Let’s go to Vienna. I want to go to a ball.” It was the crazed suggestion of a wild moment — but, once uttered, the idea wouldn’t stop twirling through my mind. The only ball I’d attended was back in my twenties, and involved rock bands and mud. I wanted to experience the old-time magic of long gowns and grand entrances, of finely dressed men and women spinning around and around. Literature is laced with them, from Pride and Prejudice to War and Peace — pinch-waisted occasions where people hold their partners close and feel the way they move. The formality makes all that repressed lust even more interesting.

We cast off from Burwick in a little former lifeboat, only five of us aboard. As we slid across Orkney’s silver-blue sea towards a flotilla of rocky skerries, a gull’s white belly flashed in the water. The seagull swung away from our boat and dipped a wing in the waves, as though to cool itself. All thoughts of the city we’d travelled from, the world of work and everyday stresses, washed away with it. Our little vessel ploughed on, furrowing the water with foam.