I kept reading. Mr Parish said Moby Dick was a classic, and all boys should read it if they wanted to understand what being a man was all about. I thought Ishmael was a nice man, and Herman Melville too. That’s why I couldn’t understand about killing the whales. I would rather have candlelight forever than kill whales to get oil for lamps. I would never eat a whale steak, not even if I were starving on a desert island.

It wasn’t till Mother reached over to open the parcel John Honey’d brought that I wrested my attention from Queequeg and Stubb to watch.

Mother opened the parcel very carefully so as not to rip the paper. She looked up at John Honey and laughed and then parted the paper and there they were: her creamy new page proofs. A cover in brown and tan with her name on it. ‘Gosh!’ she said, ‘Somehow it hadn’t occurred to me that my name would be there, like that, so big!’

She turned the pages over. They looked quite beautiful, I had to admit, peering over the top of my book. All that space around the lines, and a very nicely chosen font. The Poems of Veda Gray. 214 pages of them. Measured out, on cream, in black, with serifs.

‘Gosh!’ said Mother. ‘Oh John!’

‘Congratulations,’ said John.

‘I feel like an imposter!’

‘Oh, that’s normal.’

Mother turned over the pages, a few at a time, and then referred back to the Contents, with her finger marking where she was up to. ‘So, what do I do now? Do I read over them?’

‘Well, that’s the point, I guess,’ said John. ‘Check them. Make sure there are no typos, errors.’

Mother kept going through the pages, not quite rifling, but with a certain subtle agitation. She spent quite a bit of time looking through them, and then referring back to the Contents page, and I could tell John Honey was getting nervous.

‘John,’ she said at last, not looking at him. ‘I think one’s missing.’

John Honey grimaced and swallowed his coffee. He reminded me of Papa when he was guilty of letting Mother down. Or Jimmy Panageorgiou when he got in trouble in class and blamed me or George or Callum. ‘I know, Veda,’ he said and put his coffee cup down. ‘I’ve got to say the coward in me hoped you wouldn’t notice.’

Mother’s mouth hung just a little more open than normal but otherwise she checked her dismay admirably. ‘They’ve cut “Monastery Maiden”. Why?’

‘It was McMannish who decided, in the end.’

‘But why?’ said Mother.

John Honey’s honey colour had deserted him; he had gone red in the face. ‘McMannish thought it was a little,’ he grimaced again, ‘lewd for, you know, a book of poetry by a woman.’

Now Mother’s mouth fully dropped open.

‘Lewd!’ she said. ‘But—but it’s all so heavily veiled. That’s the whole point of it.’