Mother puffed her smoke in a different direction to let him know she wasn’t impressed. ‘I’m a girl at a dance. Talking to a very short man who is dripping his fruit cup all over his shirt.’

And then she got up and left, and Papa discovered she was right and went immediately to the Gents to clean himself up.

That might’ve been the end of it, but later in the evening, outside, Papa saw her again and this time she and her friend were having an argument.

Esmeralda was yelling something at Mother about a ‘blue fox’. She was shaking a decrepit-looking wet fur article in one hand, and angrily smoking a cigarette with the other. What Mother had done to her blue fox stole—for that’s what it was—Papa was never sure, but he had to intervene, he says. He had been taken in by those yellow ‘tiger’s eyes’. He needed to be gallant and valiant or, at least, memorable. He stepped in front of Mother just at the moment when Esmeralda threw her cigarette at her. It missed Mother but it got Papa in the chest, then fell to the ground. Papa put it out with his foot, glared at Esmeralda, and took Mother’s arm.

The two of them proceeded haughtily up Sydney Road, not looking back, Esmeralda shouting out behind them.

‘I didn’t put her stole down the toilet,’ Mother finally said. ‘I dropped it in. Accidentally. I was trying to wash it.’

Papa said nothing, so Mother took a silver decanter out of her purse and offered him some whisky. ‘My name’s Veda. What’s yours?’

They walked together for hours that night, Veda and Jo. It was not a cold night, so there was no good reason to huddle together, but at last Papa got his arm around Mother’s waist. ‘What were you writing, back there at the dance?’ he asked.

She took out her last cigarette and lit it. ‘A poem,’ she said.

Papa had never read a poem in his life. Even at school (he left at the age of twelve) he had apparently missed the classes where poetry got read.

When Mother said she was writing a poem, Papa’s mouth made the shape of an ‘O’. He didn’t quite take his arm from around her waist, but he was suddenly too nervous to kiss her.

Some days later, Papa attended Mother’s first poetry reading.

The venue was a private apartment at the Aquarius Hotel. It wasn’t a grand hotel, but it had been once: little flakes of gilt came off the plaster and there was a marble entrance hall. Now the third-floor rooms were rented out for dubious purposes, and the second-floor rooms for such curious events as poetry readings.