When the World Was Steady Read Free Page A

her mind that he might be propositioning her. ‘No thank you,’ she said.
    ‘A game of cards?’ He pulled a worn pack from his jacket pocket. ‘A quick one?’
    ‘No thank you. I’ve had a long day.’
    ‘As you like.’ He looked disappointed. As she left he was dealing himself a hand of patience.
    As a child, Emmy had known exactly what she wanted and how to get it. Born with the echo of bombs in her ears, she had felt special from the start. Her sister Virginia had been old enough tospend the war doubled over in fear, but as the two of them crouched with their mother in the shelters, tiny Emmy would continue to hum or mumble to herself, oblivious, not missing a note when all around her gasped and shuddered.
    She herself had no memory of this. And she had no memory at all of her father, a sacrifice to the enemy early in the war, a pilot shot down before Emmy’s singsong took on any tune. What was for Virginia a tragic first loss was not even a hiccup to her younger sister. It wasn’t until much later, when she felt for some reason that she should, that Emmy began to miss her father.
    Her first and eternal belief was in the creation of one’s own luck. More than that, there was for Emmy a distinct morality to luck, an interrelation between good and bad luck and virtue and vice. Throughout her life, Emmy always took it very hard if things went badly for her.
    When, at twenty, she announced to her mother and sister that she was leaving their modest home in south London in order to marry a dashing Australian named William and head for the Antipodes, they were not surprised. Emmy was in the brief flush of her beauty, between the sloppy plump child she had been and the handsome but formidable matron that she fast became. As Mrs Simpson pointed out, what better place for her to make her own luck than in the newest of the new worlds? And who could stop her?
    Virginia was perhaps even a little glad. From the day of her birth, Emmy had never ceased to terrorize her older sister, or at least that was how Virginia saw it, and she attributed her pinched, shy nature to that unplanned birth amid the whistling bombs: all her dread born at once. That Virginia would probably have been the same without Emmy was not something she recognized on that damp spring morning in 1960 when Emmy said she was leaving.
    Emmy felt her sister saw the world upside down. Virginiabelieved that things just
happened
to one, and Emmy saw this not merely as a mistake but as evil. Her final advice to Virginia was to pray. As they weren’t then religious believers of any sort, Virginia, surprised, asked to whom Emmy would have her do so.
    ‘To yourself, silly,’ Emmy said. ‘That you’ll have the gumption to
live.
’
    Emmy and William had sailed to Australia, to William’s home in Sydney, and there Emmy had discovered her luck to be greater, even, than she had imagined. She had married into a family of aspiring publishers, whose empire was small but flourishing, based on a solid ground of working sheep-stations.
    Emmy would always tell Portia of her joy when, early in her marriage, she and William had made a tour of those outback stations. She had been greeted at homestead after homestead by women with their sleeves rolled up and dust in the creases of their skin, women with their arms outstretched, all of them weeping, weeping at the sight of Emmy, because they lived alone among men and she was water in the desert, balm on an aching wound. She heard about their cramps and labours and miscarriages, she heard their recipes for biscuits and the lists of supplies they couldn’t get hold of. She heard about their worries for their children—those who had them—and their problems with their men. She took down titles of books that they longed for, hesitant requests for feminine luxuries. Some hadn’t spoken this way for years, one for almost a decade. And as she left each woman to climb into the buzzing shell of the plane, Emmy would throw her arms