‘I wonder Jack Cunningham,’ she said, ’took up with Daise. He was a fine man. Though Daise had a way with her.’

They were driving. They were driving.

When Mrs Hogben remembered the little ring in plaited gold.

‘Do you think those undertakers are honest?’

‘Honest?’ her husband repeated.

A dubious word.

‘Yes,’ she said. That ring that Daise.’

You couldn’t very well accuse. When she had plucked up the courage she would go down to the closed house. The thought of it made her chest tighten. She would go inside, and feel her way into the back corners of drawers, where perhaps a twist of tissue-paper. But the closed houses of the dead frightened Mrs Hogben, she had to admit. The stuffiness, the light strained through brown holland. It was as if you were stealing, though you weren’t.

And then those Whalleys creeping up.

They were driving and driving, the ute and the sedan almost rubbing on each other.

‘No one who hasn’t had a migraine,’ cried Mrs Hogben, averting her face, ‘can guess what it feels like,’

Her husband had heard that before.

‘It’s a wonder it don’t leave you,’ he said. ‘They say it does when you’ve passed a certain age.’

Though they weren’t passing the Whalleys he would make every effort to throw the situation off. Wal Whalley leaning forward, though not so far you couldn’t see the hair bursting out of the front of his shirt. His wife thumping his shoulder. They were singing one of their own versions. Her gums all watery.

So they drove and drove.

‘I could sick up, Leslie,’ Mrs Hogben gulped, and fished for her lesser handkerchief.

The Whalley twins were laughing through their taffy forelocks.

At the back of the ute that sulky Lum turned towards the opposite direction. Meg Hogben was looking her farthest off. Any sign of acknowledgement had been so faint the wind had immediately blown it off their faces. As Meg and Lummy sat, they held their sharp, but comforting knees. They sank their chins as low as they would go. They lowered their eyes, as if they had seen enough for the present, and wished to cherish what they knew.

The warm core of certainty settled stiller as driving faster the wind paid out the telephone wires the fences the flattened heads of grey grass always raising themselves again again again.