The Sun Walks Down: A Novel

Colony of South Australia, September 1883

The boy met a god by the hollow tree.

‘Go away,’ said the boy, and the god, formless, passed on in the direction of the red hill. Then the boy was free to hunt in the scrub for roosting hens. When he came upon the hens they flapped up as if they could fly, and he gathered their eggs in a basket. The boy was six years old and thin, with a vivid pointed face. He wasn’t pale, exactly—his skin browned in the sun—but the visible veins at his wrists and ears suggested a delicacy that the people he knew associated with pale children. There was so little of him. When his mother held him, his heart felt near. Light hair, lifting in the briefest wind. And not so delicate, in fact—a strong boy, a good runner. The name people called him was Denny, and he answered to it.

The boy was gentle as he settled the eggs in the basket. Then his mother wanted him close—he knew this, even though she hadn’t called his name. Nobody had ever told him about his mother’s deafness; she was simply his mother, which meant she heard little and spoke less. But the boy knew when she wanted him to go to her. She had finished hanging the sheets on the line behind the house, and the boy went to give her the basket of eggs; she took it, bent down to him, and pressed her face against his neck. Today she belonged to him entirely—all his sisters were at a wedding in town and his father was out planting parsnips.

The boy and his mam were alone and loving among the sheets. Then quick as a blink she straightened, turned her back, and went into the house, which always ate her up. The boy, following, wanted to help her churn the butter, but she made him put his boots on, she laced them tight, and she sent him out with a sack to gather grass and bark and twigs. He liked to collect things for the fire, and he liked to please her. The black dog, Mopsy, woke from her nap in the sun and looked as if she might come with him; but she heard Mam start the butter churn and went to supervise that instead.

The boy walked away from the red hill, although it was from behind the hill that his sisters would come home from town. The country he walked into was red and brown—desert country—but there was a haze of green over the top of it, because it was spring. At this time of day, the surrounding hills were white and yellow and green. A shrub scratched the boy’s shin and he followed, for a while, the deep course of a dry creek. He kneeled on its stony bed and saw ants carrying a large dead fly. The word that came to him was ‘housebound’, maybe because he’d heard his mother use that word about Mrs Baumann, who had large eyes, like a fly, and clean, folded hands, and sat in a chair with wheels on it as if she had neat grey wings tucked behind her. But the boy didn’t think of Mrs Baumann exactly; the word ‘housebound’ just dropped into the boy and went away again.

He rounded a curve in the creek and surprised a kangaroo. He knew the story of the kangaroo: once upon a time, it argued about food with its cousin the wallaroo, so now it stayed here on the dry, flat plain while the wallaroo lived up in the hills. The boy’s heart was big with sorrow for the kangaroo, which crouched very still and looked at him. It seemed to be waiting for something to happen. Then it turned and flew from the creek bed and the boy climbed out to follow it for its dung, which also burned. Really, he followed it because it was fast, because the boy was also waiting for something to happen, because he was six years old.

Soon, things would happen. Men would call his name in the night; there would be blood on a handkerchief, and fire on the red hill.

The boy looked north and saw a high dark wall over the ranges. The wall was moving towards him. It was made of dust, and when the dust reached him it hid the sun. The sun was there, the boy could see it through his narrowed eyes, but it was brown now, and silly: only as bright as a lamp or the moon. The dust rolled down from the north in secret colours, very soft, until the wind came up behind it. Then it stung. The boy held the sack across his face, as his father had taught him to do when the dust storms came, and he turned around and began to walk, and that’s how he got lost: trying to walk home in the dust.

When the storm had passed, his mother went out into the yard and spat red onto the red ground. She looked for him in the direction he had gone and saw no sign.

First Day

The dust storm rose up in the central deserts. In order to reach the boy and his mother, it passed over the ridges, valleys, and gorges of the northern Flinders Ranges. These ranges were laid down, long ago and slowly, in layers of rock: limestone, for example, sandstone, quartzite, also other types of rock that exist only here, in the arid middle of South Australia. They were laid down by time and water, folded into great peaks by the movement of the Earth, and in the aeons since then have been worn by time and water back to stumps. The European settlers, who came to the ranges in the 1840s, sometimes refer to them as hills, but this is too reasonable a word for the serrated ridges and startling inclines of this dusty, dry country. These are ancient mountains—so old that they’ve collapsed in on themselves, as stars do.

