ell,” said Justine to her mother, “I’ve decided what I’m going to do.”

“I thought it was already decided. Arts at Sydney University, isn’t that right?”

“Oh, that was just a red herring to lull you into a false sense of security while I made my plans. But now it’s all set, so I can tell you.”

Meggie’s head came up from her task, cutting fir-tree shapes in cookie dough; Mrs. Smith was ill and they were helping out in the cookhouse. She regarded her daughter wearily, impatiently, helplessly. What could one do with someone like Justine? If she announced she was going off to train as a whore in a Sydney bordello, Meggie very much doubted whether she could be turned aside. Dear, horrible Justine, queen among juggernauts.

“Go on, I’m all agog,” she said, and went back to producing cookies.

“I’m going to be an actress.”

“A what?”

“An actress.”

“Good Lord!” The fir trees were abandoned again. “Look, Justine, I hate to be a spoilsport and truly I don’t mean to hurt your feelings, but do you think you’re—well, quite physically equipped to be an actress?”

“Oh, Mum!” said Justine, disgusted. “Not a film star; an actress! I don’t want to wiggle my hips and stick out my breasts and pout my wet lips! I want to act.” She was pushing chunks of defatted beef into the corning barrel. “I have enough money to support myself during whatever sort of training I choose, isn’t that right?”

“Yes, thanks to Cardinal de Bricassart.”

“Then it’s all settled. I’m going to study acting with Albert Jones at the Culloden Theater, and I’ve written to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, asking that I be put on their waiting list.”

“Are you quite sure, Jussy?”

“Quite sure. I’ve known for a long time.” The last piece of bloody beef was tucked down under the surface of the corning solution; Justine put the lid on the barrel with a thump. “There! I hope I never see another bit of corned beef as long as I live.”

Meggie handed her a completed tray of cookies. “Put these in the oven, would you? Four hundred degrees. I must say this comes as something of a surprise. I thought little girls who wanted to be actresses role-played constantly, but the only person I’ve ever seen you play has been yourself.”

“Oh, Mum! There you go again, confusing film stars with actresses. Honestly, you’re hopeless.”

“Well, aren’t film stars actresses?”

“Of a very inferior sort. Unless they’ve been on the stage first, that is. I mean, even Laurence Olivier does an occasional film.”

There was an autographed picture of Laurence Olivier on Justine’s dressing table; Meggie had simply deemed it juvenile crush stuff, though at the time she remembered thinking at least Justine had taste. The friends she sometimes brought home with her to stay a few days usually treasured pictures of Tab Hunter and Rory Calhoun.

“I still don’t understand,” said Meggie, shaking her head. “An actress!”

Justine shrugged. “Well, where else can I scream and yell and howl but on a stage? I’m not allowed to do any of those here, or at school, or anywhere! I like screaming and yelling and howling, dammit!”

“But you’re so good at art, Jussy! Why not be an artist?” Meggie persevered.

Justine turned from the huge gas stove, flicked her finger against a cylinder gauge. “I must tell the kitchen rouseabout to change bottles; we’re low. It’ll do for today, though.” The light eyes surveyed Meggie with pity. “You’re so impractical, Mum, really. I thought it was supposed to be the children who didn’t stop to consider a career’s practical aspects. Let me tell you, I don’t want to starve to death in a garret and be famous after I’m dead. I want to enjoy a bit of fame while I’m still alive, and be very comfortable financially. So I’ll paint as a hobby and act for a living. How’s that?”

“You’ve got an income from Drogheda, Jussy,” Meggie said desperately, breaking her vow to remain silent no matter what. “It would never come to starving in a garret. If you’d rather paint, it’s all right. You can.”

Justine looked alert, interested. “How much have I got, Mum?”

“Enough that if you preferred, you need never work at anything.”

“What a bore! I’d end up talking on the telephone and playing bridge; at least that’s what the mothers of most of my school friends do. Because I’d be living in Sydney, not on Drogheda. I like Sydney much better than Drogheda.” A gleam of hope entered her eye. “Do I have enough to pay to have my freckles removed with this new electrical treatment?”

“I should think so. But why?”

“Because then someone might see my face, that’s why.”

“I thought looks didn’t matter to an actress?”

“Enough’s enough, Mum. My freckles are a pain.”

“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather be an artist?”

“Quite sure, thank you.” She did a little dance. “I’m going to tread the boards, Mrs. Worthington!”

“How did you get yourself into the Culloden?”

“I auditioned.”

“And they took you?”

“Your faith in your daughter is touching, Mum. Of course they took me! I’m superb, you know. One day I shall be very famous.”

Meggie beat green food coloring into a bowl of runny icing and began to drizzle it over already baked fir trees. “Is it important to you, Justine? Fame?”

“I should say so.” She tipped sugar in on top of butter so soft it had molded itself to the inner contours of the bowl; in spite of the gas stove instead of the wood stove, the cookhouse was very hot. “I’m absolutely iron-bound determined to be famous.”

“Don’t you want to get married?”

Justine looked scornful. “Not bloody likely! Spend my life wiping snotty noses and cacky bums? Salaaming to some man not half my equal even though he thinks he’s better? Ho ho ho, not me!”

“Honestly, you’re the dizzy limit! Where do you pick up your language?”

Justine began cracking eggs rapidly and deftly into a basin, using one hand. “At my exclusive ladies’ college, of course.” She drubbed the eggs unmercifully with a French whisk. “We were quite a decent bunch of girls, actually. Very cultured. It isn’t every gaggle of silly adolescent females can appreciate the delicacy of a Latin limerick:

There was a Roman from Vinidium

Whose shirt was made of iridium;

When asked why the vest,

He replied, “Id est

Bonum sanguinem praesidium.”

Meggie’s lips twitched. “I’m going to hate myself for asking, but what did the Roman say?”

“ ‘It’s a bloody good protection.’ ”

“Is that all? I thought it was going to be a lot worse. You surprise me. But getting back to what we were saying, dear girl, in spite of your neat effort to change the subject, what’s wrong with marriage?”

Justine imitated her grandmother’s rare snort of ironic laughter. “Mum! Really! You’re a fine one to ask that, I must say.”

Meggie felt the blood well up under her skin, and looked down at the tray of bright-green trees. “Don’t be impertinent, even if you are a ripe old seventeen.”

“Isn’t it odd?” Justine asked the mixing bowl. “The minute one ventures onto strictly parental territory, one becomes impertinent. I just said: You’re a fine one to ask. Perfectly true, dammit! I’m not necessarily implying you’re a failure, or a sinner, or worse. Actually I think you’ve shown remarkable good sense, dispensing with your husband. What have you needed one for? There’s been tons of male influence for your children with the Unks around, you’ve got enough money to live on. I agree with you! Marriage is for the birds.”

“You’re just like your father!”

“Another evasion. Whenever I displease you, I become just like my father. Well, I’ll have to take your word for that, since I’ve never laid eyes on the gentleman.”

“When are you leaving?” Meggie asked desperately.

Justine grinned. “Can’t wait to get rid of me, eh? It’s all right, Mum, I don’t blame you in the least. But I can’t help it, I just love shocking people, especially you. How about taking me into the ‘drome tomorrow?”

“Make it the day after. Tomorrow I’ll take you to the bank. You’d better know how much you’ve got. And, Justine…”

Justine was adding flour and folding expertly, but she looked up at the change in her mother’s voice. “Yes?”

“If ever you’re in trouble, come home, please. We’ve always got room for you on Drogheda, I want you to remember that. Nothing you could ever do would be so bad you couldn’t come home.”

Justine’s gaze softened. “Thanks, Mum. You’re not a bad old stick underneath, are you?”

“Old?” gasped Meggie. “I am not old! I’m only forty-three!”

“Good Lord, as much as that?”

Meggie hurled a cookie and hit Justine on the nose. “Oh, you wretch!” she laughed. “What a monster you are! Now I feel like a hundred.”

Her daughter grinned.

At which moment Fee walked in to see how things in the cookhouse were going; Meggie hailed her arrival with relief.

“Mum, do you know what Justine just told me?”

Fee’s eyes were no longer up to anything beyond the uttermost effort of keeping the books, but the mind at back of those smudged pupils was as acute as ever.

“How could I possibly know what Justine just told you?” she inquired mildly, regarding the green cookies with a slight shudder.

“Because sometimes it strikes me that you and Jussy have little secrets from me, and now, the moment my daughter finishes telling me her news, in you walk when you never do.”

“Mmmmmm, at least they taste better than they look,” commented Fee, nibbling. “I assure you, Meggie, I don’t encourage your daughter to conspire with me behind your back. What have you done to upset the applecart now, Justine?” she asked, turning to where Justine was pouring her sponge mixture into greased and floured tins.

“I told Mum I was going to be an actress, Nanna, that’s all.”

“That’s all, eh? Is it true, or only one of your dubious jokes?”

“Oh, it’s true. I’m starting at the Culloden.”

“Well, well, well!” said Fee, leaning against the table and surveying her own daughter ironically. “Isn’t it amazing how chidren have minds of their own, Meggie?”

Meggie didn’t answer.

“Do you disapprove, Nanna?” Justine growled, ready to do battle.

“I? Disapprove? It’s none of my business what you do with your life, Justine. Besides, I think you’ll make a good actress.”

“You do?” gasped Meggie.

“Of course she will,” said Fee. “Justine’s not the sort to choose unwisely, are you, my girl?”

“No.” Justine grinned, pushing a damp curl out of her eye. Meggie watched her regarding her grandmother with an affection she never seemed to extend to her mother.

“You’re a good girl, Justine,” Fee pronounced, and finished the cookie she had started so unenthusiastically. “Not bad at all, but I wish you’d iced them in white.”

“You can’t ice trees in white,” Meggie contradicted.

“Of course you can when they’re firs; it might be snow,” her mother said.

“Too late now, they’re vomit green,” laughed Justine.

“Justine!”

“Ooops! Sorry, Mum, didn’t mean to offend you. I always forget you’ve got a weak stomach.”

“I haven’t got a weak stomach,” said Meggie, exasperated.

“I came to see if there was any chance of a cuppa,” Fee broke in, pulling out a chair and sitting down. “Put on the kettle, Justine, like a good girl.”

Meggie sat down, too. “Do you really think this will work out for Justine, Mum?” she asked anxiously.

“Why shouldn’t it?” Fee answered, watching her granddaughter attending to the tea ritual.

“It might be a passing phase.”

“Is it a passing phase, Justine?” Fee asked.

“No,” Justine said tersely, putting cups and saucers on the old green kitchen table.

“Use a plate for the biscuits, Justine, don’t put them out in their barrel,” said Meggie automatically, “and for pity’s sake don’t dump the whole milk can on the table, put some in a proper afternoon tea jug.”

“Yes, Mum, sorry, Mum,” Justine responded, equally mechanically. “Can’t see the point of frills in the kitchen. All I’ve got to do is put whatever isn’t eaten back where it came from, and wash up a couple of extra dishes.”

“Just do as you’re told; it’s so much nicer.”

“Getting back to the subject,” Fee pursued, “I don’t think there’s anything to discuss. It’s my opinion that Justine ought to be allowed to try, and will probably do very well.”

“I wish I could be so sure,” said Meggie glumly.

“Have you been on about fame and glory, Justine?” her grandmother demanded.

“They enter the picture,” said Justine, putting the old brown kitchen teapot on the table defiantly and sitting down in a hurry. “Now don’t complain, Mum; I’m not making tea in a silver pot for the kitchen and that’s final.”

“The teapot is perfectly appropriate.” Meggie smiled.

“Oh, that’s good! There’s nothing like a nice cup of tea,” sighed Fee, sipping. “Justine, why do you persist in putting things to your mother so badly? You know it isn’t a question of fame and fortune. It’s a question of self, isn’t it?”

“Self, Nanna?”

“Of course. Self. Acting is what you feel you were meant to do, isn’t that right?”

“Yes.”

“Then why couldn’t you have explained it so to your mother? Why upset her with a lot of flippant nonsense?”

Justine shrugged, drank her tea down and pushed the empty cup toward her mother for more. “Dunno,” she said.

“I-dont-know,” Fee corrected. “You’ll articulate properly on the stage, I trust. But self is why you want to be an actress, isn’t it?”

“I suppose so,” answered Justine reluctantly.

“Oh, that stubborn, pigheaded Cleary pride! It will be your downfall, too, Justine, unless you learn to rule it. That stupid fear of being laughed at, or held up to some sort of ridicule. Though why you think your mother would be so cruel I don’t know.” She tapped Justine on the back of her hand. “Give a little, Justine; cooperate.”

But Justine shook her head and said, “I can’t.”

Fee sighed. “Well, for what earthly good it will do you, child, you have my blessing on your enterprise.”

“Ta, Nanna, I appreciate it.”

“Then kindly show your appreciation in a concrete fashion by finding your uncle Frank and telling him there’s tea in the kitchen, please.”

Justine went off, and Meggie stared at Fee.

“Mum, you’re amazing, you really are.”

Fee smiled. “Well, you have to admit I never tried to tell any of my children what to do.”

