They talked in a way that they had not talked for years, maybe never talked. Merridy started to uncover in him an intimacy, and Alex to renew an old pleasure and sense of possibility. And not really having spoken on the telephone in his life, he now talked himself into closeness. Their nightly conversations were a little shell that both crawled into. Together with Merridy he returned in shy, but increasingly jubilant steps to their first encounter in the lane behind the school; their honeymoon on Flinders, digging for Killiecrankie diamonds, the film that he had taken her to see in Whitemark, and the low-flying peacock that cracked the windscreen of their hired car.