Behind the house, baking in the continual blast of desert sun: a garden planted sensibly with cabbages, and the privy beyond it; an iron washhouse and a bread oven built of bricks; a tank for the rain that may or may not come; a path and gate to the road, and another path and gate to the yard where the goat and cow spend their days, and the hens, too, when Mary keeps them in. The house and garden are fenced to keep animals off. Cats come, naturally, wanted or not. And rabbits. Also, in certain seasons, long, fat carpet snakes, which coil beneath the boards of the verandah and keep the rats down.

  Beside the garden: Mary’s washing line strung up on two thick poles, the closest things within the fence to trees, and Mary with her arms full of the sheets she rescued from the dust. She’s hanging them out again, the black dog at her heels. Her long brown hair is wound in a coronet around her head. Mary is up before everyone in the morning and still up after they’re all in bed at night. The day opens and it closes and Mary is making beds, cooking meals, feeding animals, brushing hair, mending dresses, sweeping floors, writing letters, washing shirts, wringing sheets, churning butter, dressing children, straining milk, clearing tables, knitting socks, fetching water, hoeing the garden and darning stockings. Now she’s pegging the sheets to the line. Every time she finishes hanging a sheet she turns to look out over the yard, the plain and far into the hills, hoping to see a walking boy.

  When he doesn’t come she goes out to the edge of the yard and calls his name, making an effort to raise her voice. His name—Denny—disappears as if some other mouth is waiting just beyond hers and has swallowed it. She calls with more effort, and Deniston this time, as if the plain will respect his full name; she thinks of the name Deniston as formal, because it’s her father’s. If Denny were to call out in response to her, she wouldn’t hear him: Mary, a sufferer of persistent ear infections, lost most of her hearing by the age of twenty-two. So, when she calls her son’s name, she looks to see if anything moves in an answering way.

  Not even the cat comes to her. It sleeps, full of rat, in the shadows of the cowshed. Mary thinks to try the shed—Denny might have run there when the dust picked up. A well-built cowshed should be dense and dark, should shuffle with the sleepy lives of many animals. This shed is empty. It’s built of bark, it leans, the lime between the slats is crumbling, so Mary can see at once in the mottled light that Denny isn’t there. The goat comes tottering in from the yard, expecting food, and the dog yaps at it.

  Mary looks for Denny in the horse yard, the stable, the pigpen with no pig in it, and all the other sheds that have grown about the place as they’ve been needed. She doesn’t find him in the water tank or any of the troughs, on the roof or under the house, or in the hollow tree that stands between the house and the red hill.

  There’s no need to worry, Mary tells herself. He’ll have found a spot to shelter and fallen fast asleep. Or come across his father, and they’ll appear together at sundown. Or he’ll have walked along the road to wait for his sisters and they’ll have seen him there by the roadside, a little stump, and lifted him up into the cart. Or he won’t have filled his sack yet and is staying out until he does, and it’s just the storm that makes her miss him.

  But branches fall and snakes bite. There are sudden drops and steep gullies, dams and waterholes. There are strangers in the desert: natives, hawkers, swagmen, stockmen, teamsters, Chinese labourers and Afghans with their camels. Denny might meet any of these people—or he might meet no one at all, which could be worse. Mary remembers, though, that the Englishwoman is out there with her husband, the Swedish painter. They stopped at the house on their way north; the Englishwoman came to the door while her husband held the horses at the gate. She asked for a ‘wand of aloe’. Her speech was clear—she spoke loudly, as if she already knew of Mary’s deafness—and what she meant was a piece of the aloe vera by the gate, which Mary’s family calls the lettuce plant. The girls have scratched their names in its green flesh: Joy, Cissy, Ada, Noella. One of them wrote Lotta and Denny in, too, and Mary carved her own initials, also her husband’s, and those of her oldest son no longer at home, and since then she’s been afraid for the plant, as if it means more than it should. On the rare days she goes out of sight of the house, she looks for the aloe first on returning. It would disturb her less to see the house gone than the plant.

  So that it might have hurt her to give a piece of it to the Englishwoman. She worried that it would, but anyway said yes. ‘Only,’ she said, ‘mind the part with writing on, if you don’t mind.’ Then felt ashamed of having repeated ‘mind’.

