There was nothing. Just the note. Written by himself at his office, addressed by himself on some other envelope entirely and sent to Verity. And now it was here, in his wife’s drawer.

Verity herself must have sent it.

Another laugh. He could not find it in himself to be dismayed. He was beyond such things. He sat down on the bed.

After a time he got up and searched through the remainder of the drawer. There was nothing at all from Drummond-Smith but this reprieve brought no release. It brought nothing.

Finally he pulled out his wife’s journal and began to read.

Sunday morning dawned grey and overcast, and the crowds, upwards of twenty thousand, began to gather in the Domain, it being the last Sunday before the referendum and there being little else to do on a wet Sunday morning unless you counted church, which most did not. For it was a much greater sport to splash through the puddles and slip in the mud on the waterlogged grass, to dash from one platform to another and hear the words of one speaker after another, cheering and laughing and haranguing and slinging great clods of mud as the mood took them. If this was what was meant by Federation, they liked it. They embraced it!

In Elizabeth Bay Alasdair was standing before the mirror contemplating the futility of his Ascot tie when his wife walked into the room.

He spun about, unprepared. It was a violation, a transgression. But it was only the latest in many such violations and transgressions.

‘Tell me how many there have been,’ she demanded, pausing a yard or two short of him. ‘I no longer wish to live in ignorance.’

She was splendid in her fury, though there was a fragility and a desperation at the edges of the splendour that sent a chill of fear through him.

Was it hysteria? he wondered. Had she lost her reason? One heard of such things, a sudden derangement of the mind caused by some great distress, such as the loss of the child a year ago—had it affected her more than he had realised? The female mind was weaker than the male. He thought of asylums. Doctors.

‘For God’s sake, Eleanor!’ he replied and he turned back to the mirror. His fingers shook a little.

Could a man be a minister of the Crown, could he hope to hold any sort of parliamentary office, if he had a wife housed in an asylum?

‘No! I will not be put off!’ she said, advancing on him. ‘You will tell me.’

Alasdair put down the tie that refused to be tied and whose very purpose no longer seemed clear to him and turned again to face her. It seemed important to speak very calmly, very firmly to her, though he felt the house loosen on its foundations and quake around him. He felt the insubstantiality and transience of all things.