‘A storm like this could go on for hours!’ he cried. It lasted thirty minutes.

  But when Wilhelmina says it was a pity to have missed the church, she’s speaking of herself, apparently—of the fact that she couldn’t be present for the ceremony. ‘I always thought,’ she says, ‘to see my daughter married.’

  Wilhelmina says ‘my daughter’ in a way that also sounds like ‘meine Tochter’—speaking, as she often does, somewhere between two languages so that no one can forget her facility with both. Or perhaps she does this only with Joanna, who Wilhelmina knows to be one-quarter German and unable to speak a word.

  ‘She makes a lovely bride,’ Joanna says, looking over at Minna.

  Minna is talking with Ralph, the youngest Axam son, whom Joanna—and no one else—calls by his childhood nickname: Bear. Minna is very animated—well, it’s her wedding day—and Bear is leaning in to her pretty ear, saying something that makes her laugh. Minna’s laugh is genuine, and poor old baffled Bear goes quite red, and for the first time it occurs to Joanna that Wilhelmina Baumann might once have hoped for some connection, through her daughter, with the Axams; that she’s disappointed in Minna’s constable, who will prove so steadfast. But oh, Joanna wants to say, my sons are entirely unremarkable.

  Wilhelmina looks appraisingly at Minna. ‘Mr Rapp wanted to paint her.’

  ‘Mr Rapp paints landscapes, not portraits,’ Joanna says.

  ‘A charming man. We had a most pleasant day when he came to dine, and to speak my own tongue with such a one—what pleasure.’

  Joanna has grown tired of the Swedish painter’s charm, is glad he has left her house, and dislikes talking about him. ‘Mrs Rapp also speaks German,’ she says. Joanna considers Mrs Rapp far more impressive than her handsome husband.

  ‘Well enough,’ Wilhelmina allows.

  ‘And French,’ Joanna says. ‘I believe they met in Paris.’

  Wilhelmina glitters in her chair. ‘You know, I trust, that Mrs Rapp’s father lost the largest textile mill in northern England, and a fortune along with it.’ She lowers her voice further. ‘A player of cards.’

  Other guests approach before Joanna can convey that she is indifferent to this gossip; now she must sit silently, smiling and nodding, to make sure that Wilhelmina is given her due as hostess. The Axams have missed, apparently, the shocking collapse of the vicar, who seems well enough now, if a touch moist at the hairline. Mr Daniels comes to Joanna’s side and speaks at length about the constant expense of the kerosene with which he lights the church. Finally, George steps up and whispers into Joanna’s stifled ear, ‘We must get back.’

  Wilhelmina says goodbye with excruciating grace, and Minna with real affection, and even Minna’s constable waves them off so that it almost feels as if she, Joanna, is the one who’s just been married and is leaving her own breakfast. No one speaks much on the way home, but when the setting sun is so red on the western horizon that it looks like a fire come to consume the world, Joanna lifts her veil and says, involuntarily, ‘Oh.’

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Bear asks.

  ‘Nothing at all,’ Joanna says. ‘Don’t fuss. I simply noticed the sunset.’

  George peers up at the sky without interest.

  Bear says, ‘That’s the dust from the storm still in the air. Makes the sky red.’ He yawns and shifts his trousers over his knees. His wife, nearing the end of her first pregnancy, has been instructed to delay giving birth until the shearing is over and done with. What kind of father will Bear be? Joanna wonders. What kind of man have I made him? Loving, noisy, impressed by his own achievement. The kind who answers questions no one asks.

  Mathew Wallace, Denny’s father, has spent the day sowing parsnips with his one hired hand, Billy Rough. They’ve sown in half-mile rows, and at the end of each row one of Mathew’s big Shire horses—stubborn, moody Treat—insisted on stopping to sniff at the ground; precious time was wasted in coaxing him to move his enormous, feathered feet. During the dust storm, which they weathered in a dense brace of mallee, the other horse in the pair spooked and had to be calmed. Now that they’re knocking off, both men and horses are irritable and covered in dirt. The men loosen the horses out of the yoke and walk behind them until they’re near Billy’s hut. Mathew says, ‘Get on and give yourself a wash. You look like you’ve been ate and spewed up again.’

