‘Well,’ Bell said, into the fresh settling calm. ‘That was an . . . unexpected surprise.’

‘You have to expect the unexpected with Nina.’

She looked back at him with guarded eyes, their argument this morning still unresolved and lingering in the air between them like coloured smoke.

‘So . . .’ he murmured, at a loss as to what to do next. He couldn’t do right for doing wrong, it seemed, and his confidence felt battered. ‘It’s a nice day. What shall we do with it?’

He directed the question at Bell. She had made it perfectly plain nothing would happen without her say-so, and to be honest, he didn’t trust himself to get it right on his own now anyway.

She looked surprised by the deferral, her mouth parting in a pretty ‘o’. She looked back at Linus. ‘We could kayak? Or go for a swim?’

Linus shrugged. The idea clearly didn’t thrill him, but the look on his face asked the question, what else were they going to do? He looked bored.

‘I know some high rocks we could jump from,’ Emil said.

Linus’s head snapped up. ‘You do?’

‘Yes, but they’re about an hour’s sail from here. They’re about ten metres high, though –’

His little face brightened. ‘Cliff jumping?’

‘Well, I’m not sure cliff is quite the word,’ he smiled. ‘But they’re better than anything else you’ll find around here.’

From the look in Linus’s eyes, it was apparent they had a plan.

Half an hour later, they were on the water, lifejackets buckled and the old sail boat’s patched sails bellying and flapping as they slipped their mooring and drifted across the lagoon. They passed the smaller day-trip sailboats bobbing along the coastlines, moored in coves and bays for family days out, the tinny sound of music playing on radios drifting over the waves, children’s shrieks as they jumped and splashed from the rocks carrying to the ear and making heads – even his – instinctively turn. He felt a burst of intense emotion as he realized he was part of that scene too – sailing with his son.

He looked across at Linus, staring down into the water. Its surface was a rich, glossy peacock-blue, occasional flashes of dazzling light catching on the seam of a ripple. The water was so clear, Linus could see a school of tiny silver fish flicking one way, then the other, far down below the boat, his arm dangling over the side and trailing in the water as though he might touch them. Bell, by contrast, was enjoying the warmth on her skin and kept automatically angling her face upwards, like a daisy trying to find the sunlight. Emil tried not to look at her at all.

They approached Summer Isle, on their starboard side, and he saw how Linus looked up as they passed, his body tensing as he scanned the shoreline for sight of his mother, his sisters, Max, getting ready to wave, to shout . . . The happy expansive feeling in his chest contracted violently and in one sharp movement, he turned the boat away, snatching the view from sight, seeing how his son’s head turned instinctively towards him, unformed protest stoppered in his throat. They sailed clear of the lagoon’s claustrophobic embrace and pointed towards a horizon that stretched out – endless, empty, clear. Almost immediately, he felt released from the archipelago’s rhythms of normality, from home and the long lonely hours, where the mundane imposed itself – what to eat, what to wear, what to do . . . He felt himself breathe more easily again, the immediate threats quenched.