The girls were camping in one tent, Ravi alone in another. Will you be OK? they asked him, mostly as a joke. You won’t be scared? Or cold? By yourself? He scowled at them, and ducked inside his tent and that was the last they heard of him for the night.

In their tent, side by side in the dark, the girls talked about trees, about the things Mx Thompson had told them.

‘How beautiful this wood is,’ Stella said.

‘The pride of the islands,’ said Tara.

‘My dad loves this wood,’ said Zoe. This was a true fact because Eva had told her.

At the thought of her father, Zoe felt a familiar intermingling of anxiety and love. She had eavesdropped on more than one conversation between her father and her uncles. They had come up, the three of them, without warning Eva. Eva was at college when they got to Her House. But Zoe was there, always hanging on her relatives’ words. George, who had visited earlier in the year too, spent another hour up at the wood, pacing around. And later that afternoon, as Zoe was finishing her essay on why George Eliot took a man’s name, and only called one of her novels (the least popular) after a woman, she heard George’s voice, and Henry’s, clear and authoritative and bossy, and her father’s, coming back muffled, the discomfort evident, below in the hall. Zoe, unseen at the table near the window, forever savouring her relatives’ exotic worlds.

‘When is he up next?’ asked Tara.

‘He’s coming up to the islands soon,’ Zoe said. ‘The weekend after.’

‘Is he?’ said Tara.

‘Are you sure?’ said Stella.

‘Pretty sure,’ Zoe said.

JUDGE: What were you after?

STELLA: What else? Knowledge.

That night in the tent, Zoe asked through the dark, ‘What do you two talk about in Female Bonding?’ For she knew that Tara and Stella had paired up.

‘It’s private,’ Stella said.

‘Do you have boyfriends?’

‘Boyfriends?’ said Stella. ‘Boyfriends? No, I don’t think so.’

Zoe wondered, as she lay there, if she was supposed to know that Stella’s sarcasm was because Tara and she were lesbians, as Pauline and Kath had said, or were ideologically opposed to boyfriends, as seemed likely, or too busy, which was plausible, or because they just had casual sex. She was still wondering these things when she woke in the morning to a bleep, a text from Ravi:

Awake?

She glanced round at the other two. Tara was snoring. Stella was asleep with her arms clutched around her pillow. Zoe unzipped the tent to let out their night-long breath, and to breathe in a stream of wintery fresh air, over her face, into her nostrils and lungs. The air told her how lovely the day already was, and the wood, and these islands, and her friends. Ravi’s tent rustled open. When she looked up, blinking in the sunlight, she could see just the outline of him. He knelt down in a blur.