And, of course, there was to be a lunch party to mark the new year. A small affair, just family, but Thomas would require all the trimmings. Unthinkable that they would do otherwise: the Turners were big on tradition, and with Nora and Richard visiting from Sydney, neither frippery nor fan-fare was to be skipped. Isabel had decided to set up in a different part of the garden this year.

Usually they sat beneath the walnut tree on the eastern lawn, but today she’d been drawn to the stretch of grass in the shade of Mr Wentworth’s cedar. She’d walked across it when she was cutting flowers for the table earlier and been struck by the pretty westward view towards the mountains.

Yes, she’d said to herself.

This will do very well.

The arrival of the thought, her own decisiveness, had been intoxicating. She told herself it was all part of her New Year’s resolution – to approach 1959 with a fresh pair of eyes and expectations – but there was a small internal voice that wondered whether she wasn’t rather tormenting her husband just a little with the sudden breach of protocol. Ever since they’d discovered the sepia photograph of Mr Wentworth and his similarly bearded Victorian friends arranged in elegant wooden recliners on the eastern lawn, Thomas had been immovable in his conviction that it represented the superior entertaining spot. It was unclear to Isabel exactly when she’d first started taking guilty pleasure in causing that small vertical frown line to appear between her husband’s brows.

A gust of wind threatened to rip the string of bunting from her hands, and she held tight to the highest rung of the wooden ladder. She’d carried the ladder down from the gardening shed herself that morning, quite enjoying the struggle of it. When she’d first climbed to the top, a childhood memory had come to her – a day trip to Hampstead Heath with her mother and father, where she’d scrambled up one of the giant sequoia trees and looked south towards the city of London.

‘I can see St Paul’s!’ she’d called down to her parents when she spotted the familiar dome through the smog.‘Don’t let go,’ her father had called back. It wasn’t until the moment he said it that Isabel had felt a perverse urge to do just that. The desire had taken her breath away.