Eleanor stood up. She walked a little away and then she returned. She stood before him. ‘You would censure me?’ And when he made no reply, ‘You have made a grave error of judgement, Alasdair, if you insist on this.’

‘I am your husband and I do insist on it.’

They faced each other in the very centre of the room, in a yard or two of empty space in a room that positively overflowed with chairs and many little tables and a glut of paintings on the walls and vast lustrous ferns in great pots that they had selected together, she and he, and arranged for their comfort and pleasure and so that others might see and appreciate their good taste, and it was all rendered redundant. Their very furniture mocked them at this moment, or so it seemed to Eleanor. She had no use for it, for this room.

‘You leave me no choice,’ she said, and she spoke only in part to her husband, and in part to the furniture and the room that contained it. ‘I know about Miss Trent.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: DECEIT

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

DECEIT

And yet Alasdair’s evening had begun well enough. The Federation meeting in Marrickville. The town hall crowded, lively even. The rain, threatening all day, had held off. And he had no sooner arrived than a note from the Premier was thrust into his hand by a parliamentary messenger requesting his presence on the three-day tour of the southern districts. They were to depart on the morrow and if this short notice implied someone else had fallen ill or was otherwise indisposed and himself a last minute replacement, what of it? It was an opportunity and he would grasp at it.

After such news it had proved no easy task to turn one’s thoughts to the meeting. One of the speakers had failed to turn up but this was not necessarily a bad thing, for the minister who did put in an appearance, the Secretary for Public Monies, now assumed centre stage; gave the final speech of the evening and accepted the applause, the accolades. The event ended with welcome promptness, even a little early. Then, right at the very close of the meeting, some grog-soaked wretch in rags who had haunted the rear of the hall throughout the meeting and been noisily ejected at one point had reappeared, this time clutching a screaming brat in her arms, had come up to the stage and thrown herself at Alasdair, hurling some incomprehensible invective and, when this failed to have the desired effect, spitting on his face and lapel and having to be forcibly manhandled away by three attendant constables.

Alasdair had no sooner extricated himself from his outrage, pushing the flustered Greensmith aside and tearing off his soiled coat, than his eyes had fallen in astonishment on the grizzled face of Gregson, the hospital administrator.