She was regretting her decision to wear the blue silk gown. It was too similar to Blanche Rothe’s peacock blue brocaded satin, though they were seated some distance apart and her own gown had a tulle-sheathed bodice whereas Blanche’s was trimmed with silver embroidery and grey chiffon. But the shade of blue was uncanny, as though they had gone to the same dressmaker—which they had—though who was there at the table who would notice it? None of the gentleman, and Cecily Pyke had shown only a glancing interest in her appearance even before the advent of motherhood; now it was debatable whether she knew which decade she was in. And Blanche herself, a beauty at seventeen and still a beauty almost three decades later, who had been born into great wealth and married into greater wealth and found all things amusing, would not care a jot. But still Eleanor regretted her decision.

The discussion had moved on.

‘If they had only built the City Loop back in the seventies when it was really needed, when all the other railways were being built, we would not now be faced with this impossible dilemma,’ said Henry Rothe, who had found himself briefly Minister for Public Works a year or two back and so talked of the railways.

Opposite him Blanche Rothe, in peacock blue, took a neat little bite from a square of toast and caught Eleanor’s eye as though they shared a joke.

What was the impossible dilemma? Eleanor wondered. She sat back in her chair feeling the energy of a few moments earlier drain from her. What was the joke she shared with Blanche?

‘But my dear Rothe, there was no money in it,’ said Booker-Reid in his bored way. ‘Why build a railway underground at unimaginable expense and to the general disgruntlement of every George Street storekeeper and every city tram operator when you can make an absolute fortune building a railway—or promising to build a railway, at any rate—in an area far outside of the city in which one (or one’s brother or one’s wife’s brother) happens to hold a vast, untapped parcel of land? It is economics of the most basic kind.’

‘A somewhat cynical view of our city’s public works,’ observed Fraser Pyke, the idealist pastoralist.

‘Cynical—yet utterly true. We lived through it, did we not, Dunlevy? Came in at the tail end, anyhow. And your father benefitted from the policy greatly, did he not?’

Alasdair started slightly as though he had not been paying attention to the discussion, and now a frown shadowed his face. ‘The seventies was a boom time, Charles. Anyone who owned land did well out it.’