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theatrical moustache, his thin wife. Mr. Chance, the natty livestock and property agent, his musical daughter …
    Here were men Tim envied not for their better income but for being at home in the world. No sense of being exiled at all. Erson one of them. Reputed to be the best doctor in the Macleay, though some swore by Doctors Gabriel and Casement. Which of them had separated Missy from her body though?
    Women and children milling on deck to descend. Couldn’t wait for land after the slow steamer excursion. His wife among them. He felt calmer to watch her, she looked in such control. Thereshould be at least one of those in every family. Someone anchored. Hanney’s woman in the jar would be more apprised of all this next time around. She would play things safe and cosy and join the Macleay Valley Theatrical and Operatic Society.
    Some of those descending the gangplank with their mild, dazed picnickers’ smiles halted for a second wondering what Mr. Tim Shea was doing there with children not his own. Mr. Sheridan the solicitor and his wife. Sheridan very much the young statesman and destined for politics, one or other of the two Parliaments which would soon be available, the parliament of Australia-wide or the old parliament of New South Wales.
    Then the accountant Mr. Malcolm, a beefy man, very jovial, representing earth, and his lovely dark-haired ivory-skinned wife. Slender and—for a woman—tall, Mrs. Malcolm. White dress, huge pink hat with a rucked-up veil. She was his finest customer, the only one who occasionally used couplets of Tennyson while buying groceries. But not in a flashy way. As naturally as breathing. Poetry the mist from a noble soul.
    Once when dropping off an order in the store, a few young men on horseback had ridden wildly by, yahooing and being fools. A look of genuine defeat crossed Winnie Malcolm’s face and one drop of sweat made its way from the direction of her ear down her cheek. Tim had felt a burning pity for her at that second. But she gathered herself and wiped the sweat with a handkerchief.
    “We have to remember, Mr. Shea, that the Saxons themselves were once unruly tribes. Australia will one day become something more august.”
    Did she hope the same thing about Ernie, who was so fortunate to have such a jewel yet didn’t seem overwhelmed by his luck? She stopped by Tim and her husband waited there too, with his blowsy holiday grin fixed in place and some kind of cheroot carried negligently in the corner of his gob. A customer of T. Shea—General Store, Belgrave Street, Kempsey. He had drunk a lot, judging from his hoppy smell, and he was on his way home to eat and drink more, and then he’d probably want to jump on the divine Mrs. Malcolm. Lucky, lucky bugger! On top of everything, he didn’t know that the very air had been mortgaged to Missy, to naming Missy, to giving her rest. And that would be the rape of spirit byflesh, yet Mrs. Malcolm didn’t seem fearful. Her upper lip formed its delicate bow while the lower kept its place, glossy and static.
    Native-born Australians were like that. Never used both lips at once. He was beginning to see it this early in his children, and it was there in the little Rochester girl and helped make her sentences like those of a sleepwalker.
    “What children are these, Tim?”
    “They’re the Rochester children, Mrs. Malcolm.”
    Here in sight of Kitty and his own children, he kept a curb on his pleasure in Mrs. Malcolm’s normal sentences. And as if to show all was fair and above board, he turned to bovine Mr. Ernie Malcolm. What a bush aristocrat! Yet he stood just behind M. M. Chance as a leader of the community.
    “They’re Mr. Albert Rochester’s children,” said Tim. “Poor feller had an accident this morning.”
    “Oh dear,” said Mrs. Malcolm. She had noble, long features. “Where is he put …?”
    “It was a mortal accident, Mrs. Malcolm.”
    Mrs. Malcolm looked at the small, level-gazing Rochester girl who stared