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spotlighted, with his still unfuzzed face, he looked younger than he was, but when his voice, ripe and full and strong, lofted ‘Macushla’ and ‘Mother Machree’ to the soaring roof of the hired theatre, that stunning opposition of school shirt and matinee idol voice had the crowd cheering and pulping their palms. God has been good to him, the Brothers said in the foyer at interval. He has a great gift.
    â€˜You heard what Brother said,’ Kathleen repeated many times later, absorbed in savouring the words. ‘A great gift. Your father and I are very proud.’
    â€˜I’ve made the second fifteen,’ Brian said. He could think of nothing else.
    â€˜Nothing else,’ she had complained to Daisy. ‘The one thing he could do really well and never worked at. Oh it was a pleasantenough … hobby, I suppose. But he sang to please himself. “That’s what it’s for, Mum,” he used to say. “There’s more to life than that.”’
    She could hear him now, taking a pair of sparkling eyes to the delight of parents driven down the old Sandgate Road for school play night, encored to a reprise,
sotto voce
, and feel still the tears of pride that made her look away and squeeze Ronald’s fevered hand.
    Had she but world enough and time, she reflected in the peopled barrenness of the mall, she would invent the ultimate preservative for those makeshift, rough and ready, short-lived moments.
    Instinctively she put her hand to her face, touching the remnants of what time had left her.
    She was falling apart.
    Cutting loose.
    Doing the unexpected.
    Kathleen craved some moment of consequence in what had become a treadmill existence as she steered her children through adolescence.
I don’t count
, she had written to Daisy still sweating it out in Charco,
those childhood traumas ofmeasles, mumps and chicken-pox. Or the mindless food-hunt, the cooking, eating and expelling the stuff just so the whole damn cycle can start again. (Hey, that’s a laugh, isn’t it?) I don’t place much stress on rows at the office, promotion, retirement. Where’s the buzz?
    She had made room for one of those moments the year after Ronald died, tugged by sentiment, perhaps, or simply the need to flee the mundane while her children were safe in boarding school. Amazing herself, she took a week’s leave and went back to the town of the east wind, flying in where once, eleven years before, she had arrived by inter-island trader. When the plane came down over Guadalcanal, the jungled heights of the island, fold upon fold of uncontrolled vegetable growth, seized and choked her mind. She saw Ronald, or imagined she could see him, clambering, hacking, crawling through implacable forest to sate an obsession. His thin white figure in starched drill and toupee, all the tropic duds, kept vanishing and reappearing, heading ever towards what she guessed to be the summit of Mount Makarakombou.
    Nothing had changed. A lot had changed.
    In the still familiar bar of the hotel on Mendana Avenue the past swept in. She had told no one she was going, not even the children,and now layer upon layer of time peeled her naked.
    In the harbour, in the islands, in the Spanish seas
, Ronald’s voice sang in the highest reaches of her skull as she walked during each of the next few days past Government House and the Secretariat to the Guadalcanal Club, where she rediscovered the junior administrative officer, redder, stouter, and now an assistant secretary. There was not a kiss in sight.
    â€˜Have I changed that much?’ She resented the bleating sound as she jogged his memory.
    â€˜Married man these days,’ he countered, self-protectively. ‘Three beaut kids. You’ll meet the wife later on. She’s dropping by for a drink. God, Kathleen, what a turn up, eh? Why didn’t you let anyone know you were coming? We could have turned it on for you.’ He was convivial with a