I never wanted to come here. I was happier in England. I had a garden full of roses and squirrels at the bird table; I knew what things were called and where to get them. ‘More opportunities,’ Norman said. What did I want with those? He promised me better weather, but what did I want with that? I had a coat and good leather boots and more than one pair of gloves. I liked a wind with some bite and a crust of frost on a puddle. I liked the spring that sprang from cold dark winters and pushed up sugary pink crocuses. I liked gardens that grew when they were watered properly by nature; delicate blooms that wouldn’t fry like eggs as soon as the sun came out; soil that didn’t stain your trousers; earth you could shove your hands straight into with nothing to think of but slugs and worms. I liked my birds twittering and flittering, not squawking and smashing trees to pieces, and you didn’t have to worry an English spider might rot your foot off.

‘A change is as good as a rest,’ the travel agent said, but I didn’t need a change or a rest. I liked the business of my life. I had my own little car and a library card. I had family we saw at Christmas; I had a drinks cabinet with mirrors in its door. That seems so frivolous now but there it was. Sherry on a Sunday, wine with dinner, and gin with women who made me laugh—women I’d thought were the closest of friends till I left and all that boiled down to was barely-in-time-for-Christmas cards with shorter and shorter notes enclosed.

They say Adelaide’s a lot like England, but it isn’t. Not really. Church spires and chocolatiers, cricket pitches and antique shops, but there’s nothing in them older than eighty or ninety years. Their botanical garden is lovely, but the valleys aren’t really. It didn’t hold a candle to Yorkshire, but nonetheless, there we were.

The garden came along—all agapanthus and hydrangea, but we made a go of it. Norman did well at work, we went to functions, he got his bonuses. I learned what was what and where to get it. We had people over for dinner. We played golf. You could say we were settled. But then Norman got sick, and we had to move. Again.

I lived with Norman a long time not knowing he was ill. It’s only looking back that I can see now, there were signs. Could I call them symptoms? He knew a long time before I did, he’s admitted as much, but he couldn’t hide it forever, and after that, well, everything had to change.

Doctors used to prescribe warmer weather for vertigo, menopause, anaemia—if it couldn’t be cured with Epsom salts, a hot bath or a cold compress, they’d recommend Spain. Take the air, take the water. I don’t know that it ever did anyone any good, but we had nothing else to lose.

Perth was warmer than Adelaide and drier, and it was home enough for a couple of years, but it didn’t make Norman any better. And by then I knew he was only ever going to get worse.

So then we just wanted a place we could put down the last of our roots. Somewhere we could be together without being bothered. I didn’t want them taking him away, and I knew they would if they found out how sick he was; they’d have him off me by teatime, and what good would that do? He’d never get any better. The best they’d do was stretch the time he had left, but they’d have him in a place where they could keep an eye on him while they did it. I wanted to be the one to take care of him. We’d always been together. What would he want with strangers? For better, for worse; richer or poorer; in sickness and in health: these promises were all tested over the years, but they were promises we’d made and it was up to us to keep them—up to me to keep them.

We just needed a place to be. A kettle, a radio, a blanket on the bed, a shelf of books, not too many steps and shops close enough. We didn’t mind the warmer weather and I’d heard that humidity loosens the joints. The ocean was a bonus; they say the salt air opens up the lungs (curses your garden, but that couldn’t be helped). More than anything else, we just wanted to be left alone.

It took us a long time to get to Magpie Beach and we stayed in a lot of grotty motels on the way. Once or twice, we slept in the car—seats wound as far back as they could go and I buttered a lot of sandwiches at picnic tables. It’s not a glamorous story. But we were lucky to find the house. ‘It’s a dear little place,’ the woman had said, and little was right. In Adelaide we’d started off with four bedrooms, two bathrooms, a study and plenty of room for the children neither of us ever actually believed we’d have, as it turned out. At Magpie Beach we had a bedroom, a bathroom, and what they’d call a kitchenette. There was no proper electricity, but the generator was new and easy to run, and the water tank was rarely low enough to worry us. We burned what waste we could and buried what we couldn’t. It was an easy trip to town, where they had everything we needed, and a pleasant enough walk along the rocks north and south with nowhere else to go but out to sea.

It’s funny, when it comes down to it, everything you think you can’t live without—those essential bits and pieces, favourites and habits—well, you can. You whittle what you’ve got down to as much as you can pack into the back of a car and you cobble together the bits you’re missing out of what you find when you get to where you’re going, and you make do and get on with it.

We kept ourselves to ourselves and we pottered along. I kept Norman safe, and we kept each other company, and then the gypsy woman came to call in the middle of the night, hammering at the door in her dressing-gown.

‘He’s alright,’ she told me. But we both knew that he wasn’t. It was years since he’d been alright.

It was such a shock to see her there. What must she have thought when she found him wandering around in the dark? I was embarrassed that I hadn’t missed him, and that she knew I hadn’t missed him. She knew I’d been tucked up in bed, dead to the world until she’d knocked on the door and woken me up. He’d climbed out of the window, I realised later, and I hadn’t heard a thing. Fast asleep—what sort of carer was I? I didn’t even thank her. I should have thanked her for bringing him home.

I went to find her the next day, because of the pickles. I’m not a fan of cucumber and it touched on snooping, I thought, sneaking back the way she must have in the dark to leave a jar by the mat, but it was a nice gesture, and I did want to thank her for it, and for bringing Norman home—but mostly I wanted to make sure she understood I could take care of him. I didn’t know whether she was the type who’d make a phone call, express concern, request a visit, let Them know there was a man here who needed the sort of care his wife was not providing. We didn’t want to be found, you see. We’d hidden ourselves quite deliberately. Left no breadcrumbs and swept away all footprints.

She was burying something when I got there, some sort of bulb or bean, and we talked about gardening for a while. She didn’t have a lot to say, but I’ll admit that I enjoyed the conversation, and I shouldn’t have worried; I could see from the way and where she lived that she didn’t want to be bothered any more than we did. She wasn’t about to call anyone in to come and check on anything.

How do you keep a secret?

You tell no one.