She was surprised at the directness, the candid softness of her own voice. Did she, perhaps, hope he might watch her rising from the sea? But he was looking down, his eyelids weighed with heavy copper. Frowning. His eyes saw inward, she realized, preoccupied no doubt with some more important matter, of an explosive conscience.

Then he glanced up, and laughed, and said: ‘Oh yes, the Island!’ just for a moment looking at her.

She understood he was embarrassed. So she went away, leaving him to clothe a secret part of him which she knew by heart.

Once or twice Mrs Mortlock turned to confirm that no one was aware of the thoughts she was indulging in so recklessly, and found the landscape empty of all but its serene perfection. Into which her mind, putting on distorted flesh, lumbered and lurched, the lips of thought parted to receive. In her silence she gave little gasps, or grunts, of anticipation or surrender. Once she even laughed aloud.

It was at this point that she chose to notice the young Greek, his body scarcely less naked than his face, poised on the wall she had barely passed. Mrs Mortlock looked away in order not to see, what, she suspected, he would expect her to. On that side, she drew down the brim of her hat, forcing it scratching against her cheek. Above the uproar of straw and emotion, the sinewy Greek, balancing almost on one hand, on the stones of the irregular wall, was calling to her, in short, foreign, though expressive words. Before jumping. She heard. She heard, she fancied, the rubber soles thumping the earth. In any case, his breath, trumpeting a monstrous urgency, into the evening, behind her back, was made clearly audible.

Mrs Mortlock was running holding her hat. The landscape of dust and stones streamed. From now on, all her strength must be poured out in an effort to outdistance rubber. Her splitting dress ridiculed her. By luck, or misfortune, she had left off her foundation garment, with the result that her breasts were dealt out in great dollops. They had stopped being part of her. Running and jumping. As she ran from the rubber Greek, she was terrified by the glistening veins in the sinewy arms she could not see.

Oh the reeling cypresses. The purple evening threatening to suck her under.

Two incredulous faces, of two peasant women in black, stared at Mrs Mortlock out of a hovel.

‘Can’t you,’ she rasped, calling in a gush of tears, ‘won’t you DO?’

But for the two faces she might have been a hurtling stone.

So, in the end, still running, she had only herself to rely on. If she had expected more in the beginning. Her own hat, even, had fallen amongst the yellow thistles.

The sighing of dry thistles pursued her as she burst out into the main road.

‘A man,’ Mrs Mortlock stood, whimpering into a policeman’s face, ‘following, running, horribly, every intention of molesting. Do you understand? To molest?’ she asked, in doubt.