Before she could begin her work, I had to sign a form. Yes, you may cause me this pain, I agree. Then came a tick-box questionnaire about my medical history. I said ‘no’ to everything, including the question, Are you or could you be pregnant?

I am sure that I had carried a child. Three months passed without any bleeding by the time I confided in anyone besides Ben. Margaritte told me to lie back on her cushioned sofa while she held above my belly a gold ring on a length of silk, to determine the baby’s sex.

The ring stayed still and I sensed this wasn’t right.

‘It’s inconclusive,’ said Margaritte, her voice a dull camouflage for the thing she did not wish to say. The following day I woke in agony, my pyjamas soaked with blood. I staggered to the bathroom and sat, crying, clots sliding down the white slope of the porcelain.

I couldn’t take this to Dr Bishy, so I returned to Margaritte, and she nodded like she already knew, as if she had dealt with this circumstance time and time again. She gave me a tincture to drink to help the passage of the bleeding, and because I could not get the sheets clean, I took them up to the incinerator behind the Big House where my father and I had disposed of that slaughtered goat.

‘There is no baby,’ I told Ben, when we were together on the ship.

He had boarded too, Saul willing to make a late entry in the ledger, Ben’s swift departure the most important thing, for all.

We avoided each other until the last night of our journey. So much had been expressed on that final morning on the island, it seemed possible that I would never speak my thoughts or feelings to another person again. Yet there was still a last loose thread connecting me to my old life; I needed to cut it away.

We ate together in the small canteen with its plastic tables and nailed-down seats, its choice of one dish and its views of an ocean slowly being consumed by the darkness. It was a last supper.

Out there, on the sea, everything took on a different shade – people too. The man sitting opposite me was not the same person who had made my body come alive in the moonlight, and made the words of ‘I think of thee!’ pierce me like delicious thorns. Only the last line of that poem remained true, though it rang sharp now, different.

I do not think of thee – I am too near thee.

‘You tricked me,’ he said, and I was ready with my denial – There had been a baby! Without it, I would never have entertained the thought of boarding a boat! But I was willing to concede that this was deception of a different kind; it was one of the lies I was telling myself.