‘… just adhering to society’s expectations,’ Evelyn said. ‘Or having to.’

  ‘Look at the divorce rates, Professor,’ Dalphine argued. ‘One out of every four marriages now ends in divorce. The average length of marriage is eight years and getting shorter.’

  ‘And she’s the handsome example of it,’ Thelma tried to get her own back.

  ‘With the pill and vasectomy and the legalisation of abortion, you can pursue your genitals’ desires until boredom’s end,’ Jonathan said.

  ‘What happens when your genitals break down or age prematurely and you can’t fulfil lust’s demands?’ he asked, trying to keep a straight face. Surely you’re not that ignorant and naive? He saw that in the way they were scrutinising him.

  ‘Your machinery may break down, but that doesn’t mean your lust breaks down with it,’ Evelyn declared.

  ‘Besides, enjoying the handsome salary of a professor, Professor, you should be able to afford the magic pill that’ll put the mana back into your machinery.’ Jonathan dared cross the line between professor and student. Suppressed tittering and sniggering round the class.

  He tried to keep a straight face as he said, ‘Perhaps you, Mr Brilliant Jonathan Smittle, should write a dissertation on the topic of “Colonialism and the Capitalist Hegemony of Cialis”.’ A river of laughter swept through the room, Dalphine laughing the loudest.

  A whole chorus of sparrows and blackbirds were now accompanying the alarmed thrushes as they objected to Ranfor’s dangerous presence, when Harold got up to go and make a cup of tea.

  The door to Marilyn’s study was open and she was working on her computer, the sun streaming in through the front windows and encasing her with a skin of golden light. So beautiful, he thought. In the first few months of their relationship, when he was still married to Lucille, if he’d seen Marilyn on fire like that lust and desire would have immediately driven him to her and they would have fucked as if nothing else mattered. Sometimes they’d spent all day in bed. Finally, he couldn’t do without that unbelievable sexual connection, and had walked out on Lucille and their two sons. His relationship with Marilyn was now five years old, so, according to Dalphine’s statistics, they had one or two years left before breaking up. Lust had cooled down to perhaps twice a week, and it was now more out of habit than blood-thumping, absolutely mind-blowing experimentation and exploration of each other’s sexual possibilities. They kept agreeing they were best friends, and that was more important than anything else, but what they both secretly wanted was to discuss what they should do about their now staid, routine lovemaking. ‘Want a cup of tea?’ he called.

  Without turning from the computer, she said, ‘Yes, please, darling.’ He turned to go into the kitchen, when she added, ‘And please get Ranfor to come in; she’s scaring those poor bloody birds to death.’ She’d procured Ranfor from the SPCA near the Airport, when Ranfor was the size of her hand, and they’d agreed to call her Ranfor because she was the only kitten who had broken from the litter and run to her when she’d looked into their cage. Now Ranfor was two years old and they were both besotted with her. Since she was a teenager, Marilyn had always had a cat: always tabbies, always female. Before Ranfor, there’d been Humor, who’d been hit by a car; before her, Manono, named after the island in Samoa where she’d carried out her six-month research on the Samoan concept of mana; before her, Mānoa, the name of the fabulous valley in Hawai‘i where she’d spent what she’d expected to be an incredible few days of sexual exploration with the darkly handsome Professor Nicholas Beet, who was in his silver-haired sixties and the world authority on Rapanui, but her expectations had proven too demanding, and the distinguished professor had almost suffered a heart attack – she could laugh about it now. Before Mānoa, there’d been Vericose, and so on. She knew more about cats, tabbies, than even Ranfor’s vet, she reminded Harold when the vet tried to sell them an expensive life insurance policy for Ranfor. She’d told the vet she wasn’t a bloody fool about to spend hundreds of dollars on an animal; even one she loved more than people!

  The previous year, after publishing her latest book, a tome on the concept of mana in Polynesia, which had taken her a decade to research and write, she’d been promoted to professor in her anthropology department and invited to give the highly prestigious annual Michael Neill Lectures. This morning she was completing the PowerPoint presentation that would accompany those four lectures, which she was giving the ironic title: ‘Paradise: Michener, Brando and Raymond Burr in the South Seas’. Her throat and eyes were parched and her lower back ached painfully from sitting at the computer since breakfast, so she rose to her feet, stretched her arms and back and hurried to the kitchen, eager to see Ranfor.

