In the late afternoon, they let the boat float in the centre of the lake, drifting idly on small currents. Mickey was tired and retired to his cabin to have a sleep. Luke went to take a shower. Irene lay on her stomach reading. The day was still warm but there was a faint cooling breeze blowing off the water and plump white clouds in the sky. She heard the shower turned off and then Luke opening drawers downstairs. She was dimly aware of Katherine’s sudden, peremptory demands and of Neil and Lorrie talking occasionally in low voices. At one point she heard a faint plop, like a stone being lobbed into the lake, and looked up. She saw them kissing each other, arms loosely across the other’s lap. She frowned. Where was Katherine? She stood up, looking around.

‘Where’s Katherine?’ she called.

‘She just this minute went down to the lower … oh my God? Oh dear God. Where is she? Neil! Where is she? Katherine, Katherine! Jesus, Katherine! Katherine!’

There was a faint ripple on the surface of the water behind them, a smudged concentric circle in the corrugated pattern of waves. Without thinking, Irene took three running strides and jumped into the water towards it. Everything was in slow motion. She was suspended between sky and lake and could see Neil and Lorrie standing on the deck, Mickey’s head rising up from below, the scudding white clouds, the stretch of her arms in front of her. Could hear the sound of her ragged intake of breath and Lorrie’s wild cry still tearing through the air: ‘Katherine!’ It seemed to go on for ever, the cry of raw pain. Her sun hat lifted from her head and flew off, spinning through the air like a sudden frisbee. She thought of standing in a meadow with Sasha and Adrian, flicking their old frisbee to each other, seeing it wheel above the tall grass. The sunlight bounced off the lake, refracted into a dozen angles.

Slap of water against her body and then she broke its barrier and was falling through sudden silence, falling through time, the present streaming away from her. For a few seconds, she could barely remember her name, or the name of the child she wanted so badly to save. Green opaque water all around her – above her, below her, and she was just a pinpoint in the great watery expanse, with showers of plankton swirling noiselessly around her and a small army of mute jellyfish dilating and contracting near her blind, groping fingers.

There was a knife with serrated blade stabbing and sawing at her tightening lungs; red bolts and flashes of pain in her head. She stared desperately into the foggy water, salt in her stinging eyes. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.