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Two
A
Journey
With The Storeman

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Two
A
Journey
With The Storeman

It Was The First time that Lottie and Kezia had ever been out so late. Everything looked different—the painted wooden houses much smaller than they did by day, the trees and the gardens far bigger and wilder. Bright stars speckled the sky and the moon hung over the harbour dabbling the waves with gold. They could see the lighthouse shining from Quarantine Island, the green lights fore and aft the old black coal hulks.

‘There comes the Picton boat,’ said the storeman, page 22 pointing with his whip to a little steamer all hung with bright beads.

But when they reached the top of the hill and began to go down the other side, the harbour disappeared and although they were still in the town they were quite lost. Other carts rattled past. Everybody knew the storeman.

‘Night, Fred!'

‘Night-o!’ he shouted.

Kezia liked very much to hear him. Whenever a cart appeared in the distance she looked up and waited for his voice. In fact, she liked him altogether; he was an old friend; she and the Grandmother had often been to his place to buy grapes. The storeman lived alone in a cottage with a glass-house that he had built himself leaning against it. All the glasshouse was spanned and arched over with one beautiful vine. He took her brown basket from her, lined it with three large leaves, and then he felt in his belt for a little horn knife, reached up and snipped off a big blue cluster and laid it on the leaves as tenderly as you might put a doll to bed. He was a very big man. He wore brown velvet trousers and he had a long brown beard, but he never wore a collar—not even on Sundays. The back of his neck was dark red.

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‘Where are we now?’ Every few minutes one of the children asked him the question, and he was patient.

‘Why! this is Hawstone Street,’ or ‘Hill Street,’ or ‘Charlotte Crescent.'

‘Of course it is.’ Lottie pricked up her ears at the last name; she always felt that Charlotte Crescent belonged specially to her. Very few people had streets with the same name as theirs.

‘Look, Kezia! There is Charlotte Crescent. Doesn't it look different?'

They reached their last boundary marks—the fire alarm station—a little wooden affair painted red and sheltering a huge bell—and the white gates of the Botanical Gardens, gleaming in the moonlight. Now everything familiar was left behind; now the big dray rattled into unknown country, along the new roads with high clay banks on either side, up the steep towering hills, down into valleys where the bush drew back on either side just enough to let them past, through a wide shallow river—the horses pulled up to drink, and made a rare scramble at starting again—on and on—further and further. Lottie drooped; her head wagged, she slipped half into Kezia's lap and lay there. But Kezia could not page 24 open her eyes wide enough. The wind blew on them; she shivered, but her cheeks and her ears burned. She looked up at the stars.

'Do stars ever blow about?’ she asked.

'Well, I never noticed ‘em,’ said the storeman.

Came a thin scatter of lights and the shape of a tin church, rising out of a ring of tombstones.

'They call this we're coming to—“The Flats”,’ said the storeman.

'We got a nuncle and a naunt living near here,’ said Kezia—'Aunt Doady and Uncle Dick. They've got two children, Pip the eldest is called, and the youngest's name is Rags. He's got a ram. He has to feed it with a nenamel teapot and a glove top over the spout. He's going to show us. What is the difference between a ram and a sheep?'

'Well, a ram has got horns and it goes for you.'

Kezia considered.

'I don't want to see it frightfully,’ she said. ‘I hate rushing animals like dogs and parrots—don't you? I often dream that animals rush at me—even camels, and while they're rushing, their heads swell—e-nor-mous!'

'My word!’ said the storeman.

A very bright little place shone ahead of them, page 25 and in front of it was gathered a collection of traps and carts. As they drew near someone ran out of the bright place and stood in the middle of the road, waving his apron.

'Going to Mr. Burnell's?’ shouted the someone.

'That's right,’ said Fred, and drew rein.

'Well I got a passel for them in the store. Come inside half a jiffy, will you?

'We-ell! I got a couple of little kids along with me,’ said Fred. But the someone had already darted back, across his verandah and through the glass door. The storeman muttered something about ‘stretching their legs’ and swung off the dray.

'Where are we?’ said Lottie, raising herself up. The bright light from the shop window shone over the little girls; Lottie's reefer cap was all on one side and on her cheek there was the print of an anchor button she had pressed against while sleeping. Tenderly the storeman lifted her, set her cap straight and pulled down her crumpled clothes. She stood blinking on the verandah, watching Kezia, who seemed to come flying through the air to her feet. Into the warm, smoky shop they went. Kezia and Lottie sat on two barrels, their legs dangling.

'Ma!’ shouted the man in the apron. He leaned page 26 over the counter. ‘Name of Tubb!’ he said, shaking hands with Fred. ‘Ma!’ he bawled. ‘Gotter couple of young ladies here.’ Came a wheeze from behind a curtain. ‘Arf a mo, dearie.'

Everything was in that shop. Bluchers and sand shoes, straw hats and onions were strung across the ceiling, mixed with bunches of cans and tin teapots and broom-heads and brushes. There were bins and canisters against the walls and shelves of pickles and jams and things in tins. One corner was fitted up as a draper's—you could smell the rolls of flannelette—and one as a chemist's with cards of rubber dummies and jars of worm chocolate. One barrel brimmed with apples—one had a tap and a bowl under it half full of molasses, a third was stained deep red inside, and a wooden ladle with a crimson handle was balanced across it. It held raspberries. And every spare inch of space was covered with a flypaper or an advertisement. Sitting on stools or boxes or lounging against things a collection of big untidy men yarned and smoked. One very old one with a dirty beard sat with his back half turned to the other, chewing tobacco and spitting a long distance into a huge round spittoon peppered with sawdust. After he had spat he combed his beard with a shaking hand. ‘We-ell! page 27 that's how it is!’ or—'That's ‘ow ti'appens'—or ‘There you've got it, yer see,’ he would quaver. But nobody paid any attention to him but Mr. Tubb, who cocked an occasional eye and roared ‘Now, then, Father!’ And then the combing hand would be curved over the ear, and the silly face screwed up—‘Ay?'—to droop again and then start chewing.

From the store the road completely changed. Very slowly, twisting as if loath to go, turning as if shy to follow, it slipped into a deep valley. In front and on either side there were paddocks and beyond them bush-covered hills thrust up into the morning air like dark heaving water. You could not imagine that the road led beyond the valley. Here it seemed to reach its perfect end—the valley knotted upon the bend of the road like a big jade tassel.

'Can we see the house from here—the house from here?’ piped the children. Houses were to be seen—little houses—they counted three, but not their house. The storeman knew. He had made the journey twice before that day. At last he raised his whip and pointed.

