We left the beach, the eagle still circling above us, and made our way to the shop. I sat out in the garden snack bar and grill while Ros went to get herself dabbed. At a table near to mine a party of workmen, on the island to build more ‘Tropicals’, were taking a teabreak and ogling the girls. The most voluble of them wore a T-shirt which carried the words TAFFY’S HOMES – WE’LL DO YOU . . . A HOME; and since he was Welsh I decided that he was Taffy. Though to call him simply Welsh hardly does justice to the sort of Welsh he was. He was super-Welsh, hyper-Welsh, orotund and oratorically Welsh – altogether too rich a collection of sounds and sentiments for this fragile little cay floating in the sensitive waters of the Coral Sea. ‘Eh, eh, eh!’ he sang to his men, as a pair of only moderately voluptuous Australian girls came flouncing through the gardens, braving the cold in their bikinis. ‘Eh, boys? Look what comes here, then. When did you ever see such a couple of lovely little fruit cocktails as these?’ His voice rose and dipped, his appreciation deeper than any mine shaft. Not since Richard Burton’s funeral, I thought, could so much deliberated vitality, such lyrical lilting rhapsodical love of life have been assembled. Only here on Green Island it was assembled in the single person of Taffy.

Was Nature striking back already then? Was Taffy to be the price I paid for Ros’s throwing back of the fish?

I went to see how she was getting along with the iodine and found her coming to the end of what had been a violent argument with the man who ran the Dive Shop. He hadn’t cared for her tone. He hadn’t liked the way she’d come barging in demanding medication. ‘I’d have told you iodine was painful and not the favoured treatment anyway,’ I arrived just in time to hear him saying, ‘had you not been so pushy when you came in here.’

There was a little telltale quiver still, although it was all over now, about the bottom of his face. Closet jaw. No man who is on reasonable terms with his own nature will ever upset himself calling a woman pushy, even if pushy is what she is. Ditto ball-breaker. That whole cast of threatening women from damned whores through to termagants has no more than a shadowy existence in reality; like bugaboos and hobgoblins they stalk a mental landscape. Ros the fish-saver had ambled vaguely bleeding into what she thought was a Dive Shop and Dispensary on Paradise Island – to seek a little medication and hire a snorkel – only to discover that she’d blundered inadvertently into the pitted continent of somebody’s private terror.