July 1965

There was a note on her desk when she arrived: a profile of a visiting English writer. Born and raised in Sydney—Judith smiled from her editor’s chair—at least until she was nine or ten. Elderly now. But there’s a new book coming out, or a reprint or some such, you’ll have to check. She pushed a memo across the desk. You’re interested in these half-forgotten women.

An accusation, Pearl thought, raising her brows. What’s elderly? She looked at the note, frowned. Constance Shaw.

Never heard of her. Seventy? Judith was looking at the story list, scribbling notes. A curmudgeon apparently. Contrary. But better than anything else I’ve got for you here. She shuffled the other papers on her desk, dismissing her.

Pearl took the memo and stood. I don’t mind contrary, she said, and went off to check the library for information.

The file on Constance Shaw was thin, most of the clippings old. Short pieces on the novels she’d published in America and England, one in Paris. Well-received, mostly. One profile noted her “short temper” in interviews, her refusal to give straight answers. Shaw was critical of what she called “the middle ground of England,” its irrational fears. In another story a reviewer mentioned socialism in accusatory tones; the word “cantankerous” was mentioned more than once. Pearl thought she might like her.

She called the number Judith had given her. Was about to give up, and then a voice, low but clear: Yes? Within a minute, perhaps, it was arranged. Come at eleven, the voice said. But no photographs, not today. Pearl rang off and looked at the clock. Ten-fifteen. Jesus. She threw notebook and pencils into her bag and ran for the taxi stand.

Balmain: Pearl watched through the passenger window as the suburb rolled by. Old, desiccated. It was as if handfuls of Sydney had been seized and scattered here, part handsome, part rotting, flotsam washed up on the shore at the bottom of Darling Street and blown up the hill. Everything and nothing was here, and none of it seemed to match: factories shouldered pubs and houses, lanes pushed up beside terraces and old metal works and down by abandoned shipyards and churches. And through the spires and chimneys and sprays of bougainvillea, past the gables and brick: flashes of blue, slices of harbor. She asked the cab driver to let her off near the shops, so she could walk among the clutter of buildings and noises to the address near Ewenton Street. Years ago, after the move to Manly, she would do this every few months, catch the ferry over, walk up and down. Looking for signs of herself. For a residue of beauty. This was where she’d run as a child.

Did it matter, the absence of beauty? If you grew up in unlovely streets, did you grow unlovely too? There was part of her still that could not answer no. A part that knew beauty counted, or at least the form of things. If you were born to the dailiness of the Eiffel Tower, the elegance of its leap, it would surely pierce your dreams, inform your earthly desires. Your ambition. Slipping silently beneath your young skin so you didn’t realize, not then, what had made you.

But by the time she was a teenager she knew: a childhood in Balmain meant certain assumptions were made about you. She knew she was appraised by others in a way a North Shore girl was not. As if Balmain was not just where she lived but who she was. As if she’d breathed in squalor, that it leaked out through her pores. For a long time she might have believed it herself, worried that her eyes might filter bleakness, might process it differently than theirs. That she would not know beauty when she saw it. But not anymore. Years after her mother’s death she saw it for what it was. A kind of social conspiracy. She was relieved; could love it as she always had. Saw that her preference for odd-shaped houses, for lanes that bent and went nowhere, began here.

It was barely altered. Still down at heel and crumbling. As a child she’d never stopped to appraise the place: it was what it was: her home. All tar and stone and irregularity, the air acrid with tallow and smoke. Now she could see that it was true, there had been no collective urge to beautify, to upkeep. It was rough. The fact wasn’t remarkable; no one noticed. Why would they? Everyone lived and worked and went to school within its margins, within its uniform dishevelment.

In her childhood, the whole suburb was at eye level, more or less, except the cranes in the shipyard and the factory chimneys, and even then, nothing lined up straight, nothing was plumb. Dog’s breakfast, her mother had said, but this was what Pearl loved most, the unpredictability, the sudden dead ends and surprising corners, the wayward streets. And really, so did Amy. Even the sky is uneven, she’d say, laughing. And it was true. Its pitch was determined by where you were standing, by what you could smell and hear. Only the harbor was constant. The masts and sails and tugs at the horizon were ever-moving reminders of the sea.

She walked towards Datchett Street. Their own house had been like most others, uneven, squeezed up against another and hemmed by a neighbor’s wall. In the scrap of yard her mother grew spinach and carrots. Peas tendriled on a wire. In spring jasmine splayed, and once she’d grown a climbing rose her father named Pearl. But its tiny blooms were red, and Pearl was not unhappy when it was dashed to pieces in a storm. She’d wanted creamy white, not red, she’d wanted subtlety and beauty. Well, I loved them, her mother said as she gathered the debris that day and one of the twins cried out from a thorn. But Pearl was unmoved.

The little house was different now, partly repaired and extended, its roof replaced. There were roses once more, overblown and languid on a picket fence. Pearl stood on the opposite side of the road and wondered if the new people felt the old beneath their feet, the rough scales of the lives lived here before them. The cries and laughter of children, the plunge and knot of grief. If Suze was right and everyone was linked somehow, the life of every single person drifting through another, then surely these people would feel the rub of her parents’ hard days, the relentless grinding hours.

A breeze came up the hill from the water and Pearl adjusted her shoulder bag. Constance Shaw, then.

Number sixty-two was a house of old brick and faded weatherboards. Some kind of vine, its few ragged flowers, crept along the veranda rails, against peeling window frames. But the garden was neat and the bones of the building were good. It held itself well, like a rich dowager refusing the effects of age, or hard times.

Pearl climbed the steps that clung to the side of the house. The woman who answered the door did not look rich or famous. Or act it, at any rate. She didn’t wait for Pearl’s greeting but turned back into the light-filled flat, shuffling in slippers, a newspaper in her hand. Not sure about all this, said Constance Shaw, lowering herself into a cane chair by the window and motioning Pearl towards the other. But it breaks up the day. What is your name?

Pearl closed the door and stood for a moment, adjusting her scarf, sweeping the room with a journalist’s eye. Thinking: she matches the room, the house. A kind of rough-edged gentility, a studied carelessness: well-cut jacket though the slippers were worn at the heel, sagging cane chairs that looked out over an expensive view. Sidney Nolan hung above a red laminex table. The carpet worn to nothing beneath it.

Pearl Keogh.

Constance Shaw struck a match to a cigarette held between long fingers. Inhaled in a short breath, leaned back. Keogh, she said, exhaling. Let me guess. Irish Catholic. She regarded Pearl through smoke as she sat opposite her, retrieving notebook and pencils.

Pearl straightened her skirt. She didn’t much like the woman’s tone, but looked her in the eye and smiled. Is it strange to be home?

Constance looked to the ceiling, where mold bloomed in delicate tracery. The Catholics run the newspapers here. She drew once more on the cigarette, blew smoke through an open window sash. Home. Strange, yes. Discomforting. I find I’m appalled and consoled at the same time.

The pencil moved noiselessly over Pearl’s notebook. She began to prickle with anticipation. Constance was irascible, clever; the usual platitudes had already been foregone. Already they’d run roughshod over the usual rhythm of interviewing: the dissection, the gentle flaying, a subject’s skin peeled off so skillfully, they didn’t see their own fingers at work. Pearl lifted the pencil. Consoling and discomforting, she said. Like your work, perhaps.

There was a good hour of provocation—Greene’s a misogynist, how could you not see that? You have to get out of Sydney, my girl. Give me Brisbane or even Adelaide, Melbourne is so self-conscious. (Then why are you back? Pearl ventured. Constance sighed. At least dignify all this with a decent question, my dear.) And then Pearl detected a thaw, an adjustment in tone, an occasional flash of humor or warmth. Most surprising, the odd concession to Pearl’s own intelligence.

They had been discussing critics, book reviews. Constance waved her hand. They don’t like me here. Her tone arch, defensive again. Look, most critics are consumed with envy. Really. It’s a coward’s game. Why else would you do it? Only if you dearly wanted to write but were too afraid to.

Pearl let the words hang between them.

Don’t you think? Australian newspapers are so . . . pompous. And male. Full of swagger and certainty. It comes from feeling second-grade, I suppose. The suspicion that you’re not quite up to it. Constance had been watching the breeze flip leaves and papers along the footpath outside, but now she turned back to Pearl. I don’t know why a girl like you would waste your time with them.

Pearl thought: “Affront.” The things women had to do to be published. Aren’t newspapers the same everywhere? She’d flicked through international editions in the newsroom and already knew they were not. But Constance saw through her. Rhetorical, she said, frowning. Ask me a real question.

