I held out my hand. “Marceline? Are you Marceline?”

She jumped down, came to rub around my legs purring loudly. When I put Chris’s bag flat on the ground and lifted one edge of it to make a cave, the cat calmly walked inside it, and when I set it on its flat bottom and began to shove safety pins in it to close it, the cat just kept on purring. So I carried my burden home with no trouble except the fear that Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz would refuse to let me keep Marceline angel. No one else has a pet except Klaus, who keeps two budgies in a cage and lets them fly around his room.

She knew what was in the shopping bag, though it neither moved nor emitted a meow. How does she know? Because she sees it in the cards or the Glass.

“You keep it, princess,” she said, waving a dismissal.

I didn’t tell her that Marceline was an angel. That I had brought the animal home as an omen.

When I undid the shopping bag, there was Marceline in its bottom, paws tucked under, snoozing. Maybe my poor old boy had some reason on his side, to be so attached to this only other living thing in his life. Marceline was special. I fed her on smoked eel, which she devoured ravenously, and when I pointed to the partially open window, she stared at me solemnly, then waddled to it with distended belly, jumped to the sill, and vanished.

I wonder will I still have a cat in the morning?

Thursday,

May 12th, 1960

Yes, I still have a cat. When I woke, Marceline was curled on the foot of my bed. I picked her up and examined her closely for fleas, sores, mange, but she was as scrupulously clean as her old boy. Just skinny, probably because he couldn’t afford to feed her lavishly. We breakfasted together on scrambled eggs and toast—she certainly isn’t a fussy eater. She does like top-of-the-milk, however. That should put weight on her. There’s no problem in The House about keeping a window open; to get into our backyard, you have to scale a sixty-foot cliff. Though why would you bother, when the front door’s always open?

My poor old boy had met his Maker at about the same time as I appropriated his angel from the house on Flinders Street.

As I would have to take Marceline to the vet’s for worming and maybe spaying, I kept Chris’s canvas shopping bag, gave her a new and nicer one I bought on my way to work.

Saturday,

May 14th, 1960

Would you believe it? David Murchison turned up not long after I got in from the vet’s. My poor old boy had certainly spent what he could on his angel, because the vet told me that she was already spayed. All I had to pay for were worming and yeast tablets, plus a couple of injections for feline fevers. Five bloody quid! So when David turned up on my doorstep, my mind was on my expensive cat and what a good lurk vets have.

When he saw Marceline curled up in my lap, David shuddered and made no attempt to come closer to me than the other side of the fireplace, where (on another meter, more pennies!) I had the gas fire going. Winter’s around the corner.

“Where did you get that?” he asked with a moue of distaste.

“From heaven, I suspect,” I answered. “I’m just back from the vet’s, and I can tell you that her name is Marceline, she’s spayed, and she’s about three years old.”

His only response was a noise of revulsion, but he sat down opposite me in the other easy chair, stared at me out of the blue eyes I used to think so divine, and steepled his fingers.

“I hear you have a new girlfriend,” I said chattily.

His skin flushed, he looked annoyed. “No, I do not!” he said with a snap in his voice.

“Broke your mould, did she?”

“I am here,” he said stiffly, “to ask you to change your mind and come back to me. Rosemary was a rebound, that’s all.”

“David,” I said patiently, “you’re out of my life. I don’t want to see you, let alone go out with you.”

“You’re cruel,” he muttered. “You’ve changed.”

“No, I haven’t changed, at least not where you’re concerned. But I am a different person. I’ve gained the courage to be direct and the hardness not to relent when people play on my sympathy. You may as well get your bum off my chair and piss off, because I don’t want you.”

“It isn’t fair!” he cried, hands unsteepled. “I love you! And I’m not going to take no for an answer.”

Right, Harriet Purcell, bring out the Big Bertha cannon. “I am not a virgin,” I said.

“What?”

“You heard me. I am not a virgin.”

“You’re joking! You’re fabricating!”

I laughed. “David, why can’t you believe the truth?”

“Because you wouldn’t! You couldn’t!”

“I bloody could, and I bloody did. What’s more, I thoroughly enjoyed myself.” Fire the ten-ton shell, Harriet! “Added to that, he wasn’t precisely a white man, though he was a beautiful colour.”

David got up and left without another word.

“So,” I said to Toby later, “I’ve finally got rid of David for good, though I suspect it was more because my lover was an Indian than because I’ve had a lover.”

“No, a bit of both,” Toby said, grinning. “The silly clot! He ought to have seen the writing on the wall years ago. It’s women who choose their mates. If a man’s interested, he simply has to wait around with his cap in hand until she makes up her mind. And if she decides to give him the royal heave-ho, that’s too bad. I’ve seen it happen from dogs to dicky-birds. As for spiders”—he shuddered—”the ladies eat their mates.”

“I am not a bitch on heat, thank you!” I snarled.

He laughed. “Maybe not, Harriet, but you certainly do have an effect on us poor old dogs.” His eyelids lowered, he considered me like a sniper his target. “You’re sexy. There’s no slapping a label on that, it’s underneath the skin.”

“I do not pout, wiggle or stick my tongue out!”

“That’s confusing advertisement with essence. If a man says a woman’s sexy, he simply means that he thinks she’d be fun in bed. Some of the homeliest women I know are sexy. Look at Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz. She’s the back end of a bus, but I’ll bet the men have been turning somersaults over her since she was twelve. I rather fancy her myself, as a matter of fact. I always did like women who are taller than me. I must have Sherpa blood.”

He strolled over to my chair and put a hand on its back, then lowered himself onto its arm, his knee pinning me hard. “It’s my experience of genuinely sexy women that they are fun in bed.”

I looked suspicious. “Is that a hint or an invitation?”

“Neither. I don’t intend to let you grab me by the short and curlies at this stage, thank you very much. Which doesn’t mean I’m not going to kiss you, mind.”

He did so, forcefully enough to be painful until my head lifted off the chair back and turned to accommodate him, then he fitted his mouth luxuriously into mine and played with my tongue.

“That’s as far as I intend to go,” he said, releasing me.

“That’s as far as I intend to let you go,” I said.

Interesting man, Toby Evans. In love with Pappy, but yet attracted to me. Well, I’m attracted to him too, though I’m not in love with him. Why does everything in life seem to boil down to sex?

Pappy’s at home again this weekend. Ezra’s wife, she told me when I invited her to have something to eat and meet Marceline, is being hideously difficult.

“With seven kids, I’m not surprised,” I said, putting the beef braise on the table so we could take as much as we wanted. Pappy, I noticed, wrinkled her nose and started to hunt out the carrots and potatoes, leave the meat. “What’s this?” I demanded.

“Ezra deplores eating flesh. The beasts of the field are innocents we subject to horrible torture in slaughterhouses,” she explained. “Man wasn’t intended to eat flesh.”

“That’s complete bullshit! Man started as a hunter, and our gums are populated by as many teeth for tearing flesh as for grinding plants!” I snapped. “Slaughterhouses are policed by government officials, and all the animals that go to them wouldn’t exist at all if we didn’t eat them. Who says that carrot you’re busy masticating with your omnivorous teeth wasn’t subjected to horrible torture when it was yanked from the soil, decapitated, scrubbed hard enough to exfoliate it, cruelly chopped into chunks and then got the living daylights simmered out of it? And all that is nothing compared to the fate of the potato you’re relishing—I not only flayed it, I took a sharp knife, screwed it round in its flesh and dug out its eyes! The brisket’s good for you, you’re so thin you must be burning tissue protein. Eat the lot!”