THE LANES OF CAMBERWELL

CECILIA DART-THORNTON

CECILIA DART-THORNTON was first ‘discovered’ on the Internet after she posted the first chapter of her unpublished trilogy to an online writing workshop. Subsequently a literary agent signed her, and within a few weeks a major New York publisher bought her three-part Bitterbynde series (which includes The Ill-Made Mute, The Lady of Sorrows, and The Battle of Evernight). On publication the books were acclaimed in Amazon’s ‘Best of 2001’, Locus Magazine’s ‘Best First Novels of 2001’, and the Australian Publishers’ Association Award. ‘Australia’s Favourite Read of 2001’. They also reached the top of the Sydney Morning Herald bestseller list and received accolades in the Washington Post, The Times, Good Reading Magazine, Kirkus Reviews and more.

Grand Master of Science Fiction Andre Norton wrote of The Ill-Made Mute: ‘Not since The Fellowship of the Ring fell into my hands have I been so impressed by a beautifully spun fantasy. This is indeed a find!… The writing is very close to poetry. Many fantasies are compared to Tolkien these days but few really have the excellent writing and good characterisation that this work offers. This is far above the usual offering in the fantasy field and the reader is left longing for the adventures to continue. I feel honoured to be asked to read and comment on such work.’

Cecilia’s books, including the four-part Crowthistle series (The Iron Tree, The Well of Tears, Weatherwitch, and Fallowblade), are available in more than seventy countries and have been translated into several languages.

‘The Lanes of Camberwell’ is pure magic… and pure Melbourne.

In March that year, when autumn was already beginning to pick out amber tints across the leafy suburbs, I visited Julia, who had been my friend during our early school years. We’d somewhat lost touch, and I would scarcely have recognised her if it were not for the fact that she still lived at the same address.

She was thin, a wraith of her former self, and she came in late — having forgotten our appointment — ragged in her green dress, even barefoot, her skin like chalk. It was with true affection that she welcomed me, mingled with regret that she had inconvenienced me by making me wait. ‘Oh Jenny,’ she cried, ‘I’m so sorry. I had forgotten … my memory these days … can’t seem to get organised …’ Her sentences were broken, as if wounded. And there was truth in all she said, because the house was in a state of disarray. This was not the Julia I had known. What had happened on that day, some twelve months ago? Why had she gone to pieces? She made me sit on a couch in her living room while she brewed a pot of tea, and as she disappeared into the kitchen I mused in some dismay about her deterioration.

Julia had lived a normal life until one day about a year earlier, when she had gone missing. Eventually she had been discovered wandering the streets alone, unable to find her way home or offer any explanation for her plight. Since then she’d taken to roaming regularly, and some called her ‘the Bag Lady of Surrey Hills’, though she was only twenty, and the beauty of youth clung to her as tenaciously as the tendrils of the Boston Ivy that smothered the fences of her back garden. In autumn that vine decorated the weathered bones of the palings with splashes of deepest crimson; almost the colour of her hair.

I’d heard she now spent her days walking the local footpaths in a trance-like state, sometimes muttering to herself, ignoring passers-by with their quizzical glances. Occasionally she was to be found sitting on the nature strip with her back against the mottled bole of a plane tree, staring into space with a puzzled expression. She always, however, found her way home in the evenings.

Reentering the room empty-handed Julia said, just as if she’d read my mind, ‘Isn’t “nature strip” a funny term?’

Personally, I couldn’t see why it should be, but I nodded. We’d always laughed about Julia’s uncanny knack of apparently picking up other people’s thoughts.

‘Most suburban streets have grassy verges,’ she elaborated, ‘but I think Australia must be the only country in the world where they’re called “nature strips”.’ She was looking out of the window into the street. From here you could see the gracious, wide-spreading branches of the plane tree that grew outside her house, its leaves, as large as splayed hands, just beginning to turn gold and brown as the days became shorter. My hostess had forgotten about the tea. Instead she walked across the room to the dining table where, on the faded tablecloth, a journal lay open. ‘This is Daniel’s,’ she said. ‘He wrote this more than a year ago.’ Picking up the book she handed it to me and I read:

February: Last month of Summer.

The Lanes of Camberwell. What is it about them that draws me so? In dreams I walk them. Waking, I revisit them in my mind, think about actually returning to see them, then think again; no. Why not? Because I have grown to be over-awed. And because in any case I’ll never be free of them. They are with me always, inside my skull; their pattern, their layout, their connections, corners and angles, their feeling.

And what is that feeling?

It is made of wonder and excitement, eager expectation and the slightest tinge of fear. It is the sense of imminence; that something is about to happen, and that the something is only a hair’s-breadth away, an instant away, if only you knew how to break through. The slim, dim, dusky Lanes of Camberwell, where no matter whether the summer sun is blasting its heat across the shimmering roofs of the suburbs, there is always a breath of freshness, a hint of moisture; cool shadows caught in the long swathes of peppercorn leaves overhanging the fences like the hair of tree-giants; a gleam of syrupy gold from the five-petalled buttercups that grow at the entrance to one of the lanes, and which appear nowhere else that I have ever seen. We used to hold those flowers beneath one another’s chins, chanting, ‘Do you like butter?’, and if a golden reflection appeared on our friend’s skin, it was supposed to mean they did. But whence comes the sudden, incongruous moisture that nurtures these blossoms of yellow silk? For here in this single patch the ground is damp, as if the tiniest corner of some English marsh has appeared from nowhere, complete with bright green grass and shiny flowers floating on their stems. Everywhere else the ground is dry and hard, baked by yet another drought. Perhaps the remnant of some age-old underground spring still seeps below the Lanes, heedless of mankind’s attempts to divert and drain, to capture it with metal fetters and enclose it in pipes; a free, wild waterway that won’t be tamed but remains secret, running hidden beneath the footpaths, the foundations of the paling fences, the roots of the peppercorns, the lawns and hydrangea beds of the suburban gardens abutting the Lanes of Camberwell.

Secret, like the Lanes themselves.

For you would not know of their existence unless, walking along one of the Surrey Hills streets, you chanced to glance sideways at exactly the right moment.

Then, unexpectedly.

You’ve passed house after neat house, each perched in the centre of its tidy garden behind a front fence of bricks or pickets, each building different from its neighbours, each with its painted letter box. Here a fully-grown pomegranate overhangs ceramic fence-caps, its ripe fruit like red lanterns; there a japonica, its startlingly black boughs splashed with blood-flowers in spring. Elsewhere the gently nodding foliage of a dogwood, a crepe myrtle or a glossy lilly pilly. House-block after perfectly rectangular house-block, they rub shoulders with each other, jammed up close with no room to spare, marked out by six-foot high fences along their boundaries.