‘That's one of your paddocks belonging, ‘he said, ‘an’ the next, and the next.’ Over the edge of the page 28 last paddock pushed tree boughs and bushes from an immense garden.

A corrugated iron fence painted white held back the garden from the road. In the middle there was a gap—the iron gates were open wide. They clanked through, up a drive cutting through the garden like a whip lash, looping suddenly an island of green and behind the island, out of sight until you came upon it, was the house. It was long and low built, with a pillared verandah and balcony running all the way round—shallow steps led to the door. The soft white bulk of it lay stretched upon the green garden like a sleeping beast, and now one, and now another, of the windows leapt into light. Someone was walking through the empty rooms, carrying a lighted candle. From a window downstairs the light of a fire flickered; a strange, beautiful excitement seemed to stream from the house in quivering ripples. Over the roofs, the verandah poles, the window sashes, the moon swung her lantern.

‘Ooh!’ Kezia flung out her arms. The Grandmother had appeared on the top step; she carried a little lamp—she was smiling. ‘Has this house got a name?’ asked Kezia, fluttering for the last time out of the storeman's hands.

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‘Yes,’ said the Grandmother, ‘it is called Tarana.'

‘Tarana,’ she repeated, and put her hands upon the big glass door knob.

‘Stay where you are one moment, children!’ The Grandmother turned to the storeman. ‘Fred, these things can be unloaded and left on the verandah for the night. Pat will help you. She turned and called into the hollow hall: ‘Pat, are you there?’

‘I am’ came a voice, and the Irish handy man squeaked in new boots over the bare boards.

But Lottie staggered over the verandah like a bird fallen out of a nest. If she stood still for a moment, her eyes closed—if she leaned, she fell asleep; she could not walk another step.

‘Kezia,’ said the Grandmother, ‘can I trust you to carry the lamp?'

‘Yes, my Grandma.’ The old woman knelt and gave the bright breathing thing into her hands, and then she raised herself and caught up Lottie. ‘This way.'

Through a square hall filled with furniture bales and hundreds of parrots (but the parrots were on the wallpaper), down a narrow passage where the parrots persisted on either side, walked Kezia with her lamp.

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‘You are to have some supper before you go to bed,’ said the Grandmother, putting down Lottie to open the dining-room door. ‘Be very quiet,’ she warned, ‘poor little Mother has got such a headache.'

Linda Burnell lay before a crackling fire, in a long cane chair, her feet on a hassock, a plaid rug over her knees. Burnell and Beryl sat at a table in the middle of the room, eating a dish of fried chops and drinking tea out of a brown china teapot. Over the back of her Mother's chair leaned Isabel. She had a white comb in her fingers, and in a gentle, absorbed way, she was combing back the curls from her Mother's forehead. Outside the pool of lamp and firelight the room stretched dark and bare to the hollow windows.

‘Are those the children?’ Mrs. Burnell did not even open her eyes—her voice was tired and trembling. ‘Have either of them been maimed for life?'

‘No, dear, perfectly safe and sound.'

‘Put down that lamp, Kezia,’ said Aunt Beryl, ‘or we shall have the house on fire before we're out of the packing cases. More tea—Stan?'

‘Well, you might just give me five-eighths of a page 31 cup,’ said Burnell, leaning across the table. ‘Have another chop, Beryl. Tip-top meat, isn't it? First rate, first rate. Not too lean, not too fat.’ He turned to his wife. ‘Sure you won't change your mind, Linda, darling?'

‘Oh, the very thought of it ….!’ She raised one eyebrow in a way she had.

The Grandmother brought the children two bowls of bread and milk, and they sat up to the table, their faces flushed and sleepy behind the waving steam …

‘I had meat for my supper,’ said Isabel, still combing gently. ‘I had a whole chop for my supper —the bone an’ all, an’ Worcestershire sauce. Didn't I, Father?'

‘Oh, don't boast, Isabel,’ said Aunt Beryl. Isabel looked astounded.

‘I wasn't boasting, was I, Mummy? I never thought of boasting. I thought they'd like to know. I only meant to tell them.'

‘Very well, that's enough,’ said Burnell. He pushed back his plate, took a toothpick out of his waistcoat pocket, and began picking his strong, white teeth.

‘You might see that Fred has a bite of something in the kitchen before he goes, will you, Mother?'

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‘Yes, Stanley.’ The old woman turned to go.

‘Oh, and hold on a jiffy. I suppose nobody knows where my slippers were put? I suppose I shan't be able to get at ‘em for a month or two, eh?'

‘Yes,’ came from Linda. ‘In the top of the canvas holdall marked “Urgent Necessities”.'

‘Well, you might bring them to me, will you, Mother?'

‘Yes, Stanley.'

Burnell got up, stretched himself, turned his back to the fire and lifted up his coat tail.

‘By Jove this is a pretty pickle. Eh, Beryl?'

Beryl, sipping tea, her elbow on the table, smiled over the cup at him. She wore an unfamiliar pink pinafore. The sleeves of her blouse were rolled up to her shoulders, showing her lovely freckled arms, and she had let her hair fall down her back in a long pig-tail.

‘How long do you think it will take you to get straight—couple of weeks, eh?’ he chaffed.

‘Good Heavens, no,’ said Beryl ‘The worst is over already. All the beds are up. Everything's in the house—your and Linda's room is finished already. The servant girl and I have simply slaved all day, and ever since Mother came she's worked like a horse, page 33 too. We've never sat down for a moment. We have had a day.'

Stanley scented a rebuke.

‘Well, I suppose you didn't expect me to tear away from the office and nail carpets, did you?'

‘Certainly not,’ said Beryl airily. She put down her cup and ran out of the dining-room.

‘What the hell did she expect to do?’ asked Stanley. ‘Sit down and fan herself with a palm-leaf fan while I hired a gang of professionals to do the job? Eh? By Jove, if she can't do a hand's turn occasionally without shouting about it in return for …’ And he gloomed as the chops began to fight the tea in his sensitive stomach. But Linda put up a hand and dragged him down on to the side of her long cane chair.

‘This is a wretched time for you, old boy,’ she said fondly. Her cheeks were very white, but she smiled and curled her fingers round the big red hand she held. ‘And with a wife about as bright and gay as a yesterday's buttonhole,’ she said. ‘You've been awfully patient, darling.'

‘Rot,’ said Burnell, but he began to whistle The Holy City—a good sign.

‘Think you're going to like it?’ he asked.

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‘I don't want to tell you, but I think I ought to, Mother,’ said Isabel. ‘Kezia's drinking tea out of Aunt Beryl's cup.'