“No, you never did,” said Meggie tenderly. “We did appreciate it, too.”

The first thing Justine did when she arrived back in Sydney was begin to have her freckles removed. Not a quick process, unfortunately; she had so many it would take about twelve months, and then she would have to stay out of the sun for the rest of her life, or they would come back. The second thing she did was to find herself an apartment, no mean feat in Sydney at that time, when people built, private homes and regarded living en masse in buildings as anathema. But eventually she found a two-room flat in Neutral Bay, in one of the huge old waterside Victorian mansions which had fallen on hard times and been made over into dingy semi-apartments. The rent was five pounds ten shillings a week, outrageous considering that the bathroom and kitchen were communal, shared by all the tenants. However, Justine was quite satisfied. Though she had been well trained domestically, she had few homemaker instincts.

Living in Bothwell Gardens was more fascinating than her acting apprenticeship at the Culloden, where life seemed to consist in skulking behind scenery and watching other people rehearse, getting an occasional walk-on, memorizing masses of Shakespeare, Shaw and Sheridan.

Including Justine’s, Bothwell Gardens had six flats, plus Mrs. Devine the landlady. Mrs. Devine was a sixty-five-year-old Londoner with a doleful sniff, protruding eyes and a great contempt for Australia and Australians, though she wasn’t above robbing them. Her chief concern in life seemed to be how much gas and electricty cost, and her chief weakness was Justine’s next-door neighbor, a young Englishman who exploited his nationality cheerfully.

“I don’t mind giving the old duck an occasional tickle while we reminisce,” he told Justine. “Keeps her off my back, you know. You girls aren’t allowed to run electric radiators even in winter, but I was given one and I’m allowed to run it all summer as well if I feel like it.”

“Pig,” said Justine dispassionately.

His name was Peter Wilkins, and he was a traveling salesman. “Come in and I’ll make you a nice cuppa sometime,” he called after her, rather taken with those pale, intriguing eyes.

Justine did, careful not to choose a time when Mrs. Devine was lurking jealously about, and got quite used to fighting Peter off. The years of riding and working on Drogheda had endowed her with considerable strength, and she was untroubled by shibboleths like hitting below the belt.

“God damn you, Justine!” gasped Peter, wiping the tears of pain from his eyes. “Give in, girl! You’ve got to lose it sometime, you know! This isn’t Victorian England, you aren’t expected to save it for marriage.”

“I have no intention of saving it for marriage,” she answered, adjusting her dress. “I’m just not sure who’s going to get the honor, that’s all.”

“You’re nothing to write home about!” he snapped nastily; she had really hurt.

“No, that I’m not. Sticks and stones, Pete. You can’t hurt me with words. And there are plenty of men who will shag anything if it’s a virgin.”

“Plenty of women, too! Watch the front flat.”

“Oh, I do, I do,” said Justine.

The two girls in the front flat were lesbians, and had hailed Justine’s advent gleefully until they realized she not only wasn’t interested, she wasn’t even intrigued. At first she wasn’t quite sure what they were hinting at, but after they spelled it out baldly she shrugged her shoulders, unimpressed. Thus after a period of adjustment she became their sounding board, their neutral confidante, their port in all storms; she bailed Billie out of jail, took Bobbie to the Mater hospital to have her stomach pumped out after a particularly bad quarrel with Billie, refused to take sides with either of them when Pat, Al, Georgie and Ronnie hove in turns on the horizon. It did seem a very insecure kind of emotional life, she thought. Men were bad enough, but at least they had the spice of intrinsic difference.

So between the Culloden and Bothwell Gardens and girls she had known from Kincoppal days, Justine had quite a lot of friends, and was a good friend herself. She never told them all her troubles as they did her; she had Dane for that, though what few troubles she admitted to having didn’t appear to prey upon her. The thing which fascinated her friends the most about her was her extraordinary self-discipline; as if she had trained herself from infancy not to let circumstances affect her well-being.

Of chief interest to everyone called a friend was how, when and with whom Justine would finally decide to become a fulfilled woman, but she took her time.

Arthur Lestrange was Albert Jones’s most durable juvenile lead, though he had wistfully waved goodbye to his fortieth birthday the year before Justine arrived at the Culloden. He had a good body, was a steady, reliable actor and his clean-cut, manly face with its surround of yellow curls was always sure to evoke audience applause. For the first year he didn’t notice Justine, who was very quiet and did exactly as she was told. But at the end of the year her freckle treatments were finished, and she began to stand out against the scenery instead of blending into it.

Minus the freckles and plus makeup to darken her brows and lashes, she was a good-looking girl in an elfin, understated way. She had none of Luke O’Neill’s arresting beauty, or her mother’s exquisiteness. Her figure was passable though not spectacular, a trifle on the thin side. Only the vivid red hair ever stood out. But on a stage she was quite different; she could make people think she was as beautiful as Helen of Troy or as ugly as a witch.

Arthur first noticed her during a teaching period, when she was required to recite a passage from Conrad’s Lord Jim using various accents. She was extraordinary, really; he could feel the excitement in Albert Jones, and finally understood why Al devoted so much time to her. A born mimic, but far more than that; she gave character to every word she said. And there was the voice, a wonderful natural endowment for any actress, deep, husky, penetrating.

So when he saw her with a cup of tea in her hand, sitting with a book open on her knees, he came to sit beside her.

“What are you reading?”

She looked up, smiled. “Proust.”

“Don’t you find him a little dull?”

“Proust dull? Not unless one doesn’t care for gossip, surely. That’s what he is, you know. A terrible old gossip.”

He had an uncomfortable conviction that she was intellectually patronizing him, but he forgave her. No more than extreme youth.

“I heard you doing the Conrad. Splendid.”

“Thank you.”

“Perhaps we could have coffee together sometime and discuss your plans”

“If you like,” she said, returning to Proust.

He was glad he had stipulated coffee, rather than dinner; his wife kept him on short commons, and dinner demanded a degree of gratitude he couldn’t be sure Justine was ready to manifest. However, he followed his casual invitation up, and bore her off to a dark little place in lower Elizabeth Street, where he was reasonably sure his wife wouldn’t think of looking for him.

In self-defense Justine had learned to smoke, tired of always appearing goody-goody in refusing offered cigarettes. After they were seated she took her own cigarettes out of her bag, a new pack, and peeled the top cellophane from the flip-top box carefully, making sure the larger piece of cellophane still sheathed the bulk of the packet. Arthur watched her deliberateness, amused and interested.

“Why on earth go to so much trouble? Just rip it all off, Justine.”

“How untidy!”

He picked up the box and stroked its intact shroud reflectively. “Now, if I was a disciple of the eminent Sigmund Freud…”

“If you were Freud, what?” She glanced up, saw the waitress standing beside her. “Cappuccino, please.”

It annoyed him that she gave her own order, but he let it pass, more intent on pursuing the thought in his mind. “Vienna, please. Now, getting back to what I was saying about Freud. I wonder what he’d think of this? He might say…”

She took the packet off him, opened it, removed a cigarette and lit it herself without giving him time to find his matches. “Well?”

“He’d think you liked to keep membranous substances intact, wouldn’t he?”

Her laughter gurgled through the smoky air, caused several male heads to turn curiously. “Would he now? Is that a roundabout way of asking me if I’m still a virgin, Arthur?”

He clicked his tonque, exasperated. “Justine! I can see that among other things I’ll have to teach you the fine art of prevarication.”

“Among what other things, Arthur?” She leaned her elbows on the table, eyes gleaming in the dimness.

“Well, what do you need to learn?”

“I’m pretty well educated, actually.”

“In everything?”

“Heavens, you do know how to emphasize words, don’t you? Very good, I must remember how you said that.”

“There are things which can only be learned from firsthand experience,” he said softly, reaching out a hand to tuck a curl behind her ear.

“Really? I’ve always found observation adequate.”

“Ah, but what about when it comes to love?” He put a delicate deepness into the word. “How can you play Juliet without knowing what love is?”

“A good point. I agree with you.”

“Have you ever been in love?”

“No.”

“Do you know anything about love?” This time he put the vocal force on “anything,” rather than “love.”

“Nothing at all.”

“Ah! Then Freud would have been right, eh?”

She picked up her cigarettes and looked at their sheathed box, smiling. “In some things, perhaps.”

Quickly he grasped the bottom of the cellophane, pulled it off and held it in his hand, dramatically crushed it and dropped it in the ashtray, where it squeaked and writhed, expanded. “I’d like to teach you what being a woman is, if I may.”

For a moment she said nothing, intent on the antics of the cellophane in the ashtray, then she struck a match and carefully set fire to it. “Why not?” she asked the brief flare. “Yes, why not?”

“Shall it be a divine thing of moonlight and roses, passionate wooing, or shall it be short and sharp, like an arrow?” he declaimed, hand on heart.

She laughed. “Really, Arthur! I hope it’s long and sharp, myself. But no moonlight and roses, please. My stomach’s not built for passionate wooing.”

He stared at her a little sadly, shook his head. “Oh, Justine! Everyone’s stomach is built for passionate wooing—even yours, you cold-blooded young vestal. One day, you wait and see. You’ll long for it.”

“Pooh!” She got up. “Come on, Arthur, let’s get the deed over and done with before I change my mind.”

“Now? Tonight?”

“Why on earth not? I’ve got plenty of money for a hotel room, if you’re short.”

The Hotel Metropole wasn’t far away; they walked through the drowsing streets with her arm tucked cozily in his, laughing. It was too late for diners and too early for the theaters to be out, so there were few people around, just knots of American sailors off a visiting task force, and groups of young girls window-shopping with an eye to sailors. No one took any notice of them, which suited Arthur fine. He popped into a chemist shop while Justine waited outside, emerged beaming happily.

“Now we’re all set, my love.”

“What did you buy? French letters?”

He grimaced. “I should hope not. A French letter is like coming wrapped in a page of the Reader’s Digest—condensed tackiness. No, I got you some jelly. How do you know about French letters, anyway?”

“After seven years in a Catholic boarding school? What do you think we did? Prayed?” She grinned. “I admit we didn’t do much, but we talked about everything.”

Mr. and Mrs. Smith surveyed their kingdom, which wasn’t bad for a Sydney hotel room of that era. The days of the Hilton were still to come. It was very large, and had superb views of the Sydney Harbor Bridge. There was no bathroom, of course, but there was a basin and ewer on a marble-topped stand, a fitting accompaniment to the enormous Victorian relics of furniture.

“Well, what do I do now?” she asked, pulling the curtains back. “It’s a beautiful view, isn’t it?”

“Yes. As to what you do now, you take your pants off, of course.”

“Anything else?” she asked mischievously.

He sighed. “Take it all off, Justine! If you don’t feel skin with skin it isn’t nearly so good.”

Neatly and briskly she got out of her clothes, not a scrap coyly, clambered up on the bed and spread her legs apart. “Is this right, Arthur?”

“Good Lord!” he said, folding his trousers carefully; his wife always looked to see if they were crushed.

“What? What’s the matter?”

“You really are a redhead, aren’t you?”

“What did you expect, purple feathers?”

“Facetiousness doesn’t set the right mood, darling, so stop it this instant.” He sucked in his belly, turned, strutted to the bed and climbed onto it, began dropping expert little kisses down the side of her face, her neck, over her left breast. “Mmmmmm, you’re nice.” His arms went around her. “There! Isn’t this nice?”

“I suppose so. Yes, it is quite nice.”

Silence fell, broken only by the sound of kisses, occasional murmurs. There was a huge old dressing table at the far end of the bed, its mirror still tilted to reflect love’s arena by some erotically minded previous tenant.

“Put out the light, Arthur.”

“Darling, no! Lesson number one. There’s no aspect of love which won’t bear the light.”

Having done the preparatory work with his fingers and deposited the jelly where it was supposed to be, Arthur managed to get himself between Justine’s legs. A bit sore but quite comfortable, if not lifted into ecstasy at least feeling rather motherly, Justine looked over Arthur’s shoulder and straight down the bed into the mirror.

Foreshortened, their legs looked weird with his darkly matted ones sandwiched between her smooth defreckled ones; however, the bulk of the image in the mirror consisted of Arthur’s buttocks, and as he maneuvered they spread and contracted, hopped up and down, with two quiffs of yellow hair like Dagwood’s just poking above the twin globes and waving at her cheerfully.

Justine looked; looked again. She stuffed her fist against her mouth wildly, gurgling and moaning.

“There, there, my darling, it’s all right! I’ve broken you already, so it can’t hurt too much,” he whispered.

Her chest began to heave; he wrapped his arms closer about her and murmured inarticulate endearments.

Suddenly her head went back, her mouth opened in a long, agonized wail, and became peal after peal of uproarious laughter. And the more limply furious he got, the harder she laughed, pointing her finger helplessly toward the foot of the bed, tears streaming down her face. Her whole body was convulsed, but not quite in the manner poor Arthur had envisioned.

In many ways Justine was a lot closer to Dane than their mother was, and what they felt for Mum belonged to Mum. It didn’t impinge upon or clash with what they felt for each other. That had been forged very early, and had grown rather than diminished. By the time Mum was freed from her Drogheda bondage they were old enough to be at Mrs. Smith’s kitchen table, doing their correspondence lessons; the habit of finding solace in each other had been established for all time.

