Mrs Scudamore was downright thrilled by Anthea’s invitation to the Island. She could not help going over and over all its satisfying implications, while remembering the afternoon at Government House Minnie Briscoe, Gil Tulloch’s potty old mother, failed to recognize her. For that reason Mrs Scudamore moistened her lips at the airport and hesitated before kissing her daughter good-bye.

Then she said: ‘Always remember who you are, darling. Both sides are in the Book.’

As there was nobody close enough to hear, Anthea need not have blushed for her mother. But she did. And felt frightfully disloyal as she lowered her head and crossed the tarmac. At least the equally regrettable frown which had come to her with the warmth of shame helped to keep her hat on in the wind.

3

The day was almost upon them when Val Tulloch remembered they must expect Anthea Scudamore.

‘Oh, God!’ Gil complained.

Everyone else had arrived, and settled down into one of those temporary communities far closer knit than most of the lifelong relationships.

‘I know,’ Val decided. ‘I’ll get Ossie Ryan to fetch her out on the mail run. Then nobody need be disturbed.’

By nobody she meant her husband, who had always been her first preoccupation.

So Anthea was met at the plane by Ossie Ryan, a sandy man who knew what was happening anywhere on the Island, and who ran one of those loosely-connected bombs which rattle between fixed points in the remoter parts of Australia.

‘All set?’ Ossie asked of this spotless girl from the city who dusted the seat before sitting down.

‘Yes. Lovely, thank you.’ She was so composed, agreeable.

Ossie had never been seen without a kind of straight scar of a grin. Now he grinned at the vaccination mark which glared white from the girl’s passive arm.

They began to drive across the island, through the gold blur of barley crops, past mobs of turkeys blown sideways by the impetus of Ossie Ryan’s car. Wherever they occurred, the little runty island trees appeared to have accepted a permanent deformity forced upon them by the wind.

The girl sat holding her summer hat. She was very lush, white, imported, beside her red, skinny, indigenous companion. In her mind she composed a letter to her mother, which would in fact never be written because they had promised each other to ring through every evening after dinner. But in the girl’s mind the letter began: It is all rather an adventure ...

She sat offering a smile in place of the words she did not find for the mail-man, while the adventure continued in bursts of sun, and a bashing of wind, and the blaze of ripe barley. Sometimes Ossie Ryan would widen her experience by telling what was happening in the stone cottages they passed:

‘That’s Mrs Crane. ’Er old man got took over to the mainland Thursday. Operation for hernia. That house up there – the woman runs a baby-farm, they say. They, mind you. I don’t say nothun about no one, but mind me own business. That place is Mr Isbister’s. From Glenelg. Looks like ’e brought a different wife with ’im this year.’