The next thing they were all clustered at my door. Klaus was beside himself, weeping and moaning, so was Bob. Jim was trying to brave it out, and Toby’s face was white. So was mine, not easy for people with dark-tan skin.

I brought them inside and tried to settle them in my chairs, but they twitched, jumped, shivered. So did I.

Only Pappy wasn’t scared witless. “She’s here with us,” she said, eyes shining. “I knew she’d never desert The House.”

“Rubbish!” Toby snapped.

“No, whatever it is, it’s real,” I said. “We were all sound asleep, and it woke us up.”

I put the kettle on, made some tea, and put a stiff dollop of brandy in every mug. Vows never to touch the stuff again are not proof against Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz.

Then Pappy dropped her bombshell. Our night experience had filled her with a joy I hadn’t seen in her since the halcyon days of Ezra. She was sparkling.

“I’m not going to Stockton,” she said.

We all stared at her.

“After Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz passed over,” she whispered, “she appeared to me. Not in a dream—while I was reading. She told me that I couldn’t desert The House. So I went to see the Sisters at Vinnie’s, and asked if I could train there as a nurse but live here. Nuns are so kind, so understanding! They decided that at my age and with my experience of hospitals, I would make a better nurse if I lived out than in. I start at Vinnie’s with the next batch of probationers later this month.”

This was the first bit of good news since New Year’s Eve, and we all needed it desperately. Pappy is strange, very mystical. Yet even after hearing what she had to say, I refuse to believe that it was the real Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz I heard upstairs. I would rather think that emanations from my lost angel stole into our minds and deluded us.

Where are you, Flo? Are you all right? Do they understand? No, of course you’re not all right, and of course they don’t understand. With your mother gone, you belong to me, and I’ll shift heaven and earth before I’ll see you sent to an orphanage. If I can’t get you home, you’ll die. Your fate is in my hands because your mother put it there. Which is the greatest mystery of all.

Saturday,

January 7th, 1961

A woman from the Child Welfare came today. I saw her standing on the verandah when I returned from the shops, a dowdily dressed woman in her fifties with all the earmarks of spinsterhood, from the ringless left hand to the whiskers sprouting on her chin. Why don’t they ever pluck or shave them? You’d think that a pardonable vanity would push them to it, but at least half of them seem to prefer to wear the whiskers like a badge. It’s a good thing that the War freed up women like this to work, otherwise what would become of them? But then again, I suppose the War also cut down on the supply of husbands. Certainly there aren’t as many single around my age as there are in the Chris-Marie and upward age brackets. Mind you, Australian men are hard to catch and harder to hang onto. As Chris and Marie have found out, New Australian men are a piece of (wedding) cake compared to the Old ones.

This spinster specimen introduced herself and I introduced myself. Miss Farfer or Arthur or Farfin, something that sounded like Arf-Arf in her squeezed-up voice. So I called her Miss Arf-Arf and she answered to it without seeming to notice. As I unlocked the door and she followed me inside, I couldn’t see her reaction to the scribbles, the neglected ugliness of The House’s public halls. Then, as luck would have it, we emerged into the side passage right at the moment Madame Fugue had chosen to roast Verity.

“You fuckin’ stupid fuckin’ bitch!” was the only audible bit, thank God, but I suspect it was more than enough.

“What is that house?” she asked as I opened my door.

“A private hotel,” I said, and ushered her into my nice pink flat. There she informed me that she had come to inspect Florence Schwartz’s past living arrangements. Past living arrangements.

“I have been every day since Tuesday, but there is never a soul home,” she said peevishly.

Oh, dear. We were off to a bad start and it only got worse. A notebook was produced and duly entered as I explained the nature of The House, its tenants, who we all were, what we did for a crust, how long we’d been here, how well we’d known Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz and Flo, whom Miss Arf-Arf persisted in calling Florence. That she had already conferred with the pair who took Flo away was obvious from her questions. Did Flo ever wear shoes? Why wouldn’t Flo talk? What sort of hours had Flo kept? What did Flo’s mother feed her? Thank God for Pappy’s presence of mind over the occult paraphernalia, because Miss Arf-Arf toured the place from top to bottom and left no coverlet unturned or drawer unopened. What would she say if she knew that until shortly before her mother’s death, Flo had still been on the breast? Like the soothsaying, our secret.

I refused to let her look in Jim and Bob’s flat or in Klaus’s room because they weren’t in. It didn’t please her to be denied, but she was a lot less pleased over Toby’s reaction to her request to come up and see him.

“Go to buggery!” he snarled, and slammed his trapdoor.

I left the front room until last, hoping against hope, but of course Miss Arf-Arf wasn’t going to miss The Scene of The Murder. Very disappointing, obviously. We’d cleaned it scrupulously, so much so that even the crayon scribbles on the walls were barely visible. Of any bloody finger-painting, not a smear or a smudge.

“However, I have seen the police photographs,” she said smugly.

I was dying to tell her to go to buggery too, but I didn’t dare. With Flo’s fate undecided, what I said to anybody from the Child Welfare had to be friendly, candid, sane and balanced. So I ended the tour with the offer of a cup of tea. Miss Arf-Arf accepted.

“Considering the insalubrious location of these premises and the state of Florence’s mother’s personal accommodations, my dear Miss Purcell, you’ve made a very pleasant corner for yourself,” she said, munching one of my Anzac bikkies. No dunking for her!

I told her that I was going to apply for custody of Flo.

“Oh, that would never do!” she said.

I asked her what she meant, and she explained that Florence was being well cared for where she was (no mention of a place—it might have been in Melbourne or Timbuctoo from the way she spoke), so custody wouldn’t become an option until after everybody decided that no will or relative existed.

“Which may take many months,” she ended.

I looked into her watery blue eyes and understood that if I started to plead eloquently with all the emotional stops out, tried to tell her that Flo would die unless she came home very soon, my chances of ever getting Flo would diminish immediately.

“It’s not that they’re inhuman, or even inhumane,” I said to Toby later up in his airy attic, “it’s just that they go by the rules, that individual circumstances are dismissed.”

“Of course,” he grunted, scrubbing away at a hotel-type picture of a blue gum in a clearing. “They’re public servants, Harriet, and public servants don’t rock the boat. Everything is decided by the grey ghosts on some committee. Miss Arf-Arf’s report will go into Flo’s file along with all the other reports, and when the file measures two inches thick, it will go Upstairs for a decision.”

“She’ll be dead by then,” I said, winking away my tears.

He put down his brushes and came across to sit facing me on a hard chair drawn up very close, then he leaned forward and pushed a flopping bit of hair off my forehead. “Why do you love her so?” he asked. “I mean, she’s a nice little kid, even if she is a bit strange, but anyone would think that she’s your own, the way you talk. You call me obsessed, but Flo is a much greater obsession with you than anything I can drum up.”