Russell, New Zealand, 1931

 

'Mariette is so . . .' Miss Quigley paused, her thin lips pursed as she searched for a suitable adjective to describe her errant pupil. 'So defiant!'

 

Belle resisted the temptation to smile at the schoolmistress's description of her eleven-year-old daughter. When Belle was a child, it was often said of her too.

 

Maybe it was because he’d come straight from the Baron, but he’d been blind to the chafing between them earlier, at the party.

‘You turn up drunk for a date with me,’ Grace had said caustically when he’d walked into the bathroom where she was daubing plummy lipstick on puckered lips in the mirror above the vanity. ‘And you don’t even have the decency to apologise.’

God she looked yummy, in arse-hugging black pants and strappy high heels.   

Kweku dies barefoot on a Sunday before sunrise, his slippers by the doorway to the bedroom like dogs. At the moment he is on the threshold between sunroom and garden considering whether to go back to get them. He won’t. His second wife Ama is asleep in that bedroom, her lips parted loosely, her brow lightly furrowed, her cheek hotly seeking some cool patch of pillow, and he doesn’t want to wake her.

 

He couldn’t if he tried.