‘Sheila, why are we talking about this?’

‘Because we never have, and there’s something on my mind. When you came to see me all those years ago in Elizabeth, and I didn’t know that you didn’t know Catherine had died, and I just blurted it out like a fool – well, you were like stone, you didn’t even cry, and I wish I’d—’

‘Sheila, please. We were talking about Stella.’

‘There must still be a lot of unshed grief there …’

‘No,’ Ali said with a firm authority that brought the older woman to a sharp halt. Sheila knew nothing, nothing, about Ali’s life in Attercliffe, the fear and the shame, the dread of scandal, the horror that she might be pitied, the endless efforts at damage limitation that were part of the daily routine. ‘No, there isn’t a lot of unshed grief, and we’re going to fall out, Sheila, if you keep pushing me on this. I’m sorry to snap, but you know nothing about it. Catherine was an extremely sick woman who held life very cheap.’

Sheila, not in the least offended, gazed at Ali with a most unwelcome empathy; then, in a portentous tone that made her heart sink further, she said, ‘Well, anyway, I’d like to say one thing more, and it’s this. I let you down very badly when you first came to Australia.’

‘No, I’m not having that,’ Ali said, thinking: This is all so long ago, so far away. ‘I had Michael by then, we came to see you together, remember?’

But Sheila wasn’t listening. ‘I was poor Catherine’s oldest friend,’ she said. ‘And that gave me a kind of responsibility towards you, but I was nearly crazy with my own unhappiness at the time.’

‘Listen, Sheila,’ Ali said. ‘If there’s one thing Catherine taught me, it was to take care of myself. I didn’t come to you looking for help, we were just visiting.’ She had no wish to be dragged backwards into the distant turmoil of Sheila’s unhappy marriage, or the whys and wherefores of Catherine’s death, the details of which had travelled to Sheila via her own mother, back in Liverpool. And no, Ali thought, she hadn’t cried when Sheila broke the news, she’d only thought thank God that’s over, because Peter would be free.