The Secret Year of Zara Holt

by Kimberley Freeman

Genres: Biographical; Women's Fiction; 20th Century Romance

Synopsis

A richly imagined novel of love, fashion, scandal and one captivating woman's passionate life.

We wove magic between us with our words, soul to soul, and when the sun cracked the horizon he kissed me goodnight and promised me he'd write as soon as he arrived in London.

'You won't,' I said, feeling the morning cold. 'You'll forget me.'

He stood up. 'You'll see,' he said. 'We belong to each other now. Always will.'

Melbourne, 1927. The summer flowers smell like Christmas the night Zara Dickins meets Harry Holt. Zara is wearing a dress she has designed and made herself: white organdie over a short black slip, with black embroidery and a crimson taffeta sash. It's party season and the university crowd are celebrating end-of-year exams. Zara loves dancing with the boys and flirting with them, but it's a game to her. Nothing serious. Until Harry.

He plans to be a politician once he finishes law. She, a fashion designer, if she can find a way to break out of the secretarial pool. When he takes her hand, she doesn't want to let him go.

The spark they ignite that night will last forty years.

Portsea, 1967. When Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt disappears while swimming, his wife Zara loses herself in the memories of their volatile relationship. She always believed Harry when he said no matter what happened, he'd never leave. Their bond has stretched to London, Europe, India, America. It has survived anger, loss and heartbreak, media scrutiny, secrets and lies. But now all Zara wants is for Harry to come home.

A vibrant and compelling story inspired by the fascinating life of fashion designer and businesswoman Dame Zara Bate.

'Utterly captivating' KATE FORSYTH

Publisher: Hachette Australia

Print pages: 400

Sample

MELBOURNE, 1927

The night I met Harry I was wearing a dress I had designed and made myself. White organdie over a short black slip, black embroidery around the yoke and the hem, and a crimson taffeta sash tied in a huge bow on my hips. It was early December and the summer flowers smelled like Christmas. Party season, as all the college boys from the university celebrated the end of exams before they returned home to families in the countryside. Daddy and Mum had restricted me to one party a week … they were old-fashioned and worried about my reputation. Truly, I did love boys. I loved dancing with them, flirting with them, exchanging furtive glances with them, but it was a game to me. Nothing serious.

I waited on the front veranda of our little house in Kew, eyes on the road for Norman’s Morris. I heard the front door behind me open and Mum’s light footsteps.

‘Who are you going out with tonight then?’ she asked in her lilting Scottish accent.

‘Norman.’

‘Again?’

‘Mm-hm.’

‘And who is bringing you home?’

I turned to her and smiled. ‘Norman,’ I said firmly, though I didn’t blame her for asking. Going out with one boy and coming home with another had become a habit of mine.

‘It’s serious with him? That’s been a whole month to my reckoning.’

‘Six weeks,’ I replied.

‘You be careful,’ she said, and I knew what she meant. A girl my age, two doors down, had been forced through a hastily organised and teary wedding just two weeks before.

I wanted to tell Mum that I didn’t need to be ‘careful’, that I knew what kind of kissing I liked and didn’t like and was forthright enough to stop a boy who went too far. Also, that I had no intention of swelling up in the middle with a baby when I had spent most of the year dieting strictly enough to have visible hipbones. My natural figure and the most fashionable dresses that year did not flatter each other. But I could never talk to my mother about such things, so instead I feigned innocence.

‘Norman is a perfect gentleman,’ I said, though of course this wasn’t true. He was a rakishly handsome party-lover who danced like a fiend and told the most scandalous dirty jokes.

Norman’s dark green Morris Roadster puttered into view, saving me from further conversation. ‘Bye, Mum.’

‘Don’t be home too late,’ she called after me – vainly, I suspected.

Then I was cosying up next to Norman on the long bench seat, headed for St Mary’s Hall, where most of our dances were held. Nobody had any money, so every week a different group of us decorated the hall, brought along a gramophone, provided the punch (none of us could afford gin to make it interesting punch) and stayed to clean up afterwards.