They were trooped off to bed by the Grandmother. She went first with a candle; the stairs rang to their climbing feet. Isabel and Lottie lay in a room to themselves, Kezia curled in the Grandmother's big bed.

‘Aren't there any sheets, my Grandma?'

‘No, not to-night.'

‘It's very tickly,’ said Kezia. ‘It's like Indians. Come to bed soon an’ be my Indian brave.'

‘What a silly you are,’ said the old woman, tucking her in as she loved to be tucked.

‘Are you going to leave the candle?'

‘No. Hush, go to sleep.'

‘Well, kin I have the door left open?'

She rolled herself into a round, but she did not go to sleep. From all over the house came the sound of steps. The house itself creaked and popped. Loud whispery voices rose and fell. Once she heard Aunt Beryl's rush of high laughter. Once there came a loud trumpeting from Burnell blowing his nose. Outside the windows hundreds of black cats with yellow page 35 eyes sat in the sky watching her, but she was not frightened.

Lottie was saying to Isabel: ‘I'm going to say my prayers in bed to-night.'

‘No, you can't, Lottie.’ Isabel was very firm. ‘God only excuses you saying your prayers in bed if you've got a temperature.’ So Lottie yielded:

'Gentle Jesus meek an’ mile
Look ‘pon little chil’
Pity me simple Lizzie
Suffer me come to Thee.

Fain would I to Thee be brought
Dearest Lor’ forbd it not
In the Kinkdom of Thy grace
Make a little chil’ a place. Amen.'

And then they lay down back to back, just touching, and fell asleep.

Standing in a pool of moonlight Beryl Fairfield undressed herself. She was tired, but she pretended to be more tired than she really was—letting her clothes fall, pushing back with a charming gesture her warm heavy hair.

‘Oh, how tired I am, very tired!’ She shut her eyes a moment but her lips smiled, her breath rose and fell in her breast like fairy wings. The window page 36 awas open, it was warm and still. Somewhere out there in the garden, a young man, dark and slender, with mocking eyes, tip-toed among the bushes and gathered the garden into a big bouquet and slipped under her window and held it up to her. She saw herself bending forward. He thrust his head among the white waxy flowers.

‘No, no!’ said Beryl. She turned from the window, she dropped her nightgown over her head.

‘How frightfully unreasonable Stanley is sometimes,’ she thought, buttoning. And then as she lay down came the old thought, the cruel, leaping thought, ‘If I had money,’ only to be shaken off and beaten down by calling to her rescue her endless pack of dreams. A young man, immensely rich, just arrived from England, meets her quite by chance. The new Governor is married. There is a ball at Government House to celebrate his wedding. Who is that exquisite creature in eau de nil satin? … Beryl Fairfield.

‘The thing that pleases me,’ said Stanley, leaning against the side of the bed in his shirt and giving himself a good scratch before turning in, ‘is that, on the strict q.t., Linda, I've got the place dirt cheap. I was talking about it to little Teddy Dear to-day, and he said he simply couldn't understand why they'd page 37 accepted my figure. You see land about here is bound to become more and more valuable—in about ten years time…. Of course we shall have to go very slow from now on and keep down expenses … cut ‘em as fine as possible. Not asleep, are you?'

‘No, dear, I'm listening,’ said Linda.

He sprang into bed, leaned over her and blew out the candle.

‘Good-night, Mr. Business Man,’ she said, and she took hold of his head by the ears and gave him a quick kiss. Her faint, far away voice seemed to come from a deep well.

‘Good-night, darling.’ He slipped his arm under her neck and drew her to him.

‘Yes, clasp me,’ she said faintly, in her far away sleeping voice….

Pat, the handy man, sprawled in his little room behind the kitchen. His sponge-bag coat and trousers hung from the door peg like a hanged man. From the blanket edge his twisted feet protruded; and on the floor of his room there was an empty cane bird cage. He looked like a comic picture.

‘Honk, honk,’ came from the snoring servant girl next door; she had adenoids.

Last to go to bed was the Grandmother.

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‘What, not asleep yet?'

‘No, I'm waiting for you,’ said Kezia.

The old woman sighed and lay down beside her. Kezia thrust her head under the Grandmother's arm.

‘Who am I?’ she whispered. This was an old established ritual to be gone through between them.

‘You are my little brown bird,’ said the Grandmother.

Kezia gave a guilty chuckle. The Grandmother took out her teeth and put them in a glass of water beside her on the floor.

Then the house was still.

In the garden some owls called, perched on the branches of a lace bark tree: ‘More pork, more pork.’ And far away, from the bush came a harsh rapid chatter: ‘Ha-ha-ha-ha. Ha-ha-ha-ha.'

Dawn came sharp and chill. The sleeping people turned over and hunched the blankets higher. They sighed and stirred, but the brooding house, all hung about with shadows, held the quiet in its lap a little longer. A breeze blew over the tangled garden, dropping dew and dropping petals, shivered over the drenched paddock grass, lifted the sombre bush page 39 and shook from it a wild and bitter scent. In the green sky tiny stars floated a moment and then they were gone, they were dissolved like bubbles. The cocks shrilled from the neighbouring farms, the cattle moved in their stalls, the horses, grouped under the trees, lifted their heads and swished their tails, and plain to be heard in the early quiet was the sound of the creek in the paddock, running over the brown stones, running in and out of the sandy hollows, hiding under clumps of dark berry bushes, spilling into a swamp full of yellow water-flowers and cresses. All the air smelled of water; the lawn was hung with bright drops and spangles.

And then, quite suddenly, at the first glint of sun, the birds began to sing. Big cheeky birds, starlings and minors whistled on the lawns; the little birds, the goldfinches and fantails and linnets, twittered flitting from bough to bough, and from tree to tree, hanging the garden with bright chains of song. A lovely kingfisher perched on the paddock fence preening his rich beauty.

'How loud the birds are,’ said Linda in her dream. She was walking with her father through a green field sprinkled with daisies, and suddenly he bent forward and parted the grasses and showed her page 40 a tiny ball of fluff just at her feet. ‘Oh, Papa, the darling!’ She made a cup of her hands and caught the bird and stroked its head with her fingers. It was quite tame. But a strange thing happened. As she stroked it, it began to swell. It ruffled and pouched, it grew bigger and bigger and its round eyes seemed to smile at her. Now her arms were hardly wide enough to hold it, she dropped it in her apron. It had become a baby with a big naked head and a gaping bird mouth, opening and shutting. Her father broke into a loud clattering laugh and Linda woke to see Burnell standing by the windows rattling the venetian blinds up to the very top.

