Sarah wanted to get to the island as quickly as possible.

“Why bother with a honeymoon?” she said as they were planning the wedding. “ Why not go straight to the island? We’ll have our honeymoon there.”

“There’ll be no chance for a honeymoon once we’re there,” Jim said, and they decided on Cornwall.

Sarah had never been to Kinness. She had arranged to go once, to see it and meet Jim’s family, but then her father had been ill and she was forced to cancel the trip.

She was quite determined, though, that they should live there once they were married. Where else would they live?

When she first met Jim he was working as assistant manager on a big farm in Cheshire and she was a student midwife in Liverpool. They had met at a party in the rugby club where her brother was a member. Jim had just joined and seemed detached from the rowdy good temper of the other young men. It seemed to Sarah that he was more mature than they were, but a little lonely. He treated her with old-fashioned politeness. In those first few months of their relationship he drank a good deal, but gave nothing of himself away. This aroused Sarah’s curiosity and presented something of a challenge. She had just attended a course in psychiatry and thought that he was repressed.

He had not told her at first where he came from. She was English and did not recognize his accent. Later she was grateful for that. She would not have known, if he had told her, whether she was attracted to him or to the romantic idea that he belonged to the island. By the time he told her where he had spent his childhood she was convinced that she loved him. She had heard of the island because it had been featured in one of the colour magazines of a Sunday newspaper. The pictures of the crofts and the cliffs, the detailed description of the life there had caught her imagination. She especially remembered the faces, wary and cheerful, which stared out of the pages at her. The piece had been called “A Study of Paradise.”

She was surprised when he asked her to marry him. He had become more relaxed with her, laughed more easily, and there had been moments of passion, though he seemed almost apologetic about them afterwards. But there had been no intimacy. She did not feel that she knew him. He told her that a croft had become vacant on Kinness and that it had been offered to him.

“But we would not need to live on the island,” he said. “ It might be better not to live there.”

“But you love it,” she said. “I can tell from the way you talk about it. You wouldn’t be happy anywhere else.”