I tore my eyes from the fishing boat. “It matters a lot! It matters to me. Being a writer, a real writer, that was part of the whole . . . thing . . .” The whole idyll.

“All I mean is—I’ll still love you, if you never write another word.”

I ground my teeth and returned to the view.

“What? Freya? How is that irritating?”

“I don’t know.”

Truly, I didn’t know. Wasn’t that what I wanted: to be loved for myself? Wasn’t that what everyone wanted?

The lighthouse flared one last time and went out. The morning felt more ordinary without it.

“It’s lovely up here.” Cory spoke in a forced way, as if anxious to fill the silence.

“It’s not,” I said. “It’s depressing.”

I wanted him to refute me; to persuade me that the world at our feet—the huge, rickety house among the trees, the empty hills, the sea—was authentically lovely, but he didn’t even try. I hugged my legs more tightly, hid my face against my knees, and tried to work out what was going on in my own head. It was either that I hated him, or that I couldn’t bear to hate him, or a poisonous combination of the two.

“Talking of your paintings . . .” I said, desperate now to hurt him.

“Were we? What about them?”

“They never change, do they? The ones you’re working on now look much the same as the ones you did in September.”

“I don’t want them to change.” He sounded perplexed rather than hurt. “It’s like I said: you are what you are. I paint you as I see you.”

The trawler was leaving the coastline behind, and I could just make out the fishermen on deck. The water was choppy on the open sea and it was a wonder they could stand upright, let alone move with such purpose. It must be good to be on a boat, I thought, with the air salting your skin and something definite to do.

Cory stood up. “Let’s go.”

“We haven’t talked properly yet. You haven’t told me about your mother.”

“I will, but I think we should start heading back.”

“Back the way we came?”

“No, we’ll carry on and do a circle. If we cross this field we’ll meet the cliff-top path, and that’ll take us into the gardens.”

I stood up slowly, brushing the seat of my jeans.

“Those are Stella’s cliffs,” I said.

Cory seemed to ponder this before shaking his head impatiently.

“They’re just cliffs.”

The grass was so steep and slippery that we had either to tiptoe or break into a downhill run. We tried both, falling over and getting grass stains on our backsides, and I have to admit it was hard to stay serious. Cory laughed without inhibition; a couple of times my mouth trembled on the brink of a smile.