That modest show of independence made his temper spurt. ‘I shouldn’t have to provide lighting on the stairs,’ he declared. ‘I’d intended to deduct the price of the bulb from my rent. But since it’s your landing, it would be better if you reimbursed me and settled with Monsieur Laval yourself.’

I tried to pay him on the spot, but he claimed that he couldn’t remember how much the bulb had cost. ‘I wouldn’t want to fleece you,’ he assured me, smarmy again. ‘When I’ve checked the price, I’ll let you know. We’re neighbours, aren’t we? I can knock on your door at any time.’ He let the thought linger, smiling all the while, displaying his tiny teeth. I wished that his head would fall off.

Deb invited me to lunch. She cooked a cheese omelette, flipping it expertly in the pan. John Lennon had been murdered, and we drank a lot of wine to cheer up. Deb told me that the Bissets were dears. Monsieur Bisset posted her letters at the main post office so that they got to England sooner. Deb wrote to Angus, her fiancé, three times a week, and could hardly wait to see him at Christmas. A fiancé was as astonishing as a moped. None of my Sydney friends had fiancés – I looked on them as a spinsterish obsession that had died out circa 1962. Deb said that when she finished university she was going to marry Angus. He was already practically running the financial sector. They planned to have three children and a pony. I felt as glass-eyed and inert as the deer on the wall. I wanted, urgently, to cry out a warning: CE N’EST PAS NORMAL. But that was wrong. What Deb wanted was all too normal. If the wine hadn’t got in the way, I’d have seen that the correct warning was CE N’EST PAS ANG-TER-ES-SUNG.

In the Bissets’ front yard three disciplined trees stood along a wall as if waiting to be shot. They’d recovered quickly from the rowdiness of autumn and were already sober and bare. Monsieur Bisset was backing his car past them as I was leaving and offered me a lift. He put searching questions to me as he drove. Was it envisaged that Australian women would have the vote one day? By what factor did Aboriginal people outnumber the rest of the population? The eucalypts, so prominent in travel documentaries, at what date had they been imported to Australia from the south of France?

I improvised answers that allowed Monsieur Bisset to maintain his imbecilic vision of Australia; he didn’t strike me as the type to take kindly to correction. He worked in administration at police headquarters, he told me, and was a graphologist as well – it was extremely useful in his line of work. ‘The loop of the capital L is more enlightening than you can imagine. In letters from people applying for work, I look for economy and firmness. A certain kind of downstroke is a warning that it would be madness to ignore.’