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MOST EVENINGS, WEATHER permitting, the Natwicks sat on the front veranda to watch the traffic. During the day the stream flowed, but towards five it began to thicken, it sometimes jammed solid like: the semi-trailers and refrigeration units, the decent old-style sedans, the mini-cars, the bombs, the Holdens and the Holdens. She didn’t know most of the names. Royal did, he was a man, though never ever mechanical himself. She liked him to tell her about the vehicles, or listen to him take part in conversation with anyone who stopped at the fence. He could hold his own, on account of he was more educated, and an invalid has time to think.

They used to sit side by side on the tiled veranda, him in his wheelchair she had got him after the artheritis took over, her in the old cane. The old cane chair wasn’t hardly presentable any more; she had torn her winter cardy on a nail and laddered several pair of stockings. You hadn’t the heart to get rid of it, though. They brought it with them from Sarsaparilla after they sold the business. And now they could sit in comfort to watch the traffic, the big steel insects of nowadays, which put the wind up her at times.

Royal said, ‘I reckon we’re a shingle short to’uv ended up on the Parramatta Road.’

‘You said we’d still see life,’ she reminded, ‘even if we lost the use of our legs.’

‘But look at the traffic! Worse every year. And air. Rot a man’s lungs quicker than the cigarettes. You should’uv headed me off. You who’s supposed to be practical!’

‘I thought it was what you wanted,’ she said, keeping it soft; she had never been one to crow.

‘Anyway, I already lost the use of me legs.’

As if she was to blame for that too. She was so shocked the chair sort of jumped. It made her blood run cold to hear the metal feet screak against the little draught-board tiles.

‘Well, I ’aven’t!’ she protested. ‘I got me legs, and will be able to get from ’ere to anywhere and bring ’ome the shopping. While I got me strength.’

She tried never to upset him by any show of emotion, but now she was so upset herself.

They watched the traffic in the evenings, as the orange light was stacked up in thick slabs, and the neon signs were coming on.

‘See that bloke down there in the parti-coloured Holden?’

‘Which?’ she asked.

‘The one level with our own gate.’

‘The pink and brown?’ She couldn’t take all that interest tonight, only you must never stop humouring a sick man.

‘Yairs. Pink. Fancy a man in a pink car!’

‘Dusty pink is fashionable.’ She knew that for sure.

‘But a man!’

‘Perhaps his wife chose it. Perhaps he’s got a domineering wife.’

Royal laughed low. ‘Looks the sort of coot who might like to be domineered, and if that’s what he wants, it’s none of our business, is it?’

She laughed to keep him company. They were such mates, everybody said. And it was true. She didn’t know what she would do if Royal passed on first.

That evening the traffic had jammed. Some of the drivers began tooting. Some of them stuck their heads out, and yarned to one another. But the man in the pink-and-brown Holden just sat. He didn’t look to either side.

Come to think of it, she had noticed him pass before. Yes. Though he wasn’t in no way a noticeable man. Yes. She looked at her watch.

‘Five-twenty,’ she said. ‘I seen that man in the pink-and-brown before. He’s pretty regular. Looks like a business executive.’

Royal cleared his throat and spat. It didn’t make the edge of the veranda. Better not to notice it, because he’d only create if she did. She’d get out the watering-can after she had pushed him inside.

‘Business executives!’ she heard. ‘They’re afraid people are gunner think they’re poor class without they execute. In our day nobody was ashamed to do. Isn’t that about right, eh?’ She didn’t answer because she knew she wasn’t meant to. ‘Funny sort of head that cove’s got. Like it was half squashed. Silly-lookun bloody head!’

‘Could have been born with it,’ she suggested. ‘Can’t help what you’re born with. Like your religion.’

There was the evening the Chev got crushed, only a young fellow too. Ahhh, it had stuck in her throat, thinking of the wife and kiddies. She ran in, and out again as quick as she could, with a couple of blankets, and the rug that was a present from Hazel. She had grabbed a pillow off their own bed.

She only faintly heard Royal shouting from the wheel-chair.

She arranged the blankets and the pillow on the pavement, under the orange sky. The young fellow was looking pretty sick, kept on turning his head as though he recognized and wanted to tell her something. Then the photographer from the Mirror took his picture, said she ought to be in it to add a touch of human interest, but she wouldn’t. A priest came, the Mirror took his picture, administering what Mrs Dolan said they call Extreme Unkshun. Well, you couldn’t poke fun at a person’s religion any more than the shape of their head, and Mrs Dolan was a decent neighbour, the whole family, and clean.

When she got back to the veranda, Royal, a big man, had slipped down in his wheel-chair.

He said, or gasped, ‘Wotcher wanter do that for, Ella? How are we gunner get the blood off?’

She hadn’t thought about the blood, when of course she was all smeared with it, and the blankets, and Hazel’s good Onkaparinka. Anyway, it was her who would get the blood off.

‘You soak it in milk or something,’ she said. ‘I’ll ask. Don’t you worry.’

Then she did something. She bent down and kissed Royal on the forehead in front of the whole Parramatta Road. She regretted it at once, because he looked that powerless in his invalid chair, and his forehead felt cold and sweaty.

But you can’t undo things that are done.

It was a blessing they could sit on the front veranda. Royal suffered a lot by now. He had his long-standing hernia, which they couldn’t have operated on, on account of he was afraid of his heart. And then the artheritis.

‘Arthritis.’

‘All right,’ she accepted the correction. ‘Arth-er-itis.’

