He stole down the side of the house where an overgrown path led into the garden at the rear. Here he negotiated the bougainvillea and the frangipanis that grew unchecked and through whose ghostly branches he could hardly make out the house above him. Here were her rooms, or he took them to be, the bay window and little French balcony, and at neither door nor window was the curtain drawn. And no light at all from inside. She was not there, it was as clear as the moon in this cloudless night, but still he would not admit his defeat, stooping down and finding a stone and hurling it, like a love-stricken schoolboy, at her window. It bounced off the window and he waited, breathless, but no light went on, no door or window opened. The apartment remained in darkness and silence. He stooped again, but a light went on at another window, not hers, and a man appeared, some object—a firearm, perhaps—in his hand.

Alasdair fled, stumbling and righting himself and stumbling again. The house did not want to let him go, reaching out its branches and its roots and its shadows and trapping him, but finally he escaped, running out into the street and standing there, in the middle of the road, like a drunken man who has lost all that he valued.

But a cab came by at last and he flagged it down and got in.

Three weeks shy of the shortest day of the year and the sun did not make an appearance the next morning until the church clocks had struck seven. Those final minutes before dawn put a dew on the lawns of the houses in Elizabeth Bay. By a quarter past the sun had warmed the rocks on the little bay and most of the dew had gone. A host of seasonally confused currawongs, magpies and butcherbirds, believing spring to have come early, now set up such a racket that it was futile attempting to remain another minute in bed.

Eleanor got up. She dressed quickly, choosing a morning gown of palest yellow that seemed to complement the season’s sudden rush towards spring. She would arrange a little tea party for that afternoon, she decided, and was at once taken up with the preparations for it.

But no sooner had she dressed herself than the extraordinary burst of energy dissipated. She sank down onto the chair. The gown of palest yellow now seemed ill-advised. Precipitous. It hung heavily on her frame. The tea party, foolish.

Downstairs the front door opened and closed, and she sprung up and stood at the window in time to witness Alasdair’s early departure.