At Exeter University Melissa Tregarthen studied philosophy and sociology. When she signed up she thought that it would be an intellectual walking tour of the human psyche. The prospectus promised Hobbes to Wollstonecraft. Mary Wollstonecraft was something of a hero for her at Queen Eleanor’s School in Truro, but it seemed that none of the philosophy tutors, apart from Amethyst Dane, had ever read her or even thought of her as a philosopher. Amethyst Dane was a feminist and she loved Dorothy Wordsworth, who was the true genius in the brother–sister relationship and had sacrificed herself because of her love for her less talented brother. The other tutors mainly liked people who were interested in the dialectic or Greek and Roman ethics or the social contract. Mary Wollstonecraft, said Lancelot Pease, Roman philosophy, was only in the prospectus to snare the credulous; all young women, he said, pass through a stage when they imagine they could be heroic feminists. Melissa read the Grasmere Journals closely, under Ms Dane’s direction.

Now Melissa’s editor at the Cornish Globe and Mail has asked her in to see him. She’s only been working here six months and has graduated from court reporting (Two Truro youths guilty of joyriding in Newquay) to arts and leisure (Lifesaver Festival launches all-new surf boat). The editor likes her. He’s a rumpled fellow, who once worked – it is rumoured – in Fleet Street but suffered a breakdown. He couldn’t wait to come back to Cornwall, where you could take a lungful of air which had travelled undisturbed from Nova Scotia, rather than one which had passed through the lungs of twenty wheezing cockneys on its way to yours. The newspaper is housed in a seedy but grand Edwardian building on four floors at the end of the High Street, just before the junction where the street loses heart and gives way to the mean suburbs of bungalows with slate roofs. She was brought up in one of these. The old printing presses, long silent, are still there in the basement of Twelvetrees House. Melissa’s family home has a sloping fireplace of slate, with a hole next to the fireplace for stacking wood. Her parents think it is the last word in modernity.

The editor’s name is Edward Tredizzick, a proper Cornish name, like hers. The editorial floor is crudely divided into small open-plan work-stations, although the editor has a frosted-glass partition around his corner office; he doesn’t like to see what’s going on. Particularly now that the daily circulation has fallen to thirteen thousand. She knocks and he lets out a sort of exasperated moo on a falling note, which she knows means ‘Come’.

He’s smoking as usual, another reason for having himself boxed in.

‘Melissa, come in.’