Clio began to talk. ‘I’m glad we got the chance to do this. I just thought it would be a wee shame if I’d come all this way and we didn’t get a little bit of time just us. You must be so busy, too. I mean, an operation like this doesn’t run itself, does it? No matter how relaxed Nikolas might be as the public face of it all. We all see the work you put in, by the way,’ and here she grabbed over for Xanthe’s other hand, patted it.

Does this woman want both of my hands, Xanthe thought. Let go. Let go now.

‘All the cooking, all the admin; it’s you taking all the bookings and doing the website and stuff, isn’t it? Behind every great man is a woman rolling her eyes, eh?’

‘That’s not quite the way it works, with Nikolas and I,’ Xanthe said.

‘Do you get lonely?’ Clio asked, seemingly out of nowhere, as though the previous intrusion was merely conversational preamble for the real meat. ‘Just the two of you now, with Dido away. I mean, sure, you have these customers—’

‘We never think of our guests as customers, Clio.’

‘No, but there they are, paying you for a service nonetheless. So, you cater to these guests for about half the year, but then the rest of the time, you’re just here? Away from the world?’

She gestured to a space on the sand, smoothed it with a hand. Xanthe, who had somehow ended up holding the bottle and the cups, sat down and began to pour.

‘There is always something to be done. We are booking the guests, we are deepening our own practice, we are finding new ways just to be in the world. Just being is enough sometimes. It was a great discovery, that. Here. Cheers.’

‘Slàinte. I suppose I wouldn’t really understand that. It’s not how I work. I’ve got to say, I’m fascinated by you. I mean, here we are, the same age –

It would be unfeminist, thought Xanthe, to point out how much younger I am.

‘– and we’ve come from the same position, the same sort of place – I don’t mean originally, obviously, but the same point of activism, the same engagement with the way the world is ordered. We’ve lived in the same squat, fucked the same undercover police officer—’

Here it comes, thought Xanthe.

‘How do you just go back on that? How do you wake up, look at the world, the way it is, and not be angry?’