Her husband was with her. He too was theatrically attired, though in that bohemian manner which implied a sublime incompetence with money. While I wondered about his bell-bottomed trousers he told me that his wife had once danced with Nureyev. Rudi was the name he actually used.

Perhaps because I wasn’t Rudi, and wasn’t carrying any word from Rudi either, Lucette Aldous looked right through me when Geoff Gibbs told her who I was.

The final ballet was Stravinsky’s Firebird which to my dismay I found I liked. You can’t beat a story. Even a foolish one. It got me in where abstract impressionism had kept me out. At the end there was a highly dramatic engagement between the Evil One and the Young Man entrusted by the Firebird to save humanity. On behalf of all of us, and against all likelihood, the Young Man triumphed.

When it was all over I hung around inconspicuously, watching Geoff moving amongst the departing balletomanes with more nimbleness than any of the dancers had been capable of. The theatre seemed to empty very quickly. The moment I saw the Governor approaching I flattened myself against the wall. We exchanged a shifty glance. Then he was in Geoff’s hands, being escorted to his car. Both men threw their heads back and laughed. There seemed to be a running gag between them which I imagined their picking up and embellishing from one first night to the next.

I was just thinking how like Tolstoy’s Stiva Oblonsky Geoff was when I suddenly caught sight of Lucette Aldous and her husband at the bottom of the stairs. Immediately my mind turned to Dickens, to Miss Havisham and Joe Gargery. Which could be called a kind of augury, because the next occasion the Governor and I were to squinny at each other in formal attire was the first night of a new dramatization of Great Expectations.

What larks.

9 Granny Apples

Nine
 
Granny Apples

Although it was not a part of the country that I’d ever bothered to notice on the map or had ever had the slightest curiosity to visit, Rosalin insisted that we spend some time in the bottom left-hand corner of the State, a half-forgotten area of caves, forests, apples, and now – the reason it was only half forgotten – wineries. There were compelling emotional reasons, from her point of view, for doing the South-West, not the least being that her maternal grandparents were buried there, that her mother had been born, had met and married Ros’s father there, that Ros herself retained exquisite memories of childhood holidays there, and that Fred Luff, whom we’d met on the bus from Darwin, had chosen it to buy a run-down hotel and forget his bitter Northern Territory experiences in.