‘Wrong turn,’ I said to Norman.

‘I have to pick up a friend and his girl.’

I eyed the remaining room on the seat. ‘Where are they going to fit?’

‘We’ll squash up. You can sit on my knee and steer if you like.’

We were heading up towards the university. Norman was studying law, so I presumed his friend was a classmate. I watched the late-afternoon shadows out the window, the back of my head leaning against Norman’s hard shoulder. I felt the week fall away from me – the dreary paper-shuffling and envelope-stuffing of my job at the local parish office – and imagined a weekend of walks with Norman, afternoons stretched out on my bed drawing, baking with my sister Genevieve in our cool kitchen.

The car pulled up and I looked around. Leaning in the driver-side window was a dark-haired, bright-eyed young man. Behind him was a slender young woman in a black beaded dress.

‘Harry, Vera,’ Norman said. ‘Jump in.’

‘There isn’t room,’ Vera noted.

‘Beg to differ,’ Norman said, and gestured them around the front of the car to the passenger door, which I opened for them. ‘This is Zara.’

‘Pleased to meet you,’ I said, squeezing up onto Norman’s lap. The steering wheel dug into my thighs. ‘Norman, I’m not sure this will work,’ I muttered.

‘I’ll never fit. I’m so fat,’ the impossibly slim Vera said, making her my instant enemy.

‘This won’t do,’ Harry said. ‘I’ll ride on the hood at the back.’

‘It will be fine. We’ll all just breathe in,’ Norman said. ‘Zara, can you shift your weight so you’re not digging into me?’

I felt suddenly all wrong in my body, as though I was the problem. The reason we couldn’t all fit. I slid off Norman’s lap and said, ‘I’ll sit on the hood. Then you’ll all fit.’

‘I’m not letting a woman sit on the hood while I take the seat,’ Harry said.

‘It’s my choice,’ I said, pushing my way out of the car and gesturing Harry and Vera in.

‘Then I’ll sit with you,’ Harry said. ‘Vera, you can ride with Norman.’

I hitched myself up on the hood, my shoes resting on the spare tyre. ‘There’s really no need,’ I said, but Harry was already sitting next to me, smiling down at me. His eyes seemed to twinkle and his lashes were very long.

‘Your lipstick is the precise colour of your sash,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I replied, shocked that a man would notice such a thing. Norman certainly never did. ‘I bought the taffeta on purpose for that reason. It’s my favourite lipstick.’

The car shuddered into life, making me lose my footing. Harry grasped my wrist and held it until I was secure again.

‘Steady now,’ he said. ‘I’d never forgive myself if you dashed your brains out on the road all because I’m too poor to own a car.’

‘I’ve ridden the hood loads of times,’ I replied, gesturing at the view.

‘Is that so?’ He sized me up in the fading light. ‘Good god, I like a woman with a spirit of adventure.’

I couldn’t hide my smile. ‘It’s the only way to see the world. Backwards, with the wind in one’s hair.’

‘The wind in one’s hair, eh?’ He took off his Panama hat, but his hair was too slick with brilliantine to be much moved.

Impulsively I grabbed his Panama and pressed it onto my head over my dark curls. ‘Look at me,’ I said, in a deep voice. ‘I’m Harry and I’m going to be a lawyer and then I’ll be rich and buy as many cars as I like.’

‘Oh, I’m going to be more than a lawyer,’ he said.

‘What are you going to be?’ I asked.

‘I’m going to change the world.’ He had flipped so quickly from light-hearted to serious it made me blink.

‘You are?’

‘Watch me,’ he said with a smile that creased the corners of his eyes.

And that was it. I did want to watch him. I never wanted to take my eyes off him.

