With the help of a loan from Grandfather Tolley, Anna’s father bought a small farm in difficult country out near the Razorback. The investment didn’t end there. He bought a black Austin truck, a Massey Ferguson tractor, and implements to plough, sow and reap, all second-hand from the dealer in Canowie Belt. Throwing in a good job with Stock & Station, changing careers, going into debt—he called these things an investment or a gamble, depending upon how the season was going. Either way, investment or gamble, he hoped for a pay-off somewhere down the track. One dry year he said, very patiently, edged with impatience: Eleanor, love of my life, I can’t help feeling you’re being unrealistic about this—we could go under. Now, it’s good that you’re not a worrier, a good example for the kids, but I think being an Ison has cushioned you a bit, made you not anticipate things enough. The high school offered an academic stream and a commercial stream. Anna was disappointed when her best friend chose bookkeeping over Latin. Like her, Maxine had always been disruptive, slangy and free, her head fixed unfirmly upon her shoulders, so where had it come from, this sudden investment in her future? No one had taught Anna to be sensible in quite that way. Within the space of a summer, the two girls had little to say to one another. Within a year, Anna scarcely knew Maxine, didn’t recognise the person who nimble-fingered typewriters, columns of figures, sewing machines and cutting boards. All Anna owned was a brain that poked uselessly in all directions. The careers counsellor glanced over her list of subjects and said: Latin. Teaching Latin, that’s all Latin’s good for. Maxine was working at the Inquiries counter when Anna went in to arrange the transfer of her savings from the Pandowie branch to the University branch. The bank had fitted Maxine in a pale pink uniform that strained at her breasts and hips and filled her waist with air, so that she looked briskly stern and mature, her body unflattered and irrelevant. Her motions, so quick with her pen and her date stamp, intimidated Anna, who badly wanted to slang off at someone or something with Maxine but was reluctant suddenly to assume that a common ground still existed between them. Anna saw Maxine at the fortnightly dance whenever she came home between semesters, but they rarely spoke now. Eventually Anna came to believe that Maxine was better than her in unnameable ways. When she prepared to fly off to London, no return date planned, she knew—even though distracted by her grief for Lockie—not to apply to Maxine for travellers’ cheques, for that would underline the difference between them. She felt undeserving, and imagined the reproach, the contempt, in Maxine’s face. When Anna married Sam Jaeger, her mother-in-law’s refrigerator seemed to admonish her: You young wives, so slapdash! Mrs Jaeger’s hands whirled about the kitchen, filling it with sound: of cutlery riding loose in a drawer, of air seals breaking, of greaseproof paper whispering, of bread, tomato and mutton falling away in slices, of Tupperware lids snapping down over peaches in syrup, of tea the colour of dark-tan boot polish splashing into a vacuum flask destined to end its days flattened by a tractor tyre. Mrs Jaeger seemed to be telling Anna, as she packed the smoko buns and lunches and cold-water containers into a cane basket: It’s an investment of love in the menfolk. The menfolk came back at nightfall and dumped the dusty basket on the shoe-cleaning cupboard on the back porch: Corker lunch, you two. Anna thought: I spent hours sorting and packing eggs today. Where was my lunch? Chilled water in summer, that was Mrs Jaeger’s most loving investment. She kept the freezer stocked with metal beakers of frozen rainwater, and before the sun was up she had the beakers thawing on a bench, a few minutes’ thawing until a frosting of condensation on the metal sides told her that she had blocks of ice ready to tip into the menfolk’s drinking water. I’ll say one thing, Mother—you sure do look after us. The twenty thousand that Anna’s father left her in his will was not enough for a deposit and yet it was too much to spend, so Anna went to Pandowie Accounting Services in the main street, where Chester Flood drew up an investment portfolio: It’s best if we diversify it a little—stocks and shares, bonds, property, some of it high risk, some of it low. But the market’s healthy at the moment, so I don’t anticipate any problems. Chester was still angular and vivid to look at, and Anna watched his hands, one bracing the prospectus upon his desk blotter, the other cuff-scraping a cross with a scratchy pen at the dotted line: Sign here, here and here. Such beautiful hands. Those hands had once invested love and passion in her, one warm April day, the day Michael was killed. This afternoon Anna is helping her brother water trees on the six-forty acres. Hugo’s been planting them up and down creeks and gullies and washaways, inside tiny chicken-wire fences to keep the sheep and rabbits out. A hundred trees, and I haven’t had to pay a cent. Anna pours a bucket of bore water around the base of a golden cypress, a good windbreak tree—slowly, slowly, for the stone-flecked red dirt is in a repelling mood. Hugo has left a little plastic flag on this one: ‘Invest in Australia’s Rural Viability. Plant a Tree and Help Stop Soil Degradation.’ Anna would urge Sam to plant a few trees, but Sam has lost a bundle investing in the Showalter Park sperm-bank scheme, and he’ll only say: What’s the point, when we’re going to lose the place anyhow? He’s harder to live with now, more like his father every day, but Anna will stay with him, she owes him that. When he’s gone there will be her granddaughter to invest in. And Becky. Anna will never stop investing something in her daughter, even though Rebecca had never been an easy person to love.