Then Alison and Michael had journeyed together, up through southern France and into Italy. For three weeks, they harvested grapes in a vineyard in Umbria, then travelled on down through the length of the boot to Puglia. She acquired a rucksack of her own, and new clothes: a gauzy pink cotton dress, a green silk shirt, a white linen skirt, blue espadrilles. Michael bought these items for her, pleaded – when she resisted – to be allowed to indulge her, and she had to admit it was pleasant to submit, after so many months of scraping by on so little. Michael was besotted. Bewitched. He, who had everything, wanted only Alison Connor. At Gargano he proposed, but it was a whole week later, in the white baroque city of Lecce, that she said yes. In Ostuni, Michael’s money having eased their passage through municipal bureaucracy, they were married by the registrar before witnesses who didn’t know them, and on the same day they sailed from Brindisi to Kefalonia, from where they island-hopped for another month, before making the long, long way back to Adelaide, Mr and Mrs McCormack, Michael and Alison, Michael and Ali.

She’d had nothing to lose, back then; nothing but her absolute freedom, and she’d placed no great value upon that. Freedom had been born of necessity, in Alison’s case, and she’d known she could learn to love this man, because he loved her so much, and such devotion, she’d felt, ought to be rewarded. She had loved him. She did love him. Yes, she’d lost something of herself over the years, but perhaps he had too, perhaps it was a condition of a long marriage that part of one’s spirit must be sacrificed, in exchange for material comfort, children, companionship. Certainly, at some point soon after her arrival in Adelaide, she’d found herself conceding that the McCormack way was the only way; as a united front, they were irresistible, and irrefutable. Alison Connor was enveloped by them, she was claimed by the clan, and it was comforting, in so many ways, to succumb.

She glanced up at Michael, now, across the kitchen. He’d said sorry so easily, so glibly, for being high-handed and condescending, and was idly leafing through The Advertiser, perfectly satisfied with his behaviour. He didn’t know that his world was unsteady, that his word wasn’t always law, that Stella was upstairs looking at flights to Rome. He didn’t know that Ali, from this very room, had just sent a song to Dan Lawrence: the Arctic Monkeys, ‘Do I Wanna Know?’, a song Michael wouldn’t know, a Sheffield sound, from Sheffield lads.