It was an almost enclosed, almost a circular bay. He spent many hours looking into pools. There were crabs. There were red, blunt anemones, and the paler, trailing kind. He took up the smooth stones in his hand, the red and the mauve stones, that shone when you took them out of the water. And standing on the rim of the bay, holding the rounded stones in his hand, everything felt secure and solid, the gentle, enclosed basin of water, the sturdy trees that sprouted from the sides, his own legs planted in the moist sand. At Ard’s Bay everything was plain sailing. You looked into water and saw the shape of things.

Where have you been, Elyot? Mrs Macarthy asked when he got back.

Because Mrs Macarthy had to know everything.

Nowhere, he said. Nowhere much.

Because Mrs Macarthy and Ard’s Bay were quite separate. They had to stay like that.

The bay was his special property. Later he found the cave, going inward through the wall of rock, and he could sit and watch from the ledge of rock any outer activities, and listen to the sea as it nosed the shore. He gathered pieces of wood. He gathered the coloured stones. And on the wall of the cave he scratched with a crumbling finger of stone, no particular design, but he liked to draw, he liked to sing to himself as the line became more and more intricate on the surface of the rock. It gave him great pleasure to feel he was doing this, secretly, unknown to the Macarthys, or Julia, or Eden. He very much needed this secret life. Something that he didn’t have to explain, and which he had chosen for himself.

Once he had taken home a handful of the mauve and reddish stones. He put them on the windowsill.

What are those? asked Mrs Macarthy.

Those are just stones, he said.

I don’t see why you should bring home stones, Mrs Macarthy said. You might start making a collection of stamps. Stamps are educational, she said.

He did not answer this. When she had gone, he looked at the stones. He wondered a little himself. They were dull and colourless, unlike the glistening stones he had picked up out of pools. These belonged to the bay. Soon it was dusk, and he picked up the stones one by one, slowly threw them out of the window, heard their heavy landing in the undergrowth.

Mr Macarthy asked what he was going to be. Even if kindly, for Mr Macarthy was always gentle, this was the sort of thing you found upsetting.

I don’t know, you said.

And suddenly it became difficult again, the knowing what, as if he could choose what. He was in a jumble, shifting from leg to leg. He wanted to be left alone. Outside the sky changed, it was always changing, he watched it, and time swelling into leaf and egg, but by degrees, and it swept you with it, gradually, and this was right. He did not know what he would become. But he would be swept round the corner surely enough.