He had come here for one reason, which was that water obsessed him. Not water in all its forms. Only saltwater, and only saltwater shaped just so, sculpted just so. Hollowed out by an offshore wind, smooth and green and glassy. The sort of wave he hoped he’d find at the river mouth. There was no shortage of footage on YouTube and elsewhere, a lot of it from the WCT – the World Championship Tour – which used to take over the small town for a week or two every year. That was until a few years ago, when a disastrous bit of dredging for the sake of shipping traffic extracted too much sand and gutted the wave.

After that, the professionals had stopped coming, leaving the town to its slow rhythms and fishing trawlers. But Damien had heard from a friend, who’d heard it from someone else, that the sandbank was gradually taking shape again.

‘The autumn swell should be on its way,’ he told his cousin with more confidence than he felt. ‘We’ll intercept it in a few days when we come back.’

‘Better too early than too late,’ Max said, to be cheerful.

‘Not really.’ Damien couldn’t entirely master his disappointment. ‘But so be it. We couldn’t do much about the dates. You have to be back in Paris at the end of next week.’

There was (and this was something) at least a cool note in the air. Damien felt it in the brisk nor’-easter blowing onshore. He hoped he was right that the waves were on their way. Their plan was to drive southwest, roughly tracking the pilgrimage trail of the Camino de Santiago, and then work their way back more slowly.

‘There’s another place near here,’ said Max, studying his phone. He was in his mid-twenties, the younger of the two. Damien had always thought him a bit indulged. Their fathers were eight years apart, and Damien’s had left Italy for Australia before Max’s was out of primary school. Max was a natural linguist, and the names of towns on roadside signs rolled easily off his tongue. He pointed to the map he’d found, then read out the description like an excitable tour guide, a blurb about a hermitage, a cave, Knights Templar and treasure.