  When Harold had left Lucille, he’d shifted into Marilyn’s Mission Bay home, which she’d inherited from her father, who’d been a professor of archaeology and an avid collector of classical Polynesian art and artefacts, which now cluttered the house. After a week of living there, they decided it didn’t fit them as a couple, so, after Harold’s meticulous house-hunting in central Auckland, where they agreed they wanted to be, they bought an old but expensive villa in Lincoln Street, Ponsonby, hired an architect who specialised in restoring and renovating villas, and, preserving the villa’s basic structure, had it raised for a two-car garage underneath, and the rest of it renovated extensively. For instance, the two bedrooms were enlarged, studies and sky-lighted bathrooms were added, modern insulation was put under the floors and into the walls and ceiling, the ancient gas heaters were replaced with an electronically controlled central heating system and all the floors were stripped and carpeted. Harold (with the architect) supervised all this – Marilyn claiming she was useless at such things. She even refused to see any of the renovations until they were completed. ‘This is splendid, darling, marvellous!’ she exclaimed repeatedly as she inspected their new home. And as soon as they shifted in, she insisted that they should, like cats – her favourite creatures – mark and claim their territory by ‘spraying and rubbing our scent’ all over it. So, with incredible intensity, passion and daring, they made love all over their new home.

  He plugged in the electric kettle, opened the French doors and stepped out onto the back deck. Standing at the railing and looking down across their back lawn and overgrown garden, he called, ‘Ranfor, Ranfor, c’mon, girl, c’mon!’ No sign of her, but he knew she was hidden somewhere down there, for the birds were still objecting. One thrush in particular was now standing as a sentinel on the centre of their circular clothesline, crying TWEET-TWEET-TWEET-TWEET! and thrusting her head and beak forward in stabbing motions. He started returning to the kitchen when he felt Ranfor weaving like a warm wavelet round his ankles. He scooped her up.

  Marilyn stopped in the kitchen doorway and watched Harold, who had Ranfor cradled in his arms while he stroked her and crooned, ‘Hey, girl, you’ve got to stop scaring the birds; you’ve got to!’ She didn’t mean it to, but the observation intruded that he looked tired and older, more wrinkled and sallow in the face, his hair greyer and so thin now she could see right through to his scalp, yet he was only fifty and a year younger than her. Where was the zip, the unquenchable vitality, the ihi?

  When he turned and focused on her, she smiled and rushed forward, and he released Ranfor into her arms. ‘Darling, my little darling, you should leave those poor birds alone!’ Ranfor purred loudly as she stroked her.

  ‘What kind of tea, darling?’ Harold asked.

  ‘Green tea, please,’ she said, releasing Ranfor in front of her food dish on the floor. While Ranfor dug into her food, her teeth crunching sharply as she chewed, Marilyn refilled her dish of water and put it beside the food. She squatted down and, while Ranfor ate, she ran her long fingers from Ranfor’s neck down her back, saying to Harold, ‘She’s beautiful, eh? In good form; a fit and mighty hunter!’

  He put two food mats and a small plate of gingernuts and Krispies on the white table under the large beach umbrella on the back deck. He brought sugar and honey too, and then poured their cups of tea and took them to the table, and sat down in the red canvas chair. ‘Darling, your tea’s out!’ He glanced back and caught her rubbing the side of her face into Ranfor’s back, her eyes glazed with happiness.

  ‘Isn’t she beautiful?’ Marilyn sighed.

  So were you, so were you, he thought, and, for the first time, didn’t feel any guilt at thinking that. He started sipping his tea. When he’d first seen her around the university at various meetings and gatherings, his lust antenna hadn’t registered any interest. He saw her as a nondescript, slightly untidy woman without make-up and usually dressed in black trousers with a heavy leather belt inlaid with white pearl shell, navy blue sweater – too hot for summer – black pearl earrings and thick-soled boots, who was always forthright in her views and expressed them with authority, lucidity and persuasive charm.

  Māori Studies, Pacific Studies and Anthropology organised a conference titled ‘Post-colonialism and the Indigenous Body’, and invited him to give one of the keynote addresses. At that time, he was enthralled with Albert Wendt’s novels, which a famous French professor at the University of Bourgoyne had recommended to him, so he wrote a paper called ‘The Anthropology of Guilt and Redemption in Wendt’s Pouliuli’, and delivered it to begin the second day of the conference, to a packed and what he felt was a hugely appreciative audience, in the magnificent Fale Pasefika.

