Instead she tried to relive the moment of finding the silver coins in the Setter dig, from glimpsing the first glint of metal. The scene was so close to what she’d dreamed of that she found it hard to believe in the reality of it. Still walking, keeping the rhythm of her feet on the road and the words of T. S. Eliot at the back of her mind, she took her hands out of her pockets and looked at them. Under the fingernails she saw the soil in which the coins had been buried. In that one moment, the instant of rubbing the earth from the dull silver, she’d justified the project, established a future for herself in the islands. Unreal, she thought. It’s unreal.

She decided to walk on to Utra. She’d ask Evelyn to open the drawer of her desk and show her the coins. There was a British Museum website with images of coins and she wanted to check it out, see if there was anything similar to her find. Evelyn had a computer with internet access. Hattie thought if she didn’t do something constructive, in her present state she’d go crazy, maybe even manage to convince herself that the find was a dream; in the past after all she’d muddled fantasy and reality. She wished Mima were still alive; she’d always helped Hattie get things in proportion.

As she walked down the track that led to Utra, she passed an elderly couple. The old man was pushing a wheelbarrow with a hoe and a fork balanced on the top. The woman carried a plastic carrier bag containing something so heavy that one shoulder was lower than the other. Hattie didn’t recognize them. They stopped; the man smiled and said a few words of greeting. He only had one tooth and Hattie couldn’t understand a word he said.

‘Good-afternoon!’ She grinned, lifted her hand. ‘Good-afternoon!’

The old woman said nothing. Further along the track, Hattie swivelled back to look at them, but they’d disappeared. She told herself that they’d turned off. Perhaps they were working in one of the planticrubs, the old woman with her grey skirt and her wellingtons, the old man with his gummy smile. But she wasn’t entirely sure that they existed at all. Perhaps they were ghosts, like the merchant’s wife at Setter and her powerful husband, conjured up by her own imagination.

Evelyn was real enough. She was standing at the kitchen table cutting meat. The knife was small with a sharp, serrated blade. There was a pile of fat and bone pushed to one side of the wooden chopping board. It made Hattie feel ill.