electricity between them

The electricity between Liz Montrose and Cameron Hillier is the novel’s central image for an attraction that precedes explanation and repeatedly unsettles the roles they try to impose on themselves. It first appears as a bodily awareness between a guarded single mother and her employer, then develops through mutual recognition, resistance, separation, and renewed declaration into the basis of a shared future rather than a passing affair.

First Recognition

The attraction becomes perceptible in the close confines of Cameron Hillier’s car after an exchange in which Liz Montrose attempts to perform professional composure. Cameron stares at her expressionless face, but the atmosphere changes: what passes between them is not disapproval but an awareness of each other. Liz becomes acutely conscious of the width of his shoulders beneath his charcoal suit, the lines beside his mouth, his dark blue gaze, and the textures of his clothing and the car’s leather upholstery. The scene gives the electricity a distinctly physical register. It is not yet a feeling that either character can safely name; it is an involuntary intensification of perception.

The attraction is especially disruptive because Liz has been introduced to Cameron through a strictly functional relationship. When he demands to know where his date is, he reminds her that she is his diary secretary and therefore responsible for the practical arrangements of his life. The electricity exposes the instability beneath that arrangement: the man who treats her as an employee is also the man whose presence makes ordinary professional distance difficult to sustain.

Resistance and the Employer–Employee Boundary

Liz tries to contain the attraction by treating it as a danger to be managed. At one point she imagines that it could lead only to an affair and rejects the possibility that Cameron Hillier would marry a single mother who sometimes struggles to pay her bills. Her reasoning turns desire into a problem of social position, financial insecurity, and consequence. Even the thought of marriage alarms her, because it reveals how far her imagination has moved beyond the professional basis she is trying to defend.

The electricity also helps drive Liz’s escape from Narelle Hastings’ party. Overwhelmed by her inner turmoil, she leaves the powder room determined to get away from the house, the party, and Cameron. When the kitchen and back door fail to offer a discreet exit, she climbs onto a wheelie bin, throws her shoes over a high wall, and drops into the service area, tearing her tights and grazing her knee. The escape is comic in its physical improvisation but serious in its emotional meaning: Liz attempts to turn attraction into distance by literally crossing a boundary.

That boundary-crossing does not free her from Cameron. She ends up confronting the headlights of his long, low car as it enters the driveway. Later, when she says that it is best for both of them to remain professional because she will soon be gone, Cameron argues that professionalism had already failed. He identifies the attraction as a force that began in the car outside his house almost two weeks earlier, or perhaps even earlier, on the day Liz put on her “magic coat” and let down her hair. His account gives the electricity a history and makes clear that he has been registering the same change rather than merely responding to Liz’s uncertainty.

From Unspoken Charge to Mutual Knowledge

Cameron’s description of a “kind of electricity between us” converts a diffuse physical tension into shared language. The phrase does not eliminate ambiguity, but it changes the relationship from one in which Liz alone is struggling to interpret her reactions into one in which both characters acknowledge a mutual force. The attraction is therefore reciprocal, even when the characters express it unevenly.

At Yewarra, the setting gives the electricity a new spatial context. Liz initially feels that entering Cameron’s estate means entering a zone over which she has no control; moments later she is enchanted by the gardens, with their agapanthus, jasmine, honeysuckle, jacarandas, gardenias, and roses. The movement from alarm to enchantment parallels the emotional movement from defensive distance to reluctant participation in Cameron’s world. His house, overlooking Sydney Harbour and filled with expensive furnishings, embodies the class and power difference that makes the attraction risky, while Yewarra offers the possibility that Liz and her daughter Scout might be included in a larger household.

Cameron’s offer of work at Yewarra intensifies this mixture of practical and emotional stakes. He believes Liz is wasted as a diary secretary and proposes that she take responsibility for freeing the stud master and the horse staff from paperwork and from the stream of people passing through the estate. The position includes a staff cottage large enough for Liz, Scout, and her mother Mary Montrose, as well as a ready-made companion for Scout in Archie. The offer is professionally justified by Liz’s organisational and people skills, but its domestic provisions make the electricity harder to separate from questions of belonging, security, and family.

Cameron later asks whether Liz might feel lonely at Yewarra. Their gazes catch, and she cannot look away. She answers that she plans to be too busy to feel lonely, yet the answer fails because it avoids the unasked question carried by his look: whether the electricity between them will continue when she moves into his orbit. Her physical response is explicit in the scene. Cameron’s dynamic presence moves her and makes her wonder what it would be like to be in his arms, even as she tries to deny the significance of that response.

Mutual Desire and the Breaking Point

By the time Cameron asks whether they are finding themselves wanting each other, the electricity has become an openly shared problem. He recalls arriving in Liz’s garden to find her in an aggressively “chilly mode,” ready to keep him at an impossible distance or attack him if he made the wrong move. His ironic account shows that her withdrawal is not evidence that the attraction is absent; it is one of the strategies by which she attempts to control it.

Cameron tells Liz that she has an “amazing effect” on him, forcing the hidden dynamic into direct conversation. Liz replies that he does not show it, exposing the contrast between his controlled exterior and the intensity he claims to experience. His restraint has allowed the electricity to remain ambiguous, while her inability to read him has made the attraction more frightening. Their conflict is therefore not simply about whether desire exists, but about whether either of them can trust what the other’s composure conceals.

The charge reaches a darker consequence when Liz ends the relationship. She tells Cameron that it is over and that she and Scout will leave first thing the next morning because it could never have worked between them and there are too many issues. In tears, she repeats that he would have been mad to become involved with her and asks him to let her go. The electricity has not disappeared; instead, it has become entangled with Liz’s fear that her personal complications, economic vulnerability, and responsibilities as a mother make her an unacceptable partner. Her flight from the study turns mutual attraction into separation, temporarily reversing the movement toward intimacy.

From Electricity to Marriage

Cameron’s response is not to deny the electricity but to give it a durable form. After the couple’s reconciliation, he asks Liz to marry him. Earlier, when she says she cannot move in with him, he has already presented marriage as another option; later, his proposal becomes the direct answer to her apology and uncertainty. Liz admits that she cannot think of anything she would rather do, although she warns him that she can be difficult. Cameron accepts the difficulty as part of the relationship, describing their contrasting temperaments as potentially complementary.

Marriage transforms the electricity from a destabilising secret into an acknowledged commitment. What began with an employer and employee failing to remain emotionally separate ends with Cameron and Liz choosing a public relationship that includes Scout and Archie. Their wedding takes place several weeks later on Whitehaven Beach. Liz and Cameron arrive by helicopter with Archie, Scout, and the marriage celebrant; guests travel from Hamilton Island on Leilani and another boat before reaching the beach by tender. The bride wears an ivory lace-and-tulle dress made by Mary Montrose, the bridegroom wears a cream suit, and both children wear sailor suits. Everyone is shoeless.

The beach wedding completes the electricity’s narrative movement. It begins in confined interiors and charged thresholds—the car, the party, the kitchen, the wall, the estate gates—and ends in an open coastal setting where the relationship is no longer something Liz must escape or Cameron must decode. The attraction remains the source of the story’s tension, but its final significance lies in its conversion into mutual knowledge, domestic inclusion, and marriage rather than abandonment or a temporary affair.