My grandmother ministers her life away in service to an eternal child.

She pares the child’s corns, searches for wax in her ears, attacks her moustache with tweezers, curls her hair with spit and bobby-pins, cuts her nails when they are soft after the bath, rubs balm on her chilblains, inserts pessaries for constipation.

Nan and Reece share each other’s bath water, sleep in twin beds.

When they are both old they huddle together in the room that is so cold and smells of silence. They are strangely altered: Reece, become even smaller; Iris, changed for ever from the ruddy Jewess in crêpe-marocain, smiling at her future in the sepia photograph — not even any more the grandmother I knew, but a wrinkled lady who cries in secret. They sit together before the slit eye of the electric fire; before the changing images that never change on the flickering television. Sometimes they link hands over the leaves that swirl statically on the carpet. Sometimes Reece’s fingers caress her sister’s cheek.

They are a pair.

FOUR

Iris Pearl was the baker’s daughter.

She drove a little trap; rode the cart-horse on the sand at Largs Bay (he kicked her head, and I felt the hollow — still there, after all those years). She ran the sewing-machine through her finger; had pleurisy (slept in a tent, blew into bottles, mustard-ointment rubbed on her chest); was stranded in a boat with Alec Luckett (his was the book-mark with the shadow-letter iris). She collected peacock-feathers; made silver-paper pictures, shell boxes, a table-runner with carnations; played the piano from sixpenny populars of ‘Teasing’ and ‘Hearts and Flowers’ and ‘Fairy Wedding Waltz’.

Her tea-set was painted with ox-eye daisies. She sewed pockets for a night-dress and serviettes — trimmed them with crochet, Roman cut-work, Maltese edging.

She pinned a cameo of ivory to a collar that was high, put bandeaux of rose-buds in her hair. She had jabots of lawn and Valenciennes insertions; long-sleeved chemisettes with soutache braid on Brussels net. She had a hat of écru muslin, a petticoat of nainsook, a cover for a corset sprigged with shamrocks. She did her hair in plaited ear-phones; in the fashionable Récamier; like Psyche with glacé silk.

Iris Pearl was the baker’s daughter.

She met the policeman from Terowie on the beach. Her necklace broke, and he was there to catch the pearls — to ask her out. They married at a Methodist manse in June (before the roses). When he died, four years later, the Police Band played at the funeral. The next year she put a poem in the Advertiser:

We who loved you sadly miss you

As there dawns another year,

And in lonely hours of thinking,

Thoughts of you are ever dear.

Charles Ebenezer, son of Jessie, died at thirty, when my mother was two years old. He was allowed up too soon after a routine operation for appendicitis, and died from a clot of blood on the day he was to come home.