Reading about the fabrication was an unbearably personal experience for Emily. His life was a tragedy, she knew that. But what exactly, she’d wondered, did his life look like? What was lost? And now, after decades, it felt like an intrusion to see her father’s secret laid out like this. Was the fabrication a response to some disappointment? What did disgrace do to him? Ian’s rogue writing, once exposed, must have crushed him. His civil service career was over. People likely avoided him. Embarrassment, isolation. Here, too, was Emily’s secret side: a strand of kinship between them. Asquith was a fraud, and Emily felt like an imposter herself, first in her family (about whom Michael used to say: You fell from a different tree, didn’t you?) and then in her marriage. As a writer, from her earliest articles, she felt like an imposter in typical ways: that an idea for an article or short story was fraudulent, or unimportant or, if it were important, that she wasn’t the writer for the job. Her ambition to write about Lucky’s for the Great Magazine was, in truth, born out of Emily’s old sorrow, not purely an ambition to tell the story of the rise and fall of these restaurants.

Emily sat for a while at a carrel desk in the basement. Her mind didn’t strain to summon up an image of her father’s body. Emily saw that painting of Lucky’s restaurant. Saw herself as a young woman, before a New Year’s Eve party, fixing her hair in the mirror. You’re not an imposter, Emily told herself now. Your marriage didn’t work out the way you hoped, that’s all. And many writers feel like frauds, a little. How can they not? They’re transforming amorphous life into black-and-white lines and curls. She told her anxious mind the following: You worry about me failing, you want to avoid disappointment, but you’re making me feel like I’ve failed when I’ve barely started a task. And what is more fucking fraudulent than that?

3.

On Glebe Point Road, as Lucky slowed down to peer inside a hotpot restaurant, Emily told him she had spent yesterday at the university library. She read about her father.

‘You keep mentioning him,’ said Lucky. ‘I’m curious about the guy.’

‘At the end of the war, Dad fabricated an ancient Greek play. The fraud was exposed and he lost his job in Sydney.’

‘Funny thing to do. Must have been a mad philhellene.’

‘He must have had some point to prove,’ Emily said.

‘Maybe he felt he could only succeed if he became someone else. How do you think the fraud, getting caught, affected your father?’

‘I don’t know how it changed him—if it changed him at all. He took his own life when I was a girl.’