The trip to his home was a well-known trail, as indeed were almost all the streets of the town. Houses that he’d sold, or failed to sell, homes in which he had been a dinner party guest, places that were overlaid with his memories of more than fifty years. The tuck shop opposite the high school that had sold pies with yellow pastry and given money back for fizz bottles. The chestnut tree close by where he used to wait, fooling with mates, for the school bus that took him home to the farm. There was still the two-storeyed wooden house in Eggles Street where a woman had murdered her drunken husband with a garden spade, and the dairy that used to be a barber’s shop run by McCallister who won the MC in the war. He’d been the honorary president of the Old Boys’ Rugby Club, and Pearly had gone to his funeral years ago with other members as a sign of respect.

Surely Pearly had made a success of his life, with a good marriage, a thriving business, a leading position in the town, but as he drove he wondered how different things would have been if he had chosen to break with the past and go somewhere else. So many places of which he knew nothing, so many opportunities to which he’d been oblivious. There was no answer possible to such speculation, and Pearly was realistic enough to be grateful for what he’d achieved. He would go back to Helen with pleasure enough, later he would work in his study on whichever was more urgently required for the next day — realty business matters or municipal ones. Pearly believed that the way to keep on top of things was to prioritise. Clear the undergrowth, he liked to say. Keep busy, keep tap dancing on the ice, keep looking ahead.

THREE