The FAIRIES return and stage a spectacular storm, emptying the stage to the sound of Mendelssohn’s ‘Wedding March’.

JIM: Put the clothes in the car.

GWEN: Take the stove!

JIM: I’m going to try and dig a trench.

GWEN: You’ll get struck by lightning.

JIM: Stay in the car.

GWEN: Where’s my purse?

JIM: Stay in the open.

GWEN: The boat will be washed away.

JIM: Stay away from the trees.

JIM, GWEN and MEG are driven out by the FAIRIES, who wreak havoc with noise, light and frenzied activity.

SCENE FIVE

VIC: Where will we go today?

TOM: Round onto the rocks?

HARRY: What about going round to the next beach?

VIC: We’ve got enough food.

HARRY: The next beach?

TOM: The next beach it is.

VIC: We were lucky to miss that storm.

HARRY: We were very lucky.

VIC: I’ll bet it did some damage.

HARRY: We’d have been all right. We could have sheltered under your hat.

VIC: I love my new hat.

HARRY: We all did well out of Santa. New hat, new reel, new bathers.

VIC: Don’t get too burnt.

TOM: I’ll be fine.

VIC: Let’s go round to the next beach, then.

They go.

END OF ACT THREE

ACT FOUR

SCENE ONE

The beach.

VIC, HARRY, JIM and GWEN.

VIC: The headland shelters the beach from the wind. You can sit round there under the rocks on the coolest day and be as hot as chips. There’s a rock pool over there that’s almost a perfect rectangle. You’d think it had been carved out by human hands. The bottom’s covered in sand. Even I go in it and I’m terrified of what might be hiding in most rock pools. At the other end there’s a cave that you can get into at low tide. It goes right in under that dairy on the hill, the one you drove past on the way in here. There’s a track from the cave right up the cliff onto the headland. At night up there you can see the lights of the town, way, way over there, and the lighthouse on the island. And past that headland there’s a beach that must be, oh, five—?

HARRY: Five at least, seven—

VIC: Yes, seven miles long without a break. We walk around there for a picnic. You get halfway along and look back and there are just three lines of footprints trailing away into the distance. It’s marvellous to sit in the middle of that beach, the three of us. Sometimes when it’s really hot it’s nice to slip your bathers off in the water and just swim about like a fish.

JIM: It is a lovely spot, isn’t it?

GWEN nods unwillingly.