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'What, the girls? Yes, they do. They hardly ever squabble.'

'I meant Alan and Malcolm.'

'Oh. Right.'

There was a silence. They were wading out again after an exhilarating ride in. Lucy rinsed the sand off her board so that it wouldn't graze her stomach, then held the board ready again as they both waited for a good wave.

Mum said tentatively, 'That's important, isn't it? For the two of them to get on?'

'I—I don't know yet,' Lucy answered lightly. 'We've really only just started going out together, Mum.'

'But he's Charlotte's father, isn't he, love?'

Lucy gasped and her heart skipped a beat. 'How did you...?' She'd never suspected that Mum knew.

'I remembered his name,' she said calmly. 'You told us at the time who you were working for. Perhaps you've forgotten. You said quite a lot about both of them at first, Bronwyn and Malcolm, when we talked on the phone, and then gradually you started saying less and less, and then she died and you turned up back home. A couple of months later you told us about Charlotte. The timing was right. I always knew it wasn't Brett. Did your...affair...last for a long time?'

'Oh, Mum, no!
No!'
Lucy answered quickly. 'It wasn't like that. It wasn't an affair!'

A wave swelled and ebbed and both of them automatically raised their boards and let the strong muscle of water lift their feet briefly from the sand beneath them as it passed.

'It was just one night.. .one time...' she went on, 'and we both felt so terrible about it that I left the next day.'

'I'm glad,' said her mother quietly. 'I wouldn't have liked to think that my daughter would sleep with a man behind the back of his dying wife.'

'Oh, it wasn't like that at all! Really, Malcolm isn't the type who'd—'

'It's all right, love,' Mum soothed. 'I didn't think he was. But I knew
something
must have happened. If nothing else, he and Charlotte are so alike in their mannerisms and the shape of their faces. More alike, I think, than he is to Ellie.'

'It took me a while to see that, but now I do,' Lucy agreed.

'And what about Malcolm? He knows, I assume?'

'He does now. He didn't until a few weeks ago. He wants to tell the girls. But I—I'm not ready.'

'It's hard, at their age,' Mum agreed.

'At any age,' Lucy said. 'How do we tell them that they're sisters? We're working towards it, but it may be a few months yet.'

'And is there anything else you're working towards?'

Lucy watched and waited as another wave passed before she answered. It was a big one. They both had to jump and hold onto their boards to keep their heads above water, and were carried several metres closer to shore. The water was fabulous, clear and glassy and invigorating without being truly cold.

'I don't think he wants to get married again, Mum, if that's what you're asking,' she said finally. 'When a man has lost a wife in the way Malcolm lost Bronwyn, so young, it leaves such scars. And as for myself... I've thought about it. For Charlotte's sake, and for me, too, my own needs,' she admitted. 'I couldn't take the instability of anything less.'

'But you do love him?'

'Yes. A pity, isn't it?'

She didn't want to talk about it any more, and an incoming wave was well timed to end the conversation.

Mum was pretty good anyway. She always knew not to say too much. They took the wave together, pulling the boards beneath their stomachs and careering towards the shore on the foaming white crest, to finish with a rather ungainly scramble to their feet as sandy water poured off their legs.

'I should stand up sooner,' Lucy's mother gasped, wearing a big grin. 'But it's such a lovely feeling, zooming in like that, that I always stay on till the end and get my swimsuit full of sand!'

'Same here.'

They laughed at each other, breathless and salty and getting cold, since they'd stood in the water, having that heart-to-heart, for so long. Then they turned to the others, some metres away along the tideline now as there was a slight current in the water, which had pulled them gradually down the beach as they'd surfed.

The two girls were prancing around in the pool, splashing and shrieking. Dad was sitting on the sandy bank, with his elbows on his knees and his head tipped forward. Malcolm was standing in front of him, bending close. They were probably discussing further ambitious plans for the engineering of the 'swimming pool'.

'Enough?' Lucy's mother suggested, watching the foursome.

'I think so,' Lucy agreed.

'It was glorious! I'll tell your dad that he just
has
to—' She stopped, then clutched her daughter's arm. 'Lucy! Lucy!'

'I know,' she agreed tightly, having seen what Mum had at exactly the same time. 'Something's wrong with Dad.'

