Alice went into the house and came out a short while later with a plate of biscuits. She said she was really enjoying the dancing on the lawn, which was getting even twirlier, now that Lucija had rejoined Mariam and Nina. It was hard to keep a straight face but Alice managed to smile warily at the minister – and make light of it. Island photoshoots: such cheerful and informal affairs! She went back inside to fetch the coffee, and when she returned, the minister and she stood on the front terrace in the winter sunshine, drinking coffee and eating the biscuits Mariam had made, as if it was totally normal to have a nun, a woman in a headscarf and the mother of the minister’s child gambolling across the garden. The sky was suddenly ablaze with light. The photoshoot was going to be amazing.

Sebastian felt calmer as he talked to Alice. She was asking him all kinds of questions, and listening with great attention to his detailed answers. The more he talked, the calmer he felt. He liked talking; he liked being reminded of how good he was with women. Just last week at a biodiversity and business conference, a young girl had waylaid him like this. Not young in the sense of underage – she was probably in her mid-twenties. But young in comparison to how Sebastian felt. Young: sincere, earnest. She had green eyes and freckles scattered like delicate brown sugar crystals all down the sides of her long straight nose. Sebastian concentrated on the freckles as she was speaking, and took in not a single thing she was saying. He noticed her plain linen shift dress, the silver ring in her nose, the curling of her brownish hair, the human tang of which he could smell even from a distance, and which suggested, first that her hair was dirty, and secondly that the tidy dress she wore had probably been borrowed for the occasion. As a husband, one learnt to decode the secrets via which women prepared their bodies for scrutiny by the outside world. He guessed without listening to the girl what her words would be about: biodiversity, rising sea levels, dying butterfly species, endangered polar bears, methane gas seeping out of melting polar ice caps. But the reason the girl was speaking to him was because she liked him, he could see that. He was still, even now, a man whom women liked.