He was polite and amiable, and asked me about my family and my work. I told him that my father had been a lieutenant in the navy and had worked for Governor Hunter, but had retired some years ago to live in the bush. I could see in his eyes that he was doing the arithmetic: my father would be too young to have done such a thing voluntarily, to have relinquished such a position. But he made no comment.

Nor did he interrupt when I told him my mother had died when I was a child. It was the expression I always used: she died when I was very young. It conveyed the sense that I barely knew her, though I believed I knew her by touch and smell and soft words, and deep down in the well of my unseen soul, down in that darkness, I compared myself and my years to her ages and felt different kinds of pain every single day for her absence. These were the things I was accustomed to not saying.

The doctor was listening carefully, and I did not intend to give him any insight into the lives we were living, my father and I. So I threaded the tale away from sorrowful things and towards the Cooper children. Precocious but endearing, a girl and a boy. Their parents were indifferent, concerned only to see that progress was being made, that their little heirs were being equipped one day to return to Edinburgh society and make pretty witticisms in Greek. This glacial disdain of theirs for their children was another thing I never raised in polite conversation.

I could hear gulls outside. Beckwith smiled agreeably. He was a man adept at listening without taking up the conversation, and I’d momentarily forgotten about him. The cabin’s sunlit interior put me at ease.

The doctor glanced at Beckwith, then back to me. ‘And why are you coming along on this little voyage?’ he asked me, smiling with the far corner of his mouth.

‘My father and I have been asked to investigate the loss of a vessel in the Furneaux Islands,’ I said, seeing no reason not to be direct about the matter. I explained to him that we had been visited by the vessel’s owner and entrusted to act on his behalf. The mission felt important and worthy as I heard myself describe it.