For four days she had made no calls and she had received no calls, and not because Alasdair had forbidden it, or not directly. It was simply this: the words they had spoken to each other, she and Alasdair, on Friday night and again early on Saturday morning would not let her alone. They could not be unsaid; they could not be bidden away. They had lodged somewhere very deep. They prevented Eleanor from leaving the house, sometimes even from venturing out of her room. They had made her turn callers away. It was an agony to be alone with those words echoing unceasingly inside her head but the agony of being in society seemed infinitely worse. So she drank tea alone, she read the newspaper, she organised the household accounts, she scrutinised the tradesmen’s bills. She wore her spectacles almost all the time. She undertook all manner of everyday chores but the words remained. They would not be dislodged.

This morning, a Wednesday, Cecily Pyke had come to the door, an emissary from the outside world, and Eleanor had let her—and her daughter—in. She could not say why today particularly when every other day she had refused callers. She felt as though she had been away a long time though it had only been four days.

She had greeted her visitors cordially, she had seated them and herself, and now she poured tea with a steady hand.

‘I am quite well, thank you, Mrs Pyke,’ she said.

She had worn ivory and grey and oyster for four days, but this morning she wore a gown of the richest ultramarine Indian silk and she sat in her drawing room among the giant ferns. ‘Like an exotic bird!’ the daughter, Marguerite, had exclaimed, as though she had previously considered all her mother’s cronies rather dull. And then she had coloured.

Eleanor smiled at the daughter from her place among the ferns. The ultramarine gown rustled faintly as Eleanor poured the tea, drawing attention to itself as a well-made garment should, with delicacy and subtlety. It was certainly not a gown of someone indisposed.

‘Well. This is good news indeed,’ said Mrs Pyke after a moment or two, when it became clear her host did not intend to expand upon her answer and the mystery of her alleged indisposition must remain just that: a mystery.

But can you not see it? cried Eleanor across the void that separated her chair from theirs. Can you not feel it? And all that she held tightly within herself was so great at that moment it threatened to spill out unchecked.

But, no, they could not see it.

‘We have been reading of Mr Dunlevy’s endeavours,’ said Mrs Pyke. ‘He is with the Premier, is he not, on the south coast?’

‘So I am led to believe.’

‘You do not accompany him?’

‘No.’