When all the guests had gone, Jane waited for a moment. The wind caught the heavy outside door and it began to bang. The storm must have changed direction. Still westerly, which the birdwatchers hated, but with some north in it. She pulled it to again and locked it. The common room was quiet. She supposed Maurice and his strange dysfunctional family had gone through the kitchen to their flat.

She began the task of clearing up. The visitors would still want their breakfast the next day. Usually Maurice would have stayed behind to help her, but she knew he would have other things on his mind. Ben, the assistant warden, seemed to have rushed off too. Jane stacked plates into the dishwasher and cleared the glasses from the common room. The tables could wait for the following day. She felt oddly happy. Angela had miscalculated. It hadn’t been clever to wind up Poppy so she made a show in public. Maurice wouldn’t like that. Then there came a horrible thought, worm-like, entering her brain and refusing to leave. She couldn’t let Maurice and Angela separate. If they were to split up Angela would stay at the North Light. She was the warden, the famous naturalist, the person who pulled in the punters. Anyone could take on Maurice’s role. And there would be no place for Jane in Angela’s new world.

Chapter Six

That night Perez slept immediately, untroubled by memories of his first lover or anxieties about his current one. It was as if the first ordeal was over. Fran had survived the party, had even enjoyed it. In the car on their way back to Springfield she’d said what a wonderful evening it had been. ‘Thank you so much, Mary, for organizing it.’ And Mary, crawling at ten miles an hour as the wind buffeted the car, leaning forward for a better view of the road, had turned briefly to them and beamed.

He woke before it was light. The storm still there in the background, taken for granted now. There was a knock on the door, his father’s voice as quiet as he could manage. ‘Jimmy, you need to get up.’

He thought there must be some community disaster. He remembered being called from his bed as a young man, when old Annie had fallen ill and they’d needed an ambulance flight in the middle of the night. They’d lit fires along the airstrip to mark the way for the plane to come in, all of the island men working together, the women left behind to mind the bairns.

Fran stirred but she didn’t wake. In the kitchen his father was making tea. He was wearing a cardigan over his pyjamas. That seemed odd to Perez. Why wasn’t the man dressed? His father was the nearest thing the island had to a leader and he should be out there to supervise if there was a problem. Then he thought maybe his mother was ill and they were waiting for the nurse who was resident on the island. No way would a doctor get in this morning.