Angel by Colleen McCullough

to one side like an alert little dog. “Sit down,” he said, disappearing behind his screen to make the coffee.
    I sat and talked to him through the crisply ironed cotton folds of the screen, and when he came out with the coffee in two white mugs, we just kept on talking. He was a bush boy, he said, grew up around the enormous cattle stations of western Queensland and the Northern Territory. His father had been a barracks cook, but first and foremost a boozer, so it was Toby who did most of the cooking, kept his father in a job. He didn’t seem to hold that against the old boy, who eventually died of the booze. Back then, Toby’s paints were children’s watercolours and his drawing blocks cheap butcher’s paper, his pencils HB pilfered from the station office. After his dad’s death, he headed for the Big Smoke to learn how to paint properly, and in oils.
    “But it’s grim, Sydney, when you don’t know a soul and the hay sticks out from behind your ears,” he said, pouring threestar hospital brandy into his second coffee. “I tried working in the cook trade-hotels, boarding houses, soup kitchens, Concord Repat Hospital. Awful, between the voices that didn’t speak English and the cockroaches everywhere except Concord. I’ll give hospitals this, they’re clean. But the food is worse than station food. Then I moved to Kings Cross. I was living in a six-by-eight shed in the backyard of a house on Kellett Street when I met Pappy. She brought me home to meet Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz, who told me I could have her attic for three quid a week and I could pay her when I had the money. You know, you see those statues of the Virgin Mary and Saint Teresa and the rest, and they’re all beautiful women. But I thought Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz, the ugly old bugger, was the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. One day, when I’m more confident, I’m going to paint her with Flo on her knee.”
    “Do you still cook?” I asked.
    He looked scornful. “No! Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz told me to get a job tightening nuts in a factory`Youse’ll earn big bikkies and suffer not a bit, ace,’
    was how she put it. I took her advice, I tighten nuts in a factory in Alexandria when I’m not up here painting.” “How long have you been in The House?” I asked. “Four years. I turn thirty in March,” he said.
    When I offered to wash the coffee mugs, he looked horrified-I daresay he thought I wouldn’t do it properly. So I took myself off down to my own flat in a very thoughtful mood. What a day! What a weekend, for that matter.
    Toby Evans. It has a nice ring to it. But when he’d mentioned Pappy, I caught the shadow of a new emotion in his eyes. Sadness, pain. Light dawnedhe’s in love with Pappy! Whom I haven’t seen since I moved in.
    Oh, I’m tired. Time to put the light out and enjoy my second-ever sleep in a double bed. One thing I know-I am never going to sleep in a single bed again. What luxury!
    Wednesday, February 3rd, 1960 All I’ve been doing when I’m not doing routine chests is slapping pink paint on everything in my flat that stays still long enough. Though I’ve been around the Cross in daylight enough now to have my bearings. It’s fabulous. The shops are like nothing I’ve ever seen, and I’ve eaten more strange things in a week than in the whole of the rest of my life put together. There’s a French bakery produces long thin sticks of bread that are a dream, and a cake shop called a patisserie with these fantastic cakes of many layers thin as wafers instead of jam rolls and cream sponges and lamingtons like an ordinary cake shop. Nectar and ambrosia whichever way I look. I bought something called potato salad-oh, the taste! And a cabbage salad called coleslaw-I gobbled a whole little plastic bin of it and farted all night, but I don’t care. There’s a brick of mince with a hardboiled egg in the middle of it called Hungarian meatloaf. Salami instead of Devon, Tilsiter cheese instead of the sweating