Mum wasn’t the sort for hugging or cuddling my brothers and me, but her eyes lit up when she watched us eat. Dad at one end of the table, Mum at the other, my brothers and I either side. The nice cloth and napkins, the polished silver, crystal salt and pepper shakers, different to the everyday.

Butter in the blue dish, Dad blowing his nose with a trumpet sound and Mum passing the green beans. The thin line of her mouth, the worried crease in her forehead, which softened as she drank the single beer Dad always poured her on a Sunday. She was funny, my mum. Soft and hard all at once. Who could say what went on inside her head? She had painted before we were born, there were the watercolours framed and stacked against the wall in the shed: flowers, chairs, bowls of fruit. I never once saw her paint, even when I was small and my brothers and I were given brushes, her old paintboxes, precious paper and smocks of Dad’s old work shirts to wear over our clothes. ‘Why did you stop?’ I remember asking, maybe as a young woman, maybe a big-enough-to-wonder girl.

She shrugged. ‘I wasn’t any good.’

I thought maybe she was, though. Dad told a story sometimes about a prize she won, an art prize sponsored by Milton Presbyterian Church. Ten pounds, and they had just met, and she had bought the fabric for a dress (cream silk taffeta with a lace trim) that made him think she must be from such a fine family she would never want him. Imagine his luck, he would say. Imagine his luck that her family were not so fine after all. Her father was an honest working man, like his own, from farming stock. Salt of the earth. It was just her hands that were fine, her eyes. Her figure—before the children, that is. The wattle yellow of her hair.

As Dad told this story she would brush her greying hair from her temples with the back of her veined hands and retreat to the kitchen, carrying stacks of plates. Before the children, that is. I wondered sometimes if we ruined her, the three of us. Ruined her for him.