  That afternoon, in the same venue, he was preparing to leave after trying to stay awake during three trying, boring papers, when Marilyn walked up to the lectern.

  For a while, he didn’t recognise her. The transformation was amazing. The glowing, perfectly groomed woman with the slow beguiling smile in front of him was certainly registering on his lust meter, especially when the richly ringed, crimson-red manicured fingers of her slender right hand started adjusting the height and position of the microphone and looked as if they were stroking him. And when she spoke in a deeper voice, which seemed to be coming from the core of her belly, his lust really kicked in – or was it out? And his weakening resolve to remain faithful to Lucille dissolved instantly.

  He hurried up to Marilyn after her paper. ‘Impressive paper; really inspiring and innovative analysis of mana and how it operates in Samoan society,’ he congratulated her. ‘Best paper I’ve heard on the subject.’ Though she squirmed with embarrassment at being praised with such enthusiasm, her whole face and eyes lit up with gratitude, pride and self-satisfaction. For the remainder of the conference he made sure he was near her everywhere, and he sensed she wanted to be near him too.

  Back at work, they rang each other often, both welcoming the almost uncontrollable lust that was enveloping them. On the third day, she invited him for coffee in her office. No preliminaries: she locked her office, he swept everything off her desk and she slid onto it, lay back and raised and opened her shaking legs – she wasn’t wearing any panties, and he buried his burning face and mouth and hungry tongue in her. And the rest is history, he now told himself as he watched her playing with Ranfor. Only this time, he experienced lust not for her but for a new woman, any woman. Like the Marilyn he’d first met at that conference on the ‘indigenous body’.

  She sat down in the canvas chair opposite him, with Ranfor in her lap. He pushed her cup of tea over to her. As usual she wasn’t wearing make-up. Her face was drawn with fatigue, and her wrinkles, blotches and brown age spots were more pronounced. Her old and faded Nike sweat suit, which she wore round the house almost every day, emphasised the fact that the flesh on her arms and neck was loosening and starting to sag and droop.

  ‘Anything wrong?’ she asked him unexpectedly. He shook his head and reached over and caressed Ranfor’s head. For months now she’d felt belittled by his close scrutiny whenever he believed she wasn’t aware of it. Belittled and deeply resentful at being belittled! ‘You don’t look well; you shouldn’t work so hard, darling,’ she returned his belittling. Ranfor slid off her lap and, before she could stop her, was leaping down the deck steps onto the lawn, again setting alight the loud chorus of frightened, offended birds in the Phoenix palm, shrubs and neighbouring trees.

  Like he did at every morning tea they enjoyed together, he half dunked a gingernut into his tea, soaked it for a moment and then bit off the soft half and ate it. After the second gingernut, he took a large mouthful of tea and swallowed that to clear his gullet. Suddenly he was aware she was observing him closely, from the corners of her green-grey eyes, with disdain, and, at first, he couldn’t believe she was doing that, but then when he gulped down the rest of his tea and rose to his feet to leave and he sensed that her scrutiny was now even more disdainful, he felt exposed, naked, stripped of his integrity. ‘Got to finish my paper,’ he mumbled.

  ‘Good on you, darling,’ she said, and he believed there was a cruel, jeering tone in her voice. ‘I’ll enjoy the sexy sun for a while longer and then return to my lectures.’ She watched him going back into the house, and concluded he was definitely looking empty; definitely aging quickly, prematurely.

  She put on her sunglasses, lay back in her chair and closed her eyes. Yes, she was again definitely interested in other men, and had tried to deny that to herself over the past year. Before she’d started the affair with Harold, she’d been celibate for a year, devoting herself wholly to finishing her tome. Because she considered sex a need like food, which you ate whenever you were hungry, she’d lost count of the males (there had been three women) she’d dined with before Harold had come along. (She liked that metaphor.) For about four years she and Harold had enjoyed the wildest, tastiest, most satisfying, most eclectic, most extrovert and no-holds-barred sexual feast she’d ever helped to concoct, cook and serve. And it was so, so disappointing – but inevitable – that the feast was now a morning tea with dunked gingernuts. She almost laughed making that observation.

  When she heard Ranfor’s purring and felt her paws kneading her belly and then her warm, warm weight settling down on her, she whispered, ‘Hi, my darling, my beautiful darling!’

  He knew who it was when the phone on his office desk rang, and he let it ring for a while. He’d just finished a lunchtime lecture on the poetry of Hone Tuwhare to his stage one New Zealand literature class, of almost two hundred and fifty students. He hated lecturing to first-year students, many of whom were only taking the course as a prerequisite for other non-literary degrees such as law, and didn’t really care about the literature of their country; most were content with handing in shoddy, mediocre work. But it was a long established policy in his department for professors to take a stage one class. He felt down, stressed, cynically disappointed by his students’ indifferent reaction to Tuwhare’s poetry. What do you expect when you have such a large class and you can’t get to know students individually? He picked up the phone without thinking, and muttered, ‘Hello, who is this?’

  ‘You don’t have to speak like that to me!’ Lucille’s annoyance jabbed into his head.

  ‘Sorry, I’m sorry,’ was his automatic reaction, and he immediately regretted regressing to his manner of reacting to her anger when they were married. ‘What the hell do you want?’ He compensated for it.

  A shocked gasp, then she snapped, ‘You may speak to your bloody girlfriend like that but …!’

  ‘I can speak to you like that: I didn’t ring you; you bloody well rang me!’ A needle of pleasure pierced his tongue when he heard her snivelling, swallowing back tears. ‘You rang me, Lucille, so tell me what you want.’

  ‘Remember your sons? They’re still alive – as if you care one fucking bit!’ she attacked. He let her rave, telling him Matt and Otis had rung her complaining about him not fulfilling his promise of paying their fares to the Makaha Surfing Championships in Hawai‘i. ‘Promises are promises, Harold, despite the fucking fact you broke your promise to me and your kids and took off with that – that whore of an anthropologist!’

  ‘I did not make such a promise,’ he cut her off. ‘And I am not going to pay for their surfing when I am bloody well paying thirty percent of their annual university expenses and they continue to fail and fail. Goodbye!’ He slammed down the phone. And felt splendidly elated and free for having at last denied Lucille and his sons something.

  When he got home to Marilyn and a light evening meal of scrambled eggs, cheese and French bread, plain low-fat yoghurt and a glass of red wine, and told her about Lucille’s call and his ‘fucking lazy, spendthrift sons’, she tried to look interested in and offended by what Lucille had said and done, and said, ‘She actually called me a whore? Who the hell does she think she is? Does she think the whole university doesn’t know she puts it out even for her first-year students? Bugger her!’ She was surprised that she was really feeling offended.

  As they washed the dishes, Ranfor purred loudly, weaving round their legs, and a disturbing question, prompted by Marilyn’s comments about Lucille, grew more and more demanding in Harold’s mouth, though he tried to swallow it. She dried her hands, picked up Ranfor and, cuddling her, started to go to the sitting room. ‘Darling,’ he stopped her, ‘is it really true that everyone at the university believes – believes she’s a …?’

  Marilyn didn’t hesitate. ‘A whore?’ He nodded. ‘What you really want to know, darling, is: did your beloved wife play around with other guys when she was married to you? Isn’t it? Typical male paranoia and hypocrisy: you can fuck around but your wife can’t!’

  ‘No, and I don’t care if she did!’ Harold tried to sound unconcerned.

  Marilyn held Ranfor up against her cheek, and Harold had to gaze into both their faces. ‘So you don’t really want me to give you a truthful answer, darling?’ She focused right in.

  ‘I don’t care,’ he murmured, smiling to try and hide his fearful apprehension.

  ‘So, my darling Ranfor, shall we give your other darling the truth and nothing but the truth?’ She could feel her whole being glowing with joyous triumph. ‘Don’t worry, Harold, what I said is not true,’ she lied. ‘I made it up because of her hurtful remarks about me.’ She could see relief, profound relief, rising from the depths of his eyes and in his almost inaudible sigh. ‘Besides, is it that important? I mean, we started our marvellous affair while you were still married to her.’ Ranfor squirmed deliciously in her arms and she pushed her into Harold’s arms. ‘Here, at least Ranfor’ll never lie to us. A cat is always a cat.’