I meanwhile stumbled about the boat, amazed by how many people it could carry and made aware, for the first time, of how it might be possible to traverse the world’s oceans on a forty-five-foot yacht and never get around to meeting everyone who was on it. There were young kids down below in the galley, the permed punk offspring of the professionals above board, with whom I never even came close to exchanging a smile. There were real estate agents I didn’t get to talk to either, and obstetricians. I did fall into conversation with Rod, however, the only person on the boat who had omitted to bring any wine even though he owned a 25 per cent share in Plantagenet, one of the new and highly regarded wineries in the south-west of the State. This – both having a stake in the winery and omitting to bring any wine – might have had something to do with his being a chartered accountant. Or it might just have been a matter of his feeling that by bringing himself he had already brought enough. I don’t mean by that to imply that Rod was arrogant; only that he somehow had the knack, without at all carrying surplus weight or personality or intelligence, of suggesting superfluity. He was too tall, he was too brown, he possessed too many sharp angles, he flashed too many teeth, and when he swallowed – which was too frequently – he showed an Adam’s apple that was too prominent. Physically, like many men I was to meet in Perth, there was something of the ballistic missile about him. He seemed at all times ready to launch himself from his own firing system in full confidence that he would land slap bang dead centre of the target. Conversationally he was less killing. ‘Where’s that?’ he asked me after I’d told him that I came from the U.K.

Perhaps he suffered from too much sense of humour. It certainly tickled him to think of himself as the only Protestant aboard. ‘You leftfooters,’ he enjoyed joshing the calmly carousing Catholics, ‘you leftfooters are all the same.’