At the bottom of the envelope was the painted miniature portrait of Gale as a young man. Her mother had always said it was too precious to expose to the Australian sun. It was painted in watercolour; the light would have faded it. Hazel held the little frame in her hand. It must have been strange for Alice, older and on the other side of the globe, to have looked from time to time at this memento of a young man she had once loved. Hazel wondered if she had been glad to see him as he had been in the days of their courtship. Had she kept the portrait for herself, or for her son, so that he would have some idea of the distant man who was his father?

At least he had not removed the boy from his mother. That was something to be said in his favour. Reading around the social history of the time, Hazel realized that Alice had been comparatively lucky. Some unwanted wives were consigned to lunatic asylums. Most were obliged to relocate to an area distant enough that they could at least attempt to evade the whiff of scandal which would have attended them. Divorced mothers were generally separated from their children, forbidden to write or visit them. A woman could never hope to regain her good name, her place in society. Alice had had the opportunity of a new life and she had seized it.

She and Dr Nolan had had a child together, a daughter. Hazel was glad about that: a daughter would have been company for her mother. There was a photograph of the child, perhaps on her christening day, lying on a satiny cushion dressed in cascading frills. Hazel went to the family tree that someone – her paternal grandfather, perhaps – had written out and saw the entry for the girl: Augusta Caroline Nolan, b 1862 d osp 1911. She went to her computer to find out what that meant. When the stark words Died childless came up on the screen she felt disappointed. No long-lost cousins, there, to be unearthed and befriended. Invisible pathways connected you to the generations who’d gone before, snaking on and on, forking innumerably, each leading farther and farther back in time to the people you came from. But a path could end too, as Augusta Nolan’s did, in a cul-de-sac.