Technique

"Most things people get wrong, they get wrong in the first thirty seconds. After that you're only managing it."

The back door had never latched without a shove and I gave it one with the side of the gumboot on the way through, the same as I had for eighteen years, and it went shut behind me with the crack it always made against the swollen part of the frame. Then the gumboots came off inside the mat and stayed where I'd stood out of them, muddy, one lying over. Clean man, dirty boots. It only worked in that order.

The kitchen was already going. Warm, the heater ticking over in the corner, and the smell of the herbs coming up off the board where she'd cut them.

"Smells like progress," I said.

I got the jacket off and sent it at the chair. It missed the chair, which it had a long record of doing, and went down in a heap and stayed there. Karen looked at it for a second and said nothing at all about it, which meant it had gone on account for later.

"I've done the herbs and prepped the greens," she said, without turning round. "Pan's hot. You're on egg duty."

"My time to shine."

I clapped my hands together, which she has never once let pass without a look, and went to the stove.

The jug of whisked egg was on the bench beside the burner. I took it up in both hands, and taking it up in both hands put my elbow through the teaspoon she'd left sitting there. It went off the edge, hit the floor, spun once on its back and disappeared under the oven with a small ringing sound at the end of it that I chose to take personally.

Getting it out again meant pulling the oven, and pulling the oven meant disconnecting the bayonet, and the bayonet meant most of a morning. I put it on the list. I didn't say anything about it. Neither did she, which was worse, and we both knew precisely how that went.

I set the jug down and she came in for the plates and I picked the jug back up in the same movement, and our elbows went past one another. She stepped back. I went sideways into the space she'd just left, and we both stopped, and then both went the other way, which was how it went in a kitchen laid out for one person and worked by two who had never once sat down and discussed it.

"You haven't seasoned it," I said, looking into the jug.

"I figured you'd want to."

Which was correct, and she'd left it deliberately, and I took the salt in one hand and the pepper mill in the other and did it properly. Duck eggs wanted more salt than people gave them. The white was heavier and the yolk carried more fat, and they set faster and firmer than hen eggs and went to rubber on you if you handled them the same way, which everybody did the first time and most people went on doing for the rest of their lives. These had come off the three Khakis at the top end, out of the straw in the grey before I'd gone down to the wall, and the yolks had gone into the jug the deep orange you only get off birds that are getting slugs and greens as well as grain.

"High heat to start, then down. Let the bottom set before the fold—none of this scramble nonsense."

"You act like I've never seen you make an omelette," she said, from the cutlery drawer, which had not been the fork drawer since we rearranged it and had never once stopped being the first drawer she opened. She shut it and swore at it quietly and opened the right one.

"I'm just saying." I got the pan round on the burner and set my feet. "Some people panic and over-stir."

"That was once. Five years ago. And I was hungover."

"It was a travesty. Like egg confetti."

"And you're a sanctimonious bastard about breakfast."

"Only breakfast."

I tilted the jug and the egg went in and caught with a hiss and ran up the sides of the pan, and I turned the handle round and moved my weight and settled, and then did nothing whatsoever for a while, which was the part most people couldn't manage.

She came past behind me with the loaf and cut it thick — one slice ragged, one passable — and put both into the toaster, and neither of them fitted, and she forced the second one in sideways.

"Heathen."

"You want to make toast and the eggs?"

"Not with your chaotic methods, no."

She crumbled the feta over the board one-handed, cold and chalky, breaking off in lumps of no two sizes. The greens went in after it — chard, sorrel, the last of the spinach, which had stood out through the frosts for a fortnight and gone leathery on us. I gave her the nod and she flicked the lot at the pan and I took it in with the wrist and it landed where I wanted it.

Then I got the edge up with the spatula and looked underneath.

"This side's cooking faster."

"Your stove leans," she said. "We've talked about this."

"You said you were going to fix it."

"I said I'd mention it to your cousin. That's very different."

Four millimetres front to back and about two across. I knew the numbers because I'd put a level over it — 2013, I want to say — and written them on the back of a seed packet and then put the seed packet somewhere safe. Four millimetres over that distance is enough to run the egg to the low side and cook it there while the high side sits and waits. My cousin does floors. He'd have come out and looked at it and told me it was a wedge of packer and twenty minutes. It had been a wedge of packer and twenty minutes for five years.

