‘I am the passive type,’ she replied.

Indeed, she was so passive she had practically set in her own flesh beneath that glass conscience of a ceiling. Although a mild evening was ready to soothe, she shivered for her more than nakedness. When she stuck her head out the window, there were the rhinestones of Sydney glittering on the neck of darkness. But it was a splendour she saw could only dissolve.

‘You Austrahlian girls,’ observed Tibby Szabo, ‘ven you are not all gickle, you are all cry.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I know,’ she said, ‘it makes things difficult. To be Australian.’

And when he popped inside her mouth a kiss like Turkish delight in action, she was less than ever able to take herself in hand.

They drove around in Tibby’s Jag. Because naturally Tibby Szabo had a Jag.

‘Let us go to Manly,’ she said. ‘I have got to look at the Pacific Ocean.’

Tibby drove, sometimes in short, disgusted bursts, at others in long, lovely demonstrations of speed, or swooning swirls. His driving was so much the expression of Tibby Szabo himself. He was wearing the little cigar-coloured hat.

‘Of course,’ said Miss Slattery through her hair, ‘I know you well enough to know that Manly is not Balaton.’

‘Balaton?’

Tibby jumped a pedestrian crossing.

‘Faht do you know about Balaton?’

‘I went to school,’ she said. ‘I saw it on the map. You had to look at some thing. And there it was. A gap in the middle of Hungary.’

She never tired of watching his hands. As he drove, the soft, cajoling palms would whiten.

Afterwards when they were drawn up in comfort, inside the sounds of sea and pines, and had bought the paper-bagful of prawns, and the prawn-coloured people were squelching past, Tibby Szabo had to ask:

‘Are you trying to spy on me viz all zese kvestions of Balaton?’

‘All these questions? One bare mention!’

Prawn-shells tinkle as they hit the asphalt.

‘I wouldn’t open any drawer, not if I had the key. There’s only one secret,’ she said, ‘I want to know the answer to.’

‘But Balaton!’

‘So blue. Bluer than anything we’ve got. So everything,’ she said.

The sand-sprinkled people were going up and down. The soles of their feet were inured to it.

Tibby Szabo spat on the asphalt. It smoked.

‘It isn’t nice,’ she said, ’to spit.’

The tips of her fingers tasted of the salt-sweet prawns. The glassy rollers, uncurling on the sand, might have raked a little farther and swallowed her down, if she had not been engulfed already in deeper, glassier caverns.

‘Faht is zis secret?’ Tibby asked.

‘Oh!’

She had to laugh.

‘It is us,’ she said. ‘What does it add up to?’

‘Faht it edds up to? I give you a hellofa good time. I pay ze electricity end ze gess. I put you in ze vay of cut-price frocks. You hef arranged sings pretty nice.’

Suddenly too many prawn-shells were clinging to Miss Slattery’s fingers.