Through the window blue gums stretched from ridge to ridge as far as the eye could see. If Penrith lay a mile or two up the line, it was well hidden. She and Alasdair had come this way, Eleanor remembered, in the early days of their marriage, when Alasdair was campaigning for his first seat. They had stayed the night in a pub, sleeping in a wretched and rickety old bed that looked like it had come out with the First Fleet and been slept in by every convict and emancipist who had come this way since. An old Aboriginal woman who cleaned the place had said, The Governor slept here once, though which governor she had been unable to say. She had left them with a shrug and a candle and they had fallen, with the fury of youth, onto the bed because it was the early months of their marriage. And Eleanor remembered how the bed had shaken and the plaster had crumbled from the wall. She had been coy at first about their nights together, because it seemed this must be what her new husband wished her to be, but when she had not been coy he seemed to like it more and so she abandoned coyness and she had abandoned herself, enjoying her nakedness and relishing the moments when she shocked him. And while his thoughts had seemed often elsewhere during the daytime, and she had known they dwelled occasionally on other women, at night he had always returned to her. Now it seemed to Eleanor she could as soon reach out and touch the tip of the furthest blue gum as she could reach her husband across the small space of the train compartment.

‘It is a great log!’ cried Mr Greensmith, returning to the compartment and full of the news he brought. ‘Laid across the tracks and put there deliberately, they are saying. A railway official has come down the line from the next station to warn us and had the driver not seen him and stopped in time we would be wrecked for certain!’

‘Good heavens!’ said Eleanor. ‘Are we quite safe, Mr Greensmith, in your opinion?’

And: ‘This is monstrous!’ said Alasdair, setting aside his papers, standing up and taking the cigar from his mouth as though there were an important decision to be made and he was the one to make it. ‘Is it generally known that I am on this train, Greensmith?’

‘There has been no announcement, Mr Dunlevy, but it might reasonably be ascertained by anyone acquainted with your schedule. Or it might merely be coincidence.’

Greensmith looked at his employer unhappily. A sense that this might in some small but vital way be his responsibility seemed to weigh heavily on the young man’s shoulders.