Mr Parish, gregarious and generous outside his home, was different inside it. All day long, he hurt Mrs Parish with words and silences till I imagined her pitted in minute dings like a car I once saw after a hailstorm. ‘Would you like grapefruit, dear?’ Mrs Parish would ask at breakfast, holding out the serrated teaspoon and jar of sugar. Mr Parish would keep reading his newspaper, or his book, or his magazine, and not answer. Quietly, Mrs Parish would lean over and place before him the neatly segmented grapefruit on its blue plate. She would pour his coffee, butter his toast, put his marmalade to the side (because he liked to apply this himself), and all of the time he would ignore her till, pushing the finished plates aside, he would stretch, look at me, say, ‘Buck up, soldier! It’s not the end of the world!’, chuck me under the chin and go wherever he went for the rest of the day. Mrs Parish would then clean up. At lunch it would be similar. And at dinner, similar or worse, because then Mr Parish would drink and alcohol made him difficult.

In his absence, Mrs Parish inhabited long, quiet regular days. After breakfast, she would go walking: a solid hike if she could manage it—she had stamina, pushing through the bush in her gymkhana pants. She even once or twice put me up on her shoulders, a manoeuvre that required her to squat down, position me, and then come up in two goes like a weightlifter performing a clean and jerk. She was not as solid a mount as Gramp was, but she made good progress through the bush with me up there. She hung onto my leg with one hand and picked specimens from the bush with the other. It was steep walking around their house. It was hard. She was fit. Sometimes I held bits of wattle for her, or bits of heath, trying to keep them neat and intact in my sweaty scrunched-up fist. Back at the house, after her tense and conversation-less lunch with Mr Parish, she read to me: Flat Stanley, James and the Giant Peach, Five Children and It. We made ourselves comfortable in what she called ‘the sitting room’, which had a Chesterfield lounge suite and a large hungry fireplace that we never lit during the day. She didn’t make me have naps like you did, Ornella, but if I fell asleep, she draped a blanket over me and took up a seat by the window where she spent the latter hours of the afternoon studying perilously boring books about dried flowers, arranging her own in differently shaped earthenware pots and vases, trimming, secateuring, splitting, shaping. It was for this she collected plants on our morning walks. When she had finished, she had almost always made something lovely out of what had looked to me like dried leaves, dirt-encrusted sticks, tiny shallow-coloured blossoms, nothing much.