It was all very well for men, they could manage more of the hard words.

‘What have we got for tea?’ he asked.

‘Well,’ she said, fanning out her hands on the points of her elbows, and smiling, ‘it’s a surprise.’

She looked at her watch. It was five-twenty.

‘It’s a coupler nice little bits of fillet Mr Ballard let me have.’

‘Wotcher mean let you have? Didn’t you pay for them?’

She had to laugh. ‘Anything I have I pay for!’

‘Well? Think we’re in the fillet-eating class?’

‘It’s only a treat, Royal,’ she said. ‘I got a chump chop for myself. I like a nice chop.’

He stopped complaining, and she was relieved.

‘There’s that gentleman,’ she said, ‘in the Holden.’

They watched him pass, as sober as their own habits.

Royal – he had been his mother’s little king. Most of his mates called him ‘Roy’. Perhaps only her and Mrs Natwick had stuck to the christened name, they felt it suited.

She often wondered how Royal had ever fancied her: such a big man, with glossy hair, black, and a nose like on someone historical. She would never have said it, but she was proud of Royal’s nose. She was proud of the photo he had of the old family home in Kent, the thatch so lovely, and Grannie Natwick sitting in her apron on a rush-bottom chair in front, looking certainly not all that different from Mum, with the aunts gathered round in leggermutton sleeves, all big nosey women like Royal.

She had heard Mum telling Royal’s mother, ‘Ella’s a plain little thing, but what’s better than cheerful and willing?’ She had always been on the mousey side, she supposed, which didn’t mean she couldn’t chatter with the right person. She heard Mum telling Mrs Natwick, ‘My Ella can wash and bake against any comers. Clever with her needle too.’ She had never entered any of the competitions, like they told her she ought to, it would have made her nervous.

It was all the stranger that Royal had ever fancied her.

Once as they sat on the veranda watching the evening traffic, she said, ‘Remember how you used to ride out in the old days from “Bugilbar” to Cootramundra?’

‘Cootamundra.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Cootramundra.’ (That’s why they’d called the house ‘Coota’ when they moved to the Parramatta Road.)

She had been so dazzled on one occasion by his parti-coloured forehead and his black hair, after he had got down from the saddle, after he had taken off his hat, she had run and fetched a duster, and dusted Royal Natwick’s boots. The pair of new elastic-sides was white with dust from the long ride. It only occurred to her as she polished she might be doing something shameful, but when she looked up, it seemed as though Royal Natwick saw nothing peculiar in Ella McWhirter dusting his boots. He might even have expected it. She was so glad she could have cried.

Old Mr Natwick had come out from Kent when a youth, and after working at several uncongenial jobs, and studying at night, had been taken on as book-keeper at ‘Bugilbar’. He was much valued in the end by the owners, and always made use of. The father would have liked his son to follow in his footsteps, and taught him how to keep the books, but Royal wasn’t going to hang around any family of purse-proud squatters, telling them the things they wanted to hear. He had ideas of his own for becoming rich and important.

So when he married Ella McWhirter, which nobody could ever understand, not even Ella herself, perhaps only Royal, who never bothered to explain (why should he?) they moved to Juggerawa, and took over the general store. It was in a bad way, and soon was in a worse, because Royal’s ideas were above those of his customers.

Fulbrook was the next stage. He found employment as book-keeper on a grazing property outside. She felt so humiliated on account of his humiliation. It didn’t matter about herself because she always expected less. She took a job in Fulbrook from the start, at the ‘Dixie Cafe’ in High Street. She worked there several years as waitress, helping out with the scrubbing for the sake of the extra money. She had never hated anything, but got to hate the flies trampling in the sugar and on the necks of the tomato sauce bottles.

At weekends her husband usually came in, and when she wasn’t needed in the shop, they lay on the bed in her upstairs room, listening to the corrugated iron and the warping whitewashed weatherboard. She would have loved to do something for him, but in his distress he complained about ‘wet kisses’. It surprised her. She had always been afraid he might find her a bit too dry in her show of affection.

Those years at the ‘Dixie Cafe’ certainly dried her up. She got those freckly patches and seams in her skin in spite of the lotions used as directed. Not that it matters so much in anyone born plain. Perhaps her plainness helped her save. There was never a day when she didn’t study her savings-book, it became her favourite recreation.

Royal, on the other hand, wasn’t the type that dries up, being fleshier, and dark. He even put on weight out at the grazing property, where they soon thought the world of him. When the young ladies were short of a man for tennis the book-keeper was often invited, and to a ball once at the homestead. He was earning good money, and he too saved a bit, though his instincts weren’t as mean as hers. For instance, he fancied a choice cigar. In his youth Royal was a natty dresser.

Sometimes the young ladies, if they decided to inspect the latest at Ryan’s Emporium, or Mr Philup, if he felt like grogging up with the locals, would drive him in, and as he got out they would look funny at the book-keeper’s wife they had heard about, they must have, serving out the plates of frizzled steak and limp chips. Royal always waited to see his employers drive off before coming in.

In spite of the savings, this might have gone on much longer than it did if old Mr Natwick hadn’t died. It appeared he had been a very prudent man. He left them a nice little legacy. The evening of the news, Royal was driven in by Mr Philup and they had a few at the Imperial. Afterwards the book-keeper was dropped off, because he proposed to spend the night with his wife and catch the early train to attend his father’s funeral.

