After a time she heard the front door open and then close. A moment or two after that the clock on the landing above chimed the hour, followed a few seconds later by the other clocks in the house.

Then there was silence.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE: WATERLOO

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

WATERLOO

Alasdair returned early from the Tour of the West at the Premier’s suggestion. Was it a suggestion or more a request, an order? The words ‘complete rest’ and ‘exhaustion’ hung over him as he stood at the window of his room at the hotel and watched the porter pack his clothes, as the man stepped into the street and hailed a carriage to take him to the station, as he boarded the train, alone, and the rest of the party continued on to Wellington.

‘No Wellington for you, Dunlevy; more a Waterloo, I would think,’ the Premier had said, and he had laughed at this most excellent joke.

And his minister suffered the ignominy of the train journey with every station he passed through. At Katoomba only market-goers and early sightseers waited on the platform. The excited crowds of the day before were just a paragraph in the newspaper today. The descent of the train through the winding ridges and gullies was made at a great speed when the day before the train had strained at every incline. Every now and then he glimpsed the smoke haze of the city floating distantly on the horizon. He did not wish to reach his destination.

How would he explain himself? And to whom?

The clouds, rolling in from the west, overtook him at Penrith and the distant city vanished in a hail of new rain. It was a Saturday morning. At each station the people jostled on the platforms with crates and livestock, which they loaded into the third-class carriages, dashing from place to place beneath rapidly retrieved umbrellas. A crate overturned and a host of small yellow chicks ran in all directions. After a delay the train set off once more.

The referendum was in three days but the people loaded livestock onto trains and ran in all directions after escaping yellow chicks. He wondered what was the truth: the vote or the people going to market?

He arrived at Sydney Terminal Station at the same time as the Premier’s party was due to arrive in Wellington. He got a cab and rode through the streets feeling he had been absent a great many days and not just overnight.

He went straight home. He did not linger very long on the thought that a little to the north, at the hospital, Verity lay. He did not think about that at all.