The sun had not come out as it had threatened it might earlier, but a pleasant wind blew across the land bringing an earthy, wheaten smell that made the sea seem further away than it was.

‘I’ve watched the sun rise over this beach all my life,’ David said. ‘Why would we move, now?’

‘So you don’t drown in your beds,’ said Leo.

‘It’s fifteen, twenty years away. We won’t be here for that.’

‘One big storm, Dad.’

He looked at Leo gently. Leo was looking out over the hundred or so metres of grassland to the far-out tide and the remains of the buildings on the shore.

‘They’re like the sunken farmhouse we can see. When the reservoir is very low,’ Leo said. ‘Like now.’

‘Tell me. While your mother’s busy. These attacks?’

‘We’re fine. It’s weird to see the guards. But we’ve not had any trouble. It’s down the line the attacks are happening, really.’

‘Like on the pipeline, early days,’ David remembered.

‘Your footings are still there, you know.’

‘Built to stay.’

David’s engineering sense was in his brain, his son’s in his hands.

‘Do they know,’ David asked, ‘who? Is making the attacks.’

‘Angry people,’ Leo said. ‘No one properly organised. They don’t think. Yet. They should go for the dam if they had any sense.’

*

Leo reached out to the bowl of salt, put some directly on his tongue. ‘Do you hear it, from here? The Water Train?’

‘Don’t be duzzy,’ Helen said.

David put down the stripped chop.

‘I fancy we do sometimes, with the sea calm and the wind in the right direction. Now we don’t have to shut our ears against the bloody turbines.’

The air had unfilled when they shut down the wind farm out on the sandbanks, the horrible whine dropping from the sky around the ocean.

They had not realised how much they had come to brace themselves against the sound until it was suddenly gone. The same had happened when the air traffic more or less stopped.

‘Tell me,’ David said, ‘have you heard from your sister?’

‘I’ll see her soon,’ Leo said. ‘We’re going to the city for the weekend, when the shifts work out. Cora and Ruth get on. We’ll try and time it so Colin is away.’

‘You’re not a fan?’

‘I can’t believe she’s with him still.’

Leo had balanced a pyramid crystal of salt on the tip of his upraised finger and it caught in the light of the window behind him with the brightness the iceberg had held on the sea.

‘What did we do wrong, to raise a child who moves into the city?’

‘You fed them limpets,’ Leo said.

*

‘Give Cora this.’ David passed Leo the brooch.

‘Dad!’

‘Bronze Age, we think.’ It was beautiful. It seemed to throb despite the dullness of the metal.