‘The Sydney Hospital,’ she said to the driver, and the driver, who had just finished a morning cup of tea and had enjoyed a bit of a break, shook the reins of his horses and said, ‘Giddup,’ and thought nothing of it.

They arrived at the hospital and Eleanor went to the ward she had gone to two days earlier. The same nurse or another one smiled at her as she passed. They smiled a great deal, these nurses, though all one could see of them, due to the nun-like wimples that covered their heads, was the smooth white oval of their faces. Eleanor felt she did not quite trust their smiles, that they hid something deep within themselves. She passed the nurse coldly and did not meet her eye.

She walked a little way down the ward but she went no further than, perhaps, halfway. She could see her husband beside the bed at the far end, seated on the chair the nurse had bade she herself sit on, and she could see the figure prone on the bed, awake, now, and listening. Or not listening, she could not tell.

She could not see her husband’s face, only his back, his shoulders, his hands, his head. Every part of him was turned towards the woman on the bed, every muscle and fibre of his body was taut as he cleaved to her.

‘All those things that mattered to me I no longer care for. They are like … dust,’ he said to her, as a man does who tears open his soul and offers it to another.

A nurse spoke to Eleanor, came and stood beside her, calm and white and complacent, opening and closing her mouth. ‘Who is it you wish to visit?’ the nurse repeated.

‘I will find something else to do. With you at my side.’

Said her husband. Eleanor watched him reach out and touch the face of the figure on the bed.

And at the touch of his fingers on this woman’s face he rendered all the things that had mattered to him to dust. His wife, watching, was rendered to dust.

Eleanor swung her gaze away from the scene at the bed and into the watching face of the nurse, who remained doggedly at her side. Whose hand gripped her arm at the elbow, whose hold prevented her, it seemed, from falling. Guided her towards a chair, her expression curious, kind, concerned, wishing nothing more than to assist.

But it was not in her power to give the assistance Eleanor required. Eleanor shook the woman off. She walked towards the door.

From the far end of the ward her husband’s words followed her: ‘Verity, there will be other children.’