His voice was wrinkled with a smile. ‘Ah, you know about Caroline’s ghost.’

‘What happened to the ship?’

‘Gunpowder stores blew. The wooden ribs must have washed up on the shore. I think the tide would have showed the skeleton.’

I cracked open a grin. He hadn’t missed a beat.

‘Why did she follow him in, then?’

This time, he waited so long to answer that I thought he hadn’t heard. ‘She was trying to save him.’

I felt his presence like a remembrance. As though we had met before, in some other life if not this one. And then felt an almost irrepressible urge to tell him that, though I battled it into a somewhat more socially compliant shape.

‘She died, you know.’

He didn’t say anything. The sun started browning, folding all the light into the horizon.

Soon it would be dark.

‘Sometimes an end is nothing in the face of what has been.’

The lump in my throat stopped short at the catch in his voice. Unanchored, in a quick, brave, breathless rush I asked the kind of question I had always known not to.

‘Are you sad?’

‘If there is reason to be.’ A fine edge leadened the words. I must have imagined him.

‘There is reason to be,’ I said, crossing my arms, drawing my body into itself, and looking out over the water, my eyes drifting past the homeward-bound boats.

‘Ah, yes. The light.’

Oh.

I nodded. Yes, the light. The melting light. The melting, fading, dying light. The end of day, the end of days. Caroline and her bright young soldier, my endless expanse of teenage time.

And then, propelled by an eruption of giddiness, I said, ‘It flew too close to the sun.’

He laughed appreciatively. ‘You’re a little crazy, aren’t you?’

‘I feel quite mad.’

Well, then. I’d said that out loud, hadn’t I? Odd, how I didn’t instantly regret it.

‘But of course.’ He sounded, in the infinite universe suspended in that infinitesimal moment, deeply sad. ‘Dear girl, this is a hurt particular to loving a world that refuses to love you back.’

Something about the way he said ‘dear girl’ got stuck inside me, and it felt really nice, like a spool of soft, warm wool. So I let it be. I put it away like a prize, carefully, to be taken out and admired and relished on crappy days.

‘People like us, we are moved by too much. Even the smallest, most insignificant things. Things that are not really “real”. And this becomes a problem, I know.’

He does know, I thought, everything changing. He knows. ‘But we must not be afraid of ourselves, dear girl. This is the most beautiful part of us, this hopeless madness filled with too much love. It is bound to drive us a little crazy. But it is, in the end, a fair price to pay for the adventures we shall have.’