They lay in the hot little room and discussed the future. She had never felt so hectic. Royal got the idea he would like to develop a grocery business in one of the posh outer suburbs of Sydney. ‘Interest the monied residents in some of the luxury lines. Appeal to the imagination as well as the stomach.’

She was impressed, of course, but not as much as she should have been. She wasn’t sure, but perhaps she was short on imagination. Certainly their prospects had made her downright feverish, but for no distinct, sufficient reason.

‘And have a baby.’ She heard her own unnatural voice.

‘Eh?’

‘We could start a baby.’ Her voice grew word by word drier.

‘There’s no reason why we couldn’t have a baby. Or two.’ He laughed. ‘But starting a new life isn’t the time to start a baby.’ He dug her in the ribs. ‘And you the practical one!’

She agreed it would be foolish, and presently Royal fell asleep.

What could she do for him? As he lay there breathing she would have loved to stroke his nose she could see faintly in the light from the window. Again unpractical, she would have liked to kiss it. Or bite it suddenly off.

She was so disgusted with herself she got creaking off the bed and walked flat across the boards to the washstand and swallowed a couple of Aspros to put her solidly to sleep.

All their life together she had to try in some way to make amends to Royal, not only for her foolishness, but for some of the thoughts that got into her head. Because she hadn’t the imagination, the thoughts couldn’t have been her own. They must have been put into her.

It was easier of course in later life, after he had cracked up, what with his hernia, and heart, and the artheritis taking over. Fortunately she was given the strength to help him into the wheel-chair, and later still, to lift, or drag him up on the pillows and over, to rub the bed-sores, and stick the pan under him. But even during the years at Sarsaparilla she could make amends in many little ways, though with him still in his prime, naturally he mustn’t know of them. So all her acts were mostly for her own self-gratification.

The store at Sarsaparilla, if it didn’t exactly flourish, gave them a decent living. She had her problems, though. Some of the locals just couldn’t accept that Royal was a superior man. Perhaps she had been partly to blame, she hardly dared admit it, for showing one or two ‘friends’ the photo of the family home in Kent. She couldn’t resist telling the story of one of the aunts, Miss Ethel Natwick, who followed her brother to New South Wales. Ethel was persuaded to accept a situation at Government House, but didn’t like it and went back, in spite of the Governor’s lady insisting she valued Ethel as a close personal friend. When people began to laugh at Royal on account of his auntie and the family home, as you couldn’t help finding out in a place like Sarsaparilla, it was her, she knew, it was her to blame. It hurt her deeply.

Of course Royal could be difficult. Said stockbrokers had no palate and less imagination. Royal said no Australian grocer could make a go of it if it wasn’t for flour, granulated sugar, and tomato sauce. Some of the customers turned nasty in retaliation. This was where she could help, and did, because Royal was out on delivery more often than not. It embarrassed her only when some of them took it for granted she was on their side. As if he wasn’t her husband. Once or twice she had gone out crying afterwards, amongst the wormy wattles and hens’ droppings. Anyone across the gully could have heard her blowing her nose behind the store, but she didn’t care. Poor Royal.

There was that Mr Ogburn said, ‘A selfish, swollen-headed slob who’ll chew you up and swallow you down.’ She wouldn’t let herself hear any more of what he had to say. Mr Ogburn had a hare-lip, badly sewn, opening and closing. There was nothing frightened her so much as even a well-disguised harelip. She got the palpitations after the scene with Mr Ogburn.

Not that there was anything wrong with her.

She only hadn’t had the baby. It was her secret grief on black evenings as she walked slowly looking for the eggs a flighty hen might have hid in the bracken.

Dr Bamforth said, looking at the nib of his fountain pen, ‘You know, don’t you, it’s sometimes the man?’

She didn’t even want to hear, let alone think about it. In any case she wouldn’t tell Royal, because a man’s pride could be so easily hurt.

After they had sold out at Sarsaparilla and come to live at what they called ‘Coota’ on the Parramatta Road, it was both easier and more difficult, because if they were not exactly elderly they were getting on. Royal used to potter about in the beginning, while taking care, on account of the hernia and his heart. There was the business of the lawn-mowing, not that you could call it lawn, but it was what she had. She loved her garden. In front certainly there was only the two square of rather sooty grass which she would keep in order with the push-mower. The lawn seemed to get on Royal’s nerves until the artheritis took hold of him. He had never liked mowing. He would lean against the veranda post, and shout, ‘Don’t know why we don’t do what they’ve done down the street. Root the stuff out. Put down a green concrete lawn.’

‘That would be copying,’ she answered back.

She hoped it didn’t sound stubborn. As she pushed the mower she bent her head, and smiled, waiting for him to cool off. The scent of grass and a few clippings flew up through the traffic fumes reminding you of summer.

While Royal shuffled along the veranda and leaned against another post. ‘Or pebbles. You can buy clean, river pebbles. A few plastic shrubs, and there’s the answer.’

He only gave up when his trouble forced him into the chair. You couldn’t drive yourself up and down a veranda shouting at someone from a wheel-chair without the passers-by thinking you was a nut. So he quietened.

He watched her, though. From under the peak of his cap. Because she felt he might still resent her mowing the lawn, she would try to reassure him as she pushed. ‘What’s wrong, eh? While I still have me health, me strength – I was always what they call wiry – why shouldn’t I cut the grass?’

She would come and sit beside him, to keep him company in watching the traffic, and invent games to amuse her invalid husband.

‘Isn’t that the feller we expect?’ she might ask. ‘The one that passes at five-twenty,’ looking at her watch, ‘in the old pink-and-brown Holden?’

