Am feeling very odd, not myself at all. This afternoon I had a personal visit from Mrs Parish, with an objective that has left me in a very strange state. I hardly know what to think. I feel like, having journeyed through an unexpected tunnel, I have come out into a landscape I no longer know.

She phoned me on Monday, and informed me she was in town the next day and would like to take me to tea. Could she pick me up in the car at 11:30? (Well, I would once have thought she could take me anywhere in that car. It is about the most luxurious thing I have ever travelled in—I told her myself. I said, Should I die a rich woman, Mrs Parish, I would be buried in that vehicle.)

She came at 11:30 and drove Owen and me to tea rooms in Glenferrie. Owen was meek as a lamb all the way there. For his good behaviour, he got an enormous chocolate éclair that he made short work of, and warm milk in a cup. I had nothing because I’ve got so damned fat, just coffee. Mrs Parish had a scone and weak tea.

Mrs Parish was ill at ease the whole time: very serious, and embarrassed, and speaking so low it was hard to hear her. She had a proposition to put to me, she finally said. Well, the proposition came from her husband actually, but he thought it right the two of us talk it over as women, it being women’s business—at which point, Tilde, my antennae went all a-quiver—and she could see it might work for me, it might be helpful, well, she hoped it might be helpful for me, for my writing … So, here was the thing: they like us very much, Jo and I. They love Owen as if he were their own. They have much more money than they need, and no children. So, what they proposed was to invest in Owen’s future: they would open a Trust Fund, and into it deposit an amount every month until he was twenty-one, if we would agree to allow them to become his legal ‘guardians’.

Well, Tilde, lucky I had only ordered coffee because I suddenly lost all appetite. ‘Guardians?’ I said. ‘And what do you mean by guardians?’ Here she became all pink and unhappy and said, ‘We would like him to be, in some formal way, a part of our family.’