The rows of houses form a barrier. You are walking along the street because there’s nowhere else you can go. You have not been invited into any dwellings; you cannot even see what lies behind them, because they won’t let you past the front gate. They are private property and you have no business there. A formidable barrier they are indeed, though pretty, with their terracotta-tiled roofs and wrought-iron verandas, their benevolent-eyed windows winking from half-drawn fringed blinds. There is nothing ominous about the homes of Surrey Hills; they are where people live, that is all, and welcome their friends to afternoon tea, and tend their gardens — lawns silver-frosted in winter, daisy-starred in summer.

But you, a stranger walking along the street, may not enter. You have two choices: to keep walking in the same direction or to turn around and walk the other way. Two directions; two dimensions.

Until.

You look to the right and there’s a disjunction. Unexpectedly, one suburban plot slams to a halt up against its fence-line and before the next one begins, there’s a gap.

One more step and you would have missed it.

To your right the land rises. The houses sit proudly above the level of the street. Between them — between the green-eaved house where two elderly ladies live and the white weatherboard house deep amongst its shrubberies, a stab of brightness flashes: daylight.

Daylight at the far end of a tunnel. And the tunnel is dead straight narrow, deep-walled, sudden. You are staring along one of the Camberwell Lanes.

I closed the journal and replaced it on the table. ‘Daniel?’ I enquired. ‘Who’s that? And why do you have his diary?’

My friend looked at me and smiled. That smile was so profoundly enigmatic, it disconcerted me. She said, ‘Don’t you remember him, Jen? The blond boy who used to live down the street when we were children? He was a couple of years older than us, and Mum made us walk with him to school. He and his parents moved away about twelve years ago but by chance I met him again last year.’

‘Oh, that Daniel!’ I said, my interest awakening further. ‘I rather fancied him. We all did. What’s he like now?’

‘He’s tall’

‘Of course he’s taller, but —’

‘Oh, he looks like an angel.’

Love was written all over Julia’s face. She showed me a photograph of Daniel, which she kept on the windowsill beside a potted plant with jagged leaves. He was sitting on the beach wearing a swimsuit, the white-hot sun casting hard shadows across his tanned features. The picture must have had been taken at Christmas time, because beside him, stuck in the sand at a rakish angle, was a sawn-off pine tree decorated with tinsel and shiny baubles. I had to agree, Daniel had grown up to be gorgeous. They’d met by chance, she told me, at a meeting of an environmental action group, and reaffirmed their earlier acquaintance, settling into an easy-going, platonic relationship. He regularly invited her to visit him at his home across town, where they’d reminisce about old school days, and discuss the world’s problems and how to fix them, and many other topics besides. He was very busy in those days, with his career as a freelance journalist, and had not yet been able to find the time to visit her.

‘I loved him,’ said Julia, twisting her fingers together tightly, ‘and I still do. In hindsight I see I didn’t make the most of every moment. Perhaps I could have been a better listener.’

A tragic love affair! So that was it.

‘He has a brilliant mind,’ she went on, ‘and was always interested in the oddest things. Seeing me again seemed to trigger something, and he developed this kind of obsession …’ She hesitated, before adding somewhat doubtfully, ‘Not with me. A landscape obsession.’

‘Let me make us a cup of tea,’ I said, tactfully omitting to mention that she’d forgotten to do just that, ‘and we’ll sit down together and you can tell me all about it.’

From Julia’s neglected and overgrown garden the cooing of doves came burbling through the open windows. The curtains stirred softly in the breeze. Meanwhile, seated in the front parlour, I listened to my friend’s tale. Over the scalloped and gilt-daubed rims of porcelain cups delicately painted with pansies and violets she evoked a vision of her times with Daniel. I reconstructed her story, filling any gaps from details she let slip, for she had always seemed to possess this gift of mind-reading, and she’d perused his extraordinary journal from cover to cover, so that as I listened, it was if I’d jumped into the restless mind of this boy, this man I’d not seen for twelve years.

It was easy to imagine; she as lovely as a budding rose in her green skirts, her auburn hair spilling around her shoulders; he tall as a warrior, golden-bronze and graceful…

‘What have you been writing in that journal of yours?’ asked Julia, looking up from the armchair on which she lounged in Daniel’s study, the newspaper on her lap. She had kicked off her sandals — which lay tumbled at her feet — and crossed her slim ankles.

‘Just thoughts.’

‘About what?’

‘About Surrey Hills.’

Julia turned a page. ‘I can tell you, it has not changed much, since we were children,’ she said. ‘Only, things seem smaller and closer together.’

‘I have not been back for a year or two,’ Daniel said. ‘I think I should, just to take a look. Seeing you has reminded me of — of so much about our childhood haunts.’

‘Well, you are welcome at my place any time.’

‘I know,’ he said, ‘and I’ll take you up on that offer soon. It’s funny, but whenever autumn comes around I start thinking about the places we grew up. Do you find that autumn is an evocative time of year, a season that brings on nostalgia?’

‘Not really,’ Julia said with a shrug, her eyes wandering to the pages lying open on her knee.

‘I keep thinking about the route we took when we walked to school. I can’t get it out of my head.’

‘Oh yes!’ Julia glanced up again and smiled. ‘I remember those cold, frosty mornings, and we with our knitted scarves and gloves, our fingers and noses red and stinging, running down Guildford Road towards the lane because we were late, and how heavy the schoolbags felt, and how long and arduous the journey seemed. You used to make up stories about travelling in an armchair on wheels, with soft cushions and a blanket, and armrests so wide you could rest a hot cup of cocoa there, while we drove our armchairs to school, in comfort. And we’d imagine how the other children would stare, when we zoomed in at the front gate of the schoolyard ensconced in our chintz upholstery!’

Chuckling, the young man said, ‘I’d forgotten. I wonder how many times we walked along those same paths. Five days a week, maybe forty weeks of the year was it? That makes two hundred, minus a few days off when we had the measles, or whatever. Say, a hundred and ninety times a year for six years — that’s well over a thousand journeys. Twice that, if you count the return trip.’

‘A lot,’ Julia agreed absently.