They both began racing along the hard sand of the beach at the water's edge. Lucy got there first, and threw down her board. 'What's wrong?'

The girls had realised that something was wrong now, too.

'Grandad's got a pain,' Charlotte said. 'And he can't breathe properly.'

'Malcolm?'

He was still bending over Dad, with a hand on his shoulder, talking to him quietly. 'Just relax. Relax... Breathe steadily and slowly. Is it easing?'

'Starting to. Yes, it's easing. Thank heavens!'

'I'm going to take your pulse.'

'Go ahead.'

Malcolm sat down beside Dad on the mound of sand. Both men were messy with sand and salt and moisture. Dad's lips looked dry, and he was pale and sweating. Malcolm had the sea breeze whipping hair across his forehead. The tide was definitely coming in. Lucy's own breathing was high and shallow with fear now.

A wave threatened the elaborately dug pool, and Malcolm said, 'Let's move you further up the beach in a minute, Alan, and have you lie on a towel for a few minutes.'

'It's his heart, isn't it?' Mum said. Her voice sounded unnatural, high and quavery.

Malcolm looked up at her. 'Yes, Marion, I think it is.'

'Oh, no!' She twisted her fingers together.

'I have my mobile in the pocket of my shorts.' He was looking for it as he spoke. 'I'D ring for an ambulance and they'll get you to hospital, Alan. You're all right,' he insisted gently, 'but we do need to take this seriously.'

'Alan, you shouldn't have done so much in the garden this morning,' Mum said, fear making her tetchy.

'Wasn't the garden. Was this hole thing!' he answered with effort. 'I wanted to make it...really beaut.'

'You did, Grandad,' Charlotte said tenderly, putting a sandy hand on his bare, bony knee and looking up into his face with her big blue eyes. 'You made it the beautest thing I've ever seen.'

'Did I, darling?' He rested a shaky hand on top of his granddaughter's and chafed it to and fro, and Lucy could see the fear in his eyes.

'You're
all right,
Dad,' she told him urgently. 'Malcolm sees this sort of thing all the time, and so do I. We're not letting you go just yet, believe me! There's so much they can do for heart problems these days, and you'll be fine. The pain is easing, isn't it?'

'Yes, but if I move... I
can't
move.'

They all sat with him on the sand for several minutes more, a knot of anxious people. Even the girls stopped playing and tried half a dozen innocent ways of cheering Grandad up. Lucy dimly registered that Ellie was now calling him 'Grandad' as well. 'Here, Grandad, have this shell, too. Isn't it a lovely colour?'

One or two people just arriving at the beach came over to ask if there was anything they could do, but Malcolm, taking quiet but firm control, shook his head. 'We have the ambulance on its way, and I'm a doctor. Everything's fine, thanks.'

Lucy knew that he couldn't be certain of that. She also knew that to suggest to Dad that things
weren't
fine would be disastrous. It was vital to keep a coronary patient from panicking, because if the heart was further stressed by fear...

At last they heard the familiar wail of the siren. 'Busman's holiday for you two,' Dad joked feebly. 'Glad, though. Helps, having you.'

'Don't try to stand up, Dad,' Lucy begged. 'Malcolm's gone to tell them where to come, and they'll have a stretcher.'

'Feel silly, getting carried off the beach.'

But he made no real protest, and Lucy suspected that the pain began to return the moment he tried the slightest exertion. Mum was still breathing as if she might burst into tears at any moment, and she said under her breath as she saw the paramedics approach, 'Oh, hurry! Hurry!'

They did, and he was loaded into the ambulance within a few minutes. Lucy had packed up the beach things and given the boogie-boards to the girls to carry, and they were soon back at the house and changed out of swimming clothes, ready to see Dad at the hospital.

By the time they arrived, the diagnosis was firmer. Nitrates under Dad's tongue had dealt with some of the pain, but not all of it, and he'd received morphine as well. Questioned by the local doctor in the emergency department of the small country hospital, he admitted he'd been having some pain on exertion before this but had assumed it was indigestion.

'What's going to happen, Malcolm?' Mum asked shakily, when Dad was left alone to rest.