This particular storm contributed to the long, slow erosion of the Flinders Ranges by picking up more dust from the kicked surfaces of the sheep and cattle stations, then pouring over the jagged rim of Wilpena Pound. From there, it rolled down into the narrow northern neck of the broad tableland known as the Willochra Plain; it rolled on into the bristling wheat country, where it hid Denny and sent his mother running for the freshly washed sheets. That work done, the storm now continues south across the widening Willochra, which is surrounded by ranges on every side. The dust flows over the plain like a beery tide until it reaches the town of Fairly, where Denny’s sisters are attending a wedding.

Fairly is used to these vast dusts. Its sharper edges blur, its few trees tremble, and the polish of its windows dulls a little, but even under dust it’s active, alert, and eager with proprieties. It boasts a neat school, four trains a week, a debt-free church, and, in that church, a new harmonium. There’s also a discreet German prostitute who keeps a piebald donkey and is tolerated because she is known to sleep only with white men. Fairly has huddled under storms like this one for the eight years of its existence. It was itself tricked up out of dust. The whole town, with its grid of ten streets, seems to turn away from the north, where the storms come from; it draws its shoulders up and looks south, as if Adelaide, three hundred miles away, might be visible over the crest of the next hill.

The dust, engulfing Fairly, could ruin Minna Baumann’s wedding ceremony. When the first gusts start, Minna’s brother unhitches the pony from the wedding wagon and leads it into the church. The storm lowers the light, batters the iron roof, and makes a fine, grainy sound against the windows; but all of this ends up increasing the solemnity of the occasion, at the centre of which Minna burns in her ivory dress. The pony snorts with fright, Peter Baumann quiets it, and even this seems reverent: after all, as Mrs Baumann will later remark, there was at least one donkey present at the birth of Christ. The vicar, Mr Daniels, does have a coughing fit, but he’s known to have trouble with his lungs.

By the time the ceremony is over, the storm has moved on, bringing some spitting rain behind it. The dust sweeps across Thalassa, the last big sheep station in the wheat country; it throws itself south, as if it’s determined to travel all those miles to Adelaide. But it’s only, after all, a minor storm, and the Willochra Plain becomes so broad and flat the further south it goes that the dust spreads, tumbles, meets other winds and weathers, and eventually blows itself out.

When Minna Baumann steps out of the Fairly church and sees the red dust gathered on the road, against the few gravestones, along the arms of the young trees, and among the garlands on her wedding wagon, she chooses to feel as if it’s been offered to her as a gift. Her hair is tight at her temples. People press against her and take her hands. Mr Daniels has informed every one of these people that Minna and her husband are now one flesh. Her husband has found a handkerchief—not his own—with which to dust the seat of the wagon. He’s dusting it for her. He, Mounted Constable Robert Manning, First Class, with his red hair and freckled face, is turning to her and laughing; is helping her into the seat; is going to drive her the few minutes to her mother’s house so that Mrs Baumann can see her married daughter arrive in a German wagon covered with flowers. Minna is eighteen and ready for the world to be larger than her mother’s house—but not too much larger.

‘Well,’ says Robert as they drive from the church. Children follow after them, yipping and shouting like dogs, as if they know what it all means. Robert says, ‘Well,’ again and clears his throat. ‘Wasn’t that a lovely storm?’ Which Minna likes about him—the way he calls things lovely that aren’t. He only means it was a good example of its kind.

Minna pulls petals off the roses that cling to the wagon. ‘Let’s go now,’ she says.

‘Go where?’

‘To your house—where else? Alone.’

The wagon tilts in the road.

‘Little Minnow,’ says Robert. He holds the reins with one hand and puts the other on Minna’s leg, just above her knee, and squeezes. She leans her head against his shoulder and it’s as if they’ve been married for years and are coming home from the wedding of some other girl. Cheers rise from the people behind them. Robert puts his arm around her—more cheers. She misses his hand on her knee.

‘It was a lovely storm,’ she says.

Robert begins to hum, and Minna feels the hum pass from his body into hers.

Minna’s mother is waiting for them on the verandah; her maid, Annie, has swept it clear of dust and pushed the wheelchair out. Mrs Baumann is dressed as usual in her glossy blacks, all complicated pleats and stiff corsets, so that, propped in her wheelchair, she resembles a fussy umbrella. She’s issuing further instructions to Annie, who will have been opening doors and windows, shaking dust from the trees and chasing it down the front path with her broom.