The clock ticked to one thirty, two. It had taken Pearl the first hour to breach the writer’s austerity, to establish a fledgling trust. She knew it was one of her strengths, to set a person at ease. She sought any common ground; it was invariably there, even if it was irrelevant to the interview. In this way she offered up her own vulnerability; they both, interviewer and subject, stepped into the arena together. After nearly a decade in the job, this was the best deal she could offer: to give as much of herself as she asked of the other.

As Constance warmed they spoke about her books, her life in London, the writer in private and in public. About reputation, melancholy, marriage. Love. The possibility of relinquishment.

Of relinquishment. A surprise in the tone Constance had used, making the word sound positive. To Pearl it had always smacked of grief, of loss, of things foregone or given up.

Whatever doesn’t work for you, the writer was saying. Relationships, guilt, shoes that pinch. The past. She raised her substantial brows. Clicked her fingers. Get rid of it. Vamoose.

Pearl watched her pencil press marks onto the page. But saw only the file on the library bench, the stories suggesting Constance had lied about her years in London, about her marriage, about the true subjects of her books. That she invented a history to suit each situation. She’d made no comment on these stories, ever, mounted no defense. (Though later Pearl would ask the literary editor, who remembered a quote in an old interview in The New York Times. Quizzed about the allegations, her version of things, Constance had said only: It is how I see it.)

Now Pearl glanced up at the woman sitting opposite her, winter sun on skin paled by her years in cold places. Her gray hair was drawn back in a chignon, leaving her face and its lines and shadows exposed. No makeup, no artifice; if she was prone to lying it wasn’t about her age. And if anyone was exaggerating, it was the editor; what exactly was elderly, she wondered again. Perhaps it meant something different when applied to a woman, because Constance was, what? Late sixties? No older. It occurred to her then that men like Henry might be confronted by women like Constance. Strong, successful, single, a public figure who called her own tune. Brought to heel by one word—elderly—a suitable punishment for breaking the rules. For being the one who got away.

Pearl decided she would not raise the question of lies and inventions now. Partly out of fear, it was true; the woman would eat her alive. But mostly out of respect. Pearl had begun to admire her. She went back to her notebook, thinking: who owns the facts of our lives anyway?

She was weighing the next question, trying to phrase it, when Constance spoke again. I’m weary, she said, and thirsty. Levering herself up from her chair. A vein in her hand swelled and settled. Come and have a drink with me. She shuffled to the kitchen table, pushed off her slippers and pulled on plain street shoes. Moved towards the door. Pearl was sure Constance was more upright than before, propelling herself now with assurance, with determination. She watched her fish in a jar and draw out a wad of notes, which she tucked into a pocket. Smoothed her hair. Desultory. Come on. The words spoken over her shoulder. We’ll go to the Royal Oak. You’ll need a drink too.

Pearl rose, suppressed a laugh that bulged in her throat, and followed.

As they reached the street Constance turned into another person. The shuffling gave way to a kind of hurtling walk laced with commentary, on the weather, her brother’s children, newspapers. For pity’s sake girl, the news pages are as bad as the women’s, she wheezed. The path was uphill, but her pace didn’t slow. At least in women’s you can do interviews like this. Something intelligent. Australian conservatism, American bluster, English naïveté. The compulsion of travel. Get out of the country. This as they slid at last into a booth in the ladies’ parlor of the hotel. It was almost empty after the lunchtime rush. Constance had ordered gin for them both from the barman before Pearl could speak. You’re a bright girl. Go to London, if you still want newspapers. Or Paris. Can you speak French?

The drinks arrived in tall glasses, cool to the touch. Pearl winced. So far she hadn’t managed a word.

Fleet Street. Constance spoke without looking at her. Chewed ice. It’s a different world. London will—what do they say?—blow your mind.

Pearl wanted to say: I can’t go to London. Or anywhere. Not now. But didn’t. Moved the conversation back to books, the ban on Lady Chatterley’s Lover, George Johnston’s Miles Franklin award.

Constance said: Should have gone to his wife. Brilliant, but her books are set in Greece. Those columns she writes—raising her glass to her lips—she should have got it for those. And for putting up with him. She lowered her voice. Let’s see if next year’s a woman, she said, as if she was thinking aloud.

They were quiet for a while, drinking, listening to the barmen unload beer barrels in the yard. The scrape of wood on concrete, sentences laced with expletives. And above it all, a crow barking.

But the young will win. Eventually. Constance had drained her glass. It’s only been days but I can see that, right enough. They’ll rise up. Vietnam, Aboriginal people. Women. They won’t take it. This young Dane at the opera house, all the jealous old men. They just wish they’d designed it.

Pearl thought of Axel, his obsession with the architect, his godlike vision of the man and his cathedral. Those people, he’d spat one day, indicating Macquarie Street, they have no idea. I think they are afraid of Utzon. Of the building. Or ashamed of it. That’s how they act.

Now, above the grunt of men hauling kegs, the sound of singing. Muted, as if someone had opened a car door and left the radio on. The two women leaned in unison towards it. “Joe Hill.” Paul Robeson, the voice thick as molasses, singular. When the song finished, Pearl said: He was here, five years ago, down at the opera house. He sang to the workers. The memory of his voice, the men listening. An Italian laborer had said to her, I will never forget this. Emotion stark on his wet face. She knew then that Robeson had made a memorial of the building, noun and verb.

He stands for them, Constance said. And for his people. He’s fearless. She paused. A shame he loved Stalin.

Pearl began to ask: Stalin? Constance didn’t hear. But he spoke against the fascists in Spain . . . You’re too young to remember. He said, “The artist must take sides.” The words hung between them like a banner.

Then Yes, Pearl said, I know.

Something like: “He must choose to fight for freedom or slavery.” Well, of course we must, all of us. Constance drained her glass and looked at Pearl levelly. That, my dear, is why I write. To take a side. If you’re looking for something to say about me, say that.

The cab ride back to the office might have taken hours. She sat in the front and urged the car on silently, anxious to be back. Constance had slumped as she left, looked suddenly older, or perhaps it was the gin. Faith, she’d said, her smile crooked as Pearl turned to the door. It’s like luck, my girl. You have to make your own. Get lucky and the world will love you.

Yes, she thought now as the city reared up, shining. Luck. As they’d talked about Robeson, the hero he was, a thunderbolt: the workers. Will and Jamie were workers. And they were their father’s sons: they would be in a union. She had no idea why she hadn’t thought of it before.

In the newsroom she left a note for the industrial roundsman, Peter, and went to the cafeteria for strong coffee. Then sat at her desk, typed up her notes, and began to draft the profile of Constance Shaw. The library file lay beside her notebook, open at the most recent photograph they had: a grainy portrait, five years old. Pearl consulted it every few minutes, reaching for something that was not in her notes. Something between the imperiousness, the almost regal bearing, and the generosity she allowed as, piece by piece, the carapace was breached. As some original version of Constance was allowed out.

Then Peter was walking towards her through the swarm of typewriters, a piece of folded paper in his hand. There’s the Missos, but start with the Builders and Laborers man, he said. Not sure how much he can help, or if he wants to. Stop-work meetings this week. He proffered the single page, with a single name and a number.

She made the call immediately, her voice contained. The union man, gruff, busy, said he’d see what he could do.

Axel leaned over the metal casting box. The day before, he and the men had filled the long rectangle with damp sand. This morning the wooden mold, pressed into and against it to create their impression. Now it had been removed; he could see the curves and lines were clean and clear. Sprays of color: red, the brown of tree bark, flecked the hollows. This was not the most anxious stage of the process but still he felt his breath shorten. As if the weight of air exhaled from a man’s chest might affect the texture. Might collapse the shape pressed into the sand, or the idea projected there. The months of thinking and reading this place, of translating vision and emotion, and now this first attempt to turn his thoughts solid. It was a trial only, a scale model—he had still to solve the technical problems of a full-size piece—but today he would finally move from theory and emotion to the tangible.

Behind him two men moved around the crucible, checking the temperature of the lead crystal glowing crimson within. Twelve hundred degrees centigrade. Axel turned to them; they nodded. He took three small pieces from the shelf beside him, items from his walks and searches, and placed them lightly into the sand. Each movement made with exactitude. When he finished and stood back, one of the men reached into the crucible and filled a ladle with molten glass. The heat was a living thing; sweat pricked their faces, the skin on their arms above the long thick gloves. Their eyes narrowed. But the form was soon full and alight with color, pulsing with its own life.

It was now a matter of watching, of vigilance.

He left the cast with three of the senior men and walked back to Bennelong Point. The whole day was yellow and blue, Sweden’s colors, and the winter air rang. As he walked, his lungs opened and he realized that, during the morning, he’d held his breath for long periods as the glass was poured and the pieces settled. Now his body unclenched. A girl smiled as she passed him and he knew he must be smiling too. Must be happy.

