Then we had a stroke of luck. A couple of days before we were due to leave we ran into the Australian poetess Orianna Ooi (I have of course slightly changed her name) on the Strand. We weren’t close acquaintances, having only ever met two or three times before, on each occasion, as chance would have it, somewhere between Australia House and the Savoy; and we knew little about her except that she spent the afternoons of her exile under the chandeliers in the reading room of the Australian High Commission, combing the literary pages of the Australian newspapers for any mention of her verse. This was the only way, at so great a distance from home, that she could keep abreast with the progress of her reputation. Today, wrapped up extravagantly against the cold – every day had been the coldest day in living memory that winter – she was flushed with excitement: the Adelaide Advertiser had just alluded to her dense conceptual invention.

We congratulated her. ‘The Adelaide Advertiser,’ I remarked, ‘is not renowned for choosing its words lightly.’

She glowed at us. There might have been snow on the ground, but inside her heart it was suddenly summer. We all three paused to wave to an Australian short-story writer on his way to check what his home newspapers had to say about him.

‘He hates it over here,’ Orianna confided. ‘No one recognizes him. He hasn’t signed a single autograph. He has to read about himself in the Sydney Morning Herald to remember who he is.’

I must have given some involuntary sigh of sympathy, thinking that very soon now I would be suffering the indignity of anonymity myself, out there in the unheeding heat and dust, because out of the blue Orianna recalled what we’d told her the last time we’d collided on the Strand. ‘Aren’t you two off any time now?’

‘Day after tomorrow.’

‘And you’re going all the way round?’

I didn’t like the double emphasis. I thought I could hear a request for an exorbitant favour coming; something that would entail our having to look up every Ooi in Australia, or worse, having to search every local outback newspaper for veiled references to this Ooi’s effusions. But Rosalin has a less suspicious nature. ‘Yes, all the way round. Darwin, the Kimberleys, Perth, Kalgoorlie, Alice Springs, the Great Barrier Reef – you name it.’

‘Lucky you,’ Orianna said, allowing herself just one quick wintry shiver before she added, ‘Look, do you think you could do me a favour?’