Page 4 of The Island of Lost Girls

Robin nods. ‘I think I got the last room in town,’ she says. She’s virtually had to take out a second mortgage to secure it, too, and still she doesn’t get a private bathroom.

‘Good,’ he says. ‘These pavements weren’t really made for sleeping on.’

The engine shudders and dies.

She stares at the boats in the marina. My God, they’re huge. The contrast with the fishing boats isn’t so much because the fishing boats are small. They’re floating mansions. McMansions, with their pointed noses and their three-storey upper decks and not a feature to distinguish one from the other.

‘If I had the money for a yacht,’ she says, randomly, ‘I’d make it look like a pirate ship. They look so … ’ she struggles to find the word ‘ … samey.’

He laughs again. ‘Oh, my dear, nobody ever got poor by underestimating the conformism of the rich. They don’t want unique things. They want the things everybody else wants. That’s why the museums can’t afford Old Masters any more.’

‘A sort of membership badge.’

‘Yes.’

On the dock, two grizzled men in waterproof boots wheel the gangplank into place. The crowd shifts again, jostling as if they’re about to board a Ryanair flight. These aren’t the rich, though this is no Ayia Napa. These are the Lonely Planet bourgeoisie, tick-boxing their way round the islands to say they’ve been. Five years ago, they were all about Pantelleria, but the migrant boats have dampened their enthusiasm for Greece, though they’d never say it out loud at an Islington dinner party. They love a bit of local colour, but turds in plastic bags is a bit more than they can bear.

She picks up her rucksack and attempts to swing it onto her shoulders. It’s been a quarter of a century since she last used a backpack, and it’s made her aware of the passage of time like nothing before.

‘Here, let me,’ he says, and hoists the bag up so she can do up the buckles. He continues talking as though he’d never broken off. ‘Anyway, it’s always worth making the trip in person at this time of year. A lot of people turn up for the duke’s birthday, even in a normal year. Handy for Cannes, of course. And then they’ll be off to Scotland for the bird murder season. Too hot on the Med in August; they put ’em out to charter for the people who can’t buy their own … ’

She realises that he’s not going to stop talking, and starts for the exit. He follows, prattling as he walks. All he has with him is a weekend bag and a suit carrier. How fortunate men are. She can’t go ten minutes without needing an unguent of some sort.

He pauses as they set foot on land and Robin’s legs adjust to the shock of a stable surface. The trip from the mainland has taken eight hours and the sun is conspicuously below zenith. In the dockside cafés, beneath gaudy parasols, people finish lunch while her fellow passengers line up to claim their tables.

He gazes about him, reflectively. ‘It’s changed a lot, of course,’ he says.

He snaps suddenly back into the world. Checks his chunky watch – something she suspects she’s meant to recognise and register – and clicks his heels in a weird combination of military and Emerald City. ‘Right,’ he says. ‘Must get on. Full schedule.’

He walks away without another word, and she is alone.

Chatty, she thinks. The archetypal chatty Englishman. Glad I won’t be staying in the same place he is.