I got up as soon as I could and walked away, leaving him to his own devices. As I went past the next table, I caught Kathryn Harris’s eye and smiled at her. ‘Is everything OK?’ I asked.

‘Oh yes. It’s lovely here and I’m so excited to be helping. We’ve got the big party tonight. Have you seen Charles le Mesurier’s house?’

‘Not yet.’

‘It’s amazing.’ She looked up at the sky. ‘It’s going to be a hot one. I’d love to get out and explore the island. But I’m going to be busy most of the day getting things ready.’ She glanced over at the far table. ‘Marc’s putting together quite a feast.’

She seemed completely unaffected by what had happened the evening before, both her argument with Marc Bellamy and her encounter with Charles le Mesurier at The Divers Inn. It made me think that I might have read too much into them. She was much younger than me. Perhaps she saw things differently.

Alderney is a lovely place. I had managed to rent a bicycle and spent the rest of the morning exploring the island, captivated by the sense of anachronism, the cobbled streets, the Jane Austen architecture, all the defences – the forts, the barracks, the German pillboxes, the batteries and the bunkers – that had been constructed with almost insane extravagance but never actually used. I cycled all the way from Fort Clonque, a nineteenth-century fortress sitting on its own rocky outcrop at the western end of the island, to The Odeon, a brutalist naval range-finding tower perched on a hillside at the far east. I stopped at Gannet Rock and stood at the edge of the cliff, looking vertiginously down to the churning, crashing sea. In front of me, two rocks of biblical proportions rose out of the water, covered with thousands of brilliant white birds. It was a breeding ground for gannets and one of the wildest and most isolated places I’d ever seen.

I wasn’t going to make the same mistake as the day before when it seemed I’d been the only writer to miss George Elkin’s presentation, so just before one o’clock I was back at the Alderney cinema in time to catch the last twenty minutes of Maïssa’s performance. The cinema was not a huge place. From the outside it looked more like a shop or perhaps a solicitor’s office and once you were in there, there were only about a dozen rows of bucket seats, upholstered in the red plush of another age. Even so, Maïssa had signally failed to fill it. Only thirty people had come to hear her and they weren’t having a good time.