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found his face chimerical, its different aspects blending and separating and blending again. It was a little the same with his character. Unlike most ten-year-old boys, Mike Langford was always kindly, I’d find, with a sameness that was not monotonous; and his voice was always quiet and even. We’d confide, as we got to know each other; and yet I’d always feel that he kept things back; that he could never quite be known. Secrecy infected that whole household; it permeated the farm like the hop smell; it was in Mike’s bloodstream.
    I stared about the large, dim loft with its small windows. The ceiling was of steeply sloping planks and beams, and the floor’s woven horsehair sacking was stretched across slats, on which a few pale brown pods lay scattered. Baskets and antique-looking wooden rakes stood about; a small door led into another bare room, where a large iron press stood. It was very dry and quiet here, and uncomfortably warm. It seemed like a strange church. Streaks and shafts of sun leaked through the windows, and lay like syrup on the sacking.
    And a queer feeling came over me. The whole world outside was shut out, and the invisible afternoon was going on without us. We were cut off from the farm, and from the whole softly murmuring country; we even seemed to be cut off from today altogether, and to be nowhere. I began to have a sense of being stifled, as though we were sealed in a box, and of trespassing on something invisible; something very old and sad, hanging like the smell of last year’s hops in the big, warm quiet.
    As though reading my thoughts, Mike said: ‘We’d better go down now, Ray.
    When we came out into the simple glare and warmth of the farmyard, where a big old ash tree gave shade, and hens pecked and drawled in the gray dust, it was as though we’d escaped from something; and we smiled at each other to signal. that we knew it. But nothing was said.
     
     
    The forbidden zones at Clare came to seem natural.
    Like many nineteenth-century farmhouses in Tasmania, it contained two distinct regions: two spirits. What was forbidden mostly lay in the first region. This was the territory of the floor-oil-smelling entrance hall, of the bedrooms, and of the sitting room. That dim, formal chamber, with its drawn, floor-length red curtains and nineteenth-century cedar furniture, was like an empty stage set, waiting for some momentous action to begin. No action ever did; and Mike and I were not encouraged to go in there.
    This was still a time of chamber pots under beds; of marble-topped washstands in bedrooms, on which stood china jugs and basins, decorated with the last century’s sentimental roses. There was electric light at Clare, but not in all the rooms: the sleepout at the end of the front verandah, which Mike and I shared, was lit by candles. There was no sewerage: a gray weatherboard lavatory Mike called the dunny stood in a small glade of plum trees at the side of the house. The rambling roses climbing over its roof could not disguise the dunny’s profoundly serious stench—which came, in my mind, not just from the shit of the present but from somewhere in the dark old century that had gone.
    The second region of the house was at the back, and was utterly opposite to the first. This was the true farmhouse, where life was lived: a territory full of good cheer, based on the kitchen and on the long back verandah with its posts of rough, undressed cyprus and its jumble of old hats, milk cans, dogs and mewing kittens. The big, hall-shaped kitchen, dominated by a long pine table at which nearly all meals took place, had a black, wood-burning stove at the far end that never went out. This was the house’s center of power and warmth, controlled by Mike’s mother, Ingrid Langford. Mike’s father and his three brothers walked through constantly, with a bang of the screen door that led onto the verandah.
    Marcus was the eldest brother; then came Ken, then Cliff. They were all in their