‘It is well known,’ Daniel mused, ‘that upbringing influences character; that our environment contributes, in varying degrees, to the orchestration of our destinies. The brain of a child is capable of being shaped or formed. What if this is closer to the truth than anyone has guessed?’

‘What do you mean?’ Julia was not really paying attention, but this did not seem to matter to her companion, who was being carried away with his own theorising.

‘What if a child’s daily passage through the rooms and corridors of a familiar house, or along the streets of a familiar neighbourhood actually, over time, erodes these geographical patterns into the physical circuitry of the brain?’ he said animatedly. ‘To turn left, for example, we must look left and step left, using the right hemisphere of the brain to analyse perceived data and to send messages to the nervous system. If those particular ‘left turn’ centres of the grey matter are repeatedly stimulated at a certain point in the child’s journey through time and space, they must necessarily adapt. They must change. A cerebral map is laid down inside the skull. It is wired there, engraved there; a road plan that will be carried forever. We might never be conscious that this was so, though sometimes they manifest as the pathways of our dreams …’

The speaker paused reflectively. On the other side of the room Julia remained engrossed in her newspaper. ‘And so, I carry these pathways with me in my head,’ Daniel said softly to himself. ‘They are with me always; therefore it is not impossible that they have shaped my life, my destiny.’

Opening his journal he resumed writing. ‘Once again I think of going back. They attract me. Why?

‘I walked them, day in, day out; year in, year out, throughout all the ten-centuries-to-Christmas years of my childhood, but seldom have I returned to Surrey Hills since I was eleven years old. When I do, I never walk those paths, because now there is no reason to do so.

‘When I visit my childhood haunts they are waiting patiently, those streets. The same presentiment is always there, along with other impressions I had forgotten, such as the fact that when you walk the Lanes, somewhere around the middle of the journey you become confused. You feel lost. You cannot remember how many Lanes exist in total, or how many you have passed through, or how many are still to come. Geography seems meaningless. No matter how many times you follow that route, it always happens. All you can do is keep going, until you arrive at some familiar landmark, and then you turn a corner and slowly your inner map reassembles itself again and as if waking from deep sleep you gradually become re-oriented, and breathe a sigh, How could I be so stupid? Of course, this is where I am, this street is where the Lane comes out … But it happens every time, even when you have grown up. I have walked that route to school thousands of times, yet I can never quite remember how many lanes there are … Strange …’

After closing the journal once again, Daniel crossed his study to the bookshelves, searched the contents quickly and selected an old, somewhat battered tome.

‘What are you doing?’ Julia asked as he carried the book to the desk.

‘I have always been intrigued by Surrey Hills,’ said the young man, ‘and as time goes by the feeling gets stronger. I have decided to try to demystify the footpaths of our childhood by looking them up in the local street directory. Surely seeing them diagrammed as lines on paper will put them into perspective. It will show that the lanes and streets are leading nowhere mysterious and unattainable; that the houses along the Surrey Hills streets are not barriers manoeuvered into position by some arcane force that manipulated the minds of early town planners, nor are they concealing unknown wonders. It will demonstrate that there is a definite length to each footpath and a layout that does not alter; that the lanes do not move around, appear or disappear, that there is nothing to confuse pedestrians who Walk the Lanes.’

‘Really?’ Julia had risen from her perch and was peering over his shoulder as he searched for reference 46 D11 to H10. ‘You used to get lost on the way to school?’ Privately she was captivated by the way his hair fell down across his collar, and the fresh scent of the linen shirt stretched across his shoulders.

‘Not lost,’ he said, ‘but disoriented, in a way I never have felt anywhere else. I bet if I stare long enough at the map I will be able to memorise the layout of the Lanes and therefore, if I visit them again, I will not experience that odd and discomfiting sense of uncertainty.’

‘I’ll leave you to it!’ Julia said with a laugh, forcing herself to draw away from him. ‘Mind if I make some toast?’

Daniel nodded. ‘Go ahead, but not for me, I’m not hungry.’ His guest strolled out of the room, and when she returned, he was still poring over the open pages.

‘Clues,’ he was saying. ‘I need clues. Look at these, Jules, all these significant landscape features. The old red brick railway station, probably built a hundred years ago. Sports grounds and reserves. Boy Scout and Girl Guide headquarters. Waterways. Churches. The Salvation Army.’

Brushing crumbs from her hands Julia said, ‘Significant? Scouts?’

‘The Scouting Movement is immersed in human tradition, history and symbolism. It represents links with the land at primeval levels — campfires, singing, survival skills, camaraderie, adventure, human tribes living in the wilderness.’

‘And reminds us of Childhood Before the Machine,’ Julia contributed.

‘Indeed, and with the uniforms and badges, their troops and bivouacs and encampments, it’s like some quasi-military institution. Part of the fortifications of the boundaries. To keep something out

‘What’s significant about the railway?’

‘The railway lines are the Iron Roads; vast, interconnected electrical conductors, like silver wires running across the landscape; nerves carrying impulses from station to station. Their bridges and underpasses are significant because they are a crossing of ways, and crosses, traditionally, are meaningful symbols. See the way some of the suburban streets are forcibly deflected from their straight course by the railway line? Do you think the railway follows the path of some waterway, in order to take advantage of the smoothest gradient? Or is there some other reason?’

Julia shook her head and shrugged.

‘Which brings us to the significance of waterways,’ Daniel went on. ‘Life is impossible without water. Places where it rises or runs or collects are important. Not that all the waterways of the land are visible — civilisation has hidden many of them. But man has not, with all his efforts, entirely been able to disguise evidence of water’s pathways. Here and there in the local topography a dip, a dell, a shallow valley or parkland reserve betrays the truth — “Beneath this place water runs”. If you held divining rods and walked across these natural folds in the landscape the rods would, no doubt, twist and jump in your hands.’ He stabbed the map with his index finger. ‘Here at “Shrublands Creek Reserve” an ancient waterway of Surrey Hills has been allowed, for a few blocks, to flow uncovered. When we were kids we found tadpoles here. It was another magical place. Children can feel that land magic; I’m not sure whether I’d sense it now. I suspect the creek runs underground, beneath this other reserve over here. There’s a sudden dip in the middle, a dell so steep that the council built a hump-backed footbridge across it.’

‘A delightful, fairytale footbridge,’ declared Julia, ‘under which trolls were expected to dwell.’

‘Yes, and when we stamped across we felt sure we sounded like the Billy Goats Gruff!’

‘But we believed we were more than a match for the trolls if they did appear!’

