‘Think you’re on a kangaroo shoot or somethin’?’

‘I’m looking for Louise.’

‘Don’t you come through these doors.’ Mrs Fox appeared.

‘Kitty, if we don’t let this digger in, neighbours’ll think we got either the bugs or the bailiffs.’ The Pea eyed me suspiciously. ‘You have the look of a thing from the Disinfectant Department.’

‘Mother, we don’t have a Disinfectant Department in England.’

‘We don’t? That explains a whole lot of smells.’

‘Please, Mrs Fox, I won’t be long.’

Reluctantly Mrs Fox stood back and I stepped on to the mat.

When there was a centimetre gap between me and the door, Mrs Fox shut it and barred my further passage. I could feel the plastic letter-box cover on my spine. ‘Get it over with then.’

‘I’m looking for Louise. When did you last see her?’

‘Ho ho,’ said the Pea banging her stick. ‘Don’t play the Waltzing Matilda with me. What do you care? You walked out on her, now get lost.’

Mrs Fox said, ‘I’m glad you’re having nothing more to do with my daughter. You broke up her marriage.’

‘I’ve no quarrel with that,’ said Grandma.

‘Mother, will you be quiet? Elgin is a great man.’

‘Since when? You always said he was a little rat.’

‘I did not say he was a little rat. I said he was rather small and that unfortunately he had the look of a, well, I said a …’

‘Rat!’ screamed the Pea banging her stick on the door just by my head. She should have been a knife thrower in the circus.

‘Mrs Fox. I made a mistake. I should never have left Louise. I thought it was for her own good. I thought Elgin could make her well. I want to find her and take care of her.’

‘It’s too late,’ said Mrs Fox. ‘She told me she never wanted to see you again.’

‘She’s had a worse time than a toad on a runway,’ said the Pea.

‘Mother, go and sit down, you’re getting tired,’ said Mrs Fox supporting herself on the banister rail. ‘I can deal with this.’

‘Prettiest thing this side of Brisbane and look how she’s been treated. You know, Louise is the spitting image of myself when younger. I had quite a figure then.’

It was hard to imagine Pea having any figure. She was like a child’s drawing of a snowman, just two circles plonked one on top of the other. For the first time I noticed her hair: it was serpentine in its rising twists, a living moving mass that escaped from its tight bands just as Louise’s did. Louise had told me that Pea had been the undisputed Beauty Queen of Western Australia. She had had over one hundred proposals of marriage in the 1920s from bankers, prospectors, city men who unrolled maps of the new Australia they were going to build and said, ‘Sweet darling all this is yours when you are mine.’ Pea had married a sheep farmer and had six children. Her nearest neighbour had been a day’s ride away. I saw her suddenly, dress to the floor, hands on her hips, the dirt track disappearing into the flat of the horizon. Nothing but flat and the bar of the sky measuring the distance. Miss Helen Louise, a burning bush in the dry land.