‘Hullo!’ he said, ‘didn't wake you, did I? Nothing much the matter with the weather this morning.’ He was enormously pleased. Weather like this set a final seal upon his bargain. He felt, somehow, that he had bought the sun too, got it chucked in, dirt cheap, with the house and grounds. He dashed off to his bath and Linda turned over, raised herself on one elbow to see the room by daylight. It looked wonderfully lived in already; all the furniture had found a place, all the old ‘paraphernalia’ as she expressed it, even to photographs on the mantelpiece and medicine bottles on a shelf over the washstand. But this page 41 room was much bigger than their other room had been—that was a blessing. Her clothes lay across a chair; her outdoor things, a purple cape and a round hat with a plume in it, were tossed on the box ottoman. Looking at them a silly thought brought a fleeting smile into her eyes—'Perhaps I'm going away again to-day,’ and for a moment she saw her-self driving away from them all in a little buggy—driving away from every one of them, and waving.

Back came Stanley girt with a towel, glowing and slapping his thighs. He pitched the wet towel on top of her cape and hat, and standing firm in the exact centre of a square of sunlight he began to do his exercises—deep breathing, bending, squatting like a frog and shooting out his legs. He was so saturated with health that everything he did delighted him; but this amazing vigour seemed to set him miles and worlds away from Linda—she lay on the white tumbled bed, and leaned towards him, laughing as if from the sky.

'Oh, hang! Oh, damn!’ said Stanley, who had butted into a crisp shirt only to find that some idiot a woman had fastened the neckband and he was caught. He stalked over to her waving his arms.

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‘Now you look the image of a fat turkey,’ said she.

‘Fat! I like that,’ said Stanley. ‘Why I haven't got a square inch of fat on me. Feel that.'

‘My dear—hard as nails,’ mocked she.

‘You'd be surprised,’ said Stanley, as though this were intensely interesting, ‘at the number of chaps at the club who've got a corporation. Young chaps, you know—about my own age.'

He began parting and brushing his stiff ginger hair, his blue eyes fixed and round in the glass, bent at the knees, because the dressing table was always—confound it—a bit too low for him. ‘Little Teddy Dear for example,’ and he straightened, describing upon himself an enormous curve with the hair brush. ‘Of course they're sitting on their hindquarters all day in the office, and when they're away from it, as far as I can make out, they stodge and they snooze—I must say I've got a perfect horror …'

‘Yes, my dear, don't worry, you'll never be fat.

You're far too energetic,’ said Linda, repeating the familiar formula that he never tired of hearing.

‘Yes, yes, I suppose that's true,’ and taking a mother-of-pearl penknife out of his pocket he began to pare his nails.

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‘Breakfast, Stanley.’ Beryl was at the door. ‘Oh, Linda, Mother says don't get up yet. Stay where you are until after lunch, won't you?’ She popped her head in at the door. She had a big piece of syringa stuck through a braid of her hair. ‘Everything we left on the verandah last night is simply sopping this morning. You should see poor dear Mother wringing out the sofa and chairs. However, no harm done—not a penn’ orth of harm,’ this with the faintest glance at Stanley.

‘Have you told Pat what time to have the buggy round? It's a good six-and-a-half miles from here to the office—'

‘I can imagine what this morning start off for the office will become,’ thought Linda. Even when they lived in town, only half an hour away, the house had to slow down each morning, had to stop like a steamer, every soul on board summoned to the gangway to watch Burnell descending the ladder and into the little cockle shell. They must wave when he waved, give him good-bye for good-bye and lavish upon him unlimited sympathy, as though they saw on the horizon's brim the untamed land to which he curved his chest so proudly—the line of leaping savages ready to fall upon his valiant sword.

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‘Pat! Pat!’ she heard the servant girl calling. But Pat was evidently not to be found; the silly voice went baaing all over the garden.

‘It will be very high pressure indeed,’ she decided, and she did not rest again until the final slam of the front door sounded, and Stanley was gone.

Later she heard her children playing in the garden. Lottie's stolid, compact little voice cried: ‘Kezia! Isa-bel!’ Lottie was always getting lost or losing people and finding them again—astonished—round the next tree or the next corner. ‘Oh, there you are!’ They had been turned out to grass after breakfast with strict orders not to come near the house until they were called. Isabel wheeled a neat pram-load of prim dolls and Lottie was allowed, for a great treat, to walk beside holding the doll's parasol over the face of the wax one.

‘Where are you going to, Kezia?’ asked Isabel, who longed to find some light and menial duty that Kezia might perform and so be roped in under her government.

‘Oh, just away,’ said Kezia.

‘Come back, Kezia. Come back. You're not to go on the wet grass until it's dry, Grandma says,’ called Isabel.

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‘Bossy! Bossy!’ Linda heard Kezia answer.

‘Do the children's voices annoy you, Linda?’ asked old Mrs. Fairfield, coming in at that moment with a breakfast tray. ‘Shall I tell them to go further away from the house?'

‘No, don't bother,’ said Linda. ‘Oh, Mother, I do not want any breakfast.'

‘I have not brought you any,’ said Mrs. Fairfield, putting down the tray on the bed table. ‘A spot of porridge, a finger of toast …'

‘The merest sensation of marmalade—’ mocked Linda.

But Mrs. Fairfield remained serious. ‘Yes, dearie, and a little pot of fresh tea.'

She brought from the cupboard a white woollen jacket trimmed with red bows and buttoned it round her daughter.

‘Must I?’ pouted Linda, making a face at the porridge.

Mrs. Fairfield walked about the room; she lowered the blinds, tidied away the evidences of Burnell's toilet, and gently she lifted the dampened plume of the little round hat. There was a charm and a grace in all her movements. It was not that she merely ‘set in order'; there seemed to be almost page 46 a positive quality in the obedience of things to her fine hands, they found not only their proper but their perfect place.

She wore a grey foulard dress, patterned with large purple pansies, a white linen apron and one of those high caps, shaped like a jelly mould, of white tulle. At her throat a big silver brooch shaped like a crescent moon with five owls sitting on it, and round her neck a black bead watch chain. If she had been a beauty in her youth—and she had been a very great beauty; indeed, report had it that her miniature had been painted and sent to Queen Victoria as the belle of Australia—old age had touched her with exquisite gentleness. Her long curling hair was still black at her waist, grey between her shoulders, and it framed her head in frosted silver. The late roses—the last roses, that frail pink kind, so reluctant to fall, such a wonder to find—still bloomed in her cheeks, and behind big gold-rimmed spectacles her blue eyes shone and smiled. And she still had dimples. On the backs of her hands, at her elbows—one in the left hand corner of her chin. Her body was the colour of old ivory. She bathed in cold water, summer and winter, and she could only bear linen next to her skin and suede gloves on her hands. Upon everything page 47 she used there lingered a trace of Cashmere bouquet perfume.

