She glanced up impatiently at the veranda roof, as if tired of shouting. "I don't know if I'm strong enough to take the loneliness of having no home for the next ten or fifteen years, Anne, or however long it's going to take Luke to wear himself out. It's lovely here with you; I don't want you to think I'm ungrateful. But I want a home! I want Justine to have brothers and sisters, I want to dust my own furniture, I want to make curtains for my own windows, cook on my own stove for my own man. Oh, Anne! I'm just an ordinary sort of a woman; I'm not ambitious or intelligent or well educated, you know that. All I want is a husband, children, my own home. And a bit of love from someone!"
Anne got out her handkerchief, wiped her eyes and tried to laugh. "What a soppy pair we are! But I do understand, Meggie, really I do. I've been married to Luddie for ten years, the only truly happy ones of my life. I had infantile paralysis when I was five years old, and it left me like this. I was convinced no one would ever look at me. Nor did they, God knows. When I met Luddie I was thirty years old, teaching for a living. He was ten years younger than me, so I couldn't take him seriously when he said he loved me and wanted to marry me. How terrible, Meggie, to ruin a very young man's life! For five years I treated him to the worst display of downright nastiness you could imagine, but he always came back for more. So I married him, and I've been happy. Luddie says he is, but I'm not sure. He's had to give up a lot, including children, and he looks older than I do these days, poor chap." "It's the life, Anne, and the climate."
The rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun; the sun came out, the rainbows waxed to full glory in the steamy sky; Mount Bartle Frere loomed lilac out of the scudding clouds.
Meggie spoke again. "I'll go. I'm very grateful to you for thinking of it; it's probably what I need. But are you sure Justine won't be too much trouble?"
"Lord, no! Luddie's got it all worked out. Anna Maria, who used to work for me before you came, has a younger sister, Annunziata, who wants to go nursing in Townsville. But she won't be sixteen until March, and she finishes school in a few days. So while you're away she's going to come here. She's an expert foster mother, too. There are hordes of babies in the Tesoriero clan." "Matlock Island. Where is it?"
"Just near Whitsunday Passage on the Great Barrier Reef. It's very quiet and private, mostly a honeymoon resort, I suppose. You know the sort of thing-cottages instead of a central hotel. You won't have to go to dinner in a crowded dining room, or be civil to a whole heap of people you'd rather not talk to at all. And at this time of year it's just about deserted, because of the danger of summer cyclones. The Wet isn't a problem, but no one ever seems to want to go to the Reef in summer. Probably because most of the people who go to the Reef come from Sydney or Melbourne, and summer down there is lovely without going away. In June and July and August the southerners have it booked out for three years ahead."
On the last day of 1937 Meggie caught the train to Townsville. Though her holiday had scarcely begun, she already felt much better, for she had left the molasses reek of Dunny behind her. The biggest settlement in North Queensland, Townsville was a thriving town of several thousands living in white wooden houses atop stilts. A tight connection between train and boat left her with no time to explore, but in a way Meggie wasn't sorry she had to rush to the wharf without a chance to think; after that ghastly voyage across the Tasman sixteen years ago she wasn't looking forward to thirty-six hours in a ship much smaller than the Wahine.
But it was quite different, a whispering slide in glassy waters, and she was twenty-six, not ten. The air was between cyclones, the sea was exhausted; though it was only midday Meggie put her head down and slept dreamlessly until the steward woke her at six the next morning with a cup of tea and a plate of plain sweet biscuits.
Up on deck was a new Australia, different again. In a high clear sky, delicately colorless, a pink and pearly glow suffused slowly upward from the eastern rim of the ocean until the sun stood above the horizon and the light lost its neonatal redness, became day. The ship was slithering soundlessly through water which had no taint, so translucent over the side that one could look fathoms down to grottoes of purple and see the forms of vivid fish flashing by. In distant vistas the sea was a greenish-hued aquamarine, splotched with wine-dark stains where weed or coral covered the floor, and on all sides it seemed islands with palmy shores of brilliant white sand just grew out of it spontaneously like crystals in silica-jungle-clad and mountainous islands or flat, bushy islands not much higher than the water. "The flat ones are the true coral islands," explained a crewman. "If they're ring-shaped and enclose a lagoon they're called atolls, but if they're just a lump of reef risen above the sea they're called cays. The hilly islands are the tops of mountains, but they're still surrounded by coral reefs, and they have lagoons."
"Where's Matlock Island?" Meggie asked.