After our breakfast – which differed in no essentials from the previous night’s dinner – we took a Hayles Cruise to Green Island and Michaelmas Cay. I’d done a small amount of homework and found out that from the point of view of style, of reef-cred, it was just about all right to visit Green Island. You have to be very careful when claiming that you’ve visited the Great Barrier Reef because not all the islands are made of coral – and you look pretty foolish saying that you’ve been on one that is when in fact you’ve been on one that isn’t. In the main those that are closest to the shore, with the most developed tourist facilities, aren’t; while those further out, often inaccessible and sometimes invisible to the naked eye, are. Green Island, although a bit too close to be exclusive, was acceptable on the basis of its being a true cay – that’s to say an aggregate of coral and sand. I’m speaking purely from the angle of snobbery now; from the point of view of conservation, and with regard to environmental sensitivity, Green Island wasn’t reckoned to be very acceptable at all. But I didn’t know that at the time. As I didn’t know several other things about the island which had I known might have saved us no small amount of grief in the days to come.

We sat on the upper deck of the boat where, like every other passenger on that section, we had no option but to watch an American woman, whose name badge said MARIE, rub oil into herself. She must have been about fifty, dating from the last time that whiteness was considered attractive in a woman, and was going in still for the sort of half-awakened pubescence that made Debbie Reynolds famous. She was dressed in the way I remembered it upsetting me to see Debbie Reynolds dressed, in cute off-white hayseed shorts and a pink spotted halter top and a straw hat with blue ribbons. She had been pretty once – was pretty still, feature for feature – and had almost certainly been the second-string moll of a minor mafioso. Now, with no hoodlum to watch her oiling, she oiled, in a Brooklyn accent – ‘I need protecshun, honey’ – for us.

I tried to look at something else. Behind me Cairns was receding from view. It had no elegance at all from the water. It was low and squat and indeterminate, and could have been mistaken for an oil refinery or a series of customs buildings. Green Island, though, which I had to look past Marie to see, was beginning to take the shape expected of a tropical paradise – a flat green saucer with a sandy rim, a sectional view of a spinach pizza.