She came slowly off the ferry, distancing herself from the crowd. She wanted to feel as if she were alone. She wanted to cross time. She followed a wide, tree-lined path past a small amusement park, just visible through the trees – the circus peak of the merry-go-round, the flume tower – and soon came to a low stone, arched bridge that crossed over an inlet. To the left of the bridge, a docked enclosure of water where pedal boats shaped like swans were corralled together against the bank and held in place by a floating tether. A gust of wind travelled up the Long Pond inlet from the harbour, scribbling the water into darker blue as it came, like the shadow of some great whale moving under the surface. When the wind hit the plastic swans they came alive, clacked their wings together, jostled for space.

Eventually she came to the beach on the far side of the island, where a stone breakwater thirty metres out from shore created a quiet cove. One girl playing in the sand in a red bathing suit. Bucket. Spade. Beyond the breakwater, Lake Ontario opened up and rolled unimpeded to the horizon. Anouk walked westwards along the beach, then came up off the pebbly sand on to another path. Soon, she left the water and walked through an area thick with buckthorn and elm, with scattered houses mostly hidden by trees. Up ahead, the island school, a long, low building. Children from the city went there during school months to study subjects like bird watching and orienteering, pinhole photography, pond life and stars.

Further on, she came to the lighthouse at Gibraltar Point and in front of it stood Lucas, the man she had come to see. The founder of the school; an expert on the history of the island. She was writing a piece for a travel magazine and was here to talk to him about the formation of the islands, about how they began much further east along the lake as sand and rock from the Scarborough Bluffs, sand and rock that eroded and was carried west by the water and deposited here. A warren of shifting sandbars and wetlands. Now connected by bridges and carriageways built a hundred and seventy years before.

Lucas was short, bald and fit, relaxed in a pair of cut-off denim shorts and flip-flops. They shook hands and walked west along Hanlan’s Point Beach, towards the island airport, and Lucas told Anouk a ghost story – Victorian, spooky – about a girl who’d come to work as a chambermaid at the Hanlan Hotel, a hundred years before, and had been killed accidentally over a petty theft.

They walked slowly up the beach, and Lucas showed Anouk where the old resort hotel, now decades gone, used to store its bathing machines; squat, caboose-like structures on wheels. Private changing rooms for swimmers.

‘They’d drag the machines out to the water by horse so the swimmers could get in straight from the cabins,’ Lucas told her. ‘Mainly they were used by women; they’d swim behind the cabins, so that they were hidden from other people on the beach.’