She’s an attractive woman. Knows it too. She’s in her mid-twenties. Mouse-brown hair recently chopped into an unremarkable bob. The salt air and the sea spray has undone her ministrations with the brush and wet strands cling to her pale face. She wears wellington boots beneath her long corduroy skirt. Wears a man’s shirt and a tatty leather jacket, three sizes too big. There’s a paperback book on the damp stone beside her. It’s dog-eared and well-thumbed. She would say the same about herself, if prompted. She has a wicked tongue, does Cordelia Hemlock. The nuns used to tell her that as they did God’s work on her buttocks and back. So did the silly boys she dallied with at university, though it was said in a spirit of grateful esteem rather than chastisement.

She’s smoking. She doesn’t really enjoy cigarettes but she’s gotten into the habit and has convinced herself that it calms her nerves and that she’s entitled to do what she wants. Her son hated the smell of cigarettes and used to forcibly try and pull them from her mouth. She stopped for him. Stopped most of the things she did for pleasure. And then he died and the icy fires of grief consumed her from within and without and it had seemed absurd to deny herself something that might, if she were lucky, hasten her own descent towards the grave.