Tonight, Geraldine was in an altogether more serious vein. Everything I’d ever heard about her until our London encounter suggested that she could have been an amanuensis to a bishop, and now I was once again able to imagine her in such a role. Her hair was drawn back rigidly from her face. She wore a tweed skirt. She was very much the author of Valiant Women. And she had some distinguished guests to entertain – Alister Turner and his wife Stephanie (Alister was President of WASPS, that’s to say the West Australian Society of Plastic Surgeons), Jan Chaney (Chaney was a name to conjure with socially in Perth, Jan herself being a doctor), her lawyer boyfriend Craig (who numbered amongst his clients, as it turned out, crimplened Neil from Derby), and of course ourselves. If Geraldine had a weakness it was her belief in the solemn importance of the people she brought together; if she had a strength it was her capacity, apparently quite unwitting and not at all to be traced back to the nuns who’d trained her, to be the cause that around her solemnity degenerated into mirth. Within half an hour of Geraldine’s distinguished guests being introduced to one another her table was heaving with levity and bawdy.

It was actually Stephanie, whose refined beauty and advanced pregnancy appeared at first to confirm Geraldine’s sense of the gravity of the evening, who began it. As wife of Perth’s most eminent plastic surgeon she took a droll interest in the details of his profession, most particularly the do’s and don’ts of moles. Even as we met she was working hard on Alister to promote a Mole Awareness Week for West Australians. ‘There’s absolutely no reason why he shouldn’t set up a little mobile testing unit on the beach,’ she said, appealing to our common sense in the matter.

Malignant moles and melanomas are a major topic of conversation in Australia. There isn’t anybody who doesn’t have a horrific mole or melanoma story to tell. The fear of them, and all other forms of skin cancer, has not exactly emptied the country’s beaches, but there is no doubt that Australians sun-bathe less obsessively than they used to. I, for example, was by far the brownest person at the table, and I hadn’t been near a beach since Broome. In Perth this new fear of what the outside could do to you was especially acute because the town had been settled by so many Anglo-Saxons and Celts, fair- or ginger-skinned people not suited to sun-worship. Hence Stephanie’s belief that a Mole Awareness Week was just what the populace was looking for.