How oddly benign it sounded, put that way. As though wealth simply happened to one. The truth was more complicated. More subjective. His father, Fergus Dunlevy, for many years the unremarkable and unexceptional solicitor in a modest Kent Street practice, had bought at a knockdown price the estate of a bankrupt client, a great slab of empty bushland at Redmyre with barely a road connecting it to the city some seven miles to the east. It was an act of speculative brilliance, for a year or two later the railway had come, cutting straight through this land, and having successfully petitioned the government for a station to be built there, Fergus had subdivided and made a fortune. Strathfield it was called now. But that was merely the start. After this spectacular success, and with the seventies boom in full swing, his father had purchased other tracts of land, ever further from the city, and each time he had subdivided and sold for vast sums, always with the promise of new railway lines, new stations. And sometimes the promised railway, the all-important station, had eventuated. More often it had not and the speculators and builders who had purchased his land had been left with worthless plots, far from the city and quite inaccessible. The boom was long over now, the scramble to build new railways had slowed almost to a trickle, but great fortunes had been made by a great many men (and also by a great many politicians, particularly those concerned with railways and public works), Fergus Dunlevy included, though as many men, or more, had lost their fortunes. Had been made bankrupt. Such was the way of the world. Fergus had purchased the mansion at Ashfield and filled it with a legion of domestics and a stable full of thoroughbreds. Alasdair looked out of the cab’s window and thought of his father, whom he had once asked to fund him on an expedition into the interior on which he had, as a young man of twenty-two, been offered a place. He was to be an explorer, that was his dearest wish.

He had only asked his father on that one occasion. The subject had never come up again.

They had left the dockside now. Grand houses had been built here only half a century earlier, their lawns rolling down to the water’s edge, but now the dockyards had swallowed up all the available land and the grand houses had been subdivided, had faded, had fallen into disrepair. The grand people had moved out to Elizabeth Bay, Double Bay, Point Piper.

Alasdair had brought with him a leather portfolio which he had placed on his lap, and an umbrella which lay on the floor at his feet. He stared at these articles and could not quite make sense of them. He did not need either but habit, or subterfuge, had made him reach for both.