Though they were very dissimilar in character, they also shared many tastes and appetites, and those they didn’t share they tolerated in each other with instinctive respect, as a necessary spice of difference. They knew each other very well indeed. Her natural tendency was to deplore human failings in others and ignore them in herself; his natural tendency was to understand and forgive human failings in others, and be merciless upon them in himself. She felt herself invincibly strong; he knew himself perilously weak.

And somehow it all came together as a nearly perfect friendship, in the name of which nothing was impossible. However, since Justine was by far the more talkative, Dane always got to hear a lot more about her and what she was feeling than the other way around. In some respects she was a little bit of a moral imbecile, in that nothing was sacred, and he understood that his function was to provide her with the scruples she lacked within herself. Thus he accepted his role of passive listener with a tenderness and compassion which would have irked Justine enormously had she suspected them. Not that she ever did; she had been bending his ear about absolutely anything and everything since he was old enough to pay attention.

“Guess what I did last night?” she asked, carefully adjusting her big straw hat so her face and neck were well shaded.

“Acted in your first starring role,” Dane said.

“Prawn! As if I wouldn’t tell you so you could be there to see me. Guess again.”

“Finally copped a punch Bobbie meant for Billie.”

“Cold as a stepmother’s breast.”

He shrugged his shoulders, bored. “Haven’t a clue.”

They were sitting in the Domain on the grass, just below the Gothic bulk of Saint Mary’s Cathedral. Dane had phoned to let Justine know he was coming in for a special ceremony in the cathedral, and could she meet him for a while first in the Dom? Of course she could; she was dying to tell him the latest episode.

Almost finished his last year at Riverview, Dane was captain of the school, captain of the cricket team, the Rugby, handball and tennis teams. And dux of his class into the bargain. At seventeen he was two inches over six feet, his voice had settled into its final baritone, and he had miraculously escaped such afflictions as pimples, clumsiness and a bobbing Adam’s apple. Because he was so fair he wasn’t really shaving yet, but in every other way he looked more like a young man than a schoolboy. Only the Riverview uniform categorized him.

It was a warm, sunny day. Dane removed his straw boater school hat and stretched out on the grass, Justine sitting hunched beside him, her arms about her knees to make sure all exposed skin was shaded. He opened one lazy blue eye in her direction.

“What did you do last night, Jus?”

“I lost my virginity. At least I think I did.”

Both his eyes opened. “You’re a prawn.”

“Pooh! High time, I say. How can I hope to be a good actress if I don’t have a clue what goes on between men and women?”

“You ought to save yourself for the man you marry.”

Her face twisted in exasperation. “Honestly, Dane, sometimes you’re so archaic I’m embarrassed! Suppose I don’t meet the man I marry until I’m forty? What do you expect me to do? Sit on it all those years? Is that what you’re going to do, save it for marriage?”

“I don’t think I’m going to get married.”

“Well, nor am I. In which case, why tie a blue ribbon around it and stick it in my nonexistent hope chest? I don’t want to die wondering.”

He grinned. “You can’t, now.” Rolling over onto his stomach, he propped his chin on his hand and looked at her steadily, his face soft, concerned. “Was it all right? I mean, was it awful? Did you hate it?”

Her lips twitched, remembering. “I didn’t hate it, at any rate. It wasn’t awful, either. On the other hand, I’m afraid I don’t see what everyone raves about. Pleasant is as far as I’m prepared to go. And it isn’t as if I chose just anyone; I selected someone very attractive and old enough to know what he was doing.”

He sighed. “You are a prawn, Justine. I’d have been a lot happier to hear you say, ‘He’s not much to look at, but we met and I couldn’t help myself.’ I can accept that you don’t want to wait until you’re married, but it’s still something you’ve got to want because of the person. Never because of the act, Jus. I’m not surprised you weren’t ecstatic.”

All the gleeful triumph faded from her face. “Oh, damn you, now you’ve made me feel awful! If I didn’t know you better, I’d say you were trying to put me down—or my motives, at any rate.”

“But you do know me better, don’t you? I’d never put you down, but sometimes your motives are plain thoughtlessly silly.” He adopted a tolling, monotonous voice. “I am the voice of your conscience, Justine O’Neill.”

“You are, too, you prawn.” Shade forgotten, she flopped back on the grass beside him so he couldn’t see her face. “Look, you know why. Don’t you?”

“Oh, Jussy,” he said sadly, but whatever he was going to add was lost, for she spoke again, a little savagely.

“I’m never, never, never going to love anyone! If you love people, they kill you. If you need people, they kill you. They do, I tell you!”

It always hurt him, that she felt left out of love, and hurt more that he knew himself the cause. If there was one overriding reason why she was so important to him, it was because she loved him enough to bear no grudges, had never made him feel a moment’s lessening of her love through jealousy or resentment. To him, it was a cruel fact that she moved on an outer circle while he was the very hub. He had prayed and prayed things would change, but they never did. Which hadn’t lessened his faith, only pointed out to him with fresh emphasis that somewhere, sometime, he would have to pay for the emotion squandered on him at her expense. She put a good face on it, had managed to convince even herself that she did very well on that outer orbit, but he felt her pain. He knew. There was so much worth loving in her, so little worth loving in himself. Without a hope of understanding differently, he assumed he had the lion’s share of love because of his beauty, his more tractable nature, his ability to communicate with his mother and the other Drogheda people. And because he was male. Very little escaped him beyond what he simply couldn’t know, and he had had Justine’s confidence and companionship in ways no one else ever had. Mum mattered to Justine far more than she would admit.

But I will atone, he thought. I’ve had everything. Somehow I’ve got to pay it back, make it up to her.

Suddenly he chanced to see his watch, came to his feet bonelessly; huge though he admitted his debt to his sister was, to Someone else he owed even more.

“I’ve got to go, Jus.”

“You and your bloody Church! When are you going to grow out of it?”

“Never, I hope.”

“When will I see you?”

“Well, since today’s Friday, tomorrow of course, eleven o’clock, here.”

“Okay. Be a good boy.”

He was already several yards away, Riverview boater back on his head, but he turned to smile at her. “Am I ever anything else?”

She grinned. “Bless you, no. You’re too good to be true; I’m the one always in trouble. See you tomorrow.”

There were huge padded red leather doors inside the vestibule of Saint Mary’s; Dane poked one open and slipped inside. He had left Justine a little earlier than was strictly necessary, but he always liked to get into a church before it filled, became a shifting focus of sighs, coughs, rustles, whispers. When he was alone it was so much better. There was a sacristan kindling branches of candles on the high altar; a deacon, he judged unerringly. Head bowed, he genuflected and made the Sign of the Cross as he passed in front of the tabernacle, then quietly slid into a pew.

On his knees, he put his head on his folded hands and let his mind float freely. He didn’t consciously pray, but rather became an intrinsic part of the atmosphere, which he felt as dense yet ethereal, unspeakably holy, brooding. It was as if he had turned into a flame in one of the little red glass sanctuary lamps, always just fluttering on the brink of extinction, sustained by a small puddle of some vital essence, radiating a minute but enduring glow out into the far darknesses. Stillness, formlessness, forgetfulness of his human identity; these were what Dane got from being in a church. Nowhere else did he feel so right, so much at peace with himself, so removed from pain. His lashes lowered, his eyes closed.

From the organ gallery came the shuffling of feet, a preparatory wheeze, a breathy expulsion of air from pipes. The Saint Mary’s Cathedral Boys’ School choir was coming in early to sandwich a little practice between now and the coming ritual. It was only a Friday midday Benediction, but one of Dane’s friends and teachers from Riverview was celebrating it, and he had wanted to come.

The organ gave off a few chords, quietened into a rippling accompaniment, and into the dim stone-lace arches one unearthly boy’s voice soared, thin and high and sweet, so filled with innocent purity the few people in the great empty church closed their eyes, mourned for that which could never come to them again.

Panis angelicus

Fit panis hominum,

Dat panis coelicus

Figuris terminum,

O res mirabilis,

Manducat Dominus,

Pauper, pauper,

Servus et humilis….

Bread of angels, heavenly bread, O thing of wonder. Out of the depths have I cried unto Thee, O Lord; Lord, hear my voice! Let Thine ear be attuned to the sounds of my supplication. Turn not away, O Lord, turn not away. For Thou art my Sovereign, my Master, my God, and I am Thy humble servant. In Thine eyes only one thing counts, goodness. Thou carest not if Thy servants be beautiful or ugly. To Thee only the heart matters; in Thee all is healed, in Thee I know peace.

Lord, it is lonely. I pray it be over soon, the pain of life. They do not understand that I, so gifted, find so much pain in living. But Thou dost, and Thy comfort is all which sustains me. No matter what Thou requirest of me, O Lord, shall be give, for I love Thee. And if I might presume to ask anything of Thee, it is that in Thee all else shall be forever forgotten….

“You’re very quiet, Mum,” said Dane. “Thinking of what? Of Drogheda?”

“No,” said Meggie drowsily. “I’m thinking that I’m getting old. I found half a dozen grey hairs this morning, and my bones ache.”

“You’ll never be old, Mum,” he said comfortably.

“I wish that were true, love, but unfortunately it isn’t. I’m beginning to need the borehead, which is a sure sign of old age.”

They were lying in the warm winter sun on towels spread over the Drogheda grass, by the borehead. At the far end of the great pool boiling water thundered and splashed, the reek of sulphur drifted and floated into nothing. It was one of the great winter pleasures, to swim in the borehead. All the aches and pains of encroaching age were soothed away, Meggie thought, and turned to lie on her back, her head in the shade of the log on which she and Father Ralph had sat so long ago. A very long time ago; she was unable to conjure up even a faint echo of what she must have felt when Ralph had kissed her.

Then she heard Dane get up, and opened her eyes. He had always been her baby, her lovely little boy; though she had watched him change and grow with proprietary pride, she had done so with an image of the laughing baby superimposed on his maturing face. It had not yet occurred to her that actually he was no longer in any way a child.

However, the moment of realization came to Meggie at that instant, watching him stand outlined against the crisp sky in his brief cotton swimsuit.

My God, it’s all over! The babyhood, the boyhood. He’s a man. Pride, resentment, a female melting at the quick, a terrific consciousness of some impending tragedy, anger, adoration, sadness; all these and more Meggie felt, looking up at her son. It is a terrible thing to create a man, and more terrible to create a man like this. So amazingly male, so amazingly beautiful.

Ralph de Bricassart, plus a little of herself. How could she not be moved at seeing in its extreme youth the body of the man who had joined in love with her? She closed her eyes, embarrassed, hating having to think of her son as a man. Did he look at her and see a woman these days, or was she still that wonderful cipher, Mum? God damn him, God damn him! How dared he grow up?

“Do you know anything about women, Dane?” she asked suddenly, opening her eyes again.

He smiled. “The birds and the bees, you mean?”

“That you know, with Justine for a sister. When she discovered what lay between the covers of physiology textbooks she blurted it all out to everyone. No, I mean have you ever put any of Justine’s clinical treatises into practice?”

His head moved in a quick negative shake, he slid down onto the grass beside her and looked into her face. “Funny you should ask that, Mum. I’ve been wanting to talk to you about it for a long time, but I didn’t know how to start.”

“You’re only eighteen, love. Isn’t it a bit soon to be thinking of putting theory into practice?” Only eighteen. Only. He was a man, wasn’t he?

“That’s it, what I wanted to talk to you about. Not putting it into practice at all.”

How cold the wind was, blowing down from the Great Divide. Peculiar, she hadn’t noticed until now. Where was her robe? “Not putting it into practice at all,” she said dully, and it was not a question.

“That’s right. I don’t want to, ever. Not that I haven’t thought about it, or wanted a wife and children. I have. But I can’t. Because there isn’t enough room to love them and God as well, not the way I want to love God. I’ve known that for a long time. I don’t seem to remember a time when I didn’t, and the older I become the greater my love for God grows. It’s a great mystery, loving God.”

Meggie lay looking into those calm, distant blue eyes. Ralph’s eyes, as they used to be. But ablaze with something quite alien to Ralph’s. Had he had it, at eighteen? Had he? Was it perhaps something one could only experience at eighteen? By the time she entered Ralph’s life, he was ten years beyond that. Yet her son was a mystic, she had always known it. And she didn’t think that at any stage of his life Ralph had been mystically inclined. She swallowed, wrapped the robe closer about her lonely bones.

“So I asked myself,” Dane went on, “what I could do to show Him how much I loved Him. I fought the answer for a long time, I didn’t want to see it. Because I wanted a life as a man, too, very much. Yet I knew what the offering had to be, I knew…. There’s only one thing I can offer Him, to show Him nothing else will ever exist in my heart before Him. I must offer up His only rival; that’s the sacrifice He demands of me. I am His servant, and He will have no rivals. I have had to choose. All things He’ll let me have and enjoy, save that.” He sighed, plucked at a blade of Drogheda grass. “I must show Him that I understand why He gave me so much at my birth. I must show Him that I realize how unimportant my life as a man is.”

