Although it was well after midnight, George Cadwallader knew he had to get out of the house to clear his head. Eileen was already in bed but he couldn’t bear the thought of joining her yet. Instead he went onto the back verandah and peered up at the almost full moon. It wasn’t a good night for stargazing but it would be lovely out on the river. He would take his dinghy out of the boathouse and row up the lagoon, away from all the houses, away from all his cares. There he would cast out the anchor, or simply drift with the currents, while contemplating the stars.

It hadn’t been much of an evening. Over tea, Jim and Andy had quarrelled about some silly thing and Eileen had taken the younger boy’s side without first finding out the facts. Afterwards George had sought out Jim, who was sitting at the bottom of the yard, and sat down next to him on the grass.

‘She hates me,’ Jim had said.

‘No she doesn’t. She loves you. She loves both of you.’

‘Why does she pick on me all the time then?’

George had weighed his words carefully before replying. ‘You’re older so she expects more of you.’ But he suspected it was more than that; he suspected it was because Jim took after his father. Not in intellect, of course, but in character. Having two of them in the one family was too much for Eileen. They looked similar and they had similar temperaments. Slow to anger, logical and steadfast. Qualities that he used to think were good until he’d learnt that Eileen thought otherwise.

‘She’s very proud of you,’ George had added, extemporising. While she didn’t seem proud of Jim now, she would be proud of him in the future. She would be proud of him when he’d won a scholarship, as he was almost certain to do, and ended up achieving all those things that George had never accomplished and that Andy, good boy though he was, lacked the ability to attain.

‘We’re both really proud of you,’ George had added. He would have liked to give Jim a big hug but he’d thought he was probably a bit too old for that. So he had contented himself with patting him on the shoulder.

Now, looking up at the stars, he sighed. So much space and beauty up there, and yet down here the four of them were living in disharmony. He couldn’t understand Eileen sometimes. She had her priorities wrong, no doubt about it.

He went inside to get a torch from the laundry cupboard. The house was silent except for the relentless ticking of the grandfather clock in the hallway. The little book about the constellations of the Southern Hemisphere, tucked snugly into one of his pockets, bumped reassuringly against his left hip as he walked down the backyard to the lane. The trouble with Eileen was that she just didn’t realise that Jim was going to do remarkable things with his life. She needed to have more faith in him, and the boy needed to know now that his mother was proud of him; before it was too late.

Just as he was about to open the back gate, he chanced to see Cherry coming along the lane. He stopped quite still. The last thing he wanted, when he was out for a bit of peace, was to bump into someone he knew. People thought he was a convivial man but that was just part of the job, and anyway it derived more from a willingness to listen rather than from any tendency to gossip. Sometimes he wanted a break from it all, that endless bonhomie with his customers, day in, day out.

In the dark shadow cast by a gum tree, he waited until Cherry had passed by, turning up the hill towards the hotel. Only then did he continue on his way. Perhaps she’d been watching out for the pair of boo-book owls that were nesting in a hollow of one of the gum trees; only the other day he’d heard Ilona telling her about them. It comforted him to think that others might need to spend some time on their own at night. This sighting certainly wasn’t something to mention to Eileen though; she had a poor enough opinion of barmaids already.

He made his way along the lane that curved around to join the road down to the lagoon. On the narrow bridge he stood for a while listening to the water lapping against the piers. He wasn’t conscious of hearing the breakers beating on the beach, a sound that was so much a part of his life that it was only noticed in its absence, on those rare occasions when he had to go away from the coast. Over the bridge, he turned along the track leading to the boathouse. The moon was so bright it could almost be sunlight were it not for the fact that everything had been robbed of colour. Even his own ruddy hands looked pale and washed out. He switched on the torch anyway; there was no sense in colliding unnecessarily with a kangaroo.

After launching the dinghy, he rowed up the lagoon perhaps half a mile south of Jingera. There he shipped the oars and let the current almost imperceptibly take him back towards the settlement, only occasionally using an oar to guide the craft.

His favourite star was Alpha Gruis, the brightest star in the constellation of Grus. The whooping crane, it was such a lovely translation. He could gaze at that constellation for hours and never grow tired of it. It had been charted on the first Dutch expedition to the East Indies and he liked to think of the sailors on that voyage, seeing stars they’d never seen before, seeing oceans they’d never seen before; what a journey that must have been. The technical details of Alpha Gruis were well known to him: its spectral type and its astrometry; its mass, and its radius, and also its luminosity. But the star meant more to him than a mass of statistics. It meant peace and the insignificance of his own worries, the insignificance of his own imperfections. It meant harmony too, in some way that he couldn’t define, and that he’d never attempted to explain to anyone, not even to Eileen in those early days when he’d held such high hopes for their marriage.

He knew better than to tell anyone of things that really mattered. It wasn’t just Eileen who’d taught him not to reveal himself. It was also those other earlier collisions when he’d been growing up, those times when he’d exposed his dreams, only to have them shattered by the artillery of that army of realists, his family. That he lacked the academic ability to become an astronomer he’d never doubted, although he hadn’t been given the chance to prove this. By his fourteenth birthday, he’d been apprenticed to a butcher, and soon after realised that there was artistry in meat. He’d also learnt to keep dreams to himself. Secrets and dreams were always safe with George, whether they were his own or anyone else’s.

Tonight Alpha Gruis was not as brilliant as usual, it was true; that was because of the brightness of the moon. Yet the vast dome of the sky was soothing; he felt comforted by the sense of his own insignificance in the boundless order of things. After about an hour, having drifted back almost to his starting point, he rowed into shore and dragged the dinghy into the boathouse.

On returning home, he undressed in the bathroom and put on the pyjamas that Eileen had left out. He tiptoed into the bedroom and climbed into the double bed. Eileen woke up enough to mumble something about his werewolf-like habits before lapsing back into a sound slumber. Snuggling up to her would have to wait until next Saturday night, although he would have liked nothing better than to hold her in his arms before drifting into sleep.