KEY POINTS:
Six o'clock on a glum Thursday night, but it has stopped drizzling and is not cold. I arrive at the Prime Minister's villa a little early, so I drive round the block and park the car on a spare yellow line I find and walk to the shops for a look. There is a Heineken cafe, a Bangkok cafe, a Vietnamese restaurant and a Mortgage McCanix.
The air is full of delicious Asian cooking smells. I press the bell at the gate. Herself - as Mike Williams likes to refer to Helen Clark - opens the door to the small, compact house she and Peter bought at the end of 1980 and from which they have never moved. It is warm and tidy and nicely cluttered, with objets and pictures and a good few Asian or African masks. She wears a red tailored jacket and black slacks.
Peter Davis is at work on the curry, in a vermillion-checked shirt, honey-beige trousers, brown loafers and a corn-yellow sleeveless jumper. He looks the most comfortable and relaxed I have ever seen him. Helen is cheerful and upbeat, sipping from a large black thermos flask with a handle, which she got from the tourist shop at the South Pole. It keeps tea hot longer than a cup does. Now she does not have to warm a half cup of tea in the microwave.
Turgid classical music is playing on Concert FM. "Peter works to music," she says. "I work in complete quiet. So I go up the front of the house to work, and Peter works at this end with his music. He's got a collection of about 30 Mozart CDs. He seems to start at the beginning, play them all through, then starts at the beginning again." Peter disappears cheerfully and returns with a large box containing the complete works of Mozart. 170 discs, says the box.
In the kitchen, there are four pots on the stove, none the same shape or colour as the other. I am pleased to see the same old, battered, aluminium one still in use, the same pot in which I watched him warm up a previous night's curry nine years ago, just after Clark won election as Prime Minister, with its same battered, old, ill-fitting lid. There are green beans in one pot, diced mushrooms in another, softened onion in another and potatoes ready to start cooking in another.
"Don't cook the mushrooms too early, Peter."
He is chatting amiably but concentrating on a food-stained page of a large 500 page recipe book, Complete Asian Cooking, which I see came out in 1976. He is following the instructions for Taazi Khumben Alu Mattar Kari. "Potatoes, mushroom and pea curry," he says. "I know how to make this, so I make it a lot."
"But tonight he's using beans," says Helen. "Peter doesn't make it right, but who am I to complain when I'm not cooking it myself?"
They are the easiest I have ever seen them. In fact, the more I see them together at home, the more I see how down to earth and normal, in their sense of normal, they are. They are a perfectly suited academic couple. I ask if she is tired.
"Surprisingly, no. I'm pacing myself. Monday is the toughest day. I get up at five in the morning and don't finish till midnight. I start my week with an argument with you."
Her cheerfulness might be to do with tonight's Roy Morgan poll on TV3, which has her well in reach of governing. The news is about to start. Clark fiddles easily with a baffling range of remotes by which she records the bulletins on all channels while the television is turned off.
"Peter can't work this system," she says. "If I'm away, he has to phone me and I have to take him through it step by step and say, 'pick up the light grey one and press so and so, then pick up the thin black one and do such and such'. Peter can't get his head round it."
Peter is, however, getting his head well around the curry in the pokey, cluttered, rimu-walled little kitchen. His curry thing goes back to his parents, when he grew up as a boy in East Africa.
"My parents used to make lots of different curries and have people round. I started to do the same when I lived in Christchurch." "When I first met Peter, his curried lunches were an occasion." "Yes," he says, "I used to invite all sorts of eligible people round, including Helen."
Helen looks at me and grins and rolls her eyes in the way that wives do to saucy comments like that. Then she says, "Curry's the way to my heart."
I follow Peter back to the kitchen and examine the large, untidy, post-carded notice board on the wall. I am looking for something. That evening nine years ago, I noticed something there that I thought extraordinary. I did not film it, and I did not alert the cameraman to it either, because I knew what the public would think if we broadcast it and that the public would be quite wrong. (Perhaps it was I who was wrong, but never mind).
On the board that night was a piece of A4 paper with a line drawn vertically down the middle. On one side was the heading 'Peter,' on the other, 'Helen.' In the columns was a list of what each had spent on the household. At the bottom, the figures were tallied. "Peter owes Helen $ 46.72," I think it said, or some number like that. The impression it gave was that of a student flat. And amid the clutter tonight, I find the same kind of list. It is less organised, and there is no sign the one owes the other anything.
"We don't tot it up any more," says Clark. "Peter pays the household bills, and I pay for the holidays. We haven't balanced it for years." Peter says he does not really know why he keeps the list up. "I suppose I do it to keep the upper hand." "Even Stevens," says Helen. "Who wears the pants in this house?" I hazard, looking at the Prime Minister's elegant black ones. "Both," she replies.
In the kitchen again, Helen is leaning over the biggest pot, cutting something in it with a knife. "Peter's put the potatoes in too big," she says. "Is there salt in it?" I ask. "Yes, but I just put some more in." I am pleased with this. Peter does not have the look of a salt man. I am a big salt man. Peter has the spinach out of a plastic bag.
"I find I'm using spinach more than lettuce these days," he says, as if he has embarked on a radical new departure. "For my eyesight. There's something, something that starts with ' x' that's good for your eyesight in spinach." He says it is a nice time of year for tomatoes and is starting to buy the ones on the vine.