“You can’t do it, I won’t let you!” Meggie cried, her hand reaching for his arm, clutching it. How smooth it felt, the hint of great power under the skin, just like Ralph’s. Just like Ralph’s! Not to have some glossy girl put her hand there, as a right?

“I’m going to be a priest,” said Dane. “I’m going to enter His service completely, offer everything I have and am to Him, as His priest. Poverty, chastity and obedience. He demands no less than all from His chosen servants. It won’t be easy, but I’m going to do it.”

The look in her eyes! As if he had killed her, ground her into the dust beneath his foot. That he should have to suffer this he hadn’t known, dreaming only of her pride in him, her pleasure at giving her son to God. They said she’d be thrilled, uplifted, completely in accord. Instead she was staring at him as if the prospect of his priesthood was her death sentence.

“It’s all I’ve ever wanted to be,” he said in despair, meeting those dying eyes. “Oh, Mum, can’t you understand? I’ve never, never wanted to be anything but a priest! I can’t be anything but a priest!”

Her hand fell from his arm; he glanced down and saw the white marks of her fingers, the little arcs in his skin where her nails had bitten deeply. Her head went up, she laughed on and on and on, huge hysterical peals of bitter, derisive laughter.

“Oh, it’s too good to be true!” she gasped when she could speak again, wiping the tears from the corners of her eyes with a trembling hand. “The incredible irony! Ashes of roses, he said that night riding to the borehead. And I didn’t understand what he meant. Ashes thou wert, unto ashes return. To the Church thou belongest, to the Church thou shalt be given. Oh, it’s beautiful, beautiful! God rot God, I say! God the sod! The utmost Enemy of women, that’s what God is! Everything we seek to do, He seeks to undo!”

“Oh, don’t! Oh, don’t Mum, don’t!” He wept for her, for her pain, not understanding her pain or the words she was saying. His tears fell, twisted in his heart; already the sacrifice had begun, and in a way he hadn’t dreamed. But though he wept for her, not even for her could he put it aside, the sacrifice. The offering must be made, and the harder it was to make, the more valuable it must be in His eyes.

She had made him weep, and never in all his life until now had she made him weep. Her own rage and grief were put away resolutely. No, it wasn’t fair to visit herself upon him. What he was his genes had made him. Or his God. Or Ralph’s God. He was the light of her life, her son. He should not be made to suffer because of her, ever.

“Dane, don’t cry,” she whispered, stroking the angry marks on his arm. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it. You gave me a shock, that’s all. Of course I’m glad for you, truly I am! How could I not be? I was shocked; I just didn’t expect it, that’s all.” She chuckled, a little shakily. “You did rather drop it on me like a rock.”

His eyes cleared, regarded her doubtfully. Why had he imagined he killed her? Those were Mum’s eyes as he had always known them; full of love, very much alive. The strong young arms gathered her close, hugged her. “You’re sure you don’t mind?”

“Mind? A good Catholic mother mind her son becoming a priest? Impossible!” She jumped to her feet. “Brr! How cold it’s got! Let’s be getting back.”

They hadn’t taken the horses, but a jeeplike Land-Rover; Dane climbed behind the wheel, his mother sat beside him.

“Do you know where you’re going?” asked Meggie, drawing in a sobbing breath, pushing the tumbled hair out of her eyes.

“Saint Patrick’s College, I suppose. At least until I find my feet. Perhaps then I’ll espouse an order. I’d rather like to be a Jesuit, but I’m not quite sure enough of that to go straight into the Society of Jesus.”

Meggie stared at the tawny grass bouncing up and down through the insect-spattered windscreen. “I have a much better idea, Dane.”

“Oh?” He had to concentrate on driving; the track dwindled a bit and there were always new logs across it.

“I shall send you to Rome, to Cardinal de Bricassart. You remember him, don’t you?”

“Do I remember him? What a question, Mum! I don’t think I could forget him in a million years. He’s my example of the perfect priest. If I could be the priest he is, I’d be very happy.”

“Perfection is as perfection does!” said Meggie tartly. “But I shall give you into his charge, because I know he’ll look after you for my sake. You can enter a seminary in Rome.”

“Do you really mean it, Mum? Really?” Anxiety pushed the joy out of his face. “Is there enough money? It would be much cheaper if I stayed in Australia.”

“Thanks to the selfsame Cardinal de Bricassart, my dear, you’ll never lack money.”

At the cookhouse door she pushed him inside. “Go and tell the girls and Mrs. Smith,” she said. “They’ll be absolutely thrilled.”

One after the other she put her feet down, made them plod up the ramp to the big house, to the drawing room where Fee sat, miraculously not working but talking to Anne Mueller instead, over an afternoon tea tray. As Meggie came in they looked up, saw from her face that something serious had happened.

For eighteen years the Muellers had been visiting Drogheda, expecting that was how it always would be. But Luddie Mueller had died suddenly the preceding autumn, and Meggie had written immediately to Anne to ask her if she would like to live permanently on Drogheda. There was plenty of room, a guest cottage for privacy; she could pay board if she was too proud not to, though heaven knew there was enough money to keep a thousand permanent houseguests. Meggie saw it as a chance to reciprocate for those lonely Queensland years, and Anne saw it as salvation. Himmelhoch without Luddie was horribly lonely. Though she had put on a manager, not sold the place; when she died it would go to Justine.

“What is it, Meggie?” Anne asked.

Meggie sat down. “I think I’ve been struck by a retributory bolt of lightning.”

“What?”

“You were right, both of you. You said I’d lose him. I didn’t believe you, I actually thought I could beat God. But there was never a woman born who could beat God. He’s a Man.”

Fee poured Meggie a cup of tea. “Here, drink this,” she said, as if tea had the restorative powers of brandy. “How have you lost him?”

“He’s going to become a priest.” She began to laugh, weeping at the same time.

Anne picked up her sticks, hobbled to Meggie’s chair and sat awkwardly on its arm, stroking the lovely red-gold hair. “Oh, my dear! But it isn’t as bad as all that.”

“Do you know about Dane?” Fee asked Anne.

“I’ve always known,” said Anne.

Meggie sobered. “It isn’t as bad as all that? It’s the beginning of the end, don’t you see? Retribution. I stole Ralph from God, and I’m paying with my son. You told me it was stealing, Mum, don’t you remember? I didn’t want to believe you, but you were right, as always.”

“Is he going to Saint Pat’s?” Fee asked practically.

Meggie laughed more normally. “That’s no sort of reparation, Mum. I’m going to send him to Ralph, of course. Half of him is Ralph; let Ralph finally enjoy him.” She shrugged. “He’s more important than Ralph, and I knew he’d want to go to Rome.”

“Did you ever tell Ralph about Dane?” asked Anne; it wasn’t a subject ever discussed.

“No, and I never will. Never!”

“They’re so alike he might guess.”

“Who, Ralph? He’ll never guess! That much I’m going to keep. I’m sending him my son, but no more than that. I’m not sending him his son.”

“Beware of the jealousy of the gods, Meggie,” said Anne softly. “They might not have done with you yet.”

“What more can they do to me?” mourned Meggie.

When Justine heard the news she was furious, though for the last three or four years she had had a sneaking suspicion it was coming. On Meggie it burst like a clap of thunder, but on Justine it descended like an expected shower of icy water.

First of all, because Justine had been at school in Sydney with him, and as his confidante had listened to him talk of the things he didn’t mention to his mother. Justine knew how vitally important his religion was to Dane; not only God, but the mystical significance of Catholic rituals. Had he been born and brought up a Protestant, she thought, he was the type to have eventually turned to Catholicism to satisfy something in his soul. Not for Dane an austere, calvinistic God. His God was limned in stained glass, wreathed in incense, wrapped in lace and gold embroidery, hymned in musical complexity, and worshipped in lovely Latin cadences.

Too, it was a kind of ironic perversity that someone so wonderfully endowed with beauty should deem it a crippling handicap, and deplore its existence. For Dane did. He shrank from any reference to his looks; Justine fancied he would far rather have been born ugly, totally unprepossessing. She understood in part why he felt so, and perhaps because her own career lay in a notoriously narcissistic profession, she rather approved of his attitude toward his appearance. What she couldn’t begin to understand was why he positively loathed his looks, instead of simply ignoring them.

Nor was he highly sexed, for what reason she wasn’t sure: whether he had taught himself to sublimate his passions almost perfectly, or whether in spite of his bodily endowments some necessary cerebral essence was in short supply. Probably the former, since he played some sort of vigorous sport every day of his life to make sure he went to bed exhausted. She knew very well that his inclinations were “normal,” that is, heterosexual, and she knew what type of girl appealed to him—tall, dark and voluptuous. But he just wasn’t sensually aware; he didn’t notice the feel of things when he held them, or the odors in the air around him, or understand the special satisfaction of shape and color. Before he experienced a sexual pull the provocative object’s impact had to be irresistible, and only at such rare moments did he seem to realize there was an earthly plane most men trod, of choice, for as long as they possibly could.

He told her backstage at the Culloden, after a performance. It had been settled with Rome that day; he was dying to tell her and yet he knew she wasn’t going to like it. His religious ambitions were something he had never discussed with her as much as he wanted to, for she became angry. But when he came backstage that night it was too difficult to contain his joy any longer.

“You’re a prawn,” she said in disgust.

“It’s what I want.”

“Idiot.”

“Calling me names won’t change a thing, Jus.”

“Do you think I don’t know that? It affords me a little much-needed emotional release, that’s all.”

“I should think you’d get enough on the stage, playing Electra. You’re really good, Jus.”

“After this news I’ll be better,” she said grimly. “Are you going to Saint Pat’s?”

“No. I’m going to Rome, to Cardinal de Bricassart. Mum arranged it.”

“Dane, no! It’s so far away!”

“Well, why don’t you come, too, at least to England? With your background and ability you ought to be able to get a place somewhere without too much trouble.”

She was sitting at a mirror wiping off Electra’s paint, still in Electra’s robes; ringed with heavy black arabesques, her strange eyes seemed even stranger. She nodded slowly. “Yes, I could, couldn’t I?” she asked thoughtfully. “It’s more than time I did…. Australia’s getting a bit too small…. Right, mate! You’re on! England it is!”

“Super! Just think! I get holidays, you know, one always does in the seminary, as if it was a university. We can plan to take them together, trip around Europe a bit, come home to Drogheda. Oh, Jus, I’ve thought it all out! Having you not far away makes it perfect.”

She beamed. “It does, doesn’t it? Life wouldn’t be the same if I couldn’t talk to you.”

“That’s what I was afraid you were going to say.” He grinned. “But seriously, Jus, you worry me. I’d rather have you where I can see you from time to time. Otherwise who’s going to be the voice of your conscience?”

He slid down between a hoplite’s helmet and an awesome mask of the Pythoness to a position on the floor where he could see her, coiling himself into an economical ball, out of the way of all the feet. There were only two stars’ dressing rooms at the Culloden and Justine didn’t rate either of them yet. She was in the general dressing room, among the ceaseless traffic.

“Bloody old Cardinal de Bricassart!” she spat. “I hated him the moment I laid eyes on him!”

Dane chuckled. “You didn’t, you know.”

“I did! I did!”

“No, you didn’t. Aunt Anne told me one Christmas hol, and I’ll bet you don’t know.”

“What don’t I know?” she asked warily.

“That when you were a baby he fed you a bottle and burped you, rocked you to sleep. Aunt Anne said you were a horrible cranky baby and hated being held, but when he held you, you really liked it.”

“It’s a flaming lie!”

“No, it’s not.” He grinned. “Anyway, why do you hate him so much now?”

“I just do. He’s like a skinny old vulture, and he gives me the dry heaves.”

“I like him. I always did. The perfect priest, that’s what Father Watty calls him. I think he is, too.”

“Well, fuck him, I say!”

“Justine!”

“Shocked you that time, didn’t I? I’ll bet you never even thought I knew that word.”

His eyes danced. “Do you know what it means? Tell me, Jussy, go on, I dare you!”

She could never resist him when he teased; her own eyes began to twinkle. “You might be going to be a Father Rhubarb, you prawn, but if you don’t already know what it means, you’d better not investigate.”

He grew serious. “Don’t worry, I won’t.”

A very shapely pair of female legs stopped beside Dane, pivoted. He looked up, went red, looked away, and said, “Oh, hello, Martha,” in a casual voice.

“Hello yourself.”

She was an extremely beautiful girl, a little short on acting ability but so decorative she was an asset to any production; she also happened to be exactly Dane’s cup of tea, and Justine had listened to his admiring comments about her more than once. Tall, what the movie magazines always called sexsational, very dark of hair and eye, fair of skin, with magnificent breasts.

Perching herself on the corner of Justine’s table, she swung one leg provocatively under Dane’s nose and watched him with an undisguised appreciation he clearly found disconcerting. Lord, he was really something! How had plain old cart-horse Jus collected herself a brother who looked like this? He might be only eighteen and it might be cradle-snatching, but who cared?

“How about coming over to my place for coffee and whatever?” she asked, looking down at Dane. “The two of you?” she added reluctantly.