‘Do you see how the land’s gradients prescribed the railway route, Jules? And its waterways dictated where buildings could be placed without danger of subsidence or flooding. That much is obvious. What is not so obvious, and more debatable, is whether land magic influenced the positioning of other points of significance, such as the churches, certain houses … and the Lanes. But see here,’ Daniel added, ‘— an unusual feature, surely, for a suburban zone? “Air Force No. 1 Flight Air Training Corps Small Bore Rifle Range”.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Julia. ‘I think it was built during World War I. Remember the enormous Scottish band that used the main hall to practise?’

‘Of course!’ Daniel smiled in fond recollection. ‘In full regalia — kilts, sporrans, plaids — they played massed bagpipes every Saturday morning; you’d hear the music skirling through the streets of Surrey Hills for half the day, like a haunting reminder of our Celtic past! Look there on the map — a tower, a stream, a park …’

‘Yes,’ Julia said absently. ‘Sorry. I stayed up late last night.’ She yawned and returned to her newspaper.

Feverishly Daniel traced the map with his fingertips. ‘No need for apologies. I never expected anyone else to be interested in my current fixation. It is — I have to admit — a little eccentric to be reading the street directory on a fine Saturday morning. But there —’ something had caught his eye — an oddly-shaped road that barrelled straight ahead out of the west to then suddenly swerve north at right angles as if avoiding some invisible obstacle, before turning east again and running straight on again … ‘A road along which half the houses turn their backs,’ he said slowly. ‘A road with a name that has always struck me as bizarre … And all these places, these towers and steel rivers and martial establishments and halls of festivity for Celtic warriors, are linked; all linked by tree-lined streets and the Lanes of Camberwell. How many lanes are there?’ Carefully, his finger moving over the page, Daniel counted. As he still must count, every time, to make sure. How odd. Odd that his mind could not hold this simple number, as if the number itself were fluid. Yet he was good at mathematics, and could usually memorise numbers with ease.

He followed the railway line, later writing about it as ‘forging its way through the landscape like a cold steel river, driving deep cuttings through the bones of the hills and rising above sunken places atop embankments adorned with green filigrees of weeds’. How did Surrey Hills look — he later wondered in his journal — a hundred years ago? When the railway line was being built? Before the wild streams of the area were enclosed or buried so that houses and shops could be built, and roads laid down — where were they now, those ancient waterways? They would still be flowing — not even clever engineering could forestall the mightiest forces of nature — but no doubt they were now diverted underground, trapped in old, rusting pipe systems, flowing secretly along their arcane pathways.

‘Aha!’

At Daniel’s triumphant cry, Julia folded her reading material and put it aside. She did not resent the interruption; his enthusiasm was infectious and besides it was far more enjoyable to gaze upon her companion than to read the latest political opinions. ‘Well, have you found a clue to whatever it is you are searching for?’

‘Possibly. Just then a shape leapt out at me. It suddenly seems obvious that if you join up the lanes by drawing over them with a pencil, connecting them to the footpaths along which we walked to and from school all those years, a circuit diagram appears.’

‘What exactly is a circuit diagram?’ Julia asked. ‘I mean, I know it’s something to do with electronics …’

‘A pictorial representation of an electrical circuit.’ Spinning around in his office chair Daniel elaborated, as if quoting, ‘Circuit: any path that can carry electrical current; a path or route the complete traversal of which without local change of direction requires returning to the starting point.’

‘You actually memorise things like that?’

‘I’m a nerd, you always tell me so! Oh Jules, this circuit engraved into my brain, what does it mean? Circuits lead back to the beginning. Where is its beginning? And does it in fact lead back there, or somewhere else? Let’s go,’ Daniel said suddenly, leaping up. ‘We have to go.’

Julia did not have to ask ‘Where?’

That very morning they caught the train to Surrey Hills. From Chatham Station they walked up Guildford Road to have lunch at Julia’s house. Afterwards they set out again, passing the low brick fence of Daniel’s childhood home, retracing the old route to school.

Grey skies were heavy with rainless clouds, and there was scarcely a breath of wind in the mild air. A blackbird twittered in a hedge when they passed by.

‘I have not walked through the lanes since we left school,’ said Julia. ‘It’s funny, but even though I live in this suburb there’s a great deal of it I’m no longer familiar with.’

‘Absurdly, I can’t help feeling nervous,’ said Daniel as they strode down the footpath to the bottom of the hill. ‘After being so long away, spending so long thinking about this place, it suddenly seems as if I am walking into the pages of a storybook. But the pages might be blank! What if all that I believe I remember — the sense of oddness, the intuition that something amazing lies just out of reach — is nothing but delusion?’

‘Hmm,’ Julia said noncommittally.

‘Or, if the premonition really is a property of the Camberwell Lanes and their circuitry, maybe I’m too old to receive the signal any more! Maybe children are the only ones permitted access to it!’

‘You’re only twenty-two,’ murmured Julia.

‘Either the storybook is blank, or it is filled with tales of wonder. Either way, I am unnerved.’

Julia, who saw nothing but the suburban street lined by avenues of trees and houses, made no reply.

‘However,’ concluded Daniel, glancing up at the overcast sky, ‘the feeling seldom happens on days like this.’

They reached the mouth of what they’d always called the First Lane and passed into the shadows between its high fences. The defile was so narrow it did not permit them to walk abreast. Their feet trod a layer of asphalt, grey as smoke. In places this had cracked, and weedy blades of ribwort plantain were pushing through. The high wooden walls blocked any view into the gardens of the neighbouring houses. Ahead, a rectangle of diffuse daylight showed where the lane gave onto Sir Garnet Road.

‘Here in the Lanes we walk Beyond the Pale,’ Daniel said.

‘Beyond the paling fences you mean?’ Julia said.

‘Yes, and somehow beyond the limits of civilisation, beyond reality’s pallid appearance. On the maps this lane is nameless, you know Jules. Even now, they do not have official titles, these secret footpaths. No signs, no labels. That is part of their mystery. Is it impossible that the influence put forth by a place might be so strong that it subconsciously affects even the cartographer who attempts to define it?’

‘You’re being a nerd again,’ Julia called out from ahead of him. Her voice echoed strangely.

‘I know. How many lanes are there on the way to school?’

‘Only one.’ They emerged into the relative brightness of Sir Garnet Road. It was like coming out of a subterranean passageway. ‘That is, if you go the quickest way,’ Julia added.

