‘You know that place name we keep seeing around here, Donostia?’ Quirke said. ‘Well, that’s what San Sebastián is called in Basque.’

‘Or San Sebastián is what Donostia is called in Spanish,’ his wife responded.

She always managed to have the last word. He could never understand how she did it. Maybe she didn’t mean to? Certainly, she didn’t do it out of wilfulness – she was the least wilful person he had ever known – or to get one over on him. She was simply putting the finishing touch to an exchange, he supposed, as she would put down a full stop at the end of a sentence.

It was the morning of the second day of their stay at the Londres. They were in the bedroom of their suite – there was a small reception room as well – and he was sitting on the side of the disordered bed, by the open window, drinking an absurdly tiny cup of coffee and gazing out across the seafront to the beach and the glittering sea beyond. His head felt empty. He supposed this must be what people meant by relaxation. He didn’t go in for it, much, himself. In the normal run of things he thought of himself as standing on the edge of a precipice and having a hard time not letting go. Or that was how it used to be, until Evelyn came quietly up behind him and put her hands on his shoulders and drew him back from the brink and into her embrace.

What if one day she were to let go her hold? The thought made him shut his eyes tight, like a child in the night choosing inner darkness against the darker dark all around.

The coffee was so bitter that every time he took a sip of it the insides of his cheeks contracted until they almost met.

Outside, the rain had stopped, and the sky was clearing and the sun was making a determined effort to shine. A few tourists, with their towels and swimming caps and paperback books, had ventured on to the still damp beach. The sand was the colour of a sucked caramel sweet, and as shinily smooth. He seemed to remember reading somewhere that the Playa de la Concha wasn’t a real beach, that the sand was brought here from somewhere else by the lorryload each year before the start of the tourist season. Could it be true? Certainly from up here the stuff did look suspiciously fine and unblemished, with not a stone or seashell to be seen. At night, when the tide was out, people came and wrote elaborate slogans on it, in a strange, cursive lettering that neither he nor Evelyn could decipher. Some antique Basque script, perhaps, Evelyn suggested.