SO FAR: A jobless and sensitive young man becomes innocently associated with a bubbling woman in her late forties who lives alone on a vineyard out of Auckland, New Zealand. Nash is attracted because Hope Honeybun drives a beautifully re-built and upgraded 1939 Chevy pick-up and draws him from his ‘shell’ with ease. Hope Honeybun’s interest in young Mr Carson is that he writes a little and seems to have a worldly sense so installs him downstairs as resident author and commissions him to write a novel based on her colorful and turbulent life, much of which spans the time she has lived in the valley. Maggie's secret has been revealed and Nash learns more about the mysterious Catherine Hausman.
*
Pretty Mimi Bronkovic is the most outgoing of the Bronkovic women as well as being the oldest, but at forty-five she’s only a year older that Ana and three years older than her other sister-in-law Yela. Hope and Maggie gave her a couple of years and Neven, the oldest of their generation, was five years older than his food-loving wife Mimi who only through binge dieting managed to keep her weight in check.
No-one in the valley had expected the eldest and somewhat conservative – in the traditional family sense of the word – son of Josip Bronkovic to marry a New Zealand woman without European lineage and they were right. Indeed, there was talk about the oldest of the Bronkovic brothers not marrying at all despite his two brothers already having taken the walk up the church aisle.
In despair in 1987 Neven parents insisted that their thirty-three year old son accept airline tickets from them to visit France in the off season to increase his knowledge and expertise in the art of wine-making and vineyard management. At the same time they arranged for their son, in the twilight of prime marrying age, to visit relatives in his parent’s original homeland. Josip and Natasa’s expectation was that their boy would return with a potentially hard-working bride of Dalmatian origin. But that was not to be.
Neven returned empty-handed but smitten, in love with a French woman, five years his junior. He never made it beyond France before his return home. Mimi’s haughty parents, who operated a three hundred year old family winery where Neven spent almost three months, were unmovable – they had no problem about their daughter having a fling with this powerfully built and single-minded New Zealander, but Mimi must marry a Frenchman, and that was that.
Initially Mimi accepted her parent’s wishes, and when Neven left shed few tears – she was used to a procession of lovers passing through her home or village and actually had no intention of marrying. But gradually she began to mope and realised that Neven was a lover without peer, the only lover whom she genuinely liked. In fact she now believed he was adorable.
One afternoon – seven months after Neven’s departure and definitely not pregnant – Mimi ostensibly left home to stay the weekend with an old school friend in England. The next day the now very focused Mimi was in London, boarding a flight to New Zealand.
She arrived at Te Henui village by cab from Henderson and on the street spoke in excellent English to a pretty blonde woman and asked for directions to the home of Neven Bronkovic.
Amazingly, the woman hugged her and said she must be Mimi.
“I’ve known Neven for much of my life,” enthused this friendly woman calling herself by the strange name of Hope Honeybun. “Neven has told me all about you – over and over again, actually. Are you here to marry him?”
Overwhelmed by the knowledge and friendliness of this woman, travel-weary Mimi could only nod.
“Look, you cannot stay in the home of your fiancée, you must come with me and stay as the house guest of my father and myself for as long as you wish.”
Realising this was not an offer to be refused, Mimi accepted, therein establishing a close and lasting friendship with this very sophisticated woman called Hope Honeybun.
The wedding was held a month later, The only people from France attending were Mimi’s cousin, Brigitte Moreau and husband Chaney. Mimi’s own family had excommunicated her. Her bridesmaid was the unmarried sister of Drago’s wife Ana while Hope took the role of bride’s mother including totally organising the event in consultation with Mimi and the groom’s mother Natasa. Cedric Honeybun, as stand-in father, gave her away and flower girl for the twenty-four year old bride was Maggie Tait’s beautiful thirty month old daughter, Alayna.
Before too long, the relationship between the Mimi and Hope cooled somewhat through Mimi having entered into a relationship with Hope’s father.
Mimi had difficulty accepting that she’d allowed such a relationship to occur and it continued sporadically. She drew away from Hope a little, fearful that Hope would find out and Mimi was aware she’d be unable to justify her behaviour.
However, from the time of Cedric’s death the relationship between the two women soon flourished as never before. Occasionally Mimi wondered that perhaps Hope knew about her adulterous relationship, but by then the maturing woman was aware that Hope herself was no lily-white: although lacking evidence she was convinced that Neven and Hope’s youthful romantic entanglement was continuing. She’d detected Hope’s favourite French perfume on Neven several times. An understandable kiss, perhaps? No, not in places on Neven where she’d thought she could detect it! Mimi was not devastated, however, as the French understand such things. Life goes on, at least unless the ultimate showdown occurs.
Seventeen years later, with Neven’s and Mimi’s two children approaching adulthood, a thin-faced and slightly tentative young man arrived at the Te Henui Winery which was producing mainly for the cellar-door and the supermarket/local wineshop trade, with its premium wines selling via agencies into niche markets stretching from Dubai to Tokyo. In good years, up to twenty-five percent of its output wass exported. Sales via the internet are also increasing, thanks to a web site, professionally designed and maintained by the son of one of Hope’s ‘gentlemen friends’.
“Good morning,” greeted Mimi, addressing the cellar door’s first call-in customer of the day. “Would you care to taste a small range of our product – currently we’re offering tastings of our cabernet-merlot-franc blend, an off-dry reisling, a robust chardonnay and an upmarket merlot?”
“Not just now, thank you. What I’d rather much like is a strong cup of black coffee and perhaps two chocolate biscuits?”
The audacity of the man, Mimi thought with a shrug, finding she was captivated by the man’s gentle smile and his radiance. His radiance? She was not sure what she meant by that so hurried off to pour a mug of instant coffee and opened a pack of biscuits normally reserved for VIP visitors.
“You are around from here, I believe,” Mini said, returning with the tray. “I’ve seen you in the village walking a dog, Mrs Honeybun’s dog I think?”
Automatically holding an arm across her chest to avoid the straining material of her dress revealing too much, she leaned forward and offers Nash a chocolate biscuit which was whipped off the plate with enthusiasm.
“Thanks,” he said. “I really didn’t expect these, I just had the urge to try you on.”
“Try me on?” Mimi gaped, a little startled. In her understanding of Kiwi idiom, that meant only one thing.
“Oh, sorry. You’re foreign, aren’t you?”
“Oui, I am French.”
“A lovely country and very interesting people from what I’ve seen on the big screen. What I was meaning is I had the urge to be cheeky. Dunno why – I guess you look kind of cute.”
“Me cute?” Mimi said, unable to avoid looking pleased and displaying a slight blush; since Cedric’s death no casual male had murmured flirtatious remarks to her.
“Only young children are cute, no? You see me as a child?”
“Oh no, not a child,” he said, looking straight at her with almost a Cedric smile.
Mimi’s blush returned.
What an interesting young man. He was Hope’s man; Hope had told her a young man was staying in her house and he would be writing a family history for her.
“I’m Nash, Nash Carson. I am a guest at the home of Mrs Honeybun. I am doing some work for her.”
“How do you do,” Mimi said, shaking the offered hand. “I now know who you are as Hope has told me about you. I am Mimi Bronkovic.”
