Eleanor leaned a little forward in her chair, her eyes alive. ‘Alasdair, do you remember when you ran your first campaign and how we travelled together from place to place? All those church halls and literary institutes and council chambers, and how we met so many people—some of them quite dreadful!—and how we stayed at all those horrid little hotels that had sawdust on the floor and how you said it would all be worth it in the end. Do you remember? And it was, was it not? Worth it?’

She paused, a little breathless. She did not know why she had said all that, where it had come from. They had not talked of such things for years. She wondered if the man with the gun last night had caused her to say it, but knew at once that it was nothing to do with the man with the gun.

Opposite her Alasdair sat unmoving, his face as empty and without meaning as the sky now that the clouds had gone.

‘Certainly it was worth it,’ he replied. ‘I won the election.’

But, no, that was not what she had meant. That was not it at all.

Alasdair did not wait to hear what she meant. He pushed back his chair and stood up. ‘I must go,’ he said, and before she could think of a reply he left.

For a time Eleanor did not move. The note crumpled in her hand.

She had thought she knew every part of him, inside and out.

She got up and walked around to the other end of the table. She sat down at his seat, put on her spectacles, picked up the newspaper and studied it as he had. OUTRAGE AT PARLIAMENT HOUSE. The man’s name was Peter O’Leary. It was a nothing sort of name, the kind of name one would hear and at once forget. He was a carpenter, though he was not currently in employment, thought to be twenty-nine or thirty years of age—records were unclear. The man had spent time at the Callan Park asylum. He was yet to be questioned by police concerning his motives. There was nothing to say if the man was an Aboriginal or not. The gun, the newspaper noted, had not been loaded. And so they had not, in fact, been in any danger after all. The panic that had swept the chamber now seemed misplaced, absurd.