Leah and her father examined each other's dark eyes.

When Wysbraum at last received them, he was embarrassed. He looked as if he wished to climb into one of the cardboard boxes that littered his office floor. He offered Leah his own chair. He accepted the suit without seeming to notice what it was. He hung it behind the door. He gave Sid the patient's seat. His face wobbled. His lips were like red jelly in a field of iron filings. He straightened a leaking pen in a sea of raging papers. He looked at Sid Goldstein and then away. Someone walked into the waiting room and began to walk up and down sighing (or perhaps it was an asthmatic wheeze).

"Wysbraum," Sid Goldstein said, "we have brought the suit."

"Suit?" Wysbraum was a mess of misery, half rage and half apology. "Suit?"

"Not exactly the suit." Sid stood. He held his hands up. He spread them out. "A copy," he smiled, willing Wysbraum's far larger mouth to do what his smaller one could do with so much less effort.

"Ho," Wysbraum said, slapping his hands together like a hearty man (Wysbraum's idea of a hearty man) while all the time his eyes brimmed with old hurt and new embarrassment. 'Ho," he said again. "The suit."

He clumped to the door and lifted down the suit. It was hung on its original coat-hanger, the same one, exactly, with its chipped coat of green paint and its small bag of lavender.

He examined it slowly, carefully, looking over it in every detail.

He was so overcome he could not look at Sid, or even talk to him. He spoke instead to Leah.

"A copy," he said in a choked voice. "A perfect copy."

"She is going to be a doctor," Sid said behind him, smiling at Leah, nodding encouragement.

"Are you?" Wysbraum said, his eyes brimming. "Is this true?"

"Yes," said Leah, pleased but also alarmed.

"Oh Leah," Wysbraum said and embraced her. She felt his tears in her hair and smelt his lard and onions. Her nose was pressed into his stale shirt. It was a long long time before Leah even guessed that the body Wysbraum had held had not been hers, and that his tears had nothing to do with either her ambitions or her kindness.

It was because of this misunderstanding that she wrote, in that letter to her father that caused her so much difficulty, "Please apologize to Poor Wysbraum – I know I have let him down and although I feel I have disappointed you I feel that I have betrayed him."

Sid Goldstein did not know what his daughter was talking about.

If Melbourne University would not accept his daughter, then that was bad luck for Melbourne. Sid Goldstein put on his twelve-ounce grey-wool suit and gold-rimmed spectacles and enlisted Poor Wysbraum. The pair of them went on the train to Sydney and made a nuisance of themselves from Rose Bay to Macquarie Street.

They had no shame. There was no one they would not enlist in their cause, no old friend, no new acquaintance, no total stranger who might appear to have some influence in the matter. Poor Wysbraum did not hesitate, at dinner at the Finks', to produce Leah's report cards. They were circulated around the table while their object sat squirming in her uncomfortable chair trying to eat soup with a spoon too big for her mouth while reeling from the waste of all the words that gushed, without modesty or restraint, from the ten mouths gathered, surely, for eating and not talking.

Sid Goldstein and Poor Wysbraum pushed and shoved and elbowed on her behalf until, in the end, they made a gap in Sydney University just big enough to accommodate her.

The acceptance came on a steamy overcast February day exactly three hours before Sid Goldstein must return to Melbourne. Sid did not like to rush, and was already flustered at the thought of what he must do in three hours. Walking across the quadrangle he started pushing wads of banknotes at Leah and giving her instructions on her future conduct. Wysbraum was twenty yards ahead, showing no respect for the neatly trimmed grass, clomping on echoing boots down the flagstoned quadrangle, his trousers too short, his white handkerchief sticking out of his pocket, sweat streaming from his pale forehead. Sid, following after, punctuated his normal amble with an impatient skip.

They followed Wysbraum out of the university and across Parramatta Road. They followed him up steps cut into a steep rockface, then on to another street lined with old terrace houses.

"Wysbraum," Sid shouted, "Wysbraum, what are we doing?"

"Digs," said Wysbraum, opening the gate at the bottom of a steep flight of stone steps.

"Digs?" shouted Sid Goldstein. "Wysbraum, we must pack. We must catch our train."

"Yes, yes," said Wysbraum. "Wait, wait," and ran up the steps to the house which displayed a "Room to Let" sign in its front window.

Leah waited with her father amidst the smell of leaking gas and dying nasturtiums while Wysbraum conducted his mysterious business at the top of the crumbling concrete steps.

He was back in five minutes.

"It is taken," he said.

"What is taken, Wysbraum?"

"The room for your daughter, to sleep in, to live."

"Oh no," said Sid Goldstein, loosening his tie. "Oh no, I forgot."

"Don't worry." Wysbraum's ugly face dripped with sweat. "I have discovered she has a front parlour, upstairs. She is a widow. Her husband was Commissioner of Police in Cairo. A big man. She has a nasty case of psoriasis. I have written her a prescription. Her name is Heller", Wysbraum said breathlessly, "and she has three boarders. I have persuaded her she can have four if she permits us to purchase a bed. She wishes only to be sure", Wysbraum giggled, "that we are not Catholics. I have assured her. She asks two pounds for full board. What do you say?"

Sid Goldstein looked at his daughter in alarm.

Leah smiled.

"All right," said Wysbraum, "you will go with Leah and inspect the house. I will buy the bed."

"Maybe", Sid said, "there is a better place."

"Better, no," Wysbraum said. "There is no better place, and besides the train leaves in three hours."

Sid looked at the house. He wondered if this was how Wysbraum had chosen his surgery. He did not approve of buying the first thing. He looked at the rusted guttering, the thistles amongst the nasturtiums, the desolation of Parramatta Road with its lorries, carts, horses.

"I will buy the bed," said Wysbraum trotting sweatily down the steps.

"How much is the bed?" asked Sid helplessly.

"Cheap," Wysbraum said. "I will buy her a double bed and she can sleep in it forever."

Sid frowned. Leah blushed. "Poor Wysbraum," her father said, but more from habit than conviction. They walked upstairs to meet Mrs Heller and assure her they were not Catholic.

It was cold at Crab Apple Creek and Leah Goldstein tugged at her long black woollen socks, pulled so hard that the perfect round white hole that had occupied a spot at the very centre of her left shin now suddenly became long and thin, almost invisible, as it darted up towards her lovely knee. She wrapped her blue-dyed greatcoat tight around herself. She found a half-burnt stick on the ground and threw it back into the flames of the fire. She shivered.

"Well," she said.

Charles moved closer to her and she felt his warty hand come creeping towards her, like a lost crab wandering in the dark. The hand was so hungry and cold she held it in both of hers. Its back was hard and rough, its underbelly soft.

"Where's your father hiding?" She rubbed the rough-textured skin, trying to warm it. "If he thinks he's entertaining us, he's upter."

She looked across at the little girl who sat exactly where she had been before the con-man had done his trick. All Leah could see of her emotions was the camp fire reflected in her eyes.