Justine shook her head positively, her eyes lighting up at a sudden thought. “No, thanks, I can’t. You’ll have to be content with Dane.”

He shook his head just as positively, but rather regretfully, as if he was truly tempted. “Thanks anyway, Martha, but I can’t.” He glanced at his watch as at a savior. “Lord, I’ve only got a minute left on my meter! How much longer are you going to be, Jus?”

“About ten minutes.”

“I’ll wait for you outside, all right?”

“Chicken!” she mocked.

Martha’s dusky eyes followed him. “He is absolutely gorgeous. Why won’t he look at me?”

Justine grinned sourly, scrubbed her face clean at last. The freckles were coming back. Maybe London would help; no sun. “Oh, don’t worry, he looks. He’d like, too. But will he? Not Dane.”

“Why? What’s the matter with him? Never tell me he’s a poof! Shit, why is it every gorgeous man I meet is a poof? I never thought Dane was, though; he doesn’t strike me that way at all.”

“Watch your language, you dumb wart! He most certainly isn’t a poof. In fact, the day he looks at Sweet William, our screaming juvenile, I’ll cut his throat and Sweet William’s, too.”

“Well, if he isn’t a pansy and he likes, why doesn’t he take? Doesn’t he get my message? Does he think I’m too old for him?”

“Sweetie, at a hundred you won’t be too old for the average man, don’t worry about it. No, Dane’s sworn off sex for life, the fool. He’s going to be a priest.”

Martha’s lush mouth dropped open, she swung back her mane of inky hair. “Go on!”

“True, true.”

“You mean to say all that’s going to be wasted?”

“Afraid so. He’s offering it to God.”

“Then God’s a bigger poofter than Sweet Willie.”

“You might be right,” said Justine. “He certainly isn’t too fond of women, anyway. Second-class, that’s us, way back in the Upper Circle. Front Stalls and the Mezzanine, strictly male.”

“Oh.”

Justine wriggled out of Electra’s robe, flung a thin cotton dress over her head, remembered it was chilly outside, added a cardigan, and patted Martha kindly on the head. “Don’t worry about it, sweetie. God was very good to you; he didn’t give you any brains. Believe me, it’s far more comfortable that way. You’ll never offer the Lords of Creation any competition.”

“I don’t know, I wouldn’t mind competing with God for your brother.”

“Forget it. You’re fighting the Establishment, and it just can’t be done. You’d seduce Sweet Willie far quicker, take my word for it.”

A Vatican car met Dane at the airport, whisked him through sunny faded streets full of handsome, smiling people; he glued his nose to the window and drank it all in, unbearably excited at seeing for himself the things he had seen only in pictures—the Roman columns, the rococo palaces, the Renaissance glory of Saint Peter’s.

And waiting for him, clad this time in scarlet from head to foot, was Ralph Raoul, Cardinal de Bricassart. The hand was outstretched, its ring glowing; Dane sank on both knees to kiss it.

“Stand up, Dane, let me look at you.”

He stood, smiling at the tall man who was almost exactly his own height; they could look each other in the eye. To Dane the Cardinal had an immense aura of spiritual power which made him think of a pope rather than a saint, yet those intensely sad eyes were not the eyes of a pope. How much he must have suffered to appear so, but how nobly he must have risen above his suffering to become this most perfect of priests.

And Cardinal Ralph gazed at the son he did not know was his son, loving him, he thought, because he was dear Meggie’s boy. Just so would he have wanted to see a son of his own body; as tall, as strikingly good-looking, as graceful. In all his life he had never seen a man move so well. But far more satisfying than any physical beauty was the simple beauty of his soul. He had the strength of the angels, and something of their unearthliness. Had he been so himself, at eighteen? He tried to remember, span the crowded events of three-fifths of a lifetime; no, he had never been so. Was it because this one came truly of his own choice? For he himself had not, though he had had the vocation, of that much he still was sure.

“Sit down, Dane. Did you do as I asked, start to learn Italian?”

“At this stage I speak it fluently but without idiom, and I read it very well. Probably the fact that it’s my fourth language makes it easier. I seem to have a talent for languages. A couple of weeks here and I ought to pick up the vernacular.”

“Yes, you will. I, too, have a talent for languages.”

“Well, they’re handy,” said Dane lamely. The awesome scarlet figure was a little daunting; it was suddenly hard to remember the man on the chestnut gelding at Drogheda.

Cardinal Ralph leaned forward, watching him.

“I pass the responsibility for him to you, Ralph,” Meggie’s letter had said. “I charge you with his well-being, his happiness. What I stole, I give back. It is demanded of me. Only promise me two things, and I’ll rest in the knowledge you’ve acted in his best interests. First, promise me you’ll make sure before you accept him that this is what he truly, absolutely wants. Secondly, that if this is what he wants, you’ll keep your eye on him, make sure it remains what he wants. If he should lose heart for it, I want him back. For he belonged to me first. It is I who gives him to you.”

“Dane, are you sure?” asked the Cardinal.

“Absolutely.”

“Why?”

His eyes were curiously aloof, uncomfortably familiar, but familiar in a way which was of the past.

“Because of the love I bear Our Lord. I want to serve Him as His priest all of my days.”

“Do you understand what His service entails, Dane?”

“Yes.”

“That no other love must ever come between you and Him? That you are His exclusively, forsaking all others?”

“Yes”.

“That His Will be done in all things, that in His service you must bury your personality, your individuality, your concept of yourself as uniquely important?”

“Yes.”

“That if necessary you must face death, imprisonment, starvation in His Name? That you must own nothing, value nothing which might tend to lessen your love for Him?”

“Yes.”

“Are you strong, Dane?”

“I am a man, Your Eminence. I am first a man. It will be hard, I know. But I pray that with His help I shall find the strength.”

“Must it be this, Dane? Will nothing less than this content you?”

“Nothing.”

“And if later on you should change your mind, what would you do?”

“Why, I should ask to leave,” said Dane, surprised. “If I changed my mind it would be because I had genuinely mistaken my vocation, for no other reason. Therefore I should ask to leave. I wouldn’t be loving Him any less, but I’d know this isn’t the way He means me to serve Him.”

“But once your final vows are taken and you are ordained, you realize there can be no going back, no dispensation, absolutely no release?”

“I understand that,” said Dane patiently. “But if there is a decision to be made, I will have come to it before then.”

Cardinal Ralph leaned back in his chair, sighed. Had he ever been that sure? Had he ever been that strong? “Why to me, Dane? Why did you want to come to Rome? Why not have remained in Australia?”

“Mum suggested Rome, but it had been in my mind as a dream for a long time. I never thought there was enough money.”

“Your mother is very wise. Didn’t she tell you?”

“Tell me what, Your Eminence?”

“That you have an income of five thousand pounds a year and many thousands of pounds already in the bank in your own name?”

Dane stiffened. “No. She never told me.”

“Very wise. But it’s there, and Rome is yours if you want. Do you want Rome?”

“Yes.”

“Why do you want me, Dane?”

“Because you’re my conception of the perfect priest, Your Eminence.”

Cardinal Ralph’s face twisted. “No, Dane, you can’t look up to me as that. I’m far from a perfect priest. I have broken all my vows, do you understand? I had to learn what you already seem to know in the most painful way a priest can, through the breaking of my vows. For I refused to admit that I was first a mortal man, and only after that a priest.”

“Your Eminence, it doesn’t matter,” said Dane softly. “What you say doesn’t make you any less my conception of the perfect priest. I think you don’t understand what I mean, that’s all. I don’t mean an inhuman automaton, above the weaknesses of the flesh. I mean that you’ve suffered, and grown. Do I sound presumptuous? I don’t intend to, truly. If I’ve offended you, I beg your pardon. It’s just that it’s so hard to express my thoughts! What I mean is that becoming a perfect priest must take years, terrible pain, and all the time keeping before you an ideal, and Our Lord.”

The telephone rang; Cardinal Ralph picked it up in a slightly unsteady hand, spoke in Italian.

“Yes, thank you, we’ll come at once.” He got to his feet. “It’s time for afternoon tea, and we’re to have it with an old, old friend of mine. Next to the Holy Father he’s probably the most important priest in the Church. I told him you were coming, and he expressed a wish to meet you.”

“Thank you, Your Eminence.”

They walked through corridors, then through pleasant gardens quite unlike Drogheda’s, with tall cypresses and poplars, neat rectangles of grass surrounded by pillared walkways, mossy flagstones; past Gothic arches, under Renaissance bridges. Dane drank it in, loving it. Such a different world from Australia, so old, perpetual.

It took them fifteen minutes at a brisk pace to reach the palace; they entered, and passed up a great marble staircase hung with priceless tapestries.

Vittorio Scarbanza, Cardinal di Contini-Verchese was sixty-six now, his body partially crippled by a rheumatic complaint, but his mind as intelligent and alert as it had always been. His present cat, a Russian blue named Natasha, was curled purring in his lap. Since he couldn’t rise to greet his visitors he contented himself with a wide smile, and beckoned them. His eyes passed from Ralph’s beloved face to Dane O’Neill and widened, narrowed, fixed on him stilly. Within his chest he felt his heart falter, put the welcoming hand to it in an instinctive gesture of protection, and sat staring stupidly up at the younger edition of Ralph de Bricassart.

“Vittorio, are you all right?” Cardinal Ralph asked anxiously, taking the frail wrist between his fingers, feeling for a pulse.

“Of course. A little passing pain, no more. Sit down, sit down!”

“First, I’d like you to meet Dane O’Neill, who is as I told you the son of a very dear friend of mine. Dane, this is His Eminence Cardinal di Contini-Verchese.”

Dane knelt, pressed his lips to the ring; over his bent tawny head Cardinal Vittorio’s gaze sought Ralph’s face, scanned it more closely than in many years. Very slightly he relaxed; she had never told him, then. And he wouldn’t suspect, of course, what everyone who saw them together would instantly surmise. Not father-son, of course, but a close relationship of the blood. Poor Ralph! He had never seen himself walk, never watched the expressions on his own face, never caught the upward flight of his own left eyebrow. Truly God was good, to make men so blind.

“Sit down. The tea is coming. So, young man! You wish to be a priest, and have sought the assistance of Cardinal de Bricassart?”

“Yes, Your Eminence.”

“You have chosen wisely. Under his care you will come to no harm. But you look a little nervous, my son. Is it the strangeness?”

Dane smiled Ralph’s smile, perhaps minus conscious charm, but so much Ralph’s smile it caught at an old, tired heart like a passing flick from barbed wire. “I’m overwhelmed, Your Eminence. I hadn’t realized quite how important cardinals are. I never dreamed I’d be met at the airport, or be having tea with you.”

“Yes, it is unusual…. Perhaps a source of trouble, I see that. Ah, here is our tea!” Pleased, he watched it laid out, lifted an admonishing finger. “Ah, no! I shall be ‘mother.’ How do you take your tea, Dane?”

“The same as Ralph,” he answered, blushed deeply. “I’m sorry, Your Eminence, I didn’t mean to say that!”

“It’s all right, Dane, Cardinal di Contini-Verchese understands. We met first as Dane and Ralph, and we knew each other far better that way, didn’t we? Formality is new to our relationship. I’d prefer it remain Dane and Ralph in private. His Eminence won’t mind, will you, Vittorio?”

“No. I am fond of Christian names. But returning to what I was saying about having friends in high places, my son. It could be a trifle uncomfortable for you when you enter whichever seminary is decided upon, this long friendship with our Ralph. To have to keep going into involved explanations every time the connection between you is remarked upon would be very tedious. Sometimes Our Lord permits of a little white lie”—he smiled, the gold in his teeth flashing—“and for everyone’s comfort I would prefer that we resort to one such tiny fib. For it is difficult to explain satisfactorily the tenuous connections of friendship, but very easy to explain the crimson cord of blood. So we will say to all and sundry that Cardinal de Bricassart is your uncle, my Dane, and leave it at that,” ended Cardinal Vittorio suavely.

Dane looked shocked, Cardinal Ralph resigned.

“Do not be disappointed in the great, my son,” said Cardinal Vittorio gently. “They, too, have feet of clay, and resort to comfort via little white lies. It is a very useful lesson you have just learned, but looking at you, I doubt you will take advantage of it. However, you must understand that we scarlet gentlemen are diplomats to our fingertips. Truly I think only of you, my son. Jealousy and resentment are not strangers to seminaries any more than they are to secular institutions. You will suffer a little because they think Ralph is your uncle, your mother’s brother, but you would suffer far more if they thought no blood bond linked you together. We are first men, and it is with men you will deal in this world as in others.”

Dane bowed his head, then leaned forward to stroke the cat, pausing with his hand extended. “May I? I love cats, Your Eminence.”

No quicker pathway to that old but constant heart could he have found. “You may. I confess she grows too heavy for me. She is a glutton, are you not, Natasha? Go to Dane; he is the new generation.”

There was no possibility of Justine transferring herself and her belongings from the southern to the northern hemisphere as quickly as Dane had; by the time she worked out the season at the Culloden and bade a not unregretful farewell to Bothwell Gardens, her brother had been in Rome two months.

