It is as she had thought it would be: her father, braced by the steel in his back and his serial disappointments, is all formality. He shakes Michael’s hand. She notices his clean shirt and carefully parted hair, wonders what the effort has cost him. And feels stung, momentarily, by her love of him, her dour, decent father.

Veronica slips up beside her husband like a girl. She is struck by Michael’s beauty, Yvonne can see that. She smiles as she accepts his offering, a fish rather than flowers, a fish freshly caught. This will become a pattern, this gift of a fish; it impresses Veronica because, as she says, you can’t eat flowers. But on this first day she grips the parcel, winks at her daughter and offers tea.

Evelyn eyes Michael shyly from a doorway. Mimi can read her thoughts: he is so different from her own beau, Edward, a boy from Kangaroo Point who dreams of horses, of the vast plains of the west. He is a straight talker, Edward, and says what he means, and he watches over Evelyn, over them both, especially at the Morningside picture theatre where boys swagger and cuss. She knows immediately he won’t like Michael.

And from her corner her grandmother, Eliza, frowns at them all, at the wide-eyed younger children sidling into the room, at Michael. He is too pretty for her liking, too sure, Mimi can tell. Beware Greeks bearing gifts, Eliza tells her later, nodding like a sage. But it’s already too late: she’s in love. Besotted. And she doesn’t even care that Eliza won’t approve, that no one will. The only approval she needs is Michael’s.

Over the following months Evelyn watches Michael, and sees he has begun a campaign. It is a word she has heard a lot in her wartime childhood and it enters her head whenever he appears at their door with his gifts and his grin. This campaign has its own weapons – flirtation and charm, and he includes the whole family in their wide sweep. He uses compliments and winks, fresh fish and Greek sweets, offers of rides on his motorbike. For the twins, not yet at school, his visits are treats, thrilling. They love the bike, its throaty roar, the precarious air that rushes into their faces when he takes them up the street.

Ernie and Geoffrey, newly adolescent, find Michael irresistible, his mix of sophisticated big brother and playful father. But the things that impress the younger ones – his swagger, the exotic sounds that spill from his lips – are the things Evelyn finds unsettling. Later in her life she will remember thinking: he’s too smooth. Like her siblings she is shy and uncertain about the world, and though she likes him – she can’t help it – his cockiness unnerves her. So she stands back, watches him as she might watch a beautiful old lion that has found its way into the house, with a mixture of awe and anxiety and distrust.

All the same she keeps her own counsel about him and isn’t rude – laughs politely at his insistent offers to find her a good Greek boyfriend – because she can see her sister is smitten. In Michael’s company Mimi is a different creature; everything – her skin, the way she speaks – seems plumped out with love. Some light has been flicked on behind her eyes; they follow Michael’s every move and at the time Evelyn can only think of the word ‘covetous’. That’s it: as if her sister wants to possess every part of him, jealous of the things he touches and looks at, the glass in his hand, the moon. He makes the local boys, even the ones with jobs and money for the movies, look like lambs.