Sonja once entertained some fellow synaesthetes here and I watched from the kitchen window, feeling furtive, as Sonja served wine and snacks. Then she called me out to join them on the deck and I sat for a while with six people whose worlds matched no one else’s, not even each other’s. They laughed as they bit into tortillas and talked of deserts and ceramics, snickered as they sipped Chablis and heard ‘La Wally’, felt wet sand, smelled tamarinds. Overwhelmed, I made my excuses and went to lie on our bed. Hours later Sonja joined me.

‘Are you OK?’ I asked. ‘Have they gone?’

‘Yes, they’ve gone. And no, I’m not OK.’

‘Why not?’ We didn’t touch, just lay there, looking at each other. I know more than most how important it is to watch people as well as listen.

‘They don’t see things like I do.’

‘Well, honey, you knew that would be the case. You knew that before you asked them here.’

‘I know that. I know that. But I guess I was hoping that one of them would feel the same. Would name the same things. Like the guy with short blond hair? When he tasted the wine I was sure he’d say something about straw — it was awful by the way — but what did he say? It reminded him — that’s the received argot, it reminds one — of zoysia grass. Bloody zoysia grass. I’ve never even seen the stuff

‘I bet one of your ancestors did.’

‘There you go again.’ She turned on her back and crossed her arms on her chest, the same pose as the skeleton revealed in Cheddar Gorge.

* * *

One of our customers once asked Ian and me to design and build a deck shaped like a boat; he said he wanted it to be a deck, as it were. He’d been a sailor all his life and couldn’t imagine a life on land without a railing and a curved, planed, interlocked floor. His house was out in the country, sliding down the banks of a river, so we built out over the high-tide mark. The deck curved round from the sides of the house, the railings made from old, reclaimed banisters with beautifully turned spindles. Ian contacted a boat-builder and we stripped out the deck of a yacht that was being broken up, and installed the floor so that it dipped away neatly to drain the rainwater. The customer wanted rigging and pulleys installed so we strung these round the edge. He could even run up a pennant on the short mast we slotted into the floor, should he feel so moved.