feet stood on by the sons of Western District graziers, two of whom proposed to her.
She hid amongst the throngs of bathers on Eastern Beach and burnt her creamy skin, perhaps deliberately. No one reprimanded her. She shed her ruined skin with fascination and did not answer desperate letters from poor Annette who spent her Christmas in a rejected lover's hell.
Phoebe did not speak to the person whose image remained continually in her mind's eye. She would not even ask him to pass the bread. She ignored him at bedtime and would not even say good night. She was reprimanded for her rudeness. She shed her skin in a bedroom curtained from the February heat, and waited.
18
It is time to deal with the neighbours and I am like Goon Tse Ying, capable of becoming invisible, sliding under doors, lifting rugs from floors on windless nights. I get a dirty pleasure sifting through their private cupboards amongst the dust and fluff and paper-dry conversations. I push my invisible nose deep into the sheets of beds and breathe in the odours of their unheard farts.
There were so many ways the McGraths had upset the upper crust in Western Avenue. The offences were as numberless as flies and even Mrs Kentwell had given up on counting them.
For a start: the yellowbrick garage Jack had built in the middle of the lawn. He had built it himself, but not too well. It was as blunt and as useful as a cow bail and two deep wheel ruts ran towards it, not neatly, for there were places where the Hispano Suiza had been bogged and other marks made by horses called to pull it out.
There was also what was known locally as 'The Wall'. The function of this redbrick wall which ran from the garage to almost the middle point of the house (it arrived opposite the big windows of the music room) was to protect Molly's flower beds from the winds that howled off Corio Bay. This function was not obvious to the Kentwells, the Jones-Burtons and the Devonishes who met to discuss each new offence, and if they had known it would have made no difference. They had no sympathy with Jack's bush-carpenter's approach to aesthetics.
The McGrath mansion had been built in 1863 and was originally called 'Wirralee'. This name had been incorporated in a leadlight window above the front door. They had seen Jack McGrath remove this window one afternoon in 1917. Mrs Kentwell saw it first.
'He has the ladder out,' she told Alice Jones-Burton.
The two women put their hats on and plunged their hatpins home. They strolled along the promenade like policemen on the beat and on October 25th, 1917, shortly before noon, they witnessed the man with the binding- twine belt remove the'Wirralee' and replace it with a plain piece of glass on which a single cloverleaf had been sandblasted.
To understand the effect this had on the two ladies you have to remember that there was a big fuss going on about military conscription for the Great War, that the Catholics were against conscription, and what's more they were winning. On November 1st, 1917, the last attempt to introduce conscription would fail. In this heated climate a cloverleaf might easily be seen to be a shamrock, and the two ladies declared the McGraths not only traitorous, not only tasteless, but also Catholic.
If Jack had known all this he would have been terribly upset. He didn't like Catholics much more than he liked Chinese, although in the case of Catholics he would always say it was not the Catholic people he objected to but the religion and the priests particularly who 'swig down all the altar wine themselves, and not a drop for the rest of them'. He never knew that Molly was a Catholic, was still a Catholic, and had risked her soul by marrying him in a Protestant church in Point's Point.
Jack put the cloverleaf above his door because he was bored and because he was lucky.
There were no end of offences. The presence of Herbert Badgery Esquire was an offence. My Gentleman's Stroll did not impress Mrs Kentwell at all. She peered at me from behind fence or curtain and judged me a sharp character and a ruffian.
Western Avenue, she said, was on its way to being a slum, and when she saw the swagman arrive early one morning she knew her fears were well founded. She found it impossible to convey to her allies the true nature of this character. For when she referred to him as a swagman and they nodded their heads she knew she had not painted a proper picture of this grotesque.
'But, my dear,' Mrs Devonish said, 'they all use string.' And then she prattled on about the useful nature of string and how her father, the late Reverend Devonish (who was remembered by Mrs Kentwell for being too High Church) had always kept brown paper bags of string in various parts of the house, none of which information was sensible or useful to Mrs Kentwell and anyway did not fit too well with her memory of the late High Church man who had caused more than one upset due to his fondness for silk and satin. String, Mrs Kentwell thought, was not High Church at all.
So she dispensed with the string. She snapped it up, so to speak, with the cutting edges of her squeaky dentures and took the dryness away with a cup of sugarless tea.
'This gentleman,' she said, 'is introducing cane toads to the area.'
Laura Devonish blinked. 'Do you think, dear, we could have more hot water.'
'Hot water,' Mrs Kentwell said, 'is what we have, Laura. We are in it.'
But the cleverness of this was lost on Laura Devonish who insisted the silver hot water pot was quite empty and the tea now far too strong. There was no choice but to provide the water. It took for ever, or long enough for Laura to eat the two last slices of butter cake.
'This swagman', Mrs Kentwell said, when the tea was to Laura's satisfaction, 'is bringing in cane toads.'
'Why?'
'How would I know?' snapped Mrs Kentwell. 'How would I know why they do anything? But the fact remains, cane toads! In sacks. The poor maid was screaming. There were toads all over the kitchen.'
'You saw?'
'Heard, quite distinctly. 'Frogs,' she screamed. I heard her perfectly.'
'Not toads?'
'Toads, frogs. It is not the point. Laura, you must listen and stop eating. Eating will not fix the problem. The swagman was given money at the back door.'
19
I too was sorry about the first delivery of frogs. The swagman had been too enthusiastic. He had not contented himself with two or three frogs but had kept on collecting until his sack was half full. When he arrived at Western Avenue he entered the kitchen without introducing himself to Bridget who was nervous. Then he began to show her frogs and was misunderstood. Then when yours truly at last arrived, bare-torsoed with my trousers half done up, the swagman, overcome with excitement, emptied the whole lot on to the floor. It took me some time to sort out the mess, educate the swagman, mollify Bridget and retrieve most of the frogs. For days afterwards my hostess's scream would alert me tothe presence of a hitherto hidden frog in some corner of the mansion.
I had been expelled from houses for smaller upsets, and I waited for a little note slid under my bedroom door, the quiet chat after dinner, an eruption of anger on the lawn. My hosts surprised me. They laughed. They repeated the story and derived pleasure from telling it. When I accompanied Jack on his daily round of what he was pleased to call 'interests' the story had often preceded me and I was forced to take another step closer to becoming a herpetologist by discoursing on the dietary habits of the brown snake.
I had never been in a situation before where my lies looked so likely to become true. I did not achieve this alone. So many people contributed creamy coats of credibility to my untruth that the nasty speck of grit was fast becoming a beautiful thing, a lustrous pearl it was impossible not to covet.
The aircraft factory began to achieve a life of its own. Letters were despatched to various suppliers in Melbourne and Sydney and Jack, who loved the telephone with a passion, was chasing timber suppliers in Queensland and waking up squatters in the middle of the night to talk about investing in a wonderful new enterprise.
