And better there in hospital, though it was hard to admit it, with expert help in the moments he slipped into delusion, trained hands to help him to the toilet and the shower, or if emergency resuscitation was needed. But one day . . . Jed carefully tried not to calculate the time . . . one day Sam would be, had to be, he would be home again. In their bed again, once more smiling from the kitchen table, feeding the chooks (now boarded at Moura to save her the work). And one day the pools that had been a river would flow once more, and Sam’s pale body would float with hers by moonlight, watching for the platypus, or they would dive and play together in sunlight as they taught Mattie how to swim.

Meanwhile, she was back to writing the book put aside during this last year of small rehabilitation triumphs and melodramas — like the day he spent propped up in a strange stroller-like affair so his feet could learn walking movement again on the ground, or the night the hospital had called her to say he had lost consciousness again, after four months of improvement: three hours that had stretched into a nightmare till at last he woke, suddenly smiling, unable to remember his name or hers, but once more calling her ‘Darling’.

A man got a lot of points for remembering that word, even if he forgot the rest.

The doctors had warned there might still be brain damage, that he might never recover fully. But even if Sam couldn’t articulate much, Jed knew he understood everything, from Mattie’s gurgled stories of how she and Clancy ‘climbed the big tree, Daddy’ to the articles she read him from Ecos, for he still found it difficult to focus on print for long. He even seemed to remember some of Nancy’s reminiscences. Or perhaps, Jed realised, much of this story was already familiar to him, for Joseph or even his Aunt Flinty might have told him stories of their past.

Jed interpreted his question with the ease of practice. ‘Why hadn’t Clancy warned Flora what Overflow was like?’ Outside in the garden, Mattie shrieked as young Clancy slid with her down the slippery dip. The boy seemed to take it for granted now that he would spend Sunday afternoons entertaining a small girl.

And Sunday afternoons were all that Nancy could spare for stories of her grandparents now. Overflow’s grass was finally exhausted, even in the channels. They had moved the remaining sheep to the house paddock, leaving the rest fallow or to the roos, so that only one area would be compacted and need revegetating when this drought finally broke.

But this meant carting sileage twice a day. Its sweet rotten stench even reached Dribble. Nancy too smelled faintly of fermented lucerne, turnips and molasses. Probably she’s too used to it to even notice, thought Jed.