On Christmas Day, the Tolleys, the Isons and Mrs Mac groaned around the table in Beulah’s half of the big house. It was a day of blind eyes, blind to Mrs Mac’s singing, Eleanor Ison’s one cigarette of the year. Anna and Hugo liked to watch their mother puff and giggle through a couple of sherries, well-being rising pink from her breasts to her throat, highlighting her cheeks. Then the old ones died and Kitch edged Anna’s family out into the cold. Now there was only Grandfather Tolley, and he drove out to the six-forty acres or they carted a cooked turkey to his house behind the shop. Anna’s mother didn’t abandon her Christmas Day cigarette and sherries, but the flush at her throat lost its innocence, apt to grow hard red with hurt and anger: My own father, my own brother. How could they do that to me? The Tolleys were on the guest list for Christmas drinks at Showalter Park because Wesley Showalter and Anna’s mother had grown up together. They came to the main gate. Holly. They drove in. Christmases at Showalter Park had once intimidated her father. Until he owned the six-forty acres, he’d been forced, on Christmas mornings, to endure the drunken back-slaps of Wesley Showalter, who boxed him around the compass on three hundred and sixty-four days of the year, arranging the sale and shipment of the Park’s hoggets, ewes and rams. But the six-forty acres made him almost an equal, on those white-cloth, long-tabled Showalter Park lawns on Christmas mornings. He even bred from a couple of bottom-of-the-range Showalter Park rams. Anna was not prepared for her first Christmas Day with Lockie. She sat mute, wide-eyed, stirred to the core, as love and discord raged about her head. Lockie had a chain-smoking, corner-of-the-mouth father, a heavy, slippered mother who shouted dear at her above the racket, and a Queensland heeler stretched out on the dark pantry floor. He had a tribe of little snatching brothers and sisters, and uncles and aunts who lashed out to cuff whining earholes and skinny bare legs. And he had Chester Flood, who had no love or family of his own, only district gossip and an orphan’s bunk bed at the convent in Truro Street. Anna nodded at Chester, who sat as patient and unblinking as a hunting bird, family life whirling around him and brown beer bottles accumulating on the kitchen table. She gazed at him covertly. He was here, he was clearly Lockie’s friend. It was as though she were seeing him for the first time, as though the stigmatised kid at school had been someone else all that time. In the first year of her marriage to Sam Jaeger, Anna installed a new kitchen range and her mother’s recipes in the transportable home at the lip of the gully and offered to do the Christmas cooking. But she hadn’t counted on Mrs Jaeger: You’d better let me do the turkey, dear. I think I’d better do the pudding this year. Dad likes a skin on his custard. Do I detect rum in this, dear? Anna was offended. She refused to see it as Sam urged her to see it, a blessed release from labouring for hours over a hot stove on Christmas Eve and Christmas morning. She saw it for what it really was, an exercise in power and control. Anna could never please Sam’s mother, even if she were to clap hands for Jesus twice an hour. So why did she continue trying to please the woman? Every Christmas Day, exactly at noon, Anna and Sam loaded presents, ham and a potato salad into a cane basket and stumbled down the stony hill behind their skipping children. Into the scorching kitchen. Mrs Jaeger would peel back the linen teatowel and sniff at the potato salad: I’m not sure if there’s room on the table for all this. They chewed stolidly through the hours. Even Michael and Rebecca grew quieter, quieter. The music of Christmas in those stern years was a knife clatter on the best china, liquid jaws, the toe of Becky’s sandal kick kick kick against the stout, impregnable leg of the Jaegers’ dining-room table. Anna saw the years fall away from her father’s face when he inherited Grandfather Tolley’s shop, quit the six-forty acres and returned to the town. Tolley’s Four Square Store beat warmly between the Tourist Office and the fish and chip shop in the main street, a place for Daily Specials and catching-up over morning coffee. It became customary for him to stay open late on Christmas Eve with a promise of presents and Santa Claus for the little ones. And so Anna was hurt and bewildered when Sam offered to plump himself up in a red coat, britches and a cottonwool beard and canter up the main street at dusk on someone’s old pony. It seemed insensitive of him, so soon after Michael’s death. She read it as a slap in the face, as a reminder that she was forever guilty. Why isn’t he thinking of our son, she wondered, why isn’t he still stunned with grief, why isn’t he like me? It’s okay, it’s okay, Maxine said, comforting her, leading her away from those clamouring sweet faces and indulgent mums and dads. When Rebecca acquired a house and a lover, she invited Anna and Sam for Christmas lunch. Sam arrived in a state of great agitation, unable to meet Meg’s eye, shaking her hand gruffly before setting off at once to examine the house, oil a hinge, change a tap washer, rap his knuckles against the plastered walls. Meg shrugged at his busy back and grinned at Anna, a warm, faintly sad and mocking grin: Classic displacement behaviour, she said. There won’t be Christmas drinks at Showalter Park this year. The locals have had their fingers burnt, and many of them want only to break the test tubes, thaw the embryos, run a plough over the landing strip and dig up the parquetry floors. Until Sam feels more comfortable, he will find excuses not to spend every Christmas with the girls. There will be a ewe down, a windmill broken, the threat of dust and fire, and so Anna will make the six-hour round trip alone, grateful that he isn’t with her, yet wishing that he felt he could be. When he is gone from her Anna will prepare cold Christmas lunches; not hot, and people will nod, very sensible, but she will be just as happy to spend the day alone. She will send cards to Maxine on the Gold Coast and Chester Flood in Victor Harbor, and ring them before nightfall on Christmas Day if the lines are not tied up. There will be a stretch of time in which Anna views her teenage granddaughter with distaste at Christmas time—her bad skin, her sulky gracelessness, her tossing presents to one side as if to complain that her grandmother and her two mothers owe her something, but it won’t last.