Sylvie fell in love with Leonard innocently, romantically and very quickly. He seemed so grown-up, so worldly. And he was a great reader — not of fiction, but of biographies and poetry. She loved to hear him talk about famous people: their work, their love affairs, their bad behaviour. Most extraordinary of all, this businessman-poet wrote poems especially for her, a quartet of sonnets he presented as a gift on their eight-week anniversary: ‘First Meeting’, ‘First Date’, ‘Falling in Love’, ‘Our Future’.

She felt herself changing under his influence. He loosened her up, opened her to new possibilities, gave her the courage not simply to question accepted modes of behaviour but actually to challenge them. On their third date, he took her to see Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief. When they stood for the national anthem, she reached for his hand; she’d never been so brazen, nor so subversive. (Was it treason to be physical with a man during the national anthem?) She sidled closer to him until the entire length of her body was touching his; a florid tingling zigzagged through her until the last note of ‘God Save the Queen’ faded to silence.

If she was like this after just two weeks of knowing him, a future with Leonard Morrow promised a life beyond anything she had ever hoped for. She couldn’t believe her luck.

Nor could Leonard. He’d had plenty of girlfriends before her, though nothing serious. He wasn’t a natural at intimacy; it was not something of which he’d had much experience, and certainly not within his own family. Indeed, there was little he had learned from his family — the perfectly adequate family, he would admit — that would assist him in the future he aspired to. His parents, along with his older brother, Freddy, had migrated to Perth in search of a better life. And from their point of view, they had found it. It was Perth-born Leonard, the only member of the Morrow family to be a true Australian, who was the odd one out.

Leonard and his older brother could not have been more different. Freddy was athletic and outgoing, the ideal Aussie lad. He left school at fourteen and started work at Morrow & Sons, Electrics, first as his father’s apprentice, and later his partner. As Perth grew from a town to a city, Morrow & Sons was much in demand. Freddy married a Perth girl, they bought a house in the same suburb as the Morrow parents, they had three Perth children spaced two years apart. Freddy and Perth were made for each other.