‘And that’s why you went to Hong Kong? So you could fly on, to see her?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I mean, there was a festival, I was working, but yes, that’s why I went.’

He’d expected a storm, but that came later, and instead it remained very, very quiet in the bedroom, although she started to cry, and she cried steadily for a long time, but she barely made a sound. He couldn’t comfort her, or reassure her, because she wouldn’t let him touch her, wouldn’t speak to him, wouldn’t meet his eyes. She closed him out entirely from her grief and he had no idea what to do. He had entirely changed the colour and shape of their existence, and he wished beyond wishing that he’d kept her in the dark. The truth was overrated: no benefit to either of them now.

26

ADELAIDE,
7 JULY 2013

In the winter months, this attractive, amenable city could be so damned dreary, thought Ali: cold, wet, windy and oddly inhospitable. In the summer and early autumn there were festivals – books, music, drama – and picnics on the beach, barbecues in back yards. But nobody at all – nobody in the McCormacks’ orbit, anyway – seemed to entertain in the long drag of winter weeks; instead they succumbed to a sort of pinch-mouthed reclusiveness, and her spirit rebelled against it, although Michael considered this a new development. This time last year – before Dan, he meant, although he didn’t say so – she was perfectly content to sit out the winter like everyone else, by drawing the curtains, watching some television, writing for long hours at her desk, eating Beatriz’s rabbit stew, and waiting for the sun to shine.

‘I just don’t see why everyone needs to bloody well hibernate,’ Ali said, hating the world and therefore doing what she could to make it worse. She was outside, on her knees, with her arm down an access pipe, clearing a blockage of rotted leaves from a storm drain. She slapped each new handful down on the flagstones with furious energy. The smell, the slime: they combined to represent her mood, because in the struggle to regain their marital equilibrium, Ali and Michael took turns at being angry. Right now, Ali had picked up the gauntlet. ‘God forbid we should have any fun. I suggest getting some friends round, filling the dining table for once, and you react like I just proposed a wife-swapping party. It’s so bloody dull, Michael.’

He stood watching her, silent and stolid.

‘You realise, don’t you, that we’re living the same life your parents lived, and their parents before them?’