Alan was out, doing what irrigation foremen do early on a Sunday afternoon, but his wife, Louise, welcomed us into her house. She was carrying a naked, golden haired little boy, and was as near as damn naked herself in a skimpy singlet thrown over a bikini. Her impatience at having to wear anything communicated itself to us and made us feel intrusive. The barer the Australian body – a handy little maxim of mine, this – the broader the Australian brogue. Louise made a sound like sheet-metal garage doors (the kind you lift from the bottom) opening and closing. But that might well have had something to do with her attitude to Neil, her uncertainty as to her role, precisely, in this first actualization of one of Neil’s personalized safaris. She didn’t take too kindly to being part of some dubious intinerary, to being ordered about her own house, or to Neil’s pulling the same suicidal tricks on her as we’d watched him pull on Robin.

‘Louise knows what I’m like,’ he would say.

‘Louise does,’ Louise would reply, bringing down her garage door.

I don’t know what would have become of us all, socially, had Louise’s mother not suddenly appeared from the bedroom, limping, laughing, and rubbing ointment and insect-repellent into herself. ‘They’ve been biting me all night,’ she said, without feeling it necessary to be specific. ‘They started the day I landed in Australia, have been going at me continuously since then, but have increased in ferocity markedly since I arrived in Camballin.’ She looked around the room, more to check what might be winging towards her than to bother with introductions, and then rubbed more repellent into herself. ‘I really do sometimes wish,’ she said, ‘that my daughter had chosen somewhere more clement to live. Like Wymondham, in Leicestershire, where I do.’

She was good-looking, like her daughter, only in that droll self-consciously fragile style the English favour; whereas Louise had gone brittle and brown – had become a tuber not a flower – in the manner preferred by Australians. Interesting, though, to discover that Louise was herself an import and had been out here a mere six or seven years. That explained the more Aussie than Aussie off-handedness, and the impatience with vestments, and the sheet-metal timbre. Takes a Pom, as I’ve observed many a time, to make a genuine Australian.

Louise’s mother – out here on a brief break from the environs of Melton Mowbray – reminded me of no one so much as a visiting Forsterian relation as played, say, by Beryl Reid. From time to time I would catch her standing staring in astonishment, as if she couldn’t begin to work out who her daughter was, or why she had a little naked brown tadpole for a grandson, or why there were geckos darting diagonally across the walls. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone so amused by what bemused them. Or vice versa.