But Michael had drawn her in, with his jaunty Aussie ways and stories of the bush. He made his boyhood adventures on the family sheep station sound like the kid’s in Skippy. Alison had loved that show, because somewhere in the same parched landscape lived Sheila, the lady who’d written the letters to Catherine, and now, in Spain, she had Michael telling her that if Sheila still lived in Elizabeth, he could drive her there from Adelaide in no time, half an hour, forty minutes max, and he’d gladly do it, gladly, then he’d bring her back to the city, to his beautiful North Adelaide home, and they’d drink daiquiris on the verandah, and watch the cockatoos pick plums from the trees. She found this a fantastical proposition, sparkling with allure, but Michael kept saying, ‘It’s not fantasy, it’s not fiction, it’s Adelaide life, there for the taking.’

They’d stayed together, of course, in Spain. They’d walked the remaining 540-odd kilometres of the Camino trail, and she’d slept with him in his pre-booked hostels, and – occasionally – talked him into sleeping outside, to be stirred at dawn by the clank of bells as goats on their way to be milked slid down stony paths on a dry and fragrant hillside. In Santiago, Michael had queued with a couple of hundred fellow pilgrims, waiting for the cathedral authorities to issue him with his certificate of completion, while Alison, who felt she didn’t qualify and anyway couldn’t see the point of paperwork to prove what they’d done, hung back and waited for him, sitting on the edge of a fountain in Platerías Square. The cold water on her hot feet was everything she needed in the world, but anyway an old Spanish lady had blessed her with a torrent of Galician prayer and a dry, papery kiss to the forehead.