The perils of the back garden were so attractive that Ida turned her back on the window and slid down from the wooden seat. Taking Rosie up by one china arm, she made her way out of the room. The hallway was dark—blinds were drawn and doors closed at this time of day—and she descended the stairs carefully, grasping the rods of the banister with her free hand. From the foot of the steps, she went through to the back of the house, where a screen door opened from her father’s study onto a glassed-in veranda.

It was hot on the veranda, but there sat her mother, in a blue dress, sewing. Her mother, who was dark and beautiful and very loving, had strong, impatient opinions, and a quick temper that flared without warning and was felt through the house. Ida was both afraid to be out of her sight and afraid of making her angry, and she creaked the screen door open and looked cautiously around it.

But her mother just smiled and let her come and sit on the polished floor beside her and play with the colored silks and reels of cotton in the quilted box. Ida lined them up in their varying sizes and then in their different shades, and when she tired of that she simply sat leaning against her mother’s leg, rubbing with one finger the round button on the high-heeled shoe. The sun burned on them through the glass; her mother came here to sew because of the light, but she hated the heat, Ida knew. She couldn’t breathe, she said, until the southerly started to blow in the evening—the cool south wind that reached Sydney from the sea. She couldn’t bear to see the garden wither in the drought. One evening, she went out and watered the lawn, although that was prohibited because of the water shortage, and a passerby, seeing her with the hose, had shouted that he would report her to the City Council. Her mother threw down the hose in a fury, and came inside and said she was sick of the drought and the depression. When Marge told her it would get cooler soon, in May, she just shook her head and said she was homesick. On the study wall there was a photograph of a girl in a fur coat standing in snow, like the Christmas cards.

Jock, the Airedale, who was nosing about in the field, suddenly began to bark and came running up through the orchard. The abrupt activity shook the trees, or so it seemed, and sharpened the light. The shoe button shifted out from under Ida’s finger as her mother rose to look through the glass of the veranda.