‘Tell me something about your work,’ Mrs Mortlock asked of the doctor, though she did not want to know.

As he told about the fellowship, and their life in the States, she was greedy for the tone of his voice, droning outside her partitioned thoughts. She examined his hands, to see what she could remember of them. Their male skin was incredible. But the hands remained withheld, unless responding to some jokey demonstration of affection on the part of his younger children, or in the case of his elder girl, overt sallies of love.

‘And now we gotta settle down in Canberra,’ Barry Flegg brought his story to an end.

‘I was never cut out for any sort of academic wife. No sirree!’ grumbled Mrs Flegg, though it was obvious she would not have relinquished her position.

Mrs Mortlock had eaten half a slice of bread, with its fairly rancid, sandy butter, and burnt her mouth on the metal cup. Although enthroned on the camp stool, familiarity had begun to make her status suspect.

‘Why do you go around in a hat?’ the younger boy thought to ask.

So, she was preparing to leave, when the old Greek came along the path with the bunches of roses, the crimson-purply, country bunches. Because he was asked, Doctor Flegg bought a bunch, giving too much, Mrs Mortlock saw – she was quick to master the currency of any country she visited – and tossed the roses into his wife’s leopard-skin lap.

‘What’ll I do with a bunch of roses?’ Mrs Flegg complained, and laughed. ‘Give them to Mrs Scudamore.’

‘Oh no! Please!’ Mrs Mortlock protested.

Her lips were trembling unaccountably under the last flakes of lipstick.

‘Or perhaps one,’ she begged.

And pinned the rose with a brooch, which seemed, rather, to draw attention to the diamonds, though she had not intended it that way.

‘Flowers die on me,’ she apologized, ‘very quickly.’

She spoke more softly than was her habit, almost childlike, while glancing sideways at Mrs Flegg, who continued sitting for a moment abandoned in time, it might have appeared, but for the evidence of children, and the crimson roses, glowing and spilling from her stained lap.

Soon after that Mrs Mortlock left, accompanied by Doctor Flegg, with a string of children tagging behind, less from a sense of duty than to allay an evening boredom. There was a smell of dust and roses, as sea and sky began to purple over, and shadow deepened dust at the roots of the pines.

On their reaching the top of the ridge, Barry Flegg’s reluctant pace showed that he planned to go no farther with his guest. So that she could only feel their uneventful meeting in such uncomfortable circumstances, in the presence of his wife – to whom Mummy would have referred as Such a Common Little Person – must remain for ever a meaningless occasion.

Perhaps for that reason, as they stood amongst the rocks, Mrs Mortlock could not resist: ‘I went across to the Island, Barry, not so very long before I left. I was alone. I lived on eggs. And bread. I tramped about the bush. I was pretty miserable at the time. I swam.’