Colonel and Mrs Claire had lived for twelve years at Wai-ata-tapu Springs. They had come to New Zealand from India when their daughter Barbara, born ten years after their marriage, was thirteen, and their son Simon, nine years old. They had told their friends in gentle voices that they wanted to get away from the conventions of retired army life in England. They had spoken blithely, for they took an uncritical delight in such phrases, of wide-open spaces and of a small inheritance that had come to the Colonel. With most of this inheritance they had built the boarding house they now lived in. The remaining sums had been quietly lost in a series of timid speculations. They had worked like slaves, receiving good advice with well-bred resentment and bad advice with touching gratitude. Beside these failings, they had a positive genius for collecting impossible people, and at the time when this tale opens were at the mercy of a certain incubus called Herbert Smith.

On the retirement of her distinguished and irascible brother from practice in London, Mrs Claire had invited him to join them. He had consented to do so only as a paying guest, as he wished to enjoy complete freedom for making criticisms and complaints, an exercise he indulged with particular energy, especially in regard to his nephew Simon. His niece Barbara Claire had from the first done the work of two servants and, because she went out so little, retained the sort of English vicarage-garden atmosphere that emanated from her mother. Simon, on the contrary, had attended the Harpoon State schools and, influenced on the one hand by the persistent family attitude of poor but proud gentility and on the other by his schoolfellows’ suspicion of ‘pommy’ settlers, had become truculently colonial, somewhat introverted and defiantly uncouth. A year before the outbreak of war he left school, and now was taking the preliminary Air Force training at home.

On the morning of Dr Ackrington’s visit to Harpoon, the Claires pursued their normal occupations. At midday Colonel Claire took his lumbago to the radioactivity of the mud pool, Mrs Claire steeped her sciatica in a hot spring, Simon went into his cabin to practise Morse code, and Barbara cooked the midday meal in a hot and primitive kitchen with Huia, the Maori help, in attendance.

‘You can dish up, Huia,’ said Barbara. She brushed the locks of damp hair from her eyes with the back of her forearm. ‘I’m afraid I seem to have used a lot of dishes. There’ll be six in the dining-room. Mr Questing’s out for lunch.’

‘Good job,’ said Huia skittishly. Barbara pretended not to hear. Huia, moving with the half-languid, half-vigorous grace of the young Maori, smiled brilliantly, and began to pile stacks of plates on a tray. ‘He’s no good,’ she said softly.