“You didn’t come to call. You came to… ” She hesitated.

“Yes? Do, please, tell me why you think I came here this afternoon.”

“Actually,” she said, “I don’t know why you came or what you want. You’ll have to tell me.”

“Alicia,” he said. “You said she’s down here a lot. Is she ever down here when – when you’re not?” Ava looked at him in honest surprise. “I mean, is she – does she meet anyone else here?”

“What, like a boyfriend or something? Oh my God, are you accusing me of running a disorderly house?”

“No! No.” He turned back towards Iceland. “I just – oh, well – I had a quick look in her diary the other day. Now you’re going to say I shouldn’t have.”

“Oh, I think actually you should,” said Ava unexpectedly. “There’s something – I don’t know – I could be wrong, but… ” she sighed. “Reading her diary is the very least you could do. But you won’t listen to me because you don’t like me, so that’s not what you’re here for.”

“I never said I don’t like you, I just don’t like what you’re doing.”

“Answer the question.”

“There were these surfers,” he said, still staring at the Icelandic coastline. “They came in for a late lunch. They were talking about some – female they’d been fooling around with in the water. At first I thought they meant Alicia.”

“Then you realised they meant me. So that’s not it either. Why don’t you get to the point? What are you so afraid of?”

He turned around then, and she saw his face. The intake of breath stretched out slow and taut between them.

“You know what I want,” he said.

Ava was very still.

“You’re all I’ve thought about for weeks. I dream about you.”

“I dream about being a mermaid.”

“You’re not a mermaid, you’re a witch. You put a spell on me the first time I saw you. You’ve got a cord around my heart that’s tied round your little finger, and every time you move you pull it a little bit tighter, and now I can hardly breathe.”

“That all sounds very dramatic.”

“You can laugh and send me away if you like. Or you can make me beg. I’ll do that too if you ask me to. There’s no pride left in me. You can do anything you want with me and I’ll have to obey. If there was any justice in this world, they’d have burned you at the stake.”

“But there isn’t any justice.”

“How about mercy?”

“I don’t believe in mercy either.”

“So?”

She pulled out a sage-green chair. “Sit down. You’re too tall to talk to when you’re standing up.”

He hesitated, then sat. “Does this mean I get tea and biscuits after all?”

“Of course you don’t get tea and biscuits, you idiot,” she said, and, as he was reeling from the unfairness of this, she kissed him.

Her lips against his were a sweet shock, the touch of her tongue astounding. The taste of the coffee she’d been drinking exploded in his mouth, leaving in its wake the old cliché, Would you like to come up for a coffee?