The wind furred the sea and whipped my hair against my skin. I whooped for joy but only the gulls could hear. I felt lighter, wiped clean. My morbid resentments were blown away … my husband, my best friend … what were their names again? Who gave a toss?

Suddenly hands gripped my windpipe. I jumped.

‘We’re outside the territorial waters,’ Calvin shouted into my ear. ‘We could get away with murder and they couldn’t touch us.’

I unpeeled his hands. ‘That’s reassuring.’

He said the place was constantly shifting and that the wrecks appeared and disappeared like ghosts. Nothing could be relied upon in this surreal non-world, even the sand beneath our feet.

Our exuberance lasted all the way home. I felt so light, freed from the burden of the past. Back at his house Calvin made a pot of tea and cooked us scrambled eggs. The homeliness of this meal moved me. For the first time, I felt that I could spend the rest of my life with this man.

During that day we’d stepped through space, between the past and the future, and I realised that Calvin had felt it too. For as we were eating he said: ‘How about we get someplace together, babes? What do you say?’

My heart leaped. ‘But you love your house.’

‘Time for a new start. Too many memories.’ He gazed at me, his blue eyes screwed up, his freckled face burnt from the sun. ‘How do you feel about your gaff?’

‘Too many memories.’

‘It’ll be worth a bob or two.’

‘Even better.’

He said he’d pretty well retired from his business and it was time for Doug to take over.

‘The man whose wife gives you a biscuit after you’ve fucked her?’ I said.

‘That was a joke, love.’ He stroked my salt-sticky hair.

He said we could house-hunt in Deal, if that’s where I wanted to live. Deal, where all this started, but I’d never told him about the charity shop and the little black dress. I’d just said I loved the sea and that I could never go back to Dorset.

So we Googled properties in Deal until we were gorged with possibilities and then we went to bed and made love. This time it was on another level, quite transcendent. He wasn’t that sort of lover at all, not normally, but that night it was so intense it took away my breath.

Afterwards I couldn’t sleep. Those sands had shaken up my inner kaleidoscope and resettled the pieces. My mind was racing with possibilities. A house in Deal, facing the sea. I was hanging up the washing in its back garden, seagulls standing sturdily in a row on its wall, watching me with their beady yellow eyes. Calvin was indoors, doing what? I had no idea …