They’d been retired a couple of years when Dolly woke up one morning with a different slant on her life, as if in the night her mind had turned a corner. She lay listening to the water down in the bay, the butcherbird that Bert fed, the white cockatoos screeching in their roosting tree up the street. Thought of the rest of her life here, stretching ahead, every day the same till she died. She was nearly forty-seven, and that was nearly fifty, and fifty was old.

Yes, the house was lovely, but too perfect in a way, there was nothing to take in hand and make better. She was getting sick of Bert being around all day, pottering in the garden. They were too much in each other’s pockets. Theirs was one of those marriages that worked best when the two people didn’t spend too much time together.

She had her friends, but to tell the truth she was sick of them. She knew them so well now, there wasn’t a single thing they could say that would surprise her. She was sick of the trots, sick of the races. Wanted something. She couldn’t put a name to it, but recognised the hunger that had been filled for a time and then come back: the old restlessness. It seemed to be dyed deep in the fabric of who she was, her need to keep moving. Wanderlust. When she’d heard that word for the first time she’d thought, Yes, that’s what I’ve got. Lusting after moving on, finding the new in this wide old world. And enough other people had felt the same way for the thing to have been given a name. Once it had a name you could see that being made that way, with wanderlust in your nature, wasn’t something wrong with you. It was just one more way of being a person.

So she found herself, as if idly, glancing again at those pages at the back of the Herald. The words leapt up at her: Caledonian Hotel, Tamworth. Offered for the first time in sixty years.

The Caledonian! Their wedding night, the feel of those lovely linen sheets, and the silk eiderdown with the embroidered stork. That carpet in the Bridal Suite! She could still feel the velvet of it under her feet. The week at the Cally had seemed like the seal on the contract: she and Bert making do with each other for the sake of a good life. Well, the making-do hadn’t worked out all that well, but the good life had…

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