‘No,’ he said. ‘Not all that. But I reckon we’re not intended to be.’

She did not quite giggle for one of those extravagances which polite associations had taught her not to take seriously. At least there was no need to answer.

Over the ridge, in a clump of pines, they came to the minibus in which the Flegg family must have quarrelled across Europe. To one side a tent-contraption had been attached.

‘It’s the only way,’ Doctor Flegg explained. ‘Four kids eat the bottom out of your pocket.’

‘I ate a thing in Athens,’ told the elder girl, ‘and the cream squashed out in all directions. It was a sort of pastry. It was gorgeous,’ she remembered.

From under the canvas flap, stooping first, then straightening, came a woman. She narrowed her eyes, perhaps out of suspicion, or perhaps because she needed glasses. She hitched up her leopard-skin matador pants.

‘Cherie, this is Anthea Scudamore. I used to know in Adelaide. She just turned up along the coast.’

Mrs Flegg muttered something about an Australian under every stone. She had those very clear blue eyes surrounded by a blaze of golden skin. They were disconcerting eyes, not for what they saw, but for what they didn’t.

‘My name is Mortlock now,’ Mrs Mortlock thought it was the moment to remind.

‘Husband not with you?’ asked Doctor Flegg.

‘My husband died,’ she said. And although there was no necessity for it, she felt she must explain: ‘We had already separated.’

Cherie Flegg, who was fiddling with the tips of her uninhibited blue-black hair, thought she had better do, well, something, dispense some kind of hospitality.

‘We’ve got a drop of that ouzo stuff,’ she said, ‘left over from last night’s drunk. Or I can make you a cup of tea. An authentic Australian cuppa tea.’

Anthea laughed, and said she’d simply adore the tea. Cherie Flegg made her feel she should act in some way differently. But how? She hoped good nature would see her through.

While her hostess was boiling a battered aluminium kettle on a primus and buttering enough slabs of bread, the Flegg family disposed of themselves all around. A stool was produced for Mrs Mortlock, who was glad of it – on account of her dress. So there she sat, all of them looking up to her, and she began to accept it as her due.

‘Damn you! Damn you! Damn you!’ Mrs Flegg started to shriek in her rather thin, tin-opener voice.

The little girl only laughed, who had been sticking her fingers in the butter to smear her face.

‘I’m sorry, darling, but you do do it, don’t you? All the bloody time!’

Having first admonished, the mother caught up her youngest child, and appeared to be finding her edible. While the little girl laughed and laughed.

They must be very buttery together, decided Mrs Mortlock.

The stains of carelessness and haste had superimposed their own more abstract pattern over the formal leopard spots of Cherie Flegg’s fabric pants. Her clear eyes could not have seen, nor would they notice much else beyond the behaviour of her children, and the approach of other women. Mrs Mortlock experienced a sadness on recognizing the professional carriage, the figure from which nature had not yet exorcized the grace, of Cherie Smith. When Mrs Flegg lay down on the ground, her blue-black hair spread itself naturally around, her long legs plaited themselves together in the most expressive twists.