Free As the Earth Turns Silver by Alison Wong

daughter would have been. And there were children to consider. Katherine’s daughter – now she sounded interesting.
    *
    At first Katherine walked around the house stiffly, keeping as far from the walls and the tables and sideboards as possible. Mrs Newman said the watercolour of the Maori above the piano was by Dorothy Kate Richmond and the oil of Wellington harbour was by Jimmy Nairn. And those were by Isabel Field and Frances Hodgkins – they were sisters, you know. The furniture was so highly polished Katherine was afraid she’d scratch it, or even leave her fingerprints on it. She was afraid she’d type too slowly, make errors with her spelling, file documents in the wrong folder, but Mrs Newman was surprisingly patient. She showed Katherine step by step what she expected, and gave her time to fall into a pattern.
    Mrs Newman read all the major newspapers. ‘Katherine, look at this,’ she might say, roaring with laughter. Katherine laughed also – sometimes not so much because the story or cartoon was so amusing but because of Mrs Newman herself. How could such a dignified woman produce a sound that resembled a donkey braying, even, occasionally, a pig snorting?
    Katherine woke in the mornings excited to go to work, pleased that at last someone appreciated her efforts, that the work she was doing was helping the cause of women and children.
    Edie looked forward to playing the piano and borrowing books from Mrs Newman’s library. But no matter how much Katherine cajoled him, all Robbie wanted was to run around with Billy and Wally and play cricket at the Basin.
    Katherine started to enjoy the house, to take an interest in its gorgeous furnishings. Her favourite piece of furniture was the Ashford table in the hallway. She always stopped to admire it when she arrived at work and then again when she left several hours later. It was black marble inlaid with blooms of morning glory, poppies and irises. The flowers glowed, and Katherine marvelled at how the colours turned subtly from one shade to another.
    Lapis lazuli, jasper, carnelian, agate, marble. These were magic words. They conjured other worlds, worlds where flowers never wilted, where nothing ever died. Katherine liked the table’s roundness: no sharp edges, just a sense of completion. And there was something else Katherine liked, something she had not at first noticed: the table had a fine crack in it. Actually, two. One that ran from the edge of the marble right up to the inlaid flowers, and then another on the other side, right out to the opposing edge. She liked the cracks because everything else in the house seemed so perfect.
    Once Katherine asked Mrs Newman about the cracks, and she saw her employer’s face darken with anger. It was all the fault of one of the maids. Mrs Newman didn’t know at the time, but every day the maid had polished the table with oil. Oil, for goodness sake! On a marble table! The girl was lucky she wasn’t dismissed. Dismissed!
    Mrs Newman sighed. It wasn’t easy to get good help these days.
    Katherine moved to a two-storey, three-bedroom cottage further down Adelaide Road. They had a bedroom each, a bathroom with running water and a gate that did not fall off its hinges. And in the backyard, surprisingly, there was an old rata, a remnant of native bush that had somehow escaped being cut for firewood. Robbie nailed battens to its trunk and took to climbing up and sitting on an overhanging branch. Sometimes when she called him for dinner Katherine would find him there, sitting on that branch, dangling his legs, reading a penny dreadful or spying on the neighbours’ backyards.
    A week after they moved in, Katherine woke early. It was barely light, but wind buffeted the house and she could not sleep. She rose and put on her housecoat, raised the blind. The children were still sleeping.
    She pulled a box out from under her bed. She had packed it after Donald died, before they first