A wedding is a big thing, an Occasion, and everyone is determined to grab it by the scruff and wring it for all the joy it can give. There are not many these days, with most of the men gone. Enzia’s Joe has been sent home, disfigured but not dishonoured, with a small pension and a patch where once his left eye was. I remember him from before: a loud one, jovial, a boy still when he enlisted. Enzia says he is all the same Joe.

I’ve seen Joe since he’s come home. Sometimes he cycles to South Beach to eat polony sandwiches with Enzia at dinnertime. He flirts, he laughs. He makes light of his injury. Not need two eyes to catch fish, he croaks in a voice like an old man’s. Not need two eyes to get married, Enzia flings back at him. And the girls look on, smiling, cheered by the prospect of happy-ever-after in the face of so much life-cut-short. Vi’s Clarrie, Micky and Bruce from Mixing, Lois’s brothers Sam and Ted, Mr Prentice’s son—all gone. So he’s proof, Joe is, that men come back, they can be wounded and still come back. And still laugh. And still remember before. But I watch Joe, and I am frightened for Magnus Tulloch. For I know a few things about the stubborn kind of forgetting it takes to still laugh and still remember, and I fancy what I’m seeing is a fine performance of all the same Joe.

Enzia steps out of the bedroom to a chorus of oohs.

You’re a sight for sore eyes, sweetheart! Ollie says, twirling her around.

Franca and I puff out the fold of white fabric that is a few yards short of a proper train, and Enzia’s mother, Josepha, sighs proudly.

Enzia will be a beautiful bride on Saturday, in spite of the war. Others make do with calico prettied up with bits of muslin and whatever spangly beads can be finagled from heirloom pieces and friends’ button boxes. But Josepha has been planning her only daughter’s wedding since Enzia was a tiny girl, and long ago in Molfetta she’d put aside a length of Italian lace, laying it with care between cotton sheets and tablecloths in a tea-chest bound for Australia. And here it is, worked into the chaste bodice of this otherwise plain dress. I think Josepha is feeling a wee bit smug as she kneels on the floor with a tape measure round her neck and pins between her lips.

Enzia swishes around in the dining room of her parents’ weatherboard house while Josepha tries to pin the hem.

Did you have a lovely wedding dress, Meggie? Lois asks, handing me a puffy pouch of fabric.