‘I advised him around that time to give up the old house in Deer Park, but he had no interest in doing that, not until a palliative-care nurse told him he had no choice. He stayed home until she ordered his transfer by ambulance to hospital just a few days before he died.’

From what I understand, there were plenty of people who wanted to see Jim Olarenshaw before he went to his maker – friends from the bowls club and so on – but the person he most wanted to see, besides Snow, was Doug Grenfell.

‘I’d been his solicitor for years, so I wasn’t surprised to be summoned to his bedside,’ he told me, ‘but I was very surprised by what he had to tell me. I was sitting in the visitor’s chair next to Jim’s bed, and we were going through the list of things in the will. I said, “I’ve got down here: the house in Deer Park and its contents; the car; and the three blocks of land at Ocean Grove,” and he nodded. I said, “In a way you’re lucky, Jim, having only one child. There’s going to be quite a bit of money, but at least there won’t be any disputes.”

‘And that’s when Jim raised his finger and said, “No, that’s not right.”

‘I said, “What’s not right, Jim?” And he was very clear about it. He said, “There isn’t one child. There’s two.”’

Chapter Fifteen

Dear Jack,

Remember when I first started writing to you and you told me to point out where you’d gone wrong in your stories? Well, I’m going to tell you now that one of the things that really annoyed me was how you kept saying, ‘Oh, Snow found out when her dad died that he’d left half the family fortune to a sister she’d never met,’ but that’s not right, Jack. That’s just wrong.

What actually happened was, I’d been visiting Dad every four or six months in that year before he died, and I was always worried that something would happen to him because I was living in Sydney and he was in Deer Park and I couldn’t get to see him that often because I had the kids at Delaney House.

I wanted him to move out of the old house, but he kept telling me not to worry and that his neighbours dropped in on him. I was right to be worried, though, because just after his eighty-ninth birthday, he slipped in the kitchen and hit his head. He managed to call an ambulance and he got taken to Footscray and District Hospital. He said he felt fine but they insisted on doing a body scan and, just as they’d done with Mum, they found cancer. He called me from his bed to say, ‘Better come say your goodbyes. I’ve got the big C, and it’s gotten hold of everything.’ And I thought, ‘Right, okay, I’ll book a flight for next week,’ and next thing I knew, Doug was on the phone saying, ‘He’s dead.’