Rowe stopped. There was a great deal more to be said before Rick could be taken as fully established, of course – the number of buttons on his shirt, the thickness of the hair on his chest, the size of his shoes, whether his trousers were done up with buttons or a zip. But perhaps it would be best to skip it for now and go on with the next bit before he lost the thread of the narrative.

The cry had come from the terrace, and it was at this that Rick was now gazing.

The terrace was an area of paving, studded with shrubs and ornamental urns, covering about half an acre of land. It was at the top of a bluff, covered with parched grass, loose rocks, stunted bougainvillaea and fuchsia bushes, that fell fairly sharply down to the beach. On the lower slopes of the bluff a few wild flowers struggled with the aridity of the subsoil for a meagre existence. The only other spots of colour in the scene were a few tin cans and pieces of orange peel scattered among the grey of the pebbles and the dark green, almost black, of sun-dried seaweed.

A path led upwards from the beach, zig-zagging among the bougainvillaea, now disappearing behind a rock, now reappearing to cross a stretch of open ground. The path lay in the bottom of a sort of broad gulley that climbed the bluff between two vertical ribs of rock – gigantic buttresses that looked from a distance like splashes of umber paint down the cliff-face, but were, in fact, gigantic buttresses. The whole scene was a lunar landscape of jutting rocks, tumbled stones, and parching soil – splashed everywhere one looked, of course, with bougainvillaea.

The importance of the bluff was clear; it held up the terrace from which the cry had come . . .

Rowe stopped again. Heavens, he had scarcely started to describe the scene. He had not explained what you could see in the distance. He had not said whether the sea was blue. He had not even established which month it was, or whether the bluff faced east, west, north, or south. He had not yet brought in the great storehouse of zinnias, azaleas, robinsonia, forsythia, flowering pangloss, jacantha, orodigia, smithia, old lady’s bedsock, putria, and Peloponnesian daisies he had up his sleeve yet. Never mind. He could come back and plant those later at his leisure. The important thing now was to keep the excitement of the story going.

. . . the whole scene shimmering in the hard, almost tangible noonday glare.