‘This is a bit different, eh, Jimmy? It’s not like when you stayed here.’

And he saw that it had been transformed in their honour. There was a new double bed, fresh curtains with big blue flowers on them, and matching linen. A pair of blue towels folded on the old chest of drawers. He thought his mother must have been watching makeover programmes on daytime television when the bad weather made outside work impossible.

Lying there, listening to the wind tear at the roof tiles, Perez remembered the first woman with whom he’d had sex. The image came into his head, quite unbidden and remarkably vivid. She’d been a woman while he was still a boy. Beata. A German student, member of a National Trust for Scotland work camp; the camp had taken over the Puffin, an old stone fish store at the south end, for a month in the summer. He was sixteen, home for the long holiday. She was twenty-one.

It was the year all the construction work was done at the North Haven and the students acted as labourers, the year Kenneth Williamson had come to Springfield as a kind of lodger. One night there’d been a barbecue at the Puffin and Perez had been invited along. He remembered bottles of German beer in a row in the shadow of the hut, the smell of singeing meat. He was sitting on the grass talking to the woman and suddenly became aware that she was looking at him oddly. She half-closed her eyes and swayed slightly, lost it seemed to him now, in some erotic fantasy of her own.

‘I want to swim,’ she’d said, opening her eyes wide again. ‘Where can I swim?’

By then the other students were rowdily drunk, singing songs in languages he couldn’t understand. He’d taken her to Gunglesund, a natural pool formed in the rocks on the west of the island. It filled up on the very high tides and the sun warmed it, so it wasn’t so cold there as swimming in the sea. But still cold enough to make the children who came there squeal when they first jumped in.

Beata hadn’t squealed. Without any sort of fuss, she’d taken off all her clothes and slipped into the water. She had small breasts, a flat brown stomach, a white triangle where bikini bottoms had been. Her pubic hair was darker than he’d expected. She’d swum away from him with a languid crawl.

The sun had reflected from the water into his eyes and he’d felt faint. There was a weird shady light as if the sun had been eclipsed for a moment and would soon come out again.

‘Aren’t you coming in?’ she’d demanded, turning back to him. Impatient. A little imperious.

He’d hesitated for a moment. What if someone should come? And he’d known even then that what was expected was more than a shared swim. She’d been looking at him greedily since he’d first arrived at the Puffin. He began to undress.