Would Mother have got her picture in the papers if it hadn’t been for Mr Parish? Would anyone have noticed her transgression? She might’ve become merely a respectable published poet. Maybe somewhere down the line, an enterprising postgraduate student would have figured it out and there’d be a relevant footnote in a thesis somewhere.

Did she really want to be a respectable published poet?

Do you remember anything of Mr Parish’s speech, Ornella? Back there, deep inside that plaque-ridden brain of yours that never put any stock in memories in the first place?

Mr Parish was flushed. He had his shirt unbuttoned and a handkerchief knotted around his neck as though he were on a boat, and I watched him roll his sleeves up in preparation for getting down to business. But he was crimson in the face, and when he called everyone to attention to hear his speech, there was something frantic about his manner. I thought for a moment he might bang the table with his fist. He was more like a town crier than a poet laureate.

‘Pay attention, cryptic crossworders,’ he said, or something along those lines. He held up a drink in one hand and The Poems of Veda Gray in the other. ‘Listen in, veterans of acrostic subterfuge. For Veda Gray has your measure!’ And then, in his clever, well-practised way—searing each letter into the heart—he spelt it out so no one could miss it. Mother’s sonnet.

Mrs Parish wouldn’t look at Mr Parish while he read the sonnet. I do remember that. She spent the time pulling on a pair of very tight long black driving gloves, smoothing them over her wrists, tugging the fingertips and pulling back the cuffs. Perhaps it was her lack of interest that made Mr Parish betray Mother. Maybe he was trying to get his wife’s attention. Or maybe it wasn’t even a betrayal, in the end. Just a moment of bad judgement. Even famous poets can have moments of bad judgement. Especially when they’re drinking too much alcohol and feel themselves unloved. I have always given him the benefit of the doubt. Mrs Parish sitting there, ignoring him, putting on her gloves. It was her he wanted to hurt, not Mother.

Or womanhood in general. Perhaps. I don’t know.

Mother’s eyes flickered between people nervously, and she tried to laugh.

No one recognised the seriousness of the revelation for some days. To its credit, while the Australian merely alluded to it, the Age published the sonnet in full—in the same breath that they denounced it. Was this hypocritical? I had recently learnt the word hypocritical, and found it to be a highly valuable word, for all around me, everywhere, I saw it.