  The Englishwoman promised that she would do as little damage to the plant as possible. She’d use a freshly sharpened knife. There was something green and cool about her. Her forehead gleamed with sweat, but it looked as if she’d just stepped out of a green, cool river. Her hair was dark and her husband’s light; when she reached the gate, her smooth head shone next to his tawny one. Cutting the aloe, the Englishwoman was careful with the knife. Her husband watched her, and when she finished, he lifted his head and gave Mary a formal wave. Mary raised her arm to repeat the gesture, and it was as if they’d saluted each other across a battlefield, which seemed to make the man smile. It felt like a transaction; as if he’d given Mary something just by smiling, and now she was in his debt.

  When the older girls and Denny came home from school—what day was this? Only yesterday? The day before?—they were thrilled to hear the news of the Swedish painter’s visit, except for Cissy, who responded with a dismissive snort. Even so, Cissy went down and lingered by the aloe, rubbing its raw edge, and Denny followed her. They stayed by the gate, looking out along the road. Mary, thinking of this and of the Englishwoman and of the aloe wand, feels as if she has sent a piece of her own self out onto the plain and that Denny—not that she should worry, he’ll be home soon—Denny will find it if he needs to.

  Mary returns to the house. She fetches a broom and sweeps the dust out of the house and onto the verandah; then she sweeps the dust from the verandah to the yard. She uses the broom to swat the flies from around the door, to sweep the chickens through the yard, and everywhere she steps the ground feels yielding. She sets out with a kerosene tin for the pump, hears Mopsy barking, and looking south she sees a manageable cloud of dust moving along the road: the girls are nearly home. She fills the tin with water and carries it back to the house without spilling a single drop. Before the girls arrive, she changes her dirty apron for a clean one.

  The girls, talking all at once, begin to pull off their Sunday clothes as soon as they’re inside. They step bare and freckled out of their blue dresses with the ease they always have when men aren’t present. Mary made the dresses, made the identical red bloomers, and trimmed their hats with the same blue ribbon. The girls speak loudly and Mary stands in the middle of the room in order to hear the things they say. Denny isn’t with them.

  Cissy hasn’t changed out of her clothes, although she’s taken off her hat, and she’s in a stir. This always happens: she makes her sisters go with her to things like weddings and Sunday school teas, and when she comes home she stalks the house and yard in an obscure fury, flinging tea-leaves on the garden, snapping dishrags and kicking at the chickens.

  ‘The vicar fainted right in front of me,’ Cissy reports, taking the tin from her mother and pouring water from it to fill the kettle.

  Little Charlotte, who is rarely separated from Mary, hangs among her skirts. Mary strokes Lotta’s warm head and leans down, intending to ask her if she’s seen her brother.

  ‘Lotta dropped a sandwich,’ says Noella.

  Mary straightens.

  ‘They didn’t offer us anything to drink,’ says Cissy, rolling up her sleeves.

  Noella, scratching behind Mopsy’s ear, says, ‘The sandwiches had a special sort of ham.’

  ‘There was nothing special about that ham,’ says Cissy. ‘And riding off in a wagon full of flowers! Would Minna sit in an old wagon any other day? Roses, Mam! Roses from where? Pure sentiment is what it is.’ She talks like Miss McNeil at the school. ‘And nothing to drink, not even for Joy.’

  ‘We never went up and asked, though,’ counters Ada. ‘We never even said hello.’

  Mary clears her throat and says, ‘Denny.’

  Cissy, poking at the stove, says, ‘Peter Baumann brought the pony in from the storm, right into church. What about Denny?’

  ‘He’s gone. I don’t know where he is,’ says Mary. The girls look at her then, all but Lotta, who’s still wound in Mary’s skirts. Mary finds herself smiling, though she can’t imagine why. ‘He was out when the storm came through. I sent him out for kindling.’

  ‘But that was hours ago,’ Cissy says.

  ‘Yes.’ Mary looks at the clock on the mantel, her mother’s clock—it came from England, and though she knows the secrets of a wound-up clock, she sometimes struggles to believe that the time it tells is not the time in Norwich. She says, ‘I thought he might have met you on the road.’

  Cissy, muttering something Mary doesn’t catch, lifts the singing kettle off the stove.

  ‘I called his name,’ says Mary. It sounds so feeble. ‘I looked everywhere—the sheds, the stable.’

