‘Eve Grogan? In my class?’

‘No, Eve-Eve! The Eve! She wanted to talk to me about the part in the bible where God catches her naked with Adam and asks… Sorry, I’m not very good on the wording of –’

‘What is this that thou hast done?’

‘Yes, that! And Eve replies something about how –’

‘The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.’

‘Exactly!’

This was fiery judgement in another form, God demonstrating precisely what he thought of my Knight of Cups, forcing me, sullied and naked, to deliver aloud verses that should have been closer to my heart. Ben smiled; my offering of these lines, my cooperation, was somehow reassuring to him. Embarrassment sank away, replaced by a resurfacing terror. Was I to brace myself for a terrible confession? Was the double-cross finally complete, never mine to engineer? I thought that I had climbed into bed with Ben, just Ben, but it seemed that the Eldest Girls been lying there all along.

He continued: ‘Britta wanted to know, “with my mainland view of things”…’ He mocked this appraisal of him, the idea that he should have some influence over us, but he knew that he had. It had been there in his playful talk at the Anchor. Let’s drag Lark kicking and screaming towards the shores of the twenty-first century! Britta was no fool.

‘She wanted to know if… And I just assumed this was some kind of trick, a test to make the new teacher uncomfortable, but if it was, she’s a good actress, because…’

I didn’t want to hear it, but I asked. ‘And what was it? Her question?’

He looked down, a silent apology. He removed his hand from my arm.

‘She wanted to know if… That’s how it really happens?’

‘How what happens?’

He spoke gently, his gaze on the mess we’d made of the sheets.

‘How sex happens.’

October 2017

OCTOBER 2017

Viola became a spy too, crouching low in the ferns, fronds spearing her cheeks.

They kept their distance, so as not to be seen, and so Michael would not be considered to be trespassing and invite down that terrible fury.

The mist obscured their view at times, drifting towards the cliff edge, but when the vapours parted, when the curtains opened, the scene took Viola’s breath away. Those fat grey stones rising up from the meadow grass gave her a sense of dread – of the past, of the huge unfathomable distance of it stretching out behind them, of the people who had placed the stones there in the first place, using just their bare hands and rudimentary tools. It was as if these forebears had understood this future would exist – this exact one, with Michael and Viola in it – so had left them a monument as a message, as a warning.