‘Bloody sure. I love good French food and good French wine. Between us, my wife and I can drink tree, four bottles.’

‘That’s good going,’ I said.

Henri rolled his eyes. His moustache was so black and sleek that it actually caught the light. He was, literally, a dazzling man. And he looked so ecstatic, remembering the amount of food and wine he and his wife got through, that I wondered why he didn’t think of opening his own restaurant.

‘Because I wouldn’t have time for fishing.’ He looked around him here. I’d noticed that he’d been growing increasingly restive, watching girls coming into the bar. And I had the feeling that he didn’t want Ros to hear what he had to say to me next. Which was, ‘I’ll tell you one ting my wife and I often talk about opening . . . A high-class brottle.’

I got him to repeat this so that I could be certain it was Mauritian/Australian for what I thought it was, and not a perfectly good pronunciation of a word for a Western Australian measure of French wine.

‘There are no high-class ones in Perth already?’ I asked.

‘Yes and no,’ Henri said. He was fond of that expression. The night before he’d told us that his wife was pregnant and when we’d asked him if he wanted a son or a daughter he’d employed it then. What he seemed to mean tonight was that there might have been high-class ones in Perth, but not where he and his wife had it in mind to open one, which was off Perth.

‘Off Perth?’

He looked around the room again. He didn’t want me giving away his idea. ‘If you sail six nautical miles out of Pert you can do anyting,’ he told me.

I tried to let this information really sink in. ‘Anything?’

He nodded. ‘Anyting you can tink of.’

While I was failing Henri’s test – all I could think of doing six nautical miles off Perth was fishing – Ros had inadvertently blundered into the Australian sex-war zone, patrolled on this occasion by the drivers of the bus we hoped to catch. Calling it a bus had been the first of her mistakes. ‘Look, Sheila,’ one of them had said, putting his arm around her shoulders and pointing to the passing traffic, ‘see that – that’s a car. See that – that’s a truck. And that, over there, is a coach. On a bus you buy tickets. I drive a coach. I don’t sell tickets.’

‘We’ve already got tickets,’ Ros said.

‘We?’ The arm was still around the shoulder.

‘I’ve got mine, my husband’s got his.’

‘Oh, your husband. Been keeping him behind the bushes while you do the charming, eh?’ He was called John, this one. His mate was Dave. They were a sort of version of Wayne and Clay without the refinement.