By Marriage Divided. Lindsay Armstrong

to the Blacktown property and could probably make Mum a small fortune with the proceeds. But you obviously didn’t like him, did you, Dom?’

      Domenica looked into her sister’s dark, intelligent eyes. ‘I…don’t know why but he made me feel…nervous.’

      Christy considered. ‘On the other hand, to know that Mum was happy, settled and back in what she considers her rightful milieu would be such a weight off our minds, wouldn’t it?’

      Domenica glanced towards the kitchen doorway through which she could hear their mother musically exhorting the percolator to perk. ‘Yes, Christy,’ she said, ‘it would. But, please, just head her away from any plans to socialize with him until I, well, work a few things out.’

      ‘OK,’ Christy agreed. ‘If she mentions him again I’ll tell her he was a boundary rider’s son who didn’t get to finish high school.’

      They smiled ruefully at each other, then Domenica said slowly, ‘Not that you would know it—he looks and sounds anything but! Although—’ her mind roamed back ‘—perhaps he does have a slight chip on his shoulder. Do I often sound upper crust and la-di-da?’ she asked.

      Christy laughed. ‘Darling Dom, in fact you’re light years from being it, but there are times when you can look down your nose just like Mum!’

      Three weeks passed, during which Domenica forwarded a cheque to Angus Keir for the repairs to her car and investigated the Blacktown scenario. The cheque came back to her torn up but with no note.

      This annoyed her considerably but she decided not to pursue the matter. And, quite irrationally, it annoyed her even more to discover that his summing up of the Blacktown estate had been quite accurate. Through another real estate agent, she found out that the warehouse was, indeed, suddenly a much more valuable property.

      She tried to persuade herself that this would have become apparent to her anyway, through offers made for it, but she couldn’t persuade herself that she’d have known how much to ask for it.

      Then her mother rang one afternoon to tell her that she’d invited a few friends round for a cocktail party early that evening and would she please come.

      ‘Why such late notice?’ Domenica asked down the phone, with her mind elsewhere.

      ‘You know me, darling, I’m so scatterbrained, I was quite sure I’d told you about it, then I thought I better check, just in case! I was right.’

      ‘Who’s coming?’

      Her mother ran through a list of names, and added that she was dressing up.

      ‘All right, thanks, Mum, but I’m so busy, I might be a bit late. See you!’ Domenica put the phone down and shook her head. A couple of hours later, she remembered the party and had to shower and change on the run because she was already late.

      Damn, she thought as she wriggled into her favourite black dress and did a contortionist act to zip herself up. It was short and fitted, with narrow shoestring straps that crossed over her back, and she embellished it with a single strand of pearls, another bequest from her Lidcombe grandmother. Deciding she didn’t have time to fight with tights and it was too hot for them anyway, she slipped her feet into a pair of closed-toed black patent sandals with little heels, and applied some lipstick and eye shadow.

      But she hated rushing, she hated being late although she was not a great fan of her mother’s cocktail parties, so it wasn’t in the best of moods that she let herself into the Rose Bay house, convinced she looked less than her best and feeling quite breathless.

      Nor did it improve her mood at all to discover that she’d been right about Angus Keir—he did stand out from a crowd because he was the first person she noticed amongst the throng in her mother’s living room.