‘Do you mean, where do we go for now,’ I said, ‘or for good?’

‘Both.’ She had plucked from the mantelpiece the postcard Paul sent on his arrival on the mainland. It came on the August ship, in the last post of 2017. It was a photograph of two cliff faces and the sea between. Jaunty white script across the front declared, And so the adventure begins. On the back, he’d written a phone number starting 0208. London. From isolation, he’d thrown himself into a city of millions.

‘Well, if we need to,’ I told her, ‘you can come and live in the harbour cottage with me, and then –’

She leapt in. ‘And then we’ll catch the April ship?’ She was holding the postcard in both hands, pressing it against her chest.

I was shocked.

‘Don’t look at me like that, Leah,’ she said. ‘I have no one now. All those women, they don’t care about me, they weren’t true friends, and I will not give them the satisfaction of shrivelling up into some reclusive old hag like Margaritte Carruthers.’

I could have replied, But you have me, Mum. I should have defended Margaritte. I might have pointed out that Paul clearly cared less than the women of Lark; he’d sent no further mail after that postcard, no news, no fixed address. He still didn’t know that his own father had died. My mother had gone to the Customs House to use the international phone, standing out in the bluster at the cusp of the dogleg jetty, so as to be in clear sight of a satellite, weeping as she punched in the digits on the back of his postcard. Yet again she was greeted by an automated voice saying, Sorry, the number you have dialled has not been recognised, please hang up and try again.

‘It’s the same with my Tom,’ Hope Ainsley had told my mother at the funeral, ‘too busy on the mainland now to speak to his old mum’ – as if this self-pity would console her.

I didn’t remind my mother of any of this. There were more than two months ahead of us before the ships started running again, plenty of time to change her mind. I put down the jug I was wrapping, the one with the kingfisher handle that she liked to fill with daffodils in our brief spring, and I hugged her, told her everything was going to be all right, that there would be a place for us on Lark, a better place. I said it because she was crying, and I said it because I wanted to believe that it was true.