Whenever he was asked how he and Helen met, Pearly liked to say that she fell out of a Christmas tree. She and a fellow nurse had gone to the yard of Aspath Trucking where the Rotary Club was selling the trees — real trees, young wilding pines from the hills. The nurses bought one to set up in the ward, but it wouldn’t fit in the boot of the car, and so they tied it across the roof with baling twine borrowed at the yard. The tree fell off at the war memorial intersection when Helen braked to avoid a black three-legged spaniel making a laborious crossing. Pearly was out jogging, and he was right there, able to lift the tree to the footpath while Helen manoeuvred the car out of the way of traffic.

Helen always said she’d been more worried about damage to the tree than taking any notice of Pearly’s gallantry. Pearly, though, he took a real hit on first seeing her. There was just briefly a flustered vulnerability that he would learn was not at all typical of her, and although a nurse’s uniform wasn’t especially flattering, she was supple in movement, tall, stood pushing back her untidy fair hair as she thanked him. Pearly barely registered her companion. Helen seemed to click into some jigsaw space of what he wished a woman to be. He’d retied the somewhat battered conifer, put an arm through the window to help hold it firm as Helen drove to the hospital. He had hung around long enough to get her address and phone number, long enough to show his true interest. Eventually he hung around long enough to marry her. They had their honeymoon at the Mount Cook Hermitage Hotel. During the days they wrapped themselves in jackets and scarves to walk among rocks and snow, and during the nights they lay close and naked together, talked and made love. Helen was embarrassed that neighbours would hear — the lovemaking, not the talk.

There had been difficult times since, not many, but only in a marriage in which one partner is subservient to the other are there no disagreements, and even when exasperated, or disappointed, Pearly never regretted the marriage. He assumed without any doubt it was the same for Helen.

FOUR

Pearly’s younger brother, Richie, had taken on the family farm. It had always been his ambition, and when Pearly moved on to Dunedin, as much for sporting opportunity as because of any scholastic enthusiasm, Richie had kept his boots planted on the dry downland of their boyhood. The brothers had taken very different paths, but there was a steady, unexamined bond between them. Pearly thought it right that a Gates was still on the property bought three generations earlier, and he hoped Richie’s son would take over in his turn.