‘Dammit!’ cried Val. ‘How perfectly beastly we all enjoy being!’

She began to walk down the stony slope with that long, casual stride she adopted naturally on the Island, her figure spoiled by pregnancies. Gil Tulloch never tired of looking at his wife.

‘Here at last!’ Val heard her voice swaggering idiotically. ‘And isn’t it always alarming – one’s first contact with the natives!’

Her impulse was to embrace the girl, but the cheek so immaculate, she found herself holding out her hand, hardened by the iron frying-pan and a morning spent reeling-in.

Anthea was for the moment all motions, none of which mattered greatly, and words, none of which was distinguishable, until she bent to smoothe a crease:

‘I’m looking the most ghastly mess.’

The most colourless, Val Tulloch decided; I must do something for Anthea.

But for the moment all she could manage was to submit her to the terrors of introductions. As the Furfields came out of the house, Val was glad to realize they were some of her more negative friends.

Soon it was actually over, and when she had been taken inside Anthea Scudamore could tell the goose-flesh was leaving her arms. A crushed survivor in a room of her own, she already felt she would be happy there, because at least she could close the door. In her small stone cell she began to open drawers on yellow newspaper and the smell of somebody else’s powder. She was listening to the leaning tea-tree continue to saw at the gutter – it must have been the one which had let in the water – while the wrinkled mirror reflected a face sufficiently unlike her own to encourage a burst of vanity.

When she had unpacked her things, and hung her blue on the plastic hanger her mother had advised taking, she flopped down, and lay for a moment on the bed, on the washed-out Indian counterpane. Probably Anthea Scudamore had never indulged in a gesture quite so free, in a position so unorthodox. Certainly if anyone had seen her she would have felt ashamed – for her tumbled, white opulence. For the moment she suspected uneasily it might only be possible to come alive in secret positions, in other people’s houses. Or would a house of her own be someone else’s? She had a hankering after ornaments in jade, for the cool, sensuous throb which breaks through their remoteness of form. She would have enjoyed perching them on their neat ebony stands.

She lay there only for a moment or two, enough to feel guilty about it. She got up quickly, and glanced through the window, as though she expected her mother might approach along the stone flags of the veranda. But the sea glaze had sealed Anthea Scudamore off. Down in the bay gulls were squabbling over the heads of the fish Doug Furfield was filleting. Down around a grey, lop-sided dunny, two little boys were having a fight. Anthea Scudamore watched them briefly with the conventional interest she took in her friends’ children. She was relieved to feel she need not investigate, and probably would never hear the reason for this ritual quarrel. After all, it was not what went on at other people’s houses which invested those houses with peculiar life. It was what she herself brought into them. It was only the receptacle of which she was in desperate need, in which her uncommunicative nature might spill itself, if silently. So she was hungrily grateful for this stone cell, for the sound of the bent tea-tree as it sawed at iron and silence. And sawed.