123 Acland Street was a steaming fishbowl in summer and a brick of ice in winter. Papa opened lunchtimes Monday to Friday and for lunch and dinner on Saturday. People came. A trickle, never a rush. Papa alternated between 123 and La Coccinella. This went on for a year. It was tiring, but he loved it. His days were full. His life was busy. He had a girlfriend who was not only beautiful, but smart too!

Mother still lived in her flat in East Melbourne. She had a secretarial job at Goodwin & Franck Solicitors on King Street. The transformation this job had wrought in her, said Papa, was amazing. She was now a wearer of straight grey skirts and pale pink seersucker blouses. There still wasn’t much food in her one-person-sized Frigidaire Mini, but there was fresh milk, and usually a couple of eggs and a plastic dish of butter. She loved typing, she told Papa. She loved punching the keys into their necessarily lexical (and yet strangely numerical) patterns. Mother could plant seventy-five words a minute, without error, from the keys of her Optimat Portable onto the archival-quality paper of Goodwin & Franck. Ding! For lunch, she fished into her beige Glomesh cigarette container—filled half with Menthol and half with Peter Stuyvesant—and drank a cup of coffee. Sometimes, she bought a tuna salad sandwich from Corn’s Deli. The afternoons rolled on tediously, and sometimes—when her in-tray was empty—Mother rolled a piece of 100 gsm cream stock with embossed gold and red letterhead into her Optima and wrote some lines of poetry, just because she could; because no one was watching, because occasionally she became terrifyingly aware that being a secretary was being paid to waste her life. Sometimes, said Papa, Mother made poems purely out of chopped-up legal terms and phrases. ‘My gobbledegook poems,’ she called them.

Equitable estoppel,

Libel libel libel

Limitation of liability

Nonfeasance, reasonableness, nonfeasance

Mother earned £9 a week; she paid a considerable sum to have new curtains hung in her flat and bought herself a chest of drawers made of cedar, which she lined in paper sprayed with Arpege perfume. She and Papa had become engaged, and with that notion of herself as a fiancée, she had trimmed her wild edges. She still had a temper (she had thrown several desserts at Papa in their time together) but she was doted on now by Nonno and Nonna—even though you, Ornella, always suspected her of fraud. She was as fit for marriage as a porcupine for a carriage, you said.