Of course, he had not known she was Verity Trent then. She had been merely a young woman standing outside Customs House amid the wool warehouses and the bonded stores and the government paper store that crowded along the quay, a woman standing perfectly still and alone in the afternoon heat. A barque had come in from Wellington on the dawn tide, another from Hobart. A steam packet, the Damascus, was preparing to set sail for Cape Town and London. Merchants and seamen and dockworkers and custom officials and shipping company clerks had swarmed, hurrying from place to place, but not she. She looked as if she was waiting. She looked as if the thing she waited for meant more to her than the brilliant summer sky or the dazzling light on the water or the day itself.

As he drew level with her in his cab she turned towards him. But, no, not towards him, towards an official—suited, hatted, overdressed in the heat—who emerged from a building shaking his head, one hand held out in apology, and handed her a document, speaking to her for a moment—no more—and departing again. And she started to follow then she stopped and gave up and her look of defeat, of utter helplessness, made him bang on the roof of the cab and call out to the driver, made him quit the cab and almost forget to pay the man. It made him go at once to her aid.

He had had in his care papers from the Premiers’ Conference, though four months later he could not now recall what the papers contained nor where he had been taking them. He remembered that she wore a skirt in some pale green shade and a short, tightly fitted jacket of the same pale green, and beneath this a white blouse heavy with lace at neck and cuff, and little black boots that seemed hopelessly wrong for the climate, a hat that clung to the back of her head but offered no protection from the sun, that she carried an umbrella which she used as a parasol. He remembered that what he had taken for utter helplessness was not that at all—it was merely what he had wanted to see so that he might rescue her, when of course, really, it was she who had rescued him.

He had banged on the roof of the cab to make it stop, jumped down and pushed his way through the crowds to reach her, and her face was pale though the heat was crushing.

He touched his hat and presented himself to her:

‘Madam, my name is Dunlevy. Forgive my intrusion, and my impertinence, but it seems clear to me that you are in some little distress and confusion. Please, allow me to offer whatever assistance it might be in my power to give.’ He gave a little bow and immediately felt absurd.