He was so sure his holidays would be a complete write-off, he’d been caught off guard at first by the gentle beauty of Provincetown. When he got off the bus the iodine smell that he loved so much brought tears to his eyes and all at once he felt calmer, as you do when you’ve wept after a great sorrow. The sea was omnipresent, in the salt in the ­atmosphere, in the blue of the sky, in the strong odours that saturated the air. Before he went back to the hotel he sat on a wharf and for ten long minutes, he was happy.

But that same evening clouds had gathered above the Bay, concealing what appeared to be a magnificent sunset and casting over Provincetown a harsh, heart-wrenching light. It had all broken with great solemnity around nine o’clock and it had been raining ever since.

He ordered one last coffee. The afternoon was dragging. Provincetown was deserted and there was nothing to do. With the wind and rain even walking was impossible, ­especially with the cold he’d felt coming on in the middle of the night. So he drank coffee, read, and, from meal to meal, watched the rain fall, not daring to leave the hotel except to run across the street to the Italian restaurant where they let him hang out and didn’t make him feel as if he was in the way. And of course he kept going over everything that had happened to him in the past few weeks.