I MUST BE feeling better. Or at least I must be looking better. This morning, for the first time in months, Lance Tourney actually stopped and engaged me in conversation. Ever since I have been on my own, ever since Camilla has been known to be … elsewhere, he has respected the privacy of my grief and simply nodded whenever we have come face to face. He has enjoyed the spectacle of me with my back bent and my eyes hollow, naturally – they all have – but he has not shown it except in the little extra pep he has put into his early morning exertion. He stretches just that bit higher these days, it seems to me, and he is just that touch more demonstrative and playful in his relations with the seals. It was the same throughout the winter months when the sea was too cold even for him to swim in and he would come flying past me in his running shorts, flapping his wrists by way of greeting and hurling himself into the wind – was I mistaken, or did I detect a more than usual resolution in him to master the air, just as surely as he’d mastered most other elements, in order to point the contrast with my leaden footedness? Far be it from me to suspect Lionel of anything, least of all of peeling off his shorts, layer after layer of them, just for me; but I do think that he gets down to his white satin posing pouch more quickly now as a consequence of his knowing that I’m out there limping and stooping amongst the crags.

This morning though – a lovely faintly stirring morning of early spring – I must have appeared more robust, because he found it necessary to accost me and get me to talk about him. I was scampering down the rocks, after a brisk guilt-laden but pleasantly un-muddy trek to Targan Bay and back, and Lionel was on a lower path, presumably making for his boat. There was absolutely no necessity for us to talk. A wave would have done the trick. But he called up to me, without any preliminary greeting, ‘How am I looking?’