She catches sight of herself in the hall mirror as they go out of the door. She feels different since Lotte did her hair. It took Pim a whole ten minutes and the boys an hour on Friday morning to clock it, but to Claire it feels wildly different. She feels younger. More alive. Revamped in a way she hasn’t done for years. She keeps catching Pim looking at her, as if he can’t quite put his finger on her transformation. Even Ash told her that she looked pretty. She’s racked her brains, but as far as she can remember, her son has never, to her knowledge, used any kind of adjective to describe her. She’s just been part of the furniture as far as he’s concerned, so ‘pretty’ was fairly impactful. She’ll take pretty.

She joins Dominica and Tor, Helga and Maddy on the beach and introduces Ash, and she’s proud when he’s polite. She can see him re-evaluating her, as he watches her with her friends, curious that Claire has a life beyond her domestic cage.

‘You should come in for a swim with us one day,’ Dominica tells him and the expression on his face makes them all laugh.

‘So, you swim in there?’ Ash asks, as if he’s seeing the sea for the first time.

Claire follows his gaze to the water. She feels a physical yearning to fling herself in and she regrets not bringing her kit. She’s tempted to go in anyway, but she suspects that Ash would die of embarrassment if she stripped off in front of him and swam in her pants. She never thought she’d become so addicted to the water but looking at the expanse of blue makes her feel as if she’s discovered treasure.

Dominica is talking to the organiser of the beach clean, and she gives Ash a high-vis tabard and a picker-up stick and shows him how to work it and gives a plastic bag to Claire, as she struggles with her vest. Claire’s first instinct on seeing that she would need to wear one was dread. There was no way one was going to fit, but the large size slides on easily over her T-shirt. Yesterday she got on the bathroom scales and noticed that she was half a stone lighter than she was at Christmas. And it’s not as if she’s been particularly dieting, but she’s not eating as much sugar.

It’s to do with the swimming, she’s convinced. The midmorning and mid-afternoon slumps when she used to crave the kids’ snacks don’t happen when she’s been in the water. But that’s because she fills up on nourishing food when she’s cold, not junk.

The crowd disperses into little groups and Claire sees them setting off along the beach in both directions.

‘Which way do you want to go?’ she asks Ash and he nods towards Hove and they set off together. Dominica and Maddy come with them.

Now they’re searching for litter, Claire can see it everywhere. It’s still weird seeing surgical masks, she thinks, as Ash picks one up and puts it in her bag, his nose wrinkling with disgust. A year ago, if she’d seen a mask on the beach, she’d have assumed that there might have been a terrible accident, involving an ambulance and that a medic had dropped one, but now she sees them everywhere. A horrible sign of the times. She hopes that, before too long, they’ll be an anathema, something people remember and go, oh yes. We wore masks. Maybe that’s why she’s been so drawn to the sea. Because on the beach, by and large, she’s been able to forget all about the pandemic.