They enjoyed their snort of amusement all the better because no one else knew the reason for it.

Once when the traffic was particularly dense, and that sort of chemical smell from one of the factories was thickening in the evening air, Royal drew her attention. ‘Looks like he’s got something on his mind.’

Could have too. Or it might have been the traffic block. The way he held his hands curved listlessly around the inactive wheel reminded her of possums and monkeys she had seen in cages. She shifted a bit. Her squeaky old chair. She felt uneasy for ever having found the man, not a joke, but half of one.

Royal’s chair moved so smoothly on its rubber-tyred wheels it was easy to push him, specially after her practice with the mower. There were ramps where necessary now, to cover steps, and she would sometimes wheel him out to the back, where she grew hollyhock and sunflower against the palings, and a vegetable or two on raised beds.

Royal would sit not looking at the garden from under the peak of his cap.

She never attempted to take him down the shady side, between them and Dolans, because the path was narrow from plants spilling over, and the shade might have lowered his spirits.

She loved her garden.

The shady side was where she kept her staghorn ferns, and fishbones, and the pots of maidenhair. The water lay sparkling on the maidenhair even in the middle of the day. In the blaze of summer the light at either end of the tunnel was like you were looking through a sheet of yellow cellophane, but as the days shortened, the light deepened to a cold, tingling green, which might have made a person nervous who didn’t know the tunnel by heart.

Take Mrs Dolan the evening she came in to ask for the loan of a cupful of sugar. ‘You gave me a shock, Mrs Natwick. What ever are you up to?’

‘Looking at the plants,’ Mrs Natwick answered, whether Mrs Dolan would think it peculiar or not.

It was the season of cinerarias, which she always planted on that side, it was sheltered and cold-green. The wind couldn’t bash the big spires and umbrellas of blue and purple. Visiting cats were the only danger, messing and pouncing. She disliked cats for the smell they left, but didn’t have the heart to disturb their elastic forms curled at the cineraria roots, exposing their colourless pads, and sometimes pink, swollen teats. Blushing only slightly for it, she would stand and examine the details of the sleeping cats.

If Royal called she could hear his voice through the window. ‘Where’uv you got to, Ella?’

After he was forced to take to his bed, his voice began to sort of dry up like his body. There were times when it sounded less like a voice than a breath of drowsiness or pain.

‘Ella?’ he was calling. ‘I dropped the paper. Where are yer all this time? You know I can’t pick up the paper.’

She knew. Guilt sent her scuttling to him, deliberately composing her eyes and mouth so as to arrive looking cheerful.

‘I was in the garden,’ she confessed, ‘looking at the cinerarias.’

‘The what?’ It was a name Royal could never learn.

The room was smelling of sickness and the bottles standing on odd plates.

‘It fell,’ he complained.

She picked up the paper as quick as she could.

‘Want to go la-la first?’ she asked, because by now he depended on her to raise him and stick the pan under.

But she couldn’t distract him from her shortcomings; he was shaking the paper at her. ‘Haven’t you lived with me long enough to know how to treat a newspaper?’

He hit it with his set hand, and certainly the paper looked a mess, like an old white battered brolly.

‘Mucked up! You gotter keep the pages aligned. A paper’s not readable otherwise. Of course you wouldn’t understand because you don’t read it, without it’s to see who’s died.’ He began to cough.

‘Like me to bring you some Bovril?’ she asked him as tenderly as she knew.

‘Bovril’s the morning,’ he coughed.

She knew that, but wanted to do something for him.

After she had rearranged the paper she walked out so carefully it made her go lopsided, out to the front veranda. Nothing would halt the traffic, not sickness, not death even.

She sat with her arms folded, realizing at last how they were aching.

‘He hasn’t been,’ she had to call after looking at her watch.

‘Who?’ she heard the voice rustling back.

‘The gentleman in the pink Holden.’

She listened to the silence, wondering whether she had done right.

When Royal called back, ‘Could’uv had a blow-out.’ Then he laughed. ‘Could’uv stopped to get grogged up.’ She heard the frail rustling of the paper. ‘Or taken an axe to somebody like they do nowadays.’

She closed her eyes, whether for Royal, or what she remembered of the man sitting in the Holden.

Although it was cold she continued watching after dark. Might have caught a chill, when she couldn’t afford to. She only went inside to make the bread-and-milk Royal fancied of an evening.

She watched most attentively, always at the time, but he didn’t pass, and didn’t pass.

‘Who?’

‘The gentleman in the Holden.’

‘Gone on holiday.’ Royal sighed, and she knew it was the point where a normal person would have turned over, so she went to turn him.

One morning she said on going in, ‘Fancy, I had a dream, it was about that man! He was standing on the side path alongside the cinerarias. I know it was him because of his funny-shaped head.’

‘What happened in the dream?’ Royal hadn’t opened his eyes yet; she hadn’t helped him in with his teeth.

‘I dunno,’ she said, ‘it was just a dream.’

That wasn’t strictly truthful, because the Holden gentleman had looked at her, she had seen his eyes. Nothing was spoken, though.

‘It was a sort of red and purple dream. That was the cinerarias,’ she said.

‘I don’t dream. You don’t when you don’t sleep. Pills aren’t sleep.’

She was horrified at her reverberating dream. ‘Would you like a nice soft-boiled egg?’

‘Eggs all have a taste.’

‘But you gotter eat something!’

