She spoke to her friend, Dilly Emslie, about this, meeting her for coffee in the Patisserie Florentin in North West Circus Place. It was Dilly who had encouraged her to go to the Malacca Straits and had enthusiastically supported her project there. Now she looked again to her friend for guidance: should she start another piece of research, or should she hang up her … whatever it was that anthropologists hung up – their mosquito nets, perhaps? – and lead the life of a sometime private scholar?

‘You have to do something,’ said Dilly. ‘Sitting about is not an option for somebody like you, Domenica.’

For a brief moment Domenica imagined what it would be like to be banned from sitting about. One might sink gratefully into a comfortable chair at the end of a demanding day, only to be urged up out of the chair and back onto one’s feet. No sitting about, please. Surely there came a point at which one was entitled to a bit of sitting about?

‘I suppose so,’ she said. ‘They do say, do they not, that one should keep one’s brain active.’

‘Of course,’ said Dilly. ‘And it would be such a waste if you stopped writing. I love your papers. That piece on the domestic economy of pirate households was very good indeed.’

Domenica accepted the compliment gravely. ‘I was rather pleased with the way it worked out.’

‘Of course you were,’ said Dilly. ‘Now what?’

Domenica reached for her cup of coffee and took a sip. ‘The difficulty with anthropology is the going away side of it. I’m not the sort of anthropologist who can work on museum collections. I have to get out into the field. And that takes a lot of planning.’

‘But surely you don’t have to go far,’ said Dilly. ‘What about that work you were talking about on Watsonians in Edinburgh? Weren’t you planning to do something on Watsonian social networks?’

Domenica nodded. ‘I was. But I thought it might be a bit too dangerous. And I discovered that there’s somebody working on that at the moment. Somebody from St Andrews is already in the field.’

Dilly wondered what the implications of being in that particular field would be. For a moment she pictured the field at Myreside, where Watsonians played rugby. Would it be dangerous for a researcher to position himself on the edge of that field? Would the Watsonians suddenly object to the presence of an anthropologist?

‘Of course, it’s complex research,’ went on Domenica. ‘It involves looking at a whole set of social practices and assumptions. How does one become a Watsonian? What are the enforcement mechanisms for the values they espouse? How are social practices and expectations passed on? There’s an awful lot there.’