OLIVE: Thing is, I’d made up my mind I wouldn’t harp on last night. I’d shut my mouth, and hope that it would all go way. But if this house isn’t fit for Bubba, could be that it isn’t fit for other people either. You want to walk out on the lay-offs and the rest of us, you don’t have to talk about your options, Nancy. You can pack your bags and clear out, any time you want to.

OLIVE goes away upstairs, and it is ROO who sums up, with expressive brevity.

ROO: Well—reckon you could say that puts a kybosh on the shoppin’ expedition.

He picks up the envelope of discharge items and follows OLIVE up the stairs. Then BARNEY issues a brutal directive:

BARNEY: Doesn’t look you’ve got much choice. What you’ve got to do is shove your clothes on, go in there next door, and sort things out right now.

NANCY: [dangerously] Is that an order?

BARNEY: Tell them what you meant last night, and how they got you all wrong.

NANCY: Wouldn’t have got me wrong, them aunties, if it wasn’t something they already had in mind.

BARNEY: Who cares about them? ’S Olive that’s important—

NANCY: Last thing in the world I meant to do was to stop Bub comin’ in here. And it makes me mad that Olive had to hear that stuff from Auntie Dee. But if you ask me if I think it’s time the kid was weaned away from this place, I can tell you now. I do.

BARNEY raises an irate ‘aah’ of exasperation.

You bring Bubba back here after this, and she’ll be worse than ever. More involved and starry-eyed, with you lot fussin’ around her—

BARNEY: Where’s the harm in that, for God’s sake?

NANCY: Harm?

BARNEY: With Olive here? Olive wouldn’t let her—

NANCY: [violently] Olive wouldn’t know harm if it sat up and it bit her. Olive is the one who thinks that Roo has come out of this war with not a mark to show for it.

This seeming irrelevancy stops BARNEY in his tracks.

BARNEY: [after a brief pause] You’re gettin’ to be a hard woman, you know that? A real hard woman.

JOSEF HULTZ comes into view on the front verandah, approaching the street door.

Nothin’ I can say will make you go in there?

NANCY: Nothing I can think of, no.

JOSEF rings the doorbell.

BARNEY: Righto. But I warn you, you’ll regret this.

He moves to answer the doorbell.

Some time when it’s prob’bly too bloody late.

He opens the street door to encounter JOSEF.

Aah, hell.

JOSEF: [stiffly] I am calling on Miss Wells.

BARNEY: I’ll bet. You’re about the only thing the mornin’ needed.

JOSEF: Is at home?

NANCY: [calling involuntarily] No.