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Colin, very slowly, ‘that will be all right.’
    Ida bought the materials and cut the dresses, and I madethem under her direction. I had begun to affect the gypsy sort of clothes the artists’ girls wore, but as she fitted these new dresses on me Ida would say, ‘Now, see how wrong you were about those arty things? These are your style.’
    ‘Except for those clumpy shoes,’ said Lewie.
    ‘When he sees you in this dress,’ said Ida, with pins in her mouth, ‘he will want to buy you some new shoes.’
    ‘I love these shoes,’ I said.
    Ida and Lewie said nothing. You could hear them saying it.
    Every warm Saturday, Colin took me to the beach, every cool Saturday to the pictures, and every Sunday, whatever the weather, we went to see his mother and Les. We never saw Les’s wife because on Sundays she took the children and went to see
her
mother, with whom Les had been feuding for eight years. It was feuding territory out there.
    ‘Ooo,’ said Una Porteous, ‘another new frock.’
    ‘All togged up again,’ said Les.
    ‘She got those dresses free, gratis, and for nothing,’ said Colin.
    ‘She’ll have to let them out when the babies begin to come,’ said Una Porteous.
    ‘If they ever do,’ said Les. ‘Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.’
    Colin did not speak to me for four days. Then he reconciled himself to me in bed, and afterwards, I wept storms of tears.
    ‘Oh, stop it,’ he said wearily.
    ‘It isn’t as if I can help it.’
    ‘Nobody’s blaming you. I expect you’ll fall one day.’
    But I continued to weep because at last I had begun to admit the truth—that my greatest need was not for a baby. Indeed, there were times when I thought that all I wanted in the world was to be left alone in my beautiful room, close to people who never asked, audibly or otherwise, who I thought
I
was, but who nevertheless were interested in the answer to that question.
    Then, suddenly, I was no longer frigid. I threw my arms about Colin. ‘Oh, aren’t you glad? Aren’t you glad?’
    ‘Yes, but I’m reading this.’
    I felt that I wanted a baby after all. My night of wild tears seemed a temporary madness.
    ‘Now we can have a baby,’ I said.
    ‘Yes, there’s that.’
    ‘God, you look lovely, Nora,’ said the artists.
    ‘My dear,’ said the watercolourist sadly, ‘you look as if a light has come on inside you.’
    ‘God, you look healthy,’ said Lewie with disgust.
    ‘Ignore him, love,’ said Ida.
    Although I still thought, every day, ‘I must show Lewie this,’ or ‘I must tell Lewie that,’ I went less often to Bomera. I bought provisions at Kings Cross or in Macleay Street, and as I carried my basket home, under plane trees full of cicadas, I was proudly conscious of my status of housewife. I cut recipes from newspapers, and every night cooked as splendid a meal as our means would allow. I looked into prams, not with my former speculation, but with an expression of mindless doting, having cozened myself beforehand into liking what I saw. I told Colin that our baby would be a blond boy. I set my lips among the hairs on his sweating chest.
    ‘I wanted to marry a dark man, but oh, I’m glad now I married a fair one.’
    Empty cicada cases lay under the plane trees in Macleay Street. The trees shed their leaves, I read
Women in Love
, and Colin started to take me to football games. I stood with a hand tucked in the crook of his arm, while the cold entered my shoes, sent branches up my legs, and grew through my body like a tree of stone. I clung to his arm and was bewildered when he made an excited forward lunge and forgot that I was there. I was jealous of his absorption in the game, and estranged bythe savagery of his shouting mouth. At home I was hurt when he read the newspaper at the dinner table, and I sulked when he took my arms from about his neck and absently put me to one side. I was unhappier than I had been before. My budget book, with its additions of halfpennies and pennies, threepences and