Once back in Sydney, he went straight to the Stanmore restaurant, managed by Valia, who put away her apron and sat with him in the booth where they’d have about ten minutes together. Lucky apologised. That afternoon he’d arranged a meeting at the Quay with five men from Isaacs Incorporated, a Melbourne company that manufactured drink flavourings. There were nine Lucky’s cafes already operating in Sydney, and twelve elsewhere in the state, and Lucky no longer spent any part of his day behind a stove, instead scouting for properties and meeting distributors and bureaucrats and local council members, and visiting bars and restaurants and dance halls in the evening, wherever his business associates suggested a night out, more work disguised as socialising—an antic web of institutions and communities. Such meetings bored Valia. She declined to partake. In the booth at Stanmore, Lucky told her about Cowra, about Bakris, and he pressed his tired face to hers, and they kissed and he rushed off.

His meeting with the Melburnians, held in a conference room with mullion windows, unfolded like a commercial sacrament. They tried the red, blue, green, yellow, orange, purple flavours with beer, lemonade, water and so on—a joyless production he treated with affability. Each of the wait staff, all made preposterous, was dressed in one of the six colours. By evening’s end, the Victorians were drunk and agreed to two months of free packages per franchise outlet, and Lucky didn’t need to tell them about his condition of requiring one week to make a significant commercial decision. As the conversation moved from drink flavours to the subject of cricket (to Lucky’s mind, the only thing worse than playing cricket was talking about cricket) he excused himself and drove home.

‘Gonna surprise the wife, huh?’ one of the Melburnians said, his lips purple from the mix of flavourings.

Valia sat in the lounge room listening to the wireless. She put down her glass with a gentle tap and stood.

‘Where are you going?’ she asked. Lucky was already in another room, searching for the Bakris family’s phone number. Did the Canberra franchise have a phone number yet? He looked through his papers for their address. Valia came to the door and asked about the meeting with the drinks people.

Valia’s figure, standing by the study door, turned rigid when he passed her and made for the bathroom to brush his teeth, to remove the rock candy taste the flavoured drinks had left in his mouth. Then Valia stood in the bathroom doorway and spoke to him. She said something he didn’t catch. Years later he could remember how long the drive from Cowra to Sydney took that day, he recalled what he ate when he stopped in Mittagong, but he couldn’t remember what Valia said while she stood at the bathroom door and he wiped toothpaste from his mouth.