I am still flummoxed. Does she talk? She understands every word I say, but I haven’t been the recipient of a single beam or pulsation of telepathic communication. I had hoped against hope that I would once she was back home and accepted that her mother is no longer a part of her life. Nonsense! She accepted it the night her mother died.

The Werners have proven treasures. They make a living by doing odd jobs under the lap and taking cash payments for them. Experience has shown that they’re as competent jacks-of-all-trades as Toby, so we’ve come to an arrangement. I’ve given them free tenancy of the front ground floor flat and I give them plenty of cash for the work they’re doing and the work they’ll continue to do in perpetuity. The five houses of 17 Victoria Street now have a pair of live-in handymen to keep them in good trim. Lerner Chusovich has my old flat for the same rent because he can smoke his eels in our backyard without the neighbours bitching. It isn’t pink any more. Lerner likes smoked eel yellow with black woodwork.

Toby and I discovered how to put ablution conveniences on the floor Jim and Bob share with Klaus. We’re having the Werners take a bit off Klaus and a bit off Jim and Bob. They open onto the landing, where Otto worked out how to put in two separate toilets, even if only one bathroom. Lashings of hot water from a big system and a shower stall as well as a bathtub. I found ceramic tiles painted in budgies for the walls—Klaus is ecstatic. Toby’s room is so big that the Werners just extended his kitchen area and added another screen to hide the result, but the ground floor still has to trot down to the laundry. Fritz and Otto tend to pee into the soil around the hideous frangipani in our minute front garden if they’re caught short, but the tree has improved out of sight on the urea-rich diet, so I decided to leave them to it. We now have perfumed frangipani float bowls on our tables.

Though at first I shrank from it, in the end I bit the bullet and took over the whole of Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz’s floor for my own quarters. However, with new paint (mostly pink), some carpet in the living room and bedrooms, and decent furniture, I’ve lost my fear of it. Every house must have awful things happen in it from time to time, and I’m finding a strange comfort in being where she used to be. Used to be. That tense you can’t get away from.

This sounds as if the work is finished, but it’s not. That will take several more months, so there’s a lot of plaster dust around, and toilets and bathtubs and sinks and stoves and showers and hot-water systems clutter up the halls, while the backyard is stacked with wall and floor tiles. The Werners just smuggle the lot in through their French doors onto the front verandah.

I’m just so happy, now that my angel is home.

I ought to record that my love life has sorted itself out beautifully, at least to my way of thinking. Weekends are Toby’s. He and I go up to Wentworth Falls. In future Flo will come with us. Toby wasn’t too thrilled about that, but I told him it was either both of us or neither of us. So he pulled a face and said he’d take both. About Duncan, he’s not, um, pleased.

Duncan has Tuesday and Thursday nights with me. He came to an arrangement with the Missus, who is suffering dreadfully from the Harriet Purcell Curse. No dandruff or intractable thrush, though. She’s developed a neuropathy in her legs—not mortal, just makes her life a misery. I think Duncan was a bit appalled at my total lack of pity for her, but I daresay I have to make allowances for the fact they’ve lived together for fifteen years. I told him to give her a message from me—if she’s decent and understanding and does not feed his sons a morsel of poison about their father, I’ll lift the curse. She can’t play tennis, has to walk with a stick, and between the ACTH they’ve put her on and the lack of exercise, her weight’s going through the ceiling. She’ll soon be an XL and she wears lace-up flatties with rubber oedema stockings. Hur-hur-hur.

About John Prendergast I’m not sure yet, so the fortress has not fallen. Much though he denies it, I have a strong suspicion that he looks at me a bit like a patient with some peculiar sort of psychopathy. That’s the whole trouble with psychiatrists, they are never completely off duty. He probably analyses his performance in bed into the bargain. So I let him buy me an occasional meal and lead him ten times around the mulberry bush.

Wednesday,

May 17th, 1961

We are baffled, bamboozled, buggered if we know. Flo has been home for a month now, and she won’t scribble. There are freshly painted half-walls everywhere in my quarters and the communal passageways and landings, I bought her more crayons to add to her collection, and I tell her a hundred times a day that she’s welcome to scribble to her heart’s content. All she does is nod, smile, step over the crayons and wander off to watch Fritz and Otto as they work, hand them washers, nails, screws, bolts, trowels. Always the right thing for the job. They’re fascinated by her.

Oh, she still clings to my legs, sits on my lap, hums her tune. The snuff-brown pinnies are things of the past, but I have not made her wear shoes and the dresses I’ve bought for her are fairly plain. To Flo, colour is for crayons, though not any more. These days she walks up to the shops with me, something she never did with her mother, so sometimes I wonder if, out of sheer ignorance, I’ve thrown a spanner into how Flo and The House work. My one barometer is Flo herself. If Flo likes it or seems to enjoy it, we do it. Certainly she loves her weekends at Wentworth Falls, packs her weeny port on Friday nights and makes sure that the canvas dilly-bag is aired out for Marceline. Poor Toby! Not one, but three women.

Little though I liked the thought, I’ve made Harold’s room my bedroom, and put Flo in her mother’s old bedroom. That cranny Flo used to be in is now the linen closet and the Delvecchio Schwartz reference library. I wondered if I was removing myself too far from Flo, but luckily Marceline took care of that by transferring to Flo’s bed. She sleeps, my angel, so sweetly and soundly, never stirs, never seems to have bad dreams.

The nightly gallops and guffaws ceased the moment I found the will, but I’m still far from positive that Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz has properly Passed Over. When I went that first night to Harold’s room, my hair on end and my skin solid goose pimples, I heard a soft sigh as I closed the door. Not her sigh. Harold’s. Like a goodbye forever.

Then her voice said “Youse done good, princess. Ripper-ace!”

Something fluttered and flapped. One of Klaus’s budgies. I looked at it, it looked at me, then I held out my hand and it hopped onto my finger, jigged up and down gleefully.

“Oh, thank heavens!” Klaus cried when I presented the bird to him. “My little Mausie flew out the window the moment I opened it. I thought I’d lost her for good.”

“No worries, ace,” I said. “You’re not going to get rid of little Mausie that easily. Will he—eh, Mausie?”

All the above notwithstanding, Flo won’t scribble, and it has all of us beaten. Jim and Bob, Klaus and Pappy spend hours with her and the crayons, coaxing and cajoling. Even Toby has succumbed to Scribble Mania. He went out and bought several blocks of butcher’s paper and showed her how to scribble on those, but she just looked at me sadly and dropped the pink crayon he offered her.

Thursday,

May 25th, 1961

It’s taken a long time, but the Mesdames Fugue and Toccata are finally sorted out to everybody’s satisfaction. They stuck to their story that they only paid thirty quid a week in rent, I blew a succession of raspberries, and so it went for a long time. But today we agreed on four hundred quid a week from each of the ladies, thirty of it on the official books. Though I am fond of the Mesdames, you can’t run a very superior brothel catering to all sorts of tastes above and beyond the usual without also being as tough as a pair of old boots. They are tough. So for a short moment they tried pulling a few Council strings to get me into hot water, but I simply sent each of them a weeny Kewpie doll with china-headed pins shoved up their fundamental orifices, back and front, and a third in the mouth for good measure. Oooooo-aa! The message was correctly interpreted, the Mesdames gave in.