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that I’d been mistaken and the noise had been coming from somewhere else.
    The boat was drawing closer. It was the ferry. The red paint on the hull became visible, the engine droned louder as it advanced on the low stone jetty, pulling in with a churn of reversing engines.
    As the passengers climbed out, a movement caught my eye, something known, familiar. Alec Kemp walking the tapering jetty among them, jumping down athletically. He was dressed in navy trousers and a white shirt, unbuttoned at the neck, and already his arms and face had lost their city pallor. He looked tanned and healthy. He held a cigarette in one hand; on his face was a look of satisfaction, amusement even. When he reached the hotel he stood, facing the beach, to finish smoking. I knew instinctively that there was something wrong in his being there. I drew my head in quickly, closed the window and waited a few more minutes before going down to find Olivia. By then he’d gone.
    Olivia was down near the sea, scraping wet sand out of the blue rowing boat, Serenade , which Alec had hired for the week. The breeze puffed out the yellow blouse she was wearing over her swimming costume. She was not alone. Three boys were standing round her, and as I drew closer I saw that they were much our age, perhaps older, locals by the look of them, who were watching Olivia, giving unwanted advice, bantering with her. Olivia had let her hair loose in a wavy curtain down her back. Uncertain, I went and stood by them, wishing they’d go away.
    ‘Need a bit of help pushing her off?’ one of the boys said in his curvy Devonshire accent.
    ‘We’ll give you a push off all right!’ another said, and they all sniggered. ‘Want us to come along with you?’
    To my surprise, Olivia, instead of telling them to get lost, was smiling impishly at them. ‘I don’t think you’d better come in the boat,’ she said, ‘but we could do with a bit of help getting going.’
    ‘Getting going!’ the third lad echoed, and they all laughed raucously as if she’d said something funny or dirty.
    ‘This your friend is she?’ one of them asked, eyeing me up and down. ‘Shouldn’t think you’d need much of a hand with her to help you.’
    I scowled at them. I didn’t like being compared unfavourably with Olivia. I stood there awkwardly, dressed in an ungainly old pair of William’s shorts.
    ‘Ooh – she don’t like us!’
    To my fury, Olivia carried on smiling and humouring the boys long enough to let them help us drag the boat the final few yards to the sea. The bow slid into the water, rising and dropping suddenly as the force of each wave broke over it, and we clambered in.
    ‘Right, here you go,’ the boys shouted, standing thigh deep in the water, the edges of their shorts wafting with the water’s movement. The boat was already well afloat, but they pushed us off, cheering and waving exaggeratedly as Olivia started to row. She stopped and waved back. I kept my hands by my sides, frowning.
    ‘We didn’t need those idiots!’ I exploded furiously as soon as we were a distance from them. ‘Why did you let them?’
    ‘Oh I know we didn’t, but you have to keep them happy, don’t you?’ she said in a pettish voice. ‘Anyway, what’s eating you?’
    I didn’t answer. I watched the water curl away from the oars. Peering down I could still see pebbles and sand on the bottom and trails of green weed. I screwed up my eyes against the white light on the water. I hated it when Olivia was like this. She had suddenly gone into what I called her witch mood, when she was sharp and mean and stirring up trouble and I couldn’t get near her.
    After a while I said, ‘I saw your dad. He’d been to the town.’
    For a second Olivia hesitated, frowning, the oars stilled at right-angles to the boat. Then, abruptly, she carried on rowing.
    ‘Can I have a go now?’
    We swapped places and I started off, enjoying the pull against the water, the feel of using all my strength. I dug