Rona and Hannah, meanwhile, were making a bold attempt on the champagne. The bottle was more than half-empty, and though Hannah had drunk the lion's share of it Rona had had enough to make her drunk; except, gallingly, she wasn't.

"Typical!" she exclaimed loudly. "When I don't want to bloody stay sober, I can't get drunk to save myself!" She held up the bottle and glared at it accusingly. "Is there even any alcohol in this stuff?"

Hannah giggled. "You better believe it!" She emptied another glass of the champagne into her mouth, and held out her hand imploringly for Rona to pass her the bottle.

"Hannah" said Rona reproachfully, "did you start drinking before you came here"

"No . . ."

"You don't sound entirely certain."

"That's because I can't entirely remember."

"I see."

Hannah grinned. "Enough about me, let's talk about you."

"I don't really want to" replied Rona.

"Sure you do" insisted Hannah, "and I'm gonna damn well make you, too."

Rona wondered how she did that: shot through with such sharp and sudden insights without moving from behind a wall of drunkenness. She was used to that drunkenness, Rona supposed - and a nagging thought flared in her mind, something that Sacha had said - but she dismissed it straight away, she wasn't going to pay any credence to anything Sacha had said.

"What did she say, anyway?" asked Hannah. "When you spoke to her this evening."

"Oh -" Rona waved her hand in a pattern of general emphasis - "all sorts of shit. Some horrible stuff. You know how she gets really spiky sometimes? Well she started that on me. I never thought she would. It's like -" Rona laughed unexpectedly - "it's like being bitten by the family dog."

"Ow, that's harsh!" said Hannah.

"It's how I feel" shrugged Rona matter-of-factly.

"So now what?"

"I don't know. Fuck her, there was nothing missing from my life before she came along, why should it be any different now? Just - fuck her."

"You really feel that way?" Hannah tried hard to hide the self-interest in her voice.

Rona squared her shoulders. "Yeah" she said in a voice heavy with toughness. "Yeah, I do."

"So, no second chances?" asked Hannah warily. Before Rona could answer, however, her mobile 'phone - perched on the edge of the dining-table - started ringing. The "vibrate" mode sent it shivering across the table-top, and Rona lunged from her seat towards it just in time to catch it as it fell towards the floor. "Hello?" she said breathlessly when she answered the call.

On the other end of the line, in Canberra, Kate breathed in deeply to steady herself: she wasn't quite sure what she was doing, making this call. "Hi" she said, "I'm . . . a friend of Sacha's, and I was hoping we could talk." She finished the sentence quickly, not wanting to give Rona an opportunity to hang up. "Is that okay? It's really important."

Rona threw Hannah a look that Hannah couldn't quite decipher: a kind of confused scowl - then she turned away again. After what seemed to both Hannah and Kate to be a very long time, she said, cautiously:

"Okay."