Anna was very interested in her colleagues, their likes and dislikes, and what made them tick. One of the reasons for this was so she could leave anonymous presents for her favourites. She was also simply a people person who liked to gradually learn about others while slowly revealing more to them about herself. A few years ago, Anna discovered the existence of a library book club. I mentioned I’d chosen a book by a New Zealand author, and this interested Anna as she loved learning about New Zealand culture, politics, birds and animals. I lent her my copy of the novel, The Vintner’s Luck, by Elizabeth Knox. Anna expressed her dismay that this was a book about a 19th century French winemaker and not about New Zealand at all! Nevertheless, it was by a New Zealand author and so Anna read it. She mentioned to me that she’d enjoyed it, but I didn’t realise how much until she left a copy of the sequel – a sequel I didn’t even know existed – in my pigeonhole for me. The book has many beautiful passages and I recently read it through, wondering which ones were Anna’s favourites. In doing so, I saw she’d left pencil notes throughout the book, correcting all the copyeditor’s errors. I’ll always keep this copy with its notes intact in memory of my beloved and precise Anna. The novel is about an angel who visits his chosen favourite people on earth. He is elegant, slender, enigmatic, wise, witty, kind and beautiful. I’ve chosen a passage that had no errors for Anna to correct. ----------------- The Vintner’s Luck Elizabeth Knox 1998 Sobran paused to drink, drank the bottle off and dropped it. He was at the cherry trees; the rolling bottle scattered some falling fruit, some sunken and furred with dusty white mould. The air smelled sweet, of fresh and fermenting cherries and, oddly strong here, far from the well, a scent of cool fresh water. The moonlight was so bright that the landscape had colour still. Someone had set a statue down on the ridge. Sobran blinked and swayed. For a second he saw what he knew – gilt, paint and varnish, the sculpted labial eyes of a church statue. Then he swooned while still walking forward, and the angel stood quickly to catch him. Sobran fell against a warm, firm pillow of muscle. He lay braced by a wing, pure sinew and bone under a cushion of feathers, complicated and accommodating against his side, hip, leg, the pinions split around his ankle. The angel was breathing steadily, and smelled of snow. Sobran’s terror was so great that he was calm, a serenity like that a missionary priest had reported having felt when he found himself briefly in the jaws of a lion. There was an interval of warm silence; then Sobran saw that the moon was higher and felt that his pulse and the angel’s were walking apace. Sobran looked up. The angel’s youth and beauty were a mask, superficial, and all that Sobran could see. And there was a mask on the mask, of watchful patience. The angel had waited some time to be looked at, after all. Its expression was open and full of curiosity. ‘You slept for a while,’ the angel said, then added, ‘No, not a faint – you were properly asleep.’ Sobran wasn’t afraid any more. This angel had been sent to him, obviously, not for comfort, but counsel, surely. Yet if Sobran confided nothing, and received no advice, the way he felt – enfolded, weak, warm in an embrace itself as invigorating as the air immediately over a wild sea – that alone seemed sufficient for now and for ever.