“How on earth did I manage to accumulate so much junk?” she asked, surrounded by clothes, papers, boxes.

Meggie looked up from where she was crouched, a box of steel wool soap pads in her hand.

“What were these doing under your bed?”

A look of profound relief swept across her daughter’s flushed face. “Oh, thank God! Is that where they were? I thought Mrs. D’s precious poodle ate them; he’s been off color for a week and I wasn’t game to mention my missing soap pads. But I knew the wretched animal ate them; he’ll eat anything that doesn’t eat him first. Not,” continued Justine thoughtfully, “that I wouldn’t be glad to see the last of him.”

Meggie sat back on her heels, laughing. “Oh, Jus! Do you know how funny you are?” She threw the box onto the bed among a mountain of things already there. “You’re no credit to Drogheda, are you? After all the care we took pushing neatness and tidiness into your head, too.”

“I could have told you it was a lost cause. Do you want to take the soap pads back to Drogheda? I know I’m sailing and my luggage is unlimited, but I daresay there are tons of soap pads in London.”

Meggie transferred the box into a large carton marked MRS. D. “I think we’d better donate them to Mrs. Devine; she has to render this flat habitable for the next tenant.” An unsteady tower of unwashed dishes stood on the end of the table, sprouting gruesome whiskers of mold. “Do you ever wash your dishes?”

Justine chuckled unrepentantly. “Dane says I don’t wash them at all, I shave them instead.”

“You’d have to give this lot a haircut first. Why don’t you wash them as you use them?”

“Because it would mean trekking down to the kitchen again, and since I usually eat after midnight, no one appreciates the patter of my little feet.”

“Give me one of the empty boxes. I’ll take them down and dispose of them now,” said her mother, resigned; she had known before volunteering to come what was bound to be in store for her, and had been rather looking forward to it. It wasn’t very often anyone had the chance to help Justine do anything; whenever Meggie had tried to help her she had ended feeling an utter fool. But in domestic matters the situation was reversed for once; she could help to her heart’s content without feeling a fool.

Somehow it got done, and Justine and Meggie set out in the station wagon Meggie had driven down from Gilly, bound for the Hotel Australia, where Meggie had a suite.

“I wish you Drogheda people would buy a house at Palm Beach or Avalon,” Justine said, depositing her case in the suite’s second bedroom. “This is terrible, right above Martin Place. Just imagine being a hop, skip and jump from the surf! Wouldn’t that induce you to hustle yourselves on a plane from Gilly more often?”

“Why should I come to Sydney? I’ve been down twice in the last seven years—to see Dane off, and now to see you off. If we had a house it would never be used.”

“Codswallop.”

“Why?”

“Why? Because there’s more to the world than bloody Drogheda, dammit! That place, it drives me batty!”

Meggie sighed. “Believe me, Justine, there’ll come a time when you’ll yearn to come home to Drogheda.”

“Does that go for Dane, too?”

Silence. Without looking at her daughter, Meggie took her bag from the table. “We’ll be late. Madame Rocher said two o’clock. If you want your dresses before you sail, we’d better hurry.”

“I am put in my place,” Justine said, and grinned.

“Why is it, Justine, that you didn’t introduce me to any of your friends? I didn’t see a sign of anyone at Bothwell Gardens except Mrs. Devine,” Meggie said as they sat in Germaine Rocher’s salon watching the languid mannequins preen and simper.

“Oh, they’re a bit shy…. I like that orange thing, don’t you?”

“Not with your hair. Settle for the grey.”

“Pooh! I think orange goes perfectly with my hair. In grey I look like something the cat dragged in, sort of muddy and half rotten. Move with the times, Mum. Redheads don’t have to be seen in white, grey, black, emerald green or that horrible color you’re so addicted to—what is it, ashes of roses? Victorian!”

“You have the name of the color right,” Meggie said. She turned to look at her daughter. “You’re a monster,” she said wryly, but with affection.

Justine didn’t pay any attention; it was not the first time she had heard it. “I’ll take the orange, the scarlet, the purple print, the moss green, the burgundy suit….”

Meggie sat torn between laughter and rage. What could one do with a daughter like Justine?

The Himalaya sailed from Darling Harbor three days later. She was a lovely old ship, flat-hulled and very seaworthy, built in the days when no one was in a tearing hurry and everyone accepted the fact England was four weeks away via Suez or five weeks away via the Cape of Good Hope. Nowadays even the ocean liners were streamlined, hulls shaped like destroyers to get there faster. But what they did to a sensitive stomach made seasoned sailors quail.

“What fun!” Justine laughed. “We’ve got a whole lovely footie team in first class, so it won’t be as dull as I thought. Some of them are gorgeous.”

“Now aren’t you glad I insisted on first class?”

“I suppose so.”

“Justine, you bring out the worst in me, you always have,” Meggie snapped, losing her temper at what she took for ingratitude. Just this once couldn’t the little wretch at least pretend she was sorry to be going? “Stubborn, pig-headed, self-willed! You exasperate me.”

For a moment Justine didn’t answer, but turned her head away as if she was more interested in the fact that the all-ashore gong was ringing than in what her mother was saying. She bit the tremor from her lips, put a bright smile on them. “I know I exasperate you,” she said cheerfully as she faced her mother. “Never mind, we are what we are. As you always say, I take after my dad.”

They embraced self-consciously before Meggie slipped thankfully into the crowds converging on gangways and was lost to sight. Justine made her way up to the sun deck and stood by the rail with rolls of colored streamers in her hands. Far below on the wharf she saw the figure in the pinkish-grey dress and hat walk to the appointed spot, stand shading her eyes. Funny, at this distance one could see Mum was getting up toward fifty. Some way to go yet, but it was there in her stance. They waved in the same moment, then Justine threw the first of her streamers and Meggie caught its end deftly. A red, a blue, a yellow, a pink, a green, an orange; spiraling round and round, tugging in the breeze.

A pipe band had come to bid the football team farewell and stood with pennons flying, plaids billowing, skirling a quaint version of “Now Is the Hour.” The ship’s rails were thick with people hanging over, holding desperately to their ends of the thin paper streamers; on the wharf hundreds of people craned their necks upward, lingering hungrily on the faces going so far away, young faces mostly, off to see what the hub of civilization on the other side of the world was really like. They would live there, work there, perhaps come back in two years, perhaps not come back at all. And everyone knew it, wondered.

The blue sky was plumped with silver-white clouds and there was a tearing Sydney wind. Sun warmed the upturned heads and the shoulder blades of those leaning down; a great multicolored swath of vibrating ribbons joined ship and shore. Then suddenly a gap appeared between the old boat’s side and the wooden struts of the wharf; the air filled with cries and sobs; and one by one in their thousands the streamers broke, fluttered wildly, sagged limply and crisscrossed the surface of the water like a mangled loom, joined the orange peels and the jellyfish to float away.

Justine kept doggedly to her place at the rail until the wharf was a few hard lines and little pink pinheads in the distance; the Himalaya’s tugs turned her, towed her helplessly under the booming decks of the Sydney Harbor Bridge, out into the mainstream of that exquisite stretch of sunny water.

It wasn’t like going to Manly on the ferry at all, though they followed the same path past Neutral Bay and Rose Bay and Cremorne and Vaucluse; no. For this time it was out through the Heads, beyond the cruel cliffs and the high lace fans of foam, into the ocean. Twelve thousand miles of it, to the other side of the world. And whether they came home again or not, they would belong neither here nor there, for they would have lived on two continents and sampled two different ways of life.

Money, Justine discovered, made London a most alluring place. Not for her a penniless existence clinging to the fringes of Earl’s Court—“Kangaroo Valley” they called it because so many Australians made it their headquarters. Not for her the typical fate of Australians in England, youth-hosteling on a shoestring, working for a pittance in some office or school or hospital, shivering thin-blooded over a tiny radiator in a cold, damp room. Instead, for Justine a mews flat in Kensington close to Knightsbridge, centrally heated; and a place in the company of Clyde Daltinham-Roberts, The Elizabethan Group.

When the summer came she caught a train to Rome. In afteryears she would smile, remembering how little she saw of that long journey across France, down Italy; her whole mind was occupied with the things she had to tell Dane, memorizing those she simply mustn’t forget. There were so many she was bound to leave some out.

Was that Dane? The tall, fair man on the platform, was that Dane? He didn’t look any different, and yet he was a stranger. Not of her world anymore. The cry she was going to give to attract his attention died unuttered; she drew back a little in her seat to watch him, for the train had halted only a few feet beyond where he stood, blue eyes scanning the windows without anxiety. It was going to be a pretty one-sided conversation when she told him about life since he had gone away, for she knew now there was no thirst in him to share what he experienced with her. Damn him! He wasn’t her baby brother anymore; the life he was living had as little to do with her as it did with Drogheda. Oh, Dane! What’s it like to live something twenty-four hours of every day?

“Hah! Thought I’d dragged you down here on a wild-goose chase, didn’t you?” she said, creeping up behind him unseen.

He turned, squeezed her hands and stared down at her, smiling. “Prawn,” he said lovingly, taking her bigger suitcase and tucking her free arm in his. “It’s good to see you,” he added as he handed her into the red Lagonda he drove everywhere; Dane had always been a sports car fanatic, and had owned one since he was old enough to hold a license.

“Good to see you, too. I hope you found me a nice pub, because I meant what I wrote. I refuse to be stuck in a Vatican cell among a heap of celibates.” She laughed.

“They wouldn’t have you, not with the Devil’s hair. I’ve booked you into a little pension not far from me, but they speak English so you needn’t worry if I’m not with you. And in Rome it’s no problem getting around on English; there’s usually someone who can speak it.”

“Times like this I wish I had your gift for foreign languages. But I’ll manage; I’m very good at mimes and charades.”

“I have two months, Jussy, isn’t it super? So we can take a look at France and Spain and still have a month on Drogheda. I miss the old place.”

“Do you?” She turned to look at him, at the beautiful hands guiding the car expertly through the crazy Roman traffic. “I don’t miss it at all; London’s too interesting.”

“You don’t fool me,” he said. “I know what Drogheda and Mum mean to you.”

Justine clenched her hands in her lap but didn’t answer him.

“Do you mind having tea with some friends of mine this afternoon?” he asked when they had arrived. “I rather anticipated things by accepting for you already. They’re so anxious to meet you, and as I’m not a free man until tomorrow, I didn’t like to say no.”

“Prawn! Why should I mind? If this was London I’d be inundating you with my friends, so why shouldn’t you? I’m glad you’re giving me a look-see at the blokes in the seminary, though it’s a bit unfair to me, isn’t it? Hands off the lot of them.”

She walked to the window, looked down at a shabby little square with two tired plane trees in its paved quadrangle, three tables strewn beneath them, and to one side a church of no particular architectural grace or beauty, covered in peeling stucco.

“Dane….”

“Yes?”

“I do understand, really I do.”

“Yes, I know.” His face lost its smile. “I wish Mum did, Jus.”

“Mum’s different. She feels you deserted her; she doesn’t realize you haven’t. Never mind about her. She’ll come round in time.”

“I hope so.” He laughed. “By the way, it isn’t the blokes from the seminary you’re going to meet today. I wouldn’t subject them or you to such temptation. It’s Cardinal de Bricassart. I know you don’t like him, but promise you’ll be good.”

Her eyes lit with peculiar witchery. “I promise! I’ll even kiss every ring that’s offered to me.”

“Oh, you remember! I was so mad at you that day, shaming me in front of him.”

“Well, since then I’ve kissed a lot of things less hygienic than a ring. There’s one horrible pimply youth in acting class with halitosis and decayed tonsils and a rotten stomach I had to kiss a total of twenty-nine times, and I can assure you, mate, that after him nothing’s impossible.” She patted her hair, turned from the mirror. “Have I got time to change?”

“Oh, don’t worry about that. You look fine.”

“Who else is going to be there?”

The sun was too low to warm the ancient square, and the leprous patches on the plane tree trunks looked worn, sick. Justine shivered.

“Cardinal di Contini-Verchese will be there.”

She had heard that name, and opened her eyes wider. “Phew! You move in pretty exalted circles, don’t you?”

“Yes. I try to deserve it.”

“Does it mean some people make it hard on you in other areas of your life here, Dane?” she asked, shrewdly.

“No, not really. Who one knows isn’t important. I never think of it, so nor does anyone else.”

The room, the red men! Never in all her life had Justine been so conscious of the redundancy of women in the lives of some men as at that moment, walking into a world where women simply had no place except as humble nun servants. She was still in the olive-green linen suit she had put on outside Turin, rather crumpled from the train, and she advanced across the soft crimson carpet cursing Dane’s eagerness to be there, wishing she had insisted on donning something less travel-marked.

Cardinal de Bricassart was on his feet, smiling; what a handsome old man he was.

“My dear Justine,” he said, extending his ring with a wicked look which indicated he well remembered the last time, and searching her face for something she didn’t understand. “You don’t look at all like your mother.”

Down on one knee, kiss the ring, smile humbly, get up, smile less humbly. “No, I don’t, do I? I could have done with her beauty in my chosen profession, but on a stage I manage. Because it has nothing to do with what the face actually is, you know. It’s what you and your art can convince people the face is.”

