We seemed to live in taxis for our last two or three days in town. There were still people from Ros’s past to see, and farewells to take of those we already had seen; there were more first nights in the company of Geoff and Carole Gibbs and the Governor to get to, and then there were our bags to pack and our travel arrangements to finalize. The plan was that we would cross the Nullarbor to Adelaide by train – one of the Great Train Journeys Of The World, according to people one would not in any other circumstances have trusted – stopping off at Kalgoorlie to get a quick squizz at the Goldfields. It sounded straightforward enough but turned out not to be, on account of our wanting to spend more than an hour but less than a year in Kalgoorlie, and on account of the trains being full. A twinkling little railway clerk in his sixties sat us down in the booking office for half a day and arranged our lives for us. We’d take the Prospector from Perth to Kalgoorlie on Sunday afternoon; we’d take the Trans-Australian from Kalgoorlie to Port Pirie at the crack of dawn on Thursday morning, changing at Port Pirie, on Friday afternoon, for Adelaide. We would travel First Class on the Trans-Australian in order to get the benefit of the piano bar, though he was sorry to tell Ros that the rear compartment with rounded windows which she remembered from earlier trips no longer existed. All this was subject, of course, to there being a couple of spare berths on the Trans-Australian, but he was prepared to guarantee us, at the last, that he personally would see to it that there would be even if that meant his having to link on an extra carriage with his own bare hands. In return for which we handed over a sizeable portion of our life savings and left.

I spent my last Sunday morning in Perth talking to a millionaire, possibly even to two. We had gone, with our luggage, to have an early lunch at the house of Ron and Sandra Wise, Ron being the son of the German family Ros had virtually grown up with. When I say that I spoke to possibly two millionaries, Ron was the possibly. The certainly was Denis Horgan, owner of the Leeuwin Estate Vineyards in Margaret River where the London Philharmonic and the Berlin Staatskapelle had played early Beethoven for the cream of West Australian society. He wasn’t there, at the Wises’s place, in person, but Ron led me to understand that he would have been if he could have been. ‘I spoke to him only last night,’ he said, ‘and I mentioned that you were writing about Australia. He’s expecting you to ring him.’