The Amateur Science of Love

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They say men marry their mothers. Me, I fell in love with Tilda Robson.

Same eyes, I admit, but that’s about it: twin blues below tawny moustache-brows.

My Tilda had a masters; my mother had TV guides.

She was an artist; my mother a drunken farm wife.

I was born in New Zealand at twenty-one years old: up till then my life had just been practice. I was supposed to be a farmer, but I never had the heart. I had airs of being famous, of being an actor.

‘Pipedreams,’ my father said. ‘How could a solid man throw such a dreamer!’

I did so-so at school then dropped out of uni, which my father held against me but soon came round: I was home and he had hopes that home meant home forever. What a team we’d make—I was his only child—more blood brothers than mere son and father. ‘All this will be yours one day,’ he’d say, and fling his arm towards the jade-green vastness. The our jade-green, our thousand Waikato acres, our mountains where cloud-surf breaks on the peak and tears open with good steady rains.

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