Illywhacker

She could not think of anyone who would suit Charles better. She seemed earthy, practical, loving and unpretentious. They both prepared the pets' meals together, working side by side at the kitchen table, carving dark hunks of horsemeat, breaking eggs, crumbling Madeira cake. They already had their own moth trap and would soon start breeding flies for their pupae. They did not seem to notice that their flat had a funny smell, but even this smell, unpleasant at first, soon came to be associated, in Leah's mind, with happiness.

It was 1938. Hitler was in Austria. Bukharin and Rykov were already on trial in Moscow. Bondi Beach was not yet strung with barbed wire, but the cafes were already filling with Jews from Europe. Leah Goldstein stood on platforms beside her husband while he spoke against fighting the Nazis.

She would appear, standing erect in that severe grey suit of hers, her flinty face unsmiling, like the popular image of a severe communist, but it was from this time that her letters began to fill with the sweet fecund odours of the little pet shop where she would go, more and more often, to drink tea with Emma, to watch her belly swell, to breathe deep of air rich with straw, rape-seed, molasses and fur.

She was as happy there as in a letter. She did not speak. The two women sat behind the counter. Emma knitted.

23

Phoebe came to borrow a pound and was shocked by Emma's kissing. It was not Emma who started it. It was Phoebe who was a great one for kissing everything that crossed her path. It was not the act of kissing that was shocking. It was the quality of the kiss itself. You could feel in those kisses the juices of Emma's contentment and Phoebe – who had thought her daughter-in-law's big straight toes quite disgusting -was much disturbed. It was embarrassing, like walking into the middle of someone else's love-making, and Phoebe, who had come to flaunt her newest young man as well as get a pound, left the shop feeling old and out of temper.

She was not alone in being affected by those kisses. Leah wrote me a page about them. Emma was a plant grown in an austere climate suddenly transplanted into a fertile tropical latitude. She stretched herself luxuriously and felt her toes uncurl in the warm red soil. She was all abloom with kisses.

The extraordinary thing is she had not even loved Charles when she'd decided to marry him. She had thought only that he was a decent manly man and she had been comforted not only by his hearing aid but by his funny looks. He was like that dog-leg bridge the shire had built out over Parwan – stumpy and awkward but no one ever questioned its reliability. When he promised to honour and obey, you could rely on him. Anyone could see he was not a flash Harry or a lounge lizard or a drunkard. He would look after her.

She had expected so little, and now she was almost drunk from the richness of her life. It is true that she did not like Sydney, but then she had never liked Melbourne. Cities were too noisy and confusing to suit her. She was a homebody anyway. She was happiest amongst the pets, or upstairs in the little flat which she was modestly redecorating with what money they had left after the Education Department took its tithe. She stripped the peeling wallpaper, killed the earwigs, and ladled on new kalsomine.

Instinctively she reproduced elements of her mother's house. She bought a ha'penny brass hook on which to hang the hot water bottle, just behind the stove, in which place it had been awkward and inconvenient in Bacchus Marsh, and it was just as awkward and inconvenient in George Street, Sydney. She begged a calendar from the butcher's and hung it behind the door so that one had, as in Bacchus Marsh, to shut the door in order to know what day it was. And she found a framed picture of the King of England in Bathurst Street. It was very dusty and its frame was chipped but it was only tuppence and she brought it home and hung it (with difficulty – the picture rail was precarious) above the kitchen table. And she had just completed this last improvement when Charles, suckled on hatred of all things royal and British, walked in the door (his mind more occupied with the Snake Exhibition in his shop window) and stood, gawping, at the King of England.