She was there the following night. I was drinking my second rum and shrub and she came in, not cocky as if she owned the place, but confident, as if she had a right to be there. She wasn’t wearing the hat. A shame. It suited her. She bought a pint of bitter and sat next to me. Perhaps she knew who I was. People turn up occasionally, students and the stalkers of the art world, hoping that I’ll do them a quick sketch on the back of an envelope. Islanders take pleasure in pointing me out because they know that I hate it.

‘You’re Maureen Dance,’ she said. Her voice was West Country. Not Cornish. Devonian perhaps.

There didn’t seem any point in answering.

‘I’ve got some questions,’ she said.

I didn’t want to talk to her there, with everyone staring. But I wanted to meet her again. Close to, I saw she had a strong face, dark eyebrows. The face of a pirate. I knew I’d like to paint her.

‘Come to my house,’ I said. ‘Tomorrow night.’

She nodded and went to the bar. When I left, sure-footed up the path despite the dark, she was playing darts with a bunch of the boys who row in the gig team.

I thought of her all day. Of that distinctive face and the pirate hat. I imagined the painting that it would make, and the story that the picture would tell. Of a woman easy in her own body, searching for answers. When she turned up at the cottage I was ready for her. There was charcoal and paper on the table and I sketched all the time that we talked.

The next morning the tent was gone and the campsite was clear. No rubbish. Just a patch of flat grass to show that she’d been there at all. Again I had the strange sense that she was some sort of ghost, disappearing as soon as she’d arrived. I got on the phone to one of the boys who crew on the launch.

‘The young woman who was camping at Troytown, did she go out to St Mary’s today?’ From St Mary’s you get the ferry or the plane to Penzance. It’s the only way out of the island.

He hesitated for a moment. He’s not the most observant of men.

‘The girl with the hat. She’s not here any more.’

‘Oh yes!’ He’s suggestible as well as a bit stupid. If anyone else asks he’ll remember that he saw her, that he caught a glimpse of her leaving the island with the other visitors.

I recognized the hat as soon as I saw it on the day she arrived. It belonged once to my lover. He came to the islands when I was forty; he was my last chance of passion and a child. He spent a summer with me in the cottage, writing his poetry, helping out in the bulb fields. Occasionally he’d disappear back to the mainland, and on his final visit to me he’d left his hat there. When he arrived in St Agnes without it I should have realized it was a sign.