‘We’ll pay top dollar. We’ll splash out.’

‘We can stay the whole weekend.’

‘Maybe three days?’

‘The first day we’ll go to the concert. The second day we spend in bed. The third: we’ll visit the stores and buy you a clarinet. I like the thought of you playing music again.’

‘I don’t know, sweetheart. What I’m good at is kitchen work.’

‘Let’s open a restaurant in the city near the harbour.’

‘A place where people go before the theatre. Steaks and chicken and seafood. With a main dining room downstairs and more private eating rooms upstairs.’

‘And we’ll live on the third floor of the building.’

‘Parquet floors and columns and red tablecloths. Like the places I knew in Chicago.’

‘We’ll have two children.’

Lucky said: ‘What do you think of having three or four?’

The night of the Benny Goodman concert, Lucky and Valia checked into a hotel in Paddington, and once inside the room they soon jumped on each other and made love and came to rest not entirely unclothed on the floor of their room, the boiling orange bedclothes undisturbed. They dressed for the concert: Valia loaded her hair into a bun and tied it with white ribbon; out of the bag came a black blouse and a long striped skirt. Lucky wore a Norfolk jacket, a brown bow tie and duck canvas trousers—he appeared thrown together. They took a tram to Park Street and waited a long time to cross George Street; then inside the theatre and up a dark staircase. Red portraits of colonial figures hung on the high, white walls. Lucky and Valia walked along the hallway and down a second staircase of wrought iron, and up another set of stairs and kept walking until they could hear no voices. Circular rugs lay on the marble floor. Valia rose up another set of stairs with a coil of anticipation around her spine. They were lost. Valia was angry; she felt ridiculous, walking one direction when she could have walked down another corridor, and they hadn’t seen another person, no one, and couldn’t ask the way. The implication that came to mind, that she didn’t belong in this place, that she was only a cafe girl, brought her nerves right up to the surface, and her skirt started to irritate her—the cloth too stiff. At this point Valia slipped a few metres ahead of Lucky, moving fast, as she did in the cafe, as if about to break into a run. She heard voices, and as she turned a corner she saw them, a crowd of maybe three dozen people in black jackets, Benny Goodman surely among them.