‘How are you getting on downstairs?’ asked Linda, playing with her breakfast.

‘Beautifully. Pat has turned out a treasure. He has laid all the linoleum and the carpets, and Minnie seems to be taking a real interest in the kitchen and pantries.'

‘Pantries! There's grandeur, after that bird-cage of a larder in the other cubby-hole!'

‘Yes, I must say the house is wonderfully convenient and ample in every way. You should have a good look round when you get up.'

Linda smiled, shaking her head.

‘I don't want to. I don't care. The house can bulge cupboards and pantries, but other people will explore them. Not me.'

‘But why not?’ asked Mrs. Fairfield, anxiously watching her.

‘Because I don't feel the slightest crumb of interest, my Mother.'

‘But why don't you, dear? You ought to try—to begin—even for Stanley's sake. He'll be so bitterly disappointed if …’ Linda's laugh interrupted.

‘Oh, trust me. I'll satisfy Stanley. Besides, I can rave all the better over what I haven't seen.'

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‘Nobody asks you to rave, Linda,’ said the old woman, sadly.

‘Don't they?’ Linda screwed up her eyes. ‘I'm not so sure. If I were to jump out of bed now, fling on my clothes, rush downstairs, tear up a ladder, hang pictures, eat an enormous lunch, romp with the children in the garden this afternoon, and be swinging on the gate, waving, when Stanley hove in sight this evening, I believe you'd be delighted. A normal, healthy day for a young wife and mother. A …'

Mrs. Fairfield began to smile. ‘How absurd you are! How you exaggerate! What a baby you are,’ said she.

But Linda sat up suddenly and jerked off the woolly.

‘I'm boiling. I'm roasting,’ she declared. ‘I can't think what I'm doing in this big, stuffy old bed. I'm going to get up.'

‘Very well, dear,’ said Mrs. Fairfield.

Getting dressed never took her long. Her hands flew. She had beautiful hands, white and tiny. The only trouble with them was that they could not keep her rings on them. Happily she only had two rings: her wedding ring and a peculiarly hideous affair, a square slab with four pin opals in it that Stanleyhad page 49 'stolen from a cracker,’ said Linda, the day they were engaged. But it was her wedding ring that disappeared so. It fell down every possible place and into every possible corner. Once she even found it in the crown of her hat. It was a familiar cry in the house: ‘Linda's wedding ring has gone again.'

Stanley Burnell could never hear that without horrible sense of discomfort. Good Lord. He wasn't superstitious. He left that kind of rot to people who had nothing better to think about—but all the same it was devilishly annoying. Especially as Linda made so light of the affair and mocked him and said, ‘Are they as expensive as all that?’ and laughed at him and cried, holding up her bare hand—'Look, Stanley, it has all been a dream.’ He was a fool to mind things like that, but they hurt him—they hurt like sin.

‘Funny I should have dreamed about Papa last night,’ thought Linda, brushing her cropped hair that stood up all over her head in little bronzy rings. ‘What was it I dreamed?’ No, she'd forgotten—'something or other about a bird.’ But Papa was very plain—his lazy, ambling walk. And she laid dowrn the brush and went over to the mantelpiece and leaned her arms along it, her chin in her hands, and looked at his photograph. In his photograph he page 50 showed severe and imposing, a high brow, a piercing eye, clean shaven except for long ‘piccadilly weepers’ draping his bosom. He was taken in the fashion of that time, standing, one arm on the back of a tapestry chair, the other clenched upon a parchment roll.

‘Papa!’ said Linda. She smiled. ‘There you are, my dear,’ she breathed, and then she shook her head quickly and frowned, and went on with her dressing.

Her father had died the year that she married Burnell, the year of her sixteenth birthday. All her childhood had been passed in a long white house perched on a hill overlooking Wellington harbour—a house with a wild garden full of bushes and fruit trees, long thick grass and nasturtiums. Nasturtiums grew everywhere—there was no fighting them down. They even fell in a shower over the paling fence on to the road. Red, yellow, white, every possible colour; they lighted the garden like swarms of butterflies. The Fairfields were a large family of boys and girls; with their beautiful mother and their gay, fascinating father (for it was only in his photograph that he looked stern) they were quite a ‘show’ family and immensely admired.

Mr. Fairfield managed a small insurance business page 51 that could not have been very profitable, yet they lived plentifully. He had a good voice; he liked to sing in public, he liked to dance and attend picnics, to put on his ‘bell topper’ and walk out of Church if he disapproved of anything said in the sermon, and he had a passion for inventing highly impracticable things, like collapsible umbrellas or folding lamps. He had one saying with which he met all difficulties. ‘Depend upon it, it will all come right after the Maori war.’ Linda, his second but youngest child, was his darling, his pet, his playfellow. She was a wild thing, always trembling on the verge of laughter, ready for anything and eager. When he put his arm round her and held her he felt her thrilling with life. He understood her so beautifully and gave her so much love for love that he became a kind of daily miracle to her, and all her faith centred in him. People barely touched her; she was regarded as a cold, heartless little creature, but sheseemed to have an unlimited passion for that violent sweet thing called life—just being alive and able to run and climb and swim in the sea and lie in the grass. In the evenings she and her Father would sit on the verandah—she on his knee—and ‘plan.'

‘When I am grown up we shall travel page 52 every—where—we shall see the whole world—won't we, Papa?'

‘We shall, my dear.'

‘One of your inventions will have a great success. Bring you in a good round million yearly.'

‘We can manage on that.'

‘But one day we shall be rich, and the next poor. One day we shall dine in a palace and the next we'll sit in a forest and toast mushrooms on a hatpin…. We shall have a little boat—we shall explore the interior of China on a raft—you will look sweet in one of those huge umbrella hats that Chinamen wear in pictures. We won't leave a corner of anywhere unexplored—shall we?'

‘We shall look under the beds and in all the cupboards and behind every curtain.'

‘And we shan't go as father and daughter,’ she tugged at his ‘piccadilly weepers’ and began kissing him. ‘We'll just go as a couple of boys together—Papa.'