  Billy laughs, sings out, ‘G’night’, and peels off.

  Now Mathew is alone on his land and he likes this feeling, especially when the day is ending and he’s about to leave home for a while. At this time of year—shearing season—he always takes a dray and team of Shires into Fairly, picks up stores of flour, tea and sugar, and carries them to the stations in the far north of the plain; he loads up bales of wool at those stations and brings that wool back to the railway. He plans to leave for these rounds the day after tomorrow. He’ll spend the next two months going back and forth with stores and wool, station to railway, one station to the next, while the shearing goes on and after the shearing; he will rarely sleep at home. These are the crucial months in which Mathew’s wheat will thrive or fail and there’s nothing he can do but cart wool and pray for rain. People at the stations always welcome Mathew Wallace and his high horses. Wallace will bring up the chaff! Wallace will get away the wool! Wallace will drive his team down the sloping passes, shouting, ‘Tell the wool to get off and walk!’ His surefootedness comes right out of the East Anglian fenlands. One of his ears blooms, puffy and misshapen, from the side of his head. He believes there’s a power with which he can bargain in order to make everything turn out right.

  He’s only had one pair of his big Shires out today, and they know the way home: they follow a familiar track towards the red hill that stands beside Mathew’s house. Mathew has named his farm Undelcarra, which means ‘under hill’ in the language of the blacks—though Billy, who is black, says it doesn’t, or that it depends which language, or that it just depends. Undelcarra is forty times larger than the Huntingdonshire smallholding on which Mathew grew up. Half of his four hundred South Australian acres are under wheat; the rest is saltbush and dry soil and every fly that ever bothered God.

  From Billy’s hut, it takes Mathew half an hour to walk to the red hill and the house beneath it. He thinks, as he walks, of various habitual gripes and satisfactions—a gelding with a hoof abscess, what he’s likely to be paid for this year’s carting, the decent price he got on the parsnip seed, how soon until they can afford to keep a pig again—all of which are minor proddings at major fears: that he’ll default on the mortgage, the principal of which is due next year; that with a more lively wife he might have got on better; that five is a lot of daughters. He walks alongside his wheat, which is knee height and green enough, and doesn’t look too knocked about by the dust storm. The winter has been wet; now they need a good wet spring. The last two harvests failed. The sky is bright as a burning field.

  As Mathew approaches the house, he sees light at the windows. He built that house, hauled the stone for the walls, split the flagstones for the hearth, burned the lime and cut the planks of wood for the deep verandah. He pulls out his pipe as he walks with the horses, pleased with what he sees: the red hill with the sun behind it, the lone cypress pine growing on top of the hill, the house in the hill’s shadow and the light in the house’s windows. He likes knowing that his wife is inside with the children, and that, without him, there’d be no house, no kids, and kangaroos would eat dry saltbush where Mary has her garden. This makes the light of the house seem stronger.

  Mathew has faith in the knowledge of the body, which is full of ancient memory. He trusts in the customary shape of things, assuming that children and marriages and farms grow into their ordained forms, just as plants and animals do. If his faith wavers—and it does, at times, in this dry country—he reminds himself of certain truths: that he was meant to hear, in a church at Ely, a preacher crying out, saying, ‘Act now, change everything, trust God, and prepare yourself to work!’ He was meant to go with that preacher to South Australia; to work alongside him and his followers in the settlement at Encounter Bay; to propose marriage to the preacher’s daughter. Her father was unsure—Mary’s hearing was poor, she wasn’t meant for the fields, was brought up only to light work; the preacher wanted to wait and seek God’s will. But who knew how long that would take? Mathew reminded the preacher that his father, back in East Anglia, owned the land he farmed; he promised that Mary would never step foot in a field. There was no refusing him. And now the house is built, the girl is married, the babies are born, and Mary’s father lives hundreds of miles to the south.

  Mathew pulls at his pipe. He senses movement behind him—it might be a rabbit or a rat, but it turns out to be Cissy.

  ‘Dad,’ she says, and he squints hard to see her. She’s a dim shape in the last red light and carries a lantern, which is shaded, and he thinks that if a girl can get this near without his hearing her, he’s getting old. She stands beside him, and the horses nod and grunt. ‘We’ve been waiting for you.’

