After half an hour or so the rain eased and then stopped and the surrounding silence of the island returned. It remained a silence to me even when the gulls and the dogs resumed their perpetual contest outside, scrawing and barking, the spaces between the sounds deep and satisfying.

Munro stood and made for the door. On the wall beside the jamb at eye height there was a peculiar woolly ball, silver and grey. He grabbed it and I saw it was a fur hat that had been hanging on a hook. He punched it down over his head so that his hair and his ears disappeared under the pelt. Now the bristles were his hair, and it completely changed his appearance. I snorted to stop a laugh. The master almost summoned a tiny smile.

Munro’s face said we weren’t the first to laugh at it.

‘Badger fur,’ he grunted. ‘Warm, but it itches like a bastard.’

I drained the last of the tea and looked at the cup. There was a ship’s crest glazed on it.

~

So it was that we wandered out across Preservation Island in the gale: Munro reluctant and exaggerating his windward tilt, the doctor playing his role with obvious pleasure, stopping to admire a guinea fowl here and a plover there. He made notes and stooped to collect shells and seeds, depositing them in the pockets of his jacket.

Again I was left to guide my father, a thing I never minded doing, but which was slow work. Before long the main party had moved ahead of us and we were alone. To our left, on a gradual slope that faced the northern arc of the sun, stakes of tea tree had been driven into the earth in rows of many dozen each, and between them were strung dark wallaby skins, stretched and drying in the sun. Anywhere else, the presence of rows and rows of stakes might signify agriculture: a vineyard or a hop garden. On these islands it seemed all the works of the land revolved around dismembering beasts and selling the parts.

My father’s head turned a little that way, drawn by the smell.

He talked happily about the island, and what he considered the allure of the tyereelore women. I scolded him half-heartedly; they all had husbands, I told him. But it wasn’t so base a motive: they were Sirens to him. The cultivated ground of the island was entrancing him too, the dramatic transformation from tussocks and boulders to gardens. I described the fruit trees, the crops and watercourses, rambling patches of parsley following the water. He stopped and sniffed the air.

‘Pigs?’ he said, turning his face upwind.

I could not imagine how he had picked the pigs out from the hundreds of goats swarming around us, but he was right. ‘A sow and some piglets, I can see from here. Oh, and there’s the papa. Fine porker he is.’