She gazed at the name for a time. Miss V. Trent. One could tell everything and nothing from a name on a signboard. Was the V for Violet? Veronica? Vivienne? Victoria was the most likely, the most conventional, and she pictured the patriotic parents far from home bestowing on their newborn daughter the name of their distant consort. How proud would these same parents be now if they knew how their dearest Victoria made her way in the world? It pleased her to think this, but with a bitter pleasure as one might bite into a sour apple simply to prove it was sour.

The door opened by her pushing it. Eleanor stepped inside and her heart beat a little faster. She must have a story at the ready, something she might say if she were stopped and questioned. She would say she was visiting someone.

But there was no one about and no one stopped her. And did she not have a right to be here, as every wife had?

She looked about her. The hallway was high-ceilinged and elegant but papered in a lurid crimson-striped design, the floor covered by a worn and ugly Turkish carpet. Two doors—closed—faced her and a wide, sweeping staircase led up to a first floor. There was also a lift; she could hear its uneasy clatter as it approached the ground floor.

And what if it were her, inside?

I will know her at once, thought Eleanor, and the words she might utter clogged her throat.

But the lift doors did not open and no one emerged. The lift had simply arrived, as though in anticipation of her arrival. Eleanor availed herself of the lift, stepping into its cage and dragging the double doors shut behind her so that they locked, studying the buttons, pressing 1 and lifting her face and testing the air about her as though she had arrived at a foreign land.

The lift lurched and began its slow and rattling ascent. It arrived at the first floor with a clunk and the doors released. Eleanor pulled them open and stood for a moment. A long corridor greeted her, a number of oversized ferns in brass pots and five anonymous doors painted a uniform white. At each end of the corridor was a window, the one at this end small, round and high up, facing the street, the one at the rear of the house reaching floor to ceiling and creating a square of sunlight on the carpet. She stood for a moment, listening. The shouts of the men at the wharves and the booming of the great ships and the chattering of the lorikeets were gone and there was, instead, a strange quiet to the place. She became aware of her own position as imposter, trespasser. She felt the same way entering a cathedral or any ecclesiastical structure, could not comprehend how such places made some people calm. They always induced in her the most intense anger.