  Mathew looks towards the house. Mary’s silhouette appears on the verandah; she’s holding one of the younger ones, either Lotta or Denny.

  ‘Well, old girl,’ Mathew says.

  ‘We can’t find Denny,’ Cissy says. ‘He’s lost. We thought he might’ve gone to you in the storm.’

  Mathew’s first thought is that the boy is playing a trick. He’s not a devious boy, but he gets silly fancies and little frights. He likes surprising people with gifts and games.

  ‘I’ve not seen him.’

  ‘We’ve looked all round,’ says Cissy.

  Mathew’s next thought is that he has no time for this: he has work ahead of him in the stable tonight, preparations to make tomorrow, and a promise to be in Fairly with the dray and team the day after. The boy, Mathew thinks, can stay out all night if he wants to, and he says, ‘Walk on,’ to get everyone moving again. Part of him believes that he will get to the house and find his son safe inside it.

  ‘I need to get these two put away,’ he says, dipping his head at the horses.

  Cissy seems about to say something, but she stops herself; she runs back to the house, her lantern swinging. She meets her mother at the gate, they speak with their faces close together—Lotta’s face between theirs—and by the time Mathew reaches them he feels a tug of fear.

  ‘You can see as I don’t have the boy,’ he says to Mary. He’s ashamed of not having Denny with him, and his body knows that, of all things, shame is the worst. ‘I’ve come from up Snake Paddock and never seen him.’

  Mary looks at Mathew, as she often does, as if something has confused her. He knows she finds him hard to lip-read, though in her presence he tries to keep the fen out of his voice, along with any phrase she might consider common. But this expression isn’t the one she gets when she hasn’t heard him: it’s her more general look of bafflement at having found herself here, in this place, with these people. As always, her confusion undoes him; as does the fact that, to make sure she hears him, he must lean in to her left ear, which smells of powdery violets. He says, ‘Ah, you’re worried, Mary. But he’ll have got caught up, is all, and be back by teatime. Look, the sun’s not down yet.’ He points towards the shrinking sun.

  Mary doesn’t look at the sun. ‘It isn’t like him,’ she says.

  Mathew disagrees—he knows his son to be a daydreamer—but doesn’t contradict her. If I remain calm, he thinks, she’ll not be worried; and if she’s not worried, there’s nothing to fear. ‘If he’s not back when I’m finished with the horses, I’ll go for Billy and we’ll look.’

  ‘Yes,’ Mary says.

  ‘We can look after the horses,’ Cissy offers. She turns to Joy, who is standing on the verandah, and yells, ‘Put on your apron, we’re feeding the horses.’

  Joy shrugs and goes inside.

  ‘These two here need cleaning up,’ says Mathew.

  ‘I know that,’ Cissy says. ‘We’ll do it.’

  ‘It’s careful work,’ he says. ‘It’s cold nights, so—’

  ‘Don’t wet their bellies,’ Cissy recites. ‘No water above the knee.’

  ‘It’s careful work.’

  ‘What about the constable?’ Cissy says. ‘I could fetch him.’

  ‘You’ll stop home with your mam,’ says Mathew. Mary isn’t looking at him; she’s looking out into the dusk. What does she see out there? Another life, in which none of this is happening? Lotta sighs as if deeply bored. Mathew turns his back on them and calls out, ‘Denny!’

  Cissy says, ‘When that shepherd was lost last summer, they went out with a tracker. The police did.’

  Mathew calls again, ‘Denny! Show yourself now, Denny! I’ll count to ten!’

  ‘We’ve been calling for hours,’ Cissy says.

  Mathew calls, ‘One! Two! Three!’, and when Mary says, ‘Hush now, hush now, darling,’ he turns to her in anger; but she’s bent her head to Lotta’s and is quieting the child, who’s crying.

  The black dog, Mopsy, comes tearing up the path with her strange whinny, more like a foal than a bitch.

  ‘She wants her supper,’ Mary says, and then, to Mathew, ‘You’ll need food to take out with you.’