He walked through the site, nodding at men who recognized him now. But he was anxious to get to his shed, to the experimental pieces from the small furnace. It was important to test his ideas in this way, trying to feel, between wrist and glass, some expressive potential. The notion of perfection: it was still debated among the glassmakers and also among the students, who had been schooled in its necessity, their work judged against myriad bars, all subjective. Axel grimaced at some of their views and their taste, the hard symmetry that bored him, the cleanliness of it. Some glass artists were happy in that space, but to Axel it felt cold, bloodless. He was trying for something beyond it; for disturbance and emotion, the elusive quality of dreams. Ambiguity. Still, the mastery of skills and techniques was essential: he had to be sure that vision and idea did not collide with the practical matters of the hot shop.

It was most important now. He had been quietly experimenting in the privacy of his small shed with an old-fashioned Swedish method of blasting. Among his tools was a blast lamp, which used compressed air and sand. First he applied stencils on the parts to remain transparent; the blast lamp gave a matte finish to the remaining surface of the glass. But it required concentration, and peace.

After two hours of such intensity, he stopped, closed and locked his door, and blinked into sunlight. Turned without thinking towards the lunch shed where Jago and his friends ate their fragrant-smelling food, and the locals pretended theirs was superior. The week before, sitting among the men, Jago had been talking about beaches. Urged him to go to Bondi, the most beautiful beach in the world.

White sand, a perfect crescent, he’d said, his hands spread in front of him like a preacher. The sea cool and clean. And women. Women in bikinis. Boys on surfboards. Everyone happy, playing around like kids.

Axel had smiled at his enthusiasm. I like Manly, he’d said, shrugging. The beach is lovely there too, and I can take the ferry.

But it’s famous, my friend!

Coogee. The word rose up, a bit choked, from behind a sandwich. Got it all, the rocks, the cliffs, the pools. If we’re talking beautiful—

Tania Verstack. Low laughter rolled around the room. Someone said, I’d like to visit Tania.

Axel raised his brows, confused, and Jago shook his head. Beauty queen, he said. Miss Australia. Beautiful yes—his hands made an hourglass in the air—but really, she’s Russian.

Born in China. It was one of the Australians sitting among them.

Jago looked at them and grinned. Then you blokes can’t really claim her, he said.

She’s Miss Australia mate, if you haven’t noticed. The man’s friend this time, leaning back with his sandwich, ankles crossed. We grew her.

Jago inclined his head to the man, courteous. Let it go.

But today was Saturday; Jago didn’t often work the weekend shifts. Axel glanced inside the shed. No Jago. But remembering their conversation, he thought about Bondi. Found he was missing the ocean; particularly the push and pull of the surf, the build and collapse of waves, their energy as he entered them and the feeling he emerged with. Scrubbed and new. And despite the argument in the lunch shed he’d decided he would not go to Manly after all. It was too much part of his feelings for Pearl, so often like a rough tide that left him winded, beaten.

He looked up the bus timetable and set out with his towel and an orange and a newspaper in a bag. Bondi after all would give him something to write to Per about, to his mother. Everyone wanted to go to Bondi Beach.

When he finally stood on the steps of the pavilion he perused Jago’s “perfect crescent.” There were people on the beach despite the winter cool, but even the crowd could not dilute the deep colors of sand and sky, and in this soft sun the water was storybook blue. He breathed in salt air and stepped off between the beach umbrellas and oiled bodies on towels. As he reached the water he looked out to the horizon. Its endless promise: his father was out there, just beyond it.

Saturday morning and she’d slept late. Bridget was leaning against the wall near the taxi stand in a pose that said impatient. She twisted her lips and frowned. You could’ve rung, she said. I left a very cozy bed to get here on time. She raised her eyebrows.

Lucky you. Pearl tipped her head in the opposite direction and they fell into step together. Couldn’t ring, Bridge. She told her about the phone tap and Bridget stopped suddenly, forcing two women behind her to stop too. Pearl heard them curse as they maneuvered around.

But Bridget was motionless, staring at her. Shit, Pearl. Why didn’t you tell me? She shook her head slowly, then moved forward once more. Have you been to the cops?

The cops? The words a harsh cough. Pearl glanced around even as she spoke them, then back at her friend. But Bridget’s face was unmoved.

It is the cops! She spoke through pursed lips. Or ASIO spooks. Same thing. That’s what they do, for Christ’s sake. She looked sideways at Bridget. They tap phones, they follow people, they spy. Never, ever, go to the cops.

Bridget was quieter now. My uncle was a sergeant, she said, in the country. Not meeting Pearl’s eye. He was all right.

They’re watching me, Bridge. Listening to everything I say. The words harder than she intended. Pearl watched her friend’s eyes dim and her face flush pink beneath freckles. Just don’t trust coppers, okay? Specially uncles. She reached for her arm, squeezed. Okay?

Bridget shrugged, nodded. As they reached Della’s street and turned towards the house she said: Thanks for telling me. No one tells me anything. Then: I do the posters and fold leaflets and make lunch. But no one asks what I think.

They reached the gate of the terrace and its untended front garden. I hear things though. I’m not stupid. There’s something brewing, isn’t there?

There’s always something brewing. Pearl pushed the door open. It’s why we’re here on Saturday mornings, and not in bed. They inched past a bicycle in the hallway and into the empty kitchen.

I don’t mean the next demo at Central Something bigger.

Pearl pulled a typed page from her satchel and filled the jug. She shrugged. I’ve been lying a bit low, Bridge. Not in the loop.

Well, the boys are talking.

They went through the back door to a ramshackle shed. What are they saying? Inside they could hear Della at the mimeograph machine. Bridget’s hand was already on the doorknob. She shook her head.

All right, later. But remember, don’t call me, not even at work, Pearl said. Unless I tell you to.

Della talked about the new group as they checked the flyers that chugged out of the machine. All women, she said, all middle-aged. Weird, huh? She held a page up to the light, squinting. Gary’s mother, Tony’s.

Why weird? Pearl stacked flyers in boxes, precise. Patted down edges.

I know it’s not a competition, all that. But. Della bit her lip. Don’t want them to mess it up for us, I suppose. Dilute the rhetoric, or something. I mean, they’re housewives. She went back to the flyers. Anyway. They’re calling themselves SOS. Save Our Sons.

Pearl’s hands stilled. She saw rather than heard the words; they hung in the air, waiting to be chosen. Waiting to be plucked down and run with. Make a great story, she said. She would get in touch with Tony, speak to his mother. Offer the interview to the news desk. But Della’s words were like a string jerking, her heart attached. Her own mother would have leapt into that group.

Gary was furious when he told me, Della said.

What’s wrong with it? Pearl pressed the last flyers into the box and pushed it aside. People might listen to them. They’re not listening to us.

Della shrugged. He just said, “Christ, it’s embarrassing, your mother trying to save you. We’re grown men. We’re supposed to be saving them.”

Afterwards Pearl walked to the gardens, unwilling to let the day go. Not ready for dark. Lately the nightmares again, brief, chaotic. The images child-shaped, genderless, returning later as she lifted a facecloth or a pen, as if her body had absorbed them, not visitors but part of her. No matter if her eyes were open or closed, or if she raised her voice to them, no matter if her glass was empty or full. They were there.

She climbed a low rise above the water, lay on the grass in the fading sun. The sky the color of pale cornflowers then, though Pearl could think only of eggshells, the blue at the new edges of the opera house roof. Her father’s eyes.

Her brothers. In her dreams, they have no faces. Sometimes eyelashes, curved like a girl’s over empty sockets; sometimes a shadow of cheekbone. That is all. No mouths, ever. Twice in her sleep she has chased them, a scream caught in her throat. No sound. Her mouth stretched wide on nothing, and though she is running and they are walking just ahead she cannot reach them. They march on oblivious of her, of the horror hung in the air. When she wakes she is emptied, the panic over. Only the sense of urgency she lives with every day now, and pushes down to a place where it might be useful.

Two birds swept past and dropped into the fig tree below. She sat up to watch them, arm to forehead against the angle of the sun. Another bird, then another, arching their elegant wings in unison as they settled. Pearl laughed out loud. The image in her head sudden, startling: the Danish architect, she thought, watches birds.

Birds, plants. Ships. Clouds. Axel wiped his fingers on a handkerchief, leaned back. He watches everything. On Pearl’s low table, scraps of tomato and melted cheese, the remains of the toast they’d made together in her kitchen. He said: Patterns. The shapes and lines of nature. That’s how he works.

Pearl bit into cold crust, her own fingers shiny with grease. I think he’s a poser, she said as she chewed.

