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chair, softly reciting sonnets.
    As if by some instinct the wretch did know
    His rider loved not speed, being made from thee:
    The bloody spur cannot provoke him on
    That sometimes anger thrust into his hide,
    Which heavily he answers with a groan
    More sharp to me than spurring to his side;
    For that same groan doth put this in my mind:
    My grief lies onward, my joy behind.
    In her own ears her voice sounded plaintive and full of loss. It sounded shabby, as if she had suddenly aged, become one of the women she had seen in London living beneath shadowy bridges, with their lives in string bags and their wits asunder. It made no sense.
    When the recitation offered no consolation, Stella wrote a letter by faint lamplight to her sister Margaret, telling her in lurid detail all that had happened. There was relief, after all,in silent words. In her own words, in those that fell in a cursive stream from her own inky pen. The nocturnal world, fractional and slow, continued around her, wheeling towards dawn. Powdery grey moths hurled against the window screens. On the ceiling small lizards, the colour of her skin, clicked and scampered, their hand-shapes clinging. Stella watched them dispassionately. She resigned herself, that night, to gigantic unhappiness, the kind that novelists don’t write of, the kind that doesn’t kill, but preserves monotonously some empty register of experience, so that one waits, and waits, and waits, and waits, until whatever bitter end might mercifully present itself.
    At dawn Stella roused. She opened the door and pushed into a world dank and steamy with overnight rain. Unfamiliar flowers and raucous birdsong greeted her. It was like waking into a dream she did not understand. In the hotel kitchen, a wooden shed out the back flooding with vaporous new light, she met a kindly black woman who made her a cup of tea. She watched the woman at her morning ministrations – tending the fire in the stove, shifting pots and kettles, laying out teacups and spoons in symmetry on a tray – and understood that there are forms of order that might release one from meaning, ordinary tasks that might fill up an unfair life. She did not deem it necessary to talk to this woman; Stella was too disconsolate to express her own humanity. So she sat, tired now, bloodshot and hollowed by her wakeful night, and for some reason remembered Mrs Whiticombe’s old-woman’s hands, ropy and frail, spotted like old leaves on the verge of disintegration, resting on a pink candlewick bedspread at the moment of her death.

    The wind in the scrubland was sear and soprano. It burned and sang. When it was high, it hoisted eddies of umber dirt,so that the air filled with grit and was choking and dry. There were the swollen forms of spirals and belly shapes moving across the land; Stella found them eerie and preternatural. She learned to bring in the washing so that it would not be coated with dirt, and to close the doors and the shutters until the dust storms departed. She learned, most of all, to seal herself in, to find what solace might lie in self-erasure.
    Their lodgings at the cattle station were away from the main house, a small shack that had belonged to the stock manager before he suddenly left. When Mr Trevor, the station owner, first opened the door, Stella had seen nothing at all that could claim her affection. There was a combined kitchen-sitting room, ringed with faded yellow curtains, containing two upright wooden chairs pushed beneath a severe table; and a single bedroom, in which stood a sagging bed and a wardrobe, anomalously elegant, from another place and era. Disturbed by the sudden scrape of the door, a brown snake had slid out into the light and headed swerving through the doorway towards the long pale grass. Stella squealed as it passed her.
    â€˜Better get used to it, luv,’ Mr Trevor said. He was unconcerned. He watched the snake depart and then spat on the ground, a hearty gob, as it