‘I love what you did to your hair. Kind of punky,’ Carol says, reaching up to touch a strand and thinking better of it.

Isla wishes her sober self could return the compliment. ‘Thanks,’ she says, stiffly.

‘I can’t believe you’re really single. Are you?’

‘I broke up with someone. A few months back.’

‘Did he mess you around?’

‘He wasn’t good for me.’ The lie is like metal against her teeth. ‘I wanted kids and he didn’t,’ she says, which is at least partly true. He didn’t want kids with me, would have been closer to the whole truth. He didn’t want kids with me because I was a train wreck.

Carol is pouting at her sympathetically. ‘Time to come home?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘I know your mum and dad would love to have you closer.’

‘I don’t think so, Carol.’

A glass breaks on the patio outside and someone swears and then apologises. Farther away, a woman laughs a high, shrieking laugh. You are awful, the woman says. Isla moves to get the dustpan and brush from the cupboard, but Carol is holding her hands.

‘You got a dustpan and brush?’ Douglas Blunt joins them in the kitchen, holding the fractured stem of a wineglass. ‘We had a breakage.’

Isla leaves Carol and Doug in the kitchen as she sweeps up the glass. She takes her time over it, brushing every last shard into the pan, along with some cigarette ash and a few stray pine nuts from the salad. In the kitchen she hears Doug telling Carol that Isla sounds like a stuck-up Pom with a rod up her arse. He has the sort of voice that carries.

‘I didn’t go much on the lamb,’ Doug says. ‘Some sort of fancy marinade.’

When she looks up from the dustpan, Isla sees her brother standing by the barbecue with the other men. She didn’t notice him arrive. He’s holding a bottle of beer, talking to Roger Walker. Their dad is standing next to Roger, at the edge of the conversation, looking down at his feet. Scott looks older today, without his suit and tie. The weekend-wear hugs his belly. Somehow she thought he would have aged better, what with the money he makes, the size of his house in Bellevue Hill. He earns a living buying up land and building houses bigger than the one he grew up in, with pools in their yards and open-plan kitchen-diners. He was one of the first to predict that people would start moving back into the city from the western suburbs; that the harbour and the coast would skyrocket. Still better value than London, he’d insisted yesterday, over coffee. The apartment on Sinclair Road had shrunk in her mind as she’d described it to him.

She nods at Scott as she stands and he raises a hand. Ruby, his wife, is holding court over at the drinks table, pouring champagne. Isla wonders again if one drink would be such a big deal. Just to go and join in the toast, to celebrate her dad’s birthday.