On another morning she told him – she could have bitten off her tongue – she was stupid, stupid, ‘I had a dream.’

‘What sort of dream?’

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘a silly one. Not worth telling. I dreamed I dropped an egg on the side path, and it turned into two. Not two. A double-yolker.’

She never realized Royal was so much like Mrs Natwick. It was as she raised him on his pillows. Or he had got like that in his sickness. Old men and old women were not unlike.

‘Wasn’t that a silly one?’ she coaxed.

Every evening she sat on the front veranda and watched the traffic as though Royal had been beside her. Looked at her watch. And turned her face away from the steady-flowing stream. The way she bunched her small chest she could have had a sour breath mounting in her throat. Sometimes she had, it was nervousness.

When she went inside she announced, ‘He didn’t pass.’

Royal said – he had taken to speaking from behind his eyelids, ‘Something muster happened to ’im. He didn’t go on holiday. He went and died.’

‘Oh, no! He wasn’t of an age!’

At once she saw how stupid she was, and went out to get the bread-and-milk.

She would sit at the bedside, almost crouching against the edge of the mattress, because she wanted Royal to feel she was close, and he seemed to realize, though he mostly kept his eyelids down.

Then one evening she came running, she felt silly, her calves felt silly, her voice, ‘He’s come! At five-twenty! In a new cream Holden!’

Royal said without opening his eyes, ‘See? I said ’e’d gone on holiday.’

More than ever she saw the look of Mrs Natwick.

Now every evening Royal asked, ‘Has he been, Ella?’

Trying not to make it sound irritable or superior, she would answer, ‘Not yet. It’s only five.’

Every evening she sat watching, and sometimes would turn proud, arching her back, as she looked down from the veranda. The man was so small and ordinary.

She went in on one occasion, into the more than electric light, lowering her eyelids against the dazzle. ‘You know, Royal, you could feel prouder of men when they rode horses. As they looked down at yer from under the brim of their hats. Remember that hat you used to wear? Riding in to Cootramundra?’

Royal died quietly that same year before the cinerarias had folded, while the cold westerlies were still blowing; the back page of the Herald was full of those who had been carried off. She was left with his hand, already set, in her own. They hadn’t spoken, except about whether she had put out the garbage.

Everybody was very kind. She wouldn’t have liked to admit it was enjoyable being a widow. She sat around for longer than she had ever sat, and let the dust gather. In the beginning acquaintances and neighbours brought her little presents of food: a billy-can of giblet soup, moulded veal with hard-boiled egg making a pattern in the jelly, cakes so dainty you couldn’t taste them. But when she was no longer a novelty they left off coming. She didn’t care any more than she cared about the dust. Sometimes she would catch sight of her face in the glass, and was surprised to see herself looking so calm and white.

Of course she was calm. The feeling part of her had been removed. What remained was a slack, discardable eiderdown. Must have been the pills Doctor gave.

Well-meaning people would call to her over the front fence, ‘Don’t you feel lonely, Mrs Natwick?’ They spoke with a restrained horror, as though she had been suffering from an incurable disease.

But she called back proud and slow, ‘I’m under sedation.’

‘Arrr!’ They nodded thoughtfully. ‘What’s ’e given yer?’

She shook her head. ‘Pills,’ she called back. ‘They say they’re the ones the actress died of.’

The people walked on, impressed.

As the evenings grew longer and heavier she sat later on the front veranda watching the traffic of the Parramatta Road, its flow becoming syrupy and almost benign: big bulbous sedate buses, chrysalis cars still without a life of their own, clinging in line to the back of their host-articulator, trucks loaded for distances, empty loose-sounding jolly lorries. Sometimes women, looking out from the cabins of trucks from beside their men, shared her lack of curiosity. The light was so fluid nobody lasted long enough. You would never have thought boys could kick a person to death, seeing their long soft hair floating behind their sports models.

Every evening she watched the cream Holden pass. And looked at her watch. It was like Royal was sitting beside her. Once she heard herself, ‘Thought he was gunner look round tonight, in our direction.’ How could a person feel lonely?

She was, though. She came face to face with it walking through the wreckage of her garden in the long slow steamy late summer. The Holden didn’t pass of course of a Saturday or Sunday. Something, something had tricked her, not the pills, before the pills. She couldn’t blame anybody, probably only herself. Everything depended on yourself. Take the garden. It was a shambles. She would have liked to protest, but began to cough from running her head against some powdery mildew. She could only blunder at first, like a cow, or runty starved heifer, on breaking into a garden. She had lost her old wiriness. She shambled, snapping dead stems, uprooting. Along the bleached palings there was a fretwork of hollyhock, the brown fur of rotting sunflower. She rushed at a praying mantis, a big pale one, and deliberately broke its back, and was sorry afterwards for what was done so easy and thoughtless.

As she stood panting in her black, finally yawning, she saw all she had to repair. The thought of the seasons piling up ahead made her feel tired but necessary, and she went in to bathe her face. Royal’s denture in a tumbler on top of the medicine cabinet, she ought to move, or give to the Sallies. In the meantime she changed the water. She never forgot it. The teeth looked amazingly alive.

