It was the autumn of 1955 when Sylvie Stirling met Leonard Morrow in the menswear department of the Myer Emporium. Sylvie was nineteen years old and employed at the busy Revlon counter. (Her preference had been for the book department, but the personnel manager had said it would be a waste of a pretty face, and assigned her to cosmetics instead.) Leonard, six years her senior, was about to buy a controlling share in the library-supplies company where he’d been working for the past four years. There was a meeting scheduled for the following day when the deal would be finalised, and to mark the occasion Leonard had decided to buy a new tie. He was oscillating between a maroon check and a blue stripe when Sylvie returned from her lunch break. She walked past him, slowed down, and without thinking, turned back and offered to help.

She took both ties, and standing on tiptoe, draped first one then the other around his neck. Her fingers grazed his skin, that sensitive spot just above the collar, and bliss bombs bolted down his spine. When she decided on the maroon — it was the more attractive pattern, she said, and it also complemented his colouring — all he could do was nod. It was only as she turned to leave that he managed to find his voice. ‘Would you meet me? After work? For a drink? Or tea, if you’d prefer?’

Sylvie had never before approached a strange man, and she certainly had never shoplifted one — the term she always used when describing their first meeting. In the normal run of her life, she presented as a nicely brought-up middle-class girl. She was a loving sister to Maggie, a devoted daughter to her warm, sweet-tempered mother, and a patient one with her hard-to-please, impatient father. She was popular, she was pretty, and while she was cleverer than girls were expected to be in the 1950s, she was adept at dampening down her intelligence. Presenting a calm and cheerful disposition, despite her difficult father, despite the disappointments of life, despite her fears of A-bombs and H-bombs, Sylvie Stirling was in all respects a young lady. So she was even more surprised than Leonard when she approached him in the Myer menswear department.

‘Let me help you,’ she said.

Leonard heard the words and took in the speaker. She was small, elfin, in fact, with fair hair tied in a ponytail, and the largest, bluest eyes he had ever seen. Luck, having shunned him for the first twenty years of his life, had been his constant companion since moving from Perth to Melbourne. Friends, a great job, and now this bombshell of a girl.

Their courtship began that very evening. He took her to the ladies’ lounge of a hotel of which even the strictest parents of a well-brought-up girl would approve, and over a Pimms for her and a beer for him, they started to get to know each other.