My eyes narrowed. My squiggly mouth straightened itself into an ungenerous line which left no trace of the lower lip that so entranced Phoebe and along which she had loved to run the tip of her red-cuticled finger.

"There is just one particular", he said (I stared at the pale scalp that shone through his thin black hair), "in which I have not been able to oblige."

"Oh, yes."

"In the matter of the copyright which is already registered and held, you see," the pointing finger had three long black hairs on its bony knuckle, "by a Mr Bradfield of Sydney."

"Do you recall my instructions?"

"Oh, exactly, Mr Badgery."

The draughtsman removed his spectacles and cleaned them with his handkerchief. The watery eyes, thus revealed, showed no respect for his customer.

"My instructions were that you should put my name on the plan in respect," I said, "in respect of the substantial changes I have made to the aileron designs."

Of course I had stolen the damn plans. Never mind that my method of getting them had been clever or that Bradfield himself was never able to get a backer to make his six-seater B3, and that I was, in this way, actually doing the man a favour by attempting to make the craft he had laboured so long on.

Bradfield would have sympathized with me. He would not have grudged me his drawings, his technical data or the stress diagrams and calculations which he had, with typical thoroughness, had checked and passed by Captain Frank Barnwell, the man who designed the Bristol Fighter.

There was only one reason Bradfield could not make his B3 -British interests didn't want him to.

Now another member of the master race was trying to do the same to me. I held my temper nicely: "You don't understand, it would appear, that these drawings you have executed are the foundation stone on which the Australian aircraft industry shall be built."

The draughtsman allowed himself a thin smile at the very thought of such a thing. "Legally, Mr Badgery, a very shaky foundation."

It was very quiet in the office. A horse and dray rattled down the laneway, its driver singing "Annie Laurie".

"Have you ever been to Grafton?" I asked, leaning across the counter as one might lean across a bar.

"No," the draughtsman said, and blinked.

"As you enter Grafton from the south," I said pleasantly, "there is a rather large house on the left-hand side, a big stone place with leadlight windows, three houses before the post office. There is a gentleman who resides there, a Mr Regan, the Town Clerk of Grafton. Perhaps you know him."

"No."

"A pity, because you would know that Mr Regan has only four fingers on his left hand."

The draughtsman tried to look me in the eye, but could not hold it. He blew his nose to hide his confusion. "Why do you tell me this?" he said.

"Because it was I who tore one off," I smiled. "Just like a chicken wing."

"You are threatening me?"

"The same in his case," I said. "Now would you please place my name as the designer of the craft." And I spelt my name out for him slowly.

This Regan story was, at least for the moment, a lie. Unnecessary, of course, but I enjoyed it. I liked the detail of it, the quick fabrication of the large stone house and the nine-fingered inhabitant within, forever sitting at a table which, although I did not trouble the Englishman with the details, was set for dinner. I silently encircled the house with elms and dotted daffodils across its brilliant lawns while the draughtsman hesitated before his vision of the stricken Regan whose four-fingered hand was torn and bloody.

"I will need this amendment by next Tuesday afternoon," I said, putting on my hat. "You will oblige me by delivering them to Mr McGrath's house in Western Avenue."

It was because of this visit to the draughtsman that many people in Geelong said that I was a Chicago-style mobster. It was merely one of the conflicting stories I would leave behind me when I finally departed.

Molly unplugged herself, released her anxious coils of wire, and recaptured the kitchen from Bridget who was bidden to make stuffing for the goose. Bridget watched her mistress sew up the goose with too much thread and drop knives and forks in her hurry to have it done with.

Jack arranged chairs in the music room which were destined to be unused (the meeting with the squatters would never move beyond the dining room). He ran new wires to the front porch and hooked them up to a globe of extraordinary dimensions which would give the backers a floodlit entrance and bathe the inside of Jonathon Oakes's bedroom whether he liked it or not.

The snake, confused by winter heating, shed its skin out of season and began to search for frogs which were not forthcoming. It moved at summer speed, its tongue flicking, and bit its discarded skin in irritation.

"It knows something is up," Jack insisted. "Animals can feel these things and if you put it down to heating you are missing half the point."

He was inclined to philosophize on this but I had too much on my mind to take pleasure from conversations about snakes or knots or wheels. I had to take the Morris Farman down to Colac to pick up a squatter for the meeting, an easy enough assignment, but I also had business with Phoebe in Geelong. Time was running short, and I left Jack at the dining-room table, rolling a rubber band off the plans which he had already made worn and grubby in his enthusiasm.

I flicked open my fob watch. It was already two o'clock. I should have been at Barwon Common.

I stood on one side of Little Maude Street, Phoebe on the other. She was in front of the milliner's, her plastered arm in a cerise silk scarf which did not make her the least less attractive, not to me, not, I assumed, to the lanky boy who had come, the night before, to drive her to a gathering in an American Stutz. She wore the latest straight-line dress, a dazzling yellow, against which her breasts pushed most attractively and below which her wonderful calves (calves she had wrapped around me, calves I had licked and stroked) were there for total strangers to have dirty dreams about. I ached to hold her, but was totally forbidden.

When Stu O'Hagen drove between us in a brand new T Model with his straw-hatted wife sitting proudly beside him I did not even see him. When Jonathon Oakes (whose pockets included a stolen letter his own sister had written to Jack McGrath Esquire) tipped his hat to me I was unaware of him. Only later, in the air above Warn Ponds, would I recognize these incidents as things from a dream, forgotten on waking, can be remembered later in the day.

Phoebe would not speak to me in public, but she had agreed to inspect the room. Her terms had been clear, hissed quickly. She would inspect it on her own, without me. She knew things that I did not. She had already intercepted one letter from Mrs Kentwell, a terrifying thing with an ultimatum like a scorpion's tail. As for telling me why she was dancing with boys she had once rejected, she assumed that I would know exactly why she did it.

Yet there I was, across the street in front of the ironmonger's, like some moon-eyed boy, and there was Jonathon Oakes, the wrinkled spy, picking his fussy way along the footpath, his little head turning this way and that, observing everything.

The pig-tailed Chinaman was watching too. He stood in the doorway of his laundry and Phoebe was her father's daughter because she saw, not a man, but a cartoon from theBulletin: John Chinaman outside his den.

I could stand it no more. I began to walk across the street towards her. The sweating Clydesdales of the brewer dray missed me by inches and the cockney driver's abuse fell upon love-deaf ears.

Phoebe, having stopped to see me safe, turned angrily upon her heel and carried her broken arm sedately into Maude Street. I reached the milliner's and stopped. Phoebe pretended to be interested in something in a baker's window on the corner – let's call it a dead fly, beside a tray of vanilla slices. I turned and saw that the Chinaman had come to stand in the middle of Little Maude Street to watch our love dance. I walked back towards the grinning sticky-beak who took a few steps backwards before fleeing for the steamy safety of his laundry. When I turned to look for Phoebe, she was no longer looking at flies or vanilla slices and Maude Street was empty except for a tram and a young man in a natty suit swinging on the crank handle of his Chevrolet. The Chevrolet was straddled squarely across the tramlines and the Newtown tram was bearing down on it, its bell clanging loudly.