She sipped her coffee. It was bitter and she winced but she relished its bitterness. It made her feel alive. She had more to say about the weather but she reserved her comments. Her father had used to say that if you wanted to know what the weather would be like in three days’ time, you should look at what the weather was like in Perth today, as it took the weather three days to traverse the continent. And when her father was proved right, which he was around half the time, he was pleased as punch, and when he was wrong, which he was the other half of the time, he never mentioned it. For sometimes the weather got as far as South Australia and changed its mind or simply gave up altogether, and other times Sydney made up its own weather. But her father had enjoyed the weather—he had been a naval captain—and he would read out snatches of it from the newspaper over breakfast. ‘A high in the bight!’ he would exclaim with glee, and though Eleanor had not the least idea to this day what that meant she had loved the sound of it.

She saw that Alasdair’s face had darkened over the newspaper.

‘Has our adventure of last night made its way into the newspaper?’ she enquired.

‘It has.’ And he put back his head as though to distance himself from the words, and read aloud, ‘Outrage at Parliament House. Man Wields Gun at Crowded Room. Arrested Man Detained by Police. Premier and Ministers Reported Safe.’

How curious it was. Now that it had been turned into words for the newspaper, the event, so shocking at the time, meant little to her. She felt nothing, except perhaps relief that she and Alasdair were seated at the breakfast table discussing the day’s news and any possibility that a catastrophe was befalling them seemed suddenly remote.

‘And what of the man? Do they say who he is? What he was doing there?’

She had no interest in the man, neither his motivations nor his fate; it was the exchange between she and Alasdair that was important.

‘An itinerant, out of work, of no fixed abode. A previous arrest for disturbing the peace.’ Alasdair frowned and shook out the paper a little angrily. ‘Not an anarchist, hardly even an anti-billite. Merely an opportunist.’

He spoke as though he were proving a point, though to whom was not clear. He folded up the newspaper and placed it on the table, the frown still present, and it seemed to Eleanor there was something else on his mind, or perhaps there was more to the story than he had told her. Now he pulled himself back from whatever place he had gone to and saw her observing him and it seemed, for a moment, he must surely confide his thoughts to her.