‘Surrey,’ she said. She made it sound like an apology.

It turned out that she’d been in Australia for twenty years and in Northcliffe for six. ‘It’s OK really,’ she said. ‘It’s not up to much financially, but the social life is good.’

I looked around me. All I could see were wide dusty streets disappearing into scrub, and tin houses.

‘You’ve got to join in,’ she explained. ‘It’s like anywhere. You’ve got to mix.’

I thought this was as good a time as any to ask her if there was a Fred Luff in town. Yes, he was installed over at the hotel. She wasn’t sure whether the sale had gone through yet but it was certainly imminent. ‘Well, he should liven things up,’ I said.

She eyed me suspiciously. She seemed to think I was questioning her opinion of the social life.

It took Fred a minute or two to remember who we were, which gave us the opportunity to form an opinion of his investment from the inside. From without it hadn’t looked too terrific. It seemed to be, as an estate agent might have said, in need of sympathetic if not imaginative refurbishment. It was neglected and impoverished and not situated where you were bound to see it. But these would have been the least of my worries had I been the licensee; altogether more problematical, both from the point of view of tone and of personal safety, were the wild-eyed hairy locals in cowboy boots who lounged around the cold cavernous bar laughing at things that weren’t funny and spitting glass onto the filthy lino. They appeared, however, to present no kind of problem to Fred other than one of interior design. ‘A lick of paint and a bit of upholstery and we’ll have that room right,’ he told us.

He was in the very best of spirits, as cheerful as he’d been when he was remembering swimming with Aborigines in Arnhem Land. ‘And this over here,’ he said, leading us into a peeling hall at the bottom of a flight of steps I would never, under pain of death, have climbed, ‘is going to be an art gallery. There’s a local painter who’s quite good, and my sister-in-law in Perth paints on bark.’

He took us into an empty dining room furnished with straight-backed dark-stained chairs of the late thirties. The tables were all set for business but didn’t look as though they’d been sat at since 1951. ‘And this,’ he said, as if he were now presenting the star prize, ‘will be the restaurant.’

I was unable to keep myself from voicing doubts. ‘Is there, um, much in the way of what you might call passing trade?’ I asked.