  ‘A bit of bread would do it,’ Mathew says. He thinks of his oldest child, his first son, who said one day that he wanted to join a stock drive north into unknown country, and Mathew told him no. Did Joe obey his father? Certainly not—he was young and knew his mind, or thought he did. And Mathew, fuming, drove him off.

  Cissy leads the horses into the yard. ‘Not a drop above the knee,’ he calls, though he’s about to follow her, to saddle his riding horse. Mopsy gives one demanding yap.

  Lotta, blinking, looks up at him as if she’s just noticed the dark and the presence of other people.

  Mathew turns to Mary. ‘Keep a lamp burning overnight.’

  Mary nods. If Mathew were at the supper table and felt this surge of love, he would reach over, fluff someone’s hair and say, ‘Sit straight.’ Now he’ll ride away on Bonfire, chewing on Mary’s bread; he’ll collect Billy and tonight they’ll find Denny. Then the carting will pay well, they’ll have a wet spring, the wheat will thrive and the principal will be paid on the mortgage. When he rides home again tonight with Denny safe, Mary will smile at him and say, ‘You’ve done well, you’re a good man, I was right to marry you and I’m content.’

  When the sun had almost set, the boy found a rock that formed a kind of seat and sat on it, his legs outstretched. This was the time of day when the sun touched the red hill and the gods came creeping out of it—out of the sun. They parted the branches of the cypress tree and stepped with care over the rocks at the top of the hill. They ran like water down the hill, and their footsteps were like water around the corners of the house. Denny was aware that these were not the only gods. There was also the Bible God, who loved him. Sometimes his mother read aloud from a book of old stories about many gods from olden times, who roared and thundered. They each had jobs to do, like men, and were in charge of things like the sea and music, but those were not the boy’s gods. His gods took charge of nothing. They watched men work and laughed at them. His gods weren’t good or bad. But they spoke of him, he thought, with special care, though he had never heard them speak. And he hated the red hill.

  He hadn’t cried yet. He wasn’t a boy who cried much, but when he did, it was in loud gulps. Other boys had called him ‘sissy’, but Cissy was the bravest person he knew. He had, earlier, wet his boots when he piddled, and after that they’d felt much heavier. But he couldn’t take them off by himself, so they’d stayed there on his tired feet, laced tight. Sitting on the rock, he tapped the toes together. He didn’t like wearing boots; but he did it, when he had to, to please his mother.

  He had his knife with him, the one Dad was teaching him how to skin possums with. He could use his knife to cut the laces from his boots but Mam wouldn’t like that. He’d done it once before, and then she’d had to talk to the hawkers when they came to the house selling shoelaces. The hawkers had quick, showy hands. The boy liked them, especially the one who pulled his wagon with a team of goats, but Mam didn’t. So he decided not to cut his laces. He thought of other uses for his knife. He could make marks on trees, as his father had told him to do if he was ever lost. But was he truly lost? Or was he like a glove or spoon that someone couldn’t find; they’d call out, ‘I’ve lost it!’ and Cissy would say, ‘It isn’t lost, you just don’t know where it is.’ He wasn’t sure what being lost felt like. The way he felt reminded him of seeing the moon shining in a cup of water, and when someone moved the cup, the moon was gone.

  The light had almost faded, little rat things rummaged in the grass, the last crows flew towards the dark. The air grew colder and the boy was hungry. The sky looked as if someone had sprinkled sugar over it, shaken the sugar, then crushed it in. The boy walked up into the sky and tasted the sugar; he walked across the sky and found himself on another rock in another part of the plain. He was somewhere else, but this rock looked the same as the first one he’d sat down on. There was dust in his teeth, his nose, his fingernails and the roots of his hair. He was thirstier than he was hungry. When he closed his eyes, he saw his mother walk away from him into the house and lock the door behind her. The boy still had his sack. He laid it out across his legs and waited for the morning.

  FIRST NIGHT

  The Swedish painter’s name is Karl: Karl Rapp. His English wife’s name is Elizabeth, but he calls her Bess. On the night of Minna Baumann’s wedding, they lie by the embers of their campfire in the hills north-east of Fairly and Karl says, ‘There’s a light I want, I haven’t seen it since that morning with the crows—like green glass coming down. It’s a morning light.’