‘Annie,’ Mrs Baumann says, ‘you will go now and change your apron for a fresh one.’

Mrs Baumann kisses her son-in-law and shoos him inside to wash the reins off his hands, but she has questions for Minna. The first thing she wants to know: was the Swedish painter at the church? Minna expected this enquiry. The Swedish painter has preoccupied her mother since he appeared in town a week ago.

‘No, Mama, I told you, they’ve already left for Wilpena.’

‘The wife also?’

‘Yes, both of them.’

‘Psh,’ says Mrs Baumann. ‘And what are they going to do out there in the desert?’

‘Paint, I daresay,’ says Minna. She looks down at the top of her mother’s head and feels the urge to kiss it, but Mama would shrink from that kind of affection.

‘What about the storm?’ asks Mrs Baumann.

Minna says, ‘He promised us he would be all right.’

And she’d believed him. The Swedish painter had dazzled her the way an angel might, wandering into a village and asking for a meal and a place to sleep, seeming ordinary, complimenting someone on their bread, and leaving the next morning in a cloud of light so that everyone could see his wings. The enormity of the angel would humble the village; they would worship it and be glad to see it gone.

‘Drowned in the dust,’ Mrs Baumann says, abandoning the Swede to his fate with a shrug. ‘But at the church, I was meaning—how was the storm at the church, Hermina?’

The guests are arriving. They gather at the gate to make way for each other. The men clear their throats into their fists and the women lift their skirts away from the red dust on the ground.

‘Peter brought the pony inside.’

Mrs Baumann nods. ‘Well, what else was possible?’ she says. She reaches up and takes Minna’s hand in her own, which feels furred and soft, like an apricot. If Minna had married in a Lutheran church, her mother might have made the effort to leave the house. The way Mrs Baumann holds Minna’s hand, laughs, and says, ‘What else was possible?’ communicates all this: no pony would have been allowed into a German house of God. But Mrs Baumann is a long way from Germany. She and her husband left that fine, green country in their youths and came blazing into the Australian desert. Minna has heard the story many times. She is the result of it, and so is her brother Peter, and this house—the first in town with wooden floors. The wooden boards hide spiders, dust, lost needles, beads, which Annie must ferry out with her long broom. Other houses have wooden floors now, but the Baumanns’ are important, because first. Minna has seen her mother summon strength from the wooden floors. She’s insistent that they should never show the tracks of her wheelchair.

‘Tell me,’ says Mrs Baumann, ‘did the Axams show their faces?’

When Minna says no, there were no Axams at the church, Mrs Baumann shakes her head, unsurprised. She closes her eyes and opens them again, and Minna knows that in that moment her mother has equipped herself for battle: her long, tedious battle with the Axams, who have insulted her by having good breeding behind them, property, sheep, while Mama (whose father owned a draper’s shop, a substantial one, in Dortmund, but was not, you understand, a Jew) rolls in her chair over the wooden floors.

‘So, you are now married,’ Mrs Baumann says. ‘My Liebchen. To a constable!’ She glances at Minna’s stomach, which remains flat beneath the ivory dress. ‘And all things will be well.’

Mrs Baumann settles her skirt over her knees and turns a cordial face towards the gate, so Minna goes into the house to look for Robert. She finds him sitting on her bed with his elbows on his knees, his hands and head hanging so that she can see the slight thinness of his topmost hair. He seems almost dainty from this angle, despite his bulk and the size of his hands. She loves his hands. They look as if they’ve been baked, or as if he coated them in pink clay one day and it stuck. It has only recently occurred to Minna that men can be beautiful—during the Swedish painter’s visit, in fact. She wouldn’t call Robert beautiful. He’s something else. He’s desire itself.

‘Hello, Mr Manning,’ she says.

Robert lifts his head and smiles at her. It’s a real smile—tired and loving. ‘Mrs Manning,’ he says. He puts his hands on his knees and stands, slowly, so that she sees him in thirty years, an eternity away, creaking up from a chair. He’s so much larger than her bed, this room, the house. But not larger than the town. The size of him, next to her: just large enough. And red, white, pink, brown: the colour of local rock.

‘Put your arms around me,’ she says.