By the time Linda was fourteen, the big family had vanished; only she and Beryl, who was two years younger, were left. The girls had married; the boys had gone away. Linda left off attending the Select Academy for Young Ladies presided over by Miss page 53 Clara Finetta Birch (from England), a lady whose black hair lay so flat on her head that everybody said it was only painted on, and she stayed at home to be a help to her mother. For three days she laid the table and took the mending basket on to the verandah in the afternoon, but after that she ‘went mad-dog again,’ as her father expressed it, and there was no holding her.

‘Oh, Mother, life is so fearfully short,' said Linda.

That summer Burnell appeared. Every evening a stout young man in a striped shirt, with fiery red hair, and a pair of immature mutton chop whiskers, passed their house, quite slowly, four times. Twice up the hill he went, and twice down he came. He walked with his hands behind his back, and each time he glanced once at the verandah where they sat—Who was he? None of them knew—but he became a great joke.

‘Here she blows,’ Mr. Fairfield would whisper. The young man came to be called the ‘ginger whale.’ Then he appeared at Church, in a pew facing theirs, very devout and serious. But he had that unfortunate complexion that goes with his colouring, and every time he so much as glanced in Linda's direction a crimson blush spread over his face to his ears.

‘Look out, my wench,’ said Mr. Fairfield. ‘Your page 54 clever Papa has solved the problem. That young fellow is after you.'

‘Henry! What rubbish. How can you say such things,’ said his wife.

‘There are times,’ said Linda, ‘when I simply doubt your sanity, Papa.’ But Beryl loved the idea. The ‘ginger whale’ became ‘Linda's beau'.

‘You know as well as I do that I am never going to marry,’ said Linda. ‘How can you be such a traitor, Papa?'

A Social given by the Liberal Ladies’ Political League ripened matters a little. Linda and her Papa attended. She wore a green sprigged muslin with little capes on the shoulders that stood up like wings, and he wore a frock coat and a wired buttonhole as big as a soup plate. The Social began with a very painful concert.

‘She wore a Wreath of Roses'—'They played in the Beautiful Garden'—'A Mother sat Watching'—'Flee as a Bird to the Mountain'—sang the political ladies with forlorn and awful vigour. The gentlemen sang with far greater vigour and a kind of defiant cheerfulness which was almost terrifying. They looked very furious, too. Their cuffs shot over their hands, or their trousers were far too long … page 55 Comic recitations about flies on bald heads and engaged couples sitting on porch steps spread with glue werecontributed by the chemist. Followed an extraordinary meal, called upon the hand-printed programme Tea and Coffee, and consisting of ham-beef-or-tongue, tinned salmon, oyster patties, sandwiches, col’ meat, jellies, huge cakes, fruit salads in wash-hand bowls, trifles bristling with almonds, and large cups of tea, dark brown in colour, tasting faintly of rust. Helping Linda to a horrible-looking pink blancmange, which he said was made of strangled baby's head, her father whispered: ‘The ginger whale is here. I've just spotted him blushing at a sandwich. Look out, my lass. He'll sandbag you with one of old Ma Warren's rock cakes.'

Away went the plates—away went the tables. Young Mr. Fantail, in evening clothes with brown button boots, sat down at the piano, and crashed into the ‘Lancers.'

Diddle dee dum tee um tee tum
Diddle dee um te um te tum
….
Diddle dee tum tee diddle tee tum!

And half way through the ‘evening’ it actually came to pass. Smoothing his white cotton gloves—a page 56 beetroot was pale compared to him; a pillar box was a tender pink—Burnell asked Linda for the pleasure, and before she realised what had happened his arm was round her waist and they were turning round and round to the air of ‘Three Blind Mice’ (arranged by Mr. Fantail même).

He did not talk while he danced—but Linda liked that.

When the dance was over they sat on a bench against the wall. Linda hummed the valse tune and beat time with her glove; she felt dreadfully shy and she was terrified of her father's merry eye. At last Burnell turned to her.

‘Did you ever hear the story of the shy young man who went to his first ball? He danced with a girl and then they sat on the stairs and they could not think of a thing to say. And after he'd picked up everything she dropped from time to time, after the silence was simply unbearable, he turned round and stammered: “D-Do you always w-wear flannel next to the skin?” I feel rather like that chap,’ said Burnell.

Then she did not hear them any more. What a glare there was in the room. She hated blinds pulled up to the top at any time—but in the morning, in the page 57 morning especially! She turned over to the wall and idly, with one finger, she traced a poppy on the wallpaper with a leaf and a stem and a fat bursting bud. In the quiet, under her tracing finger, the poppy seemed to come alive. She could feel the sticky, silky petals, the stem, hairy like a gooseberry skin, the rough leaf and the tight glazed bud. Things had a habit of coming alive in the quiet; she had often noticed it. Not only large, substantial things, like furniture, but curtains and patterns of stuffs, and fringes of quilts and cushions. How often she had seen the tassel fringe of her quilt change into a funny procession of dancers, with priests attending … for there were some tassels that did not dance at all, but walked stately, bent forward as if praying or chanting. How often the medicine bottles had turned into a row of little men with brown top hats on. And often the washstand jug sat in the basin like a fat bird in a round nest.

‘I dreamed about birds last night,’ thought Linda. What was it? No, she'd forgotten…. But the strangest part about this coming alive of things was what they did. They listened; they seemed to swell out with some mysterious important content, and when they were full she felt that they smiled.

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Not for her (although she knew they ‘recognised’ her) their sly, meaning smile; they were members of a secret order and they smiled among themselves. Sometimes, when she had fallen asleep in the daytime, she woke and could not lift a finger, could not even turn her eyes to left or right … they were so strong; sometimes when she went out of a room and left it empty she knew as she clicked the door to, that they were coming to life. And Ah, there were times, especially in the evenings when she was upstairs, perhaps, and everybody else was down, when she could hardly tear herself away from them—when she could not hurry, when she tried to hum a tune to show them she did not care, when she tried to say ever so carelessly—'Bother that old thimble! Where ever have I put it?’ But she never, never deceived them. They knew how frightened she was; they saw how she turned her head away as she passed the mirror. For all their patience they wanted something of her. Half unconsciously she knew that if she gave herself up and was quiet—more than quiet, silent, motionless, something would happen … ‘It's very very quiet now,’ thought Linda. She opened her eyes wide; she heard the stillness spinning its soft endless web. How lightly she breathed, she scarcely had to page 59 breathe at all … Yes, everything had come alive down to the minutest, tiniest particle and she did not feel her bed—she floated, held up in the air. Only she seemed to be listening, with her wide open watchful eyes, waiting for someone to come who just did not come, watching for something to happen that just did not happen.

