As Pearly drove to his next appointment, he was thinking of Deidre Utterspan, not real estate. He wondered if she was really having it off with Sanderson’s neighbour, and he felt a condescending pity for his deputy. Philip with his earnest concern for pest-free reserves and dairy run-off, while his wife, after a stirring anti-fluoridation meeting, or an exhibition of installation art, was off shagging herself silly in Montgomery Street. She wasn’t an especially good-looking woman, nor did she act, or dress, provocatively, and Pearly was surprised by the revelation of her double life. Like many men, he assumed that sexual drive in women was commensurate with their attractiveness. Why that should be so when it didn’t apply to his own sex, he never thought to consider.

Pearly was well aware of the aberrations that love and lust could cause in even the most logical and composed personalities. Love has extreme persuasion but is not a sensible emotion. It may provide sublime happiness or occasion a total collapse of an ordered life. Perhaps both in turn, even simultaneously. The coach of Pearly’s first club team had been a solicitor with a personal life outwardly irreproachable: a wife notable for gaiety and as a bridge player, two teenage daughters successful in almost everything they attempted, a holiday home in Wanaka, and a record of giving time to a free legal clinic for those who couldn’t afford a lawyer’s advice. He left all of it to disappear to Sydney with a twenty-six-year-old journalist who had the body of a cheerleader. Pearly had met him in the street the day before he left, and the man was a stranger to him, jittery and with forced bonhomie, eyes distraught with the enormity of his decision. He was a man possessed, and although Pearly never saw him again, he never forgot the evident pain and confusion of that possession.