‘What did you tell them?’ asked Mrs Last.

‘Said I’d go,’ her husband said, doing things to the change in his pocket.

He was a short man, given to standing with his legs apart.

Georgina Last withheld her reply. Formally of interest, her shape suggested she had been made out of several scones joined together in the baking.

‘Daise Morrow,’ said Horrie Last, ‘wasn’t such a bad sort.’

Mrs Last did not answer.

So he stirred the money in his pocket harder, hoping perhaps it would emulsify. He wasn’t irritated, mind you, by his wife – who had brought him a parcel of property, as well as a flair for real estate – but had often felt he might have done a dash with Daise Morrow on the side. Wouldn’t have minded betting old Les Hogben had tinkered a bit with his wife’s sister. Helped her buy her home, they said. Always lights on at Daise’s place after dark. Postman left her mail on the veranda instead of in the box. In summer, when the men went round to read the meters, she’d ask them in for a glass of beer. Daise knew how to get service.

Georgina Last cleared her throat.

‘Funerals are not for women,’ she declared, and took up a cardigan she was knitting for a cousin.

‘You didn’t do your shoes!’ Mrs Hogben protested.

‘I did,’ said Meg. ‘It’s the dust. Don’t know why we bother to clean shoes at all. They always get dirty again.’

She stood there looking awful in the school uniform. Her cheeks were hollow from what she read could only be despair.

‘A person must keep to her principles,’ Mrs Hogben said, and added: ‘Dadda is bringing round the car. Where’s your hat, dear? We’ll be ready to leave in two minutes.’

‘Arr, Mum! The hat?’

That old school hat. It had shrunk already a year ago, but had to see her through.

‘You wear it to church, don’t you?’

‘But this isn’t church!’

‘It’s as good as. Besides, you owe it to your aunt,’ Mrs Hogben said, to win.

Meg went and got her hat. They were going out through the fuchsia bushes, past the plaster pixies, Which Mrs Hogben had trained her child to cover with plastic at the first drops of rain. Meg Hogben hated the sight of those corny old pixies, even after the plastic cones had snuffed them out.

It was sad in the car, dreamier. As she sat looking out through the window, the tight panama perched on her head lost its power to humiliate. Her always persistent, grey eyes, under the line of dark fringe, had taken up the search again: she had never yet looked enough. Along the road they passed the house in which her aunt, they told her, had died. The small, pink, tilted house, standing amongst the carnation plants, had certainly lost some of its life. Or the glare had drained the colour from it. How the mornings used to sparkle in which Aunt Daise went up and down between the rows, her gown dragging heavy with dew, binding with bast the fuzzy flowers by handfuls and handfuls. Auntie’s voice clear as morning. No one, she called, could argue they look stiff when they’re bunched tight eh Meg what would you say they remind you of? But you never knew the answers to the sort of things people asked. Frozen fireworks, Daise suggested. Meg loved the idea of it, she loved Daise. Not so frozen either, she dared. The sun getting at the wet flowers broke them up and made them spin.