Beatriz still helped clean the house and still cooked for the family. She’d been a godsend to Ali when the babies came, soothing them to sleep with Portuguese lullabies, teaching them the words when they were older, baking pães de ló and pastéis de nata for their birthday teas, just as she had for Michael and his two brothers, a generation earlier. She would answer the phone – if no one managed to beat her to it – by saying, grandly, ‘McCormack residence, who is calling?’ which filled Ali with mortified horror every time she heard it. She was, no one could really deny it, a living relic of Margaret McCormack’s pretentions and grandiosity, but Beatriz was wholly cherished, she belonged here, and, in a thousand different ways, despite her left-leaning soul and working-class roots that ran all the way through the globe back to Attercliffe, Ali depended on her. She didn’t know that Beatriz had intended this – that she’d looked at Ali when Michael first brought her here, an uncertain girl in a new country, and thought: Now there’s a child who needs a mother. She’d also understood, with equal certainty, that Margaret McCormack wasn’t the woman to fill those shoes, so she’d stepped into them herself, and begun to look after Ali from the day she arrived, so that before long, Ali loved Beatriz unreservedly, and Beatriz loved Ali, not as much as she loved Michael and his brothers, but still with a stern, protective passion. She’d watched over her, even when Ali was unaware of it; watched to be sure she always had what she needed. Beatriz understood the McCormacks: knew them far better than she knew her own distant family, those cousins and nephews and nieces in Porto, who wouldn’t recognise her now if she sat next to them on a bus. She knew that James, the late, great McCormack patriarch, had had a string of mistresses, at least three of whom had attended his funeral, and that Margaret’s tyranny had often been a disguise for her insecurity, her shattered self-esteem. Beatriz knew, too, that Michael, the eldest of three boys, the great success of the family, the paediatrician with healing hands and wholesome good looks, could be far too set on getting his own way. Ali had still been Alison when she first arrived here with him in North Adelaide, but Michael, with that Australian compulsion to abbreviate, simply kept calling her Ali until everyone else did; until that’s what she called herself. Beatriz once asked her, ‘Do you prefer Ali to Alison?’ and she’d said, ‘I think so. I know Michael does.’ And yet, Beatriz had thought, Michael is always Michael – never Mike, never Mick.