Oh, dear. I’m turning into a shrew. Still, it worked. Pappy helped herself to beef and enjoyed the taste of it enough to forget darling stupid drongo flipping Ezra.

Luckily she liked Marceline, and Marceline liked her enough to climb on her lap and purr away. Then I set out to do a bit of fishing for information on Ezra, and learned some very interesting stuff, such as how he can afford to maintain a wife and seven kids as well as a flat in the Glebe and very pricey substances the Law says he can’t have. He holds a chair, but academics don’t get paid what managing directors do because intellect and education don’t rank with money-making. His salary, Pappy said, goes to his family. But he has written a couple of books that sell to a popular market, and he keeps that income for himself. Oh, the more I hear about Ezra, the less I like him! Utterly, totally, completely selfish.

On the other hand, Pappy’s so happy, and every day that she’s happy is one more day that she isn’t unhappy. Not an ounce of practicality in her, but we can’t all be like me, I suppose.

Saturday,

May 28th, 1960

An animal is good company. Today was one of the really quiet Saturdays, Jim and Bob off tooling around the Blue Mountains on the Harley Davidson, Klaus off down to Bowral, Chikker and Marge in the front ground floor flat sleeping off a binge, Toby off with his sketching block and a tin of watercolours to some site in Iron Cove that’s caught his fancy, Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz dealing with a cavalcade of blue-rinsed clients (they love to come on Saturdays), and Pappy somewhere in dreamland at Glebe. Harold was here, of course. I don’t know what he does when he isn’t teaching school, but he certainly doesn’t go out. Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz does his washing when she does her own, so the one part of The House I can be sure not to find him is the laundry and backyard. There’s never a sound from his room, though it’s right above me—no music, no creaking of my ceiling, and when I’m outside and lift my head to look at his window, its blind is drawn, both panes shut all the way. Yet I’m conscious of him somewhere in the back of my mind all the time. It used to be just when I went upstairs to have a shower, but during the last couple of weeks I’ve noticed that if I go upstairs anywhere to see anybody, as I come down again I think I can hear feet whispering shoeless behind me. I turn around, but there’s no one there. And if it’s Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz I go to visit, he’s always on the landing outside her door when I leave, not moving, just staring at me.

It must have been about six o’clock when someone knocked on my door. The days have drawn right in, so it’s dark by six now, and I’ve taken to sliding the bolt on the inside of my door when the back regions of The House are deserted except for me and Harold. Even worse indication of my creeping paranoia, I’ve driven six-inch nails from my window frames deep into the architraves around them, which allows me to keep them open at top and bottom, but not wide enough for anyone to slither inside. Sydney’s not cold enough to close windows all the way in winter, neither wind nor rain beats in along the side passage, and in summer I don’t get the sun. If I am inside and the big bolt is engaged, I am safe. When I think about that, I get the shivers. That awful little man upstairs is waging psychological warfare against me, and for all my horror of cowardice, in some ways he’s winning. Yet I can’t say anything to anybody about it—when I did to Toby, he pooh-poohed it. Paranoid.

So when the knock fell on my door, I jumped. I was reading a whodunit by a snobby Pommy woman and Holst’s Planet Suite was playing on Peter’s hi-fi, the gas fire was going, and Marceline was curled up in the other easy chair, fast asleep. A part of me wanted to call out and ask who was there, but that’s cowardice, Harriet Purcell. So I walked to the door, slid the bolt and opened it with a rush, every muscle poised not for flight, but for fight.

Mr. Forsythe was standing there. My muscles sagged.

“Hello, sir,” I said brightly, and held the door wider. “Ah, um, er, come in.” Feeble.

“I do trust that I’m not inopportune?” he asked, entering.

What an incredible turn of phrase! God speaketh in a superior tongue, none of this “I’m not in the way, am I?” stuff.

“You’re perfectly opportune, sir,” I said. “Sit down.”

Marceline, however, was not about to budge. She likes the fire too much. His solution was to pick her up, ensconce himself in the chair, put her on his lap and stroke her back to sleep.

“I can offer you coffee or three-star hospital brandy,” I said.

“Coffee, thank you.”

I disappeared behind my screen and stood looking at the sink as if it held the answer to the meaning of life. The sound of his voice jolted me into action, I filled the percolator, spooned coffee into it, turned it on.

“I’ve been to see an aged patient of mine at Elizabeth Bay,” he was saying, “and I have to return later tonight. Unfortunately it’s over an hour’s drive to my house, so I wondered if perhaps you might be free to join me for dinner in this area.”

Oh, lord! It’s got to be almost two months since I last saw him, that night when he gave me a lift home and drank a mug of my coffee. Since then, not hide nor hair of him.

“I’ll be out in a minute,” I called, wondering why percolators took so long to get their only job over and done with.

Why was he here? Why?

“Black, no sugar,” I said, finally reappearing. Then I sat down opposite him and looked at him as Chris Hamilton had looked at Demetrios on that famous day when I’d gone up her like a rat up a drainpipe. The scales fell from my eyes. Those wretched cards are right, Mr. Forsythe wants me. He wants me! So I sat staring at him stupidly, too astounded to find a thing to say.

I don’t think he noticed the mug of coffee or the cat on his lap, he was too intent on me, chin up, eyes calm and steady. A bit like a film star playing a spy going to his execution. Prepared to suffer, prepared to die for what he believed in. Suddenly I realised that I knew nothing like enough about men to understand what forces would impel a Duncan Forsythe to do this. All I did know was that if I accepted his invitation, I was going to trigger a chain of events that had the power to ruin both of us.

How fast is thought? How long did it take me to sit there, wordless, and make up my mind? Harold aside, I’m happy with my lot—with myself, my sexuality, my code of behaviour, my life. But he, poor man, doesn’t even know who or what he is. I don’t have the remotest idea why he wants me, only that he’s brought himself to the necessary pitch to come asking. On the strength of three little encounters.

“Thank you, Mr. Forsythe,” I said. “I would be delighted to have dinner with you.”

For a moment he looked absolutely taken aback, then that smile that turns me into a melted puddle lit up his face and his eyes. “I’ve booked a table at the Chelsea for seven o’clock,” he said, finally saw the coffee and picked it up to sip at it.

The Chelsea. Gord Aggie! The hospital grapevine is definitely right, he’s not a philanderer. He was planning to take me to eat at the poshest restaurant between the City and Prunier’s, where half the customers would recognise him in an instant.

“Not the Chelsea, sir,” I said gently. “I don’t have that sort of wardrobe. Would you mind the Bohemian up the street? Russian Egg and Rostbraten Esterhazy for ten bob.”

“Wherever you like,” he said, looking as if some huge burden had been lifted from his shoulders. Then he put the mug down and rose to his feet, deposited Marceline back in her chair. “I’m sure you’d like to have some time to yourself,” he said then with the courtesy he was famous for, “so I’ll sit in my car outside and wait for you to come out.” At the door he stopped. “Ought I to go ahead of you, make a reservation?”