Once, not long after he took himself off, there’d been a report of a horse out on the sands with its saddle hanging down under its belly and the body of a man trailing beneath. Sonny Peen had seen it from his little hut above the shore and come running into town making frantic shapes with his arms and bellowing from his long wordless mouth. Sonny always liked to be the first with news of anything interesting or unusual out in the bay and when Evangelina heard his awful bellowing – that terrible donkey-sound of his that was like an ancient see-saw, or the slow drawing up of a bucket on a rusty winch from the bottom of a cavernous well – when she heard it she went running down there with a shawl pulled on over her nightgown but it wasn’t Joseph it was only a poor traveller attempting to cross over in the dark without a guide. Since then there’d been nothing, no rumours or sightings or reports or false alarms; Evangelina the only person who didn’t believe that the emptiness out in the bay, the mist, and the water creeping soundlessly back and forth beneath the moon, in and out over the sands, were the silence of a man who was doing his best to disappear.

It was the minister at Bethseda who first asked me to visit Evangelina, to sit with her from time to time and keep her company.

‘It will do her good, Margaret,’ he said, ‘to have someone there. Another voice, another face.’

We all knew by then what had happened when the schoolteacher, Mr Gardiner, had gone to visit her in his best clothes with a bunch of snowdrops in his fist.

‘Are you blind?’ she’d shouted at him from the open doorway, not even asking him across the threshold, and pointing at Joseph’s coat. She snatched hold of one tattered grey lapel and shook it in the schoolteacher’s face. Didn’t he know she was waiting for her husband to come home? Couldn’t he see that? Her voice shrill, indignant, amazed. The schoolteacher blushed, he was young like she was and thirteen months must have seemed a long time to him for a good-looking husband to be gone and for his wife to believe he was ever coming back. When she carried on shouting at him he dropped his flowers and hastened backwards down the path. He hadn’t argued with her. If that’s what she wanted to believe, he’d told people afterwards, let her.

We didn’t talk much, Evangelina and I, and hardly ever, after those first few months, about Joseph.