All that autumn, winter, she was continually amazed, at the dust she had let gather in the house, at old photographs, books, clothes. There was a feather she couldn’t remember wearing, a scarlet feather, she can’t have worn, and gloves with little fussy ruffles at the wrists, silver piping, like a snail had laid its trail round the edges. There was, she knew, funny things she had bought at times, and never worn, but she couldn’t remember the gloves or the feather. And books. She had collected a few, though never a reader herself. Old people liked to give old books, and you took them so as not to hurt anybody’s feelings. Hubert’s Crusade, for instance. Lovely golden curls. Could have been Royal’s father’s book. Everybody was a child once. And almost everybody had one. At least if she had had a child she would have known it wasn’t a white turnip, more of a praying mantis, which snaps too easy.

In the same box she had put away a coloured picture, Cities of the Plain, she couldn’t remember seeing it before. The people escaping from the burning cities had committed some sin or other nobody ever thought, let alone talked, about. As they hurried between rocks, through what must have been the ‘desert places’, their faces looked long and wooden. All they had recently experienced could have shocked the expression out of them. She was fascinated by what made her shiver. And the couples with their arms still around one another. Well, if you were damned, better hang on to your sin. She didn’t blame them.

She put the box away. Its inlay as well as its contents made it something secret and precious.

The autumn was still and golden, the winter vicious only in fits. It was what you could call a good winter. The cold floods of air and more concentrated streams of dark-green light poured along the shady side of the house where her cinerarias had massed. She had never seen such cinerarias: some of the spired ones reached almost as high as her chin, the solid heads of others waited in the tunnel of dark light to club you with their colours, of purple and drenching blue, and what they called ‘wine’. She couldn’t believe wine would have made her drunker.

Just as she would sit every evening watching the traffic, evening was the time she liked best to visit the cinerarias, when the icy cold seemed to make the flowers burn their deepest, purest. So it was again evening when her two objects converged: for some blissfully confident reason she hadn’t bothered to ask herself whether she had seen the car pass, till here was this figure coming towards her along the tunnel. She knew at once who it was, although she had never seen him on his feet; she had never seen him full-face, but knew from the funny shape of his head as Royal had been the first to notice. He was not at all an impressive man, not much taller than herself, but broad. His footsteps on the brickwork sounded purposeful.

‘Will you let me use your phone, please, madam?’ he asked in a prepared voice. ‘I’m having trouble with the Holden.’

This was the situation she had always been expecting: somebody asking to use the phone as a way to afterwards murdering you. Now that it might be about to happen she couldn’t care.

She said yes. She thought her voice sounded muzzy. Perhaps he would think she was drunk.

She went on looking at him, at his eyes. His nose, like the shape of his head, wasn’t up to much, but his eyes, his eyes, she dared to think, were filled with kindness.

‘Cold, eh? but clean cold!’ He laughed friendly, shuffling on the brick paving because she was keeping him waiting.

Only then she noticed his mouth. He had a hare-lip, there was no mistaking, although it was well sewn. She felt so calm in the circumstances. She would have even liked to touch it.

But said, ‘Why, yes – the telephone,’ she said, ‘it’s this way,’ she said, ‘it’s just off the kitchen – because that’s where you spend most of your life. Or in bed,’ she ended.

She wished she hadn’t added that. For the first time since they had been together she felt upset, thinking he might suspect her of wrong intentions.

But he laughed and said, ‘That’s correct! You got something there!’ It sounded manly rather than educated.

She realized he was still waiting, and took him to the telephone.

While he was phoning she didn’t listen. She never listened when other people were talking on the phone. The sight of her own kitchen surprised her. While his familiar voice went on. It was the voice she had held conversations with.

But he was ugly, real ugly, deformed. If it wasn’t for the voice, the eyes. She couldn’t remember the eyes, but seemed to know about them.

Then she heard him laying the coins beside the phone, extra loud, to show.

He came back into the kitchen smiling and looking. She could smell him now, and he had the smell of a clean man.

She became embarrassed at herself, and took him quickly out.

‘Fair bit of garden you got.’ He stood with his calves curved through his trousers. A cocky little chap, but nice.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘this’, she said, angrily almost, ‘is nothing. You oughter see it. There’s sunflower and hollyhock all along the palings. I’m famous for me hollyhocks!’ She had never boasted in her life. ‘But not now – it isn’t the season. And I let it go. Mr Natwick passed on. You should’uv seen the cassia this autumn. Now it’s only sticks, of course. And hibiscus. There’s cream, gold, cerise, scarlet – double and single.’

She was dressing in them for him, revolving on high heels and changing frilly skirts.

He said, ‘Gardening’s not in my line,’ turning his head to hide something, perhaps he was ashamed of his hare-lip.

‘No,’ she agreed. ‘Not everybody’s a gardener.’

‘But like a garden.’

‘My husband didn’t even like it. He didn’t have to tell me,’ she added.

As they moved across the wintry grass, past the empty clothesline, the man looked at his watch, and said, ‘I was reckoning on visiting somebody in hospital tonight. Looks like I shan’t make it if the N.R.M.A. takes as long as usual.’

‘Do they?’ she said, clearing her throat. ‘It isn’t somebody close, I hope? The sick person?’

Yes he said they was close.

‘Nothing serious?’ she almost bellowed.

He said it was serious.

Oh she nearly burst out laughing at the bandaged figure they were sitting beside particularly at the bandaged face. She would have laughed at a brain tumour.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I understand. Mr Natwick was for many years an invalid.’

Those teeth in the tumbler on top of the medicine cabinet. Looking at her. Teeth can look, worse than eyes. But she couldn’t help it, she meant everything she said, and thought.

At this moment they were pressing inside the dark-green tunnel, her sleeve rubbing his, as the crimson-to-purple light was dying.

‘These are the cinerarias,’ she said.

