The front door led into a narrow passage. There were only two rooms. On one side was the bedroom and on the other the kitchen, with a small scullery at the back. In the kitchen there was a range. The fire was ready to light. Sarah suddenly felt chilled, and tried not to shiver. There was a little essential furniture in the room—a kitchen table, a couple of chairs—but it looked cold and bare.

“Alec and Maggie gave us this,” Jim said. “For the time being. The old man who was here moved to the mainland to live with his sister and he took everything with him. Alec will bring our things on the tractor and trailer later.”

“It’ll be fun to start from scratch.”

Everything was spotlessly clean, but the net curtains which hung at the windows were frayed and tatty, and the lino had lost all its colour.

“It’s lovely,” she said. “Really. It’s lovely.”

He took her hand and led her towards the bedroom. He stopped her at the door, picked her up, and carried her inside.

George and Jonathan walked back slowly to the school house. Jonathan had lingered at the quay, looking out at the gannets fishing over the sea until the islanders had gone. George felt awkward. He had made friends on Kinness and would have liked to walk down the island with them.

“How’s Sylvia?” he asked

“Fine.”

He had never found Jonathan easy to talk to. Every time he visited Kinness he felt that he was in the school house on sufferance. Drysdale was polite but George felt that the politeness was an effort. Yet each year the invitation came, and after he left there was a warm and friendly letter saying how much Jonathan and Sylvia enjoyed Palmer-Jones’ visit.

“Did you have a good spring?” George asked.

Jonathan considered. “Not bad,” he said in the end. “ I broke my record for ringing auks. We didn’t have any very special migrants.”

He had a clipped, rather affected accent, which George found irritating. He must have been thirty-five but he still looked and sounded like a public-school boy. Molly, George’s wife, thought that Jonathan was shy, but that had never seemed to George a reasonable excuse for rudeness.

“I’ve been invited to the party tonight,” George said. “Sandy wrote to me specially. Will you and Sylvia be going?”

“We’ve been invited,” he said. “ Everyone on the island’s been invited. I suppose that we’ll have to go. Sylvia’s very keen. And as I said, I’ve been told to participate in community affairs.”