I think he is heroic. He lifted his chin. And really, so do you.

She grinned, brushed crumbs from her hands. She’d never say it, but she liked this about Axel, this way of speaking. Even when he was wrong. He spoke plainly, firmly, but without challenge or spite. In the mouths of some Australian men, the same words would have been insistent, the glove down. But this way of Axel’s forced a civility from her. Or at least, neutralized her anger.

Heroic! she barked. You’ve read too many sagas. This by way of dismissal, but Axel knew. He only smiled and leaned towards her. You must have been a terrible child, he said. Something like happiness flashed in her face. In her eyes.

Her eyes: that’s where she lived, he thought. Behind them, in their depths. Something fierce there, something fugitive. As if she harbored another version of herself beneath the lids, a Pearl unafraid of love, for a building or a man. A girl who was not bombproof, a girl who might at any moment begin to cry, and not stop.

It had been months, and still no sign of her brothers. This had been their glue: her fear and determination. It underscored each encounter and conversation. She’d found simple comfort in his company, he knew, and distraction. Nothing more. Still, their early lovemaking had been intimate and startling. When he remembered, it was not the pulse and slip of foreplay, the electric charge of their bodies fusing—though that had been deeply satisfying. It was her eyes, open on him, locking them together, sealing them tighter than flesh. Later he would see it was not her vulnerability but his own that startled and held him. The plainness of the offer and of the taking, the intent; it was about something more than pleasure. It was not coy. It was as if in opening her body to him she was sharing more than skin and fluid. It was devastating in its honesty, in its lack of agenda, in what it wasn’t.

But it didn’t happen like that often after the first time, and he began to believe he’d dreamed it. Or imagined it in the stupor of desire. After that she always closed her eyes. It didn’t matter. Dream or waking, he knew without question that in the flare of honesty in her eyes, he could see the edge, the cliff, the clear air he fell into. Love. Blind and willing. It gave him enough to withstand this new distance, the brittleness that grew with each dead end, each false lead on her brothers. At some time, he knew, another Pearl would re-emerge, the girl she was before the world intervened. Strong and brave and true. Optimistic. His mother would love that girl.

Tonight there were hints of her. She was softer, and in her movements and her banter he could feel something loosen. She plucked up the oily plates—Tea? she asked—and went to the kitchen. While he waited and looked about, noticing. Newspapers and books, and on a small table sheets of drawing paper, pencils, thumbs of charcoal. Some sheets were blank and others filled with the ordinary: a branch of dry twigs, a leaf in close-up, birds. He leaned in, saw the detail of branch and feather, the pencil’s minute attentions, and was surprised by tenderness.

You draw.

She came towards him, her fingers looped into the handles of two cups. Sat down and pushed the sketches aside, making a puffing sound, dismissive. She held a cup to her lips with two hands. Child’s play, she said behind it. Not like real artists. Not like you.

Axel shrugged. But I draw for work, he said. It’s different. He leafed through the pencil sketches again. And I make pictures on the letters I write to my mother. As you say, things a child might draw. He raised his own cup, smiling behind it. But it always starts with a pencil. Like yours.

They sat quietly. Then Pearl stood and walked to the front windows, drew the blinds. When she turned to him her eyes were steady. She unbuttoned her shirt.

Draw me, she said.

The air turned electric. His stomach unsettled, his hands. But she would not remove her gaze, watching him as she stepped from her skirt. This loosened something in him, and he tipped his head to the side, smiling.

He was unsure what she was asking. It took him a moment. But still he knew it was not Pearl who would be revealed. Nakedness of the body was nothing, he knew that, not compared to the exposure of drawing it. All of his flaws, any residue of fear, any lack of tenderness or compassion or openness. It would be in the lines he made on the paper she had produced and laid in front of him.

He stared at his hand, gripping the pencil, and at the blankness, the whiteness of the paper. As if he was projecting her outline, as if the shape of her was already there. As if he had already failed her.

She stepped around the room adjusting the lamps and let the last of her clothes slip from her.

In the morning he woke early, suddenly sure: he wasn’t the only one. He’d felt it in their lovemaking, a subtle distance, and now he remembered how she was around men, how they were around her. It didn’t matter. He watched her sleeping, at once afraid and drawn by it, this hard knowledge. A moth to the bright flame of her, not just her body but her confidence, the way she tilted her chin to the world, never hesitating.

Who are you? He waited for her answer. Her voice when it came like a dream sound. Though her eyes were still closed he knew she was awake. A muscle in her neck pulsed, subsided.

Alexander the Great.

Silence.

Plato.

She turned her head. Her face open as a girl’s. I was dreaming about Kennedy. The hole in America.

He glanced to the long window. Its peeling white edges framed the ocean, bluer than it could be, as close and alive as Pearl. Here in this bed, he thought, it would be possible to be alone without fear, at least without need. The ocean a body breathing beside you, its tempers almost human.

On the ferry home he watched the opera house approach, its shapes looming against the sky. Leaned back against his seat. For months he had done this: absorbed the movement of air and temperature, the drift and call of language. The shape of desire in the city, in the angle of its streets and the eyes of its people. The way its buildings cut into the sky. Stone, he thought, felt odd in this place, where light fell and tumbled like an acrobat, stretched and played in empty spaces. He began to see the city in terms of its light: the way it captured or held it, bounced it back. The way light was swallowed in the throats of the streets, in alleyways, between buildings. The lemony feel of five o’clock, faces coated by dusk. Light was like glass, it changed the way you saw things.

He wondered about the country outside the city. Beyond harbor and headland to the wide stretches of land behind them. Endless acres where cattle ran, and kangaroos. Deserts. A raw, empty center. He had heard of vast stretches of red sand, and a rock monumental in size, a sacred presence. Was this the equivalent of the temples that erupted from South American jungles? There were Aboriginal people who lived in its shadow, from an ancient culture with story and song and dance at its heart. Then how could this center be described as empty? He sat upright. And how could anyone represent this place in art without reference to its beginnings?

He drank his coffee at a café near the quay. The liquid was barely drinkable but it was too early for Lorenzo’s, and there was little choice. Once more he thought of searching out a coffee pot and bean grinder; Mrs. Jarratt might supply hot water from the kitchen at this hour. But he liked to sit near this busy part of the harbor, to feel the morning stutter and start around him, faces untouched by the coming day and still hopeful. The city itself a blank page, uninscribed.

Except that it wasn’t. Beneath this layer of living, this past two hundred years, were the traces of that older civilization, a thick net of pathways and habitation, the tracks of people and animals. Mogens Prip-Buus, Utzon’s chief associate and friend, had said that the place was “storied.” That an entire city had flourished here, different in look and substance—closer to the ground, greener. Look for what isn’t there, his mother had always said, for what is missing. Through the layers of concrete and pavement and bitumen of this city, beneath the brick and tile, even the sweep of gardens and lawn, other lives had been lived. He knew little of them. Where were the marks of the old people then? He automatically looked about him, at the quay and its shops and ferries, the city fanning up and out from the harbor’s original edge. Where were their traces? He had no idea who to ask.

As he rose to leave, his eye caught the open pages of a newspaper on a neighboring table. He paused, despite himself. There was a short piece about the architect; that was no surprise. He looked more closely: another change in arrangements, and quotes from Minister Hughes. A panel of local architects would be appointed to oversee Utzon’s work, and he would not be paid until a task was complete.

He looked around, plucked the paper from the table. Read the story over again as he walked. A straight piece of reporting without any comment from the architect. But surely, they would have to get one: this new arrangement meant nothing could be planned now in advance, because each job had to be complete before funds were released. It was staggeringly, outrageously stupid. And so transparent. No architect could work under those conditions.

How could he possibly know how much each individual thing would cost exactly, or how long the building would take? How could anyone even try to put a value on it? There was nothing like it in the world. Any structure that aspired to myth and dream would look broken as it was built; all art was like this. Clearly, they wanted to break Utzon. The truth of this struck Axel like a blow. They wanted to snap his foreign vision and his hold: as if the architect, some kind of magician, had infused Australians with his own way of seeing, revealed their own vaulting potential. Some latent spirit of inquiry and humility and integrity that his opponents found confronting. Politicians especially.

Why should they be afraid of this modern Pied Piper? Or better: why shouldn’t they be? Like the old inhabitants of Hamelin, these people had struck a deal, and in their case at least a true bargain. Perhaps their leaders had not anticipated that the people would fall in love with beauty, that they would look into the bright mirror of the opera house shells and see themselves. This might be dangerous. Who knew what else they might want: kindness, tolerance, more beauty, more.

Of course, they hadn’t counted on the power of the piper. The sound of his flute, unworldly, untranslatable. Ethereal. Of course he had to go.

