‘Don’t forget to say something! Only politician I ever heard of who could not speak!’

Mr Dunlevy ignored this fresh intervention, ignored the heckler, ignored them all. He turned instead to his secretary, Greensmith, who was witness to his humiliation but who stood, reassuringly, at the edge of the platform. A young man of ambition, and exceptionally well turned out, who had reworked the minister’s speech even as they had sat in the train together that morning and whose notes, written in blue ink in a workmanlike hand, filled the pages he now held before him.

And here Alasdair understood that the only person who could have intercepted a note he had written to his mistress, who could have opened the note, understood its contents and redirected the note to the one person to whom it could do the most damage, was his secretary. Was Greensmith.

He remembered the young man’s gallant taking of his wife’s arm at the Premier’s reception and again at Penrith, his dismay that morning on arriving at the house to learn Mrs Dunlevy would not be accompanying them. He saw that ambition formed only one small part in the man’s motivation. That the main reason was desire.

Alasdair delivered his speech. He did not need to refer to the notes. He was a parliamentarian of twenty years standing, he could exhort these men to their civic duty simply by opening his heart and his soul to them! For he had realised it could not touch him, this final betrayal, coming as it did so soon after other betrayals that had cut so much deeper and that would require so much more time to heal.

Afterwards men cheered, though he did not wait to hear their cheers. He left the stage, left the handwritten pages of his speech where they had dropped, abandoned, to the floor, and when his secretary stepped forward to shake his hand, the minister swept past him and went, alone, to his next engagement.

At the house in Elizabeth Bay Eleanor Dunlevy stood at her window. In the street below people came and went, some in carriages, some on foot, going to the polling booths and returning.

Eleanor did not accompany her husband, though it was a day they had both worked towards for a year. More than a year—for much of the last decade. This was the culmination of that endeavour, the long-awaited triumph after so many hours of toil, and she would not be there to see it nor to share in it. Indeed, she was no longer certain what it meant to share in her husband’s triumph, or in his failure. Both seemed remote to her.

She had gone to his room late the previous night, when they had managed to avoid one another for most of the day, and said, ‘I shall not accompany you tomorrow, Alasdair.’