‘Would you do my back?’ She wasn’t talking specifically to me. If we have to deal in specifics she was talking to another American woman in her party. But in actuality she was addressing all of us. The American friend was just a proxy. It was in order that the entire upper deck might get to work on her that she handed over the lotion, turned around, arched her back, and held up her hair with both hands. Thus, with nothing to impede us, we were able to oil her very slowly, starting at the neck and working our way down over each shoulder blade, taking care not to miss a millimetre of damageable skin, lingering over every spinal stud, even slipping the tips of our fingers just inside the strap of her halter, so that should it perchance slide in the sun, Marie would still stay for ever white.

‘Hey,’ she said, just as we were wondering about the band of her shorts, ‘this suntan lotion smells like pina colada. Anybody wanna drink?’

On the red plastic seats to my left a pale, fashionably dressed English couple in the black and black Joseph uniform of aggressive introspection, held on to each other tightly. By carefully keeping his eyes lowered the boy had not gagged on Marie’s flesh, but now the girl was beginning to look sickly. I had to fight back a rush of loathing myself, for the nerveless distaste of the young.

We disembarked at the jetty, pausing only fractionally at the underwater observatory where they piped Tchaikowsky’s Romeo and Juliet overture through loudspeakers to get you in the mood for paying to watch fish. Yet another American girl steered her boyfriend past the entrance. ‘Aw no, not there,’ she said. ‘That’s pure kitschville.’

It almost made me want to go in.

We spent a couple of hours on the island, Ros snorkelling, I lying on the beach. And then we were back on the boat again, speeding across the water to Michaelmas Cay, where we were transferred to what they called a submarine, though it was only we who were submerged, through the glass sides and bottom of which we were able to behold the wonders of the Reef. And wonders, to my absolute astonishment – I who had the greatest scorn for underwater gawping – they turned out to be. Fish every bit as multicoloured as the postcards suggested swam by us. Fish as bright and as neurotically gaudy as pop singers. Shirley Bassey fish. Boy George fish. Clown fish. Harlequin tusk fish. Fish that were striped and fringed, bejewelled and earringed, bearded and even caped. Batfish that were all cloak and no face, just a pout like Charles Laughton’s. Banded humbugs. Mottled reef eels. Fish that danced. Fish that told jokes. Horrid stove fish. Even, in the lugubrious turquoise giant wrasse, fish that I would have sworn were Jewish.