Val served the dinner with one hand but felt too sick to eat. Vomit rose in her throat, and her wrist throbbed with a sickening pain that radiated up her arm into her neck.

At the hospital, Tony was every inch the loving husband, joking with the nurses about Val’s clumsiness. She stayed tight-lipped but couldn’t stop shaking for hours afterward.

Her wrist set a little wonky, with a lump protruding, and it would always be weak on that side, unreliable for carrying heavy weights. But the main side-effect was that she became scared of Tony; properly scared. If he could deliberately break her wrist, what else was he capable of?

There had been plenty more slaps and pinches, kicks and shoves in the years since then, but he hadn’t broken any more bones; he didn’t need to, because the threat hung over her. If she did as he said, he was kind. They had holidays on the Gold Coast, he bought jewelry on her birthday and their wedding anniversary, they liked the same TV programs. It wasn’t all bad, but she never knew when some insignificant incident would trigger the reemergence of his angry alter ego. And she was desperate to stop that happening.

* * *

Val decided to wear her only suit for the opening of the Opera House. It was a Jackie Kennedy–style pencil skirt and box jacket in pale blue seersucker trimmed with white braid. She’d wear a pearl necklace too, so the Queen’s aides would consider her the right sort of person for the monarch to approach; they weren’t to know the pearls were fake. Of course Tony would never have let her attend the royal event, but in the seventeen years that had passed since he broke her wrist, she had developed ways of rebelling against his control. It wasn’t that the fear had lessened; she had simply gotten better at outwitting him.

He made her list all her expenditures in a lined accounts book that he checked every Sunday evening, and woe betide her if he thought she had wasted a cent; but she had found ways of siphoning off small amounts here and there, by shopping in markets that didn’t give receipts and inflating the totals. She kept the money hidden in a box on a tiny shelf between the back of her dressing table and the bedroom wall, and smiled to herself each time she was able to add a couple of dollars.

In another bid for independence, she often rushed through the chores so she could slip out for coffee with her friend Peggy. If Tony rang while she was out, she’d act puzzled. “I must have been at the store,” she’d say, or “Maybe I had the vacuum cleaner on.”