A Needle in the Heart by Fiona Kidman

with her, as if he was in the presence of someone he had always known. Every time he saw her he experienced a swoop of joy, one that never went away, even when they were older, and things turned to shit, as they did, for a long time, when the children were growing up, and they were busy making their marks in the world, and not paying a lot of attention to each other. He swore the joy would never go away, never leave them.
    Right from the beginning, the way she dressed made him proud of her when they were out. They were students when they met. She wore straight plaid skirts with dark sweaters, black stockings and flat-heeled lace-up shoes. When she came towards him on the street she would have pulled a beret over her hair, pouched towards the back, and a long scarf would be trailing behind her. The year that he became engaged to her, Petra was rehearsing As You Like It with the university. She was Rosalind. Of course. He was helping to build sets in his spare time, not that he had much of that, but he made it anyway.
    ‘My parents will drive you crazy,’ she told him when they had chosen the ring at Stewart Dawson’s, the big jeweller’s shop on the corner of Lambton Quay and Willis Street. ‘This is a very tasteful ring,’ the attendant had murmured, as she showed them the diamond on a bed of velvet.
    He had been surprised by her insistence that they do thingsproperly. This was a time when young women like Petra were throwing convention out the window. She was a banner waver like him, a ranter and a raver, hurling herself into causes like ban the bomb and trade unions, and the polemics of poetry; she believed it was all right for her to tell him when she was hot for him. All that stuff. She’d read The Second Sex .
    ‘They’re rich. We’ll have to have a big wedding. D’you mind?’ (I do really love them, she said, as a little parenthesis she used from time to time when she spoke about her parents. Like an apology. She was their only child.)
    ‘Just as long as you’re there,’ he’d said. Trying to sound resolute.
    ‘They’ll want your guest list before you can blow the fire out,’ she said.
    ‘I won’t have one. It’s simple.’
    ‘What d’you mean, you won’t have one?’
    ‘Well, just that. Your friends and mine. The rest’s up to you.’
    ‘Don’t be silly, darling. Your family and all that.’
    ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t have any family to ask.’
     
    The Blue Rose China shop was in a long elegant room with timber panelling. Margaret Ellis and her husband Nicholas, who was a dentist, owned the whole building. Nicholas had his rooms upstairs and her shop was on the lower level facing one of the main avenues in Tauranga. It got good afternoon sun which made the glass and silverware sparkle. She kept a set of rapier fire irons and the Peerage brass plaques down the front to give extra brightness in the winter.
    Each day Margaret and Nicholas had their lunch together in the stockroom at the back of the shop. They considered themselves a convivial mix of commerce and the professions, or that’s what Margaret said. Margaret, or Mrs Ellis as she preferred to be called by her customers, was a trim woman, invariably dressed in smooth straight black dresses when she was in the shop, her blonde French roll immaculate and lacquered into place, never a speck on her dark upright shoulders.
    One lunch hour, their conversation concerned their daughterPetra who had just become engaged. Striking the right tone for the newspaper notice was giving both her and Nicholas long pause for thought. ‘What on earth are we going to put about Philip’s parents?’ she said in a strained voice.
    Even Nicholas, who was used to pain and blood and people looking their most unattractive, or shouting for mercy, pointed his scrubbed pink-nailed fingers together and hesitated. ‘Perhaps son of the late Mr and Mrs Moffit.’
    ‘But I understand that Mrs Moffit is still alive.’
    ‘But she’s not Mrs Moffit any more,