In the kitchen at the long deal table under the two windows old Mrs. Fairfield was washing the breakfast dishes. The kitchen windows looked out on to a big grass patch that led down to the vegetable garden and the rhubarb beds. On one side the grass patch was bordered by the scullery and washhouse and over this long whitewashed ‘lean to’ there grew a big knotted vine. She had noticed yesterday that some tiny corkscrew tendrils had come right through some cracks in the scullery ceiling and all the windows of the ‘lean to’ had a thick frill of dancing green.

‘I am very fond of a grape vine,’ decided Mrs. Fairfield, ‘but I do not think that the grapes will ripen here. It takes Australian sun …’ and she suddenly remembered how, when Beryl was a baby, she had been picking some white grapes from the page 60 vine on the back verandah of their Tasmanian house and she had been stung on the leg by a huge red ant. She saw Beryl in a little plaid dress, with red ribbon tie-ups on the shoulders, screaming so dreadfully that half the street had rushed in … and the child's leg had swelled to an enormous size.

‘T-t-t-t.’ Mrs. Fairfield caught her breath, remembering. ‘Poor child—how terrifying it was!’ and she set her lips tight in a way she had and went over to the stove for some more hot water. The water frothed up in the soapy bowl with pink and blue bubbles on top of the foam. Old Mrs. Fairfield's arms were bare to the elbow and stained a bright pink. She wore a grey foulard dress patterned with large purple pansies, a white linen apron and a high cap shaped like a jelly mould of white tulle. At her throat there was a silver crescent moon with five little owls seated on it and round her neck she wore a watch guard made of black beads.

It was very hard to believe that they had only arrived yesterday and that she had not been in the kitchen for years—she was so much a part of it, putting away the clean crocks with so sure and precise a touch, moving leisurely and ample from the stove to the dresser, looking into the pantry and the larder as page 61 though there were not an unfamiliar corner. When she had finished tidying, everything in the kitchen had become part of a series of patterns. She stood in the middle of the room, wiping her hands on a check towel and looking about her, a tiny smile beamed on her lips; she thought it looked very nice, very satisfactory. If only servant girls could be taught to understand that it did not only matter how you put a thing away; it mattered just as much where you put it—or was it the other way about…. But at any rate they never would understand; she had never been able to train them …

‘Mother, Mother, are you in the kitchen?’ called Beryl.

‘Yes, dear, do you want me?'

‘No, I'm coming,’ and Beryl ran in, very flushed, dragging with her two big pictures.

‘Mother, whatever can I do with these awful Chinese paintings that Chung Wah gave Stanley when he went bankrupt? It's absurd to say they were valuable because they were hanging in Chung Wah's fruit shop for months before. I can't understand why Stanley doesn't want them to be thrown away—I'm sure he thinks they're just as hideous as we do, but it's because of the frames—’ she said spitefully. ‘I page 62 suppose he thinks the frames might fetch something one day. Ugh! What a weight they are?'

‘Why don't you hang them in the passage?’ suggested Mrs. Fairfield. ‘They would not be much seen there.'

‘I can't. There isn't room. I've hung all the photographs of his office before and after rebuilding there, and the signed photographs of his business friends and that awful enlargement of Isabel lying on a mat in her singlet. There isn't an inch of room left there.’ Her angry glance flew over the placid kitchen. ‘I know what I'll do. I'll hang them here—I'll say they got a little damp in the moving and so I put them up here in the warm for the time being.'

She dragged forward a chair, jumped up on it, took a hammer and a nail out of her deep apron pocket and banged away.

‘There! That's high enough. Hand me up the picture, Mother.'

‘One moment, child—’ she was wiping the carved ebony frame.

‘Oh, Mother, really you need not dust them. It would take years to dust all those winding little holes,’ and she frowned at the top of her Mother's head and bit her lip with impatience. Mother's deliberate way page 63 of doing things was simply maddening. It was old age, she supposed, loftily.

At last the two pictures were hung, side by side. She jumped off the chair, stowing back the little hammer.

‘They don't look so bad there, do they?’ said she. ‘And at any rate nobody need ever see them except Pat and the servant girl. Have I got a spider's web on my face, Mother? I've been poking my head into that cupboard under the stairs, and now something keeps tickling me.'

But before Mrs. Fairfield had time to look Beryl had turned away again. ‘Is that clock right? Is it really as early as that? Good Heavens, it seems years since breakfast!'

‘That reminds me,’ said Mrs. Fairfield. ‘I must go upstairs and fetch down Linda's tray.'

‘There!’ cried Beryl. ‘Isn't that like the servant girl. Isn't that exactly like her. I told her distinctly to tell you that I was too busy to take it up and would you please instead. I never dreamed she hadn't told you!'

Someone tapped on the window. They turned away from the pictures. Linda was there nodding and smiling. They heard the latch of the scullery page 64 door lift and she came in. She had no hat on; her hair stood up on her head in curling rings and she was all wrapped up in an old cashmere shawl.

‘Please can I have something to eat,’ said she.

‘Linnet, dear, I am so frightfully sorry. It's my fault,’ said Beryl.

‘But I wasn't hungry. I should have screamed if I had been,’ said Linda. ‘Mummy, darling, make me a little pot of tea in the brown china teapot.'

She went into the pantry and began lifting the lids off a row of tins. ‘What grandeur, my dears,’ she cried, coming back with a brown scone and a slice of gingerbread—'a pantry and a larder.'

‘Oh, but you haven't seen the out-houses yet,’ said Beryl. ‘There is a stable and a huge barn of a place that Pat calls the feed-room and a woodshed and a toolhouse—all built round a square courtyard that has big white gates to it! Awfully grand!'

‘This is the first time I've even seen the kitchen,’ said Linda. ‘Mother has been here. Everything is in pairs.'

‘Sit down and drink your tea,’ said Mrs. Fairfield, spreading a clean table napkin over a corner of the table. ‘And Beryl, have a cup with her. I'll watch you both while I'm peeling the potatoes for page 65 dinner. I don't know what has happened to the servant girl.'

‘I saw her on my way downstairs, Mummy. She's lying practically at full length on the bathroom floor laying linoleum. And she was hammering it so frightfully hard that I am sure the pattern will come through on to the dining-room ceiling. I told her not to run any more tacks than she could help into herself but I am afraid that she will be studded for life all the same. Have half my piece of gingerbread, Beryl. Beryl, do you like the house now that we are here?'