‘Look at this corner,’ said Daniel, surveying the street. ‘Isn’t it the strangest shape? A complete anomaly! Within a few paces the whole street abruptly makes two right-angled deviations for no apparent reason, then changes its name to Surrey Avenue. And half the houses turn their backs on it! There’s not a front door or front gate to be seen along the western section, only back fences. Who do you think Sir Garnet was?’

‘No idea. Maybe there never was such a person.’

‘The Knight of the Red Jewel,’ Daniel said softly, half-serious. ‘Damn,’ he subjoined, staring across the road, ‘look at that. They’ve pulled down the Southall house.’

Towers of scaffolding and concrete rose from a block where a familiar weatherboard house used to stand, at the crux of Sir Garnet’s strange configuration. Julia gave a cry of disgust. ‘They’re building townhouses or something, by the look of it,’ she said. ‘What a shame. That house was no mansion but it had a certain character.’

‘And memories,’ said Daniel.

After navigating Sir Garnet Road’s dog-leg, they struck out across a public children’s playground no bigger than a standard house-block. A kind of goat-track, made by the passage of countless feet, ran down the middle; a path of worn-away soil cloven through the tussocky sward. Nearby, brightly coloured plastic equipment squatted like alien spacecraft.

‘What a shame they’ve removed the whizzy,’ Daniel said with regret. ‘It provided one of the two most thrilling rides in this playground. The old steel climbing frame and slide and swings have gone, too, swept away by politically correct safety rules.’

‘What other dangerous ride was your favourite?’

‘The “maypole”.’

Julia visualised the lethal construction of free-swinging heavy chains and metal rings, which no doubt knocked many a child unconscious and smashed many a bone, not to mention wrenching shoulders from their sockets and probably attracting lightning to boot.

‘Aah, but it was a wonderful ride,’ said Daniel, ‘with the wind in your ears and the clamour of the chains against the concrete-embedded pole, jangling like iron bells. A wonderful ride!’

The track led them to Empress Road — ‘Named, no doubt,’ said Julia, ‘in honour of Queen Victoria, Empress of India,’ — where they turned left, but soon they paused again at the other side of the Southall block with its tall, hollow-eyed skeletons of buildings. The house’s rear had overlooked Sir Garnet Road while the front faced onto Empress Road, and notably it had been the abode of the famous author Ivan Southall. More pertinent for children of that bygone era had been the fact that all along the base of the Southalls’ white-painted wire-work front fence grew small plants they called ‘egg and bacons’, because the flowers, with their bright yellow centres, looked like fried eggs and, more astonishingly, they smelled like eggs cooked with bacon. The children had considered it quite fascinating. It was also frustrating to inhale the odour of a delicious but inedible breakfast.

The other outstanding feature of Ivan Southall’s house in those days was that their schoolmate Jan Southall — his daughter — was able to depart either from her front gate onto Empress Road or from her back gate onto Sir Garnet Road. Every other suburban house seemed to be hemmed in at the back by someone else’s private property. As children they’d considered that Jan’s ability to slip between roadways via her house was intriguing; like owning a secret passageway. She was deemed to be incredibly fortunate; almost charmed.

They loitered in the street outside the Southall block, trying to see if any egg and bacons had survived the construction workers. There was nothing to be seen except dust and clay.

‘It’s all gone pear-shaped,’ said Daniel decisively. ‘At the risk of seeming to turn into a bitter old coot, I feel like saying what happened to the good old days, and they don’t make ‘em like they used to.’

‘At least schools are better now than they were,’ said Julia.

‘That’s true,’ her companion observed. ‘Nothing could be worse than Chatham School in our day. The awful, awful school, I thought it was. The strict, soulless, brown-linoleumed, vertiginously-staircased, cruel school with its hard-surfaced so-called playground that fried us in summer and gouged our knees when we fell, and all the other petty inflictions: the headmaster with his strap, the rulers smacking the backs of our legs, the public humiliations, the eccentric teachers.’

‘If we detested the buildings and staff,’ said Julia, ‘We loved the learning, you and I, didn’t we Dan.’

‘We did, and it was by losing ourselves in that, and those fanciful games we used to make up, that we survived, I think …’

‘I am sure of it. Come on, shall we get moving? We’re only halfway.’

‘No, wait, there are other ways to get there.’

‘We could go by the lane with the buttercups. It’s slower, though.’

‘Perfect! I would love to see that again.’ They retraced their steps past the desecrated Southall site, moving east. ‘I think,’ said Daniel, ‘of all the lanes the buttercup one was my favourite. If ever I walked home via Luke’s house, I used to take that way.’

A short street formed a T intersection at the end of Empress. On the left it narrowed to become, along more than half its length, the unofficially named Buttercup Lane — forbidden and inaccessible to all traffic except pedestrians. When they reached the entrance, Julia and Daniel could discern no sign of the massed drifts of buttercups that had so enchanted them as children. Disappointingly, nothing but short-cropped turf abutted the neighbouring properties.

‘Well it has been a long time,’ Julia said despondently. ‘Anything could have happened.’

‘Gone! All gone!’ Daniel said, throwing up his hands in despair. ‘Did the drought kill them? Or is it political correctness again — has someone poisoned them, or mowed them all down because they are not native plants?’

Julia uttered a squeal and ran forward. She crouched down close to the fence, peering eagerly at something on the ground, cupping it gently in her hands. ‘Look Dan, just here. Right against the fence, where the lawnmower couldn’t get them. A few, just a very few — and dwarfed, clinging to the dry earth. Tough little things aren’t they, despite their fragile beauty when they’re in flower!’

Daniel was kneeling beside her in an instant, his handsome face alight with pleasure. ‘I’m going to save one,’ he said. ‘I’ll dig it up and put it in a flowerpot.’ Carefully excavating he dislodged one of the tiny plants from its niche in the dirt, wrapped the jagged foliage in his handkerchief and folded it in a capacious pocket.

They sprang to their feet, exuberant about this precious find, this symbol of childhood’s golden past which had courageously struggled through years of adversity and emerged victorious. ‘Let’s see if the peppercorns are still there,’ said Julia, impulsively taking her companion by the hand and leading him into the Buttercup Lane.

The peppercorn trees at the other end of the shady thoroughfare still let down their spicy grey-green tresses, and in that the couple rejoiced anew. Turning left as they exited the lane, they headed down Mont Albert Road towards the pedestrian crossing.

