For there was Miss Cullen, doing something with a brief-case in the hall.

‘Ugly bitch,’ Jum said.

‘Plain is the word,’ corrected Eileen.

‘Arch couldn’t do without her. Practically runs the business.’

Certainly that Miss Cullen looked most methodical, shuffling the immaculate papers, and slipping them into a new pigskin brief-case in Arch and Nora’s hall.

‘Got a figure,’ Eileen conceded.

‘But not a chin.’

‘Oh, hello, Miss Cullen. It’s stopped raining.’

It was too bright stepping suddenly into the hall. The Wheelers brightly blinked. They looked newly made.

‘Keeping well, Miss Cullen, I hope?’

‘I have nothing to complain about, Mr Wheeler,’ Miss Cullen replied.

She snapped the catch. Small, rather pointed breasts under the rain-coat. But, definitely, no chin.

Eileen Wheeler was fixing her hair in the reproduction Sheraton mirror.

She had been to the hairdresser’s recently, and the do was still set too tight.

‘Well, good-bye now,’ Miss Cullen said.

When she smiled there was a hint of gold, but discreet, no more than a bridge. Then she would draw her lips together, and lick them ever so sweetly, as if she had been sucking a not unpleasantly acid sweetie.

Miss Cullen went out the door, closing it firmly but quietly behind her.

‘That was Miss Cullen,’ said Nora Mackenzie coming down. ‘She’s Arch’s secretary.’

‘He couldn’t do without her,’ she added, as though they did not know.

Nora was like that. Eileen wondered how she and Nora had tagged along together, ever since Goulburn, all those years.

‘God, she’s plain!’ Jum said.

Nora did not exactly frown, but pleated her forehead the way she did when other people’s virtues were assailed. Such attacks seemed to affect her personally, causing her almost physical pain.

‘But Mildred is so kind,’ she insisted.

Nora Mackenzie made a point of calling her husband’s employees by first names, trying to make them part of a family which she alone, perhaps, would have liked to exist.

‘She brought me some giblet soup, all the way from Balgowlah, that time I had virus ’flu.’

‘Was it good, darling?’ Eileen asked.

She was going through the routine, rubbing Nora’s cheek with her own. Nora was pale. She must remember to be kind.

Nora did not answer, but led the way into the lounge-room.

Nora said:

‘I don’t think I’ll turn on the lights for the present. They hurt my eyes, and it’s so restful sitting in the dusk.’

Nora was pale. She had, in fact, just taken a couple of Dis-prin.

‘Out of sorts, dear?’ Eileen asked.

Nora did not answer, but offered some dry martinis.

Very watery, Jum knew from experience, but drink of a kind.

‘Arch will be down presently,’ Nora said. ‘He had to attend to some business, some letters Miss Cullen brought. Then he went in to have a shower.’

Nora’s hands were trembling as she offered the dry martinis, but Eileen remembered they always had.

The Wheelers sat down. It was all so familiar, they did not have to be asked, which was fortunate, as Nora Mackenzie always experienced difficulty in settling guests into chairs. Now she sat down herself, far more diffidently than her friends. The cushions were standing on their points.