Whoever decorated the hall that night had done it cursorily at best. A few sad crepe-paper chains hung from the rafters, and the long table for the bowls of punch and the enamel cups was bare of any doilies or garlands. Still, we had good music, a roomy dance floor, and a hall full of young people determined to have fun. I danced with Norman for two songs, spending most of the time glancing around for Harry and Vera. She was so tall and elegant – taller than Harry – that she stood out, and the knot of jealousy in my stomach grew ever tighter. Vera didn’t look to me as though she had a ‘spirit of adventure’. I wondered if Harry had told her he was going to change the world, and if she believed him. I believed him. I believed him with my whole heart.

Harry caught my eye and smiled over Vera’s head. The corners of his mouth went all the way up when he smiled, as though he was filled with boyish delight. I felt my own lips curve up, not the coquettish smile I normally used with boys I like, but something genuine and irresistible.

Norman saw my expression and looked around. ‘Why are you grinning at Harry Holt?’ he said.

‘I’m not grinning,’ I said, as Norman spun me so my back was to Harry.

His eyebrows twitched but he said nothing more.

Later, I gathered with a group of my girlfriends out on the back steps of the hall. The air smelled like cut grass and jasmine. Eloise and I smoked, though I didn’t care much for cigarettes. Betty was in the middle of describing to us how to use a fork to make perfect pleats when a shadow blocked the light from the door and I looked up to see Harry.

‘Hello,’ I said, beaming.

He joined us on the stairs. ‘Am I interrupting something?’

‘No, not at all.’ I extinguished my cigarette under my shoe. ‘Girls, this is Harry. A friend of Norman’s from university.’

My friends introduced themselves one by one, and he was charming with all of them, but then turned to me and said, ‘I haven’t had a dance with you yet, Miss Dickins.’

Something about the way he said it, with a deep promise in his voice, made my heart stir. A ragtime piano tune came on the gramophone inside. I loved a foxtrot.

He took my hand in the light from the doorway and tugged it gently, leading me out onto the lawn. ‘There’s more room to dance out here,’ he said. The music was faint, but audible enough to hear the rhythm. He pulled me up against him – I could smell the sharp, slightly mineral scent of his hair cream – and we danced in the balmy evening air.

I suppose that’s when I fell in love with Harry, though in some ways it felt as though I had always loved him and had simply been waiting for him to arrive. He was not half the dancer that Norman was, and yet when the music ended and he let me go, I ached for more. We returned to the stairs, and I realised his girl, Vera, had joined our little gang. If she was perturbed by me dancing with Harry, she didn’t show it. And of course we all danced with each other all the time – nobody was expected to dance with the same boy all night. But that dance felt different from any dance I’d danced before. The heat and the power of his body were imprinted on all my senses. I felt giddy.

Harry disappeared back into the hall, but Vera stayed with us. She was funny and friendly, despite being thin, and in no time she was making up dirty lyrics to a song with Eloise. It was only when we were heading inside for some punch that Vera gently grasped my elbow and held me back.

My heart thudded in my throat. Why did I feel guilty?

‘He does this,’ she said.

‘Does what?’

‘Woos other girls. All the time.’

‘He wasn’t wooing me,’ I said lightly, shrugging her off. ‘It was just a dance.’

She sniffed. ‘He won’t be any more faithful to you than he is to me. Or the last girl or the one before.’

‘It was just a dance,’ I said again. ‘But thank you.’

I didn’t dance with Harry again that night and in fact I didn’t see him leave, which made me feel terribly deflated. I had thought he might seek me out to say goodnight, but he didn’t. Those few magic moments dancing with him had clearly meant more to me than to him. Norman brought me home at eleven. We sat in the car a few minutes kissing, but then he got a little too bold with his hands and for some reason tonight I couldn’t tolerate it. I firmly pushed him away and said it was late. I waved him off from the patio where Mum had left a hurricane lamp burning for me by the door. His car disappeared down the street and I listened to its engine recede. Then I turned to go inside.

‘Zara?’ A harsh whisper.

I spun round. Emerging from the shadows of the high rose hedge that bordered our garden was Harry.

