Winston Leung, central to Leonard’s work life for a decade or more, had left the country with apparently no plans to return. Leonard refused to give any details, but he was clearly upset. Sylvie assumed there had been unpleasantness, which would explain why Leonard had waited until now, apparently months after the fact, to tell her, and why Winston, a member of the Morrow extended family, had not said goodbye to her. Of course Leonard would be suffering, was suffering.

She continued her stroll among the dead. Each headstone told a story, many possible stories; in this sense, Galina was right, they were like letters. She lingered in front of a grave where a man and woman were buried with their three young children, all having died in a single month in 1893 — of some ghastly disease, she supposed. Further along the path was an unmarried woman of forty-one buried for all eternity with her mother, and what disappointments oozed from that sad arrangement.

In another section were two men with foreign names in a single grave, cousins who had died months apart in 1944, both in their early forties. If theirs had been war-related deaths, surely this would have been mentioned on the headstone. Perhaps they had been gangsters operating the black market, two men hated enough to be murdered, yet loved and mourned by their own family. Perhaps they were like Leonard, men with feelings for each other — although she couldn’t imagine any family being so free-thinking that they’d accept such a relationship, much less advertise it to the rest of the world by burying the men together.

Many of the epitaphs were very moving — even to tears, in some cases. Such powerful feelings for long-dead strangers alongside her adamantly muted feelings about her husband’s … what? His lifestyle? His infidelity? His perversity? There was so much she didn’t understand.

It was while she was tramping through one of the more overgrown areas of the cemetery, where headstones were askew and many inscriptions were so weathered as to be illegible, that she came across a Mary O’Donahue, not the first Mary O’Donahue she had seen, but this one a possible match for her Mary O’Donahue.

MARY O’DONAHUE

BORN BALLARAT, 1894,

DIED 1945, MELBOURNE.

AND THE DAUGHTER OF THE ABOVE,

GEORGIANA O’DONAHUE,

1912–1946.

Sylvie had in her collection a 1911 letter written to a Mary O’Donahue at an address in the mean streets of Fitzroy, a letter of sadness and harsh condemnation from Mary’s father, also an O’Donahue, from a Ballarat address. Mary had brought disgrace upon the family, he wrote. He prayed for her soul, and he mourned the loss of his only daughter.