Six feet underground were bones. Catholic bones, Protestant bones. But none of the other denominations. Ilona picked her way around the listing gravestones and the signs partitioning the faiths. The cemetery, on the top of the headland, was bound on the cliff side by a white-painted fence. Beyond that, on a narrow ribbon of land, bloomed blue-flowering shrubs of a type she’d never come across before. Standing here she could see in all directions. To the north lay the long yellow arc of the next beach, ending in another headland that looked not dissimilar to this. To the east the ocean swelled endlessly in. To the south stretched Jingera Beach, a sweep of sand rising into high sand dunes. Behind the dunes lay a wide strip of dense bush that separated the beach from the lagoon. Jingera was built in the wrong place, she thought. It would surely have been more convenient for everyone if it was at the southern end of the beach with easier road access. It must have been located here for other reasons; someone had fallen in love with the view, or the fishing was perfect, or the river convenient. Although she knew by now that not everything could be explained by logic, by one event leading inexorably to the next.

Seated on the top rail of the fence, she could see the school, where Zidra was at this moment, a clutch of houses and, beyond them, the roof of the hotel.

A headland was a strange place to bury people, she felt, with a panorama that the dead would never see. Man is born astride a grave. Samuel Beckett had been Oleksii’s favourite playwright. There, she had thought of Oleksii again when she had promised herself she would not. Despite being in Jingera for several weeks, she had avoided the headland until today. She hadn’t wanted to be reminded of Oleksii. She looked again at the signs segregating parts of the graveyard. Years ago she had converted to Catholicism in a half-hearted sort of a way, for Oleksii’s sake, and now he was buried six feet under in the Catholic section of Rookwood Necropolis.

Breathing deeply, she tried to distract herself from these thoughts by listing all the good things about Jingera. When she had finished, and the list was rather long, she began again. By now tears were obliterating the view; she pulled out a handkerchief and wiped them away.

It was no longer possible to deny that she felt more lonely now than in those first few weeks after Oleksii’s death. A death that had been so sudden. How could she have guessed that what appeared to be a mild cold might turn into pneumonia? One day he’d staggered home from the factory at lunchtime, lurching so much that initially she’d wondered if he was drunk, although putting a hand to his burning skin soon disabused her of this. So high was his temperature that an egg might have been fried on his forehead. So delirious, too, that his incoherent ranting was impossible to interpret. At one point he’d even become violent, imagining she was some assailant from his soldiering days, and so she’d given up trying to put him to bed. Eventually she’d convinced him to lie on the sofa while she dashed out to find the doctor. By the time she returned he was only partially conscious and struggling to breathe. The doctor prescribed sulpha drugs – pink cubes that were supposed to be swallowed in batches of six – but Oleksii had been unable to keep them down. That whole night she’d lain awake beside him, sponging him when he became even hotter, and trying once more with the drugs.

Early the next morning the doctor had visited again but it was too late. Afterwards he explained that asphyxiation had killed Oleksii. Pockets of pus around the lungs had made it impossible for him to breathe. That the delirium would have insulated him from any awareness of what was happening was at least some comfort to her. Why this illness had come on so quickly she did not understand. Most likely Oleksii had felt ill for days and had simply not bothered to tell her. His detachment had dated from soon after they arrived in Australia but it was something that he could not, or would not, talk about. Disappointment, she had guessed, that he could not get a job as a musician. Working in the biscuit factory was probably a bit like a prison sentence to him.

She dried her eyes and looked out over Jingera township. She could just see her cottage, its roof a splash of rusty corrugated iron in the dense foliage that surrounded it. A sea hawk sailed into view. It wheeled around the headland, gliding on some updraft, and drifted north over the long crescent of beach towards the next headland.

After a time Ilona retraced her steps through the cemetery and down the road past the school. Inside, children were singing to the accompaniment of a slightly out-of-tune piano. She sighed. So far there hadn’t been a single enquiry about the piano lessons. Her funds were going down; slowly, it was true, for living in Jingera was cheap, but she would have to get some pupils soon if she wasn’t to eat too much into her savings.

