‘Sorry,’ he said, pulling on the trunks without any awkwardness. ‘Nobody’s come this way before.’

‘Oh!’ she cried, then mumbling, blown this way and that, it seemed, on the edgy rocks: ‘In another direction. I didn’t mean to intrude.’

Never had she been so powerless to express, never had she stood longer waiting for guidance of some kind.

‘Come on down, then,’ he encouraged, ‘now that we’re more conventional, and make appropriate conversation.’

His teeth were glaring up at her.

‘You’re reading,’ she contributed, with an obviousness which would not be avoided.

But he threw the book aside as though it were something they might not be able to discuss, and as she planted herself in the sand beside him, he was looking at her from under those thick eyelids, detaching from the light whatever was necessary to stimulate a changed relationship. She wondered how much of her would have been necessary to Barry Flegg. She wondered, in fact, intensely, as everything she did, said, now, was happening out of curiosity. The innermost part of her was pulsing with daring, like the sounds of footsteps approaching through thick sand.

‘I hate to barge in on people.’ Her clumsy words lurched after sincerity. ‘Particularly when they’re reading.’

‘I hoped you weren’t barging in,’ he said. ‘I hoped it might have been part of a delicate plan.’

His flippancy, unexpected in one who had conveyed earnestness till now, confused her slightly. She confessed: ‘I was at a loose end. After lunch. Everybody their own occupations. Just for the moment I couldn’t think what to do.’

Her blotting-paper voice flapped uncontrolled around him in the wind.

‘What do you do, Anthea?’ he asked.

‘What do I do?’

‘I don’t know anything about you.’

She wished it had been easier to answer.

‘Well,’ she said desperately, ‘I’m taking the course at Mrs Treloar’s Secretarial College.’ He was watching her as closely as she felt it necessary to examine the fragment of cowrie she held in the palm of her hand. ‘For a time, I,’ she gulped, and laughed, ‘I thought I might have a talent for acting. I started a drama course. I thought that, later on at least, there might be some parts for me. I saw myself playing older women. But I,’ she hesitated, ‘I was too self-conscious, I suppose. Daddy said I was too big. That most men wouldn’t like acting with me.’

She was suddenly annoyed he didn’t interrupt, even more so because she suspected him of staring into her shirt where it flapped open unbuttoned lower because of summer and the beach.

Then she did what she didn’t know properly how to do. She lay back on the sand, stretching out her bare thighs, to allow herself the luxury of confessing something she had only just that moment thought of.

‘Of course what I’d really like to do,’ she said, ‘is take up something like physiotherapy. Or nursing. I’d like to feel I was helping people.’

For a moment she honestly believed it. A voluptuousness of self-sacrifice swam at her out of the drained sky, and she had to make an effort to contain the tears which would have been shameful for Doctor Flegg to witness. Because he was still looking at her so intently. Could he have noticed her expression, self-indulgent in her act of service, as she bent above the bed-sores of old, flaccid men?