogs followed, and Marcus was left in his little pink house with his thoughts.

His thoughts weren’t exactly little and pink. They were large and black. He cleaned the kitchen and polished the pink bench-tops. He unpacked, put his clothes on the pink clothes hangers, stared at the pink walls, thought about how many hours there were in two weeks and how much pink a man could stand.

Not much more than this.

He set up his laptop and logged into his work space. It was nine at night, which meant it was five in the morning in New York. No one was online.

He’d expected a sheaf of correspondence from Ruby. There was nothing.

A man could go crazy.

Where was everyone? He stared at his cellphone. He could ring. There were plenty of things he could discuss.

He’d wake everyone up.

They worked for him. They’d get over it.

But…

‘Have a holiday,’ Ruby had told him. ‘I mean it, Marcus. No work. Take two weeks. We don’t want to hear from you. See if you can do it.’

She’d said it as a challenge and he’d reacted as if she’d been stupid. But now, staring at his cellphone and at his idle computer, he knew Ruby wasn’t stupid. Ruby knew him better than he knew himself.

Maybe because she’d walked the same lonely road.

Tonight had been good, he thought. Tonight had been…excellent. Teaching a twelve-year-old to cook a curry.

It was more than that, he conceded. His pleasure had come from watching a twelve-year-old enjoy himself. And more than that. Watching a twelve-year-old’s big sister enjoy her little brother’s pleasure. Giving his Cinderella more.

Tonight Peta had been happy and it had felt good. It was a strange sensation but it had felt right. Making Peta happy.

Caring.

Whoa! He caught himself and gave himself a mental swipe to the side of the head. He was getting soppy here. This whole situation was for two weeks, he told himself. Only two weeks. Two weeks, Benson, and you’re out of here.

He was going nuts.

But what the heck was a man to do? He flicked on the television and watched an inane American sitcom. What on earth was this country doing, importing this stuff? Was it funny?

How the heck would he know when he couldn’t concentrate?

How had he ever got himself into this mess? he demanded of himself. The world seemed to be going to bed, but how could he go to bed? His head said it was six a.m. New York time and every single part of him was awake.

Peta had adjusted to New York time, he thought, so maybe she’d be feeling like he was. How could Peta be calmly going home to bed?

On her veranda?

That was another thing to think about. To chew over. To make a girl sleep on the veranda…

This set-up was dreadful, he thought. Appalling. She must have had the pits of a childhood. He thought of her lying in a bed-probably with broken springs-probably with thread-bare blankets-setting the alarm for the crack of dawn or earlier, so she could get up to milk her cows.

She was a real Cinderella, he decided, whether she admitted it or not. And he… He’d volunteered to rescue her.

No, he hadn’t. Offering to marry someone for two weeks out of practicality hardly turned him into Prince Charming.

There must be more he could do.

She couldn’t be asleep. Not if the bedsprings were sticking into her. And…what was that fairy story about the pea? The princess sleeping on a hundred feather mattresses, yet still disturbed by one pea underneath the bottom layer.

Fairytales! He was losing his mind.

But the image refused to go away and he found himself opening the back door and staring outside. You’re going to rescue her from a pea?

I’m not going anywhere.

But he was. He refused to stay one minute longer in this little pink room in this little pink house.

He’d just wander by her veranda, he told himself. Just to make sure. And if there were any peas that needed removing…

Well, maybe he was just the man to do it.

Don’t do it, he told himself. Just go for a walk. And if you end up close…

Sleep was nowhere. Peta lay and stared into the dark and tried to conjure up the pure contentment she’d always felt in this bed. In this place.

When their father had died the boys had conducted a vote and had decreed the inside bedroom was Peta’s. She’d refused. For as long as she remembered she’d lain in this little bed at the far end of the veranda while the boys lay in the bigger bed at the other end. They were not too far away, but not too near. This was her private place. Here she could haul the bedclothes up to her nose and disappear into her thoughts, while out in the wide world cows chewed their cuds, trees rustled in the wind, the sea did its thing, owls hooted, frogs croaked…

This farm was alive at night and it was her company. She’d missed it so much while she was in New York.