Nathan Oliver—Millie Tranter

Nathan Oliver and Millie Tranter’s friendship offers a private, companionable counterpoint to the suspicion and hostility surrounding Oliver on Combe Island. Their walks and conversations bring together two very different lives: Millie’s daily disappointments and Oliver’s travels and literary ambitions. When his death is investigated, her insistence that they were friends becomes both a defense of their bond and a measure of how alone she feels in mourning him.

The Friendship Begins

Millie dates their first meeting to Oliver’s previous visit, in July, soon after Jago brought her to the island. Their connection developed through walks and repeated morning meetings, rather than through a single dramatic declaration. Millie explained that Oliver would telephone early to arrange when they would meet. Sometimes they talked; sometimes, when he had little to say, they simply walked together.

The meetings were private enough to be mistaken for something else. Mrs. Burbridge had assumed that when Millie said she was out walking, she was visiting Jago at Harbour Cottage, and reprimanded her for bothering guests who had come to the island for privacy. Millie answered that she had indeed been walking, but with Oliver. She rejected the suggestion that she had imposed herself: it had been his idea, she said, and he had told her he liked seeing her. Her account presents the relationship as mutual companionship, even though the arrangements were discreet and the household did not know about them.

What They Shared

Millie recalled that their conversations often concerned her own life. Oliver had a notebook and sometimes wrote down things she said. She emphasized that she had put her clothes back on by the time they talked, an insistence that registers the household’s disapproval without explaining more than her testimony establishes. Their later meetings included stories from Oliver about his travels around the world and his efforts to learn how to write by meeting people. The balance between his listening and his storytelling mattered: Millie was not only an audience for a celebrated writer but someone whose experiences he attended to.

When Oliver asked whether she was happy, Millie answered in terms of the occasions when she was unhappy. She remembered her grandmother being taken to a home and developing Alzheimer’s, the death of her cat Slipper, whose paws were white, Jago’s refusal to take her out in the launch, and Mrs. Burbridge’s repeated complaints about the linen. These details give their conversations a distinctive scale: grand ideas and literary ambition met the specific troubles of Millie’s days.

Oliver, in turn, told her that he was unhappy most of the time. He asked about her grandmother and said that everyone who grew old feared Alzheimer’s because it took away one of humanity’s greatest powers, a power comparable to that of a tyrant or a god. He ended the thought with the stark observation, “We can be our own executioner.” The exchange shows how their friendship could move from practical grievances to reflections on age, memory, and human power without ceasing to be a conversation between two individuals.

Loyalty and the Investigation

Millie last saw Oliver on Thursday afternoon. When she spoke about him during the investigation, her manner shifted from guarded answers to an angry defense of their friendship. She accused the people around her of wanting him off the island and declared, “I’m the only one who cares that he’s dead.” Her certainty is not an objective account of everyone else’s feelings; it reveals how isolated she felt among people whose disputes with Oliver had been openly visible to her.

Her connection to Oliver also shaped her handling of a note from Dr. Speidel. Told to give it to Oliver, Millie went to Peregrine Cottage but did not find him. She heard Miranda Oliver talking in the sitting room and chose not to hand the note to her, since it was not addressed to her; instead, Millie left it in the porch postbox. During her testimony she regretted having taken the note at all and wished she had torn it up. The episode places her friendship beside an act of loyalty and a source of distress, without making her responsible for what followed.

Meaning and Limits of the Bond

Millie’s account does not make the friendship equal in experience or circumstance: Oliver was a widely travelled writer, while she described herself through family loss, the death of a pet, and frustrations with island routines. Yet he gave those experiences sustained attention, and she remembered the conversations as evidence that he liked her company. The notebook, the early telephone calls, and the walks without conversation all make the bond legible through repeated acts rather than formal promises.

At the end of her testimony, Millie insisted that Oliver had been her friend and said she would not stay on the island any longer. Her anger and grief resist the tendency to reduce him to the conflicts that surrounded his death. In the investigation, the friendship also supplies a more intimate account of Oliver: not only a difficult guest or a famous author, but a man who asked whether Millie was happy, listened to her answer, and shared his own unhappiness with her.