He’d lost his own property in the disaster but he’d been fortunate – ‘I was a lucky’ – or provident, more like. Coming from an area that knew to expect nothing but malevolence from Nature, he had built a strong bathroom in the bottom of his house, and there he and his family had sheltered until Troicee had got bored. Now, such reinforced bathroom and shower cubicles were compulsory in all domestic dwellings built in Darwin.

‘So if there is another cyclone . . .’ I was about to wonder, but he waved away my conditional conjunction.

‘No ifs.’ He flashed me an irresistible smile, full of spurious European fatalism. ‘Only when.’

That was pretty much how I felt on the issue of dispatching our suitcase, though I had a formidable opponent in the girl at the Greyhound office. Formidable in the sense of difficult to engage with. Every time I asked her a question she backed away. So I tried her with statements. ‘We want it to go directly to Perth,’ I said. ‘On Tuesday.’

Since it contained nothing that could be of any earthly use to us in the heat, there was an argument for sending the case straight back to England, or at least to Melbourne, which amounted to more or less the same thing. But Perth was Rosalin’s home town; she had friends and family there still, people she hadn’t seen for twenty-five years. It wasn’t beyond the bounds of possibility that we would be required to smarten up a bit in Perth. I didn’t know at the time, of course, that from the moment of our arrival we would never be out of formal attire, never absent from a first night at the theatre or the ballet, and never far from the august presence of His Honour the Governor of Western Australia. Ros had forgotten to tell me that this was how people passed the time in Perth.

The elusive girl at the Greyhound office said, ‘We need advance warning of all unaccompanied baggage consignments.’

‘I’m giving you advance warning. We would like it to go on Tuesday.’

‘We don’t take advance warnings so far in advance,’ she said. ‘You’ll have to tell us the day before.’

‘I’m telling you now so that you’ll know the day before,’ I said.

‘I can’t do anything with the information. We only take advance warnings on the day itself prior to the day of consignment.’

‘Can’t I tell you now that I’ll be telling you then?’ I asked. But I’d forgotten what I’d learnt. Recognizing a question, she backed away.