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Father is sprung upon her. We felt we could cope for a few days.”
    â€œWe?”
    â€œRuth and myself.”
    â€œOh.” Emily, had almost come to believe that Ruth did not exist, that she was a necessary fictional background to make affairs illicit and possible. “You really live with her?”
    â€œQuite happily.”
    â€œShe’s coming to Ashville?”
    â€œProbably not. It would be pointless, I think. The family has nothing to do with her.”
    â€œHmm. I would have thought…”
    â€œNew York then? Thursday. Call me with the flight number.”
    â€œOh Adam,” Emily said as she hung up. “We seem to be committed to it. You capitulated.”
    She often spoke to him as though he were an adult and a co-planner of their lives. He waited for her to translate.
    â€œI thought you didn’t want to go,” she said.
    â€œI didn’t want to miss Verulamium. And I thought, I was afraid … we’d never come back here. But Uncle Jason said it was only for a few days.”
    â€œAha. You do like living in London.”
    â€œI like my school,” he conceded uncertainly, afraid of entrapment. “But I wish we could go back to Australia.”
    He said it the way a child says: I wish I could fly to the moon. I wish I had a million dollars. Intense, but aware of powerlessness.
    And Emily, against her will, was back there. Refugee from Montreal and Sergei. Foreigner. Drifter in the sun. Awaiting the birth of Adam.

    Sydney in the early 1970s was hardly what she expected — a city dignified as an Empire dowager with secret slatternly ways. On mornings when she should have been practising, Emily spent hours on the harbour ferries, travelling through blueness, letting the child ripen in the warmth. The sun fondled her like a lover. And this was supposed to be winter!
    At the Taronga Park dock she would leave the ferry and simply walk a quarter of a mile and back along the road, filling in time until the boat returned.
    Perhaps it was the pregnancy, perhaps the eucalypt-sharp air, perhaps the sun. Contentment was everywhere, a profound physical fact. She walked with one hand on her belly and was able to think of Sergei with gratitude, with affection, without anguish. Almost.
    I will not need men any more, she decided. She had leaned into the very flume of obsession (a siren song, deadly) and had careened on as unscathed as Ulysses.
    Not like Mother.
    Unbidden that image arose (it had floated up in dreams recently, because of the baby, she supposed): the delicate figure, intense with otherness, caged behind the French windows of the old house. She thought also of Anna in Montreal.
    But she, Emily had escaped.
    When the ferry slapped softly against the dock timbers she would commit herself again to the harbour, tranquil cradle, and glide back toward the skyscrapers and Circular Quay. The Opera House arches, white and glistering as Fabergé eggshells, soared into lapis lazuli.
    When they finish building it, she thought, I will be playing there. People on the ferry boats will hear the applause drifting out over the water. This is the lucky country; no entanglement in wars, no civil strife, no dark side; a country still in the innocence of childhood.
    â€œUtter rubbish, I’m afraid,” Ian said, handing her a beer under the shade of his trees in Mosman. To the assembled company strewn about his lawn he announced: “Emily thinks we’re an innocent country.”
    A breeze of tolerant derision wisped through two dozen people, turning heads, stirring languid limbs. Such an extravagance of golden flesh and sun-bleached hair, Emily thought. How casually Australians take their bodies. As they take their sun. With an easy gluttonous indifference.
    â€œInnocent!” Someone laughed. “Wishful bloody thinking, sweetheart.”
    â€œOnce upon a time,” Ian said, “some Chinamen were strung up in these trees like flypapers for living