We had played this corrosive game so many times. Pity, love and anger from me; resentment, love and anger from him. He would deny as a first line of defence—What bottle? Who said I couldn’t? Why is it your concern?—then turn the argument on me, on my loneliness. If he was especially angry, or especially drunk, he would include a reference to my mother’s achievements at the same age. Married to an officer—him—and raising a child, me.

I would flare and retort that the officer was now a recluse who depended on others for his survival, a man blinded and damned by his own deeds. And my mother was dead. And if my anger was at an incandescent peak, I might add that it was his foolishness that caused it. I would regret the words the moment I said them, even before he threw his bottle or his glass in my direction.

I did not even know whether it was true that it was his fault, since I had never known how the fire started.

It was a routine, a punishing exchange of hurtful truths and mere guesses that could never produce a victor. Apologies were rare, but they were always mine, never his. Never. The shouting fuelled him: he would drink on from the confrontation, enter a state where he was more animal than man, a sensory and heedless creature that craved and hungered and could not reason. He would piss himself, vomit, fall over, break things into shards. In the morning, all recollection would be gone along with the broken things, and contrition was only there as a cloud of self-doubt, the drinker’s vague awareness that they’ve done… something. Lowered brows, soft speech. Never sorry.

The boat pushed steadily south and his drinking was only an hour old. In this state he could be agreeable company; warm and funny. Looking at him now, with the yellowing bruise on his scalp from the fall and a faint smile around his eyes, I saw a glimmer of the man I believed him to be. I loved him always but I loved him clearest when I saw the distinguished past in him.

‘Are you happy with the master?’

He cocked his head as though my question was a faraway sound and crunched his face in contemplation. ‘The boat feels right underfoot. Rides the short stuff easy enough. Course, that might be the boat, not him. But the rigging sounds tight, and those two lunatics are getting the sail orders right…when they’re not threatening to kill each other.’

He laughed his sidelong laugh, sharp to the world’s absurdity, and just for an instant it filled my heart.

‘Have you spoken with the master, though?’ I wanted to know what impression he’d formed, given he couldn’t detect the most striking thing about him.