Bouncing down Jim’s drive and then along the track at the lower edge of Apocalypse, Francis started to feel that something really exciting could be done with the block of land formed by the three ranches. After a couple of miles, he arrived at Yab-Yum and passed under an arch made from sea-worn driftwood, polished by waves and bleached by the sun. The shadow of the totem pole rippled over the car as he started his ascent towards Hope’s formerly eponymous hilltop ranch.

The front door was opened by a lightly bearded young man, with his hair in a bun, wearing Turkish trousers and a black ear-stretcher.

‘Hi there, you must be Francis! Hope is in the pool. It’s just below the deck you can see through those doors,’ he said, pointing across the glowing wooden floor of a glass-walled, open-plan living room, scattered with stone and bronze sculptures of various deities from the crowded Hindu pantheon. Islands of sofas and armchairs and low wooden tables rested on brightly coloured rugs patterned with bears and elk and other wild animals. Hanging above the fireplace, on the only plaster wall in the room, was an unframed expanse of blue and white paint, evoking the endless contest between the protean vapours of the sea and the sky: the many-headed foam, the wind-shot or curling wave, the shape-shifting clouds and, towards the top of the canvas, a ragged cylinder of fog rolling in from the far horizon. Maybe the painting worked better on a breezy night, when the windows reflected the interior of the room and the invisible ocean murmured and boomed through an open door, but now, as Francis stepped across the threshold of the upper deck, its appeal to confusion and plasticity was guillotined by the dry precision of the view, the steep hills, the dark sparkle of the water, the cloudless sky.

When he reached the railing of the deck, he glanced down and saw Hope doing a gentle breaststroke along the outer edge of her infinity pool, naked. Francis dithered between the familiar pleasures of the landscape and the guilty pleasure of the more immediate view. At the centre of the pool’s mosaic of dark blue tiles was a swirl of orange, pink and silvery-white ceramic koi, and across its surface Hope’s slim golden body gliding slowly, her arms reaching out and her legs opening to push the water behind her. He remembered St Augustine’s famous prayer, ‘Oh, Lord, make me chaste, but not yet’, trying unsuccessfully to lift his gaze beyond the pool, towards the tumbling slopes to the placid sea. After one last moment of voyeuristic turmoil, he decided manfully to let Hope know that he had arrived, but before he could say anything she stopped swimming, dipped her head backwards in the water, smoothed her hair away from her face, and looked up at him directly, as if she had known that he was there all along.