What an empty life. But that’s only me talking. To her, it is exactly the life she dreamed of living since her schooldays, I imagine. Heaps of money, two handsome sons who sound as if she’s kept them very young for their ages, a divine house way out in the Wahroonga backblocks, where the ground covers two acres, there’s a swimming pool, and she can’t see the neighbours. She has a gardener, a slushie to scrub the floors, vacuum, wash and iron, a woman who comes in to cook on the evenings she expects Duncan home, a Hillman Minx car, and unlimited accounts at the best department stores and Sydney’s two fashion salons. How do I know all this? Not from Duncan, but from Chris and Sister Cas, who admire Cathy Forsythe with heart and soul. She’s got what women yearn for.

As for me, I suppose you might say that I’m happy to take Cathy Forsythe’s leavings. The part of Duncan she most definitely doesn’t want is the part of him that I appreciate. We do a lot of talking, he and I, about everything from his fascination with sarcoma to the private secretary in his Macquarie Street rooms, Miss Augustine. She’s into her fifties, another old maid, and she treats Duncan like her only begotten son. A model of efficiency, tact, enthusiasm, you name it. She’s even invented a special sort of filing system, which made me smile to myself when he told me about it. What a way to ensure your own indispensability! The poor man can’t find a thing without her.

It’s just over five weeks since he knocked on my door with that invitation to dine at the Chelsea, and he’s changed. For the better, I flatter myself. The laugh comes easier and those dark, muddy green eyes aren’t as sad as they were. In fact, his looks have improved so much that Sister Cas is going around remarking that she always knew Mr. Forsythe was a handsome man, but she’d never noticed just how handsome. He’s blooming, simply because someone esteems him as a man. Unlike the habitual philanderers, he’s not conscious of his attractiveness to women, so he thinks that capturing me is miraculous.

Anyway, as long as Cathy Forsythe doesn’t get wind of me, I keep hoping everything stays as it is. Only my exercise book is suffering, and that’s a small price to pay for the love and the company of a very desirable, terrifically nice man.

Friday,

July 22nd, 1960

I’ve finally seen Toby. It’s worried me that he’s kept himself completely invisible. When I’ve gone up the stairs to Jim and Bob and Klaus’s level, his ladder has always been pulled up to the ceiling and his bell’s been disconnected. Jim and Bob haven’t changed toward me, though there’s a certain sorrow present for my obtuseness in choosing a man, and Klaus continues to tutor me in the kitchen every Wednesday night. I can now fry and grill as well as braise and stew, but he won’t teach me how to make puddings.

“The stomach has a separate compartment for desserts,” he said earnestly, “but if you train that compartment to close down now, dear Harriet, you will benefit when you get to my age.”

I suspect, however, that he hasn’t managed to close his own dessert compartment down, judging by his figure.

I didn’t go up to see Jim and Bob or Klaus tonight, I went up to see if Toby’s ladder was down. And it was! What’s more, the bell was back on its string.

“Come up!” he called.

He was wrestling with a vast landscape he couldn’t fit on his easel, and so was attacking it on a makeshift frame—painted white, of course—rigged on top of the easel. I’d never seen him paint anything like it before. If he did a landscape, it was always some blast furnace or dilapidated powerhouse or smoking slag heap. But this was a stunner. A great valley filling up with soft shadows, sandstone cliffs reddened by the last light of the sun, a hint of mountains that went on forever, endless still forests.

“Where did you see that?” I asked, fascinated.

“Up the other side of Lithgow. It’s a valley called the Wolgan, cut off all around except for one four-wheel-drive track that winds back and forth down a cliff and ends at a pub that’s a real relic. Newnes. They used to mine oil shale there during the War, when Australia was desperate for fuel. I’ve been spending every single weekend up there, doing sketches and watercolours.”

“It’s a beauty, Toby, but why the change in style?”

“There’s a contract being let for paintings in the foyer of a new hotel in the City, and this is the sort of stuff the management is looking for, so Martin says.” He grunted. “Usually the hotel’s interior designers have a graft going with some gallery owner, but Martin wangled me a chance at it. He can’t landscape, he’s purely a portrait man when he isn’t into cubism.”

“Well, I think this one should hang in the Louvre,” I said sincerely.

He flushed and looked quite absurdly pleased, put his brushes down. “Want some coffee?”

“Yes, please. But I really came to ask if we could make a date for you to taste my newfound culinary skills,” I said.

“And disturb you when the boyfriend might turn up? No, thanks, Harriet,” he said curtly.

I saw red. “Listen, Toby Evans, the boyfriend doesn’t intrude unless I want him to intrude! I don’t remember that you had much to say about Nal apart from an intolerant attitude toward my levity, but the way you’ve cut me since Duncan arrived in my life, you’d think I was having an affair with the Duke of Edinburgh!”

“Come on, Harriet,” he said through the screen, “you know why! The House grapevine says that he’s not the sort of bloke who visits girls who live in Kings Cross. Unless, that is, they’re working girls like Chastity and Patience.”

“Toby, you’re a bigot! I wouldn’t touch a man who patronised the Mesdames Fugue and Toccata!”

“Dirty water’s dirty water.”

“Don’t be crude! And you’re begging the question. What about dear Professor Ezra Marsupial?”

“Ezra doesn’t slum it here. Pappy goes to his place. And just who is your lordly bloke, anyway?”

“Do you mean The House hasn’t informed you of that snippet?” I asked sarcastically. “He’s an orthopod at Queens.”

“A what?” he asked, arriving with the coffee.

“An orthopod is an orthopaedic surgeon.”

“But Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz called him Mister, not Doctor.”

“Surgeons inside their own hospitals are always called Mister,” I explained. “Though you didn’t hear that from our landlady. I introduced Duncan to her as Doctor.”

He wasn’t rattled, simply lifted his brows. “Then I must have heard it from Harold,” he said, sitting down.

“Harold?”

“What’s peculiar about that?” he asked, surprised. “I often stop to have a word with Harold, we usually come in about the same time. And he’s the biggest gossip in The House, he knows the lot.”

“I’ll bet he does,” I muttered.

Because Toby’s good opinion matters to me, I tried to explain why I was involved with Duncan, tried to make him see that it isn’t immoral, even if it is illicit. But he retained his scepticism, I couldn’t dent it. Bloody men, with their double standard! Tainted by the venom of a snake like Harold Warner, no doubt. He was one who wouldn’t ignore the chance to make trouble for me with those I love. Oh, but it hurts when Toby condemns me unjustly! He’s so decent and straightforward himself, so incapable of being underhanded. Why couldn’t he see that my own openness about my affair with Duncan was evidence that I too am not underhanded? If it were up to me, the whole world could know. It’s Duncan wants to keep our secret so his precious Cathy isn’t embarrassed.

I changed the subject back to the painting on his easel, very glad that his absences weren’t on my account. Truth to tell, it is Pappy’s plight drove him up the other side of Lithgow. Then he floored me by telling me that he’d bought a piece of land on the wrong side of the tracks at Wentworth Falls, and was building a shack on it.