‘Camberwell,’ said Daniel as they went. ‘Such an English name! It might be part of Britain’s landscape, or Canada’s, or New Zealand’s, or America’s. It might lie in Australia, or Gibraltar, or anywhere in space and history that was once colonised by the British, who brought their place names with them. Did you know, Jules, that there are many Camberwells all over the world? The original, a district, lies in the London borough of Southwark. There is much in a name, for names have roots, like trees, and those with the longest roots tell stories. Through them etymologists can trace languages, which give clues to migrations, famines, wars, invasions, and the entire history of the human race.’

‘However,’ said Julia, ‘in 1994 they changed the City of Camberwell’s name to Booroondara.’

‘An Aboriginal word,’ said Daniel.

‘It is. But one cannot help wondering what Booroondara’s etymology is, given that in 1951 the Aborigines bestowed the title of Melbourne’s famous festival, Moomba, upon the City’s aldermen, with the assurance that it translated as “Let’s get together and have fun”, when in the late sixties it was revealed that the term literally means “up yours”.’

Laughing and joking they reached the school, strolled around its perimeter marvelling at how it had shrunk and recalling increasingly hilarious anecdotes of school life, then turned for home. The late afternoon sun had appeared and, as the cloud cover receded to the east, the daylight brightened to mellow amber.

‘This is closer to the feeling,’ Daniel muttered, as if thinking aloud. Addressing Julia he said, ‘Two lanes. Only two lanes between home and school when you go the long way. Keep reminding me! It seems like three or four.’

‘I suppose the playground could be considered an honorary lane,’ said Julia, in an attempt to reassure him. ‘I mean, there is a public footpath through it, and it cuts through between houses, like the lanes do.’

‘You’re only saying that to mitigate my madness,’ said Daniel, smiling, ‘but thanks anyway. I assure you I am not this navigationally challenged in other suburbs. It’s only Surrey Hills.’

‘You might be thinking of the Three Lanes Way,’ Julia persisted. ‘The really long way.’

‘Let’s take that route back!’

They crossed Mont Albert Road and turned right. About a block further on they ducked into the shadows of the Top Lane, whose straight, echoing path brought them out into the western section of Empress Road. There they stood still, looking about. Front fences, punctuated with gates, stretched away to either hand. Twin avenues of trees dwindled into the distance.

‘If you didn’t know any better,’ said Daniel, ‘you’d think you only had two choices — to go left or right. Two dimensions.’

‘But you’d be wrong,’ said Julia.

Hidden on the opposite side of Empress Road, slightly to their left and easily overlooked, was the mouth of the Middle Lane. They followed it to the end, the sound of their footsteps ricocheting hollowly off adamant surfaces. After they emerged into Sir Garnet Road they walked diagonally across and entered the confines of the Lower Lane. This graven furrow disgorged them opposite the wide grassy oval of Canterbury Sports Ground, at the bottom of Guildford Road which — Julia’s parents had told her — had been named after some place in the English county of Surrey.

Daniel said, ‘Canterbury, Surrey, Guildford, Chatham, Victoria — all the English names transplanted.’

‘Turn left,’ Julia said, ‘and prepare yourself for the long hard walk home uphill, or so it always seemed; an arduous drag, with a heavy schoolbag on your back after an onerous day of cruel school. Now that we have grown up it doesn’t seem so terrible.’

‘This place where we are standing right now,’ said Daniel, ‘is one of those connecting points I’ve identified on the maps. Straight ahead a footpath leads across the Sports Ground to the railway station. The line runs to the city centre, the hub of the state’s rail network, which in turn is connected to every city on the globe. We could turn for home, or if we had the inclination we could journey from this point to just about anywhere in the State of Victoria, or in Queen Victoria’s Empire for that matter.’

‘Come on,’ said Julia, ‘let’s go back to my place. I’ll cook dinner for us both.’

They trudged up the hill, Daniel still airing his thoughts aloud. ‘My mother went to Chatham School. She must have Walked the Lanes daily.’

‘Walking the Lanes,’ echoed Julia. ‘The phrase reminds me of the ancient English tradition of Beating the Bounds. I’ve heard that in Britain they still do it to this day, ceremonially circumnavigating the boundaries of a district. It’s a relic of the ancient need to protect the borders from invading Picts or Gaels from Beyond the Pale, I suppose.’

‘Which means,’ said Daniel, without breaking his train of thought, ‘that the Lanes of Camberwell and I share a long history maybe, beginning when my mother was old enough to begin school. Fifty percent of my genetic heritage travelled those pathways regularly, before I was conceived. In a way, I made this journey before I was even born.’

Wattle birds were squabbling in the street trees and the sun was going down at their backs. Shadows stretched long before them.

‘But what,’ said Julia, as they passed the wrought-iron gate of an Edwardian mansion, ‘what is it all about these clues you speak of, this feeling you get? What’s the point of it all?’

‘Jules, you’ll think I really am crazy if I tell you.’

‘No I won’t! I promise.’

They bantered for a while, but eventually with reluctance Daniel began to reveal his theories.

‘The Lanes of Camberwell have a secret,’ he said. ‘That, I have come to suspect. An old, old secret. Older than colonisation or the Aboriginal tribes that roamed Victoria; maybe older than anyone guesses. As old as the underground waterways? Older?’ He brushed a stray lock of hair out of his eyes, made as if to say something, faltered, then continued, ‘They are almost exploding with that secret.’

Julia merely nodded, unwilling to interrupt the flow.

‘It alters the course of a road,’ Daniel said. ‘It chops through boundaries, bans some people from its route and invites others, contains its own dewy moist atmosphere, grows its own flowers, hugs mystery to its tall fences like a cloak of leaves and shadows, confuses us, misleads us, swallows us up in places between; neither here nor there, neither England nor Australia, neither the old world or the new, nor at home nor at school… and spits us out into somewhere else entirely.

‘There are secrets here, Jules, and strange, unguessable forces of nature at work.’

‘That may be true,’ Julia said noncommittally.

‘It is my theory,’ he persevered, ‘that the secret of the Camberwell Lanes can be discovered. But only by someone who Walks the Lanes in the right way, at the right time. Oh yes, it has to be the right time. And the right person.’

Julia said, ‘Maybe a person who travelled the Lanes before their own birth. Someone who Walked the Lanes when young enough to perceive and hear and feel and taste what adults cannot; young enough to see through angles that harden and cloud over as you grow older and preconceptions blind you.’

‘Exactly. As to the right time — the time when the secrets rise closest to the surface; when, as you Walk the Lanes, you tremble with anticipation, the paling fences grow taller, the overhanging foliage sharper and clearer, the streets more deserted — why, that season is autumn.’

