For eggs the households on Isonville relied upon half a dozen black hens. A faint, engrossed scratch and murmur filled the daylight hours, a perpetual background busyness beneath the wiry hedges. At sundown the hens bobbed spastically into the open and crossed the yard to the wire-netting pen and sheltered roosts at the rear of the house. It was Hugo’s task to toss them kitchen scraps at night and Anna’s to collect the eggs in the morning. Two generations ago an Ison had planted apricot, apple, quince and fig trees to screen the big house from the overseer’s cottage. The families rarely ate beef. A ewe or a hogget, butchered once a month, provided chops, liver, brains and leg roasts. They got milk and cream from a couple of Jersey cows. The children often felt a kind of slathering avarice for scalded cream. There were occasions, abundant springtimes, when the milk tasted of the wild-flowering grasses that had begun to choke the paddocks. Anna grew carrots and radishes in a narrow strip of weedy soil beside her father’s tomato vines, sweetcorn and sandy lettuces. One numbing and bitter day in August, when the windborne rain slanted far into the shelter shed and the ground was as hard as iron, Anna gave up her school lunch to Chester Flood. He sat with everybody but he had no lunch box open upon his knees. The nuns had dressed him in patched shorts and a threadbare grey pullover, and Anna couldn’t bear to see the purple cold-bruises on his shanks or hear his helpless teeth. He ate the jam sandwich; she ate a rock bun; neither said a word. Anna wrote about race relations on the frontier for her honours research project. According to Mrs Showalter’s old family memoir, the Protector of Aborigines had toured the district in 1842:
Consequent upon the presence of great numbers of cattle and sheep hereabouts, the chief food of the Native, namely the kangaroo, the emu and the wallaby, has been unprocurable and so he makes armed attacks upon the hut-keepers, carrying off livestock, occasionally with the loss of life on both sides. I have communicated with representatives of the northern tribes on the subject. They acknowledge having attacked the flocks, claiming shipi paru padlotti (a longing for sheep’s flesh). I advised them to desist, for they risked rendering themselves obnoxious in the sight of the European and liable to persecution and abuse. I am now satisfied that they fully understand the nature of our laws and punishments on the points of theft and murder, and expect no further trouble from them. Indeed, one settler has made tea, flour, sugar and tobacco available in exchange for labouring duties, the Native proving to be most adept at hauling stone, and on occasion, a lubra will deliver a wild turkey and be paid in flour, which she gobbles from her cupped hands.
Anna’s tutor had never heard of the book: Indulgent family history, privately published—how can you be sure it’s accurate? he demanded. Is there any real analysis? Anna’s job in London entitled her to luncheon vouchers, issued in bundles of five on payday once a week. Her pay was mean, the luncheon vouchers were mean. One voucher, exchanged for a thin, cramped wedge of sandwich or an apple and a finger of stale cake was not enough to take away her hunger. She needed food to fill her up and she needed it to help her forget. When she had been married for five years and the children were toddlers, her twin cousins, the daughters of Kitchener and Lorna, had a double wedding in the garden at Isonville. A vast striped marquee crowded the lawn at the front of the house, the canvas bellying and exhaling as a hot northerly blew in across the lucerne flats. Anna sat with Sam, Hugo and her parents at a trestle table next to the bridal party and picked at cold chicken and potato salad while Hugo sneezed and wiped his scratchy eyes. Anna drank too much and took showy risks on the portable dance floor, her way of fighting down old grievances. She had not seen her uncle and aunt for many years and rarely since the day they’d forced her family out. Kitchener and Lorna had prospered at Isonville, but there were no sons to carry on the Ison line, only sons-in-law from the city, sleek men who would carve the property up when Kitchener and Lorna died. Anna could see her mother thinking these things, see the complicated memories and hopes in her face. Then Uncle Kitch appeared at their elbows: I was thinking about an Ison family reunion, this time next year. What do you think? Eleanor? Care to help me arrange it? The field days every April were pretty daggy, in Anna’s view. She always helped with the catering, more as a way of gathering information for the Chronicle than as a commitment to the district. She didn’t notice Wesley Showalter’s drunkenness this time: she wore her new dress and was daydreaming. Should she go to Chester naked underneath? She beamed across the cups and saucers and plates of scones in the Ladies’ Auxiliary tent, confusing the orders and blushing at the frankness of the scenes playing behind her shining eyes. She did see Wesley Showalter at the funeral, four days later, staring abjectly at the ground. He thought that he was fully culpable, but Anna knew better, Anna shared in the guilt. She should not have been coming home from seeing a lover or enjoying the lingering sensation of him on her skin but concentrating on the shapes coming toward her through the dust on the sunken road. Years later, something happened to cure her of her guilt. To celebrate Rebecca’s acceptance as a student at the Conservatorium, Sam and Anna arranged a meal out at the Bon Accord Hotel. Dinners there were a joke, everyone knew that, but that was part of the appeal. The steaks came drenched in gravy on chunky white plates and Rebecca’s salad was awash in vinegar. That awful man, Rebecca said suddenly, and Anna looked through the smoky alcove to the front bar. Wesley Showalter stood there swaying and shouting, his heavy face red with power and unhealthy blood. He recognised her, went still, then began to elbow jab through the smaller men until he was framed in the alcove and finally booming above them, dipping alarmingly at Rebecca: You’ve grown, girlie. Rebecca shrank away from him. He stood at a rocky attention again: Worst day of my life. Should’ve stayed at home. Anna understood that he meant the day he slammed her car into the rock face. They stared at him. After a while he wandered away. Last week Anna put it to the Jubilee Committee that tribal seeds, berries, grubs, tubers and insects should be included in a proposed display of the district’s foodstuffs. Her suggestion was approved by a vote of seven to six, but only after some forceful lobbying on her part. Today she is making notes about the double suicide on Showalter Hill for her column in the Chronicle. The Red Cross had stepped in with food and mugs of tea after the funeral, but Anna finds that she cannot bring herself to mention their generosity or the funeral itself, not when the suicide is clearly an indication of a deep malaise: The government would do well not to ignore the level of disenchantment of the people who make the nation’s food, and we would do well not to place all of our hopes in the Jubilee festivities. As she learns to cook for one, Anna will find herself eating less and better food. She will learn to make small economies. One of the pleasures of her life will be to buy fruit and vegetables fresh from the market gardens that ring the city, for fruit and vegetables at Tolley’s Four Square had always displayed the wear and tear of storage and transport and were rarely a pleasure upon her tongue.