The houses, sheds and outbuildings of Isonville homestead sprawled along both sides of Ison’s Creek, but only heat shimmers were visible from the sunken road, heat caught in the soil itself, in the walls of local stone, in the baking rooftops. The roofing iron, steeply raked, and the verandah iron, low and capped, caught the sun as though water rippled there among the stands of blue gum, peppermint gum and sheoak. A palm tree loomed at the side of the main house, home to a hundred starlings. Ancient, knotted quince and mulberry trees screened the main house from the overseer’s house, a square, blockish, unloved cottage on the opposite bank of the creek. But Isonville was no Showalter Park. There hadn’t been an overseer on Isonville since the end of the First World War. When Peter Tolley, son of the widower shopkeeper in Pandowie, courted Eleanor Ison in 1949, he found two households living in the big house on Isonville, sharing fourteen cool, deep, shadowy rooms, with ceilings of pressed tin, the pressed tin extending right along the broad central corridor that linked both halves of the house. Eleanor lived with her parents and her brother, Kitch, at the eastern end of the house; her Aunt Beulah lived in the western end. Then Peter married Eleanor, precipitating a further divide. Anna, dear, we couldn’t afford to buy a house. No, we didn’t want to live with his Dad behind the shop. It made more sense for him to come and live with me here. It was a bit cramped. We didn’t have much privacy until Kitch decided to do up the overseer’s cottage for himself and Mum and Dad retired to Adelaide. My poor mother was worn to the bone from looking after Auntie Beulah. We should have hired a housekeeper long before we did. Anna and Hugo stopped listening for a moment. Great Aunt Beulah was shuffling past their kitchen window, la, la, la. They waited. Sure enough, there was Mrs Mac, hurrying to fetch her back. One day the children’s Uncle Kitch went to a stud breeders’ conference over in the west and came back with a fiancée: This is Lorna. Handshakes, edgy laughs, then Lorna’s head swung down upon the children. Anna and Hugo froze. Lipsticked, glistening teeth, powdered pores, desperate eyes, hair stiff as wheat, assembled inches from their faces: What adorable kids. Kitchener and Lorna had twin daughters. They spilled out of the overseer’s cottage on the opposite bank of Ison’s Creek, and Anna heard her mother say uneasily: It’s as if they’re waiting, Pete. Don’t you feel it? Waiting to get rid of us? They did not wait for long. Grandfather Ison died, Beulah died, and Mrs Mac moved on, all in the space of a year. At once Uncle Kitch moved his family across the creek and into Beulah’s half of the house. The Tolleys seemed to shrink back from the stained-glass dividing door at the dead centre of the long corridor: Pete, they make me feel temporary in my own home, the home I grew up in. For six months the Tolleys searched for another house to live in. Finally: I’ve had enough of this, Anna’s father said, and he quit his high-mileage job with Stock & Station, scratched up a loan, and bought a tractor, a header, a little Austin truck and six hundred and forty acres plus house. Their new home was small, overgrown with oleanders, subject to northerlies and rising damp, but it was all theirs. Some long-ago builder had scored fine, white, dead straight lines in the cement that bound the russet creek stones together. The outside walls were warm to the eye and warm in the angling sun. The Bitter Wash school bus passed by the ramp at the end of the potholed drive. Pandowie, nineteen miles. Their party-line signal was one long ring, one short, one long, but, anxious to know that they were wanted and loved, Anna and Hugo snatched up the phone every time it rang, to be told by an irritated neighbour: Do you mind? The first house of Anna’s marriage to Sam Jaeger was a transportable kit house, a present from Mr and Mrs Jaeger. It resembled a log cabin, and the truck hauling it north from Adelaide took a wrong turn at Pandowie and arrived three hours late. Sam and Mr Jaeger raged uselessly at the driver, who shrugged, caught Anna’s eye, winked obliquely as if to say: What have you let yourself in for, love? Anna spent the next two years landscaping the garden. She set deckchairs on the splintery verandah and enjoyed drinking sundowners there, where Mr and Mrs Jaeger were bound to see her through the lace curtains in their stone house in the gully below. She found it impossible to call them anything but Mr and Mrs Jaeger. Mr Jaeger, stabbing his finger at an item in the monthly ledger: I see you’ve been buying icecream for the shearers again. Michael and Rebecca, toiling up the hill from the stone house, red-faced and elated: Mum, we’ve been clapping hands for Jesus. The Jaegers had also given them little books to read. Anna would not clap hands for Jesus: Mum, are you the anti-Christ? That’s what Grandpa Jaeger says. After five years of being crowded by his parents, Sam said: We’re moving out. It was Grandfather Tolley who told Anna about an advertisement on his noticeboard: ‘House to Let. Restored schoolmaster’s residence near Showalter Park. Late-nineteenth-century charm, adjacent to picturesque ruin.’ Good God, Anna’s mother said. My old school. Are you sure you’ll have enough room? There’s never been a family in it, as I recall, just a string of bachelor schoolmasters. Sam sat Michael on one knee, Rebecca on the other: Just temporary, kids, till we fall on our feet. Anna lost count of the roofs Sam painted, the post holes he dug, the truckloads of wheat he carted for the locals. Hugo and her father brought him in to help sow and reap the six-forty acres. The Showalters hired him to work with the stud manager. He was paid a hundred dollars to appear in a film as a Boer farmer galloping down the skyline, footage that was never shown. Anna herself found two days a week at the Chronicle, helping Carl Hartwig with his hatch, match and dispatch stories. Just temporary, but Sam and Anna lived in the schoolhouse for fifteen years, until old man Jaeger died and the Mrs retired to a house in Pandowie. Back to what’s mine, Sam said. Back again to the transportable house at the lip of the gully. Anna had no intention of moving into the stone house where Sam’s parents had lived: Your father’s spirit still moves there. The transportable house badly needed a new coat of paint, new carpets, a slow-combustion stove for winter: I don’t remember it being such a chilly place, Sam, do you? I guess we were young then. Sam put his hands on his hips: Anna, the kids got colds every winter. Becky developed asthma. How could you forget that? There was another reason why Anna wanted to install a slow-combustion stove in their old house. She wanted to drive out the sourpuss residue of all the crackpots who’d stayed in it temporarily over the years, clap-hands-for-Jesus guests of the Jaegers in the gully below. These days Sam is learning to grant his daughter some space—as Rebecca would call it. This evening he stands musing on the verandah long after Meg and Becky have waved goodbye and bumped down the track to the Adelaide road, and now he’s rasping a worn hand along his jawline: Anna, if those two are planning on having a kid, I guess it can’t be temporary? Drily: No, Sam. He blushes: Umm, how do you reckon, you know, they’ll go about it? Without a man, I mean? When Sam is gone, Anna will move to the coast. One day she’ll get a call from Hugo: Mum died in her sleep last night. Anna will drive back to Pandowie for the funeral, step into the little stone church for the first time in years, and be struck by how small it is, no more than a boxy room with dusty roofbeams, and yet it had seemed such a vast, booming chamber when she was a kid.