Many of my middle-aged friends were desperately groping for a ripcord to parachute out of their marriages. But jumping off into the unknown has its hazards, too. There was no guarantee of a safe landing. When lust evaporates you could just be lost. Maybe it was better to just stay strapped into my marital safety belt, ride out the buffeting winds and hope for bluer skies? But it was only fair to tell him about my affair – after which he might not want me anymore, anyway. I felt driven to reveal the truth – but feared I was being driven by Ted Kennedy at Chappaquiddick. Anyway, I couldn’t tell him now, on Christmas Eve, with Zoe due home any moment and Jake putting his electrician skills to work by happily stringing up extravagant lights around my haphazardly decorated tree.

I know what you’re thinking – Don’t tell another lie, Ruby Ryan! You just want to fling yourself forward and shake me until my fillings fall out, don’t you? And I’m with you! I really am. While I wouldn’t call myself an intellectual – I mean, I’m clearly not the kind of girl who sits around splitting atoms in her spare time – I had never before realised the true depths of my stupidity. If it’s any consolation, at this point, nobody could have liked me less than I did. There’s a cream to cure people like me, you know; haemorrhoid cream, because I’m such a pain in the arse.

Above me, seagulls squawked like teething babies. The sound repulsed me. Any slight angst I had was soothed by simply burying my face in a beach towel for half an hour and screaming and screaming and screaming.

29

On Christmas Day, it’s a good idea to tell each family member what to bring to lunch – that way two people don’t show up with the same sexist or racist opinions and get thrown in the pool. This was the Ryan motto.

Our family always celebrated Christmas lunch beside Ruth’s backyard swimming pool. The sisters divvied up the courses and the boys manned the bar and the barbecue while the six cousins played Marco Polo in the deep end, forgetting to be ‘cool’ and harking back to the fun they’d enjoyed as little kids.

My mother still lived in our family home – a palatial manor on the furthermost point of the Insular Peninsular, on a big, broad block that looked out across the mouth of the river to the swaying eucalypts of the national park. The area is an architectural minestrone, with residents playing out their fantasies in bricks and mortar. A Swiss chalet with a gabled roof and ornate carvings rubs up against a Japanese-themed minka with sliding doors, opposite a Mexican ranch house. Ruth’s plantation-style French colonial mansion is the most imposing on the street, and nicknamed by we Ryan girls ‘The Swank-ienda’.