‘The telephone!’ She shouted to be heard above the whispers of her own thoughts.

‘What about it?’

‘Isn’t it deafening!’

When he answered he sounded surly enough for her to remember that lower lip. Sun and wind had worked on it to what looked a painful extent, yet she could not visualize intentions ever weakening under the scaly skin.

‘In places like this,’ he mumbled, ’they ought to tear the telephone out.’

Then Val’s full figure was standing in the lit doorway, her voice calling: ‘Anthea? The telephone. It’s your mother.’

Anthea Scudamore was relieved, not exactly glad, but relieved.

‘I must go and speak to her,’ she explained superfluously to Doctor Flegg. ‘We promised to ring each other every evening. To save writing.’

When she went into the house her hand remained in possession of a certain salt stickiness, a roughness of crumbs, though she translated at once into affectionate pleasure any exhilaration that lingered. In the full room where the telephone stood, all her agreeable friends, as she glanced round, were again the strangers she would never know.

‘Oh, yes. It was lovely. But over quickly....’ She was echoing her own voice in the depths of the telephone. ‘A man met me. In a car ... A man ... The mail-man ...’

Nobody in the room was listening, but mildly enjoyed hearing: Mollie Aspinall scratching her salty scalp, with nails she glanced at afterwards, Helen Furfield waiting for children to cry, from a distance, out of their sleep.

‘Oh, yes, it’s lovely. So unspoiled,’ Anthea Scudamore was saying expectedly. ‘Well,’ she said, looking round, apologizing, smiling, ‘the ones we were told ... Yes ... And Barry Flegg ... Flegg ... Yes. It is a short name ... Yes ... At the University ... A physicist ... No, I don’t know whether his aunt ...’

What to do about Anthea? Val Tulloch was obsessed.

‘I don’t know ... Go to bed, I suppose ... Yes ... Yes ... The view’s lovely ... Yes, I hung it up as soon as I unpacked ... on the hanger ...’

After that, when the telephone had been silenced, they went to bed. Barry Flegg had already gone. There was nothing left, though Gil Tulloch imagined that, if he had not been a married man, he would have come back, and got drunk, alone.

When she had gone with her to her room, Val managed to kiss Anthea at last, and promised as she closed the door: ‘Tomorrow you’ll have to see something of the Island.’

Anthea thanked for everything.

But most of all she was thankful for her own stone cell, in which she might flower again – a full, distinct white. She was never unhappy, as Mummy liked to say. Tomorrow she would be shown, she had been told, an estuary of black swans. She could not remember whether she had ever come close enough to hear the hissing, to watch the writhing of the black necks. Did she altogether want? Or touch the papery bark, flaking, down around the grey dunny, into opalescent scales. Sun and wind, to say nothing of moonlight, had worked upon the paperbarks. Better to watch without becoming involved in any process of skin. She withdrew her hand, finally, out of reach of further experience.