I stood alone with the snake. No one looked at me. They shook Jack's hand as they departed.

"Ah," I said, after five minutes of silence during which Jack had poured himself two large tumblers of Scotch. "I'm sorry."

Jack could only shake his head. There was no malice in him, no anger. He had big eyes like a Labrador. "Why? What came over you?"

I was a sleep-walker trying to explain my presence, barefoot, on a midnight street.

"You should have lit the flares down at Barwon Common," I said. "You shouldn't have sent me down to Colac and not have anywhere for me to land."

"You never told me, Badgery. I'm not a mind-reader."

"Anyone knows a plane can't land after dark."

"Well, I didn't know," he bellowed, and the whole household heard his voice and they felt frightened. "I didn't know," he yelled. Sergeant House heard him. Mrs Kentwell and Jonathon Oakes, playing cribbage in their parlour, heard him.

"Ah," I said, wondering if I might have a whisky and then deciding against it. I looked at Cocky Abbot Junior's fallen chair and Oswald-Smith's teacup. "Agents! I've had enough of being an agent."

"We're a young country. We've got to crawl before we can walk."

"If you start out crawling, you end up crawling."

Jack looked at me resentfully and poured more Scotch into his glass. "You were wrong about the snake," he said.

I shrugged. I was not worrying about right or wrong any more. I was only worrying that I had been a fool.

"You don't know anything about animals," my host said. "There isn't a creature alive who won't respond to kindness. You're not a kind man, Badgery, and it hurts me to say it."

Judged, I put my head in my hands.

"If there is one thing I know about," Jack went on, "it's animals. I had a tame kangaroo in Point's Point. I raised it on a bottle when its mother was killed. It used to follow me. You ask the wife, she'll tell you. It followed me everywhere and then some larrikins from Mansfield shot it, with a rifle."

"I dare say," I said, "but that is what they call an analogy."

"I don't know anything about analogies," Jack said impatiently, "but by Jove I know about animals."

"It's not the point."

"It is the point. It's the whole point. If kindness is not the point, what point is there?"

I put out my hand and touched Jack's clenched fist, I was as close to tears as I had ever come. I said a few words to comfort him but I doubt he heard me. He sat with his heavy smudged tumbler before him and looked at this stranger he had invited into his house and wondered how any man alive could not believe in kindness.

"It's a great disappointment," he said.

I always believed he was referring to the aeroplane.

There were too many things that Geelong could not explain or understand. Why would a healthy, happy man like Jack McGrath go sneaking into another man's bedroom and remove a hessian bag containing a snake? Why, at two o'clock in the morning, would he open this bag in the kitchen? And why, when he was bitten, would he walk out on to the front lawn to die in public (in his pyjamas) rather than raise his family and ask for help?

It was I who found poor Jack, poor grey-faced dead Jack. I could not bear his staring eyes. I can bear few memories of that dreadful day. I look at them still through half-closed lids against a too bright light. Molly in nightgown howling like a dog inside the music room. Mrs Kentwell standing at the fence ducking the clod of earth Phoebe hurled at her. Sergeant House with notebook suggesting I was not telling everything.

Gawpers, comforters, people with gifts of fruit turned away by Bridget, who would resign next day when the snake was still not found.

I joined the police search for the snake. I supervised the loading of the Morris Farman on to a flat-top wagon and rode with it to Barwon Common on which windswept expanse I tried to weep but all that came from me was a small ugly sound like a man might make when choking.

No point to dwell on this episode, to detail the various threats I received from men who thought themselves friends of Jack McGrath, amongst them the elder Cocky Abbot and the once friendly manager of the National Bank, or the strict instructions given mother and daughter to remove me from the house.

They stuck by me, my only allies. And even Molly, unravelled by grief, dizzy, vomiting, summoned up enough love to tell me it was not my fault.

When I did not leave the house as Geelong thought fit, the crowds of mourners who had followed Jack McGrath's coffin saw fit to ostracize the wife and daughter for their indiscretion.

Geelong lined up with Mrs Kentwell and cut them dead. All the fine fellows who had taken quids and ten-bob notes from Generous Jack, who had accepted hospitality, and laughed and drank and danced and scuffed up the floors of Western Avenue, now abandoned his family to solitary grief.

Phoebe slept with her mother. I made them bowls of bread and hot milk. I cannot remember how long this little hell went on for, only that Molly finally expressed a desire to go to Ballarat and Phoebe was sent to withdraw one thousand pounds from the bank. She also, for reasons I never understood, invited Annette Davidson to accompany us.

Ballarat, the Golden City, was in decline. The streets were peopled by dour cloth-capped men in braces. Shops were boarded up and there was a mean dispirited air about the place which was made no happier by the big white statue of Hargreaves and his Welcome Stranger nugget, the flower bed in Sturt Street or the feathery cirrus clouds that streaked pink across the pale evening sky.

Annette Davidson was sorry she had come. She, at least, had rallied to her friend and now she wondered why her friend had wanted her. Annette, when neglected, had a tendency to cynicism. She had cancelled two days of classes for which she would lose two days' pay and Phoebe, sitting between Annette and the widow, would not even take her hand. Why ask her then? She answered herself bitterly: to witness the theatre of her grief, to be spellbound, taunted, maddened, by the pale skin and red lips behind the veil.

It had been a terrible journey, conducted in a silence broken only by the small whimpering noises Molly made as she wound and rewound the cord from a bulky electric radiator around her wrists. No one had explained the function of the radiator to Annette and it was too grotesque to inquire after. Molly, however, had been more explicit about a large piece of cardboard cut in the shape of a toilet seat which she would not travel without. It had "up" written on one side and "down" on the other and, fearful that she might be compelled to carry the ludicrous object into a country hotel, Annette kept quiet about her most pressing and painful problem.

She wanted a pee.

She had assumed we would go straight to a hotel, but no one in the car seemed in any hurry at all. First, it seemed, they would have to find a Dr Grigson. Much as Annette felt pity for Molly she could not see why the visit could not be postponed until the morning.

Annette, who could wax lyrical about the working people of Paris, did not bring this view to those of Ballarat. Small boys with no shoes ran beside the car and their faces frightened her. She thought the Hispano Suiza an insult to their condition. Groups of men on street corners stopped their conversation and stared at us in silence. She saw a drunk vomit into a gutter and another pee against the green-tiled walls of Craig's Hotel.

Molly clutched at her wires. She could not remember the names of streets. She was as confused and shocked as a householder returning to a bombed-out city and her directions to me lacked confidence.