'He'll have to go up to Canberra in a couple of days,' Malcolm explained. 'He'll have a coronary angiogram to have a look at exactly where the problem is, and then he'll probably need an angioplasty. If it's more serious, they'll do a bypass. Those are the most likely possibilities, anyway.'

'Oh, Lucy.' Mum turned to her. 'I'm so glad we made the move from Brewarra when we did. We're so much closer to the hospital here, and they would have sent him all the way to Sydney from Brewarra, wouldn't they? For the tests and the procedure?'

'Probably,' Lucy agreed, squeezing her mother's hands.

'Oh, Lucy, thank goodness you and Malcolm were here!'

'I'm sorry, everyone,' Dad said, when they paid him a visit in hospital that evening. 'I've spoiled your weekend.'

'Don't worry about it, Dad,' Lucy said warmly, then teased, 'Just make sure you don't try to dig all the way to China next time. A few thousand metres into the earth's crust is probably deep enough.'

And in a strange way he hadn't spoiled the weekend. He'd added another dimension to it, a deeper layer of connection...because, as Mum's words earlier that afternoon had suggested, Malcolm had fitted into the whole drama as if he'd truly belonged. He'd been able to calm Mum's fears and present a clear picture to Dad. He'd taken the girls on a rock-pool exploration that afternoon while Lucy and her mother had helped Dad settle in properly at the hospital, and he'd taken over the cooking of the evening barbecue without a particle of fuss.

Mum stayed at the hospital after it was time to take the girls home to bed, telling Lucy, 'I'll get a taxi home. I'm going to stay as long as they'll let me.'

'That's till ten,' said the nurse, who'd come to check Dad's pulse and blood pressure.

'Ten.' Mum nodded firmly. 'All right, so expect me at about a quarter past, but not before.'

Lucy only understood why her mother had been so definite on the subject once the girls were in bed and already asleep at just after eight o'clock. A day of activity and ocean air had tired them both out so thoroughly that they'd dropped off almost as soon as their heads had hit their pillows.

Which left Lucy and Malcolm with at least two hours in which they were essentially quite alone, just as Mum had known they would be.

'Would you fancy a drink?' Malcolm suggested as soon as they'd emerged from their respective rooms.

'Tea? Oh...'

'I didn't mean tea,' he said bluntly. 'I meant a
drink.
I'm thinking of coffee and one—just one—of those highly alcoholic creamy things that you sip out of a tiny glass. Something that's going to go straight to my head and make me a bit light-headed and very sleepy, and the only reason I'll stay awake at all is because of the coffee, which will be rich and fresh and—'

'Stop it!' she groaned. 'You're making it all sound so good that I'll probably weep if we discover there's none in the house.'

'But there is,' he said triumphantly. 'Your father offered me a drink last night while you were in the shower. I was given a guided tour of the possibilities in his liquor cabinet. And your mother made fresh coffee this morning. The beans are in the freezer and the electric grinder is in the cupboard under the stove. There's even...' he was poking around in the pantry as he spoke '...some sort of...' he found a tin and took off the lid '...very wicked-looking chocolate-slice thingy, with, I'd say...' he inhaled the aroma rising from the tin '...walnuts in it. We'll have some of that, too.'

'You ought to have been an insurance salesman,' she said, accusingly. 'You'd have done extremely well, if your success at selling me your supper plan is any guide. You could have stopped before you got to the chocolate slice.'

'And
you
could have held out a bit longer. I was going to offer to bring it all to you on a tray,' he teased, 'if that
was
what it took to persuade you.'

She groaned again.

Fifteen minutes later, there they sat with their supper and soft music playing, and both of them so aware of each other that it was no surprise at all when he slid closer to her on the large, soft leather couch and wrapped his arms around her.

'Oh, Lucy, what is it about you?' he whispered, brushing his lips against her hair and her ear and her neck. 'What
is
it? You're like the harbour and I'm the boat, and there's been a huge storm and I'm limping into port with my mast broken, and there you are, tranquil and safe and there for me.'

He turned her face towards his with the caress of his fingers along her jaw, and pressed his forehead against hers. Then he sat back just a little and brushed the hair from her forehead, as if needing to brush away the shadow it made so that he could see her eyes. He searched them.