‘Certainly it was miraculous,’ said Elizabeth. ‘We were battered about, the blows against the table were awful, and if I hadn’t kept my head and clung on to the ship’s side, we must have upset. They had heard our calls by then, and I sprang on to the rope-ladder they put down, without a moment’s pause, so as to lighten the table for Lucia, and then she came up too.’

Elizabeth paused a moment.

‘Diva, you will bear me witness that I always said, in spite of Amelia Faraglione, that Lucia didn’t know a word of Italian, and it was proved I was right. It was an Italian boat, and our great Italian scholar was absolutely flummoxed, and the Captain had to talk to us in English. There!’

‘Go on,’ said Diva breathlessly.

‘The ship was a fishing trawler bound for the Gallagher Banks, and we were there for two months, and then we found another trawler on its way home to Tilling, and it was from that we landed this morning. But I shan’t tell you of our life and adventures, for I’m reserving that for my reading to you.’

‘No, never mind then,’ said Diva. ‘Tell me intimate things about Lucia.’

Elizabeth sighed.

‘We mustn’t judge anybody,’ she said, ‘and I won’t: but oh, the nature that revealed itself! The Italians were a set of coarse, lascivious men of the lowest type, and Lucia positively revelled in their society. Every day she used to walk about the deck, often with bare feet, and skip and do her callisthenics, and learn a few words of Italian; she sat with this one or that, with her fingers actually entwined with his, while he pretended to teach her to tie a knot or a clove-hitch or something that probably had an improper meaning as well. Such flirtation (at her age too), such promiscuousness, I have never seen. But I don’t judge her, and I beg you won’t.’

‘But didn’t you speak to her about it?’ asked Diva.

‘I used to try to screw myself up to it,’ said Elizabeth, ‘but her lightness positively repelled me. We shared a cabin about as big as a dog kennel, and oh, the sleepless nights when I used to be thrown from the shelf where I lay! Even then she wanted to instruct me, and show me how to wedge myself in. Always that dreadful superior attitude, that mania to teach everybody everything except Italian, which we have so often deplored. But that was nothing. It was her levity from the time when the flood poured into the kitchen at Grebe –’

‘Do tell me about that,’ cried Diva. ‘That’s almost the most interesting thing of all. Why had she taken you into the kitchen?’

Elizabeth laughed.