Angel by Colleen McCullough Page B

intended to make her retarded, then forgot and gave her a brain.”
    My hackles rose as high as Mum’s; I glared at him, the myopic git! “Flo is special!” I snapped.
    “She looks half-starved to me,” was Granny’s verdict when she and Mum returned from the toilet. “What a great lump of a woman her mother is! Very common.” That is the most damning thing Granny can say about anyone.
    Common. Mum agreed fervently.
    Oh, dear. I ushered them out at ten, stood and waved goodbye as Dad drove off in the new Ford Customline, and hoped they would never return.
    What they said about me, my flat, The House, Flo and Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz as they went home I can only guess, except that I had a fair idea Dad’s opinion of my landlady was a bit different from Mum’s. My bet is that the old horror was just making enough mild mischief to make sure the Purcell Family did not make The House a regular stop whenever they went out.
    What makes me want to cry is that I was so bursting with opinions and impressions and conclusions about everything that’s happened to me in the last four weeks, yet the moment I looked at their faces as they eyed Flo’s scribbles in the front hall, I knew that I couldn’t air a one of them. Why is that, when I still love them to death? I do. I do! But it’s like going down to the Quay to farewell a friend heading off for England on the old Himalaya. You stand there looking up at the hundreds of faces clustered at the rail, holding your brightly coloured paper streamer in your hand, and the tugs get the ship under way, it unglues itself from the wharf, and
    all the streamers, including yours, snap and float on the dirty water with no purpose left except to contribute to the flotsam.
    In future I am going to Bronte to see them. I know I said in here somewhere that I could never go back to Bronte, but I meant inside my soul.
    My body is going to have to do its duty, however.

Sunday
February 28th, 1960
    Tomorrow I can propose marriage to some bloke I fancy because this is a Leap Year, February has twenty-nine days. Fat chance.
    Today I met Klaus, who didn’t go to Bowral for the weekend. He’s a chubby little bloke in his middle fifties with big round pale blue eyes, and he told me that he’d been a soldier in the German army during the War, a paper pusher in a depot near Bremen. So it was the British who interned him in a camp in Denmark. They offered him his choice of Australia, Canada or Scotland. He picked Australia because it was so far away, worked as a clerk for the Government for two years, then went back to the work he was trained for, goldsmithing. When I asked him if he’d teach me to cook, he beamed all over his face and said he’d be delighted. His English is so good that his accent is almost American, and he doesn’t have any SS tattoos in his armpits because I saw him
    hanging out his washing in his singlet. So poop to you, David Murchison, with your petty biases against New Australians. Klaus and I made a date for nine o’clock on next Wednesday night, which he assured me wasn’t too late an hour for a Continental. I was fairly sure I’d be home by then even if Cas was a nightmare.
    On Friday night I had stopped in at the Piccadilly pub’s bottle department to buy a quart of threestar from Joe Dwyer, whom I’m getting to know quite well now that brandy doesn’t taste so foul. This afternoon I trotted it up the stairs to the lady herself, who greeted it and me with great enthusiasm. She fascinates me, I want to find out heaps more about her.
    While Flo took her dozens and dozens of crayons and drew her aimless squiggles on a freshly painted section of wall just inside, we sat on the balcony in the steamy salty air with our Kraft cheese spread glasses, a plate of smoked eel, a loaf of bread, a pound of butter and all the time in the world, or so it seemed.
    She never once gave me the impression that perhaps someone else was due to visit, let alone tried to hustle me out