He only needed telling once. Thereafter, wherever I ran into him on the island, he would ask ‘How’s it going, Howard?’ or ‘You right, Howard?’ or ‘Wanna join us on the reef at low tide, Howard?’ The only time he didn’t stop whatever he was doing to look up at me and use my name was when I saw him in the bar later that night. He was off duty then, I gathered, because he was not wearing his Activity Officer T-shirt. And he stared right through me.

Because our room, it was in fact called a ‘Tropical’, was not quite ready for us when we arrived – girls of several nationalities running in and out of it with fan-shaped towel and face-cloth arrangements – we decided we would have a preliminary walk around the island, the cold and the soft drizzle notwithstanding. The beaches looked as though they’d had even rougher treatment in the night than Palm Cove. A few trees had come down and there was debris everywhere. We picked our way between it, determined to find marvels even amongst the ruination. We oohed at every shell; we aahed at every twist of coral. Then we both espied, lying palpitating on the sand, a brilliantly coloured fish. Perhaps an euxiphipops xanthometapon – a yellow face angel fish. What it was doing here, still alive, several yards from the water but with no apparent plans for getting back to it, we didn’t understand. Ros, however, turned out to know something about resuscitating fish. It was the sort of knowledge that West Australian girls just somehow picked up. She lifted it gently and carried it in both hands back to its own element, passing it again and again through the water, ‘to force oxygen into its gills,’ she explained. I looked on, astonished. You can live with a person a long time and never have an inkling of what they know. After two or three minutes of this she knelt down on the sand and released the fish into the water. It made a spirited dash for the open sea, then, seeming to lose its nerve or its bearings, it suddenly leapt into the air, performed a triple backward somersault, and landed with a plop at her feet. I would have called it a day at that, but she re-commenced the whole procedure, running it through the water the way a child propels a rubber duck, all the while exhorting it with words of encouragement and affirmation. From the fish’s standpoint it must have been like a telephone conversation with the Samaritans so weighted in favour of staying alive was the advice.

And eventually it did the trick. The fish started to gulp and look positive. Its eyes bulged. It even wriggled.