Valia turned off the light on her way out, and Penny rested for a while, then slept, and in the morning she drafted a follow-up letter to the University of Sydney. She enquired whether they’d received the previous correspondence and references from her headmaster and the head science teacher at her high school. Might there still be time for an interview? There must be a fine art to these letters, thought Penny: some code, some formula that other Australians understood. There must be something she didn’t get right in that first correspondence, and that was why the university hadn’t responded. In her new letter, Penelope Asproyerakas used many words to, in essence, say the following in code: she rejected her father’s expectations and dreamed of being a scientist.

4.

On a Wednesday in July, the Sydney Morning Herald exposed I.W. Asquith’s fraud: he had falsely claimed to have discovered a play from the Hellenistic Period. He lost his British consulate job that Friday. He was guilty of misconduct. The high commissioner, doing the proper thing, came to Sydney and met with Ian at the office.

‘It’s a bloody embarrassment,’ the commissioner said. ‘Turns out this daft play is all your work.’

‘I’m profoundly sorry, sir,’ said Asquith.

‘We can’t have it.’

‘Yes, and I’m ashamed,’ said Asquith. ‘And I understand that diplomats can’t be seen to behave in such ways.’

‘I suppose, yes, in a broad sense you were a diplomat.’

In failure, Asquith confronted certain facts he’d managed to ignore during the lifespan of his fraud: the fabricated play was the product of a wound left by his university education, by his inability to become a scholar of classical literature. That he’d now ruined his civil service career and turned his life into the consequence of common and ineludible disappointments of early adulthood—dissatisfaction with his teachers, frustration with his talent, with the outcome of his education—which were all hurts he should have relinquished but couldn’t, well, this made him feel ever more pathetic. He had allowed himself to be disfigured by the experience of failure. In response Ian Asquith, fond of alcohol, began to drink heavily.