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this.’
    â€˜Little devil,’ snapped Mr Buckingham. ‘Been sailing boats on it, too. She’ll have to have a jolly good smack this time.’
    â€˜She did tell me,’ said Pippa, ‘but I thought I was dreaming.’
    â€˜She
told
you! And you did nothing about it? Really, lass!’
    â€˜I wasn’t awake, Dad...I didn’t...’
    Stevie came back with the buckets. He was still half-asleep. ‘Can’t find Julie,’ he said. ‘She doesn’t answer.’
    â€˜She’ll be hiding somewhere. Put your shoes on, lad. Go look for her. She won’t be far. She knows she’s done wrong all right. Little devil.’
    â€˜Dad,’ said Stevie vaguely, ‘I reckon I smell smoke.’
    â€˜Smoke? What sort of smoke?’
    â€˜I don’t know.’
    â€˜You’ve got a job to do, Stevie,’ said Mrs Buckingham. ‘Find Julie. Now get yourself dressed and do it. And you’d better help him, Pippa.’
    â€˜Funny, that,’ said Mr Buckingham. ‘I had an idea I could smell smoke myself. You couldn’t see it, lad?’
    Stevie shook his head.
    â€˜I think I can smell it, too,’ said Pippa. ‘Like when the fire brigade burnt off the Georges’ bit of bush last year.’
    There was silence for a moment; all four of them, man and boy, woman and girl, stood in water, tensely, each reluctant to take the conversation any further, Stevie because he wasn’t sure what it was all about, anyway. There was something of the ostrich in each of them; what they didn’t face they didn’t have to worry about.
    â€˜We’d better clean up this mess,’ said Mrs Buckingham, ‘or we’ll be lucky to get away by noon.’
    â€˜In a minute, in a minute,’ her husband said. He squelched to the kitchen and out on to the steps at the back. He was frankly fearful that he might see smoke in the sky, but he didn’t. The sky, perhaps, was not as clear as it should have been, but that was probably the wind, probably dust. He could feel the wind on his face, hot and positive, almost like a physical blow, and he could hear it roaring in the tall timber. He looked around, and Pippa was behind him. ‘If there is a fire, lass,’ he said, ‘it must be a long way off. Nothing to worry about, I should think. Bad day, though. A shocker. It’s not going to do the berries any good. Finish them off completely. The Georges won’t be too happy about it. Wouldn’t hurt, you know, to give them a hand for an hour or two. I would if old George wasn’t so blamed independent.’
    The Georges were in the raspberries, in the midst of the long rows that leaned and lurched to the wind, rows already limp from the heat, their leaves scorched.
    All three of the Georges were there—father, son John, and daughter Lorna—streaked with sweat and dust, hands bleeding with the pulp of fruit so soft that it bruised at the lightest touch. They had been there since the first light of day, not from any love of the dawn, but to save what they could of their crop before the sun sucked the juices out of it. But this had happened already, really. It was a poor man’s yield, what was left of it, and that was what old man George kept mumbling to himself. A man worked like a slave and what did he get for it? A wind hotter than fire on his neck at five-thirty in the morning, and a whining son with itchy feet, fretting to leap on his motorcycle and roar into town; a whining son more concerned with heroics, with the smell of smoke, than with the sight of raspberries cooking on the canes. The smell of smoke to this young man was like the smell of fox to a hound. It was the call to the hunt.
    â€˜Forget the smoke, will you,’ old man George grated. ‘If there’s a fire, let someone else do the fighting. We’ve got a big enough fight of our own.’
    John didn’t see it that way. His