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it in her Honours year whose results were the ones that really mattered
for her career. Under the circumstances, she could no longer write her
thesis under Jacques’ guidance, but she would do it on him and other
poets of his generation, supervised by Dr. Black.
On top of everything else, Jacques wanted to get her involved in
Labour politics. Before leaving the country in 81, he had been active in
a Left wing group of the party in Western Australia. Now that he was
regaining confidence in himself and therefore in others, he was becoming
interested again in fighting the rightist drift of the social democrats in the
fields of education, culture, environment, social security and Aboriginal
rights. When she told him that she knew a nice man, the owner of the
Oxford Creek nursery in French’s Forest, who shared the same ideas
and had worked a lot in the past for environmentalist and Aboriginal
lobbies, she found that he had already made his acquaintance: in fact,
it was at his nursery that Jacques had bought those hibiscus shrubs on
the afternoon of their first date... “If you need a cosy block of land to
root your flowers in, try me,” she joked, and blushed. She would always
remember the hibiscus and take special care of them at Whale Beach.
Fred Devlin, the nurseryman, was a close friend of her aunt Carol and
the same person who had made the adoption of the Aboriginal baby
possible. She guessed that Fred was secretly in love with Carol, but the
poor woman, who had just turned forty, would probably never marry.
She had lost the man of her life when she was in her early twenties and
never fully recovered from the shock. It sounded old-fashioned, oddly
romantic, but there was nothing banal, unfortunately, about Carol. She
saw very few people outside her workplace, a private high school where
she was a geography teacher.
Jacques had not seemed overly curious about her aunt, but, just
evoking the possibility of an encounter between Jacques and her aunt
had made her a wee-bit uneasy. It wasn’t jealousy, just a vague, aimless
fear that something wrong could happen: maybe Jacques would find
Carol downright disturbed, or Carol would raise some doubts about
their future. Who knows? She would delay the meeting until they had
settled together, or even after the holidays: Carol would never attend a
housewarming party anyway, and it could be painful for her to return
to her old district, that she had avoided ever since she had moved and
changed her name in order to hide from her mother and the rest of the
family, including Anna, Carol’s mother, three or four years ago. Since
it would even be difficult to fake a chance opportunity for Carol and
Jacques to make acquaintance, the best was for Kathy to visit her at her
home fairly soon, hoping that baby La was with her —such a beautiful
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