Robert hesitates. ‘Your dress. And this, here, I don’t want to squash it.’ He points at the spray of orange blossom on her bodice.

‘It’s just wax.’ Minna unpins the blossom and throws it on the bed. ‘Shall we climb out the window?’

This makes him laugh. ‘Too late for that.’

But it’s early. Minna says, ‘Now we’ll never have to be apart again.’

‘Sometimes, Minnow,’ Robert says, smiling. ‘Sometimes we’ll have to be apart.’

Minna sees herself and Robert in the mirror on her wall. ‘Look at us!’ she says, and when he does she kisses him.

All five of the Wallace sisters have left their mother washing sheets, their father planting parsnips, and their brother Denny collecting eggs in order to travel the few miles to Fairly for Minna Baumann’s wedding. They’ve been allowed the use of the old mare and the spring-cart, which Cissy—who is fifteen, and the second-eldest of the girls—drove to the church. Once there, she pushed her sisters into a pew and shushed them when they giggled at the entrance of the pony, and now she’s making them all go to Mrs Baumann’s for the wedding breakfast. She herds them through the gate and up the path in a dingy cloud of calico. Not even Joy, the eldest sister, is offered a cup of tea.

Cissy eats a slice of tongue while her sisters huddle under a pepper tree. She watches a lizard slip into the house through an open door and follows its example; then she’s in a room full of oblong mirrors and intricate chairs. The wooden floor is silken with wax. Minna’s wedding presents are laid out on a table, but Cissy won’t lower herself to look at them. On another table, Cissy sees a silver bowl with silver palm trees rising from its rim. Each palm tree is attended by a turbaned Indian, and in each tree there’s a silver monkey, and in each monkey’s arms a candle. Cissy touches one of the candles, which is firm and smooth, and through a doorway she sees Minna Baumann pressed against the constable. Minna is covering her husband’s face in a flurry of kisses. How ridiculous, to kiss his cheeks and nose like a baby’s, or a puppy’s! Especially when it seems to embarrass him. But then he begins to kiss her back with some force, lifts one foot, and uses it to push the door closed.

Cissy, disconcerted by the slamming of the door, goes outside to her sisters. They’re a drab clump under the bright pink berries of the pepper tree, all of them wearing dresses cut from the same blue cloth. The youngest sister, Lotta, is crying, and the vicar squats beside her, holding one steadying finger against the ground. Mr Daniels and Lotta have the same-coloured hair: yellow like hay, but dry hay that won’t shine. He’s talking to Lotta, and pauses to cough. He coughed in the church when Peter Baumann brought the pony in, but Cissy was grateful for it then; it covered the sound of Ada and Noella giggling. Now, joining her sisters under the pepper tree, Cissy is irritated by the vicar’s fussy cough and consoling manner.

‘I’ll bring you another,’ he’s saying to Lotta, and Cissy sees a spoiled sandwich in the dust by his finger.

‘It has a special sort of ham,’ Noella says mournfully, eyeing the sliver of pink on the dirty sandwich, and Lotta gives the heaving sigh that means she will now stop crying.

The vicar stands up too quickly, which seems to make him dizzy. He holds a hand to his forehead and blinks; then he smiles at Cissy and says, ‘Your brother is missing the fun.’

‘Ha!’ Cissy says, stroking Lotta’s hair. ‘Denny!’ She lifts Lotta to her hip.

Mr Daniels looks as if he expects her to say more, but Cissy knows you can stand all day just talking for no reason, and then the day is lost.

‘Did you enjoy the wedding?’ he asks.

Surely he knows it’s the finest wedding she’s ever seen. Why bother asking? If the vicar ignored her she’d despise him; because he’s courteous, she considers him a fool.

Ada tugs on Cissy’s sleeve and says, ‘Should we take Lotta home?’

Cissy pulls her arm away. ‘You,’ she says, ‘were the one who insisted on bringing her in the first place.’

The vicar, who also looks as if he’d like to go home, says, ‘I did promise your sister another sandwich. Why don’t I secure a plateful? Some nourishment for you all before your journey.’

Before Cissy can reject this offer—if her sisters want to eat, they should be brave enough to approach the food themselves—Mr Daniels presses one hand to his chest and looks at Cissy with a stricken expression. She watches the colour drain from the top of his head down to his stiff white collar. He’s swaying slightly, but before anything can be done about it, Mr Daniels collapses to the ground, hitting it with an unseemly ‘Oof!’

