“I’ve connected the septic tank,” he said, pushing the hair off my forehead. “Want to come up to Wentworth Falls and have a look this weekend?”

“With knobs on, ace, with knobs on. Hur-hur-hur.”

Pappy helped me tidy up when I asked her, pushed Toby out the door protesting.

“How much of this did you know?” I asked her.

The almond eyes elongated, the rosebud mouth curved into a faint smile. “Some, perhaps, but by no means everything. One always had to make deductions, and often more from what she didn’t say than said. What I did know was that from the moment I told her I had met a Harriet Purcell at Queens, she never let up on me until I brought you home. So I realised that your name held some significance for her, but what, I had no idea. If anyone got the message, it was Harold. He knew that you stood higher in her affections than the rest of The House put together, though I don’t think for a moment that she told him a thing. But he loved her, poor little man, and after almost forty years of having his mother to himself, he couldn’t accept sharing the woman who had taken her place. He knew she loved you even before you turned up in the flesh, and it ate at him more and more as he watched the two of you together. I think you were right to fear him. I think that for a long time, it was you he planned to murder, not her. Though I’m sure he never planned what did happen. We’ll never know what passed between them that night, except that I’m sure she threw him the ultimate insult. The knife was there, he picked it up and used it. But no, I don’t think he intended to.”

“Did she see it in the cards or the Glass, Pappy?”

“You’d know that better than I, Harriet. What I do know is that she wasn’t a charlatan, though she may have started out that way. She could see things, especially in the cards when they concerned The House, and with Flo when it came to her clients. Those women swore by her, and they weren’t consulting her on private matters. They consulted her to inform their husbands what was going to happen to the stock market, to money, to how the Government’s actions might affect commerce. They paid her a fortune, which means that what she told them had to be absolutely accurate. And though we found scrapbooks full of clippings about these men, we found no books on economics or business trends.”

“It’s the fact that she submitted so tamely really gnaws at me,” I said.

“She believed implicitly in destiny, Harriet. If her time to Pass Over had come, she would have accepted it simply and naturally. What’s more, it started just before the New Year of 1960—that’s when Harold and the Ten of Swords first appeared. She hadn’t even heard your name then, though she turned you up in the cards at the same moment as Harold and the Ten of Swords. You were her salvation, the Scorpian Queen of Swords with the massive Mars. All she said to me was that you would preserve The House.”

So there you have the Papele Sutama Theory. I am fairly comfortable with it.

Monday,

April 10th, 1961

I came back from Wentworth Falls this morning by train, leaving Toby behind to carry on with his construction. Like me, today is his first day of independence; we both finished at our places of work last Friday with neither fuss nor fanfare.

When I set eyes on Toby’s refuge, I was amazed. I’d expected what he’d called it, a shack, but instead I found a truly beautiful, very modern small house well on its way to completion. There had been an old dead house on the site, he explained, and it yielded him enough lovely old sandstone blocks to make his foundations, footings, floors and the piers between his windows as well as the few internal walls. His money had mostly gone into the glass, a corrugated iron roof and fixed fittings.

“I modelled it on a Walter Burley Griffin House on top of the crest at Avalon,” he said, “which belongs to Sali Herman. I don’t have its water views, but I do see the mountains and forests forever. Nice, to think that this part of the country’s so rugged no one logged it out in the old days, and now they can’t log it at all, thanks to government embargoes.”

“You’ll get the afternoon sun,” I frowned. “With all this glass, it will bake you.”

“I’m putting a very wide verandah on the western side,” he said. “In the evenings I’ll sit out there and watch the sun set over the Grose Valley.”

He’d done all the building himself, with a little help from Martin and the rest of the Cross camp scene.

“I’m a bushie,” he explained. “Where I come from, you can’t just ring up a plumber or a chippie or a stonemason. You learn to make do with your own pair of hands.”

The place was terribly overgrown, but there was the remnant of an old apple orchard, right at this moment loaded with fruit. I made such a pig of myself that I was exceedingly grateful for the flushing toilet and its septic tank, which he informed me he’d got working by chucking a dead rabbit into it. The things you learn!

We just went to bed together after we’d eaten and he’d washed the dishes—some things will never change, he’s still the most obsessive man I know. Manna from heaven for me! I’ll never have to do any of the housework. Just a spot of cooking.

I’d wondered what sort of lover that would make him, but I needn’t have. He’s an artist, he appreciates beauty, and for some reason he thinks I’m beautiful. No, I’m not, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as they say. What are Mum and Dad going to say when nudes of Harriet Purcell pop up in art galleries? The lovemaking is delicious, but I really think he’s more interested in painting me. Of course as he grows more famous he’s going to lose his clinical eye and branch out into stuff that only the high art connoisseurs will appreciate, I suspect, but they’re the ones who pay the biggest bikkies anyway. I still like the smoking slag heap in the thunderstorm. And his portrait of Flo, which he’s given to me. He never did get around to painting Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz, though he doesn’t seem to be sorry about it.

He’s a lovely hairy man, which would please her. Not black hair like Mr. Delvecchio, but dark red. As I suspected, muscular and strong, and not at all disadvantaged by his lack of height. He says it makes my breasts more accessible. I prowled the tangles and snarls, combed the you-know-where with me tongue, hur-hur-hur.

“But you mustn’t think,” I said to him as I packed my little weekender bag and prepared to make the four-mile traipse to the railway station, “that you own me, Toby.”

His eyes were dark, probably because dawn was barely breaking. “You don’t need to tell me that, Harriet,” he said. “I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again now. In some ways you’re very like Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz. No man can own a force of Nature.”

Good bloke!

The big C-38 steam engine was just approaching the station when I crossed the bridge over the line, and I stopped to lean over the parapet, get massive clouds of black coal smoke and soot in my face. She’d come down from Mount Victoria, the gorgeous beast. I love steam trains, spent the whole trip home leaning out of the window to get the sound and smell of her pushing those con-rods around, work, work, work. The Government is switching to diesel locomotives, which are dismal. You never see any evidence of the power. I adore power on display, including that in muscular men.

Friday,

April 21st, 1961

Flo came home today, clinging to my hip like a monkey, all wreathed in smiles. When she saw fat Marceline she wriggled down and was off to play, just as if those months in the child shelter and Queens Psych had never happened. As if she had never scribbled in blood, or gone through a plate glass window, or compelled innately kind people to tie her down.