Jimmy Jones was twenty-one, four years older than me, and his wishes extended beyond simply granting mine. He had plans to travel that summer and his backpack shook with impatience at the foot of his rickety bed. I was needy and adrift since caring for my dying mother had so abruptly reached its conclusion and wanted nothing but Jimmy Jones’s warm skin and soft kisses and a backpack of my own.

Mum left me the means to escape by way of an enigma. There wasn’t much to go on, just the surprise of one thousand unexplained pounds in a Post Office Savings Account and, in its wake, the serendipitous arrival of a book. The author of the book was Charmian Clift, an Australian writer who lived here on Hydra and who, for several years in London, had been my mother’s closest friend. I was looking for any sort of road and thought Charmian might shed some light on the secrets my mother had taken to her grave.

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