‘The what?’ He didn’t know, any more than Royal.

As she was about to explain she got switched to another language. Her throat became a long palpitating funnel through which the words she expected to use were poured out in a stream of almost formless agonized sound.

‘What is it?’ he asked, touching her.

If it had happened to herself she would have felt frightened, it occurred to her, but he didn’t seem to be.

‘What is it?’ he kept repeating in his familiar voice, touching, even holding her.

And for answer, in the new language, she was holding him. They were holding each other, his hard body against her eider-downy one. As the silence closed round them again, inside the tunnel of light, his face, to which she was very close, seemed to be unlocking, the wound of his mouth, which should have been more horrible, struggling to open. She could see he had recognized her.

She kissed above his mouth. She kissed as though she might never succeed in healing all the wounds they had ever suffered.

How long they stood together she wasn’t interested in knowing. Outside them the river of traffic continued to flow between its brick and concrete banks. Even if it overflowed it couldn’t have drowned them.

When the man said in his gentlest voice, ‘Better go out in front. The N.R.M.A. might have come.’

‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘The N.R.M.A.’

So they shuffled, still holding each other, along the narrow path. She imagined how long and wooden their faces must look. She wouldn’t look at him now, though, just as she wouldn’t look back at the still faintly smouldering joys they had experienced together in the past.

When they came out, apart, and into the night, there was the N.R.M.A., his pointed ruby of a light burning on top of the cabin.

‘When will you come?’ she asked.

‘Tomorrow.’

‘Tomorrow. You’ll stay to tea.’

He couldn’t stay.

‘I’ll make you a pot of tea?’

But he didn’t drink it.

‘Coffee, then?’

He said, ‘I like a nice cup of coffee.’

Going down the path he didn’t look back, or opening the gate. She would not let herself think of reasons or possibilities, she would not think, but stood planted in the path, swayed slightly by the motion of the night.

Mrs Dolan said, ‘You bring the saucepan to the boil. You got that?’

‘Yeeehs.’ Mrs Natwick had never been a dab at coffee.

‘Then you throw in some cold water. That’s what sends the gravel to the bottom.’ This morning Mrs Dolan had to laugh at her own jokes.

‘That’s the part that frightens me,’ Mrs Natwick admitted.

‘Well, you just do it, and see,’ said Mrs Dolan; she was too busy.

After she had bought the coffee Mrs Natwick stayed in the city to muck around. If she had stayed at home her nerves might have wound themselves tighter, waiting for evening to come. Though mucking around only irritated in the end. She had never been an idle woman. So she stopped at the cosmetics as though she didn’t have to decide, this was her purpose, and said to the young lady lounging behind one of the counters, ‘I’m thinking of investing in a lipstick, dear. Can you please advise me?’

As a concession to the girl she tried to make it a laughing matter, but the young person was bored, she didn’t bat a silver eyelid. ‘Elderly ladies’, she said, ‘go for the brighter stuff.’

Mrs Natwick (‘my little Ella’) had never felt so meek. Mum must be turning in her grave.

‘This is a favourite.’ With a flick of her long fingers the girl exposed the weapon. It looked too slippery-pointed, crimson-purple, out of its golden sheath.

Mrs Natwick’s knees were shaking. ‘Isn’t it a bit noticeable?’ she asked, again trying to make it a joke.

But the white-haired girl gave a serious laugh. ‘What’s wrong with noticeable?’

As Mrs Natwick tried it out on the back of her hand the way she had seen others do, the girl was jogging from foot to foot behind the counter. She was humming between her teeth, behind her white-smeared lips, probably thinking about a lover. Mrs Natwick blushed. What if she couldn’t learn to get the tip of her lipstick back inside its sheath?

She might have gone quickly away without another word if the young lady hadn’t been so professional and bored. Still humming, she brought out a little pack of rouge.

‘Never saw myself with mauve cheeks!’ It was at least dry, and easy to handle.

‘It’s what they wear.’

Mrs Natwick didn’t dare refuse. She watched the long fingers with their silver nails doing up the parcel. The fingers looked as though they might resent touching anything but cosmetics; a lover was probably beneath contempt.

The girl gave her the change, and she went away without counting it.

She wasn’t quiet, though, not a bit, booming and clanging in front of the toilet mirror. She tried to make a thin line, but her mouth exploded into a purple flower. She dabbed the dry-feeling pad on either cheek, and thick, mauve-scented shadows fell. She could hear and feel her heart behaving like a squeezed, rubber ball as she stood looking. Then she got at the lipstick again, still unsheathed. Her mouth was becoming enormous, so thick with grease she could hardly close her own lips underneath. A visible dew was gathering round the purple shadows on her cheeks.

She began to retch like, but dry, and rub, over the basin, scrubbing with the nailbrush. More than likely some would stay behind in the pores and be seen. Though you didn’t have to see, to see.

There were Royal’s teeth in the tumbler on top of the medicine cabinet. Ought to hide the teeth. What if somebody wanted to use the toilet? She must move the teeth. But didn’t. In the present circumstances she couldn’t have raised her arms that high.

Around five she made the coffee, throwing in the cold water at the end with a gesture copied from Mrs Dolan. If the gravel hadn’t sunk to the bottom he wouldn’t notice the first time. provided the coffee was hot. She could warm up the made coffee in a jiffy.

As she sat on the veranda waiting, the cane chair shifted and squealed under her. If it hadn’t been for her weight it might have run away across the tiles, like one of those old planchette boards, writing the answers to questions.

