Illywhacker

They went for long walks together, up towards the Lederderg Gorge, or down through Durham's Orchards, or out along Grant Street to the park at Maddingley. They kicked through the deep dead leaves on the footpaths and talked. Really it was Charles who talked. Emma was surprised, and pleased, that he had so many ideas – although it was not the ideas that struck her but the kindness she recognized behind them all, even if he did, sometimes, express himself badly.

"You should go into politics," she said once, walking back from Saturday's mud-caked football match.

"Nah," he said. "Not me." And he was quiet then. They walked hand in hand past fields of cabbages, split-rail fences, then the big new houses with their stucco walls and arched porches. They walked for half a mile with the rest of the rustling crowd who kicked at the leaves or walked hunched, hands deep in pockets, hiding their faces from the fine drizzle that was now falling.

"You know what I like best?" he said.

By then they were standing in Main Street in front of Hallowell's milk bar. His eyes were suddenly full of emotion and Emma, quite consciously, treasured the moment, just as she might "treasure" a wild flower picked on a honeymoon. Her father, she thought, had once been like this. All men, she thought, are once like this, and then life begins. So she remembered the little shining brown tiles outside Hallowell's and the drawn holland blind in the window and the family walking past with woollen beanies in the yellow and black Bacchus Marsh colours, and how he held both her hands and she thought he was going to kiss her there and then in the Main Street with the victorious Dustin family (Darley supporters) tooting their horn as they made a left-hand turn at the Court House Hotel and headed back home to their market gardens at Darley.

"What do you like best?"

"Sitting in the kitchen," he said.

He never explained it. She could see the pressure of his emotions pressing against the back of his eyes, and she did not like to ask him what it was he meant.

He could talk at length about the injustices of the world. He knew he was poorly informed and badly educated, and he would never pretend to know more than he did, and this gave to his feelings the extra strength of his natural honesty. But he could, at least, in his own way, talk about poverty, hardship, unfairness, even the subject of being Australian – these were emotional subjects, but not nearly so loaded as what it meant for him to sit in the Underhills' kitchen – the steam, flour-dusted hands, women's laughter, hairbrushing, the short hiss of a damp finger on a hot black iron, aprons with pockets full of wooden pegs, shining peeled potatoes, spitting fat, hot jam on steamed puddings in the middle of the day – these were things too precious to be spoken of.

Only Henry Underhill could spoil the kitchen; introducing his harsh opinions, his barked orders, his acrid tobacco odours, and it was only then, after work, or during weekends, that Charles felt such a desire to take walks, or to visit the dunny down the back.

The wind whipped down into the town from the cold stone churches on the Pentland Hills and when you left the kitchen to go to the dunny the dogs threw themselves, yellow-eyed and broken-toothed, against their chains. It was cold out there and a draught as thin as a knife blade blew through the trapdoor at the back of the can and froze your bum and shrivelled your balls. You wiped yourself in the gloom with old government forms, all torn neatly and hung on a nail. The paper was cold and hard and the hair-trigger dogs barked every time you ripped off a sheet; a well-informed stranger, walking along the street, could look down across the top of the link chain fence and see the closed dunny door and the dogs straining towards it and imagine, exactly, what it was you were doing.

Charles did not like Underbill's dunny, but when Henry Underhill was home he stayed there for long periods, luxuriating in the remembered kitchen.