He talked to us about the Aborigines who used to be his friends but who were now gone to ruin in the towns, sniffing petrol, drinking the water from car batteries, eating sandwiches made of boot polish mixed with methylated spirits. ‘They’ll eat and drink anything up here,’ he said, ‘even scent, which rots the belly quicker than anything.’

The homestead enjoyed an isolation which made me giddy. The gardens choked in the heat. Spinifex pigeons with rakish crests came to Roy’s call. Bower birds busied themselves doing up their bachelor pads. The air swarmed with hosts of butterflies of enormous size. And the whole time he talked to us a trickle of perspiration ran down Roy’s weather-beaten chest. He was getting lonely here. It seemed to me that it was doing him no good, every day raking the ashes not just of someone else’s past but also of his own. But he was hopeful of a change. He had recently been interviewed by a local paper and had been quoted as saying that he wouldn’t mind having a woman to live with him up here except that he didn’t believe a modern woman could survive the hardship of the bush. Since then he’d had letters from women ready to take up his challenge. He particularly liked the one who simply said, ‘I can. I’m forty years old, five feet tall and weigh eight stone.’ He’d written back and was expecting her to join him any day.

‘With the intention of seeing how you hit it off?’ Ros asked.

He wiped the perspiration off his brow and opened his soft blue eyes. ‘With the intention of matrimony,’ he said.

Since we weren’t going to be able to use Kununurra as a base to explore the Kimberleys, I decided that we would try the region from the other end. If we caught the bus after dinner we could be in Derby, eight or nine hundred kilometres away, by four or five o’clock in the morning.

‘Derby? What do you want to go to Derby for?’ Henri asked when we met again that evening in the Green Room.

He wasn’t particularly impressed with any of my reasoning, but when I added that an old childhood friend of Ros’s was there, running a hotel and restaurant, his objections lost themselves in simple word association. ‘Do you like French food?’ he immediately asked me.

‘Of course,’ I said.

‘I’ll take you where you can get some in Pert. I know te best chefs. I only eat tere when I know tey’re cooking.’

‘How do you know when that is?’ I asked. Naive bastard.

‘I go into the kitchens. I walk straight trough te restaurant and see who’s cooking. If tey’re not tere, I don’t order.’

‘I suppose that’s the way to do it,’ I said.