‘Harry?’ Puzzled. Thrilled.

He walked towards me, spreading his hands, hat loosely grasped. ‘I hope you don’t mind.’

‘How do you know where I live?’ I asked as he ascended the three stairs to our patio.

‘I didn’t until I asked Eloise,’ he said in a soft voice. No lights were on inside and neither of us wanted to wake my parents. ‘I’m sorry I left without saying goodbye. Vera’s parents expected her home by ten.’

‘So how long have you been waiting for me to come home?’

He shrugged. ‘Doesn’t matter.’

I stood, gazing at him in wonder for a few moments, then remembered myself. ‘I can’t invite you in, but we could sit here for a while?’ I gestured to the wicker settee by the door.

‘I’d like that,’ he said, and took my hand so we sat down together, close. Again, I experienced the heat of him, the warm magnetism of his presence.

Both of us looked straight ahead. A few moments of silence ensued, but they weren’t awkward. I could hear the crickets, the soft breeze in the very tips of the trees, the faint shush of the hurricane lamp. Then he shifted in his seat so he could face me, and I turned too. He was smiling.

‘Why did you come here?’ I asked him.

‘I’m going away tomorrow,’ he said. ‘London. I’ll be gone until the middle of next year.’

The distance my heart fell surprised me. ‘Oh,’ I said.

‘I couldn’t leave without seeing you,’ he said. ‘Asking you if … well, I think I know.’

‘Know … ?’

He tilted his head. That boyish grin. ‘You feel it. How can you not? It’s too hot and bright for me to be imagining it.’

I opened my mouth to play the coquette, play hard-to-get. Feel what? But with Harry, I wanted to be simple and true. Instead I said softly, ‘Oh yes, I feel it.’

He picked up my hand, rubbed his thumbs slowly up and down the length of my fingers. Electricity flared in all my nerve endings.

‘Be my girl and wait for me?’ he asked.

Good sense kicked in. I wasn’t a green little girl. Six months was a long time. ‘Harry, we’ve only just met. I know nothing about you.’

He withdrew his hands. ‘Well, then. I will tell you all there is to know, and then you’ll be my girl.’

I laughed. ‘Go on.’

He told me the facts: his mother dead, his father living in London where he worked in the theatre trade, his younger brother Cliff also pursuing a career in entertainment. But it was the small changes of expression in his face, the tone of his voice, and his shifting between expansive and terse that told me the most about him. Summers at his grandfather’s farm were covered in detail. The dislocated loneliness of arriving at boarding school at twelve were reframed in the reasonable tone of a man looking back embarrassedly on childish things. Missing his mother’s funeral was skipped over in a clipped sentence. And when the facts were exhausted and he started talking about his thoughts and feelings, he invited me to share mine too. Hours passed as we agreed and disagreed violently with each other, our voices sometimes becoming too loud, which resulted in us shushing each other and giggling. We wove magic between us with our words, soul to soul, and when the sun cracked the horizon he kissed me goodnight and promised me he’d write as soon as he arrived in London.

‘You won’t,’ I said, feeling the morning cold. ‘You’ll forget me.’

He stood up. ‘You’ll see,’ he said. ‘We belong to each other now. Always will.’

I shook my head, smiling. ‘I don’t know what to make of you.’ I picked up his hat, which he had rested on the back of the settee. ‘Here, don’t forget this.’

‘You mind it for me,’ he said. ‘That way you know I’ll come back for it. Besides, it looks prettier on you.’

I placed it on my head and blew him a kiss.

‘Prettier than a rose,’ he said. ‘My Zara.’ Down the stairs, looking over his shoulder. ‘I’ll write.’

‘And I’ll write back.’

‘You’ll have to break it off with Norman.’

‘And you with Vera.’

‘Already done. I’m no two-timer.’

I didn’t tell him that Vera had said differently.

I watched him until he disappeared around the corner then sat on the settee, eyes gritty with tiredness as the sun came up over the laurels.

