The dingoes had howled across the mountains, and the possum who ruled the ceiling and the lemon tree had indulged in his nightly growling battle with any intruder into his kingdom, but this morning Wombat Hills seemed peaceful, the only sound the thud of the wallabies once again failing to get through the fence to the rose garden. Mrs Douglas Mulberry (née Agnes Glock) opened her eyes in her late mother-in-law’s bed while across the room her late mother-in-law’s maid, Trout, added more wood to the bedroom fire. To Agnes’s relief her husband was not lying beside her. Douglas must have had a good night again.

The curtains were open, as usual, as were the windows. The air smelled of chilled gum tree from yesterday’s late spring snow. Douglas did not like closed windows, even in the mountain winters, nor closed curtains at night.

Across the room the two cherubs that supported her mother-in-law’s chaise longue stared at Agnes, unblinking. It was a perfectly good chaise longue. The bed was comfortable, and the linen sheets worn to an incomparable softness. The only fault Agnes could find with them — and the rest of the house furnishings — was that they had been her mother-inlaw’s choice, just as Trout had been her mother-in-law’s maid.

Douglas’s mother had been dead for eight years — four of them before Agnes had come to Wombat Hills — but Trout had made it clear she was still, and always would be, the lady’s maid of Mrs Gordon Mulberry, deceased, and not of the interloper who’d replaced her.

Trout looked up from the now flickering fire, her moustache quivering, and regarded Agnes with deeper disproval than usual. Many a major general in the War would have envied Trout’s moustache.

‘Last night was a total disaster, madam,’ stated Trout, her voice rich in doom.

‘Oh dear,’ said Agnes calmly. She had grown used to Trout’s frequent ‘total disasters’. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘That wretched beast destroyed all your camiknickers! Ruined!’

‘You mean the wombat?’ Private Private had lugged the unconscious animal all the way from his hut across the ridge just before Agnes had retired to bed the night before, a great wound on its neck bleeding sluggishly.

‘An argument with a bigger male over a female in heat,’ Private Private had explained, as Enid and Mildred the housemaids had discreetly looked away. This was not because of the bleeding wombat — Enid and Mildred were well acquainted with wounds — but to avoid looking directly at the exposed portions of Private Private that nice women were not supposed to notice.

Private Private had discarded his uniform in 1918. He had also discarded all other clothes, except a rare pair of cut-off trousers and a blanket round his shoulders on cold nights…

Continue reading the extract here…

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