They had more news about David than about Merle, though he hadn’t visited them—didn’t dare, was my guess, until that wacko shiner I’d given him faded.

“He’s got a new girl,” Mum remarked casually.

“I hope she’s a Catholic,” I remarked casually.

“Yes, she is. And she’s all of seventeen.”

“That fits,” I said, breathing a sigh of relief. No more David Murchison! He’s found a new bit of female clay to mould.

After I’d cleared the uneaten gateau away and made a pot of tea, Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz and Flo materialised. Oh, dear. The family didn’t know what to make of them! One didn’t talk, the other’s grammar wasn’t the best, and the most that could be said for their unironed dresses was that they were clean. Flo, barefoot as always, was clad in the usual snuff-brown pinny, while her mother sported orange daisies on a bright mauve background.

After giving my tall, athletic-looking Dad the unmistakable glad-eye, my landlady sat down and monopolised him, much to Mum’s annoyance. As her excuse, Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz chose the Harriet Purcells, and quizzed him as to why, when there wasn’t one in his generation, he’d bestowed the dread name on his only daughter. Normally oblivious to feminine advances, Dad absolutely glowed at all this attention—even flirted! He might be pushing eighty, but he doesn’t look more than sixty-five. In fact, I thought, watching the pair of them, they went well together. By the time she got up to go, Mum was so livid that poor Granny, legs and eyes crossed, was desperate to go too. Only when Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz was well and truly gone did Mum oblige Granny. I’d never seen Mum jealous before.

“That kid gave me the jitters,” Gavin said. “Looks as if God intended to make her retarded, then forgot and gave her a brain.”

My hackles rose as high as Mum’s; I glared at him, the myopic git! “Flo is special!” I snapped.

“She looks half-starved to me,” was Granny’s verdict when she and Mum returned from the toilet. “What a great lump of a woman her mother is! Very common.” That is the most damning thing Granny can say about anyone. Common. Mum agreed fervently.

Oh, dear. I ushered them out at ten, stood and waved goodbye as Dad drove off in the new Ford Customline, and hoped they would never return. What they said about me, my flat, The House, Flo and Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz as they went home I can only guess, except that I had a fair idea Dad’s opinion of my landlady was a bit different from Mum’s. My bet is that the old horror was just making enough mild mischief to make sure the Purcell Family did not make The House a regular stop whenever they went out.

What makes me want to cry is that I was so bursting with opinions and impressions and conclusions about everything that’s happened to me in the last four weeks, yet the moment I looked at their faces as they eyed Flo’s scribbles in the front hall, I knew that I couldn’t air a one of them. Why is that, when I still love them to death? I do. I do! But it’s like going down to the Quay to farewell a friend heading off for England on the old Himalaya. You stand there looking up at the hundreds of faces clustered at the rail, holding your brightly coloured paper streamer in your hand, and the tugs get the ship under way, it unglues itself from the wharf, and all the streamers, including yours, snap and float on the dirty water with no purpose left except to contribute to the flotsam.

In future I am going to Bronte to see them. I know I said in here somewhere that I could never go back to Bronte, but I meant inside my soul. My body is going to have to do its duty, however.

Sunday,

February 28th, 1960

Tomorrow I can propose marriage to some bloke I fancy because this is a Leap Year, February has twenty-nine days. Fat chance.

Today I met Klaus, who didn’t go to Bowral for the weekend. He’s a chubby little bloke in his middle fifties with big round pale blue eyes, and he told me that he’d been a soldier in the German army during the War, a paper pusher in a depot near Bremen. So it was the British who interned him in a camp in Denmark. They offered him his choice of Australia, Canada or Scotland. He picked Australia because it was so far away, worked as a clerk for the Government for two years, then went back to the work he was trained for, goldsmithing. When I asked him if he’d teach me to cook, he beamed all over his face and said he’d be delighted. His English is so good that his accent is almost American, and he doesn’t have any SS tattoos in his armpits because I saw him hanging out his washing in his singlet. So poop to you, David Murchison, with your petty biases against New Australians. Klaus and I made a date for nine o’clock on next Wednesday night, which he assured me wasn’t too late an hour for a Continental. I was fairly sure I’d be home by then even if Cas was a nightmare.

On Friday night I had stopped in at the Piccadilly pub’s bottle department to buy a quart of three-star from Joe Dwyer, whom I’m getting to know quite well now that brandy doesn’t taste so foul. This afternoon I trotted it up the stairs to the lady herself, who greeted it and me with great enthusiasm. She fascinates me, I want to find out heaps more about her.

While Flo took her dozens and dozens of crayons and drew her aimless squiggles on a freshly painted section of wall just inside, we sat on the balcony in the steamy salty air with our Kraft cheese spread glasses, a plate of smoked eel, a loaf of bread, a pound of butter and all the time in the world, or so it seemed. She never once gave me the impression that perhaps someone else was due to visit, let alone tried to hustle me out quickly. I noticed, though, that she always kept an eye on Flo, sat herself where she could see Flo scribbling, and nodded and grunted whenever the little sprite turned her head with an enquiring look.

I yattered on about my continued virginity, about David, about Norm’s disappointingly sloppy kiss; she listened as if it was important and assured me that the breaking of my hymen was definitely in the offing because it had appeared in the cards.

“Another King of Pentacles, another medical man,” she said, making a sandwich out of smoked eel, bread and butter. “He’s right next to your Queen of Swords.”

“Queen of Swords?”

“Yep, Queen of Swords. Except for Bob, we’re all Queens of Swords in The House, princess. Strong!” She went on about this King of Pentacles next to me. “A ship what passes in the night. Which is real good, princess. You ain’t gunna fall in love with him. It’s murder to do it for the first time with someone you think you’re in love with.” Her face took on an expression of mingled malice, amusement and smugness. “Most men,” she said conversationally, “ain’t very good at it, y’know. Oh, they brag a lot among themselves, but braggin’ is all it is, take me word for it. See, men are different from us in more ways than havin’ dinguses, hur-hur-hur. They gotta come—they gotta fire the old mutton gun, or they go barmy. That’s what flogs the poor bastards on like lemmings to the cliff.” She sighed. “Yeah, lemmings to the cliff! But we don’t need to come, so for us it’s kinda—I dunno, less important.” She huffed with exasperation. “No, that ain’t the right word, important.”

“Compulsive?” I suggested.

“Spot on, princess! Compulsive. So if your first time is with someone you think shits caramel custard, you’re likely to be disappointed. Pick a real experienced bloke who loves pleasurin’ women as much as he loves shootin’ his load. And he’s there in the cards for youse, I promise.”

Finally I got around to telling her about my family’s dismay, even though she was a big part of it—she can take stuff like that on the chin—and about the ship with the broken streamers.

As we talked she fondled the cards like friends, occasionally turning one up and sliding it back into the pack, I fancied a bit absently. Then she asked me whether I was on the ship or the shore, and I said on the shore, definitely on the shore.