‘Oh, yes, I like the house immensely and the garden is simply beautiful, but it feels very far away from anything to me. I can't imagine people coming out from town to see us in that dreadful rattling ‘bus and I am sure there isn't anybody here who will come and call…. Of course it doesn't matter to you particularly because you never liked living in town.'

‘But we've got the buggy,’ said Linda. ‘Pat can drive you into town whenever you like. And after all it's only six miles away.'

That was a consolation, certainly, but there was something unspoken at the back of Beryl's mind, page 66 something she did not even put into words for herself.

‘Oh, well, at any rate it won't kill us,’ she said, dryly, putting down her cup and standing up and stretching. ‘I am going to hang curtains.’ And she ran away singing

‘How many thousand birds I see
That sing aloft in every tree.'

But when she reached the dining-room she stopped singing. Her face changed—hardened, became gloomy and sullen.

‘One may as well rot here as anywhere else,’ she said, savagely digging the stiff brass safety pins into the red serge curtains….

The two left in the kitchen were quiet for a little. Linda leaned her cheek in her fingers and watched her Mother. She thought her Mother looked wonderfully beautiful standing with her back to the leafy window. There was something comfortable in the sight of her Mother that Linda felt she could never do without. She knew everything about her—just what she kept in her pocket and the sweet smell of her flesh and the soft feel of her cheeks and her arms and shoulders, still softer—the way the breath page 67 rose and fell in her bosom and the way her hair curled silver round her forehead, lighter at the neck and bright brown still in the big coil under the tulle cap. Exquisite were her Mother's hands and the colour of the two rings she wore seemed to melt into her warm white skin-her wedding ring and a large old fashioned ring with a dark red stone in it that had belonged to Linda's father … And she was always so fresh, so delicious. ‘Mother, you smell of cold water,’ she had said. The old woman could bear nothing next to her skin but fine linen, and she bathed in cold water summer and winter-even when she had to pour a kettle of boiling water over the frozen tap.

'Isn't there anything for me to do, Mother?’ she asked.

'No, darling. Run and see what the garden is like. I wish you would give an eye to the children, but that I know you will not do.'

'Of course I will, but you know Isabel is much more grown up than any of us.'

'Yes, but Kezia is not,’ said Mrs. Fairfield.

'Oh, Kezia's been tossed by a wild bull hours ago,’ said Linda, winding herself up in her shawl again.

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But no, Kezia had seen a bull through a hole in a knot of wood in the high paling fence that separated the tennis lawn from the paddock, but she had not liked the bull frightfully, and so she had walked away back through the orchard up the grassy slope, along the path by the lace bark tree and so into the spread tangled garden. She did not believe that she would ever not get lost in this garden. Twice she had found her way to the big iron gates they had driven through last night and she had begun to walk up the drive that led to the house, but there were so many little paths on either side … on one side they all led into a tangle of tall dark trees and strange bushes with flat velvety leaves and feathery cream flowers that buzzed with flies when you shook them-this was a frightening side and no garden at all. The little paths were wet and clayey with tree roots spanned across them, ‘like big fowls’ feet', thought Kezia.

But on the other side of the drive there was a high box border and the paths had box edgings, and all of them led into a deeper and deeper tangle of flowers. It was summer. The camelia trees were in flower, white and crimson and pink and white striped, with flashing leaves-you could not see a leaf on the syringa bushes for the white clusters. All kinds of page 69 roses-gentlemen's buttonhole roses, little white ones but far too full of insects to put under anybody's nose, pink monthly roses with a ring of fallen petals round the bushes, cabbage roses on thick fat stalks, moss roses, always in bud, pink smooth beauties opening curl on curl, red ones so dark that they seemed to turn black as they fell, and a certain exquisite cream kind with a slender red stem and bright red leaves. Kezia knew the name of that kind: it was her Grandmother's favourite.

There were clumps of fairy bells and cherry pie and all kinds of geraniums, and there were little trees of verbena and bluish lavender bushes and a bed of pelargoniums, with velvet eyes and leaves like moth's wings. There was a bed of nothing but mignonette and another of nothing but pansies, borders of double and single daisies, all kinds of little tufty plants she had never seen before….

The red hot pokers were taller than she; the Japanese sunflowers grew in a tiny jungle. She sat down on one of the box borders. By pressing hard at first it made a very pleasant, springy seat, but how dusty it was inside! She bent down to look and sneezed and rubbed her nose.

And then she found herself again at the top page 70 of the rolling grassy slope that led down to the orchard and beyond the orchard to an avenue of pine trees with wooden seats between, bordering one side of the tennis court. She looked at the slope a moment; then she lay down on her back, gave a tiny squeak, and rolled over and over into the thick flowery orchard grass. As she lay still, waiting for things to stop spinning round, she decided to go up to the house and ask the servant girl for an empty match-box. She wanted to make a surprise for her Grandmother. First she would put a leaf inside with a big violet lying on it-then she would put a very small little white picotee perhaps, on each side of the violet, and then she would sprinkle some lavender on the top, but not to cover their heads. She often made these surprises for the Grandmother and they were always most successful.

'Do you want a match, my Granny?'

'Why, yes, child. I believe a match is the very thing I am looking for-’ The Grandmother slowly opened the box and came upon the picture inside.

'Good gracious, child! how you astonished me!'

'Did I-did I really astonish you?’ Kezia threw up her arms with joy.

'I can make her one every day here,’ she thought, page 71 scrambling up the grassy slope on her slippery shoes. But on her way to the house she came to the island that lay in the middle of the drive, dividing the drive into two arms that met in front of the house.

The island was made of grass banked up high. Nothing grew on the green top at all except one huge round plant, with thick grey-green thorny leaves, and out of the middle there sprang up a tall stout stem. Some of the leaves of this plant were so old that they curved up in the air no longer-they turned back-they were split and broken-some of them lay flat and withered on the ground-but the fresh leaves curved up into the air with their spiked edges; some of them looked as though they had been painted with broad bands of yellow.

Whatever could it be? She had never seen anything like it before. She stood and stared. And then she saw her mother coming down the path with a red carnation in her hand.

'Mother, what is it?’ asked Kezia.

Linda looked up at the fat swelling plant with its cruel leaves, its towering fleshy stem. High above them, as though becalmed in the air, and yet holding so fast to the earth it grew from, it might have had claws and not roots. The curving leaves seemed page 72 to be hiding something; the big blind stem cut into the air as if no wind could ever shake it.

'That is an aloe, Kezia,’ said Linda.

'Does it ever have any flowers?'

'Yes, my child,’ said her Mother, and she smiled down at Kezia, half shutting her eyes, ‘once every hundred years.'