A sudden afternoon breeze blew motes of thistledown past their faces.

‘Autumn of the early mists,’ said Daniel, ‘the long amber sun rays of perpetual morning, the glassy panes of leaves turning crimson; mushrooms and toadstools springing in the short-mown turf of the nature strips. Walk the Lanes of Camberwell in autumn and there’s a chance you will hear an echo of an echo. You might almost but never quite see.’

‘Autumn is now.’

‘True, but it’s not the right time yet. There are certain days …’

‘How can you tell?’

‘It is a feeling. I know I’m right. It’s a “feeling I get when I look to the west, and my spirit is crying for leaving” as the Led Zeppelin song goes. There will be days during this season, certain days, when the feeling will be just right. It’s easy to tell. Magic will be in the air; thick in the air, and that’s when it will be time.’

Giggling erupted from one of the front gardens, where small children were blowing bubbles through wire rings dipped into detergent. Translucent spheres came drifting over the fence into the plane trees then popped and vanished.

‘The tides have their rhythm,’ said Daniel, ‘the heart has its rhythms, the seasons have theirs … and there is a rhythm too, to the approach and retreat of that Something Else. How can that feeling be described? It is the sense that something exhilarating and possibly dangerous is about to happen. It is the sense that some unseen barrier, having congealed and thickened throughout the months of summer, has diminished to the sheer filminess of a veil, and that veil in places is so tenuous it can, perhaps, be torn — if you know the secret. It feels as if some Other World is pressing up against ours as the veil dwindles; some Other World which is usually separated from ours by impenetrable forces. As you are walking beneath the leaves on your way to the Lanes something from that place is, or might be, watching you from behind the trunk of one of these very trees, but for what purpose, with what intent, is unfathomable. Time’s wheel turns, the forces ebb and flow. Autumn is low tide; the lowest of the year.’

Daniel watched as seven bubbles floated past.

‘The veil becomes, in places, as thin as a soap bubble’s walls,’ he said. ‘Thinnest in places such as the panes of autumn foliage.’ They were passing beneath the burnished boughs of a plane tree. Reaching up he touched one of the leaves. ‘When the sun shines through the stained glass of a smoky-amber plane tree leaf, it becomes a window, if only you knew how to look through it. The splendour is leaching through into the Pale — the rich apple-reds, the warm gold tints, the wine-crimsons — and do not be mistaken, the changing of the leaves is attributed to chemicals and sap but it is not. No, the leaves turn colour because they are membranes where the bubble-wall is thinnest, so that the hues of Other World, of Autumn Place, of Equinoxia, come seeping through, dripping through like mulberry wine and melted toffee and honey mead … It’s the leaves, Jules, and the light — the long mellow rays of equinoctial light.’

‘So it is associated with the equinoxes, this feeling, whatever it is,’ said Julia.

‘Most definitely. But it is so overpowering! Don’t you feel it? No? Why I seem to be the only instrument upon which these sensations play, I have no idea. But as I walk along the Camberwell Lanes, knowing that the Other is all around, everywhere, in the sky, in the sunlight, beyond the Palings, it comes to me that the Pale is where we are living; the Pale World, on the borders of one that is more richly coloured. And Beyond the Pale lies a place outside the jurisdiction of normal laws, a place considered hostile by civilisation, but which can never be reached, even at equinox when the wall, a thousand miles thick at Midsummer, thins to gossamer.

‘Or perhaps it can, if you find the hidden way …’

He fell silent, then.

They returned to her house on top of the hill, and while Julia prepared dinner Daniel borrowed her street directory, somewhat to her annoyance. He sat at the kitchen table and once again riveted his attention on the maps of Surrey Hills.

‘When I drew the shape of this “circuit”,’ he said, ‘it meant nothing to me. Expanding the diagram I added links to significant places in case this helped form a meaningful figure, a symbol; some kind of pattern, a shape, laid out tracing the route, the shape of an ancient symbol — some rune, perhaps, or a key. A key! That’s what I yearn after.’

Julia reached into the pantry for a chunk of parmesan cheese.

‘Waterways, paths, journeys, burials,’ said Daniel, ‘death, warfare, wilderness survival, crossing places, iron roads, conduits — I marked them on my map sensing somehow that they had been placed there not at random but for some particular reason. Not that the town planners had decided to create pivot points or circuits; but that forces had been at work of which they were unaware. Forces that moved them without their knowledge. The land itself dictated the ways humans should use it.’

Having placed two bowls of pasta on the table, Julia pulled up a chair.

‘Thanks.’ Daniel picked up a fork. ‘Sorry Julia, I’m being a pain I know. You’re very kind to put up with me.’

‘Not at all. I find your theories fascinating.’

‘Really? One day I’ll lend you my diary. It’s full of ‘em.’

‘Well, maybe not that fascinating …’

He laughed. ‘Point made! I promise I will not mention my delusions any more tonight.’

‘And he kept his promise,’ Julia said to me over the scalloped rim of a delicately painted teacup. ‘We spent that night together, talking until sunrise, and he stayed with me until noon the next day. He said he was falling in love with me. Oh, but I miss him.’

‘I’m so sorry. Why did he leave you?’

‘Why?’ Julia smiled mirthlessly, picked up Daniel’s journal once more. ‘See for yourself!’ she said, pointing out the beginning of a paragraph.

‘For autumn,’ Daniel had written, ‘is approaching again. It is the last month of summer and the days are noticeably shorter. And once or twice, already, there has been a day when a hint, just a hint of that anticipatory delight has flavoured the air. Just for half an hour or so … As the time approaches it seems increasingly urgent to crack the code; to unravel the mysteries of the Lanes. Autumn, apple-time, leaf-time, golden tawny light time … That other place, I know, is lit with long rich light, its slanting rays of burnt gold.’

‘Did you suggest he seeks counselling?’ I asked.

