His mind was far away and Alasdair could not, at first, make sense of these words, he could not identify the voice that spoke them. When he had swum across the ocean that separated his thoughts from the place where his physical body was, he saw it was his wife who addressed the cab driver, who stood at the door of his cab without hat or gloves or even a coat. She shivered, her arms hugging herself as though it were a winter morning in some cold place and not a Sydney morning with the sun already high in the southern sky warming the earth.

Her eyes searched his face. They peeled back layers of skin revealing the soft tissue beneath. His flesh burned.

‘I am going to the station,’ he replied, indignant, as might any man be at such a question. He was on official business. He was to join the Premier.

But they had passed this point. They were already halfway down a path that was uncharted and brutal and had no place for denials. And so he added, in a quite different tone, ‘And to the hospital.’

These words, freeing him.

A vaguely quizzical look came into Eleanor’s eyes and he thought for a brief, bright, extraordinary moment that she had accepted what he said, but the look was gone almost at once, leaving no look at all, a blankness. Calm acceptance, he took it for. But he was wrong.

She grabbed the handle of the cab door and jerked it open and began to get in.

Dismayed, he held her off.

‘What are you doing, Eleanor? For God’s sake!’

He wrestled the door from her and she fell back, stumbling a little. Behind her he saw the cab driver, who had jumped down from his perch and had his mouth open and the whip in his hand, and Alasdair stared at the man’s stupid face rather than at his wife’s. He resumed his seat. He pulled the door shut and shouted at the man, ‘What do you wait for?’

The man sprang back up to his seat and cracked his whip and the horse started awake and the cab jerked forward. Alasdair stared straight ahead.

At Macquarie Street the clerks and lawyers and government officials strolled towards their places of business, the usual morning industry made languid by the suddenness of sunlight after so much rain. The people shone and the streets, submerged by the deluge only hours before, were bone-dry.

Alasdair viewed them across a great distance. The horror of it wrapped him in a mantle that pinned his arms to his sides and dulled the thoughts in his head.

It had come too soon, the confrontation with Eleanor. He was not prepared. He had meant to do it on his terms not hers. He wished very much to be angry at her for that appalling scene, but for the moment the horror of it precluded his fury.