Sonny Peen’s wooden hut is perched on the rock above the shore, something like the lookout on a rampart. It has a chimney made of beaten metal, one small window at the front made of pieces of bottle-glass stuck inside a shellacked frame. From there he can see all comers, which is what he likes. He likes to see the travellers coming in when the tide is chasing them, when they have to cluster around the guide’s white horse and cling to the edges of his floating cloak, like rats on a cheese. He likes to see the shapes of the people and the carts and the carriages looming up through the mist like creatures from the deep, and when he spots something out in the bay he makes a circle with his forefinger and his thumb, as if he has a telescope, and then he presses his good eye to the imaginary glass and closes the other eye and squints through the hole. He does this several times a day, and, depending on whether the tide is in or out, he sees carts and carriages and wading birds, herons and egrets picking their way delicately through the muddy sand; fishing boats and seagulls afloat on the rocking grey surface of the water.

Perhaps Sonny had his own theory all along about what had happened to Joseph Hine; perhaps he’d studied the big blacksmith from afar through his make-believe telescope and perceived some unusual sort of anguish; perhaps it had seemed to him that Evangelina’s husband was not well, that he was suffering or sickening for something and had gone away, like a cat or an elephant, to die. Perhaps, when Sonny Peen spied the tall powerful figure of Joseph Hine approaching across the shimmering sand, and saw his long weird clothing, snapping and guttering in the salt wind, he thought he was looking at a shroud.

But when Joseph Hine came back, he wasn’t a ghost. When Joseph Hine stepped off the wet sand into the marshy grass of the foreshore, what Sonny Peen saw, through the small shellacked frame of the bottle-glass window in his little wooden hut, was a woman.

He is a sight, though I suppose most of us are used to it now.

It is more than a year since he returned and I have often wondered what it was like, his first meeting with Evangelina when he came back, the first time he walked in through the door in his woman’s clothes. I have often imagined their conversation.

Joseph?

Evangelina.

A long silence.

How are you?

I don’t know. I missed you. I wanted to come home.

Another long silence.

I kept your coat for you.

Thank you. Thank you, Evangelina. That was kind.

Another long silence.

Joseph?

Yes?

Come.

When they are out in cold weather Joseph wears the big grey coat on top of his woman’s clothes.