Cissy, who has waited all her life to be part of a catastrophe, so that she might take some decisive, swift action for which she will always be remembered, looks down at the fallen vicar, who appears to have fainted; then she looks up at the other wedding guests, all of whom are now aware of the pepper tree, the Wallace sisters, and the vicar lying in the dust beside them. Adults approach, offering hands and handkerchiefs to the vicar, who has regained consciousness and whose face has now flushed entirely red. Cissy finds herself unable to move until Joy calls her name; then she herds her sisters out of the way as the vicar is helped to his feet. The only feasible course of action is to leave immediately.

Cissy, hurrying her sisters to the gate, is both mortified and furious. She wants people to say, ‘There goes Cissy Wallace.’ But why should they, when she did nothing but stand there in witless surprise? They’re all looking at the vicar, who is being led into the house with a patch of red dust on the seat of his pants. Cissy wants to stay and hear what people say about him. She wants to hear about the handsome Swedish painter and his wife, and to get close to Mrs Baumann’s wheelchair, which people say is made of Indian reed; Cissy wants to know what’s so particular about Indian reed. She’d like to see if the Axams of Thalassa turn up, because she despises them for being the kind of people who are referred to along with the name of the place where they live. She’d like to see and hear everything so that she can tell Miss McNeil, the schoolteacher, all about it—Miss McNeil, who isn’t at the wedding because she claims to be busy. Busy with what? Cissy wishes Miss McNeil were here in order to be angry alongside her. Angry at Minna Baumann’s complicated dress, the frailty of the vicar, the size of Constable Manning’s hands on Minna’s waist, the width of the plain they all live on, the stupidity of planting wheat that will either dry up or be eaten by grasshoppers, the dust storm that may have damaged that stupid wheat, and at the extravagance of growing roses for no better reason than to put them on a wagon at a wedding. Angry at store-bought candles and silver bowls with silver palm trees growing out of them. Miss McNeil should also be angry that Cissy has taken the time to darken her boots with lampblack and to trim her nails and brush her hair, and angry that she would like to stay and be talked about. Cissy is longing for someone to be angry with her.

But there are these sisters, blocking the gate, and the terrible responsibility of loving and looking after them. And there will be chores at home—the whole house full of dust, no doubt, and Mam left to look after it, and Denny, all by herself.

As Cissy drives them north out of town, Noella asks, ‘What part did you like best?’

‘The dress,’ says Joy, her face raised to the sky as if expecting God or rain.

Cissy would like to whip the mare and send it flying. The dress, the dress! As if the dress is anything. ‘If I get married,’ she says, ‘even to a tiny jockey, don’t you ever bring a horse into my wedding.’

Her sisters laugh. They drive past other small wheat farms like their father’s: past Britnell’s and Jutt’s, who have committed to at least one more harvest, and past Swinborn’s, who have already given up, and past Nead’s, who are about to. The wheels of the spring-cart roll softly on the thickened road. Joy, Cissy, and Ada sing; Noella claims to like the gritty feel of dust between her teeth. The afternoon is warm, and flies sleep on the girls’ matching hats. Lotta fusses until, about a mile from home, she vomits over the side of the cart. Then she sleeps and her sisters stop singing. But Ada continues to hum.

Here is their mother, Mary Wallace, moving in and out of the house that Denny thinks of as eating her up. The house is made of mellow red stone stained occasionally with white and yellow. It has an iron roof and, nailed to the northern eave, a snakeskin to keep the swallows from nesting. Inside: a clay floor that must be swept morning and evening, limewashed walls that must be repainted every spring, a stove under a dark hood that spits heat all day, one big room that’s both parlour and kitchen, two neat bedrooms, and, at the end of the verandah, another room, a lean-to built of clay and native pine, where Mary’s husband sleeps. The house could be dark—small windows—but isn’t; the door is always open, and in the main room a large chiffonier of fine mahogany gleams with mirrors that throw out light. On top of the chiffonier, a porcelain bowl of porcelain flowers. The other furniture is the right scale for the house and more obviously serviceable. There are cushions, the kind you might kneel on to pray, meticulously needlepointed with Bible verses by Mary’s stepmother. And in the corner of the parlour there’s space for failure to crouch, open-mouthed, larger or smaller depending on the day, the weather, and the harvest. Mary cleans that corner just as thoroughly as the rest.

