She glanced furtively back at the house; her mother was there, an outline at the window.

‘What are you here for then?’ she asked quietly, rubbing at her arms, jigging in her trainered feet to beat back the cold.

‘Support,’ I said.

She had been unsure about coming with me; I’d expected that. I didn’t need to wonder what the Eldest Girls had told her. They despised me for stealing away their beloved Mr Hailey, and by rights, they could consider me in league with Mr Crane.

I had thought in the days since my father’s death of the times they had asked me questions in class, seemingly innocent things – tangents, I’d assumed, to draw us away from the tedium of GCSE exam practice. How come you wanted to teach here after being a pupil, didn’t it put you off? Is Mr Crane as strict with you as he is with us? I thought how easily I’d brushed theses enquiries aside. No wonder the girls had taken their fear and confusion to a stranger, to Ben.

Just as my father said, we, the island, had let them down.

I told Viola what I planned to do. I asked her to trust me.

She asked if she could bring her dog.

‘People think of that animal as a familiar, you know,’ I warned, ‘they don’t like it.’

But it was a deal-breaker. If Viola was to be my support, the dog was to be hers.

Our walk was illuminated by a perfect half-slice of moon, no need yet for the torches that we all, without a second thought, carried in every coat pocket. The dog gave us pause to stare out across the water, making us halt every few yards so it could squat low in the grass verge.

‘What is it doing?’ I asked.

‘Peeing,’ Viola replied cautiously, as if there might be a trick to my question.

‘But can’t it just go all at once, so we don’t have to keep stopping?’

She shrugged, suggesting there probably was a way to correct the animal, if only she had the desire to do it.

During our stuttering progress towards the harbour, I summarised my case, what I intended to say. I asked her if she was happy to back me up.

She puckered her lips in thought, then said, ‘It’s beautiful here really, isn’t it?’, which felt like an agreement, an understanding of what I was trying to do. Beside us, the waves were picked out silver by the particular glow of the moon, and I sensed that Viola was seeing this for the very first time, that she had been looking out across that ocean all these months and seeing no splendour, only distance.

‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘it is beautiful here, despite everything.’