Ash’s stay, his mother brought him a piece of toast as he lay in bed. She said, “Are you sure you couldn’t manage a boiled egg? Or a beer?” She wasn’t Ash’s mother, of course, but Lachlan’s: they had the same voice, echt Aberdeen. Margaret’s straight, short hair, the delectable pewter of pencil shading, was parted on one side like a child’s and fastened with a child’s flowered clip. She picked up Ash’s coat and hung it in the wardrobe. Ash felt shivery again and decided to risk a cup of coffee. Lachlan brought it to him in a mug that said “Farmers Do It in the Dirt”—it was excellent coffee, frothy and strong.
Lachlan said, “Feel up to a tour? Shame to have to leave without seeing the old place.” He was wearing only a woolen vest over his red RB Sellars shirt, so Ash was too abashed to retrieve his coat from the wardrobe. He lifted his scarf from the hook on the door, and Lachlan peered at him, saying in an incredulous way, “Not feeling cold, are you?” as if Ash had taken it into his head to challenge an unassailable proposition in logic.
Ash trailed his host in and out of big rooms with empty fireplaces. They were like rich people’s rooms anywhere, only colder. Lachlan said things like “1869” and “the Twenties” and “1976”; Ash gathered that the original homestead had been added to or remodeled at these dates. He was shown the former telephone room—larger than his study in the tower—and a room that had once contained the family silver. There was also a ballroom with stained-glass windows built to impress a duke, who sent a last-minute telegram in his place.
They crossed the ballroom, emerged onto yet another veranda, and went back into the house by a different entrance. Ash remarked on the number of doors.
“Fifteen external ones,” said Lachlan. “I counted them once. Handy for Bob’s boyfriends—always an escape hatch somewhere. I’d look out my window and see the latest bloke running away.”
“Does your bedroom door open in such a way that you can’t see who’s standing there?”
“They all do in the old part of the house. Very practical, the ancestors: you can give the maid her instructions without having to look at her.”
A wonderful surprise waited in the kitchen: it was warm. Margaret sat by the Aga, peeling potatoes onto a sheet of newspaper. “We’re having mash for our tea,” she told Ash. “With Thai green curry.”
Ash offered to peel potatoes—it would be a reason to linger in the warmth. When his offer was refused, he said firmly that he felt too weak to continue and sat at the table anyway.
“Have you shown your friend the gun slits?”
“His name’s Ash, Mum.”
“I know that.” Margaret turned to Ash. “My children think my mind’s going because of my old woman.”
Ash looked polite. Lachlan said, “Mum!”
“When I wake up these days, there’s an old Aboriginal woman waiting,” explained Margaret. “She gave me a scare the first time, but I look out for her now.”
“It’s called hypnopompic hallucination,” said Lachlan. “A kind of dream that carries over into waking.”
“That’s what you say. But I spotted my old lady outside the bank last week when Bob took me into town. She was wearing a blue tracksuit.” Margaret added the last pale potato to the bowl and dipped her fingers in the earthy water, saying, “Well? Are you going to show him the gun slits?” She told Ash, “They’re in the old cold-storage room. It’s Bob’s office now. You should take a look before it gets dark.”
“I’m not sure I’m up to that,” said Ash. The phrase “cold storage” had filled him with dread.
“They’re just slits in the walls,” said Lachlan. “For shooting at marauders. In case there were escaped convicts about. Or blackfellas.”
Ash said, “I thought Butcher’s Creek had taken care of one of those problems.”
“Oh, you know about that? Well, you see, a shepherd was found speared,” said Margaret. “So whole families were slaughtered at the creek in retaliation.”
“You know there’s no actual historical record of a massacre, Mum.”
“My husband’s grandfather was alive when I first came here,” said Margaret to Ash. “He told me all about it. It was spoken about openly when he was a boy. Mind you, I always thought there was Aboriginal blood in my husband’s family. You’ve only to look at Lachlan.”
Ash looked at Lachlan: milk and ginger, sanitary blue eyes.
Standing behind his mother, Lachlan tapped the side of his head. He opened the fridge and peered inside, saying, “Is it too early for a beer? Do you want one, Ash?”
“I think that’s what my old woman comes to tell me. You can say she’s a dream. But another word for a dream that recurs is ‘truth.’”
“Bob still hard at it?” asked Lachlan, pulling the ring off a can. He told Ash, “There’s a downward spiral of genetic selection on most family farms. The smart kid goes away, the dumb one stays home and manages the property. Luckily, it happened the other way around with us.”
Margaret said, “This kitchen was the front room in the original homestead. If you go over to that window and look out, you’ll see Bob’s office. Of course, the gun slits are on the other side.”
Ash felt obliged to comply. A low building with a hipped roof stood across the yard. The old glass in the kitchen window was faintly rippled. The child who had appeared at Ash’s door strolled across this cockeyed view. Ash saw Margaret at ten: the straight hair chopped off at the tips of the ears, the triangular face. The eyes were different: not the grandmother’s hooded blue but a shallow, creaturely yellow. They looked directly at Ash. The child was holding something—an apple? an iced bun? a cricket ball?—that Ash couldn’t quite identify. It displayed a semicircular white scar. Ash thought that he had never seen anything as unnerving as the conjunction of that mauled missile and the small brown hand.
After dinner, Lachlan came to Ash’s bedroom to take away his tray. He said, “I can remember when it became fashionable to have a convict in the family tree. All the amateur genealogists hoped to find one. Now you get people who dream up an Aboriginal ancestor. Is it progress? Or another kind of stealing to persuade ourselves we’re legit?”
They were driving back through the not-landscape when Ash saw the wardrobe from his room. It stood in a paddock, upright and empirical and empty: a survivor. What was horrible was that the wardrobe was the Ashfield Tamil. No one else knew this, only Ash, and he was not allowed to tell. He woke to a delirious magpie and a distant shout: “Man up, Stevie!” That would be Bob, calling encouragement to her daughter or her dog.
The first thing Ash had bought in Sydney was a heater. Three or four times a week, Cassie and Ash would have dinner in a restaurant before going back to Ash’s warm flat. There was a smell there—also detectable on the stairs—that was very strong in the built-in cupboards: a musty smell, but pleasant, like old apples and loam. Ash and Cassie would drink vodka in bed, tell jokes, show off a little to each other. These hours were dedicated to the business of bodies but strayed easily into myth. The flat became their castle, the city was transformed into a forest, the preserve of bears; a stranger arrived with urgent messages from the emperor and was turned away at the gate. At different moments of their affair, each of them felt it: the sense of timelessness and fate that underwrites old tales.
In the morning, Cassie liked to climb the stair to the tower. She claimed it was for the view, trying to conceal her fascination with the room: the books, the journals, the printouts, the piles of student essays. The framed Constructivist prints on the wall were of no interest, as they belonged to the old professor. On Ash’s desk, an upturned lid held paper clips and a staple remover. Cassie swiveled slowly on an ergonomic chair. There was something here that held the key to Ash—something more intimate and revealing than the mouth guard he wore to keep from grinding his teeth in his sleep. She carried a book stuck with markers downstairs. “Why are some of the