Pearly opened the pipe-and-wire gate that kept stock from the flower garden and went up to the house. A snaking blue hose was casting spray on the lawn, which had barely a tinge of green. A blackbird jittered and fluttered its wings in a small ecstasy within the sparkling circle. Natalie was at the kitchen window and smiled, waved, before disappearing to come to the door. Richie was down at the sheds, she told him, and that was what Pearly had expected. He hadn’t rung to say he was coming, but that wasn’t unusual. Natalie said to tell Richie to come up for morning tea in half an hour. Pearly talked with her for a while, mainly about the school commemorations, Gumbo and Helen’s job at the hospital, which was to begin quite soon.

Pearly enquired after Natalie’s mother, who since widowhood spent most of her time at the bowling club. Her jacket was weighty with the coloured strip badges of tournament success, and she played even in the rain. Sport and family were the staples of her conversation. She had no interest in the wider world. ‘Oh, she’s still going strong,’ said Natalie. ‘She pops in from time to time when she’s not bowling. She still drives herself everywhere.’

‘How old is she now?’ asked Pearly. More to show interest than from any curiosity. He’d found Natalie’s mother a very sharp woman and once had an argument with her about the media’s neglect of women’s sport, during which she called him a numbskull. She was of a generation that used words like that. Numbskull. But he wished her no ill. ‘Eighty-one’s a fair age,’ he replied when Natalie told him. ‘Anyway, good on her. She’s a goer.’

Pearly took his time walking down to the sheds. The surroundings were restful, and even as he enjoyed that he was aware of decisions to be made, especially about Helen and about Deidre. difficult decisions. ‘Things aren’t so good, Pearly,’ he said. ‘Not so bloody good at all.’ The parallel wheel tracks were worn into the dry ground, and even the centre strip had only a straggle of short grass. Someone had been cutting Scotch thistles, and the stalks lay still greener than the living grass. Pearly and Richie had done that as kids — slashing thistles in the paddocks for pocket money, yet each autumn the massed thistledown still took invasive flight across the sky or trembled in pale, loose congregation along the hedge lines and baulked in corners.