Heyman, who “always looked like she walked out of the pages of a magazine,” is a former mechanic, mother of two, and married to Ralph – an audacious and controlling man who insists his wife stay home to conduct her “duties” as a wife.

“Frankie was both fond of her husband, and fearful,” Lamprell writes. She tells Edith she can “handle Ralph by staying at home and doing what I’m told”.

She lives within a maniacal regime: every weekend, Ralph checks the odometer to ensure his wife has not gone out.

On the same day, he conducts a “white cotton glove test” – putting on a pair of white cotton gloves and running his fingers along the surfaces around the house for signs of dust.

Every day, he expects a full load of clean clothes to be hanging on the line when he returns from work.

Every Sunday, at exactly 9.29pm, he would tuck cash into Frankie’s underwear drawer and at 9.30pm, they would “make love”.

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In the ’60s, this was behaviour that would perhaps have inspired private concerns. Now, we call this coercive control.

When Frankie opens up to Edith about wanting to do more with her life, Edith proposes an idea — Frankie can go into the city to work, while Edith completes the chores for her friend (as well as her own).

Frankie finds ways to hide her paid labour from her husband by jacking up the car, placing wood blocks near each rear tyre and running the car in reverse so the odometer runs backwards.

“If Ralph checked the mileage, he would find it exactly the same as it had been before she drove to the city this morning.”

Before leaving home in the morning, Frankie takes the phone off the hook in case Ralph calls.

“If he complained about a busy signal later that evening, Frankie used variations on three scenarios: either she had knocked the phone off the hook while cleaning, or she had been on the phone to a friend or there was something wrong with the line.”

Women often have to resort to deception to exercise any agency.

Like any woman who has survived history against a backdrop of male domination, she has had to be deceitful – a trait forced upon her because her society does not allow her the rights bestowed to a man.

For a person in a male body, writing about the interiority of women, Lamprell has not failed in eloquently depicting the intense bewildering ecstasy between two adult women.

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And yet where he falls short of achieving the potential heights this book could have reached is allowing his characters to experience the full spectrum of romantic love.

Many fiction works of late have been frustratingly bound by the constraints of heteronormativity — queer tendencies are left to shimmer, and then extinguish, as just that – mere tendencies: “Frankie smiled gloriously and Edith felt her stomach flip. Not in an unpleasant way; not like when her nerves got the better of her. This felt more like … falling in love.”

Reading Lamprell’s novel feels like reading a censored version of Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt (commonly titled Carol).

All the beauty and wonder of female relations is there — sadly, minus the sex.

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