Well connected as we turned out to be once Ros had made contact with one of her oldest mates in Mary, we were able to engage in this reverse slumming in some style aboard the Queequeg, a forty-five-foot yacht which ten or twelve years before had finished fourth or fifth in the Sydney to Hobart, but which today, on a balmy idle Easter Monday, was stowed with food, wine, children, us, and two of every profession considered meritorious in West Australia.

The old mate who had organized this jaunt for us – or at least had included us in it once she knew we were here – was Carole Gibbs (née Ochiltree), a person I had never previously met but knew of from a long and fitful correspondence, erupting into the most flagrant sentimentality on birthdays and anniversaries, which she and Ros maintained. Carole’s letters could be so upsetting, with their minute allusions to convent vicissitudes of thirty years before, that Ros would dread the post on those days when there was something to commemorate. She even claimed that she knew, telepathically – so powerful was the affective charge of Carole’s prose – when a letter had been sent and where it was at any time in the international postal system. Leaving aside what the reunion meant to them, I was pleased to discover in person what I already, of course, knew as a reported fact, namely that Carole was keen-eyed and vivacious with three children and a distinguished thespian husband, and didn’t, for all the references in her letters to confessionals and cloistresses, wear a wimple.

By the time the thirty or so passengers (we could hardly have been called crew) had come aboard, bringing with them the dozen or so picnic hampers and the fifteen or so Eskies of cold beer and Chardonnay, Ros and Carole were deep into a dramatic re-enactment of their correspondence, which itself was a dramatic re-enactment of their past.

‘How could I have told you?’ I heard Ros asking, as we pulled away from the other forty-five-foot yachts berthed at the marina of the Royal Perth Yacht Club. ‘You never wanted to talk about those things.’

‘That’s because you never wanted to talk to me about them.’

‘Well, I expect you to be prepared to talk about them now.’

‘Oh, “I expect”. That’s nice – “I expect”. You haven’t changed, Rossi. You always did “expect”.’

They were to cry a few times before the afternoon was over, either jointly or when they thought the other wasn’t looking. And they would fall into odd petulant silences, too. But never for long and never without an accompanying look of getting precisely what they’d come for.