The answer from the union man came back the following week. Surname of Keogh? The same rough-edged voice, but quieter, businesslike. Got a William and a James. Cooma, New South Wales.

Cooma? Pearl was barely aware she’d spoken.

Employed by the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Company.

She stared at the desk in front of her. The world shrank to this: the round metal keys of the typewriter, the circled letters, the roller and its paper. The words, paragraphs there suddenly unreadable, insignificant. They’re still current members? At that address? Her voice a low kind of bark, though she tried for calm. Please, she thought. A prayer to no one but, if needed, to the god of her childhood, of the dour, righteous Protestantism of her mother. Good things come, she heard her say. She closed her eyes.

A brief pause down the line. The sound of pages turning. Yep. Paid up, both of them.

Pearl blinked at the walls around her, the ceiling above. Everything changed and nothing did. The world turned benign, ordinary, and her body released its hold, the defensive certainty of bad news. She breathed.

The man’s voice again. All I can tell you, mate. More than I should. Good luck, eh?

And he was gone.

She sat for a moment and let the information settle. Looked at the scatter of paper and notebooks in front of her, all suddenly edged in light. In her head, alps, snow, bright rivers and men, heroic, forging new shapes in the landscape, holding back the force of water with their bare hands. Jamie and Will, with the faces of children.

Finally she stood, walked again into the library, found the right phone book, asked for the files on the Snowy scheme. Scurried with them back to her desk, a witch with her hoard, with the makings of a spell to find them, to bind them. There were people to tell, but she wanted to sit with this feeling, let it settle in her, the joy and relief of it—and the trepidation.

She thumbed through the files. The folders were thick with stories and speeches, sentences and sentiments that puffed up on the page like blancmange. The fervor, the righteous clamor that accompanied such projects, the building of a nation. Images of mountains tunneled by men, moles working in deep dark earth, slinking from their holes at shift’s end with exhausted smiles. The camera recorded it all. Men with faces marked by exile and immigration, the surprise of comradeship with old enemies and a decent wage.

Newcomers and locals, stunned by cold, threw arms around each other’s shoulders for the camera, stepping into symbolism. They looked too tired to be cynical, too grateful. Too needy. Thumbing through endless clippings, this is what she realized: for the migrant men, war weary, whatever happened to their hands here, to the soles of their feet, their backs, these things didn’t matter. This was work for pay and for good. The war was in the distant past. In this place they were all one nationality.

But then the regular reports of accidents in tunnels and on roads. Just two years earlier, three men in a tunnel had been caught in an avalanche of liquid concrete, were pinned by it as it set in the bottom of a shaft. There were rock falls, mistimed detonations. She turned from the clippings of accident reports with their images of ambulance bearers and faces frozen in shock. Could not meet their eyes. The thick skin she had grown as a reporter allowed her this, at least.

Until suddenly, it didn’t. She wanted to weep: the lives of working men and women. The duty and acceptance. All over the world, men went down dark mines, labored with axes and shovels, in tunnels and sewers and abattoirs and in unforgiving fields. Women in the stink of factories and laundries, the relentless fist of the machine. Skivvying in the kitchens of the rich. Her own mother at the steam press and the cannery; she could not bear the smell of asparagus for the rest of her life. All without choice and little reward.

Among them, her brothers. Were they grateful too for these jobs, this forging of an icon, for this fellowship of damaged men? Like those from the shredded countries of Europe, were they grateful, were they happy? Up there in the Snowy—even as laborers, or digging the earth, hewing rock—they would have a new identity, recast as builders of the new Australia. As useful. As brave. But still at the mercy of a pitiless landscape, a pitiless machine.

There was the urge to borrow a car, find a map, drive south. But alongside it, needles of terror. She had wanted to protect them from the bludgeoning hand of government and war. But were they safer where they were, tucked away in snowbound villages, than they would be in Sydney? They might be. And their jobs might be exempt from the ballot. Even if they weren’t, it might be easier to avoid the draft up there, where news was harder to get and the thicket of nationalities might disguise you. There was the irony of big cities: everyone was connected in some way, and eyes were everywhere. She’d found that out those months ago as she marched in the first protest; the middle of the mob and still she was caught, seen by a random camera that turned the moment into an image.

And then there was the fear: she may not know these brothers any more. Their moods and ideas, their personalities, how the grief of their childhood played out in them now. How they expressed anger, or worry, or love. How the hard scrabble towards manhood had marked them. Part of her was afraid she wouldn’t like them; they wouldn’t like her. That they would not want to be found.

Depends who you’re doing all this for, said Suze that night, playing with the ends of a buttery plait that snaked down from her shoulder and across her breast. She examined the spikes of hair for splits, then dropped it. For them or for you.

She had no answer. But the next day she called Jeanne, said she could stop searching. Asked if she could borrow the car Jeanne used to drive around the parish.

Out on the site the night shift was not yet in full swing. Axel surveyed the forest of concrete and steel, the giant cranes in their crucifix shape, the erection arches along the soaring lines of the roof shells. The shells themselves like cupped hands, open and poised for prayer. Everything was cross-hatched, an artist’s impression. But now the moon, rising, turned the apex of the shells luminous, silvering the wide-hipped ribs. He followed their line upwards and there—like a show reel, like a magician’s trick—the stars of the Southern Cross. Above the crane, unmistakable even to a man who had grown up beneath the northern sky: two pointers and a crucifix. What did it signify to these people? He didn’t know. The shape of it, hung there like a symbol, like a promise.

Now he wandered slowly through the darkness towards the concourse, readying himself for the blaze of industrial light, the blunt power of it, indiscriminately flooding the yards and corners, the shells and the main auditorium, the concrete and metal. A brutal sun in this forest of steel. In a real forest on the other side of the world, Utzon had walked and walked, around the lakes, through trees in thick drifts of leaves. Every day before he moved to Australia, he took his architects into the forest and out onto the frozen lake to sketch their ideas on ice.

Axel had walked these forest paths too, but alone, and much later. Looking for signs and messages, clues to the architect’s mind, or his dreams. He had heard a story about Utzon’s children, how they had run at full pelt through this forest one afternoon to meet their father off the train, their bodies flickering through trees, their chests heaving, each dying to be the one who told him: he had won the competition, his design for the opera house. Their own father. The best in the world.

This was the man he wanted to find. The architect, the father. At first it felt like a waste of time; he couldn’t feel the man there or, when he did, it was just his shadow. But now, walking this dreamscape of steel and concrete and unworldly shapes, he could imagine himself back to Hellebæk, to the shores and the forests, walking beside Utzon, speaking of poetry and the sacred, clouds and canopies, the recurrent shapes of nature at the service of the artist. Here, beneath the darkened concourse, the evidence of this conversation was all about him.

It was cold now; he pressed his hands beneath his pullover, looked out beyond the empty yard with its crouching shapes, unknowable in moonlight. Muted sounds from the handful of night workers reached him, and it felt very agreeable to be here, alone, surveying the richness of the scene. He leaned back in the quiet. Then he saw him: a mere shadow but tall, unmistakable, moving slowly against the fence, hands dug into the pockets of his overcoat. A noble silhouette. Axel was up before he realized, took several steps and stopped. Would he seem like a lunatic, approaching the man in the dark? He glanced down at his clothes: respectable, ordinary. Stepped out again. But in those seconds of hesitation the figure had gone. He hurried then, searching each section, and finally asked the guard if Mr. Utzon had dropped by. He shook his head, no, went back to his paper. But Axel knew what he had seen.

When he reached the far end of the quay on his way home, he turned. From a distance and in a shimmer of night light, the sails themselves might be new celestial forms, a new constellation or galaxy in the southern sky. Might do the same work as the Southern Cross, he thought, guiding people home.

Saturday morning dawned cool and clear. She caught the bus to St. Joseph’s, watching old women in cardigans and scarves subside in their seats, their faces unreadable. Outside, the winter paradox of Sydney: a cold wind snatching leaves from trees, overcoats held tight to waists, and the sun striking gold angles through lanes and windows, mocking. The city, gray, gaunt, was sliced with light.

At St. Joseph’s Jeanne met her in the car park, clutching keys and a road map for the Alps. They embraced, Jeanne’s arms hard around her. It brought back the maddening tears she’d been crying since Thursday, some bottomless well of new emotion. When they pulled away from each other Pearl turned quickly to go. But as she drove through the gate she could see the nun in her rearview mirror, standing straight and still. She was there, hands in pockets, watching, when Pearl turned the car south. The early breeze picked up her hair, briefly curtained her face. Pearl blinked, pursed her lips, but the image hung before her as she drove.

