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Clio must have realised she’d overstepped the limit of good manners and was sitting silently, hunched over, frowning. Mary turned her back, busy washing up. She carefully dried the fragile cups and replaced them in the cupboard, then took the teapot outside to empty the spent leaves.
    When she came back, Clio looked up at her.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to be rude.’
    ‘That’s all right.’ Mary gave her a smile of measured coolness.
    ‘I get tired. I’ve probably been up too long. I should let you get on with your work.’
    It was enough of an apology. ‘Do you need a hand to get back to bed? Oh, and I didn’t ask whether you had any washing. Would you like me to change your sheets?’
    Clio seemed confused. ‘No, I … No, I put clean ones on before I went away.’
    ‘What about clothes? Night gear?’
    ‘Yes. There was a bag I brought back, I’d forgotten. Do you mind?’
    ‘After Martin’s room, I doubt whether anything you’ve got will horrify me.’
    ‘Martin’s room … I told him years ago he was old enough to take care of it himself. And as for Paul …’
    That would account for the state of those rooms, Mary decided. She put her hand out to help Clio rise from the chair. ‘Shall we go and find that bag? Then maybe you’d like to have a nap while I think of something lovely to cook for our tea.’
    Once Clio had settled back among her pillows with the duvet pulled up to her chin, Mary followed her directions to locate the bag she’d brought home from Perth. This gave her a welcome chance to have a closer look at the room.
    In spite of the gloomy afternoon, the room shimmered. The wide french doors were veiled with sheer off-white curtains that caught and diffused the daylight. The walls were white, too, covered with a glossy damask-textured paper. Brushed sheepskin rugs lay like pale islands on the wine-dark ocean of the floor. The only other colours were a deep armchair upholstered with sapphire velvet, and a crocheted rug lying across the foot of the bed that encompassed all the colours of the world outside.
    Mary found the bag in the little bathroom that had been built into a corner of the room, stealing space, she guessed, from the adjoining room as well. As compact as the bathroom in a caravan, this room was all white, too, even to the tiles on the floor.
    Finding that bathroom answered two of Mary’s questions: why she’d seen no sign that a woman used the bathroom she was sharing with Paul and Martin; and how Mrs Hazlitt had managed to get by for that first day back without even a drink of water.
    But the room posed other questions: that Clio had set herself up so carefully in this attractive room, leaving her husband in solitary squalor in what had plainly been the conjugal bedroom, implied a permanent rift. What could have caused it? And, if things were so bad that a break had been inevitable, why did she stay? Why not leave and get on with her life somewhere else?

5
    A FTER CHECKING THAT CLIO WAS SLEEPING , Mary collected her parka from the hook outside the back door and went for a walk. It was very cold outside, although there’d been no rain. She set off briskly, shoes crunching on the gritty ground, past the stone house, glancing to see if there was any sign of life there, but there wasn’t. Janet would hardly be back from school yet, even if she’d left the minute the bell rang. Her husband, Cec the studmaster, could be anywhere, attending to the sheep or the bookwork. She wondered if they used a computer for their stud records. They probably did.
    The stone house had fibro additions at the back, and a neat single garage to one side. If that was where she kept her car, Janet wasn’t at home. There was a rotary clothesline and the skeleton of that huge tree, which in summer would cast its shade over the building. Across what looked like the farm’s main thoroughfare was the fibro house that must be the Graysons’. There was no activity there, either.