Christmas passed, and New Year’s, and no letter came. My heart didn’t break. Sometimes before I went to sleep, I’d do the maths of the situation in my head. Six weeks for him to get to London, perhaps two weeks for a letter to get back via air mail. And when I thought of that exotic route – the aeroplane stopping in places like Persia and Burma – it seemed highly likely something so inconsequential as a letter would get lost along the way. Then again, perhaps he had sent his letters via sea mail, which would mean an even longer wait.

Or perhaps he hadn’t meant it when he said we belonged to each other. Or he had meant it at the time but his regard for me dissolved as the ship left the shore. So I kept seeing Norman, though the shine was dulling when we danced and kissed.

My best friend Betty started work at a construction company office on the northern end of Russell Street, and found me a job in the secretarial pool with her, so I leaped at the chance to work in town and felt quite the grown woman on the tram every morning with my new tooled-leather handbag over my wrist. I had plenty on my mind, and by February I couldn’t remember Harry’s face all that clearly anymore.

It was only when I woke before dawn that a deep sense of loneliness washed over me. As though something important was missing, as though a glittering opportunity had been within my reach and I’d failed to grasp it.

Betty and I sat together in a pod of three desks in the secretarial pool, which was very poor planning on our head secretary Mrs Bloomsbury’s part, as we spent a good deal of the day gossiping over the clatter of typewriters. I loved to draw dresses and Betty loved to sew, and that meant a lot of our conversation was about clothes, and of course which shoes and lipsticks and hairstyles went best with them. Irma, the thin-mouthed secretary who sat at the head of the pod, clearly disapproved of our obsession with appearance (though Betty and I had commented many times that she had the perfect figure for a drop-waist shift). Dresses won’t get you far in life, was her favourite thing to say to us, but I suspected she was wrong. Being a secretary didn’t get you far, or at least only as far as a marriage because no woman could possibly support herself on a secretary’s wage.

So we started playing a secret game with Irma. Every Friday, I would hand a dress sketch to Betty and over the weekend she would make it. Betty’s aunt had passed on her old sewing machine as a Christmas gift, and she hoarded fabrics and lace, sometimes taking apart an old dress to make a new one. On Monday, she would wear the dress and tell Irma she’d bought it on the weekend at Manton’s or even Georges, and Irma never once suspected they were our designs. Instead, she usually complained that Betty spent far too much money on clothes, given some people were too poor to eat.

I became bored with the game after a few months because the dresses I liked to sketch were evening gowns with beads and sequins, velvet and chiffon. Not even a glamourpuss like Betty could get away with wearing those to work, at least not without being mistaken for a lady of the night. But the game was the start of us thinking about what it might be like if we opened our own dress shop. Would we simply gossip all day and go out of business in a month? Or would working at something we both deeply loved keep our ‘heads down’, as the head secretary liked to tell us?

We talked about it idly, dreamily, but I was aware that Betty’s boyfriend Tom Ramsay was likely to propose soon, and that would be that for dreams of single ladies running a dress shop. I had no desire for Norman to ask me to marry him. Things had changed between us too much since I met Harry. He annoyed me more readily now. He seemed clingy, perhaps because I was impatient with him. And I could hardly let myself think about Harry as a potential husband, given that he had come into my life in one bright moment then disappeared like a phantom.

Once a week, Mum caught the tram into town with a picnic from home. Ordinarily I didn’t eat, keen to preserve my figure. We walked down to Fitzroy Gardens and Mum would spread out a checked cloth for us to sit on. It was nothing fancy – just sandwiches and a flask of tea, and sometimes jam tarts if she had made them – but I spent so much time ravenous that it seemed a joyous treat.

On this particular February afternoon, unusually hot, I had a mouthful of cheese sandwich when Mum reached into her handbag and pulled out two letters.

Two.

I knew straight away what they were, though I waited for Mum to pass them to me.

‘These arrived this morning, both from the same person. London address. Do you know a Harry Holt?’

