This was my first time in Miami Beach. Gina had moved here only nine months earlier. She ran a small company in partnership with her husband of fifteen years, a New Yorker called Dan Bazalget. They had met in New York during an electronics product-launch event; they had both been working in PR, for the same company on different sides of the Atlantic. They had already been in their forties, with the complicated pasts you acquire by that age; Gina had a childless divorce behind her, and Dan actually had a twenty-year-old daughter, whom I’d never met. But once they had glommed onto each other they had soon gone into business together, and then sailed into parenthood, producing two fine boys as easily as shelling peas, despite Gina’s age. Now, based on Gina’s Florida inheritance, they sold something called “conference visioning and management”—coordinating probably unnecessary conferences for senior business types.

My father the accountant had always mocked Gina’s job title. “I mean, can you take a degree in ‘conference visioning’?” he would ask. Well, actually, yes, you could. I didn’t begrudge Gina her thoroughly modern choice of career or her commercial success—not much, anyhow, given the usual sibling-rivalry envy for a sister who in every aspect of her life had always seemed to do better than I ever had.

When I had passed most of the big hotels I cut inland, passing through an alleyway. I crossed Ocean Drive, where even the police officers wore skintight shorts, to reach a main street called Collins Avenue. I bought a small tourist map for a few dollars from a drugstore and briskly toured Miami Beach’s highlights. There was an art deco area, a small district peppered with ornately decorated buildings—hotels, private homes, banks, bars, some set behind heavy security gates. The most beautiful building of all seemed to be the town’s main post office, a pointlessly grand edifice across whose magnificent floor queues snaked desolately.

I couldn’t quite get the city into focus. There was a faint sense of sleaze about the place, of a past of dirty money and menace—and yet somebody had made a determined effort to clean it up, as witness the alarm buttons on the boardwalk. And I knew my sister well enough to know she wouldn’t bring her kids to a place she couldn’t make them safe. Still, I was relieved to get back to the boardwalk, and the huge physical presence of the sea.

I never watch American TV. Those constant ad breaks make me feel hyperactive, as if I’ve been taking too much sugar. I ordered up a movie, a comedy, and a room service “snack,” bigger than most Sunday lunches back home, with a half bottle of Californian Chardonnay. I was asleep before the movie was over.