Behind the house, baking in the continual blast of desert sun: a garden planted sensibly with cabbages, and the privy beyond it; an iron washhouse and a bread oven built of bricks; a tank for the rain that may or may not come; a path and gate to the road, and another path and gate to the yard where the goat and cow spend their days, and the hens, too, when Mary keeps them in. The house and garden are fenced to keep animals out. Cats come, naturally, wanted or not. And rabbits. Also, in certain seasons, long, fat carpet snakes, which coil beneath the boards of the verandah and keep the rats down.

Beside the garden: Mary’s washing line strung up on two thick poles, the closest things within the fence to trees, and Mary with her arms full of the sheets she rescued from the dust. She’s hanging them out again, the black dog at her heels. Her long brown hair is wound in a coronet around her head. Mary is up before everyone in the morning and still up after they’re all in bed at night. The day opens and it closes and Mary is making beds, cooking meals, feeding animals, brushing hair, mending dresses, sweeping floors, writing letters, washing shirts, wringing sheets, churning butter, dressing children, straining milk, clearing tables, knitting socks, fetching water, hoeing the garden, and darning stockings. Now she’s pegging the sheets to the line. Every time she finishes hanging a sheet she turns to look out over the yard, the plain, and far into the hills, hoping to see a walking boy.

When he doesn’t come she goes out to the edge of the yard and calls his name, making an effort to raise her voice. His name—Denny—disappears as if some other mouth is waiting just beyond hers and has swallowed it. She calls with more effort, and Deniston this time, as if the plain will respect his full name; she thinks of the name Deniston as formal, because it’s her father’s. If Denny were to call out in response to her, she wouldn’t hear him: Mary, a sufferer of persistent ear infections, lost most of her hearing by the age of twenty-two. So, when she calls her son’s name, she looks to see if anything moves in an answering way.

Not even the cat comes to her. It sleeps, full of rat, in the shadows of the cowshed. Mary thinks to try the shed—Denny might have run there when the dust picked up. A well-built cowshed should be dense and dark, should shuffle with the sleepy lives of many animals. This shed is empty. It’s built of bark, it leans, the lime between the slats is crumbling, so Mary can see at once in the mottled light that Denny isn’t there. The goat comes tottering in from the yard, expecting food, and the dog yaps at it.

Mary looks for Denny in the horse yard, the stable, the pigpen with no pig in it, and all the other sheds that have grown about the place as they’ve been needed. She doesn’t find him in the water tank or any of the troughs, on the roof or under the house, or in the hollow tree that stands between the house and the red hill.

There’s no need to worry, Mary tells herself. He’ll have found a spot to shelter and fallen fast asleep. Or come across his father, and they’ll appear together at sundown. Or he’ll have walked along the road to wait for his sisters and they’ll have seen him there by the roadside, a little stump, and lifted him up into the cart. Or he won’t have filled his sack yet and is staying out until he does, and it’s just the storm that makes her miss him.

But branches fall and snakes bite. There are sudden drops and steep gullies, dams and waterholes. There are strangers in the desert: natives, hawkers, swagmen, stockmen, teamsters, Chinese labourers, and Afghans with their camels. Denny might meet any of these people—or he might meet no one at all, which could be worse. Mary remembers, though, that the Englishwoman is out there with her husband, the Swedish painter. They stopped at the house on their way north; the Englishwoman came to the door while her husband held the horses at the gate. She asked for a ‘wand of aloe’. Her speech was clear—she spoke loudly, as if she already knew of Mary’s deafness—and what she meant was a piece of the aloe vera by the gate, which Mary’s family calls the lettuce plant. The girls have scratched their names in its green flesh: Joy, Cissy, Ada, Noella. One of them wrote Lotta and Denny in, too, and Mary carved her own initials, also her husband’s, and those of her older son no longer at home, and since then she’s been afraid for the plant, as if it means more than it should. On the rare days she goes out of sight of the house, she looks for the aloe first on returning. It would disturb her less to see the house gone than the plant.

So that it might have hurt her to give a piece of it to the Englishwoman. She worried that it would, but anyway said yes. ‘Only,’ she said, ‘mind the part with writing on, if you don’t mind.’ Then felt ashamed of having repeated