It was eight months now since she and Thomas had sailed out of Liverpool on their wedding day aboard The Hurricane in search of a new life. It had excited them both, the idea of starting from nothing. They’d liked the razed, empty look of everything on the map, the vast unpunctuated distances, and at the beginning of it all she hadn’t minded that the only company was the sound of the wind and the rain and the crackle of the dry grass in the sunshine. At the beginning of it all, she hadn’t minded the quiet.

She hadn’t minded that when they’d arrived in the town they’d found nothing more than a single dusty street. No railway station and no church, only an empty hotel and a draper, a dry goods store that doubled as a doctor’s surgery, a smithy and a pen for market day. She hadn’t minded that when they’d ridden out twelve miles into the parched country beyond the town they’d found rocks and gum trees and small coarse bushes and the biggest sky she’d ever seen and in the middle of it all their own patch of ground and low, fallen-down house. She hadn’t minded that there weren’t other farms nearby, other wives. She hadn’t minded that there was no one but Henry Fowler, who lived six miles off and had no wife. No, she hadn’t minded any of it and wouldn’t now, she was sure, if things with Tom were not as they were.

Now she wished there was another wife somewhere not too far away. Someone she might by this time have come to consider as a friend; someone she might be able to bring herself to tell. But there was no such person. There was her married sister in Poole who she could write to, but what good would that do, when it might be a year before a reply came? A year was an eternity; she didn’t think she could last a year, and even then, she wasn’t really sure she could get the thing down on paper in the first place.

Once, a month ago, when she and Tom had gone into town and he was off buying nails, she’d got as far as the black varnished door of the doctor’s consulting room in the dry goods store. She’d stood there outside it, gripping her purse, listening to the low murmur of a woman’s voice on the other side of the door and she’d tried to imagine her own voice in there in its place and she couldn’t. She just couldn’t. It was an impossible thing for her to do. What if the doctor said he had to speak to Thomas? What then?