Cooma was hard and grubby with snow. Pearl was self-conscious, a pale figure in a pale landscape, pushing into the wind. Despite jumpers and coat, her bones were cold. The air particled with pieces of things, torn leaves, bus tickets, a scrap of fabric that might be a hat band, and the wind itself projectile, stinging her eyes. She wiped at them savagely as she walked.

At the office of the Hydro-Electric Company, the unabashed gazes of men. The day manager did not remember her call. Apparently. He rifled through lists.

Keogh, eh? You’re a relative?

She regarded his bent head, Brylcreemed, and ignored the question. Dandruff littered his shoulders, the dark wool. James, she said evenly, and William.

The stub of his finger pressed and sought. And then stopped.

Here we are. Hut 27, Island Bend. He looked up at her with a loose smile. Your brothers, you say?

She moved her head infinitesimally.

Well then, if you go and talk to Wendy over there—he nodded towards a blond beehive across the corridor—she’ll fill you in. He swiveled to look at the clock above his desk. The next transport up there leaves in fifteen. You’ll want to leave your car here, unless you’ve got chains.

Later, standing outside the office beneath the threat of a new snowfall, she thought: Island Bend. So they’re tunnelers? Human machines clawing rock and mud. Though in her head they were animals, boring into darkness, inching towards the sun. Their muscles fired and brutish, their eyes forgetting light. When she climbed into the jeep she looked quickly around, checking faces and bodies for signs. For what? She wasn’t sure. Hair and feathers, something scaly or raw? But they were just tired-looking men, two wives carrying shopping. When she told the driver who she was, he said, Keogh lads? Done for the day. They’ll be up at the ski jump with the others. And before she could reply: I’ll drop you up there.

From a distance, the ski jump itself was not intimidating. An oversized ladle, a scoop of snow and wood. The men on the jump were not men but figures in a child’s wind-up toy, sliding, leaping, landing one after the other. Their timing and movements uniform and almost mechanical, the push, the lean, the flight. From a few hundred yards away she could hear the occasional whoop carried through the clear, still air.

Pearl stood for a long time and watched, imagining this one Jamie, that one Will. Identifying profile and body shape, the angle of a crouch. Absorbing the irony: these boys, born to Sydney sun and summer heat, who had, she assumed, spent years in the parched landscapes of the bush; now trusting the angle and weight of their bodies to this air, this frozen ground. One after the other: the crouch, knees bent, chin up; poles firm for the push, the acceleration, the world rushing up. Then the leap, feet together, bodies merging with skis, they became boys with feet of wood, thinking through their soles and the palms of their hands, their knees, because these are what will save them, reattach them to earth. Without skulls and bones smashing as their balance fails and the world spins and splinters.

She moved off towards the jump. Up closer of course it was bigger, more fearful to the eye. Its curve like the outstretched paw of a monstrous bear. Now she could see there were others like her, standing still to watch, trying to interpret the language of this. This flight. This bodily tunneling through air.

She waited among the small group of spectators until the jumpers began to thin, until her brothers were two among the last four or five unbuckling their skis, pulling boots from packs. She could hear their voices now, the deep, easy voices of men. But unmistakably theirs; she knew them in a second. The cadences of their speech, the way Will’s sentences tipped up at the end. Still she waited behind several others, fiddling with the strap of her bag, attempting invisibility. She thought this was for them, not to embarrass or startle them. Her belly roiled with anxiety, a girl on a blind date.

Then they were shouldering their skis and packs and the other men speared off, and she was standing in their path. Their eyes not quite registering. It was Will who broke first. Pearlie? He stopped, they both did. Staring. There were three feet and six years between them. Then Jamie tipped his head to the side, a smile twitching at the corner of his mouth.

She was struck dumb, looking. They were taller. Their faces sharpened by manhood and perhaps by life. Weathered, she’d think later, though in that moment she saw only eyes and skin alive with risk, with the force of the elements they’d been daring. They were grown up, relaxed, limbs loose. With five o’clock shadows. She wanted to rub her hands over their chins, kiss their rough cheeks, say, You need a shave.

But of course, didn’t. Her chest heaved, she swallowed tears that might change things. There was so much she didn’t know. But then their faces were against hers, she felt their arms about her, their voices. Is it you? one said. It is you. And the other: Pearlie. Which was which? It didn’t matter. They patted her cheeks, smudged with their own tears, wiped their eyes. Then pulled back. Laughed. How the hell? Jamie was holding her hand, shaking his head. How—?

Nothing came. The words in her were gone. She stood mute, not trusting herself. Then Jamie stopped suddenly, the smile contracting, closing him up. He looked into her eyes. What’s wrong? Is it—?

She stood squarely, eyeing them both. No. Nothing. She shook her head. Your Da’s okay. Not up to leaping off a ski jump, but he’s all right.

She saw his chest expand with a breath finally taken. His lips part as he blew it out.

Then, in the silence, Will’s slow grin. Did you see us up there? Tipping his head to the jump. Were you watching? As if it wasn’t real unless she saw it. He was the boy in the tree once more, about to leap from a high branch, or from the woodshed roof, needing her as witness. As admirer.

She nodded. Yes, of course I was watching. Her body returning to itself, to what she always had been: their sister. She beamed. Bloody terrifying. She looked from one to the other as both faces flushed with happiness. They were delighted and gratified by her fear for them. As they always had been.

Back in the village, she walked between them towards their quarters in the single men’s huts. The sun faded to apricot, the cold like a fist tightening. The next shift began at ten; they’d change and take her to eat at a café in Cooma, their favorite, Jamie said.

She glanced at her watch; five hours together, five hours to win them back.

She sat in the mess to wait. A wooden shed, flimsy as cardboard, marginally warmer inside than out. At the end of a long table she watched men, dirt-smeared, fill their plates from tureens at the other end. They slid along the benches and immediately dipped their faces to their food. Occasional conversation sputtered into the air, low grunts of laughter against a background of cutlery scraping, plates and glasses banged down, the soft crack of bones as limbs were stretched. Pearl had learned the best approach in such places, where she was outnumbered by men by a hundred to one, was to assume a proprietorial air. She tilted her chin up to the space above the table, where industrial lights hung low above the rows of bent heads. But she stole glances at the faces and profiles: the olive-skinned, the swarthy, the bearded; bodies of every shape.

She recognized Axel’s way of speaking, or something like it, in the mix of languages that flowed like a braided river across the room, voices rising and falling and drifting into quiet. Beginning again. She tried to pick up the sentences of the Scandinavians, but they were lost in the robust cadences of the locals and the Italians. She watched them speaking and eating and drawing pictures in the air. Even dirt-streaked they were glossy, these Mediterranean men. Their skin shone. The pale-haired northerners looked washed out in comparison.

The men drifted in and out. Through the staccato of conversation she heard her own internal voice, her fretting questions. How to say what she’d come to say? She’d rehearsed lines in the car as she drove, plain-spoken sentences firmly put. There’s a war on and you need to come home. Will, especially. I’ll get you jobs, good ones. Or: what? As the miles had fallen away so had her confidence. She was, she realized, far more nervous about talking to her brothers than she’d ever been with politicians. It wasn’t just the matters of conscription, of war; it was the matter of love. Love and negligence, love and judgment.

Now, at the end of this long table of men, she saw she’d expected to find them still boys. Even at nineteen and twenty. But their hardscrabble years alone had grown them up; it was in their demeanor, their acceptance of hard things. Their refusal of pity. They were men now, working men, who wore the mantle of hard labor as their father had. She recognized his approach, his attitude: they were workers and proud of it. Hard labor was their fate and their strength. But they were not subservient. She could see it in the way they held themselves, the way they spoke. They were not slaves. They were good at what they did, and they were paid for it. They had found dignity in it, in this bargain. That is what would save them. They would work, they would work hard. But they would not be trodden into the ground.

And they would ski! A reminder that their bodies were not merely forms to be bent to the company line, but free, strong. And in the miraculous air of the mountains, in the recklessness of the jump, completely their own.

So how to speak of government and policy and war in this place? Here in this mess hut—perhaps over the whole immense project—politics had been abandoned. Exactly twenty years before, these men were dropping bombs on each other’s countries, aiming rifles at one another, manufacturing hate. Now, many of them were refugees, without homes or countries except here, in this company of outsiders. Others had left families in shattered cities to seek work to feed them. Somehow they managed to sit at this table and eat together, to work the long night shifts side by side.

And then there was this: how to say come with me, you’re in danger, when they worked in the face of danger every day? And in company with these men. Who had seen the very notion of it redrawn in the last war, and the notion of belief, of allegiance. She felt the chill wind of her own naïveté, her own failure to think things through.

