Humans were good at forgetting. But Rose did not forget. She wanted Danny to know it. She would make him remember too. Maybe after all she was a little bit animal. The hedgehog, as he said.

This was what she wanted to tell him, before he lost control, before his hands went to her throat. It was the line from Archilochus.

‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’

The best left in Europe

Damien didn’t go alone. Maybe that’s where he went wrong. He roped in his Italian cousin Max, who lived in France. It was a warm afternoon in late September when they drove into the Basque valley – both in their twenties, both windswept and dark-haired, looking like they belonged to the same genre of person, a genre of dark-haired surfers with hopes of the perfect wave.

‘This is it,’ he said. ‘You’d better be ready, Max. It’s going to be sick. An amazing left-hander.’ Damien was already in boardshorts, ready to leap out of the car without wasting a millisecond.

‘I’m ready, don’t worry.’ At the wheel, Max smiled broadly as he rested his elbow on the sill, shirt cuffs flapping freely in the wind. Although it wasn’t great for a surfing trip, the near-vintage soft-top Mercedes was his pride and joy. Behind them, the surfboards stuck up in the back seat, their bags and rolled-up towels jammed around the fins.

They pulled into an old fishing village. Narrow streets, stone buildings, guesthouses, a church. A river sliding out from between the hills, widening into an estuary, emptying over a sandy bar into the ocean.

It was a dream of a river mouth, the best left-breaking wave in Europe. Damien had fantasised about it. He and this wave were meant to be. The swell charged around a headland and arrived in long straight lines, creating barrels that could last for more than a hundred metres.

But not today. There was no swell. All that was out there was the flat blue Atlantic.

‘Is this the place?’ Max asked. ‘I have to say I’m not seeing it.’

Damien frowned his disapproval at the vast, untroubled ocean. At a family get-together in Italy the previous April, he and Max had agreed they were long overdue to catch some waves together. Damien was already flirting with the idea of Spain, and he sold Max on the idea. ‘You won’t want to miss it, I’m telling you.’ He had been planning this trip for more than a year, and had come through three different airports to get here, lugging his surfboard in a padded foil bag.