‘Jenny, the man’s a genius. These are not the ravings of a lunatic, don’t you see? I think he struck on something, I really do. At first I was sceptical like you, but then I did some research.’ Brandishing a notebook of her own, Julia said, ‘I found this information in a library book when I looked up the etymology of “Camberwell”.’ Opening the book she read, ‘The original “Camberwell” is believed to have been named for a well lying within its boundaries, whose waters possessed extraordinary healing properties. In the Domesday Book the English parish is called “Ca’berwelle”. The author of A Short Historical and Topographical Account of St. Giles’s Church — the parish church of Camberwell — writes, “It has been conjectured that the well which gave part of the name to the village might have been famous for some medicinal virtues, and might have occasioned the dedication of the church to this patron saint of cripples and mendicants. Cam is a very crooked word, and is applied to anything out of square, or out of condition. Having regard, therefore, to the fact already noticed, that the church is dedicated to the patron saint of cripples, we are certainly justified in assuming the word cam to be in this instance descriptive of individual condition; and the well would then become the well of the crooked or crippled.’” Julia put down the notebook. ‘A place of miraculous magical water!’ she cried. ‘But here in the Australian Camberwell, most of the streams and springs have been diverted underground! They have become secret magics…’

‘Ironically, Camberwell is a “dry” area,’ I said, attempting levity. Julia gave me a look of pity. ‘Dry areas’, local areas free of licensed hotels, where alcohol could be bought at shops but not restaurants, were a legacy of the 1920s, when the temperance movement was strong. Only two pockets of Melbourne were ‘dry’, and the erstwhile City of Camberwell was one of them.

‘Where is Daniel now?’ I asked humbly, to make amends for my inept stab at humour.

‘For a while he went away. He came back one last time, on a clear, bright morning early in May last year, and announced to me that this was one of those days in full bloom; the feeling at its strongest, the walls at their thinnest. “I have to Walk the Lanes again today at the height of autumn,” he said. And naturally I went with him.’

My auburn-haired friend sat on the arm of a chair, looking forlorn and dejected. I felt sorry for her.

A long hiatus ensued.

At length I broke the silence, saying gently, ‘And that was the day you were found wandering the streets, lost, unable to find your way home. What happened? Where is Daniel?’

‘He’s gone,’ said Julia brokenly. ‘He’s been missing ever since. The detectives can’t find him. And I cannot really explain it.’

‘But you go looking for him every day,’ I said, and now I felt tears pricking the backs of my eyes.

‘Yes. I go seeking the way in.’

‘The way in?’ Julia’s confusion appeared worse than I had first suspected. ‘The way into what?’

‘Come with me. I’ll show you.’

‘I don’t have time to tramp around the whole of Surrey Hills, I’m sorry Julia,’ I said.

‘Just as far as the end of the First Lane.’

‘All right.’

Together we walked down Guildford Road and up the lane. Along the way Julia became quite agitated, blurting, ‘Did you see that? I caught a glimpse of something moving over there, see, beneath the trees,’ or, ‘Look! Between the sky and the ground — a flash!’ but I witnessed nothing out of the ordinary, and my alarm over her mental state intensified.

As soon as we stepped out of the lane at the corner of Sir Garnet Road she took my elbow in a confidential manner and leaned to murmur in my ear, while waving the other hand at the half-completed townhouses where the old Southall house used to stand.

‘Leaves were blowing down all around us in the Buttercup Lane,’ she said, ‘and at the Southall house, and the sunlight was blowing too, as if the leaves were made out of sunlight, and our feet left the ground. We could hear the sound or jangling bells. We two were whirled up, and we saw the pattern laid out below as if in lines of fire across the suburb, and the pattern is the key, and the key unlocks the door. We returned to earth, and that was when I saw the door opening, and Daniel went through, but I held back because I was afraid. But for the brief moment the door remained ajar I looked in and saw an amazing sight, just as Daniel had described. Then it closed, but the golden honey soft comfort feeling of autumn lingered.’

She would say no more and I didn’t like to press her, in her current state.

We returned to her house, where I took my leave of her. ‘Julia, you are getting professional help aren’t you?’ I said as I stood on her threshold.

‘Of course,’ she said.

‘Is there anything I can do?’

Julia insisted that she was fine and there was no way I could be of assistance. So I said goodbye to my altered schoolfriend and journeyed homewards.

A week later a wonderful autumn day dawned, and for the first time I sensed that feeling described by Daniel. Next day it was trumpeted all over the news and everyone was talking about it — the bizarre incident that had occurred in Surrey Hills overnight.

This was too coincidental. I had to go and see for myself.

Surrey Hills was abuzz with sightseers, and the air was fragrant with savoury scents I could not quite identify. Errant breezes whisked leaves and hats through dazzling sunlight; the day was vividly alive. I turned up at Julia’s house but it was locked, and nobody answered the door. Then the neighbour, Mrs Warner, came in at the gate to tell me that Julia had disappeared again and detectives were searching for her.

Mrs Warner had a key, and let me in. The pot-plant on Julia’s windowsill was in full bloom, vibrantly ablaze with buttercups. I found Daniel’s open journal on the table.

In Julia’s handwriting —

‘I hear his thoughts in my head. He is calling me. He tells me that Ivan Southall’s house stands at a fulcrum, or possibly the fulcrum of the circuit that is the Camberwell Lanes. It is there that Sir Garnet Road does its strange and sudden contortion, there that our favourite flowers grew, there that the playground chops in twain a row of houses, there that privileged daughters were permitted to pass between two roadways. This site is somehow connected to the Buttercup Lane — perhaps by an underground waterway. With the Three Lanes route to the west of the Southall house and the Two Lanes (almost three) to the east, bounded to the south by the Iron Road and to the north by busy Mont Albert Road with its hurtling traffic, the circuit centres on the Southall house.’

Outside in Guildford Road, an untamed wind was gusting; a sweet, clean wind from beyond the stars, and with every breath I felt I would be borne aloft. I followed the crowds to the old Southall block where they were gathering. Perplexed residents were scratching their heads and wondering how such a strange thing could have happened. Some had heard of a rain of frogs, or even of fish but never such a phenomenon as this!

From top to bottom, the entire site was awash with deep drifts of leaves and flowers. The partially constructed buildings, two stories high, were barely visible beneath this confetti, although it was already being scattered by the breezes. The spectacle was extraordinary.

Late that previous night all the people whose homes bordered the lanes of Surrey Hills had been woken, simultaneously, by the sound of running footsteps and laughter. In the morning the construction site was found weltered in autumnal leaves, in gilded buttercups well out of season, and yellow buttons of flowers with a savoury scent, and blue hyacinths, and soft silver-grey catkins, and I knew with a rush of joy that Julia had got through.

She was with Daniel.

I envied them both.

That year we had one of the most beautiful autumns we’ve ever seen in Melbourne.

*

AFTERWORD

The Lanes of Camberwell can be located in the Melway Street Directory of Greater Melbourne, Map 46, F10 and G10.

— Cecilia Dart-Thornton