I tried not to be too eager snatching them from her. ‘Yes, I met him a few months ago.’ The envelopes were both thickly stuffed. My heart swelled. I slid them into my handbag and fastened the clip, then tried very hard to concentrate on what Mum was saying.

My mother was beautiful, and this had been a great source of pain for me since I reached my teenage years. She was tall and slender where I was five feet two and well-covered with a soft layer of flesh. She had wide-spaced eyes and a strongly defined jaw and cheekbones, whereas I had a round face and a small mouth. I watched her hands as she poured us tea into two enamel mugs: they were elegant with rounded nails. My hands, by comparison, were small and doughy with nails most often bitten down to the quick. I had seen among my friends that a moment always came when their own beauty blossomed and surpassed their mother’s. I didn’t believe that moment would ever come for me.

I found it difficult to engage with our usual lunchtime conversation because my mind was most determinedly elsewhere. If Mum noticed, she didn’t say anything. She loved to talk – something I did inherit from her – and filled me in on all the latest about our neighbours (who fought savagely and audibly every Sunday after church), about how she was certain Genevieve’s boyfriend Jack was going to propose any moment, about how my two younger brothers had muddied the sheets on the line this morning playing in the garden before school. I nodded and tutted and smiled exactly where I should, but my heart was off with Harry.

Where it would be all my life.

We wrote to each other with force and fire, crushing pen tips and burning pages with our fervour. After those first two letters – one of which had been delayed somewhere along the route, the other full of reproaches that I hadn’t responded – they kept coming. Great wads of paper covered in his looping, flowing handwriting. So little of what he wrote was of the day-to-day life in London with his father. Rather, he wrote to me about the ideas he had and the dreams he was nurturing, or he wrote about things that had happened in his childhood, and how boarding school and his mother’s death had affected him. He gave me his future and his past but very little about his present. By contrast, I felt my letters were mundane and full of details of secretarial pool gossip and complaints about my brothers. So I embellished them with tiny drawings in the margins and corners, mostly pixies and fairies, which I had always been fascinated by. They all had cupid’s bow lips (like me) and tiny waists. Harry loved them, and asked for more of my art, but I had never considered my pictures art. So sometimes I would include a few sketches in the envelope, and he was delighted by them. He was delighted by me. I had never known a boy to be so interested in me, not as a pretty girl, but as a person.

Of course, I imagined him coming home and asking me to marry him, perhaps with a ring he bought on the way in Ceylon, which I understood had the most beautiful sapphires in the world. I dreamily drew wedding dresses on my bed in the evening, concoctions of flowing satin, chiffon and rose-point lace. But his letters also made me want to imagine other things. He spoke openly of his desire for me, and I responded in kind. I had not forgotten the irresistible physical draw of him, and at night before I went to sleep, I imagined over and over being with him. Kisses at first, then touches, and over time it all grew more intimate and feverish in my head, until some nights I couldn’t get to sleep for the violence of my body’s reaction to such thoughts. More than once Mum found me in the kitchen drinking milk from the ice chest at midnight, and when she asked me why I couldn’t sleep I would never have been able to answer her. Lust, Mum. I am full of burning lust. All the cold milk in the world could not extinguish it.

While my thoughts were always turned towards Harry – imagining encounters with him, making note of things to write to him, reading books he’d recommended (usually not my style) and so on – he didn’t exist in a real way in the world, and that’s probably why I didn’t do as he’d asked and break it off with Norman for quite some time. I had a real life to live and, as a young woman, that involved parties and dances. Getting dressed up and arriving on a dapper man’s arm was part of that.

Around the middle of April, as the weather was obdurately turning towards winter, Eloise had her nineteenth birthday and threw an enormous party at her godfather’s house in Toorak. While Eloise’s family was an ordinary middle-income one like mine, her godfather was, in her words, ‘richer than Croesus’, and his house boasted a small ballroom with a parquetry floor and an arched ceiling. The room was lit softly and shadows shifted across the walls. A live swing band played on the low stage, and it was so much louder than a gramophone that the only way to talk was to head out through the French doors onto the tiled patio overlooking the tulip trees.

