Bruce had changed for lunch into a pair of canary-yellow strides and a sports shirt in alternating stripes of pastel blue and peach. I could see that he still had his singlet on underneath. I kept looking out of the window. The train had stopped at Rawlinna, although there didn’t appear to be anything you could call a platform there. I saw a school, a post office, and about fifteen wooden houses, all built to the same design and painted cream or green, and all, of course, with large corrugated iron water tanks. It was 1 p.m. on a cloudless day and nothing stirred. A few mongrel dogs slept in the dirt. To the north I saw a mirage – an interminable, inviting lake, showing the reflection of trees that weren’t there. Otherwise Rawlinna was not easy on the eye. It seemed to exist only as a convenience for the railway, as a kind of slag heap memorial to the predacity of the train. Old sleepers were piled up as if for bonfires; whatever had been surplus to use in the excavation or restitution of tracks lay where it had been tossed. Everywhere I looked I saw litter – plastic egg boxes, beer cans, rags, even books with broken spines.

‘Jeez, you’d have to be keen to live out here,’ Bruce said.

Later in the afternoon I decided it was time to see what life on the Trans-Australian was like for poor people. I had a dread of discovering that they were having all the fun down there in coach class, that there would be poker schools and sing-a-longs and drinks parties in every compartment, so I was relieved to see that they were very nearly half as bored as I was. I took a seat in the cafeteria club bar and ordered the going thing – a hot apple pie served in a cardboard soup-bowl with an inverted tub of Street’s vanilla ice cream slapped on top. Behind me, a woman old enough to be in first class was complaining about the table manners of people she had recently attended a stand-up dinner with. ‘Some of these women eat as if they’ve never eaten before,’ she said. Her companion was sympathetic. ‘Buffets bring out the worst in people,’ she observed. At the table opposite, three WRANs (the Australian equivalent of WRENs) were discussing everyone they knew. I decided they were WRANs partly because their voices were so deep, partly because they were all wearing what looked like ammunition – small rounds of shot – as earrings, but mainly because I’d observed that servicewomen were always much too short or much too tall, and that’s what these were.

‘She’s a lovely girl,’ one of them said, apropos an absent friend. ‘But a bit over-concerned about her figure.’

‘Waiting for Mr Right.’

‘Only Mr Right never comes along.’

‘I’ve heard she’s found someone else’s Mr Right.’

‘Mr Rights always are someone else’s.’