Argyle’s hairy legs protruded under the hem of the dress and ended at his brown, bare feet on the boards. The watch he used for navigating was attached to a short piece of ribbon and pinned to the waist of the dress. I saw him writing: at first I thought he was diligent about keeping his log, but that only accounted for some of this work: much of it was done on writing paper. It was the horizon and the flat expanse of sea and the paper and him there, alone with his thoughts.

‘Are you writing a letter home?’ I approached him from behind and below: the scrape of the nib stopped and he immediately turned the paper over.

He did not look up as he answered. ‘No. Just the business of the vessel.’

I came level with him beside the helm and I saw how his body was at ease in the dress, in a way it had not been when we first met ashore.

He looked up now. ‘Yes?’ One eyebrow stood high in expectation. I had no reason to begin this conversation, nowhere to take it. I imagine I must have sighed.

‘I just wondered, I…I just wanted to say hello.’ I smiled meekly but his eyes narrowed in stern examination of me.

‘You wish to know why I am dressed this way, I suppose.’

His voice was not cold, as perhaps I have indicated, but warmed by some great animating complexity. I stammered the beginnings of a demurral but he cut me off. ‘It’s worth fifty lashes on shore. A small consolation I allow myself on board.’

Consolation. That word stays with me, even now. He chose it specifically. Not a freedom, or an opportunity, as one might expect of a man who has chosen to wear women’s clothes, but a consolation. And telling me he’d be met with fifty strokes of course did not answer the question why: it spoke only of consequence.

I could hear my father in the galley below us, singing softly. The clink of a bottle. He was rapidly building up the map of the vessel in his mind, giving him freedom of movement and ever more access to the booze. I needed to keep moving it, or get rid of it. Argyle’s eyes, which had been locked on mine, flickered slightly at the sound. He lowered his voice.

‘What happened to your father’s sight?’

‘What do you mean?’ It was churlish, but I could be opaque also.

‘He was not blind at birth. He told me what your mother looked like.’

The words cut straight through me. I did not see it coming. I was looking into his eyes and then I could not see him for tears. But he moved, reached down into the galley and lifted out a stool, placed it beside me and shut the galley hatch.