Passing the hotel, she exchanged a greeting with sweet-faced Cherry Bates, who was washing the hotel verandah floor. She would have liked to stop and talk but didn’t feel able. In spite of what George Cadwallader had said about Cherry’s interest in the piano, she hadn’t approached Ilona about lessons. On through the town she walked, past her house, screened from the road by a dense hedge, and down the hill to the lagoon. There she turned along the track to the jetty.

It wasn’t until almost reaching the end of the jetty that she noticed the man sitting on the steps leading down to the water. She stopped at once. Never had she seen a full-blooded Aborigine before and she couldn’t help staring. Never had she seen such black skin.

He glanced up and smiled.

Smiling back, she rested one hand on the splintered jetty railing. Dressed in ragged clothes, he continued to look her way although not directly at her. One hand held a fishing line and next to him was a bucket whose contents she could not see.

‘I am Mrs Talivaldis,’ she said eventually. Her words seemed to hover rather awkwardly in the air. ‘We have recently moved here from Homebush in Sydney. Before that we lived in England and before that in Latvia. We are refugees.’

‘Tommy Hunter,’ the man said. Although he didn’t seem disposed to add anything else, Ilona realised she would like to establish some sort of communication. Why, she didn’t understand; perhaps it was because she felt so lonely or because his silence seemed friendly.

‘What do you do, Tommy?’ This was too direct; she realised at once that it could be construed as impertinence.

‘Fish, and when I’m not fishin’ I pick beans.’

‘Where do you pick beans?’

‘Wherever they need pickin’. ’Ere, there and everywhere.’ The man shrugged.

An itinerant bean picker. That was the sort of job Oleksii would have been doing if he were here with her; he would have been looking for a job as a peripatetic labourer.

And perhaps she would be looking for work like that soon if she didn’t get any pupils. Leaning on the jetty railing, she looked across the water. In the middle of the lagoon was a white-painted timber post and on the top of this a pelican was balanced. Its beak was the colour of a fragile rose, the palest pink.

She found she wanted to tell Tommy about Oleksii. The Aborigine was unlikely to spread what she had to say all round the town. ‘My husband died in Sydney,’ she said slowly. ‘He hated it there. He was a musician, a composer. He worked in a biscuit factory though.’ She hesitated and glanced at Tommy, but all she could see now was the back of his head. Dark wavy hair covered the collar of his shabby black jacket, which must once have been part of someone’s best suit.

‘No one cared much for Oleksii’s music, either in Sydney or in England,’ she said. ‘He was ahead of his time. And became increasingly unhappy with his work at the factory, and with the need to feed our daughter and me.’

Tommy now pulled in a fish. Averting her eyes, she inspected the bushes on the other side of the water; she had heard them described as ti-tree. Behind that grew some stringy trees that she intended to identify one day with the tree book she’d seen in the library.

‘Good tucker,’ Tommy said. She understood that he meant the fish.

‘My husband couldn’t get work in an orchestra,’ she said, when Tommy had cast his re-baited line back into the water. ‘And he didn’t want to teach. He wanted to write music. So he went to work in the biscuit factory, but he wasn’t happy there and he wasn’t happy at home. He had become a very unhappy man. That found its way into his music, and it is a strange thing how so much unhappiness can make such good music.’ Perhaps one day in the future she would play his music again. But not yet, not for some time yet. The pelican was still balanced on top of the post. It looked as if it were contemplating something profound but it was probably waiting for one of Tommy’s rejected fishes.

‘Now I must go,’ she said at last. ‘I thank you for listening to me.’

The man mumbled something in reply and it was only when she had walked the length of the jetty that she realised what he had said. She turned around but he was not visible from the shore. To show that she had understood, she shouted his words back at him:

‘We are both refugees,’ she called. Then she saw, above the boards at the end of the jetty, a black hand waving a farewell.

It was only later, when she was almost back at the cottage, that she wondered if Tommy might actually have been offering her a fish for tea. Fish for tea; refugee. It was all too easy to misunderstand and be misunderstood.