‘Well, that’s just so that we were in time for breakfast,’ he says. ‘They stop serving it at eleven thirty. We were in such a hurry this morning that I’m starving.’

She laughs at him. ‘I don’t believe a word of it. Fliss would have given you breakfast. But I don’t blame you. It’s beautiful here. I love it. I’d want to share it, too.’

She turns in her seat to watch a dog racing across the beach to retrieve a stick its owner has thrown and, though her delight is evident, he’s aware of a sadness and he remembers that she is newly widowed, that her sense of loss must be sharp, fresh. After so many years of marriage he imagines that she must miss her husband terribly and he feels guilty that he’s briefly forgotten it.

Sam knows deep down that it is right to bring her here. This is a good place to be: it’s a healing place. Here, his own loneliness recedes, the sense of emptiness draws back. Some instinct told him to bring Cara here and he can see by her face that the magic is working. He’s been to Blackpool Sands often in the last few weeks, when this new sense of confusion and the pressing in of the past has weighed upon him. He’s walked on the beach, watching families having fun, and tried to imagine what it must be like to have parents, people to call ‘Mummy’ and ‘Daddy’. He’s wondered what kind of shot he might make at being a parent and he suspects that part of the attraction of teaching is bound up in his own sense of loss.

It was here that he came last year after his incredible experience in Shanghai; to find the privacy he needed to come to terms with his unhappiness. The pain has faded, the world restabilized. He no longer yearns to see her, to feel her in his arms. He can even say her name – Ying-Yue, ‘reflection of the moon’ – without the spasm of pain that used to assail him. Here, on this beach, he is not the Gwailou, the Ghost Man. The foreign devil so despised by Ying-Yue’s parents. There was never any possibility of bringing Ying-Yue home, of showing her this precious place. They were irrevocably separated by culture and distance, but he loved her with a passion.

Sam realizes that Cara is looking at him and he flushes slightly, uncomfortable under her scrutiny. He’s relieved when the waitress arrives so that he can cover his lapse of concentration with the organization of the table, sharing out the cutlery, and with the process of eating.

‘Lizzie used to bring me here,’ he tells Cara, ‘when I was very small. Me and Rufus.’

‘Rufus?’ queries Cara, buttering some toast.