On Saturday the 5th of April, starting at twelve-thirty and going on until very late in the afternoon, Ros had her famous Girls Reunion. The idea for it had grown out of a conversation she’d initiated with Carole, in-between ancient recriminations and endearments, and to the accompaniment of mock chicken sandwiches and Chardonnay, aboard the Queequeg. She had simply mused, as a matter of idleness, on how nice it would have been to see so-and-so and such-a-one had she only known where in the world so-and-so and such-a-one now were. ‘That’s easy,’ Carole had said. ‘They’re right here.’

‘In Perth?’

‘Yep.’

‘All of them?’

I missed this part of the conversation; I was talking to Ian and Olive at the time. But I can imagine Carole fixing her old friend with a whole battery of challenging expressions. Of course all of them. What else, Ros, would nice convent-educated girls from Perth do but stay right where they are? You, as we know, chose to go your own way, but then you always were . . . etcetera, etcetera.

So, since they were all here, they all met. I wasn’t invited, naturally. But by special dispensation I was granted an audience afterwards, in the garden of the restaurant where they’d lunched. And, because I needed a guide and a companion, and because he was welcome at every gathering, Carole’s husband Geoff was given a special dispensation also. I made, as it would have seemed to me absolutely unforgivable not to make, superhuman efforts with my appearance. I teased my eyelashes. I trimmed my moustache in such a way as to give the impression of poetic yet vigorous youthfulness of upper lip. At any time you don’t turn up to meet a dozen West Australian women in their prime looking like a dog. But when those women are the girls your wife made up rude rhymes with, just out of hearing of Sister Gertrude, thirty years before – well, you pull out all the stops.

‘I can’t tell you how exciting it is,’ I said, as I greeted them in their arboreous setting, ‘to see the legend made flesh at last. Nymphs, in your orisons be all my sins remembered.’

A dozen pairs of eyes, most of them unfamiliar, all of them awash with champagne, looked me up and down. The work I’d done on my moustache had not gone for nothing. ‘Goodness me, Ros,’ Margaret Hall (née Jackson) observed, ‘you are married to a young husband.’ The subtext to this: And he’s not your first, either.