‘She asked me to,’ said Pearly. He had hoped he wouldn’t have to tell his wife that, but once into the whole thing he was determined not to lie. ‘That’s the odd part. She really wanted you to know. I owed her that at least.’

‘I think I’d rather not have been told,’ said Helen. ‘It’s spoilt your third term for me, that’s for sure. No matter what you achieve it will have this behind it.’ She used the cloth in her hand to clean the two place mats, wiping them with abstracted care.

‘I’ll just have to make the best job of being mayor that I can,’ said Pearly. ‘That’s all I can do to make up for anything. Jesus, I haven’t murdered anyone, and Deidre’s no angel. A lot of people would think she got what she deserved.’

‘An anonymous letter’s a coward’s way.’

‘I thought it was easier for everybody. It gave her options.’

Helen regarded him with steady deliberation, her subtle expression one of wry disbelief. She looked straight into Pearly’s eyes for what seemed to him a long time. ‘And anyway,’ she said finally, ‘what she does isn’t for you to judge. No business whatsoever of yours. You’re not God, Pearly.’

Pearly felt a fierce and peculiar anger, and, recognising it as anger against himself, he left Helen and went onto the patio, sat on a cushioned deckchair next to the covered barbecue they rarely used. How quickly things can change: all going along to complacent plan and then abruptly erupting. His unthinking stupidity with Gumbo, and then the consequences of the letter to Deidre Utterspan. ‘Christ, Pearly,’ he said quietly, ‘you haven’t been getting it right. Not right at all.’ Mean, Helen had called him, and selfish. He didn’t like that. It hurt more because it was true. The evening sun showed his neat section at its best, but that was no comfort to him. He’d stuffed up. Pearly wasn’t accustomed to stuffing up. It was galling to admit his deficiencies, his self-serving pettiness, the fraudulent guise of fair dealing. ‘Fuck,’ he said to the barbecue and the tended colours of the garden, the blaze of evening sun above the hills. If he’d gone to the Sandersons’ place in Montgomery Street just a couple of minutes earlier or later, he wouldn’t have seen Deidre entering the house next door. If Gumbo had taken off his socks before tackling the climbing rope, there wouldn’t have been a fall. Maybe he could blame everything on chance. Pearly’s nature would have remained the same, however, just as it was as he sat on the patio in summer warmth, and it was his reluctant confrontation of aspects of himself that was the most painful thing of all. He found himself rocking slightly, back and forward, as an unconscious physical release of unhappiness.