She looked up to see them striding into the hut, self-conscious in their clean clothes, their hair slicked down and combed. Some of the men wolf-whistled and one called out: Eh, Jamie, hot date huh? You like older woman? Pearl could see the color rise furiously in their faces. Jamie grimaced. And Will, over his shoulder and stern: Shut up you idiot. She’s our sister. But they enjoyed it, she could tell, it was in the looseness of their bodies as they approached her, their mocking smiles.

She stood and inhaled the soapy smell of them. Then turned and linked her arms in theirs. She said: Take me to the swankiest place in town.

You’re in it, said Will, deadpan. And steered her through the door and out into the mugging cold.

The landscape was muffled, hard to read. Night had absorbed forms and shapes, but the snow, Pearl thought, was lit from within, as if some great fire burned beneath it. The sky was a million points of light. They walked down a path towards another jeep. But you’re in luck, Jamie said, squeezing her hand, it’s lamb roast night at the Cooma sports club.

She sat opposite them at a vinyl-topped table. Everything was lighter here: the décor and faces, the sounds. Plain white walls with posters and photographs, conversations and laughter. There was a party air. Family groups, couples, faces open and flushed pink. The sounds of a jukebox in a distant corner. No one wore work clothes or dour expressions; like her brothers, the men had shed roughened skins and reverted to ordinariness. There was once more the choir song of languages.

Lamb and vegetables and gravy. On us, Will said lightly. Shandy? He tilted his head towards her, hesitant, uncertain of the proprieties. Or—sherry? She bit her lip in a pretense of choosing. I’ll have a beer, she said, whatever you have, Will, and watched him lope away. Jamie pulled out a stackable steel chair and Pearl realized it was for her. She slid onto the cold seat, let Jamie maneuver it towards the table. He sat across from her and beamed. Will returned with a jug and three glasses and sat down beside her. Watch this, sis, he grinned, pouring beer. The head on a beer should never be more than an inch.

It wasn’t. I’m impressed, she said, and drained half the glass in one go. That’s good, she said. They exchanged swift glances, and grinned.

When their meals came she watched them eat, as she had the men in the mess. Their energetic jaws, scrubbed faces. They ate quickly, speaking as they chewed, pausing only to shake more salt over the meat or to nod at someone they knew. They talked about the township, the weather, and began to ask questions they didn’t know they had. Pearl’s work. Their father. The twins and their children. Jane. Pearl chewed thick slices of overcooked lamb, cold beneath the warm gravy, and felt the conversation as the same texture. They were muffled, all of them. Everything unspoken. They exchanged surface pleasantries, like people on a bus. No one mentioned the real thing. All the missing years.

But of course, their disappearance, her own, was like a net thrown over them, Pearl thought; they could wriggle around beneath it, but it caught and trapped them, confined them to a particular space, a particular way of being with each other. She pushed soggy roast pumpkin around her plate. In the oily residue she could see it: there was only one way she could say what she had come to say.

She struggled with the last piece of meat and finally pushed the plate away. Picked up her beer. There’s something I need to talk to you about, she said, both hands around the glass. Her brothers flicked a look at each other. Knew it, the look said. Then their eyes settled on her.

You ran away. Didn’t know where you were. Took some finding.

Their eyes blank, shifting.

It’s all right, she said, trying to hold them. The fault’s mine. I ran away first.

She checked them for any sign they might bolt now. But they sat with their hands in their laps, docile as infants at story time. She breathed in, out. So. Let’s see. I think I got the job at the Tele a couple of years before you left. Can’t remember exactly.

In the pause Jamie lifted his head. His doe eyes. He said: Something like that. You cut out your first stories and brought them to show us.

Will said: Yeah, we’d sit around and look at them and think, geez, Pearlie’s hit the big time.

She smiled at him. Yeah. I thought I was big time. Ordinary old Pearlie. This big important job at the newspaper. People wanted to talk to me, read my stories.

In their faces she could see the patience they’d had as children. Waiting for her to come and play with them or get them out of the bath. Dress them. Their eyes lifting to her from the tub or from their beds. I loved looking after you two when you were little, she said. Though she hadn’t expected to. As if you were mine. You were, in a way. She didn’t wait for a response. But that job. It switched something on in me. Something that had gone off.

You were good at it. Will’s voice encouraging. And the money. That was good too.

The words fell into the empty space above the plates, the smears of gravy and fat. She looked at them, their faces open, unbetrayed. Then why did she feel she was in a witness stand? Will shrugged. Two seconds, three. It’s okay, he said. We knew you were busy at work, Pearlie.

And then after a while we— Pearl watched Jamie’s Adam’s apple rise and fall in his throat. We had to get out of there. He was a teenager again, lifting his shoulders in answer to a question.

We hated it, Pearlie. Will’s voice matter-of-fact, as it always was.

She could barely look at them. But did. I know. And I’m sorry. I’m sorry I didn’t come.

They looked back at her. Not angry. But there was an equation on the table: the extent of their suffering, she saw, had to match the heft of her actions, her reasons. It was clear she was still in debt.

I lived a pretty wild life for a while there. She leaned back, preparing. Worked hard, played hard. Being the child I didn’t get to be. She shrugged. Stupid.

Perhaps it was her surroundings, these icy fields of labor, hard labor, or just her brothers, finally. Because it was suddenly plain to her: the impetuous leaps she’d taken, the self-gratification. She thought, there was something in me, and still is, that allowed me to do all that; the risks, the forgetting. She had put herself first. Occasionally, she could still feel it: a pure selfishness kicked in, a blindness to others. It drove her then; she went after what she wanted. And usually, she got it.

Her fingers on a white paper napkin now; she rubbed it over an imaginary spill. And. I got pregnant. To a married man. The gaps between words meant to ease them, but still she shocked even herself. Again, it was more than she’d expected to say.

In their faces, the fight for words, or equanimity. Selfish, she thought, I’ve said too much. A cheap shot to clear the debt; to make the debt theirs. It wasn’t fair, the equation was wrong. But that’s nothing to do with you. The distress in their eyes. Nothing at all. And anyway, it’s all in the past, she said. Trying to absolve them of the need to respond. A long time ago. A thin smile. I’ve grown up now.

Out of the long silence: Bloody ’ell. It was Will. His lips moved to speak again but nothing came.

You’re okay then? Jamie’s head was down; he looked up through dark eyelashes.

I’m fine.

The baby?

Lost it, she lied. Though it wasn’t a lie, not really.

Then Will’s fist against the table. Jesus, Pearlie.

They finished the jug of beer. Will fetched tea. Pearl watched them stir sugar into their cups and turned the talk to them. Their lives since she’d seen them. Fruit-picking, laboring. Then the miracle of the Snowy. It didn’t take long to realize how their experiences had changed them. The Labor Party was full of communists; Menzies has saved them, the whole bloody country. Students and protesters were louts. They should get a job, said Will. See what real work feels like. He rubbed his shoulders as he spoke. What do they know? Sitting on their arses all day. Do they even know what they’re talking about?

Pearl’s lips pressed together. Keeping her feelings behind them. So you get the news up here, people talk about it? she said. Politics, protests.

The wireless. Jamie nodded. And the papers get shared around.

All ripped and greasy by the time we get ’em, Will said.

Jamie lowered his glass, thoughtful. I do like a fresh paper. He looked to Pearl, suddenly shy. You know, with a cuppa and a smoke. Like Da.

They grinned at each other. But her pleasure was smothered by the way they spoke, their odd opinions. Her brothers had turned into Tories.

But if they read the papers they’d have to know about the war. About Vietnam. Still she struggled with a way to speak. A way to put things. Will got up to get trifle and when he returned she blurted: So you’ve read about Vietnam? This war? Menzies is sending our men now, conscripts too.

Jamie poured more tea.

Pearl said: Twenty-year-olds. Accepted the full cup he slid to her. Like you. The tea burned in her throat. She pulled her coat tighter.

They exchanged a glance. Yeah, we know, Pearlie. Will lowered his spoon, licked crumbs from his lips.

Later, she’d see that was the moment when knowledge struck. When they spoke again she already knew the words. How they would sound. A cold stone sinking in her belly. The room collapsed in on their small table, the three of them, their hands.

Jamie examined his palms. We’re going too, Pearlie, he said, then dared to look at her. We’ve enlisted. Just waiting to be called.

Yep! A grin cracked across Will’s face. Reckon Da would be proud.

She was aware of her mouth opening and shutting. No sound. It was like a dream that was hard to wake from, one without voices. She was frozen, mute, powerless against them. For several seconds she understood this as the truth.

Then Will spoke again. What do you reckon? A couple of tours of Vietnam and then they’ll train us in a trade. Metalwork maybe. The smile hadn’t left him. But it wasn’t the Will of a moment ago, who could still smile like a child. Suddenly in front of her he was a man. With a future. And a mission: to save the country. Himself. Her.