  ‘He does sleep in the cowshed sometimes,’ says Ada.

  ‘I thought he might have gone to meet your father.’

  Cissy is tightening her hair, she’s pressing an arm against the doorframe as she checks the sole of one black boot. She doesn’t bother to say, ‘I’m going out to look for him.’ They know she’ll go out to look. Mary has been waiting for Cissy to come and do exactly this: make the gestures that mean she’s preparing herself to go out and find Denny. Cissy might be capable of standing at the gate and hauling the whole plain in like a net. Trees and fences will come with it, flocks of sheep, paddocks of wheat, the railway, and also Denny—Cissy will catch him up and bring him in. Mary would like to step across the room and press her forehead against her capable daughter’s shoulder. But Cissy doesn’t like to be touched. She’s ready to go, having tapped the boot hard against the side of the doorway—she always complains of stones lodged in the soles of her boots—and taken a drink of water.

  ‘Which way did he go?’ she asks.

  Mary points.

  Ada hands Cissy her everyday hat, which is an old one of Mary’s: it has a tiny hole in the crown and no ribbons.

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ says Ada.

  But Cissy is issuing instructions: Ada to the dam, Noella to the creek. Mary hears Cissy say, ‘Joy, you climb the red hill,’ and Joy, who is always reluctant to climb the hill, says, ‘He won’t be up there.’

  Cissy huffs and says, ‘Probably not, but you can see for miles.’ She turns to Mary. ‘You and Lott will be here when he gets home.’

  Cissy squares the battered hat on her narrow head. It makes her head seem separate from her body, which is still dressed in its wedding clothes.

  ‘Your dress!’ says Joy.

  ‘My dress, my dress,’ says Cissy. She steps onto the verandah, marches down the path, opens the gate and closes it, and strides across the road. Mary watches Cissy walk onto the plain. She seems to sail over the thorny ground, with nothing to stop her step or catch her skirt. It’s as if there’s nothing there but Cissy—no plants or rocks or flies, no sun or temperature at all, and Mary is proud to have made this girl, this daughter, who will find Denny and bring him home.

  The Axams of Thalassa do come to Minna Baumann’s wedding breakfast. First up the path come the two Axam boys (only they aren’t boys, they’re men in their thirties, shortish, squarish, with high surprised foreheads): George and Ralph, without their wives. And after them their mother, Joanna, her hair the kind of white that was once blonde, and all of her upper body covered in a cashmere shawl of fine navy so long that at the back, where the shawl dips to a point, the fringe almost touches the ground. Joanna Axam wears the shawl to hide her left arm, which she injured a year ago in a riding accident. Because she considers the shawl a kind of disguise, it’s the most beautiful she could buy in Adelaide. Otherwise, Joanna favours practical clothing in grey and brown; small, tight hats for her small, tight head; sensible hairstyles; and sturdy shoes. Even to a wedding, she wears clothes that make people think of horses.

  The Axams come to the breakfast, although they weren’t in church for the service—shearing starts next week, protested George Axam, what do they expect, we don’t have all the time in the world for weddings. And his brother Ralph said, we’ll go for an hour. George’s wife approved of this (she’s only at Thalassa because the Swedish artist came to stay, she’ll leave as soon as possible, they should convey her regrets but please not make her endure a policeman’s wedding), and Ralph’s wife’s opinion is irrelevant: she’s pregnant and in Adelaide.

  Joanna thinks they should have been in church. Otho Baumann was an enormous help when he came to Thalassa as overseer after Joanna’s husband died, and it would be right to honour Otho’s widow and daughter by attending the entire wedding. Joanna pointed this out to her sons, to no effect. Since her accident, they seem to have decided that all she needs from them is to be asked about her health. Having enquired, and made a modicum of fuss, they can withdraw. It’s been quite startling to Joanna, in fact, to hold so little sway in her own household, and so suddenly. Where once she would have marched her sons to every minute of the Baumann wedding—in memory of Otho Baumann—she can manage only an hour of the breakfast now.

