They are sort of depressing and reassuring at the same time, he thought, looking back down the aisle and turning over in his mind the possibilities of a review. Those Blue Mountains vistas hazed over with purple, and there are always a lot from round Yass or somewhere with a river at a distance between bare paddocks in a wiggle of trees, and sheds with rusty iron and old abandoned farm machinery. And that man that does river stones – he’s always there. Maybe it’s just always the same picture – who would know? Here and there are people taking photos of each other in front of the displays. Perhaps they’re the artists. It’s something to get hung, he thought, however meagre your talent. But just once in a while, there’s a picture that has something.

In front of him was a desert, or semi-desert scene done in overlapping glazes. There were areas where the paint had been applied so sparingly that the texture of the canvas was the chief thing you noticed, but others where the ground disappeared while the colour maintained a paradoxical appearance of transparency. And here and there verticals, thick strokes, almost calligraphic, were suggestions of trees, vegetation, people even, glimpsed from afar off.

Cliche, perhaps, but among the purple-headed mountains and the sheds and the not-quite-Streetons, not to mention the river stones, there was something about this picture that was not trying so hard to be representational – something of the dreamlike, a landscape in a mirage. Dennis liked the implicit metaphor that gave to the temporal beings their own dimension while the flat land stretched in boundless timeless surface all about them. He looked at the catalogue.

Untitled – Deniliquin, it said, and $800. That was pleasing. For all that this painting had reminiscences of Fred Williams, it was a sure touch, he thought, to let the metaphor of the picture flow through into its name. For what can we call those landscapes other than ‘untitled’ – and yet, as long as we presume to occupy them, whether our title is of the traditional or Torrens kind, we will put up our obsessive little signs like ‘Sandy Gully’ and ‘Ten Mile Creek’. Ghost towns too had street names once. This artist saw more deeply than most. He checked the catalogue again; the name meant nothing. Now he was about ready to move round the corner and begin on the watercolours.

‘Do you like it?’

Dennis didn’t immediately take the words as addressed to him. But they had to be, it seemed, for they clearly came from the only other static presence in the immediate neighbourhood. The lateral current shuffled the crowd along the aisles: they two alone, caught in an eddy, were slapping the seawall side by side. He had been conscious that there was someone else pausing near the picture, but hadn’t taken much notice.

It was a young woman, or young enough anyway – say 25 to 35. Jeans, a white shirt with unbuttoned cuffs, a long cardigan the way people were wearing them then: a patterned knit in a sort of weed-green.

‘It’s got something,’ Dennis said warily – was this perhaps the artist? ‘It’s certainly saying “look at me”, but I don’t think it’s saying “buy me”. But I’d sooner look at it than most of what’s here.’

‘Do you buy things?’

‘I have sometimes. And I think you always know when you really want to; I’ve never bought anything I wasn’t happy with afterwards.’

‘So you’ve got an eye – or you’re just pleased with yourself.’

‘Was that a question?’

‘Not really.’

This insolence from a total stranger was a precious thing.

‘I will tell you why I don’t want to buy it, then,’ said Dennis. ‘To me, the coloration is just a tiny bit vulgar.’

‘Vulgar – isn’t that a bit harsh?’

‘See that pink there, and that shade of green up here in the sky?’

Leaning over the barrier to make the point.

‘No touching the works of art, please, sir,’ from a security guard.

‘What really upsets me – no, it doesn’t upset me, it disappoints me – is that the artist, who is obviously an intelligent person, has let him- or herself down, and if someone comes along and buys it, it will only encourage them and they will keep on doing it.’

‘You’re very sure of your opinion – I’ll give you that. But you can have a few points for “him- or her”. You’re not as completely hateful as I first thought.’

‘I don’t find myself specially hateful. If I seemed a bit over-critical, perhaps I was just annoyed by that guard calling me “sir”. I don’t know about you, but I always find it irritating.’

The Goldsworth students had been profuse with their ‘sirs’.

‘I don’t get called “sir” much.’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘Shall we look at the watercolours?’

‘Why not? Do you like licorice allsorts?’

‘Intensely.’

‘Have some.’

The aniseed, the musk, the banana. Flavour and colour: perfect synaesthesia. They chewed in front of the watercolours.