But Flo knows or senses or feels some of what I’ve gone through, I swear she does. It’s in her eyes, my angel. She came to me the minute I sat down and climbed onto my lap, kissed my face all over, snuggled down and played with her fingers. Then her hand stole toward my brandy glass.

“Not from mine, Flo darling,” I said. “If you want some, ask your mother.”

“Oh, let her have a bit,” Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz rumbled. “I’ve finally got her off the breast, so she deserves something.”

“What made you do that?” I asked, astonished.

“Saw it in the cards, princess.” She reached over to take my right hand, turned it over to study the palm, then closed it into a fist and chuckled. “Youse’ll be all right, Harriet Purcell. This ain’t gunna keep you down. Sent him back to the missus, eh?”

“Yes. He was getting more and more possessive, then told me he was going to ask his wife for a divorce so he could marry me and we could live respectably. But I couldn’t stomach so much as the thought of it.” I sighed. “I did try to let him down easily.”

“Men got so much pride there’s no such thing as lettin’ ‘em down easy when it’s the woman doin’ the heave-ho. He’s a real fine bloke—a gentleman and a scholar, as they useta say. Youse’d be good together part-time, but permanent? It just ain’t in the cards. All that water and all that fire—sooner or later the pair of youse woulda gone up like a volcano meetin’ the sea.”

“You did his horoscope?” I asked, surprised.

“Yep. Solid Leo, Aries, Sagittarius. Looks and acts like a Virgo with a touch of Libra and Sagittarius, but underneath he’s on a permanent slow burn—there’s an afflicted square between Venus and Saturn, though he ain’t got the selfish streak of that—it hobbles him terrible, but. Pity I dunno what he rises in.”

“How did you find out his birth date? Even I don’t know!”

“Looked him up in Who’s Who in Australia,” she said smugly.

“You went out to a library?”

“Nah, princess! I got me own library.”

If she does, it isn’t kept in this room. Her attitude helped me a lot—this will pass, the sea is chocka with fish, my Queen of Swords is well placed, I am unbreakable. Though Flo helped me more. She never budged from my lap until Harold arrived, when she bolted under the couch.

He looks frightful. Ill, unkempt. He’s crumbling, his self-esteem is eroding badly. He used to be so immaculately groomed—a prissy, fussy little man in ancient three-piece suits with a gold watch and fob across the waistcoat. Now he reminds me of a derelict. His shirt collar is frayed, his trousers are rumpled, his thin grey hair is flaked with dandruff. Oh, Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz, try to be kind to him!

But that isn’t in her. She resents him, she wants to be rid of him, yet the cards say he has a job to do for The House, and she will never go against the cards. So she picks away at him like a crow at a carcass, the softest and most vulnerable bits first.

“You’re early,” she snarled.

Even his voice has lost its edge, its pernickety genteel vowels more nasal, flatter, Australian. “It is precisely four o’clock by my watch,” he said, his eyes on me. Hate, hate, hate.

“Bugger the time!” she roared. “You’re early, so piss off.”

Harold actually rounded on her! “Shut up!” he screamed shrilly. “Shut up, shut up!”

Oh, Flo, you shouldn’t be listening to this, but you are from under the couch! I shrank in my chair and prayed a silent babble that the cards released Flo’s mother from this hideous, self-inflicted bondage.

Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz simply laughed at him. “Garn, Harold, you ain’t even a danger to all them little boys at school!” she said contemptuously. “You don’t impress me one little bit with your shut ups. Or with your trouser snake, ace.” She winked broadly at me, but made sure that he could see her do it. “Truth of the matter is, princess, that if it was half an inch shorter, it’d be a hole.”

“Shut up, shut up!” he screamed again. Suddenly he turned on me, the hate flaring up in his eyes like a fire doused in petrol. “It’s your fault, Harriet Purcell! It’s all your fault! Things have changed around here since you arrived!”

If I could have answered, she would have cut me short. “Lay off Harriet!” she thundered. “What’s Harriet ever done to you?”

“She’s changed things! She’s changed things!”

“Bullshit!” she scoffed. “The House needs Harriet.”

That set him off around the room, wringing his hands, screwing his head down into his shoulders, shaking and shuddering. Dear God, I thought, he’s genuinely demented! “The house, the house, the wretched house!” he cried. “Do you know what I think, Delvecchio? I think you have an unhealthy attachment to this—this female! Harriet wants, Harriet gets. There’s no difference between you and that filthy pair upstairs! Oh, why are you so cruel?”

“Bugger off, Harold,” she said with dangerous quietness. “Go bugger off. The cards may say I gotta keep youse here, but you just done your dash in the nooky department, ace. From now on you can masturbate. Fuck off!”

One more scorching look at me, and he went.

“Sorry about that, princess,” she said to me, then, to the couch, “Youse can come out, angel, Harold ain’t ever comin’ back into this room.”

“Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz, there’s something seriously wrong with Harold’s mental processes,” I said with all the authority I could summon. “If you insist on keeping him in The House, please, I beg of you, treat him more kindly! He’s deteriorating, surely you can see that! And he stalks me—or at least he did until Duncan came. Now that Duncan’s gone, he might go back to stalking.”

Oh, how can she be so intelligent and wise, yet so thick? Her response was to blow me a derisive raspberry. “Don’t youse worry none about Harold, princess,” she said. “The cards say you ain’t in any danger from a little wart like Harold.”

The cards, the cards, the bloody cards!

Still, I got Flo to myself for two hours, which delighted me. That scene between the two unlikely lovers had been awful to endure, but even in the midst of it, my heart had turned to lead at the thought that the breach between them would mean no more Flo on late Sunday afternoons. I think Flo was feeling the same as she huddled under the couch, because when her mother handed her to me, she lit up so vividly that I melted the way I used to when Duncan smiled at me. Used to. Past tense, Harriet, past tense. Oh, I miss him! Thank God I don’t have to miss my angel too.

She loves the other angel, Marceline. If only Flo would put on weight the way Marceline has! My five-pound cat is now ten pounds, and still expanding. The pleasure in watching the pair of them roll around the floor! But I have made up my mind that Flo must start playing with the alphabet building blocks. I’ve tried sending my thoughts at her, but they don’t get through. So if I teach her to read and write, then we’ll be able to communicate.

She listened intently while I showed her A and B and C and T and a few others, seemed to comprehend completely when I built CAT and DOG. Yet when I give the bricks to her, what comes out is CTB or DAC. She can’t even hand me A or B. Meaningless to her. The reading centre in her brain must be damaged or nonexistent. Oh, Flo!

Monday,

September 26th, 1960

Pappy must have returned very late last night, while Marceline and I were asleep. Yet there must be some sort of supernatural force in The House, because I woke two hours early and I knew that she was home. When I came around the corner to her room with the coffee percolator in my hand, her door was wide open.

She was sitting at the table, looked up at me and smiled. Oh, so much better than she had looked when she went away! I hugged her and kissed her, poured both of us coffee, sat down. There were sheets of paper spread on the table, some blank, some with a few words written on them in purple ink.