BERNIE

February. This month is the cruellest, in temperature and circumstance. The air is crispy with heat and it’s only just after dawn. Sunday morning and I haven’t slept except for a horrible dream, running through some maze of foreign streets with a bolt of sapphire shantung unravelling behind me, in flames. Because Singapore has fallen. The jewel in the crown of the Empire is gone. Truly. Darwin has been bombed too, and with it Sydney seaside property values: you couldn’t sell Arcadia now for five bob with the wireless thrown in. And still the Americans haven’t come. Because their hands are full in the Philippines, and of course there was that business of them losing half their ships and planes in Hawaii while I was underwater, wasn’t there.

I don’t want to get up. But I have to. These Japs won’t get to me. Can’t. I will stretch my hope three times from here to Jupiter and it won’t break no matter what they do. At least it is Sunday and Mrs Lockhart is religious enough that the wireless is not switched on, so I can’t hear that anything worse has happened. But still, Sundays I can hear the silence stretching, from all the personal ads I’ve put in the papers, from the Sydney Herald, to the Northern Standard in Darwin, the Courier Mail in Brisbane, Townsville Daily, Cairns Post, and the Rural Press across the northwest from Armidale to Broken Hill: Bernadette Cooper searching for Gordon Brock call urgently Hay X 43. A continent of silence.

Apart from the bombs dropping on Darwin, about which the Department of Information is saying: What’s a few bombs to us? No one died. Just as no one’s died in New Britain either. Department of Lies.

Get up: I’m not giving in to this.

Neither is Mr Curtin. He’s made the US Army an offer of heavily discounted pork if they help us. How could they refuse?

Stop it, Missy.

Losing hope is an indulgence I’ve got no time for. Or at least I’ve got better things to do. There is always plenty to do, even on a Sunday in a little country town. Go to church with Mrs Lockhart and be reminded by the calm and gentle certainty of the Reverend Shepherd – truly – that I have two hands and a heart to help, and no giving is too small a gift. That way salvation lies, and the other way of eternal pain is reserved for the manufacturers of munitions, and the bank managers and pressmen who facilitate their devilry. Yea verily, those suffering with this drought suffer just the same as those who suffer bombs, only a lot more quietly and never in the news at all. Rejoice that you are not a sheep. Or a bean. Be happy for an hour or so listening to Mum and Dad bickering over my state of Presbyterianism.

Then, after lunch, while Mrs Lockhart dutifully breaks the Sabbath running up ever more blackout curtains ahead of the Jap invasion of these pitiless burnt-toast plains, I’ll plod over to the camp on Odds, and I’ll spend the afternoon with the Werner boys, doing something listless. Even Alby is spent in this heat, can’t be bothered looking at his little brother – does one need more evidence that Hughie can be merciful? I’ll read them a story, Paterson poems in an accent so broad my jaw won’t move at all, or I might just lie on the floor of the dining room breathing in the charcoal air and listening to Mrs Zoc tell me that she is one hundred and fifteen percent certain, bella, that Gordon is all right. He has to be. She says: I would know, Bernadetta, believe me, he is like a son to me, he is my good boy, I would know.

Know that she is a madwoman and that I am too, as I go to the dressing table now, automatic reflex picking up my hair comb, the one he gave me, pressing the little spray of amethyst daisies to my lips, Thinking of you . . . And no one in this town will say it’s too sparkly a thing to wear to church, because everyone the length of the Paddock from Deniliquin to Wilcannia knows why I wear it: because they’re all mad enough themselves to know that if I wear it religiously I can make him safe. I fix it into my hair now before I’ve even got dressed, a little spray of mauve sea, and my Good Companion looks at me, from where it sits on the floor beside the wardrobe, in its case, untouched since …

Something nags at me, that I should write against this. But I don’t know what I mean by that. I don’t know what I might write. Not Eugenia’s flight of fancy. That’s gone too. Something else. Maybe something true.

Open up my marquetry box of precious things, my portable Arcadia, and I take out the newspaper photograph of us that sits on top of Mum and Dad’s bits and pieces, and I look into his lovely face, his lovely eyes, full of promise, ready for anything, and I’m sure he must be all right, too. Out there … somewhere … I lift the clipping out of the box, to read our nice Aussie story that I know off by heart – Gordon Brock of Nyngan with his fiancée Bernadette Cooper at Sydney Flying Boat Terminal, Rose Bay. Mr Brock is on his way to New Guinea – and Mum’s wedding band falls out from one of the folds behind it. Plain, gold. Rose gold so coppery it became the shape of her finger over time; they couldn’t afford better, couldn’t afford an engagement ring either, but this one alone is perfect, a perfect wobbly circle, perfect because Dad bought it with every hope and promise in him.

Courage. Put it in my pocket with my jasper B, and for another day it’s mine.