She rested her head on his shoulder and didn’t reply, because she didn’t wish to articulate her thoughts, didn’t wish to reflect upon the life she might have had with Daniel, the life she’d felt compelled to let go, and it wasn’t exactly that she regretted the years she’d spent being married to Michael – how could she, when they’d made such a life together and Thea and Stella, those glorious girls, were the result of their union? It was more that when she considered Daniel as a flesh-and-blood possibility, she experienced a kind of unease that came from knowing she would be happier still with him, happier than she’d been with Michael, her loving husband, their daughters’ loving father. She hadn’t fully realised, until she saw Dan again, that there was a different kind of love waiting for her, and that, in some essential, deep-seated way, it completed her. She knew this. She did. He’d turned up in Adelaide and reduced her to a romantic cliché, made her heart race and her spirits soar, and when she looked into his eyes she recognised a kindred soul, her Sheffield boy, and it wasn’t just nostalgia, although that was part of it too; but no, it wasn’t just nostalgia: it was an absolute certainty that this was meant to be, that the stars were aligned when she and Dan were together. She considered this now, and it made her melancholy, made her face the reality of this life she hadn’t lived, which was presented to her now as a possibility for the future, amid all the complications and commitments of her real world, her chosen path, her beloved family. Pain and joy, joy and pain, promised in equal measure, indivisible.

They drank their water, and leaned together, and for a while they were silent, alone with their thoughts, then he said, ‘So, talk to me about Sheila,’ and Ali told him about Catherine’s oldest friend, who had sailed to Australia on an assisted passage and made a new life for herself here just as the sixties tipped over into the seventies. ‘Did you miss her, when she left?’ Dan asked, and Ali said no, not at all, because she hadn’t known her; Sheila used to live in Liverpool, but she’d written to Catherine after she emigrated, brilliant, dazzling letters, full of incident and sunshine.

‘Catherine didn’t care about Sheila by then, but Sheila kept writing because she didn’t know what Catherine was like, and she hoped she would follow her out there, to Elizabeth, because she was all evangelical about it.’

‘Elizabeth?’

‘It’s where she used to live when she first came. It’s north of Adelaide. There was industry there, and lots of northerners migrated to work at the car plant.’