  But heavens, what an insufferable bore Otho Baumann was, what a German, always riding about on enormous horses like a fat medieval knight, the skin under his eyes sagging so much that the bright red of his inner eyelids showed. It made looking at him a kind of violence. Joanna hadn’t been surprised to learn of his death from heart congestion—had felt some satisfaction, even, because her own husband died young, and since then she has understood that marriage includes death, a fact that people ought to acknowledge sooner. She does pity Wilhelmina, Otho’s wife, in principle. But then you visit the Baumann house—today, for example, arriving for the wedding breakfast—and you see Wilhelmina swathed in her permanent mourning, as if she thinks the privileges of grief should be accorded to her forever, and she makes one of those graciously apologetic gestures from her wheelchair to remind you that she can’t rise or walk or come to greet you, and that you must come to her. Then Wilhelmina is hard to pity.

  Joanna remembers the young Willie Baumann as an agile woman, if somewhat colourless. Now she’s enthroned in her immobility, so that Joanna Axam and her sons are required to walk to Wilhelmina, adjust their faces, bend down towards her frizzed forehead and accept her proffered hand. Her hands have always been lovely, as if they’ve never touched wood or water, and on her right ring finger she wears a large red opal. Wilhelmina claims it’s a Hungarian death opal, one that will lose its fire as soon as its owner dies. Joanna admires the opal, would like it for herself, and she suspects—this is fanciful, yes—but she’s almost sure she’s seen the opal flicker in her presence, as if it’s prepared to switch allegiances.

  Already the maid is hovering with a chair for Joanna, and the two widows sit side by side on the verandah. Joanna leans in towards Wilhelmina (who since taking to the chair speaks in a deliberately quiet voice) and the guests looking over at them see their companionable heads, their dark dresses and their dogged persistence. They see how old we are, Joanna thinks—everyone ages at a wedding, while the bride and groom grow young. If Willie and I died tomorrow, the newspapers would call us ‘relic of the late Otho’ and ‘relic of the late Henry’. She makes sure to shoo the flies from her face without sending them to Wilhelmina.

  Minna Baumann brings her policeman groom to be introduced. Apparently Joanna has met this Robert Manning before; well, she thinks, I’ve met most people. Minna has found herself a husband with good square shoulders (her sons’ slope)—look at his whole wide permanent face, each freckle as dependable as a brick. This one, thinks Joanna, will be a long time dying. She approves, but then she’s always approved of lively, pretty Minna.

  Joanna’s sons wander through the crowd, drinking and laughing. The boys often resist coming to this sort of occasion, then find themselves surprised by pleasure. Certainly they’re enjoying this more than they enjoyed the visit of the Swedish painter, Mr Rapp, who intimidated them—they’d preferred Rapp’s wife, who’d asked about maps and routes and permanent water sources. Mrs Rapp’s questions gave George and Ralph the opportunity to approve or alter the Rapps’ intended path north to Wilpena Pound; they could give advice and argue with one another. They warmed to Rapp once he expressed his enthusiasm for river red gums that have been toppled by floods and now lie with their roots exposed. George and Ralph sent him out to some excellent specimens, perfect for painting, and Joanna saw in them a pride that a man like this, an artist, required their assistance and admired their big dead trees; this also made it possible to laugh at him.

  Joanna’s boys are used to spending their days with station hands, shearers, teamsters and shepherds; as a result, they can be uneasy when encountering their peers in Adelaide. But their manner at Wilhelmina’s is just right. The people here care as they do about the time of year, the shearing or the harvest, about the weather, and often when they meet the Fairly men it’s on the cricket field or at the races, when Thalassa and the town compete, so there’s an elastic kind of rivalry between them, amiable, robust—it generates conversation, it gives them gestures and phrases, it provides. At present, George is holding forth in a circle of blacksmiths, bankers and shopkeepers, and he’s flushed with the gratification of it.

  Wilhelmina Baumann is speaking in her quiet voice, folded as neatly as her hands. ‘Such a pity to have missed the church,’ she says, and Joanna says, ‘The storm, my dear, the dust.’

  In fact, it wasn’t the storm that kept the Axams from the church, though it did delay them—they hadn’t left for Fairly until it passed. They’d all been ready, too—dressed, the horses harnessed to the carriage—when it came pouring down from the north, and they’d had to take shelter in the stable. Ralph filled his pipe, despite George’s ban on smoking in that particular building, and said nothing more than, ‘It’s come up pretty sharp.’ George paced back and forth, fretting about the sheep, threatening to abandon the wedding altogether.