It appealed to my rudimentary sense of symmetry that the last voice we heard in Kalgoorlie should be Ray Finlayson’s. We were sitting on the station platform waiting for the Trans-Australian to pull in when he came through on a radio news bulletin, countering the figures just released by the W.A. Conservation Council claiming to show that there were sulphur dioxide emissions of up to five times the acceptable level blowing across Kalgoorlie, making it the most polluted air in Western Australia. ‘I can see no evidence at all of pollution,’ the Mayor said. ‘I can see no evidence at all that people are suffering from sulphur dioxide.’

I looked around me. ‘Me neither,’ I said to Ros.

Waiting with us on the platform were a couple of dozen middle-aged men in blue blazers. Since they were too old and portly to be a rugby team, I decided that they were a brass band – maybe English or German – on an Australia-wide tour. I looked forward to their company on the train. I had high hopes of the Trans-Australian. The great trek across the Nullarbor. A stainless steel sleeping berth – my own roomette, as it was called. A piano bar. And now, with a bit of luck, an oom-pah-pah band that we could yodel along with. It was going to be some trip.

So I was a bit disappointed when the men in blue blazers turned out to be the stewards, waiting to start their shift. But I wasn’t disheartened.

We were no sooner aboard the train than we were required to make a snap decision – did we want to take breakfast at the first sitting or the second? As we’d been up since five we plumped for the first, not knowing that we had thereby signed our freedom away, that we were now first sitting passengers for life, always to be forced to eat too soon and always to be required to leave too early. The same terrible finality applied to our choice of table also. Because we sat opposite Bruce and Judith for our first breakfast, they were to be our eating companions for the rest of the journey. So I tried not to mind that Bruce had a gravelly voice, a murderer’s beard, liked living in Essendon in Melbourne, and wore a transparent nylon shirt through which you could see – and indeed were meant to see – his pale blue singlet. I tried to concentrate instead on those qualities for which Judith had married him, Judith being one of those doggedly loyal girls, whose fragile good looks appear to be a function of a deprived upbringing, of the kind that Dickens liked to write about. And there was this to be said for Bruce and Judith, too – apart from us they were the only people travelling in the first-class section of the train (and I hadn’t yet seen what was in the other half) who were under sixty-five.