There was an accident this evening down at the intersection. A head-on collision. Bodies were carried out of the crumpled cars, and she remembered a past occasion when she had run with blankets, and Hazel’s Onkaparinka, and a pillow from their own bed. She had been so grateful to the victim. She could not give him enough, or receive enough of the warm blood. She had come back, she remembered, sprinkled.

This evening she had to save herself up. Kept on looking at her watch. The old cane chair squealing, ready to write the answers if she let it. Was he hurt? Was he killed, then? Was he – what?

Mrs Dolan it was, sticking her head over the palings. ‘Don’t like the accidents, Mrs Natwick. It’s the blood. The blood turns me up.’

Mrs Natwick averted her face. Though unmoved by present blood. If only the squealing chair would stop trying to buck her off.

‘Did your friend enjoy the coffee?’ Mrs Dolan shouted; nothing nasty in her: Mrs Dolan was sincere.

‘Hasn’t been yet,’ Mrs Natwick mumbled from glancing at her watch. ‘Got held up.’

‘It’s the traffic. The traffic at this time of evenun.’

‘Always on the dot before.’

‘Working back. Or made a mistake over the day.’

Could you make a mistake? Mrs Natwick contemplated. Tomorrow had always meant tomorrow.

‘Or he could’uv,’ Mrs Dolan shouted, but didn’t say it. ‘I better go inside,’ she said instead. ‘They’ll be wonderun where I am.’

Down at the intersection the bodies were lying wrapped in someone else’s blankets, looking like the grey parcels of mice cats sometimes vomit up.

It was long past five-twenty, not all that long really, but drawing in. The sky was heaped with cold fire. Her city was burning.

She got up finally, and the chair escaped with a last squeal, writing its answer on the tiles.

No, it wasn’t lust, not if the Royal God Almighty with bared teeth should strike her down. Or yes, though, it was. She was lusting after the expression of eyes she could hardly remember for seeing so briefly.

In the effort to see, she drove her memory wildly, while her body stumbled around and around the paths of the burning city there was now no point in escaping. You would shrivel up in time along with the polyanthers and out-of-season hibiscus. All the randy mouths would be stopped sooner or later with black.

The cinerarias seemed to have grown so luxuriant she had to force her way past them, down the narrow brick path. When she heard the latch click, and saw him coming towards her.

‘Why,’ she screamed laughing though it sounded angry, she was, ‘I’d given you up, you know! It’s long after five-twenty!’

As she pushed fiercely towards him, past the cinerarias, snapping one or two of those which were most heavily loaded, she realized he couldn’t have known that she set her watch, her life, by his constant behaviour. He wouldn’t have dawdled so.

‘What is it?’ she called at last, in exasperation at the distance which continued separating them.

He was far too slow, treading the slippery moss of her too shaded path. While she floundered on. She couldn’t reach the expression of his eyes.

He said, and she could hardly recognize the faded voice, ‘There’s something – I been feeling off colour most of the day.’ His mis-shapen head was certainly lolling as he advanced.

‘Tell me!’ She heard her voice commanding, like that of a man, or a mother, when she had practised to be a lover; she could still smell the smell of rouge. ‘Won’t you tell me – dearest?’ It was thin and unconvincing now. (As a girl she had once got a letter from her cousin Kath Salter, who she hardly knew: Dearest Ella …)

Oh dear. She had reached him. And was given all strength – that of the lover she had aimed at being.

Straddling the path, unequally matched – he couldn’t compete against her strength – she spoke with an acquired, a deafening softness, as the inclining cinerarias snapped.

‘You will tell me what is wrong – dear, dear.’ She breathed with trumpets.

He hung his head. ‘It’s all right. It’s the pain – here – in my arm – no, the shoulder.’

‘Ohhhhh!’ She ground her face into his shoulder forgetting it wasn’t her pain.

Then she remembered, and looked into his eyes and said, ‘We’ll save you. You’ll see.’

It was she who needed saving. She knew she was trying to enter by his eyes. To drown in them rather than be left.

Because, in spite of her will to hold him, he was slipping from her, down amongst the cinerarias, which were snapping off one by one around them.

A cat shot out. At one time she had been so poor in spirit she had wished she was a cat.

‘It’s all right,’ either voice was saying.

Lying amongst the smashed plants, he was smiling at her dreadfully, not his mouth, she no longer bothered about that lip, but with his eyes.

‘More air!’ she cried. ‘What you need is air!’ hacking at one or two cinerarias which remained erect.

Their sap was stifling, their bristling columns callous.

‘Oh! Oh!’ she panted. ‘Oh God! Dear love!’ comforting with hands and hair and words.

Words.

While all he could say was, ‘It’s all right.’

Or not that at last. He folded his lips into a white seam. His eyes were swimming out of reach.

‘Eh? Dear – dearest – darl – darlig – darling love – love – LOVE?’ All the new words still stiff in her mouth, that she had heard so far only from the mouths of actors.

The words were too strong she could see. She was losing him. The traffic was hanging together only by charred silences.

She flung herself and covered his body, trying to force kisses – no, breath, into his mouth, she had heard about it.

She had seen turkeys, feathers sawing against each other’s feathers, rising afterwards like new noisy silk.

She knelt up, and the wing-tips of her hair still dabbled limply in his cheeks. ‘Eh? Ohh luff!’ She could hardly breathe it.

She hadn’t had time to ask his name, before she must have killed him by loving too deep, and too adulterously.