The engine was switched off and the craft, on her own momentum came alongside Miss Rickerby-Carrick’s diary. Tom climbed over the taffrail, held to it with his left hand and with his right, prepared to angle.

‘But no!’ screamed Miss Rickerby-Carrick. ‘Not with that thing! You’ll destroy it! Don’t, don’t, don’t! Oh please. Oh please.’

‘Stone the crows!’ Mr Lazenby astonishingly ejaculated. With an air of hardy resignation he rose from his Li-lo, turned his back on the company, removed his spectacles and placed them on the deck. He then climbed over the taffrail and neatly dived into The River.

Miss Rickerby-Carrick screamed again, the other passengers ejaculated and, with the precision of naval ratings, lined the port side to gaze at Mr Lazenby. He was submerged but quickly re-appeared with his long hair plastered over his eyes and the diary in his hand.

The Skipper instructed him to go ashore and walk a couple of chains downstream where it was deep enough for the Zodiac to come alongside. He did so, holding the diary clear of the water. He climbed the bank and squatted there, shaking the book gently and separating and turning over the leaves. His hair hung to one side like a caricature of a Carnaby Street fringe, completely obscuring the left eye.

Miss Rickerby-Carrick began to give out plaintive little cries interspersed with gusts of apologetic laughter and incoherent remarks upon the waterproof nature of her self-propelling pen. She could not wait for Mr Lazenby to come aboard but leant out at a dangerous angle to receive the book from him. The little lump of leather, Troy saw, still dangled from her neck.

‘Oh ho, ho!’ she laughed, ‘my poor old confidante. Alas, alas!’

She thanked Mr Lazenby with incoherent effusion and begged him not to catch cold. He reassured her, accepted his dark glasses from Troy who had rescued them and turned aside to put them on. When he faced them all again it really seemed as if in some off-beat fashion and without benefit of dog-collar, he had resumed his canonicals. He even made a little parsonic noise: ‘N’yer I’ll just get out of my wet bathers,’ he said. ‘There’s not the same heat in the English sun: not like Bondi.’ And retired below.

‘Well!’ said Caley Bard. ‘Who says the Church is effete?’

There was a general appreciative murmur in which Troy did not join.

Had she or had she not seen for a fractional moment, in Mr Lazenby’s left hand, a piece of wet paper with the marks of a propelling pencil across it?

While Troy still mused over this, Miss Rickerby-Carrick who squatted on the deck examining with plaintive cries the ruin of her journal, suddenly exclaimed with much greater emphasis.

The others broke off and looked at her with that particular kind of patient endurance that she so pathetically inspired.