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said, or planned. Victor Yee prepares a meal in the front flat with no sense of release, Miles, who has forbidden Georgina to visit him, watches on video while she strips, Norman Proctor’s memorial plaque at the Avon Crematorium dazzles the custodian with reflected sun.
    ‘You realise that it’s political action rather than any religious conversion that I’m interested in,’ says Slaven.
    ‘You want your aims to be spiritually and socially regenerative though. Isn’t that so?’ replies Thackeray.
    ‘And I don’t want to work within any particular party; certainly not yet. Just give people the opportunity to endorse a few basic principles, just give me the chance to gauge the opinions of ordinary people.’
    ‘For that you’ll find Tuamarina the ideal place,’ says Thackeray.
    ‘Is there provision for a fee?’ says Kellie. ‘Aldous has very little coming from the partnership while he can’t work you know.’ The minister spreads his fingers palm uppermost as if to make clear that he hasn’t any golden handshake.
    ‘Expenses though of course,’ he says.
    Kellie decides for the future that if indeed Slaven hasthe gift then it will not necessarily be passed on as such. She leaves her husband and Thackeray talking, and the Thomas sons, adult, but not yet come into their intellectual inheritance. These two rise in courtesy as she goes. Kellie imagines them late at night, roaming the beaches and parks while they practise their rhetorical skills and await their chance. Will the Charismatic Cambrian Church, the country even, be big enough for two of them when Thackeray has given up? Will they be new Lloyd Georges from the glass caves of the other side of the world? Do they harangue the possum, rat and morepork with wondrous eloquence despite the pebbles beneath their tongues?
    Thackeray and Slaven find that they can be straight with each other. There is in both a bedrock intelligence and good intention as a link despite the slightly gothic aspects of the Rev Thomas’s personality and the reverse in Slaven’s.
    ‘I see you as the keynote speaker at Tuamarina,’ says Thackeray, despite this role normally being his own. He is pleased with his insight in regard to Slaven’s significance and he takes an innocent pleasure in the comfort of Kellie and Slaven’s home, with its basking garden of colour and the hobby paddocks as a further privacy around it. He has no great wealth and possession and doesn’t direct his talent in that way, but it sometimes occurs to him that there may be Meyrick estates in Penrhyn which are owed to him perhaps. ‘Are you the gardener?’ he asks Slaven.
    ‘My wife.’
    ‘What a talent she has. My own wife now, she’s an equestrian. Dressage is the thing with her and I suppose that’s rather like being a gardener in a way. A sense of fitness, order, the contained display of nature. My own personality is rather archaic to a degree, tempestuous even, but you can’t deny your race. You’re not Celtic are you?’
    ‘More English and Dane.’
    ‘It’s of no consequence,’ says Thackeray, ‘but I do hope you’ll come to Tuamarina in June. We’re taking a risk in the weather, but the seventeenth of June was when the fight took place there — the massacre as it was once known. It’s fitting in that way you see and our organisation is quite strong in the countryside there.’
     
    ‘I rang Adelle and found out a bit about him,’ says Kellie. ‘Adelle’s into religion and influential figures and so on. She says the Cambrian Church is one of the big things now throughout the country, but they believe more in regional autonomy and grassroots help than a high national profile. She says Thackeray Thomas even goes overseas to speak by invitation.’
    ‘Well then, it seems reasonable to appear at Tuamarina. It’s not as if we’re joining up and it provides a ready made platform, a means of access to the people.’
    It is late evening now and the colours of their garden are fading