I thought that this meant sometime in the next thirty years, and made the sort of noises appropriate to the assumption; but Ron already had the phone off the hook. ‘I’ll dial the number for you now,’ he said. I began to get some inkling of what made an entrepreneur.

Ron had once been an academic but hadn’t enjoyed university life. Funny that. For all that he must have been in his early forties there was still a touch of gilded youth about him – a golden boy, if Jewish or half-Jewish boys can be called golden, trim and brown and dangerously handsome in tennis gear, but with a curious absence around the eyes, as if he were listening in to sounds from another room, or remembering events from another life. I had a theory about that: I believed that he was forever preoccupied with the terms of some Faustian compact he had made, too terrible to confide to those who loved him. But I do veer towards melodrama when I try to put my mind to businessmen.

Meanwhile, in another part of the city, another one was picking up his phone. Ron didn’t waste any time on preliminaries. None of the sorry to bother you’s and I don’t suppose you remember but’s of mere salaried telephone users. ‘Denis?’ he simply said. ‘This is Ron. I’ve got that journalist here.’

Although journalist can be a word of the keenest disapprobation when one is at one’s desk, it can carry a heavy charge of responsibility when one is, so to speak, in the field. Journalist? Weren’t journalists people who asked questions? In all honesty I could not think of a single question I wanted to hear the owner of the most successful vineyard in West Australia answer. But the phone was in my hands, a pleasant voice was saying, ‘G’day, Howard,’ and through the window I could see Ron’s friends, also in their tennis gear, sipping Pinot Blanc around the pool. ‘G’day, Denis,’ I said, ‘I wonder if you can tell me how Sidney Nolan feels about having one of his paintings decorating a wine bottle?’

I surprised myself by how prim I sounded. I knew that I was still the proud possessor of some residual Leavisite moralizing – the lees in the ageing cask of my maturity – but I hadn’t intended to be ungracious.

In the circumstances, Denis Horgan made a good job of staying affable. ‘Fine wine and art and food go together in quite a happy mix, Howard,’ he said. ‘And I’ll tell you something else – when we buy or commission these works of art, we offer the painters the option of how they would like to be paid. And some of them don’t mind being remunerated in bottles, I can assure you.’