Under the wet conkers and shining leaves, they shelter a little from the rain. New, fresh rain. Clean rain. They watch the bird.

She peers out from the tree. ‘What’s it doing?’

‘It’s cleaning itself. Sorting out its feathers. I think it’s going to be alright.’ He sighs, a huge lungful. ‘I thought it was our sacrifice to the gods. Our payment for having such a nice honeymoon. Letting it die.’

She’s never seen anything look less like it was going to die.

He’s huddled in his cagoule, holiday flip-flops on bare feet, hugging the tablecloth round his shoulders. ‘Imagine. If we’d left it there.’

She nods. ‘I thought it was a pigeon.’

‘I wish we’d done that forty-eight hours ago.’

‘I didn’t know we could.’

‘A gull. Imagine if we’d let it die.’ He shudders. ‘Poor gull.’

New, fresh rain. She’s trembling a little in the cold. She realizes she’s still wearing her thin pyjamas. Her canvas shoes are getting wet through.

The gull’s bathing in the rain, the guttering a birdbath. It stretches its wings twice, casting a flurry of raindrops as it fluffs its feathers. She thinks she can see the plumage whitening.

‌On Margate Sands

Angela and Lisa sit on the Harbour Arm, eating chips.

The sky looks like the fighting Temeraire (‘except the sunset is in the wrong place,’ says Angela). Lisa, who is used to south coast seaside, suddenly twigs that they are facing north. She gets out her camera, winds it on and takes a photo of her friend, orange hair against the orange sun. And then one holding up a wooden spoon of mushy peas. ‘Guacamole,’ says Angela to the camera.

They have been here a day. Dreamland has begun its decline, and the Turner gallery will not be built for twenty years. Margate, they agree, is a bit of a waste land.

It’s Michaelmas term (although Angela and Lisa do not call it that), and it’s not warm. The chips are delicious, wrapped in cornets of paper and soaked in vinegar. Lisa has ketchup on hers, which is ‘just wrong’, in Angela’s opinion. They eat them all, especially the crunchy bits at the end, unwrapping the cornet to find them.

Lisa takes out a pack of Marlboro Lights, and they promise each other that they will give up once they have finished their dissertations. They huddle together over the flame and then pull their hoods up and scrunch their sleeves into their fists to smoke and watch the day come to an end.

As night falls they walk further into it, east along the esplanade, past the Winter Gardens and the old 1930s Lido, towards Cliftonville, where their B & B is. They dropped off their bags this morning.