Then I make a terrible discovery. Peter is using inferior olive oil from a litre bottle of the cheap imported stuff you get at the supermarket. I begin an outraged discourse upon the inferior, rancid, so-called extra virgin olive oils the Europeans are dumping here.
"Look at this, Peter," I cry, reading the label aloud. "Extra Virgin Olive Oil. Olive Oil With a Definitive Olive Flavour. In other words, it is so processed they had to put an olive flavour back in. It's probably not even olive oil!"
Clark jumps in with a laugh. "Where's that Paul Holmes Extra Virgin Olive Oil?" and pulls a bottle of it from the back of the bench. She holds it up proudly. The camera clicks away. I cannot believe my luck. Straight on the website, I am thinking.
"I use the Italian one for cooking," says Peter. "Peter," I say, "You can use the good stuff for cooking, too."
"Oh dear," says Peter, reaching round behind me and opening the cupboard under the sink, "I see I've made a terrible mistake." I think he means he has left out an ingredient. Clark has already remarked he has used insufficient turmeric. Then I see it, under the sink. Another unopened litre bottle of the same dumped Italian nonsense.
Peter cuts coriander leaves and reaches into the packed condiment drawer with its little packets of curries for the garam masala. Sitting in the sunroom, I notice way at the end of the garden, in the half light, a birdbath. Peter loves his birds. Peter is a bird watcher. I say, mischievously, to Helen, "Peter told me once rather sniffily that you don't have the patience for bird watching."
"I don't. But in Africa once we saw 120 birds in one day. I'd say to Peter, 'I don't think you've seen that vulture before'. We saw seven kinds of vultures." I note that the vulture is the bird she mentions. She would have, by now, a discerning eye for vultures.
The curry is taking a while to cook. Helen moves to the kitchen. Helen cannot believe Peter hasn't parboiled the potatoes. "Well, yes. I forgot." She gathers up the remains of the vegetables and puts them in a plastic, fading-pink triangular colander.
"Show Paul our compost machine," says Peter. "Paul doesn't want to see our compost machine." Paul does actually, and I follow her to the back of the garden where she opens the lid and throws the debris in.
"Our gardener says this makes very good compost. We're almost zero waste." Will they be installing a ClitronMoultrin toilet, the type I saw at Jeanette Fitzsimons', I ask. They laugh. Peter says they have dual flush and that is about as far as they will go.
Dinner is served. Helen takes her place at the head of the table and starts before the rest of us. It is more absent mindedness than rudeness. Tiredness, too, I expect, wanting to get this thing done. I decline a wine, and Peter pours a drop for them both in crystal glasses. The curry is very tasty. Halfway through, Peter gets himself another glass. Helen tells me he already had one in the kitchen. I chuckle. He is hardly Malcolm Lowry. The crystal glasses came from the London School of Economics, Davies tells me. The LSE, says Clark proudly, where Peter received two masters degrees.
She asks if he got the glasses when he was there. "No," he says in mild rebuke at her ingratitude, "they gave them to you when you made that speech."
"Get some cheese, Peter? Let's have some cheese. And a port."
A discoloured, plump round of very smoky cheese arrives. "That is a serious cheese," I say. "Helen paid $17 for it," says Peter. "Oh, hang on! We don't want to be telling everyone what we spent on cheese. What other cheese have you got?" Peter brings in a brie, which he says was cheap at the supermarket.
"Are you nudists?" I ask, as I had asked Fitzsimons last week.
Helen laughs. "Too bloody cold!" Peter says Helen has made MMP work. "Without Helen, it would be a mess."
"Do you still have things to do?" I ask her.
"Hell, yeah. In fact, the longer you're there, you see the possibilities much more clearly."
"How will you handle it if you don't win?"
"There is only Plan A."
"Did you ever wish you'd had children?"
"No. Nor have I ever spent a lot of time thinking about it."
"Who's your best Cabinet Minister?" She has no hesitation in naming Michael Cullen. She shakes her head at the work he gets done. Peter endorses this and marvels at Cullen's legacy - Working for Families, Kiwisaver, the Cullen Fund, things that will be round for years, major social policies.
"Let's talk about you," I say to Helen. "What do you like most about me?"
"Your impish sense of humour."
Suddenly, although night has fallen, there is a short burst of birdsong in the trees outside the window. Helen and I look at Peter for guidance. His eyes are wide and alert. "Now," he says quickly. "People, tell me, tell me that is a tui." "Well," barks the Prime Minister, "tell it to go to bed."
Next day I phone Helen. "I forgot to tell you that my son asked me to pass on to you that if he were 18, he would be voting for you."
"Oh, that's nice. That's very touching. Thank him very much."
And I know she meant it.
TAAZI KHUMBEN ALU MATTAR KARI
500g mushrooms
500g new potatoes
1 cup peas ( or beans)
1 Tsp ghee or oil
1 small onion
1 tsp grated ginger
1 clove garlic, crushed
2 Tsp fresh coriander
1 tsp ground turmeric
½ tsp chilli powder ( optional)
1/2cup hot water
1 tsp salt
1 tsp garam masala
Gently fry onion in heated ghee or oil for three minutes. Add ginger, garlic and chopped coriander and sauté for another few minutes, stirring occasionally. Add turmeric and chilli powder. Finally add mushrooms, potatoes and peas, with water and salt. Stir well, cover and simmer for 15 mins. Stir in garam masala, cover, and simmer another 15 mins until potatoes are tender. Serve with rice or naan bread.
