They were right, I agreed with them, and I appreciated their frankness. I looked at the scenes they pointed to and tried to develop Sal along the lines they suggested. I extended some of her scenes. I gave her more dialogue. I worked out what she looked like, what she wore—the ragged fringe on her shawl, the patched bonnet. I gave her likes and dislikes, had her plant geraniums and yearn for nice teacups.

It all helped. But when I gave the book to its publisher, Michael Heyward, for the first time, in March 2004, Sal still wasn’t working. I didn’t know what else to do.

All my previous novels had had fine editors who’d suggested changes for the sake of pace, consistency or clarity and caught my errors of fact, grammar and punctuation. The publishers who employed them had reassured me that the books needed only ‘a light edit’ and had scheduled accordingly. I’d enjoyed working with those editors and valued all that they’d added.

But for one novel—Dark Places—I’d had a session with the publisher Hilary McPhee, then at Macmillan. We met only once, and hardly looked at the text. Instead we’d had a conversation that allowed me to see what sort of thing the book was and what it was doing, and what changes could be made to allow it to be more itself.

That experience told me what I’d always suspected: that an editor and a writer could together do something more than a ‘light edit’. I was hoping to find that again with my new publisher.

Michael told me he was doing a ‘broad-brush read-through’. Then in June 2004 we got together across my agent’s dining-room table and did what he called ‘turning the pages’.

I hadn’t worked with Michael before. The first surprise was how little he’d written on the manuscript. Like Hilary with Dark Places, Michael hadn’t burrowed into the words—that would come later in rigorous detail—but into the meaning of the book and its characters.

We turned quickly through as far as page 78, where Thornhill and Sal have recently arrived in Sydney. On this page he’d written ‘Sal has changed’. He explained what he meant. The Sal we meet in London is happy, tender, playful, but as soon as she arrives in Sydney she’s moody, grumpy, a nag. Thornhill notices it too: