Anticipation (26 page)

I must have walked through Emily Place a lot, that summer. Between Queen Street and the office, Quadro and my car. Pausing to drink my coffee, take my calls, reject the vendors’ counter-offers. And all the while, up here in apartment 4C, ninety-three-year-old Mabel Johanssen lay neatly dead in her bed.

Had I known, down there in the park, I would have raised my flat white to Mabel’s success. Her ending lithe as an Esther Williams dive, barely rippling the day. Her very last feelings clean sheets on her skin, the flow of a spring afternoon all around, as she lets her heavy eyelids sink and it goes on without her.

Now, in the open-plan kitchen where her hall used to be, I raise a glass of champagne.

Jake clinks his glass against mine. ‘To Mabel,’ he says.

We’ve kept the old parquet floor, put in marble and black walnut. I like to think she’d approve. And apart from that and her perfectly accomplished death, I refuse to imagine anything about her.

Outside, the evening traffic is dwindling away, the city shutting down. A warm breeze brings the end of the day through the open windows, the sounds of bus brakes and rattling security grilles bouncing off old stone and tall glass and the harbour, stirring the white linen blinds. Close the shutters, and you could forget about all that. Lose the city completely. In here, there’s a heavy,
square-edged calm. Soft light and clean white walls. Jake’s done a beautiful job.

We’re holding the first open home tomorrow. The stagers finished this afternoon — there’s a platter of pomegranates and a stack of vintage
Architectural Digests
on the coffee table just to prove it. We’ve gone for an old-money-New-York style — pared back, not overstuffed — with leather and vintage crystal and campaign chests, thick creamy Berber rugs on the floors. Paul and Andy have even lent me a couple of their Hotere prints to hang on either side of the fire.

I’m almost tempted to live here myself. See what lessons leach out of Mabel’s remaining walls. But I’m beginning to think that history doesn’t repeat itself without a helping hand. And besides, despite the Ralph Lauren knock-off sofa and big gas fire, the park down below, this is no place for a dog.

After I’ve taken Jake out for dinner, we’ll be heading back to the island, Ella and I. That much I can tell you. Barring accidents, at least. As for whether we’ll be alone, who knows?

Ella licks a pomegranate and lies down, with a sigh, on the rug. I follow Jake out onto the terrace, look at the dusk creeping up from the streets. The park is already in shadow, the treetops rowdy with mynah birds, a little gold light, here and there, wavering down from the office blocks. Somewhere, a bar turns up the music.

Jake leans back, elbows on the parapet. He’s looking very smart tonight — the house-stagers might have put him there in his floaty linen shirt and Italian loafers. He looks over my shoulder, back inside, and sips his champagne.

‘So,’ he says. ‘This worked out well.’

‘We don’t know that,’ I warn him. ‘Not yet.’

‘Come on, you don’t think it’ll sell? Look at the place. You’ve got it just right.’

I turn and lean beside him. I have to say that it does look right.

‘We should do another one,’ he says.

Maybe we should.

‘Have you thought,’ Jake continues, ‘about what you might do next?’

Maybe I’ll turn into my mother. Maybe I’ll put too many logs on the fire one day. Maybe I’ll be too busy closing the sale of Emily Place to notice the ambulance coming down Queen Street.

I smile. ‘You know, I really have no idea.’ My arm, as I rest my glass on the balustrade, brushes his. I allow it to remain there. ‘I haven’t decided yet.’

Maybe I’ll go swimming.

Descriptions of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp drew on the
eyewitness
accounts contained in Ben Shephard’s
After Daybreak: The Liberation of Bergen-Belsen, 1945,
as well as Bill Close’s memoir,
A View from the Turret: a history of the 3rd Royal Tank Regiment in the Second World War,
which also provided much background information on the period. Robert Capa’s wonderful
Slightly Out of Focus
was an inspiration and a source on Second World War photography and photographers, as were images contained in the collections of the Imperial War Museums and the Steven Spielberg Film & Video Archive of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The BBC WW2 People’s War archive provided a background to life during the Blitz.

Information on court proceedings in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries came from The Old Bailey Proceedings Online, published by HRI Online Publications, part of the Humanities Research Institute at the University of Sheffield.
The Huguenots and French Opinion 1685–1787
by Geoffrey Adams was a source on that period and provided the story of a bank proposed by elements within the French government to draw on the funds of Huguenot refugees in return for greater tolerance in France.

A big thank you to Creative New Zealand and the Todd Corporation for their generous support, as well as to Harriet Allan and all at Random House, to my editor, Anna Rogers, and to Charlotte Randall, Jane Higgins and Bernadette Hall for their kindness and advice.
Also to Eloise Cowie, Mary Harty and Nick Clark for sharing their expertise on various aspects of plot and settings. To Ian, always. To Nicola Feggetter at the Islington Local History Centre and to Elena Payami at the London Fire Brigade Museum for answering my questions; also to Google and the dedicated scientific community of Wikipedians, without which neither this novel nor its plot would have been feasible. And finally, to Jamie Macpherson, who walked with me to an island many years ago.

Tanya Moir was born in Invercargill and grew up in rural Southland. She has worked in radio, print and television in New Zealand and as a television promo producer in Rome and London. She now lives on the west coast of Auckland with her husband, Ian.
Anticipation
is her second novel.

From a stunning new voice in historical fiction comes a novel about a stark but beautiful landscape, about challenging social norms and about finding love …

In 1866, Daniel Peterson and his family give up their comfortable life in London for an unseen farm on Banks Peninsula. Daniel plans to make a fortune growing grass-seed; until he does so, there can be no going back. But the realities of a remote hill country block are very different to the cosy imaginings of a clerk.

The Petersons find themselves at the mercy of the land, the weather and their few neighbours — a motley, suspicious assortment of old whalers, escaped convicts, wary French settlers and true-blue Tory squatters. Even their own house has a secret to hide — that of its first inhabitant, the scandalous Etienne La Rochelle and his Maori lover. When Daniel’s daughter Hester discovers La Rochelle’s journal, it leads her on a journey of discovery — a path into a world of beauty, darkness and illicit love, which she may follow if she dares.

Available as a print and digital title.

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