A dry chuckle came from a chair; once more she trod to salute a ring on an aging wormy hand, but this time she looked up into dark eyes, and strangely in them saw love. Love for her, for someone he had never seen, could scarcely have heard mentioned. But it was there. She didn’t like Cardinal de Bricassart any more now than she had at fifteen, but she warmed to this old man.

“Sit down, my dear,” said Cardinal Vittorio, his hand indicating the chair next to him.

“Hello, pusskins,” said Justine, tickling the blue-grey cat in his scarlet lap. “She’s nice, isn’t she?”

“Indeed she is.”

“What’s her name?”

“Natasha.”

The door opened, but not to admit the tea trolley. A man, mercifully clad as a layman; one more red soutane, thought Justine, and I’ll bellow like a bull.

But he was no ordinary man, even if he was a layman. They probably had a little house rule in the Vatican, continued Justine’s unruly mind, which specifically barred ordinary men. Not exactly short, he was so powerfully built he seemed more stocky than he was, with massive shoulders and a huge chest, a big leonine head, long arms like a shearer. Ape-mannish, except that he exuded intelligence and moved with the gait of someone who would grasp whatever he wanted too quickly for the mind to follow. Grasp it and maybe crush it, but never aimlessly, thoughtlessly; with exquisite deliberation. He was dark, but his thick mane of hair was exactly the color of steel wool and of much the same consistency, could steel wool have been crimped into tiny, regular waves.

“Rainer, you come in good time,” said Cardinal Vittorio, indicating the chair on his other side, still speaking in English. “My dear,” he said, turning to Justine as the man finished kissing his ring and rose, “I would like you to meet a very good friend. Herr Rainer Moerling Hartheim. Rainer, this is Dane’s sister, Justine.”

He bowed, clicking his heels punctiliously, gave her a brief smile without warmth and sat down, just too far off to one side to see. Justine breathed a sigh of relief, especially when she saw that Dane had draped himself with the ease of habit on the floor beside Cardinal Ralph’s chair, right in her central vision. While she could see someone she knew and loved well, she would be all right. But the room and the red men and now this dark man were beginning to irritate her more than Dane’s presence calmed; she resented the way they shut her out. So she leaned to one side and tickled the cat again, aware that Cardinal Vittorio sensed and was amused by her reactions.

“Is she spayed?” asked Justine.

“Of course.”

“Of course! Though why you needed to bother I don’t know. Just being a permanent inhabitant of this place would be enough to neuter anyone’s ovaries.”

“On the contrary, my dear,” said Cardinal Vittorio, enjoying her hugely. “It is we men who have psychologically neutered ourselves.”

“I beg to differ, Your Eminence.”

“So our little world antagonizes you?”

“Well, let’s just say I feel a bit superfluous, Your Eminence. A nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live here.”

“I cannot blame you. I also doubt that you like to visit. But you will get used to us, for you must visit us often, please.”

Justine grinned. “I hate being on my best behavior,” she confided. “It brings out the absolute worst in me—I can feel Dane’s horrors from here without even looking at him.”

“I was wondering how long it was going to last,” said Dane, not at all put out. “Scratch Justine’s surface and you find a rebel. That’s why she’s such a nice sister for me to have. I’m not a rebel, but I do admire them.”

Herr Hartheim shifted his chair so that he could continue to keep her in his line of vision even when she straightened, stopped playing with the cat. At that moment the beautiful animal grew tired of the hand with an alien female scent, and without getting to its feet crawled delicately from red lap to grey, curling itself under Herr Hartheim’s strong square stroking hands, purring so loudly that everyone laughed.

“Excuse me for living,” said Justine, not proof against a good joke even when she was its victim.

“Her motor is as good as ever,” said Herr Hartheim, the amusement working fascinating changes in his face. His English was so good he hardly had an accent, but it had an American inflection; he rolled his r’s.

The tea came before everyone settled down again, and oddly enough it was Herr Hartheim who poured, handing Justine her cup with a much friendlier look than he had given her at introduction.

“In a British community,” he said to her, “afternoon tea is the most important refreshment of the day. Things happen over teacups, don’t they? I suppose because by its very nature it can be demanded and taken at almost any time between two and five-thirty, and talking is thirsty work.”

The next half hour seemed to prove his point, though Justine took no part in the congress. Talk veered from the Holy Father’s precarious health to the cold war and then the economic recession, all four men speaking and listening with an alertness Justine found absorbing, beginning to grope for the qualities they shared, even Dane, who was so strange, so much an unknown. He contributed actively, and it wasn’t lost upon her that the three older men listened to him with a curious humility, almost as if he awed them. His comments were neither uninformed nor naïve, but they were different, original, holy. Was it for his holiness they paid such serious attention to him? That he possessed it, and they didn’t? Was it truly a virtue they admired, yearned for themselves? Was it so rare? Three men so vastly different one from the other, yet far closer bound together than any of them were to Dane. How difficult it was to take Dane as seriously as they did! Not that in many ways he hadn’t acted as an older brother rather than a younger; not that she wasn’t aware of his wisdom, his intellect or his holiness. But until now he had been a part of her world. She had to get used to the fact that he wasn’t anymore.

“If you wish to go straight to your devotions, Dane, I’ll see your sister back to her hotel,” commanded Herr Rainer Moerling Hartheim without consulting anyone’s wishes on the subject.

And so she found herself walking tongue-tied down the marble stairs in the company of that squat, powerful man. Outside in the yellow sheen of a Roman sunset he took her elbow and guided her into a black Mercedes limousine, its chauffeur standing to attention.

“Come, you don’t want to spend your first evening in Rome alone, and Dane is otherwise occupied,” he said, following her into the car. “You’re tired and bewildered, so it’s better you have company.”

“You don’t seem to be leaving me any choice, Herr Hartheim.”

“I would rather you called me Rainer.”

“You must be important, having a posh car and your own chauffeur.”

“I’ll be more important still when I’m chancellor of West Germany.”

Justine snorted. “I’m surprised you’re not already.”

“Impudent! I’m too young.”

“Are you?” She turned sideways to look at him more closely, discovering that his dark skin was unlined, youthful, that the deeply set eyes weren’t embedded in the fleshy surrounds of age.

“I’m heavy and I’m grey, but I’ve been grey since I was sixteen and heavy since I’ve had enough to eat. At the present moment I’m a mere thirty-one.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” she said, kicking her shoes off. “That’s still old to me—I’m sweet twenty-one.”

“You’re a monster,” he said, smiling.

“I suppose I must be. My mother says the same thing. Only I’m not sure what either of you means by monster, so you can give me your version, please.”

“Have you already got your mother’s version?”

“I’d embarrass the hell out of her if I asked.”

“Don’t you think you embarrass me?”

“I strongly suspect, Herr Hartheim, that you’re a monster, too, so I doubt if anything embarrasses you.”

“A monster,” he said again under his breath. “All right then, Miss O’Neill, I’ll try to define the term for you. Someone who terrifies others; rolls over the top of people; feels so strong only God can defeat; has no scruples and few morals.”

She chuckled. “It sounds like you, to me. And I have so too got morals and scruples. I’m Dane’s sister.”

“You don’t look a bit like him.”

“More’s the pity.”

“His face wouldn’t suit your personality.”

“You’re undoubtedly right, but with his face I might have developed a different personality.”

“Depending on which comes first, eh, the chicken or the egg? Put your shoes on; we’re going to walk.”

It was warm, and growing dark; but the lights were brilliant, there were crowds it seemed no matter where they walked, and the roads were jammed with shrieking motor scooters, tiny aggressive Fiats, Goggomobils looking like hordes of panicked frogs. Finally he halted in a small square, its cobbles worn to smoothness by the feet of many centuries, and guided Justine into a restaurant.

“Unless you’d prefer al fresco?” he asked.

“Provided you feed me, I don’t much care whether it’s inside, outside, or halfway between.”

“May I order for you?”

The pale eyes blinked a little wearily perhaps, but there was still fight in Justine. “I don’t know that I go for all that high-handed masterful-male business,” she said. “After all, how do you know what I fancy?”

“Sister Anna carries her banner,” he murmured. “Tell me what sort of food you like, then, and I’ll guarantee to please you. Fish? Veal?”

“A compromise? All right, I’ll meet you halfway, why not? I’ll have pâté, some scampi and a huge plate of saltimbocca, and after that I’ll have a cassata and a cappuccino coffee. Fiddle around with that if you can.”

“I ought to slap you,” he said, his good humor quite unruffled. He gave her order to the waiter exactly as she had stipulated it, but in rapid Italian.

“You said I don’t look a bit like Dane. Aren’t I like him in any way at all?” she asked a little pathetically over coffee, too hungry to have wasted time talking while there was food on the table.

He lit her cigarette, then his own, and leaned into the shadows to watch her quietly, thinking back to his first meeting with the boy months ago. Cardinal de Bricassart minus forty years of life; he had seen it immediately, and then had learned they were uncle and nephew, that the mother of the boy and the girl was Ralph de Bricassart’s sister.

“There is a likeness, yes,” he said. “Sometimes even of the face. Expressions far more than features. Around the eyes and the mouth, in the way you hold your eyes open and your mouths closed. Oddly enough, not likenesses you share with your uncle the Cardinal.”

“Uncle the Cardinal?” she repeated blankly.

“Cardinal de Bricassart. Isn’t he your uncle? Now, I’m sure I was told he was.”

“That old vulture? He’s no relation of ours, thank heavens. He used to be our parish priest years ago, a long time before I was born.”

She was very intelligent; but she was also very tired. Poor little girl—for that was what she was, a little girl. The ten years between them yawned like a hundred. To suspect would bring her world to ruins, and she was so valiant in defense of it. Probably she would refuse to see it, even if she were told outright. How to make it seem unimportant? Not labor the point, definitely not, but not drop it immediately, either.

“That accounts for it, then,” he said lightly.

“Accounts for what?”

“The fact that Dane’s likeness to the Cardinal is in general things—height, coloring, build.”

“Oh! My grandmother told me our father was rather like the Cardinal to look at,” said Justine comfortably.

“Haven’t you ever seen your father?”

“Not even a picture of him. He and Mum separated for good before Dane was born.” She beckoned the waiter. “I’d like another cappuccino, please.”

“Justine, you’re a savage! Let me order for you!”

“No, dammit, I won’t I’m perfectly capable of thinking for myself, and I don’t need some bloody man always to tell me what I want and when I want it, do you hear?”

“Scratch the surface and one finds a rebel; that was what Dane said.”

“He’s right. Oh, if you knew how I hate being petted and cosseted and fussed over! I like to act for myself, and I won’t be told what to do! I don’t ask for quarter, but I don’t give any, either.”

“I can see that,” he said dryly. “What made you so, Herzchen? Does it run in the family?”

“Does it? I honestly don’t know. There aren’t enough women to tell, I suppose. Only one per generation. Nanna, and Mum, and me. Heaps of men, though.”

“Except in your generation there are not heaps of men. Only Dane.”

“Due to the fact Mum left my father, I expect. She never seemed to get interested in anyone else. Pity, I think. Mum’s a real homebody; she would have liked a husband to fuss over.”

“Is she like you?”

“I don’t think so.”

“More importantly, do you like each other?”

“Mum and I?” She smiled without rancor, much as her mother would have done had someone asked her whether she liked her daughter. “I’m not sure if we like each other, but there is something there. Maybe it’s a simple biological bond; I don’t know.” Her eyes kindled. “I’ve always wanted her to talk to me the way she does to Dane, and wanted to get along with her the way Dane does. But either there’s something lacking in her, or something lacking in me. Me, I’d reckon. She’s a much finer person than I am.”

“I haven’t met her, so I can’t agree or disagree with your judgment. If it’s of any conceivable comfort to you, Herzchen, I like you exactly the way you are. No, I wouldn’t change a thing about you, even your ridiculous pugnacity.”

“Isn’t that nice of you? And after I insulted you, too. I’m not really like Dane, am I?”

“Dane isn’t like anyone else in the world.”

“You mean because he’s so not of this world?”

“I suppose so.” He leaned forward, out of the shadows into the weak light of the little candle in its Chianti bottle. “I am a Catholic, and my religion has been the one thing in my life which has never failed me, though I have failed it many times. I dislike speaking of Dane, because my heart tells me some things are better left undiscussed. Certainly you aren’t like him in your attitude to life, or God. Let’s leave it, all right?”

She looked at him curiously. “All right, Rainer, if you want. I’ll make a pact with you—no matter what we discuss, it won’t be the nature of Dane, or religion.”

Much had happened to Rainer Moerling Hartheim since that meeting with Ralph de Bricassart in July 1943. A week afterward his regiment had been dispatched to the Eastern Front, where he spent the remainder of the war. Torn and rudderless, too young to have been indoctrinated into the Hitler Youth in its leisurely prewar days, he had faced the consequences of Hitler in feet of snow, without ammunition, the front line stretched so thin there was only one soldier for every hundred yards of it. And out of the war he carried two memories: that bitter campaign in bitter cold, and the face of Ralph de Bricassart. Horror and beauty, the Devil and God. Half crazed, half frozen, waiting defenseless for Khrushchev’s guerrillas to drop from low-flying planes parachuteless into the snowdrifts, he beat his breast and muttered prayers. But he didn’t know what he prayed for: bullets for his gun, escape from the Russians, his immortal soul, the man in the basilica, Germany, a lessening of grief.

