‘They’re good, aren’t they?’ she said, noting the strumming of the captain’s fingers on the bar top while he watched the dancers.

‘Eh? Oh, yes,’ Samuel agreed as she nodded in the direction of the dance floor, but he hadn’t really been watching the pair at all, he’d just been grooving to the beat. God he loved jazz.

‘So you heard we make beautiful music in this place?’

‘Sorry?’ he queried, unsure of what she’d said, he’d clocked out of his surrounds and on to the beat once again.

‘That’s what you said,’ she prompted, ‘that you’d heard we make beautiful music in this place.’

‘Yep, I sure did.’ The girl was interested in small talk so it was only polite to oblige. ‘And I must say I was delighted to discover the music’s been coming from our own Company C boys.’ He gave her a friendly smile. ‘Makes me feel darn proud.’

‘Yeah, Rupe and Kasey are talented all right.’ Betty could tell the captain didn’t really want to talk, but she didn’t care. She felt as though somehow she knew him – well, just a bit – from what Kasey had told her. This bloke was a jazz freak, Kasey had said, ‘Not a nigger hater like the other bastard,’ had been his exact words. ‘This guy really loves music. That makes him one of us, you know?’

Betty didn’t dare let on that Kasey had spoken so intimately about his commanding officer, it might get him into trouble, but she wanted to make contact with this man. She could report whatever she learned back to Kasey. The two of them talked about absolutely everything.

‘So if you didn’t hear from your own blokes,’ she queried, ‘who was it that told you about our place?’

‘A couple of officers from Kissing Point Fort,’ he replied dutifully. ‘I’m billeted down that way, a private house in Mitchell Street.’

‘Oh really, which one? Whose house?’

The girl wasn’t going to give up. She was extremely distracting, and Samuel tried not to sound just a little testy. ‘Hayden House, it’s called, the owner’s a very nice lady —’

‘Amelia Sanderson,’ Betty said with a distinct ring of triumph.

‘Yes, that’s right. Mrs Sanderson is —’

‘She’s a close friend of my mother’s,’ Betty trumpeted with an even greater ring of triumph.

‘Really.’ Samuel tried to appear as if the fact held even the remotest shred of interest.

‘Yes, everyone knows everyone in Townsville.’

‘Apparently.’ He smiled in a way that he hoped was warm and pushed a note across the bar. ‘Keep the change, Betty, and thank you for your excellent Gershwin.’

‘Golly,’ she picked up the one-pound note, it was an excellent tip, ‘thanks.’

By now, Rupe had segued into Duke Ellington’s ‘I Ain’t Got Nothin’ But the Blues’.