She stopped swimming and stood still, some distance from him, regarding him with what he thought was a smile.

‘Doctor Ross,’ she said. ‘You are returned.’

‘Yes.’

‘I am glad,’ she said.

He was made flustered by the word she’d chosen. Glad? Was she resorting to teasing him straight away, before they had even had the chance to see each other clearly, or had she discovered, in their long absence, some genuine vestige of her former regard for him – before the disaster of the tea room proposal? Whichever it was, Ross didn’t know what more to say to her. It was as if, having held her for so long in his mind, a beautiful ghost, the object of his fantasies and his sorrow, he was unable to communicate with the real Jane.

‘I won’t come any closer,’ Jane said, ‘for I think you have left all your clothes in a distant rainforest, and you would not want me to take advantage of that.’

He made no reply. It was as if Jane had emptied his mind of words.

She spoke again. ‘By this light,’ she said, ‘the place is full of wonder, is it not? Does it not feel to you as though we were swimming in a dream?’

‘It does.’

‘And in dreams, everything may defy normal expectation. Is that not right?’

‘Yes.’

‘So if I were to come closer, if I were to … but no, I can read your face in the dark. You would not want that. I will take my leave.’

Jane turned about and began swimming away from Ross. He watched her go. He felt too stunned by the encounter to call her back. Part of him was still refusing to believe that she was actually there at all. If he had not been naked, perhaps he would have swum after her, but he couldn’t do this. He stayed very still, staring at her slow passage through the water. When she reached the end of the bath, Jane mounted the steps and went away.

Though he was tired – not just from the journey, but by all his lonely wanderings in the West Country, by the sight of empty hillsides and tides in turmoil and the terror of ships – Ross didn’t go to bed, but sat by a yellow lamp in his rooms at Edgars Buildings, smoking a cheroot and wondering what – if anything at all – had just happened to him.

What he knew he would not be able to withstand would be a pretence by Jane Adeane to feel some regard for him, only for her to reveal within a short time that this was not the case. Even if he wasn’t reconciled to the fact of her indifference, he had at least grown used to it, as if to a bruise on his chest, and he’d formed the hope that the bruise would eventually fade. He’d half believed that once he’d set foot on the island of Borneo and was reunited with Edmund he would – almost – cease to think of her.