This house was very fine: a stately bluestone mansion, Michael’s inheritance. They were already husband and wife when he first brought her here to meet his family, but even so she had been promptly – and somewhat coldly – billeted by his mother in one of the spare bedrooms, and only after a full twelve months of married life did she permit them to openly share a room, and a double bed. Margaret McCormack had been a force of nature, an impossible, indomitable, high-handed martinet of a woman who believed her son had been hoodwinked by Ali, because after all, what did the girl have to offer? Margaret saw no cachet in the English accent, was unmoved by Ali’s obvious beauty, and was maddened almost beyond endurance that the young woman quickly found herself a job behind a bar in a pub on Hutt Street. But the young couple toughed it out, and Michael told Ali that his mother would love her in the end, if they just played by her rules when they were in the house. Anyway, he said, this house was a treasure: why pay rent somewhere inferior, when they had no money as it was? So, for a year, Michael – an adult, a medic, a married man – crept across the expansive Turkish rug on the first-floor landing to find Ali, awake in her chastely single bed, waiting for him. Hard to imagine, if you’d never met Margaret, that such a situation could go unchallenged, but they perfected the art of silent sex, and Margaret – who must have known what was going on, because only a fool could not have known, and she was no fool – seemed satisfied that her supremacy remained undiminished. A year after she arrived, to the very day, Ali had gone upstairs to find the single bed stripped of linen, and her belongings – clothes, toiletries, cosmetics – gone. Margaret, behind her on the landing, had said, ‘Your things are in Michael’s room. I had Beatriz move them while you were out. No need to thank her, she’s more than adequately paid. You may, however, thank me.’

Now, of course, Margaret was long gone, but Beatriz was still here and she was sitting at the counter shelling peas when Ali walked into the kitchen. The old lady had her long grey hair piled into its habitual turban, and she wore a quaint, outdated housecoat, bright florals, gold buttons, to keep her clothes clean. Her fingers worked expertly at the pods and her broad, open face creased into an affectionate smile when she saw Ali.

‘Ali, my girl,’ she said. She held out an unpodded shell, and Ali took it, cracked it open, and tipped the row of peas into her mouth. Beatriz looked at her with love.

‘I’m not here for long,’ Ali said through the peas. ‘I have to go up to Collinswood, to the studios.’