Prologue Excerpt: 1946

In the final weeks of 1941, when I was adrift in life and my sister was missing in a war zone, my father offered our home as sanctuary to a young Japanese woman named Mitsy Sennosuke, unaware that I was in love with her. This was in Broome, in the northwest of Australia, at the time of the invasion of Malaya, when Japanese bombs were falling like silver rain and old certainties were crumbling, when some who had been our friends were now treated as aliens, transfigured by enmity and fear.

My father, Michael Penrose, was a pearling master. He ran a fleet of six pearling luggers, crewed by Malays, Manilamen, and Koepangers, with one Japanese diver on each lugger, and owned Penrose Chandlery Supplies, an airy tin-and-flywire shop situated at the head of the jetty that juts into Roebuck Bay.

We lived at the southern end of Broome, where many of the master pearlers lived. Broome was a straggling mile of wood and currugated-iron shops and dwellings, and our house was a typical timber and iron bungalow on stilts, with broad verandas on all sides, shuttered windows, and a kitchen separate from the rest of the house. Creepers choked the verandas. Houses like ours were built to capture the cool morning and evening sea winds. The sun always beat down, but it reached us — on the veranda or in one of the rooms — as gauzy light through the creepers or banded through the shutters. We enjoyed our tropical existence: mangoes and barramundi on the table, bamboo furniture, siestas, sundowners, pearlshell ashtrays, servants.

But together with the cheerful clamor, an atmosphere of faint pain surrounded our house. My father had preserved my mother’s name upon the bow and stern of his leading lugger, the Ida Penrose, but the love that had inspired it was increasingly under strain in my teenage years, as my mother grew to hate Broome in all of its moods and almost, almost, to hate Alice, my father, and me.

She was from England, originally, and had been governess to some inland children when my father met her. You could say that, unlike the rest of us, she did not have red dirt, mangroves, or pearls in her blood.

I want to be fair to my mother. She loved Alice and me, and, for along time, loved my father. It’s even possible that she continued to love my father after she left us and returned to England to be with her elderly mother, but that’s something I’ll never know. But I do know that she wanted the best for us.

It could not have been easy for her. We were too careless, too casual, too democratic for her tastes. Our lives revolved around the seasons and the sea. There were two seasons — the Wet, from November to March, when the northwest was subject to cyclones; and the Dry, when the waters were safe again. During the long months of the Wet, my father would grumble about in his shop, undertake pointless maintenance of his luggers, which were laid up along the Dampier Creek mudflats, or bicker at home with my mother. He’d meddle in the garden and itch to be more useful than he was. Then, blessedly, the skies would clear and his mood would lift, and he’d put to sea again in the Ida Penrose, leading his little fleet to the pearling grounds. But sometimes he’d not return for weeks at a time, and that worried my mother.

So she chafed. She wanted coolness, calmness, greenness. She wanted England. She filled the house with Dickens, Austen, Keats, the Bronte sisters, and we read them to please her, but were too restless and unused to reflection to talk to her about our reading, and my father and I preferred travelers’ talkes of remote Australia — books about ourselves, in other words — which left her cold. She’d push Great Expectations into our hands, and we’d say, "Too thick, I’ll never get through it."