In this frame of mind, and while there was still light, we drove to the Donnybrook cemetery to see her grandparents’ graves. We spent several hours there, wandering between the headstones as aimlessly as we’d earlier meandered around the fruit. I jotted names down in my notebook, as I always do in graveyards, for later fictional tinkerings. I especially liked Minnie Scriven, which struck me as Dickensian, Jamesian and Spike Milliganesque, all at once. Otherwise the stones told the usual distressing colonial stories of exile and separation. There were men from Iowa and Sardinia buried here. And women from Donegal and Harrow. I couldn’t decide which was the sadder – the taciturn tomb of a solitary alien, unaccompanied and far from home, or the garrulous family mausoleums, commemorating the swathe death had cut through a whole dynasty of pioneers.

We were still there as the light faded. The tips of the hills and the tallest trees turned pink in the dying afternoon. There were no sounds to be heard other than those made by the soft scuffing of our feet and the whistling of birds. As we walked back towards the car Ros speculated on the ties that bound her to this place. It occurred to her that her mother thought she had got away but now lived somewhere comparable, where the birds also whistled in the late afternoon, in the south of Victoria. And Ros herself had made a vast circuitous journey only to be landed in a Cornish fishing village which rivalled even Donnybrook for melancholy. ‘Freedom?’ she murmured, her head buried in her chest. ‘Don’t talk to me about freedom. I don’t think anyone is free to spit.’

When we walked out of our motel the following morning we felt as though we’d stepped into Marvell’s Garden. Ripe apples fell about our heads. The turf we trod on sprang back at us like a trampoline, denying all memory of our impress. Where the motel car park ended, a field of aubergines began; even as we stood and watched we could see their purple gourds increase and swell with life. Life, death; death, life: it didn’t make an awful lot of difference. We were good and sandwiched between the two and there wasn’t anything but anguish to look for from either of them. But at least, if you’ve got a little car, you can chug your way out of Weltschmerz Valley.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ I said to Ros, ‘before we start looking in real estate agents’ windows.’ But I only got her to agree to leave on condition that I would promise to bury her here if she died before me. So it came down to real estate after all.