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with Pearl, and how, after a while, the boy would cry for her. Her breasts were leaking milk; she touched herself where her dress was wet and saw herself alone in the bush, a crazy woman with streaming hair, falling blindly across tree stumps and the dry grass of summer that was dying away as the cold weather set in. The river bubbled over the stones, shining where the water and the falling light touched them. She saw clouds, and bodies and floating, waving arms and the star faces of babies in them. Perhaps Pearl could look after her baby; she would soon get into the way of keeping house, the way Esme had. Then she thought that if that happened, Pearl would be with Jim, and that wouldn’t be right.
    She turned and walked back towards the town. The sun had dropped away, blood red, followed by the amber light that strikes justbefore dusk under the mountain; darkness started to settle. She began to be afraid of what she would find, and how she would have to face up to Jim’s anger if he discovered she’d left Neil with Pearl. I went for a walk and I got lost, was the first story that sprang to mind. If he wasn’t home already, might she not gather up Pearl and Neil and take them to the station to catch the train home? To Taumarunui. Only the train wasn’t due for hours and he would find them there on the station. Perhaps they could hide somewhere.
    Then she told herself she had imagined everything. That nobody knew. Conrad had had a day off sick, or his roster had been changed. He’d be on the train the next day. By the time she got to the house, she found herself believing this.
    Inside, the kerosene lamp had been lit. Pearl was stoking the fire under Norma’s instructions. Norma sat at the table with Neil in her lap, trying to get him to eat some food she’d mashed up for him. There was no sign of Jim.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ she said to both of them.
    ‘I didn’t know where you were,’ Pearl said sullenly.
    ‘The girl came and got me,’ said Norma. ‘Thank goodness. She’s got more brains than I’d have given her credit for.’
    ‘Has Jim been in?’ Esme asked.
    ‘Wouldn’t be surprised if he was having a drink or two with his mates.’
    ‘Jim doesn’t go drinking.’ Which was true. Jim wasn’t a drinking man: it was one of those things that had recommended him to Queenie.
    ‘Happen he might be now,’ Norma said. She stood up patting the creases in her skirt. ‘You know, Esme, it doesn’t pay to get your meat where you get your bread.’
    ‘I don’t know what you mean.’
    ‘There was a letter came for you this morning. Seeing you hadn’t been in for the mail I brought it over when Pearl called me. My husband said take it to her, it might be urgent.’
    ‘Thank you,’ said Esme again, glancing at the envelope. She didn’t recognise the big block letters that spelled her name on the envelope,but she saw the soft glue that held the flap of the envelope in place. She guessed it had been opened.
    ‘Aren’t you going to open it?’ Norma asked.
    Esme crumpled the letter in her hand as if it wasn’t important. ‘Probably a bill. That’s all the mail that ever comes, isn’t it?’ She opened the door and held it ajar, so that Norma had to walk through.
    The letter said:
    Dear Esme
    You don’t know who I am but I think you ought to know that a certain man has been told he will be killed soon unless he takes some action to stop it happening to him he might have an engine run over him it will look like an accident I can promise you but it will happen he has said he will do what he must or rather what he must not. yours a wellwisher.
    When Esme’s next boy was born she nearly died. The doctor and nurses at the cottage hospital gave her so much chloroform that if the baby hadn’t killed her coming out sideways, the dose almost did.
    Norma came to visit and took a long look at Philip. ‘He might pass,’ she said, in a doubtful voice. Philip had been born with jet black curls and olive skin, nothing