It came to him suddenly as he stood there — the reason he’d felt attracted to Charlotte on first meeting. He hadn’t clicked to it before. She reminded him of Mary Usher, who was in his stage three geography class at Otago and was his lover for four and a half weeks before switching her affections to a lecturer in the chemistry department. The same dark, heavy hair, the same legs, but obviously not the same inclination that had led Mary to lie day and night with Pearly beneath four army blankets in his sordid flat, with frost glistening on the Dunedin roofs outside. Pearly had missed so many rugby practices that he’d almost lost his place in the varsity side, but those four and a half winter weeks were worth whole summers with his feet on the ground.

He stood so long silent in the office doorway that Kylie was curious. ‘Has she forgotten to do something?’ she asked.

‘No,’ said Pearly. ‘It’s virtually all done. She’s got a good deal, I think. She reminded me of someone I knew years ago, and I’ve just twigged.’

‘She works in the florist shop by the ANZ bank.’

‘That’s right,’ said Pearly. Maybe some day he might happen to go in there and see her; maybe he’d just catch a glimpse of her passing in the street. He turned back to his desk and the routine job of selling properties. His left knee began its familiar ache, and he massaged it through the material of his trousers. He supposed that somewhere in the world Mary Usher was still alive, having raised a brood of budding chemists. He wished her well and wondered if she ever thought of him, ever recalled life naked beneath four army blankets in defiance of the white winter gathered outside the window.

Pearly was cheerful again by the time he returned home, but after he’d parked the car and was about to go into the house he noticed a large bird splatter high on the pale roughcast above the door and difficult to reach. Its spread indicated a flight path trending west to east. ‘Bugger, bugger,’ he said. Pearly considered himself a selected victim for such occurrences. No matter how busy God is, he finds time to put a dead blowfly behind the china cabinet or arrange a bird strike — pale on a dark background, dark on a light one. ‘It’s just happened,’ Pearly complained when he was inside. ‘I would’ve noticed it this morning.’

‘You can get the hose out,’ said Helen.

‘There’s always something. I won’t be able to reach it without the extension window brush.’

‘It’s not the end of the world.’

‘And it’s tonight I said I’d go to the League of Mothers fundraiser for Somalian orphans. That’ll be a bundle of laughs.’