It’s the commos, sis. They’re like insects up there, hordes of ’em, taking over the world—

For Christ’s sake. She was barely aware of speaking. Her head moving slowly, side to side. She opened her mouth, unsure if she could trust her voice. You’ve signed up? She tried for calm. Both of you? And looked at Jamie.

Didn’t get drafted, he shrugged. Had to volunteer.

She turned to Will. Couldn’t let him go alone. Grinning. Happy.

Her voice when it came was a muted cry. You’re too young, Will. They won’t take you. Then to Jamie: And you don’t have to go.

I’m in, Pearlie. At that moment a man appeared at their table, confusing her. She didn’t know who had spoken, Jamie or Will.

Evening, he said. Who’s this? She looked up into leery eyes and immediately looked away. The boys must have warned him off; when she looked up again he was gone.

Why? she said, the word shocked out of her into unsteady air. It’s not even our war, we don’t belong there. She looked from one to the other. You don’t belong there. And—her trump card—you’re wrong about your Da. He’d be appalled. Shocked. And your mother— But it was too hard to continue. She squeezed her lips together. Looked away.

They seemed devoid of a response to this. None of them have been our wars, Pearlie. It was Jamie, rubbing his thighs as he leaned forward at the table. We’re lucky, living here. We haven’t had a war. But we could, all that stuff happening up there. In Asia.

She frowned at him.

All this shit, Korea, Indonesia. That bloody mob in China, it’s them. They’ll work their way down.

What did he mean by this? What did he know of Asia, of Europe, he hadn’t even finished school. She wanted to shake him. Instead she dropped her hands to her lap, and her voice took on a kind of pleading. But Vietnam. Again she looked from one to the other. It’s like eating your own. Those boys in the north, they’re just like you.

Still don’t want ’em here, said Will.

What do you mean?

Jamie’s right, they’re on the march, Pearlie. All that empty country up there, Cape York, the Territory. We’ve been in those places, they’re as empty as the sea. We wouldn’t even know they were here ’til they were. He shrugged. Gotta be stopped. See?

They stepped outside, their bodies changed by the conversation, their limbs stiffer, hands at a loss. So they were surprised by cold, by shapes made precise, unarguable. The hard beauty of frost, and silence.

The night sky wheeled above them. Jagged stars, light colliding. Pearl looked away from it, nauseous. Found, once more, that she could not speak. Not struck dumb so much as quieted by her own reluctance to say hard things. And by what she had seen as she sat there with them: that her absence had removed her right to admonish, even to advise. She had relinquished it when she left them to find their own way.

War’s a disgusting thing, she said finally. It’s not cowboys and Indians, Will. It’s not toy guns and nice uniforms and girls.

We know.

Even if they don’t kill you. It’s your mate dying horribly in the dirt next to you. It’s mothers and children blown up by bombs and mines.

Silence.

Bloke got killed on the job up here not that long ago. Buried alive. Jamie pushed the top of his boot against dirt. Had a wife and kid. We knew ’em. He stopped, looked at her. That was a horrible way to die, Pearlie.

She suddenly saw where he was taking this. Dying in Vietnam would be better. Braver. She wanted to say: this is brave, what you do here. You’ve been brave all your lives. But couldn’t. Could not humiliate them, diminish their fledgling sense of worth. You want to defend the country, is that it? Protect us.

They both looked at her blankly. Then Will shrugged. Dunno, Pearlie, he said. It’s just the right thing to do.

They stood together at the door of her motel room. Hands pressed into pockets. Pearl felt numb, her body deadened, her heart scooped out of her chest. They stood in the kind of silence that precedes a parting. Jamie turned then, peered up at the cold sky. Flung out an arm to take in the mountains, iced with snow and luminous in the dark, the dark shape of their world.

Camped out for nights, looking up at that sky.

Three heads tilted to the stars. In the silence Pearl fancied she could hear them, the stars, the sky, the bare rasp of ice beneath water, or snow forming as it falls.

Will said: Had to find the Cross. Every night, before we went to sleep, like it was a lucky charm or something. He wrapped his arms around himself. And if we woke up and couldn’t sleep, it was still there, low and kind of— He looked at the ground.

What?

Kind of, reassuring. Reliable. You know?

Pearl stole a glance at his face. He was blushing. Just there, he said, night after night.

The new day dawned crystalline. Pearl stood at the window and could see only a cruel beauty. The blue and white clarity of it mocked her; she would have preferred a gray rain, a mournful air. When the boys came to her after their shift, their faces emptied by the night’s labor and bodies sagging towards sleep, she tried, as she knew she had to, one last time. In the mess hall she said: You don’t have to do this. I’ve got a friend at the opera house, there’d be jobs there, good ones. She was aware of the pleading in her voice. Tried to smile. Brave jobs. You’d be serving your country too, working on that.

They grimaced over weak tea. Jamie said: Serving the country here, Pearlie.

Finally she had to concede.

They wandered towards the car, each step slow, tentative. You sure you gotta go now, today? Will pouted, his face returned to the eight-year-old.

Pearl kicked a front tire. I have to get this back to Jeanne. Matter-of-fact now, already girding herself, and she lowered her head, realizing. She softened. And you two have to sleep.

They dug their hands in their pockets. Will grimaced. S’pose.

As she threw her few things in through the back door: So when is all this nonsense happening, then? And turned to smile at them, her arms open.

But when she slid into the car her whole body turned to lead. She twisted the key in the ignition, pushed the gear stick into first and moved off while her volition lasted. Raised her hand in farewell and drove. Still, the crying took her by surprise. It convulsed her chest and throat, unstoppable, releasing waves that blurred her vision, weakened her limbs. But she drove. Needing to. Realized too late that she’d taken a wrong turn—she was heading southeast, towards the coast. She slowed, wiped a sleeve across her face, got her bearings. To hell with it. She would just drive. Take the coast road. Longer, but no matter. So long as she was back by the morning.

She was careful in Jeanne’s wheezing motor, pulling up when she thought of it to check its water and tires. Bega, Narooma. At Nowra she stopped to eat an early dinner at a Greek café: chops and eggs and lemony potatoes. Strong Greek coffee. Scraped the plate with bread and butter and realized she hadn’t eaten all day. Then drove to a beach to walk it off in the just-dark.

The strip of sand was empty apart from the distant figures of a man and a dog. Too far up the beach to know if they were moving towards her or away, but the memory came unbidden of the conversation about Wanda Beach those weeks before. She dismissed it, walked deliberately as a man would. Deliberate as Della’s new boyfriend, pushing himself into her when she confessed she’d taken the new contraceptive pill. As if that was consent. But up ahead the figures were shrinking into distance and the night. Pearl slowed her pace, felt her muscles loosen. Looked up to the mess of stars, until all she could see was the Cross. Then turned back to the car.

All the way to Sydney she could see only the shapes of two boys in swags, a dying fire, and the million-acre sky careering above them. Their eyes hunting the Cross, elusive as a dream. Until they saw the pointers, undeniable, flashing like a sign, and recognized the womanly shape, the head and feet and hips. A reliable mother, above them every night, reassuring, protective. A shuffle to east or west, up or down but the same Cross in any case, her meanings alive and bigger than she was. No wonder the boys sought her, Pearl thought, and no wonder that every Australian government, of every stripe, had kept her on the flag. The flag that flew them to governance, to servitude, to war. That validated everything.

Night was evaporating when she pulled into the convent. She sat in the car and watched darkness leach from the horizon, her eyes gritty with the drive and the aftermath of crying. Sadness fought off anger and then swung back, until she could no longer read her own emotions, no longer knew what she felt. There was only an endless emptiness, a desolation, and the certainty of her own culpability. She pushed back the seat and closed her eyes.

And woke to brightness, to the sound of a thousand car engines speeding people to town, to jobs. The stars had retreated, the sky already milky with winter sun. She felt bruised, her bones chilled. But as her eyes and ears adjusted, another sound, soft but insistent through the closed car windows. The bells were ringing.

Pearl walked towards the path Jeanne would take to chapel. She was numb, hollowed out, but the bells pulled her like ropes thrown to the drowning, the sound coiling softly around her. She was once more the child craving touch, a consoling hand on her head or her arm. A voice that spoke forgiveness. Absolution. The path skirted the ancient graveyard and its bent, tired trees. Pearl moved slowly, her head down. The bells sharpened in the cold air, a chisel striking granite, and when she raised her eyes there was Jeanne stepping quickly between gravestones. Pearl stopped still on the path. As Jeanne neared her she lifted her hands to cover her face. What Jeanne would see there.