Melbourne is the home city of several guests at Tranquillum House and, after the retreat, part of the geography of Frances and Tony’s developing relationship. It links their departure from the group’s temporary world to the everyday lives they resume—and to the long-distance walking routine they create together.

A Home City Among the Guests

When the retreat ends, the Marconi family and Tony are identified as being from Melbourne. They are among the interstate guests leaving the next morning, while Carmel is from Adelaide and Frances and Lars are the guests from Sydney. Tony has hired a rental car, and plans to drive Ben and Jessica to retrieve their car, which Delilah had left behind. The practical arrangements make Melbourne one point in a wider map of journeys home, as the group prepares to separate after its time together.

The Distance After the Retreat

The novel gives the return to ordinary life a counterpoint in Frances’s expectation that the retreat will soon seem dreamlike. She anticipates that, with distance from Tranquillum House, the guests may wonder what they had in common and whether the extraordinary things they did together could really have happened. Melbourne is part of that dispersal: a home destination rather than a continuation of the retreat’s shared setting.

A Shared Walking Routine

Two months later, Frances and Tony are walking in different states, nine hundred kilometres apart. They have made a habit of keeping each other company as they walk around their respective neighborhoods. At first they hold their mobile phones to their ears; after Tony’s daughter Mimi suggests headphones, they can walk longer without their ears aching. Their brief exchange about whether Tony has reached the steep part of his route shows how intimacy persists through small, familiar details despite the distance between them. Melbourne therefore figures not only as a place Tony returns to, but as one half of a routine through which he and Frances remain connected.