‘Okay — gloves and a hat. What kind of dress?’

‘One that will fit me,’ said Mattie practically.

Which was why Jed was rummaging in the dressing room at the old homestead, hunting for what might conceivably be tacked up to fit a nine-year-old. At last she found a short mauve flapper dress, straight from shoulder to fringed hem.

Excellent! She could put a tuck above the hem that would raise it six inches, or whatever that was in blasted metric. And that mauve cloche, perfect, with its small bunch of silver wattle on the side. And dancing slippers — she could push socks up into the toes so they wouldn’t fall off. They would look only slightly ridiculous, but Mattie was right — the glamour would work. And now for gloves . . .

She had never opened Matilda’s glove drawer — had never worn gloves since she left high school in Year 11. The fragrance filled the room as she opened it, Chanel No. 5 and talcum powder and something that was so profoundly Matilda she almost cried.

She sorted through the neat rows of gloves, smiling. Black gloves for funerals, white gloves for church, fur-lined gloves for winter driving, plain leather gloves for work.

Her hands felt something. She reached down to the bottom of the drawer and pulled it out.

It was a photo of a man in brown and white, which she vaguely remembered was a forerunner to black-and-white photos. The man leaned against a tree, tall, in his early sixties perhaps, his face lined with laughter and eyes that saw the entire world around him and was part of it. He wore old but good moleskins, unpatched but giving a little at the knees, a faded but good shirt that had never needed darning, a well-made hat, but marked with sweat and that spot on the top that came from lifting it to ladies.

Not Tommy. Tommy was slum born, slum reared, for all his later wealth. Tommy had been almost the same height as Matilda. But this face was familiar . . .

And then she knew him, though the only photo she had seen of him must have been taken years later, when his hair was white as snow. Clancy of the Overflow.

‘Clancy says you can tell a lot from a photo.’ What did this one tell her?

That Clancy and Matilda had met, which she knew anyway. That he must have been a knock-out when he was young, which she’d suspected, but it was good to know for sure. Maybe they could even use the photo in the book, or copy it for the cover. Either way, Julieanne would love to see it — and, as editor as well as friend, be relieved that Jed was still working on what she’d intended to be the Rose Clancy book, but which had turned out to be even more about Clancy.