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when Laura once said the word ‘cameo’.
    ‘ What she say?—Would you mind not talkin’ Chinese, love? It’s too hard on me brain-box.’
    Now Laura was astounded and mortified. She expunged ‘cameo’ from her vocabulary for ever. But it was almost as easy to inflame bad feeling by saying an attractive but not lethal word like ‘San Francisco’.
    ‘Well, what’s that?’ Diane looked baited.
    ‘The city.’ Laura’s voice was faint.
    ‘Oh.’ A very flat silence. Evidently she had given them a white-hot forty-seven-sided puzzle to pick up.
    ‘Where is it then?’ Greta demanded grudgingly. ‘Up north, do you mean?’
    ‘In America.’ Light-headed, Laura lifted a batch of receipts from the desk. Reality was a child’s Meccano skyscraper, and the game was to surprise the toy inhabitants by pulling the floors from under them.
    ‘America! Well, how did that get into the act? I wasn’t sayin’ anything about America!’
    Her young tutors forgave Laura much, however, the day she too was persuaded to buy a Purple Wine lipstick, after holding out against it so long that they had deemed themselves criticised.
    Mrs. Vaizey smiled. ‘Good heavens, Laura! Blue lips! You look as if rigor mortis had set in. You look like a far-advanced heart case.’
    There was a war on.
    On Saturdays at the pictures, newsreels showed the bombed cities of Europe and later still the deserts of the Middle East and the northern jungles, streaming jungles where trees walked and killed. Callow, shallow, safe, ashamed, the Vaizey girls were part of an audience that witnessed the destruction of the light of the world from cushiony red seats in the lilac-scented disinfected dark. They were pressed back on themselves and their few square inches of knowledge and experience. They felt in themselves and each other the inadequacy, hollowness and frustration of one seekingwater at a dry spring.
    Walking slowly home they talked with an empty excited despondency. Laura more easily wound herself up to judge, pronounce, and theorise, but Clare only ground the soles of her shoes harder into the footpath and, grated, said, ‘What’s the use? We don’t know .We don’t know .I mean—’ She only meant it felt something like blasphemous, something like licentious, for their ignorance to speak, improvise opinions, consider its emotions in this situation. ‘I mean—we don’t know anything.’
    Laura stood in a thicket of people where the bare sunburned arms of strangers touched each other, to watch the soldiers marching down Elizabeth Street to the Quay and the waiting ships.
    ‘It’s a shame the kids are all at school. They should give the boys a proper send-off on a Saturday when—’
    Trumpets came level suddenly, sopping up voices, eyes, attention, flashing, passing. Drums, boots, a mesmerising march tune that compelled the most blasé-seeming of pedestrians to fall in with the ‘ left , left ,Ihad a good job but I left ’of marching boots. Slouch hats, khaki, bayonets glittering, flags performing in the wind.
    ‘North. That’s what they say. That’s where they need ’em.’
    Brown-faced soldiers, and more soldiers. ( Left , left ,Ihad a good job but I left .)Another band playingwith pitiless gaiety.
    ‘They look pretty tough, eh? Look like fighters, don’t they? Good old Aussies—’
    Again the crowd cried out, and again cheered, and soon another heart-wrenching band was heard in the distance approaching.
    Laura watched, and was not the only one to glance up and away from the left , left ,of sparkling tan boots to the high brick walls of the insensible department stores and office buildings opposite.
    Pausing over the ironing of a blue cotton dress, she said to her mother, ‘Even Clare’s doing something at school with these exhibitions the teachers fix to send bundles to Britain.’
    ‘Well, don’t tell me if you want to send someone a bundle.’ Brittle with boredom, Stella Vaizey looked up at Laura, then looked a moment longer