In the spring of 1945 he had retreated back across Poland before the Russians, like his fellow soldiers with only one objective—to make it into British-or American-occupied Germany. For if the Russians caught him, he would be shot. He tore his papers into shreds and burned them, buried his two Iron Crosses, stole some clothes and presented himself to the British authorities on the Danish border. They shipped him to a camp for displaced persons in Belgium. There for a year he lived on the bread and gruel which was all the exhausted British could afford to feed the thousands upon thousands of people in their charge, waiting until the British realized their only course was release.

Twice officials of the camp had summoned him to present him with an ultimatum. There was a boat waiting in Ostend harbor loading immigrants for Australia. He would be given new papers and shipped to his new land free of charge, in return for which he would work for the Australian government for two years in whatever capacity they chose, after which his life would become entirely his own. Not slave labor; he would be paid the standard wage, of course. But on both occasions he managed to talk himself out of summary emigration. He had hated Hitler, not Germany, and he was not ashamed of being a German. Home meant Germany; it had occupied his dreams for over three years. The very thought of yet again being stranded in a country where no one spoke his language nor he theirs was anathema. So at the beginning of 1947 he found himself penniless on the streets of Aachen, ready to pick up the pieces of an existence he knew he wanted very badly.

He and his soul had survived, but not to go back to poverty and obscurity. For Rainer was more than a very ambitious man; he was also something of a genius. He went to work for Grundig, and studied the field which had fascinated him since he first got acquainted with radar: electronics. Ideas teemed in his brain, but he refused to sell them to Grundig for a millionth part of their value. Instead he gauged the market carefully, then married the widow of a man who had managed to keep a couple of small radio factories, and went into business for himself. That he was barely into his twenties didn’t matter. His mind was characteristic of a far older man, and the chaos of postwar Germany created opportunities for young men.

Since his wedding had been a civil one, the Church permitted him to divorce his wife; in 1951 he paid Annelise Hartheim exactly twice the current value of her first husband’s two factories, and did just that, divorced her. However, he didn’t remarry.

What had happened to the boy in the frozen terror of Russia did not produce a soulless caricature of a man; rather it arrested the growth of softness and sweetness in him, and threw into high relief other qualities he possessed—intelligence, ruthlessness, determination. A man who has nothing to lose has everything to gain, and a man without feelings cannot be hurt. Or so he told himself. In actual fact, he was curiously similar to the man he had met in Rome in 1943; like Ralph de Bricassart he understood he did wrong even as he did it. Not that his awareness of the evil in him stopped him for a second; only that he paid for his material advancement in pain and self-torment. To many people it might not have seemed worth the price he paid, but to him it was worth twice the suffering. One day he was going to run Germany and make it what he had dreamed, he was going to scotch the Aryan Lutheran ethic, shape a broader one. Because he couldn’t promise to cease sinning he had been refused absolution in the confessional several times, but somehow he and his religion muddled through in one piece, until accumulated money and power removed him so many layers beyond guilt he could present himself repentant, and be shriven.

In 1955, one of the richest and most powerful men in the new West Germany and a fresh face in its Bonn parliament, he went back to Rome. To seek out Cardinal de Bricassart, and show him the end result of his prayers. What he had imagined that meeting might be he could not afterward remember, for from beginning to end of it he was conscious of only one thing: that Ralph de Bricassart was disappointed in him. He had known why, he hadn’t needed to ask. But he hadn’t expected the Cardinal’s parting remark:

“I had prayed you would do better than I, for you were so young. No end is worth any means. But I suppose the seeds of our ruin are sown before our births.”

Back in his hotel room he had wept, but calmed after a while and thought: What’s past is done with; for the future I will be as he hoped. And sometimes he succeeded, sometimes he failed. But he tried. His friendship with the men in the Vatican became the most precious earthly thing in his life, and Rome became the place to which he fled when only their comfort seemed to stand between himself and despair. Comfort. Theirs was a strange kind. Not the laying on of hands, or soft words. Rather a balm from the soul, as if they understood his pain.

And he thought, as he walked the warm Roman night after depositing Justine in her pension, that he would never cease to be grateful to her. For as he had watched her cope with the ordeal of that afternoon interview, he had felt a stirring of tenderness. Bloody but unbowed, the little monster. She could match them every inch of the way; did they realize it? He felt, he decided, what he might have felt on behalf of a daughter he was proud of, only he had no daughter. So he had stolen her from Dane, carried her off to watch her aftermath reaction to that overpowering ecclesiasticism, and to the Dane she had never seen before; the Dane who was not and could not ever be a full-hearted part of her life.

The nicest thing about his personal God, he went on, was that He could forgive anything; He could forgive Justine her innate godlessness and himself the shutting down of his emotional powerhouse until such time as it was convenient to reopen it. Only for a while he had panicked, thinking he had lost the key forever. He smiled, threw away her cigarette. The key…. Well, sometimes keys had strange shapes. Perhaps it needed every kink in every curl of that red head to trip the tumblers; perhaps in a room of scarlet his God had handed him a scarlet key.

A fleeting day, over in a second. But on looking at his watch he saw it was still early, and knew the man who had so much power now that His Holiness lay near death would still be wakeful, sharing the nocturnal habits of his cat. Those dreadful hiccups filling the small room at Castel Gandolfo, twisting the thin, pale, ascetic face which had watched beneath the white crown for so many years; he was dying, and he was a great Pope. No matter what they said, he was a great Pope. If he had loved his Germans, if he still liked to hear German spoken around him, did it alter anything? Not for Rainer to judge that.

But for what Rainer needed to know at the moment, Castel Gandolfo was not the source. Up the marble stairs to the scarlet-and-crimson room, to talk to Vittorio Scarbanza, Cardinal di Contini-Verchese. Who might be the next Pope, or might not. For almost three years now he had watched those wise, loving dark eyes rest where they most liked to rest; yes, better to seek the answers from him than from Cardinal de Bricassart.

“I never thought I’d hear myself say it, but thank God we’re leaving for Drogheda,” said Justine, refusing to throw a coin in the Trevi Fountain. “We were supposed to take a look at France and Spain; instead we’re still in Rome and I’m as unnecessary as a navel. Brothers!”

“Hmmm, so you deem navels unnecessary? Socrates was of the same opinion, I remember,” said Rainer.

“Socrates was? I don’t recollect that! Funny, I thought I’d read most of Plato, too.” She twisted to stare at him, thinking the casual clothes of a holiday-maker in Rome suited him far better than the sober attire he wore for Vatican audiences.

“He was absolutely convinced navels were unnecessary, as a matter of fact. So much so that to prove his point he unscrewed his own navel and threw it away.”

Her lips twitched. “And what happened?”

“His toga fell off.”

“Hook! Hook!” She giggled. “Anyway, they didn’t wear togas in Athens then. But I have a horrible feeling there’s a moral in your story.” Her face sobered. “Why do you bother with me, Rain?”

“Stubborn! I’ve told you before, my name is pronounced Ryner, not Rayner.”

“Ah, but you don’t understand,” she said, looking thoughtfully at the twinkling streams of water, the dirty pool loaded with dirty coins. “Have you ever been to Australia?”

His shoulders shook, but he made no sound. “Twice I almost went, Herzchen, but I managed to avoid it.”

“Well, if you had gone you’d understand. You have a magical name to an Australian, when it’s pronounced my way. Rainer. Rain. Life in the desert.”

Startled, he dropped his cigarette. “Justine, you aren’t falling in love with me, are you?”

“What egotists men are! I hate to disappoint you, but no.” Then, as if to soften any unkindness in her words, she slipped her hand into his, squeezed. “It’s something much nicer.”

“What could be nicer than falling in love?”

“Almost anything, I think. I don’t want to need anyone like that, ever.”

“Perhaps you’re right. It’s certainly a crippling handicap, taken on too early. So what is much nicer?”

“Finding a friend.” Her hand rubbed his. “You are my friend, aren’t you?”

“Yes.” Smiling, he threw a coin in the fountain. “There! I must have given it a thousand D-marks over the years, just for reassurance that I would continue to feel the warmth of the south. Sometimes in my nightmares I’m cold again.”

“You ought to feel the warmth of the real south,” said Justine. “A hundred and fifteen in the shade, if you can find any.”

“No wonder you don’t feel the heat.” He laughed the soundless laugh, as always; a hangover from the old days, when to laugh aloud might have tempted fate. “And the heat would account for the fact that you’re hard-boiled.”

“Your English is colloquial, but American. I would have thought you’d have learned English in some posh British university.”

“No. I began to learn it from Cockney or Scottish or Midlands tommies in a Belgian camp, and didn’t understand a word of it except when I spoke to the man who had taught it to me. One said ‘abaht,’ one said ‘aboot,’ one said ‘about,’ but they all meant ‘about.’ So when I got back to Germany I saw every motion picture I could, and bought the only records available in English, records made by American comedians. But I played them over and over again at home, until I spoke enough English to learn more.”

Her shoes were off, as usual; awed, he had watched her walk barefooted on pavements hot enough to fry an egg, and over stony places.

“Urchin! Put your shoes on.”

“I’m an Aussie; our feet are too broad to be comfortable in shoes. Comes of no really cold weather; we go barefoot whenever we can. I can walk across a paddock of bindy-eye burns and pick them out of my feet without feeling them,” she said proudly. “I could probably walk on hot coals.” Then abruptly she changed the subject. “Did you love your wife, Rain?”

“No.”

“Did she love you?”

“Yes. She had no other reason to marry me.”

“Poor thing! You used her, and you dropped her.”

“Does it disappoint you?”

“No, I don’t think so. I rather admire you for it, actually. But I do feel very sorry for her, and it makes me more determined than ever not to land in the same soup she did.”

“Admire me?” His tone was blank, astonished.

“Why not? I’m not looking for the things in you she undoubtedly did, now am I? I like you, you’re my friend. She loved you, you were her husband.”

“I think, Herzchen,” he said a little sadly, “that ambitious men are not very kind to their women.”

“That’s because they usually fall for utter doormats of women, the ‘Yes, dear, no, dear, three bags full, dear, and where would you like it put?’ sort. Hard cheese all round, I say. If I’d been your wife, I’d have told you to go pee up a rope, but I’ll bet she never did, did she?”

His lips quivered. “No, poor Annelise. She was the martyr kind, so her weapons were not nearly so direct or so deliciously expressed. I wish they made Australian films, so I knew your vernacular. The “Yes, dear’ bit I got, but I have no idea what hard cheese is.”

“Tough luck, sort of, but it’s more unsympathetic.” Her broad toes clung like strong fingers to the inside of the fountain wall, she teetered precariously backward and righted herself easily. “Well, you were kind to her in the end. You got rid of her. She’s far better off without you, though she probably doesn’t think so. Whereas I can keep you, because I’ll never let you get under my skin.”

“Hard-boiled. You really are, Justine. And how did you find out these things about me?”

“I asked Dane. Naturally, being Dane he just gave me the bare facts, but I deduced the rest.”

“From your enormous store of past experience, no doubt. What a fraud you are! They say you’re a very good actress, but I find that incredible. How do you manage to counterfeit emotions you can never have experienced? As a person you’re more emotionally backward than most fifteen-year-olds.”

She jumped down, sat on the wall and leaned to put her shoes on, wriggling her toes ruefully. “My feet are swollen, dammit.” There was no indication by a reaction of rage or indignation that she had even heard the last part of what he said. As if when aspersions or criticisms were leveled at her she simply switched off an internal hearing aid. How many there must have been. The miracle was that she didn’t hate Dane.

“That’s a hard question to answer,” she said. “I must be able to do it or I wouldn’t be so good, isn’t that right? But it’s like…a waiting. My life off the stage, I mean. I conserve myself, I can’t spend it offstage. We only have so much to give, don’t we? And up there I’m not myself, or perhaps more correctly I’m a succession of selves. We must all be a profound mixture of selves, don’t you think? To me, acting is first and foremost intellect, and only after that, emotion. The one liberates the other, and polishes it. There’s so much more to it than simply crying or screaming or producing a convincing laugh. It’s wonderful, you know. Thinking myself into another self, someone I might have been, had the circumstances been there. That’s the secret. Not becoming someone else, but incorporating the role into me as if she was myself. And so she becomes me.” As though her excitement was too great to bear in stillness, she jumped to her feet. “Imagine, Rain! In twenty years’ time I’ll be able to say to myself, I’ve committed murders, I’ve suicided, I’ve gone mad, I’ve saved men or ruined them. Oh! The possibilities are endless!”

“And they will all be you.” He rose, took her hand again. “Yes, you’re quite right, Justine. You can’t spend it offstage. In anyone else, I’d say you would in spite of that, but being you, I’m not so sure.”