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his hand on Mark’s shoulder, guiding him into the cool shady shop like a spider trapping a big juicy fly. She followed, grinning at Mark who was looking at her with one inquisitive eyebrow raised.
    ‘No, I’ve never done any diving, though I’ve often fancied the idea. Can I do it here?’
    ‘Can he do it here! Bless!’ A husky female voice came from the cool and gloomy back of the shop. ‘This is the mother, the great Glenda-of-Chiswick,’ Henry introduced her. Glenda was a tall woman, built for strength , with long grey hair clinging to the last of blond streaks and with half a dozen brightly beaded braids on the left side, hanging and crashing around her perma-tanned face. She was wearing a purple and pink tie-dyed billowing smock which reminded Lucy of Colette’s school production of
Hair
, for which she had persuaded Theresa to rummage in her attic and drag out the perfect hippyish outfit of multicoloured crochet tank top and flower-patched loon pants. She must have been at least sixty, Lucy reckoned, and with. skin that seemed to have shown only contempt for moisturizer, but all the lines looked as if they were caused by laughter. Lucy speculated on how long she’d lived on the island: she could have come over at least thirty-five years before, perhaps brought back like a souvenir from England by Henry’s father.
    ‘We’ve got one of the world’s most spectacular reefs, just a mile or two round the island,’ Glenda said, waving an armful of silver bracelets in the direction of the south shore. ‘You do the diving preliminaries in the hotel pool then it’s out to sea. It’s all supervised, all safe. Henry’s a qualified dive master.’
    ‘What do you think? Shall we?’ Mark asked Lucy. He was looking eager, thumbing through a rail of wetsuits at the back of the shop. Lucy considered, wondered how much time it would take up. Colette wouldn’t mind, she’d spend most of her time with Luke and Becky anyway. She thought of Simon and his worrying, of Theresa and her stress level and then she thought of the peace and calm of the below-sea world.
    ‘OK, let’s.’

Three
    THAT YOUNG COUPLE who’d been fondling each other at the cocktail party were in the pool. Wherever Simon went he seemed to come across various romantically inclined young pairs strolling, arms entwined, between the Sugar Mill bar, the Coconut spa and the small arcade of gift shops just beyond the hotel entrance. It was supposed to be the rainy season just now, which he assumed hadn’t bothered them because they looked pretty pale, as if they’d been spending a lot of potential tanning time in bed. The hotel was big on weddings, going by the photos mounted on the board in the lobby. The favoured spot was clearly the elaborate white wrought-iron gazebo under the tamarind tree between the pool and the beach. Shirley said it reminded her of the bandstand on the seafront at Exmouth, but Perry thought it was more like a big version of the fancy kind of thing that smart gardeners bought to grow their runner beans up.
    The pair in the pool had been larking about, splashing and diving and ducking each other and making the kind of shrieky squealy noises Simon usually heard from Becky when she’d got her mates round and they were holed up in her bedroom mucking around with make-up and gossip. It was hard to concentrate on his book , with piercing yells and splashes from those two punctuating every paragraph. Worse, when they went suddenly quiet and he happened to look up to check if they had gone, he saw them locked into a passionate clinch, snogging like kids at a late-night bus stop. The girl had opened an eye and caught him staring, which made him shift uncomfortably and feel an embarrassed extra warmth that was nothing to do with the hot sun. The only other pool occupant was a small boy floating on a lilo, and with the water barely churned up, Simon could see the girl’s thighs wide apart, clenched tight around her