Eddie had been right about the traffic. There was only the occasional lorry which shook the Kingswood as it passed. I drove for two hours beyond Rockhampton, then Rosemary told me to pull in to a rest stop and she took the driver’s seat. We left Lily sleeping, earlobe folded and chin resting on the sling of her seatbelt, and stretched our legs in trading places, tightening the straps on the tarp that tucked the horses in the trailer.

It was less than an hour then to Theodore, and we slipped our shoes back on and collected the bits we’d taken from our handbags: tissues and glasses and lolly wrappers.

The motel Eddie had booked was just past the fuel stop on the run into town. A long double-storey with two parking spots in front of every spinach green door: one each for the unit downstairs and its twin above. There was a bottle shop at one end and a restaurant at the other. ‘You’ll have to book if you want dinner tonight,’ the girl on the front desk told us, and Lily snorted but she went ahead and made a reservation.

‘We won’t want a late night,’ she said.

Once we’d found our room, Rosemary disappeared into the bathroom and locked the door. Lily and I understood her wanting to be alone and didn’t worry it might take a sinister tread. We knew she would come back to us when she was ready, and in the meantime we settled in to wait.

Lily tutted at the crust of calcium in the kettle, but she made tea and we sat together on the big double bed with our shoes off while she dragged us up and down the television channels and found a film that hadn’t long started. Rosemary knew its title when we told her later, though by then Lily and I had both forgotten it. When it finished, Lily levered herself off the bed and buttoned her cardigan.

‘Red or white?’

‘Either,’ I told her.

‘But which would you prefer?’

I didn’t mind.

A little whistle escaped her teeth. ‘Right then.’ When she rapped on the bathroom door, we heard the thick swoosh of Rosemary sitting up, waking to chill water and a scum of soap.

‘I’m just popping out to get a bottle of wine,’ Lily called. ‘Will I get you anything?’

‘I’m right, thanks.’

‘Right then.’ Right as rain, my grandmother used to say.

There was the squeak of a tap and the blast of hot water bringing the temperature back up, but it was still a while before Rosemary came out, and Lily and I drank wine out of teacups Lily wiped out with a tissue she found in her handbag, while we watched a teatime quiz show on the television.

We had our dinner early. Lily did most of the talking, wondering what to order from the chalkboard, whether we should have a glass each or another bottle of wine. Rosemary bounced hints and hesitant little questions away like small stones off a racquet. She wasn’t ready yet to join in, so there was no mention at all of the little baby assembling in our minds now that we knew it grew inside her like a cashew. We talked instead about the drive, wondered what the market would be like, how many horses we might hope to sell, who might buy them, whether we might get a chance to wander around the other stalls ourselves.

Teeth were brushed and nighties pulled on turn by turn in the mustardy light of the bathroom, and we were in our beds by nine o’clock, Rosemary and I sharing the double while Lily took the rollaway that someone had been in and set up.

‘Does anyone want to read?’ she asked.

I would have liked to but didn’t want to say, so the lights went out in a sequence of snaps and pings.

‘Did you ever want children?’ Rosemary asked us then.

It was velvet-black in the room, its curtains wide and thick enough to let road-weary travellers sleep late into next mornings and right through sunny afternoons. The pillows were crinkle-clean and crackle-soft. Sheets pulled tight and blankets scratchy.

‘What makes you think I haven’t got them?’ Lily said.

‘Do you?’

‘No.’

I felt the shake of Rosemary’s giggle.

My brother and I used to share a room. We used to giggle in the dark, whisper across the lava of our bedroom carpet and stuff our faces into pillows so laughter wouldn’t bring an angry parent in the middle of the night. Sometimes we’d share a book and torchlight and the Wild West of Louis L’Amour.

‘I never wanted them,’ Lily said, though there was a stillness to it that made me wonder if she might have, once upon a time and long ago; if Helen might have been a baby’s name.

‘I’ve never much liked them,’ she went on. ‘Always up to something they shouldn’t be.’ There was a pause in her breathing and the dull clunk of a cup reaching a saucer on the floor. It could have been water or wine. ‘Dirty little things.’

It was a strange word to use, I thought: dirty. Men in raincoats and hairs in pies. Children are grubby; their faces want scrubbing, hair brushing, feet wiping; they’re biscuits in bedclothes and dogs up where they shouldn’t be, but I’d have liked a grubby little boy or girl. I’d have let them dig in the garden, run along barefoot, lick the spoon.

‘I never really thought about it,’ I said. But I had.

Rosemary reached across and took my hand. It was kind enough to put a lump in my throat, but I wanted desperately to pull away. I wished myself outside, under a big sky, cold and on my own. More pressing, though, was the feeling that I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, so I left my hand in hers and only squeezed my eyes shut tight.

‘Well, it’s a bit late to start now,’ Lily said with a chuckle. She was right. It was all water under the bridge, and I half-remembered a poem my grandmother taught us about a mill turning. If she hadn’t actually made us learn it, she’d recited it so often that we did.

‘I was never that interested in sex or any of that,’ Lily said quietly. ‘I dozed off more than once.’ Rosemary giggled again and my hand was freed. ‘More to the point,’ Lily went on, ‘do you want children?’

Did Rosemary want children? The child that grew inside her, did she want it? Would she keep it?

I waited a long time for Rosemary to answer, but she didn’t. She just turned away, untucked the top sheet with her feet and pulled fistfuls of hairy blanket, and her knees, into a curl.

After a while, Lily began to snore softly. There was chatter on the street. Taps turned on next door. I lay there alone in the dark and worried the corners of my grandmother’s poem until it peeled from memory like a label soaked.

Learn to make the most of life,

Lose no happy day,

Time will never bring thee back

Chances swept away!

Leave no tender word unsaid,

Love while love shall last;

‘The mill cannot grind

With the water that is past.’

‘That was nice,’ Rosemary whispered, so some of it, at least, must have been out loud.