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twenty-five people in a space designed for twelve – rang in her mind.
    She set out walking to the headland, perhaps a kilometre away. Beyond it was a cove she’d seen from the terrace of the house. The cliffs she passed were of a fine-grained peach sand, pockmarked with pied kingfisher nests. The birds appeared in the entrance of their holes, shook their heads at her, then crept back into their tunnels.
    Houses lined the low cliff above in two or three-acre intervals. Each of these was connected to their parcel of beach by a stone staircase. The stone was weathered and pitted almost to pumice. She had read that these staircases were once a supply route; dhows would sidle up to the cliffs and deliver goods to the house and to the villages beyond. There were few roads in those days. Life was conducted by sea.
    She saw a figure in the distance, someone sitting alone, hunched over on the sand.
    As she approached the figure did not lift his head. Nothing in Storm’s posture or demeanor suggested invitation. She stopped several metres away from him.
    He stood with a jolt. On the sand where his legs had been was an oval. In the distance it had looked to her like a rock, a piece of driftwood. It was shiny, olive-coloured. Its edges were neatly scalloped.
    She leaned towards it and the oval-shaped object moved.
    ‘They retract their head and legs when they’re threatened.’ He leaned down to pick it up.
    He turned the oval. She peered down a dark funnel. She saw a glint. Two small eyes stared out at her from the darkness.
    ‘There you are,’ she said.
    He raised his eyes towards her and gave her a shocking smile. ‘The tide’s coming in,’ he said. ‘There you go. Take it easy.’
    The turtle crawled towards the tideline. At the lip of the ocean it hesitated. The turtle was washed by a single wave; it floated, buffeted by sea. Then it began paddling. They watched as it melted into the waves.
    They walked back to the house. He told her about the turtles that nested along the coast, how the females lumbered up the beach under the cover of darkness to lay their eggs, how he had helped countless hatchlings run the gauntlet of gulls on their arduous journey to the edge of the ocean. The sun came out. Under its glare the sea turned a hot garnet.
    When they arrived back at the house Julia was getting out of her car, a dull silver Land Cruiser. Julia wore a white semi-transparent shirt, a green-and-turquoise bikini beneath it. A slim silver bangle rested on her upper arm.
    Julia’s eye flickered over them. ‘Where have you two been?’
    ‘I went for a walk on the beach and bumped into Storm.’ Her explanation was completely true, but Julia’s eye shuttled back and forth between them.
    ‘Can I help with the shopping?’ she offered.
    ‘No, the staff will bring it in.’ Julia pressed the horn twice. Grace and Michael, the gardener, appeared. Julia turned to her. ‘I thought we could do one of our little walks.’
    She had begun to help Julia on her patrols of the house to dust and rearrange its many objects. They both seemed to delight in this. The orphan part of her enjoyed following her aunt around the house; she was an audience, but perhaps this is what children are, she thought: audience and adoring companion.
    Julia looked so much like her mother from behind, her trim legs, which emerged from hips perched high in a slightly swayed back. But when Julia turned around the illusion was shattered. Her hair had been expensively coloured in striations of dark honey, platinum, even a faint note of pink. Her mother’s hair had been naturally golden in the sun, and her nails had always been unvarnished, bitten at the rims, unlike Julia’s perfectly manicured hands.
    They walked from one end of the five-acre parcel of land to the other, where seedlings grew in the herb garden encased in mesh to protect it from the monkeys. Plated lizards scattered at their approach; she saw only the chevron of their tails and their stout