He watched birds, seabirds, some of them big, wheeling on the long grey span of themselves, suddenly swooping. He walked through grasses studded with clover. Down on the strand he found the corpse of a young seal, part devoured. He hurried away from it. He tried to think clearly about his new circumstances, to have a view of himself, a man in another man’s shirt stalking about an island he did not, he realised, even know the name of yet. But what was there to think? He spoke in a hushed voice to his sister. He told her about the Frends, about the community, the mysterious Thorpe. Later—further on—he woke himself out of deep reverie crying, “Damn you, Wood!”

It did not take him long to weary himself, and when it came it came suddenly, as if he had been walking hard all day. He hauled himself back to the house, went in unnoticed, pushed at the wrong part of the tongue-and-groove wall and had to work his way down until he found the door. He hurried to his bed, sat on it to take off his boots, thought he would take them off in a while and woke, bewildered and briefly frightened, in a light that slanted into the room from the west. He sat up, felt wild with thirst, and went out to the larger room to find the family sitting at their supper. They looked at him in a way that mixed kindness with something like appetite. These people, he thought, are starved of company. He might not be Thorpe (even in Thorpe’s shirt) but he was someone.

He sat in the remaining chair, Jane on his left, Emily to his right, Cornelius opposite him. There was a lot of drink on the table—a bottle of whisky or brandy, two bottles of wine. Also a chipped blue jug of water. He filled a glass with water and emptied it, twice.

“We are eating cockles,” said Emily. “And sea carrot and bread. And this cheese, which does not look pretty, is, we think, almost the nicest we have known. It was made by Jesse Campbell, whose house you were staying at.”

“Then I honour it,” said Lacroix. He served himself, took something of everything. Of the others, only Jane seemed to have much interest in the food. He smiled at her, nodded. She was wearing a spencer jacket over a muslin dress, the jacket red as a soldier’s but worn loose, undone.