The trip she had in mind would see us travelling due south from Perth to Augusta, taking in Bunbury and Busselton, and Donnybrook and Margaret River, and then moving east to Albany, by way of Pemberton and Northcliffe, Walpole, Denmark, and Wilson’s Inlet; and I decided that we could give three days to it provided that Ros understood they ate into our West Australian allowance and that we would therefore have to make plans to leave Perth the minute we returned. I was beginning to fret about how unadventurous we’d become, how slow the thin air of Perth had made us, how much of our time seemed to be given over to people and nostalgia, instead of to – well, instead of to the harsh vagaries of the outback. Ros could have the South-West as a treat, but after that we really were going to have to get our skates on. I went off to make provisions for a little hire car – I didn’t think we’d need much of a car – shaking my head and sighing, like a man who had it in him to scale mountains but was contracted to spend a week playing carpet bowls with old ladies instead.

In fact there were to be more hardships in this quick excursion than I’d bargained for, beginning with the hire car company not delivering the car to me as they’d promised, but delivering me to the car. This is liable to happen with rental firms that have depots only at airports, and can be extremely inconvenient if the airport is an hour the wrong way out of town and you don’t have much of a sense of direction. It was only the affability of the young man who’d kidnapped me that kept me from losing my temper. That and the fact that when I’d said I’d only ever heard a white Kenyan accent like his once before, and that was in Kununurra, in the far north of the State, he’d replied, ‘Oh, that’ll be Charlie. He’s my brother-in-law.’

On the way out of Perth we dropped in on some old friends of Ros’s parents. It had always been her intention to pay this call but I took the timing of it to be a pointer to what lay ahead of us. Over the next few days Ros really meant to lift the lid off her past. Prams, rattles, swaddling clothes – it was her intention to go rummaging through the lot.