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couture.’ And it was true that Irene had a proud walk.

23
    Send My Roots Rain
    A T NIGHT , R EX tossing beside her, skewing the bedclothes, Irene thought of fleeing. It should be easy, a ‘cinch,’ as Americans might say: a suitcase of clothes, a train to Sydney. She pictured herself boarding the train, stowing her suitcase in the rack, placing her feet on a tin footwarmer, closing the window against cinders. Irene loved to travel. To be going somewhere. Anywhere. Recklessness stirred in her.
    As the train neared Sydney, though, her imagination failed. Instead of the platform at Central Station, solid under weary legs, there was a chasm. Instead of a new life, instead of possibilities – nothing. In her frustration, another image filled her mind: a penned heifer. Irene’s heifer was in the pink of health, with gleaming flanks, strong teeth, pointy hooves, but its muzzle was flecked with foam, and its eyes swiveled to the side, to the back of its head. Irene wept for herself.
    She cast around for a solution closer to home. A job, perhaps. In Progress, women worked in the banks, post office, library, hospital, and schools, although they gave it up once they had children. Irene particularly envied the women scientists posted to the agricultural research laboratories near Progress, but they were unmarried and had university degrees; another species, as far as she was concerned. No one would employ her.
    Still, the idea of working stayed with her, so when Freddie Garlick offered her a dogsbody position – typing, filing, answering the phone – she jumped at the chance. Rex approved; anything to make her happy. He bought her a Volkswagen – white, with baby-blue upholstery – and the eagerness with which she put on her lipstick and climbed into the little car to go to work every morning was pitiful. The neighbors thought it was one more example of Irene getting above herself.

24
    And You Alone Can Hear the
Invisible Starfall
    F REDERICK G ARLICK WAS an ugly man – small, swarthy, jug-eared – with a resonant voice and boundless energy. A mongrel, he said, to forestall questions about his looks. A bit of everything: Scottish, Portuguese, Polish, even some gypsy blood. He was a type occasionally found in rural towns: well-educated, lacking not in ideas but direction. Or, rather, he had gone in too many directions, to find himself the manager of a country radio station. All the same, he was making the best of it.
    After Irene had been at the radio station several days, Freddie invited her into the second of the station’s two studios, a tiny cork-lined windowless room. Although Freddie’s sexuality was as indeterminate as his parentage – a born bachelor was the general consensus – Irene hoped for seduction. Instead, he asked her to sit.
    â€˜Listen,’ he said.
    With infinite care, he lowered the arm of the turntable onto a record, and the opening bars of Beethoven’s ‘Emperor’ Concerto crashed from the speakers. He handed her the sleeve of the record, which was decorated with a large gold crown on a red background, and she sat holding it and listening.
    The pianist was Arthur Rubinstein, with the orchestra conducted by Josef Krips. By the end of the second movement, she was in tears. Here was something that expressed exactly her own feelings of yearning and dread. Here was something to which she could tie her turbulence.
    Freddie hated Bach, Handel, and Mozart, loved Beethoven, Rachmaninoff, Shostakovitch, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Liszt, and these became Irene’s favorite composers; his tastes suited her perfectly. He didn’t restrict his instruction to music; he played her a recording of Under Milk Wood , and again doors opened for Irene. She exulted in the tumble of Dylan Thomas’s words, relished his bawdy puns. He gave her volumes of poetry by Constantine Cavafy and George Seferis, and she dreamed of visiting Greece.
    Culture did not