There are, for Bindi, clear memories of Lissy. The clearest on the Sandpath.

She remembers her eyes - she'll never forget her eyes - big as night pools with the moon gone when Bindi had hurried to the Fishcastle after seeing Jennifer wandering out on the road, half-dressed for school. She had found Lissy crouched and dying in a corner of the laundry with the door closed so the children wouldn't see the cancer eating the last of her, curled up on the floor like a pile of old clothes.

And she remembers the smell - clothes soiled, a rot - death still breathing.

'Where's your mum and dad?' she called to Jennifer down the road, before she knew the truth but had a feeling something was wrong.

'I think they're sleeping in. I can't find Gulliver.'

'Your brother's down on the rocks watching the fishing boats go out I saw him from my place. You'd better tell him to put some clothes on.' And she'd followed an instinct and gone to the house and found Lissy.

She'd said to the children, 'Sssssh, don't disturb them if they're sleeping, and you know where to find me if you want anything, darlings,' and shaking like a jelly she'd hurried them off to school. And Marlin? He'd slept in, all right, but not in his own bed and not with his own wife. Making himself un-sick, hale and healthy - not like ordinary mortals - sickness being the worst of human weakness to him.

'0l' Marlin wouldn't let nothing like sick get the better of him,' Hughie Pheiffer once said to her. 'He's a man pulled up high by his own boot straps. Tough as hide. Sharp as sharks. Taught himself everything he knows - you've got to give the man his dues. A man who never set foot in a university till he was asked to give a lecture in one. He's a do-it-yourselfer, ol' Marlin. Doesn't worry me they call him professor round here, he's worked for it'

And then she remembers a time just after Lissy's funeral when the kids were howling every other minute - just before she was cremated, there was a story going the rounds that that Irish biddy, Angie Frost, was heard to say to him, 'Poor Marlin. Poor you who's lost his wife and the mother of his children, how in God's heaven can I help you?' And how he'd said back to her in that sly way of his, 'In the easiest way of all, Angie girl.' Maybe true, maybe not.

Bindi remembers a photo Steven had once taken of Marlin, all dressed in white, all blond and clean and proper, leaning against a tree and grinning and she'd thought. He doesn't drink. He doesn't drive because of the pollution. He eats plain. He won't let the kids swear - butter wouldn't melt on him but I never trusted him for a minute. He's like a devil tarted up as a saint to fool you.

Steven Hope had begun to photograph Proudie Bay from the day he and Bindi returned to the Sandpath from their honeymoon. He'd photographed everything that moved and most things that didn't. Bindi had them all stacked, dated and named. She thought of them as her Steven in two shoe boxes, to be brought down from the top of the wardrobe any time she wanted him. Now she wanted him. She made a pot of tea and put the boxes on the kitchen table.

She sorted through stacks of black and whites and coloureds of Proudies who'd either moved or died. Weddings, anniversaries, harbourscapes and oceanscapes blurred when the wind was too strong. Views from Shack Hill and from the church on the high point opposite it, and then selected a bundle that included the Fishcastle.

One was of a young, slim Lissy, simply dressed, looking with huge, dark eyes at the camera. On her head she wore a patterned scarf. A girl child hung back behind the curtain of her mother's skirt. The child was not smiling. The background of trees and harbour glowed soft like a watercolour, but the mother and child looked as though they were pinned to it, startled and wide-eyed like insects. When Bindi had seen this she knew that Lissy was already ill and that her small daughter somehow knew it.

Another photograph was of Marlin and his firstborn, Gulliver, sitting in their dinghy and grinning up to the camera, handsome, arrogant, and not caring about the two trembling females on shore.

And another of Marlin's sister, Hesta, who came to do what she could for the children during the worst of the motherless times, but a dreamer like her brother, play-acting for the camera and probably anxious to go back to the Blue Mountains, where her new love had bought her a nest.

There was a photo of the boy child, Gulliver, standing under the flame tree, holding a lizard in one hand and a tortoise in the other with a snake coiled at his feet.

And another of Jennifer, not long before Steven died, grown tall, and with brown lank hair and the resigned eyes of a drone. Taken not long before she took the job of waitress at Dolan's Cafe. Not long before she waitressed all day for the Dolans then went home to the Fishcastle and waitressed all over again.

But then, Bindi came to her favourite photograph of Proudie Bay. Her favourite, and Steven's too. It was protected by a cover.

They had gone for an early morning walk around the point and had looked back across the bay. They'd watched a fishing boat cruise past the Fishcastle in a sky mist and a mist of its own, but Marlin's garden could be clearly seen: the flame tree, the fig, the dinghy cave, the jutty, the clothes line with nothing but a pair of panties flapping from it, Marlin's royal standard, so they said. The cock's flag flying when he'd had a woman in his bed. It was a photograph in all the subtle shades and shadows of black and white (Steven's choice for scenes like this). There was a surreal quality to it and if it had not featured the Fishcastle she would have had it enlarged and framed.

She'd always thought he could have won a prize for it. Medals for memories ... Pity about the subject... Pity the best go and the worst are left, she thought.