I let the sigh out, since she'd earned it, and turned the heat down and gave it another half-minute and then folded it, and it came over clean and went onto the plate in one piece.

The second one was thinner and went on off-centre, which happens when there's less in the jug than the pan wants. Chives over both. Pepper. I put them down on the table.

"Chef's work."

"You nearly tripped over your own boots and spilled the juice."

"Art has casualties."

We stood there a second and looked at what the kitchen had come to. Crumbs the whole length of the bench like sawdust off a rushed cut. A smear of feta on the fridge handle. Butter in the air thick enough that it was going onto the ceiling above the stove, the way it had been going onto that ceiling for eighteen years. It wasn't tidy. Every single thing in it had ended up where it needed to be.

"Eat before it goes cold," I said, and got the chair out.

I started before she'd sat down. I've been doing that since 1998 and have never been able to give a reason for it.

The egg was hot enough to catch the front of the tongue. Heavier than hen egg and richer with it, the chives coming up over the top and the greens underneath doing the work greens do, which is to stop the whole thing being too much of itself. The toast was scorched along one edge and soft through the middle and I ate the lot of it.

My wrist objected when I turned the fork over. There was a red hole in the pad of my left thumb where the splinter had come out and the hot water had left it tender. My back had gone into the chair and was making no complaint whatsoever, which was new.

We didn't talk for a while. Forks on the plates, water moving through the old pipes under the floor, the wind putting a hand on the window now and then and taking it off again. A currawong went off down past the fence — the long descending one, drawn out and out until it thinned to nothing at the end of it. I stopped chewing to hear the finish. They'd been about all week.

"Good?"

I nodded with my mouth full and got the fork up off the plate. "See? Technique."

"I prepped everything."

I raised a finger at her, which I would have thought twice about if I'd known what was on my chin. "But the cookery, Karen. The cooking is the soul."

"The cooking," she said, flat enough to check a floor with.

"Of course. You're the framework. I'm the painter."

"So I'm the scaffolding, and you're bloody Monet."

I put a hand at my plate, which was two thirds gone. "Do you see this? This is breakfast impressionism."

"You're not even wearing shoes."

"That's because true artists need to be grounded."

She went into her tea to laugh and very nearly took it down the wrong way, and came out of it and flicked a crumb across the table at me. It landed on my sleeve and sat there. I left it and kept eating.

We sat on a few minutes after that. Nothing much in it. The heater going, the smell of the butter, and the far edge of the wall coming into my head somewhere around the second-last mouthful and setting up there. I got my legs out from under the table and leaned the chair back and looked at the window.

"You thinking about going back out there?"

"Can't leave that far edge unfinished," I said. "The soil's holding water. If I don't get the gravel in, it'll slump again."

"You could let it slump. See what nature does with it. Embrace chaos."

"I live with you. I already embrace chaos."

"Flattery's not going to save you from digging."

I stood up with the plate in one hand and put the other over the top of my head, which was still wet, and didn't need checking, and got checked.

"You've got Luke coming. I'll get out of the way. Besides, it's not real work unless you can feel it in your knees by sundown."

Two barrow-loads of the twenty-mil into the bottom of the far edge, then the geotextile over the top of it, then the topsoil back. Get that in and the whole of the back slope would run into the rain garden the way it should have been running since the year we bought the place. Then the backfill behind the shed, which was still lying open where I'd left it. Two jobs. At first light it had been one.

"You want a sandwich later?" she called after me.

"I'll find something."

The gumboots went back on at the mat and they were cold all the way through, which was the one bad minute of the morning. Then the door, and the air came round it at me, and with it the wet ground and the eucalypt and somebody's fire going somewhere up the valley.

The barrow was against the shed where I'd left it. I took the shovel out and went down to the far edge and stood a moment getting my eye along the fall of the ground, and then put the blade in. It went in clean. The frost had come out of the top of it by now and underneath that the soil was wet right through and heavy with it, and the first spit came up off the shovel in one piece and held its shape, and I turned it over and had a look at it, and it was good ground, and I got on.