Michael was talking about work, staff issues, an incompetent registrar. She half listened to him, and to the cockatoos bickering their way towards bedtime, to the sprinkler hiss on the parched summer lawn, to the thrum and chirrup of grasshoppers in the shrubs. This was certainly a kind of heaven, but she wondered now if in fact she’d always belonged elsewhere? Another life, that other world, where January meant not sultry heat but rain and sleet, and the Attercliffe bus throwing arcs of icy brown water at unwary pedestrians, and her mother, who always plunged into a hating mood after Christmas, doing anything, anything, for another drink. In Sheffield, in 1979, heaven had been Daniel’s bedroom, Daniel’s music, and the urgent, consuming heat of his body alongside her own. But her sanctuary then, her place of complete safety, had been the cloistered quiet of Bill Lawrence’s pigeon loft, where he’d one day placed a quivering bird into her careful, cupped hands and the anxious little heartbeat in its breast had made Alison feel – just for that short while – invincible.

Cass said it was time she was invited to Lismore Creek, and since Michael would never ask her, she thought Ali should. Ali spluttered with laughter and spilled some of her wine.

‘What!’ Cass said. ‘What’s funny?’

‘You.’ Ali wiped the table ineffectually with a beer mat. ‘You, proposing a visit to the land of Hoofs and Horns. You can’t get a skinny latte at Lismore, you know.’

‘Hey, I was a girl guide, y’know, I can rough it, and I still think it’s a scandal you haven’t taken me,’ Cass said.

‘Well, I hardly ever go myself. And, well …’ She hesitated, thinking about it.

‘And, well, it’s Michael’s, not yours?’

‘Kind of, yeah.’ It was true, and a little awkward, somehow. Lismore Creek was part and parcel of the family legend, a proud outward sign of their history and status, and Ali never felt more like a Connor and less like a McCormack than when she was there. To take Cass up to Lismore, without Michael, at her own invitation? Well, it seemed unlikely.