They went to Swaffham on market day. To Norwich to see the cathedral. To Castle Acre and Castle Rising, those names she would remember, and to other places whose names she would forget. One day they drove past the walls of Sandringham where Jonathan said that the Queen spent her summer holiday but he didn’t know if she was in residence or not. I think they have a flag flying if she’s there, he said. But they did not see any flag. They did not see the house even, only those long walls and trees behind them. Maybe it was just at Buckingham Palace, he said, that she flew the flag to show when she was in. Or maybe she was not there at all, now he thought about it, he thought now it must be Christmas that she spent in Norfolk, or Easter. She had a place in Scotland for the summer.

One day that promised to be particularly fine, they went to the beach and he took pictures of her in the English dunes as he had taken pictures of her on a beach in Japan a year before. They went for a long walk out through the marshes and to the dunes and then on, making their way across mud and clumps of marsh grass and wet sand to a piece of land that became an island when the tide rose, and at the point at the tip of the island they saw seals playing in the sea. Then they put down their things and changed, and swam in the sea themselves. She wore the same red swimming costume as the year before, but there was a sting of wind and the sea was cold, despite the sunshine. It was a few degrees cooler on the coast than it had been inland, with that breeze and a hint of cloud coming in over the sea. This beach on the side of the island that faced the sea was long and the colouring cool, the sand pale and the beach grasses a bleached green. They ate the picnic they had brought with them and then he took pictures of her with the long pale strip of sand stretching out behind her and the endless sea horizon. No shadows, as the thin cloud moved in across the sky. The wind just so gently blowing her hair and blowing sand against her. She wrapped herself in a towel. It’s cold, your English seaside. They moved back into the shelter of the dunes.

They stayed while the other trippers began to walk back.

Can’t we stay here, just the two of us, she said, and play like the seals? This is so much nicer than your spare room.

But look at the time.

It won’t get dark for hours.

It’s not the time that matters, it’s the tide. If the tide comes up we’ll be cut off.

We’ll have to swim.