They could see her, of course, standing here in the room without her husband. A space had appeared all around her as it might for a pariah. A leper. She imagined herself to be Adaline Jellicoe, who must stand like this now, the outcast, wherever she went. But she was not Adaline Jellicoe and it was not her life laid bare in the morning newspaper.

Still she could not shake the thought: which of them—out of compassion or out of spite—had sent her the note intended for her husband’s mistress?

She saw Everett Judd, the octogenarian, one of the few remaining original members of the ’56 Assembly and wearing, it appeared, the same suit he had worn to that first Assembly almost half a century earlier. Judd’s electorate, a large one on the shores of Botany Bay, bordered on its western edges Alasdair’s own electorate and they were close, he and Alasdair, or as close as any two members of an Assembly could be.

Everett saw her and fought his way over. He placed a hand on her arm. ‘My dear Mrs Dunlevy,’ he said, as though he knew she was to be pitied.

And she was glad to have someone upon whom she might rest her gaze, even if it was such an ancient and tired face—but distinguished still, if a little dried up and greyish and all but obscured by his long white whiskers, and she smiled, though her instinct was to pull away. Judd’s wife, a kind, quiet woman who had stood at her husband’s side for forty years, had died quite suddenly only a month or so ago of a fever or a seizure, and now Everett was like a man out of step with time, constantly looking about him for the thing he had lost.

‘Dear Everett,’ she said, peering into his ravaged face. It was he who should be pitied, yet the tears that now pricked Eleanor’s eyes were for herself and not for him. She placed her hand over his where it lay on her arm, and for a moment they were quite alone in the crowded chamber.

This illusion was abruptly shattered by George Drummond-Smith, who hailed them, pushing his way through the crowd and clasping Eleanor’s hand.

‘Dear Mrs Dunlevy. How delightful. But I do not see your husband. Is he not joining us?’

Drummond-Smith ignored Judd and retained hold of Eleanor’s hand for longer than was necessary. He was not a tall man but tightly packed with a massive skull and forehead and eyes that fixed you and, like his hands, did not let go. There was a Mrs Drummond-Smith, a slight woman whose people had land in South Australia, but she was rarely seen and never accompanied her husband to official engagements, an arrangement that seemed to suit Drummond-Smith very well.