At first the girls did not understand how it was that Mr. Parfitt emerged from the sea if he had fallen in love with a mermaid. It was Sarah who suggested that a witch’s curse had put an end to the tryst between man and mermaid. As for Rebecca, the suggestion was her time in the wood had been a time of magical transformation. She had cast a good spell over the wicked witch.

“Shall we see the mermaids for ourselves?” the girls asked Roger. He told them it was possible. “You see them, if at all, when you’re not expecting it. Go out there looking and you’ll see nothing.”

That did not square with Mr. Parfitt’s own success. But, of course, he found love when he least expected it. The really good things in life, the exciting and different and thrilling things, were unforeseen.

It was difficult to comprehend things that were not in view. No matter how hard you looked, how carefully you scrutinised the horizon, there was no sight of the America that was said to be out there, that indeed was there, but imperceptibly so. There was another continent, a new world that you might come upon by chance. Surely there were undiscovered islands out there? It was too vast to be surveyed entirely.

But, of course, he found love when he least expected it. The really good things in life, the exciting and different and thrilling things, were unforeseen.

This allowed great space for the imagination to move freely across uncharted waters. In Rebecca’s art there were creatures not yet known to the land-bound. Sarah, of course, was inspired by these images. Then there were stories of drowned cities. Let us suppose that in mid-ocean a cathedral spire appears. Let us suppose that in the mists something is glimpsed. Or that in a great storm ancient treasures are brought forth, washed upon the beach among the seaweed and driftwood. There were only the vaguest bounds to the possibilities in the depths of that otherness.

Rebecca was often seen on the foreshore, breathing creative stimuli from the air. She took care not be seen swimming naked in a cove a little way down the coast. There, and in that way, she found the sense of being that some may have called freedom. But for her it was not the loosening of restraint that appealed nearly as much as the developing strength of heart.

It was not her fate to be taken by the water, for her promise to be lost. The spell that Rebecca was under was not a cruel one. The child who drew a face in the sand became the woman whose canvasses were oceans and continents of aquamarine and indigo and gold.

Rebecca was drawn to sunsets, of course, but also to the early light when the world is not yet peopled. If possible she would slip out of the house at dawn to walk in the public gardens beneath the high cliff. There was rarely a person about. A solitary dog-walker, perhaps. There was no reason to be afraid.

But it was caution to the children when they found a shell on the beach, a large, exquisitely fashioned conch. Sarah held it reverently, held it to her ear, then almost to her lips before the others said she was not to. Sarah began to cry when the shell was taken from her hand. She could not have understood the power that lied in such innocent-seeming things. “It wasn’t clean.” The others said “You might have caught some disease.” That was not the case really, but it, and hugs, appeased her on the walk back to the harbour.

Then it was that Sarah asked her question. And she looked out to sea for an answer. In the end there was sight of something. “Keep looking, and it may come again.”