After the warmth of the ballroom, the chill of the patio was welcome and I stood out there with Betty, as we often did, dissecting every dress we’d seen, enthusing over some and shuddering with horror over others. Betty’s Tom came and fetched her to dance, and I was by myself a few moments before Norman joined me at my side.

‘Have you seen the size of the birthday cake?’ he asked.

‘No.’

He held his hand at hip height. ‘They just brought it out. I dare say they’ll be cutting it shortly. Want to head back inside?’ He took me gently and pulled me against him in foxtrot-ready stance. ‘I’m not done dancing with you yet.’

I laughed and gently extricated myself. ‘Not now.’

I was expecting him to shrug it off as he usually did, but something had changed with him and he grabbed me with force. ‘Not now? Then when, Zara? We come to parties and dances, and you give me one dance. I drop you home and you give me one kiss. I can’t live on one dance and one kiss a week.’

I shrank back but he held me firm. ‘Norman, let go of me.’

‘You know I fancied myself in love with you?’

‘I’m sorry, Norman, I don’t feel the same.’ I said it all in a rush, guilty.

He released me so roughly that I stumbled and had to reach for the stone balustrade to steady myself. ‘It’s a dangerous game you’re playing, Zara. Leading a man on like this.’

‘I hadn’t meant to lead you on,’ I said, forcing a smile, lightening my tone. ‘We have a good time, don’t we? We’re young. Nothing needs to be so serious.’

He shook his head, and the sadness in his eyes sent a sharp pulse of guilt through my chest. ‘I thought we were serious. I’d started saving for a ring.’

Words stuck coldly in my throat.

‘Zara, I know,’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I overheard you and Vieve talking at last week’s dance. Harry Holt’s been writing you love letters, hasn’t he?’

My furtive romance with Harry was so secret I hadn’t even told Betty. But Mum and my sister knew because they saw the letters arrive. ‘He’s been writing to me, yes,’ I said. ‘And I write back. But I barely know him and we’re only friends.’

‘Ha!’ Norman said with a bitter shake of his head. ‘I should have known better than to introduce him to you. There’s not a woman alive who can resist him if he puts his mind to it, apparently. It’s not the first time he’s decided he wants what’s mine.’

I fell silent. I couldn’t bear angry men; they frightened me.

He drilled a finger into the soft part of my shoulder. ‘You’re welcome to him. In fact, you are welcome to each other. A pair of two-timers. He will lead you on a merry dance and, when it’s over, you’ll realise what you lost. And I wouldn’t have you back for all the tea in China.’

I tried to stammer out an apology but he stormed off. I was so relieved that I sagged against the balustrade and took deep breaths. He was right to break it off with me. I should have done it myself, months ago. After the first letter. No, even earlier – after dancing with Harry. There was no other man for me from that moment on, so I should have admitted it to myself and to Norman.

A few minutes later, Betty emerged. ‘Oh my, Zara, what have you done to Norman? He’s raced off in his car and I think he was crying.’

The very idea that I made a man cry cut me deeply. I confessed everything to Betty, who comforted me and told me I’d done nothing wrong, but Norman’s words stayed with me. A pair of two-timers. I knew it was true of me, and more than one person had now told me it was true of Harry. What had I gotten myself into?

There were six of us in our house in Kew, so quarters were a little cramped and Genevieve and I shared the smallest bedroom at the front of the house. On a clear day, if you tilted your head at just the right angle, you could glimpse the Yarra River in the distance over the violet farms that dotted the hills. John and David, my younger brothers, had another room, and my parents had the largest, facing the garden with its tidy lawn and beds of hyacinth. In the middle of the house was Daddy’s dark little den, where Vieve and I had lessons with a governess until I was twelve. Afte