The Pleasure Quartet by Vina Jackson Page A

never known. I felt a pang of anger.
    ‘I think something happened and they all became estranged. I’ve never found out what exactly happened,’ he continued.
    ‘My father died before I was born,’ I told him. ‘On our way to New Zealand.’ There was no need to explain the actual circumstances.
    ‘Oh . . . I wasn’t aware of that . . . I’m so sorry. That’s very sad. I feared something of that nature as there were no traces of him in any of the documentation or
searches I made.’
    ‘So how did you come across me?’ I asked my new-found distant cousin.
    ‘A death notice in a newspaper, for your mum. I located it on a micro-fiche . . .’
    I recalled how, after my mother had passed away, Iris’s parents had insisted on placing the formal announcement in an Auckland publication. ‘No one should depart this realm in total
silence,’ Iris’s father had said. He was always a very dignified person, a man with compassion and consideration.
    ‘Why were you looking?’
    ‘Genealogy is a hobby of mine. I’m studying for the bar,’ he said. ‘So it’s the sort of research that can always prove useful,’ he added. ‘And I was
curious about our family tree.’
    It felt odd, but I was intrigued. In a strange way, it meant I wasn’t totally alone, in the blood. Gwillam was such an uncommon name, though. And he sounded so terribly posh and
worldly!
    He beat me to it.
    ‘We should meet,’ he suggested.
    ‘Absolutely,’ I agreed.
    I had to explain my lack of availability in evenings. He sounded genuinely excited by the fact that I worked in the theatre, before I had a chance to reveal how menial my position at the
Princess Empire was. He confessed to me that life as a legal student was mostly dull and he was envious of me moving in such by comparison decadent circles. I was about to correct him, but then
thought why the hell should I?
    I, dull and repressed Moana, could become his highly exotic cousin!
    It then occurred to me that maybe this was some sort of prank being played on me by Thomas, or even by Iris. After all, she was employed at a lawyer’s, and Gwillam had similar connections.
Was it just a coincidence?
    I asked Gwillam where he worked and he mentioned a chambers in the Inns of Court that didn’t sound familiar to me. Iris was with a large firm of solicitors based in Chancery Lane. Which
didn’t mean that there was no collusion between them all, but still made me less suspicious. We settled for lunch a couple of days later. Gwillam suggested the Tavern Bar on the corner of
Bleeding Heart Yard, off Greville Street. It was a part of London I was unfamiliar with but within walking distance of his office.
    He was standing to the right of the bar counter when I arrived and was nothing like I expected. Medium height, wearing plain NHS-issue brown-framed glasses, a blue cotton button-down shirt,
black jeans and brown leather moccasins.
    His hair was lustrous and fell to his shoulders, which made him the least lawyerly lawyer I could have imagined. It was pale brown and combed back, highlighting a vast, smooth forehead beneath
which his eyes twinkled incessantly, combining with a permanent half-formed smile to give the impression that everything amused him. To me, he looked like something of a hippie, were it not for his
more traditional clothing. Had he come from his workplace dressed like that? Back in New Zealand, I knew that a lawyer, even an apprentice, would have been clad in solid black from head to toe, and
a plain white shirt with an anonymous necktie. I remembered the gloomy office Iris and I had been summoned to, where we had been passed Joan’s note and the open tickets for the journey to
Britain.
    Were it not for our respective expressions, and if we had switched hair length, I felt we could have been brother and sister, with me the introvert one and he the extrovert. I warmed to him
immediately.
    ‘Hello, cousin,’ he said, his smile creasing further into welcoming realms