He glanced overboard, but the dim light made it impossible to gauge depth. He threw the small anchor overboard anyway. If it was too deep, they would drift, albeit slowly, for the currents were gentle inside the lagoon. If not, they could wait here until the mist rolled back and he could get his bearings.

They all stared out into the miasma. It had fallen as thickly as a velvet curtain, its approach silent as a cat. It almost seemed to dance for them, a living thing that swayed and rolled and breathed. There were no edges to it, no signs of it furling or peeling back to expose the blue beyond. Instead it kept on rolling in in plumes of changing density, a totemic warning stick in the shallows occasionally winking back into focus momentarily, then disappearing again. Even to him, the sense of isolation was eerie. There were no passing boats, no sounds of shrieking children skating across the water, and it could have easily been the middle of November, deserted and abject.

‘Should we . . . go back?’ Bell asked him cautiously, her voice low. He knew she was trying not to alarm Linus, who kept looking back at them both, but she, too, was like a doe, all big eyes and run instinct.

‘No. We need to just sit tight,’ he replied. ‘It will pass.’

She turned away again, biting her lip, and he noticed the mist’s dampness was like a sheen on her skin, the wispy tendrils at the base of her neck beginning to darken, the fluttery sleeves at her shoulder beginning to droop.

He looked quickly away, finding Linus already watching him. He smiled reassuringly. ‘It’s okay, Linus, we’re perfectly safe here.’

‘But what if it doesn’t go?’

‘It will. We just need to be patient. My father used to say to me birds fly not into our mouths ready roasted.’ They sat in silence on the still water, all waiting. Waiting. The sense of expectation – of something having to happen – settled heavily upon him. This had been his idea after all. It was his fault. Fifteen minutes passed. Twenty . . . His eyes fell on something beyond his son’s shoulder.

Linus turned and saw a dot of blue begin to grow, the mist beginning to thin and peel back. Emil saw his son’s body soften with relief, a small laugh escaping him now that the worst of the danger was seemingly past. ‘That was so cool!’

Bell laughed too as the landscape became less hostile and more friendly by the moment, the reasserted sunlight highlighting now caramel-coloured rocks covered with yellow sedum and violet beach pea, wild bilberry and lingonberry bushes, fir and alder trees – and a sheer ten-metre escarpment that had Linus almost leaping from the boat in excitement and Bell grabbing him by the arm.

Within minutes the sea mist had gone without trace, as insubstantial as candyfloss, and both Linus and Bell were stripping off their clothes and leaping in without hesitation, both of them joyous. So ready to be happy. He looked away as she leapt, refusing to look again at the last body he had touched, the only woman he had known in eight years. He refused to remember the yielding feel of her in his hands . . . They surfaced laughing, enjoying the cool as they trod water and looked around them again, before doing some playful duck dives and backward rolls.