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Fortunately at this time Tony was sharing a flat in Neutral Bay with another pilot and didn’t spend much time at the family home. Thus I was spared too much exposure to the formidable Pamela Cooper. Tony’s flat mate, Mark, was an older guy, who had been an air force pilot before joining Qantas. He was an inveterate womaniser, too. Tony and I started calling his girlfriends ‘Miss January’, ‘Miss February’, ‘Miss March’ and so on as few of them lasted more than a few weeks. Living with Mark meant you’d never know who you were going to bump into leaving the bathroom the next day. Some of these girls were lovely but there was no point getting to know any of them because as soon as you’d developed an attachment for one she’d be shown the revolving door. Of course Mark was often away, too, so we did have many glorious periods where we had the flat all to ourselves.

I’d established by this time that Tony’s sculpted body wasn’t completely a work of nature: he liked to exercise, a lot. I signed up to his gym and started joining him on the bikes and treadmills. We’d get all hot and sweaty on the gym equipment, have a shower, and then go home to get all hot and sweaty again whilst performing a work out of a completely different kind. He was not the wildly adventurous lover I dreamed of, but I was completely in love with the idea of being in love and with the intimacy that only comes with that. I think there is a place for the good old, no-strings-attached fling; one highlight from my trip to Italy I omitted to tell Tony about was the twenty-four hours I spent holed up in a pensione with Roberto, a lawyer I met at a restaurant near the Spanish Steps. It was with Tony, however, that I finally discovered the difference between having sex and making love.

I never tired of the fact that he was so big and strong and masculine - it made me feel, if not exactly petite, at least very feminine. Once I’d worked up the courage to suggest it, we’d sometimes pretend I was a damsel in distress and he my rakish lover come to take advantage of me.

One afternoon, after about a year of togetherness, we were lying in his bed. I plucked up the courage to ask him a question that had been niggling at me for some time.

‘You know the night we got together, at David’s farewell party.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Was it me or Mimi you were interested in?’

His head jerked up from the pillow a little and he gave me a puzzled look. ‘You - I thought that would have been obvious.’

‘Well, she is very beautiful. Most men flock to her. I thought you might have been going to hit on her but when you got talking to me changed your mind, or something.’

‘No, never…Mimi is very attractive, but it was always you.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know…it’s not something I can really put into words. You just looked nice. Although,’ he said, giving me a wicked look, ‘I did notice that you had very nice breasts.’

Then he went quiet for a while, his usual state. I thought our conversation had reached a typical dead-end but he surprised me this time by continuing. ‘You know, I don’t really know Mimi that well, and she seems nice and all, but in my opinion really beautiful girls are generally more trouble than they are worth. You know about Sarah, I suppose?’

‘Yes,’ I said. I knew of Sarah, Tony’s last serious girlfriend, well. Alice and Cathy, the catty girls in Tony’s crowd, delighted in telling me about this apparent paragon of beauty and virtue whenever they could. Sarah was travelling in Europe by this stage, so we’d never actually met.

‘She was absolutely, stunningly gorgeous [I could have done without hearing that] and when we started going out I thought that all my Christmases had come at once, but in the end she just drove me nuts and I got sick of her.’

Ah, that was much better. ‘Why?’ I asked, trying - and failing - not to sound too eager.

‘She is a daughter of one of my dad’s friends and my mum and dad were really keen on us getting together. I think they thought we’d eventually get married, you know. [That