It was like a room in a nun’s cloister. Clean and white, with a child’s wardrobe made of oak and a white single bed. A chest of three drawers sat beneath the window; on it was a tiny vase holding a single twig of eucalypt. Marc explained that the bathroom next door could be for my exclusive use. Mine and the baby’s. He would confine himself to his ensuite.

‘That’s kind of you,’ I said.

I stepped to the window and scanned the view: below was the garden, a damp mess of uneven grass and clumps of flourishing weeds, with tall ferns and bottlebrush around the perimeter. Beyond this were similar gardens behind similar houses. Beyond those, trees: at the end of Marc’s street was the entrance to a national park.

‘It’s very nice,’ I said, turning back to him. ‘Your house.’

He walked into the room, pressed down lightly on the bed with a splayed hand.

‘We like it.’

I could see the dimples left by his fingers in the quilt cover.

It occurred to me later that ‘arc’ was also spelled with a ‘c’. Science was one of the subjects I hadn’t failed. I remembered learning that an arc is a visible jolt of electricity: the jagging, blue-white path energy takes when it’s finding the fastest way from one point to the next.

As for the wife, I never saw her. That’s not completely true: I saw her all the time, smiling obligingly out of framed photographs. She was away on some kind of sabbatical – archaeological, I think, although I might have imagined that. They had a lot of artefacts around, which looked like they’d been dug up: limestone and soapstone, clay and flint.

Marc worked from home during the day except for Fridays, when he went to a university in the city to teach a seminar on torts. When he said this word I pictured cakes. I had worked in a bakery for a while. To me, tortes were dense Eastern European things that sat like stones in their boxes when I packed them up.

When I told him this, he smiled.

‘A tort – my kind of tort – is a wrongdoing,’ he said.

Still I pictured layers of dense wintery sweetness as foreign as snow.

‘Say a man is driving a car and he veers off the road and over a cliff,’ Marc said. The baby was in bed and we were drinking dandelion tea, a strong, swampy brew that stank like the chicory my great-grandmother drank. He was sitting on one couch. I was on the other.

‘Say the man dies. Who’s to blame? The driver? The car? The roads authority?’

‘No-one,’ I said. ‘It’s an accident.’

That made him laugh.

‘You probably wouldn’t like my class,’ he said.

‘What’s the answer?’