Anna’s mother had been friendly with the Showalter boys, Wesley and Rex. There is a photograph of her with Kitchener and the Showalter boys sitting in a sulky, an old painted horse sniffing the dirt. One Showalter was stitched with cannon fire in the skies over Germany and the other grew into a glossy, twice-married ugly drinker and household name. She’d also assumed that her brother was her friend: So how could Kitch connive at driving me out of my home? Anna’s first real friend was Maxine, from the town. But Maxine’s father was the stationmaster, she lived in a simple railways cottage, and the big house at Isonville always seemed to deflate and subdue her. Desperately Anna entertained Maxine, but Maxine remained flat, small and precise at the table, incapable of conjuring the sheepyards, the sheds and Ison’s creek into a place shimmering with promise—then at school on Mondays she’d behave as though the weekend had never happened. Maxine got her nerve back when the Tolleys were forced to move to the smaller, plainer, foursquare farmhouse on the six-forty acres. That house reduced Anna to a manageable size, and the fretting salt-damp walls indicated a degree of poverty and strife. Maxine was also older now, with a steady head on her shoulders. So steady that Anna felt left behind. All Anna wanted was to muck around through the years, as though she—born of an Ison—should not be obliged to plan or calculate or think past tomorrow, but Maxine knew that her only hope lay in a skill learned, a job, a marriage and children. Maxine shrugged off Latin, mathematics, the sciences. Even her body changed. She grew calm, unhurried, somehow taller, always half-smiling pleasantly, the secret of life behind it. Anna responded by becoming ratty. Her intimates now were boys, and then only for as long as it took for her to milk them dry under the cover of darkness and a tartan rug. She still wrote to her penfriend in Leeds but she did not call that a friendship. There was nobody warm, flooding or unselfish in her life. Then Lockie came along. He stayed and he stayed and he stayed. He actually liked talking to her. Was it that he knew nothing about her past—and she could not believe that—or that he knew but did not care? He loosened her tongue. She sprawled in his utility, lazy-lidded, lips swollen, a flush on her breasts that she loved and rued and was helpless to control, her spine accommodating the worn springs and cracked upholstery as if she were a dozy cat, feeling more alive than she could remember. What came first, the tingling or the friendship? Did she tingle only because he was also her friend? She also admired his uncomplicated friendship, an attraction of opposites, with Chester Flood, the orphan boy. To Lockie, everything was a huge joke. He was full of constant cheery exertions and would live forever. Chester was smarter, quieter, more subversive, laying the groundwork for his life. The three of them became friends. But then Anna went away to study and small serpents slipped into the garden. Anna began to change, going about with a frown of fury and concentration and a heart that threatened to burst. Soon Chester refused to drive down with Lockie to visit her at the college. Their arguing distressed him and he was not interested in the war. They’d become mismatched, Anna and the boys from home, their concerns were different. But, shortly after that, Anna befriended a woman in her dance class who also cared nothing about the war. Am I being inconsistent? Anna asked herself. Perhaps my attachment to Connie works because there is no history to trip us up and nothing at stake between us? What is right, and what is wrong? She burned with these questions. And Connie was unsound in fundamental ways. Connie took her to Hindley Street pubs after dance classes, advised her to dab rosewater or sugar water on her nipples, made her laugh unsoundly. The next thing Anna knew, Connie was stripping for the R and R boys in a Kings Cross nightclub: Don’t wish you were here, said her one cheery postcard. When Anna next saw Chester, seven years had passed, but she fell easily into an old wisecracking affinity with him. Quick wits and risk-taking had bought him money and influence. Got any cash to invest? Me? Anna laughed. My husband has fallen out with his father, we’re renting that old schoolhouse out near the Park, and I’m working two days a week for Carl Hartwig at the Chronicle. No chance. She looked at him, scarcely breathing. She needed some love, luck and whirling joy in her life. Surely Chester brimmed over with good luck—how else could he have escaped the call-up, escaped an untimely death, which Lockie’s had been? She needed him inside her. As it happened, they made love only once, in April, when the roads were dust-choked and shuddery and Anna had gone straight to him from the Showalter Park field day, wearing a shapely, flawless summer dress that she wanted him to feast his eyes upon for a moment before he stripped it from her body. She saw him again after the accident, and even though nothing was said, it was clear that they would not be lovers again. But they were friends for life. Chester was her friend at a time when many people were wary of friendship with her. Anna could not forget that, not even when he took one risk too many with the twenty thousand she inherited when her father died. The Public Prosecutor, the judge and jury, the hungry press, all said that he was a crook. Anna makes no such judgement. She visits him at the prison once a month, kisses him on the lips, holds his hand. She has come to believe that sexual attraction is an element in all friendships. She feels it with Maxine sometimes. There has always been a passionate edge to their friendship. The period when they fell out had been like an inflexible stand-off between quarrelling lovers, solved by Anna’s capitulation: Dear Maxine, I’m writing to ask if we could be friends again. There are times—when Maxine bubbles over with laughter or a secret, when her breasts are soft and her lips mobile, damp and blooming—that unsettle Anna. She can imagine being naked and unwithholding with Maxine. She knows that Maxine knows it. Maxine blushes, tosses back her head, oddly pleased. Most of the men whom Anna knows would say that their best friends are their wives. No wonder they are so often left high and dry. How must it be for Hugo, who has never married? Am I his best friend? Is our mother? In a community organised around the notion of couples, a single man is unlikely to be invited to dinner, no matter how many dinner parties he himself might hold. A man alone upsets the balance. There must be something wrong with him. If he has to be invited, then a single woman will have to be invited. Doubts, then suspicion, lodge in the orderly mind contemplating the unmarried man. Poor Hugo. Anna will be friends with Rebecca and Meg, attending concerts and often dining with them, but there will be things that the younger women won’t share with her. Anna won’t need many friends in her place beside the sea. Fewer friends but deeper friendships, old men and women looking out for one another.