Teeth-staining tea in bone china cups, Anzac biscuits, service medals clanking on Grandfather Ison’s dark suit and on their father’s sports coat. Even their mother wore a tiny red and gold cloth badge in her lapel. Waiting, in the house in Burnside, until it was time to take a bus in to the Cross of Remembrance. Parking will be hell, Peter, Grandfather Ison said. He had the bus timetable open upon the table. Pom, pom, pom. The children’s father stretched his legs, leaned back in the little kitchen chair, clasped his hands behind his head. Smoke wreathed about his sun and smile-crinkled face, and his cigarette bobbed: Good to catch up with the blokes again. Grandfather Ison stiffened. His spine seemed to say: No slouching, not in this house. No talking around a cigarette. Remember who you are, remember it’s the Isons you married into, remember what this day represents. It was a day of reunions, but Grandfather Ison wanted it to be a day of mourning. Even Eleanor, his daughter, was going off with her pals from the munitions factory after the ceremony. Anna saw her father snap forward in the chair, swing around to the sideboard and silence the radio: That’s better. Couldn’t hear myself think. Grandfather Ison swelled: Good God, man, that was a Bach mass. Behind her husband, swirling in her apron, the cake tin in her hands, Grandmother Ison twinkled, a silent message directed at Anna: Your dad likes winding your grandpa up, doesn’t he? It’ll be a relief when they’ve finished their tea and left the house so we can have the place to ourselves. The only gift that mattered on Anna’s twenty-second birthday was unexpected and unintended: Hi, Anna. Coming home at last, April sometime. Be good to catch up with you. Guess what—they gave me a stripe. Yours etc., Corporal Lachlan Kelly, esq. She turned the card over. Rice and misty saw-teeth mountains, and a kid with a water buffalo. A flicker of outrage: Vietnam’s being torn apart by war and they’re still making postcards? Not Lockie’s fault, though. They’d be reunited soon and that’s what mattered. They would start anew. He still wanted her, didn’t he? He’d written to say he was coming home—that had to mean something. And he hadn’t needed a lucky wound to bring him back. On the morning of the reunion of the Isons, Anna made a potato salad, sorted, weighed and packed fifty dozen eggs, filled the car from the bulk fuel tank, cleaned the children’s shoes, got herself and the children ready, and read to them until Sam came in from the paddock. She imagined her way into her mother’s skin, walking through the big house on Isonville again. I’ve been there a few times in the past year, you know, helping Kitch get his facts right for the reunion book and writing letters to far-flung Isons, that kind of thing. I must say I feel better about the bad blood between us. But I’ve never been invited further than the kitchen. Lorna’s a difficult woman. Did you know yours is an old family name? Anna. Hugo’s another one. Rebecca. Michael. Old Mrs Mac’s been invited. And a million Isons. Kitch has been marvellous. He actually dug up an old photo, it had on the back ‘Ison’s Field, Berkshire’. Makes you think, doesn’t it. That’s how Anna’s mother had been babbling on for the past few months, and Anna could see now that it was simple excitement. Her mother was a forgiver. So long as Kitch doesn’t have a go at me about not checking Chancery records for him, Anna told herself, then maybe I can forgive, too. Anna stared around the heads of her children, beyond the verandah railing, focussing on a flash of windscreen glass in the Jaegers’ yard below. Sam and his father, back from the paddock. The father saying something, laying down the law, Sam turning his back, stamping up the track toward the house. The sooner we find somewhere else to live, the better, Anna thought. Sam stormed up the verandah steps: That’s the last time I talk to my old man, the last time I work alongside him. I’m cutting myself free. As of now, I’m a separate person. We’ll never be reconciled. But then Michael was killed. Sam grieved. He looked accusingly at Anna: What were you doing on that part of the road, anyhow? He wanted his mother and his father around him. He was away for most of the day. Anna and Rebecca heard the thin slam of the Land Rover’s door just as the sun irradiated the clouds behind the Razorback and died. Rebecca ran to him and he swept her up. Anna remained where she was; she knew that she must seem cold and staring to her husband and her daughter, but she had no light left in her. Sam hesitated in the doorway, finally bursting out: I had to come home. I couldn’t stand it any longer. They had their holy rollers there. Wanted me to sit around in a circle with them, holding hands. Said we were going to thank God for taking Michael. And his voice cracked. Rebecca’s arms went tight around him. At least Sam had the love of a daughter in his life. Reunions, anniversaries, get togethers. Anna was reunited with Maxine, but not with Lockie. On the twentieth anniversary of the Hammersmith house, she was not at the base of Nelson’s Column, and nor, she supposed, were the New Zealanders who had taken her in. Tonight Anna is on the telephone to North Adelaide: They’ve even planned a high school reunion. I tell you, Becky, I’m getting tired of the word Jubilee. You’re a cynic, mother. I liked that school. I wouldn’t mind catching up with everyone again. Becky, you hated school. No I didn’t. School was an escape. Anna swallows. She wants to cry. She doesn’t know what the truth is about some things, any more. She doesn’t know if Becky’s being tactless or intending to wound. Anna’s frame will shrink and her bones grow brittle, and she’ll wonder, when the time comes: With whom, in death, shall I be reunited? Will Michael still be five years old with a smiling dimpled chin, or will he be middle aged, as I am old? Will my grandmother bear the wounds of those tearing teeth? Will she like me? Will the other one want to dance?