Barbara had taken off her shoes and was walking barefoot, straying into the lapping water, watching her feet sink into the wet sand.

‘There’s no birds,’ she said. ‘Where are the gulls?’

Joe could spot them right enough, crouching on the branches of the wind-bleached spinney that reached to the shore, silent as corpses. ‘They’ve taken cover,’ he said. ‘A storm’s due.’

‘How can they tell?’

‘That’s the beauty of them,’ Joe said. ‘They’re more sensitive than we are. They sense any change in barometric pressure. Look,’ he pointed at a hawk in the distance. ‘That bird is usually high in the sky. But he’s flying low today.’

‘My mother used to tell me stuff like that,’ Barbara said. ‘She knew a lot about birds.’

Had Trude thought of him, perhaps, when she talked about the birds with Barbara? Did she see Joe in her mind’s eye? Listen, look, standing behind her with his hand on the binoculars, training them into her sight, smelling her hair and the faint odour of her body, knowing her flesh was soft and yielding. Or was it List she had conjured up?

‘But I never paid any attention.’

‘That’s a shame,’ Joe said. ‘Perhaps I can tell you all about them, sometime?’

‘Perhaps,’ Barbara said.

He wanted to say, And will you come and visit me? He’d like that very much but wasn’t sure that’s what he should say. It might presume too much. Was she even wondering if Joe was her father? Was she waiting for the moment to ask him, in her straightforward German way? It was a difficult thing to broach, Joe understood that. The pair of them. Tiptoeing.

He stood still and watched her paddling at the edge of the water. She’d rolled up her jeans and was holding her shoes in one hand. She had bright-red toenails, he noticed, but it didn’t make her look common. She didn’t look like Trude, that was for sure. Trude’s face was as round as a muffin, mousy with it. This young woman had a beauty about her which Trude never possessed. She was skinny, mind. Looked like she could do with a square meal. Perhaps she was one of those vegetarians, nothing but bone.

‘Would you take food from a poor man?’ he said.

She looked up and laughed. ‘Do you mean, am I the sort of woman who’d take food out of a poor man’s mouth?’

Joe felt the colour rise to his face. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I mean, would you stay for a meal? That’s if you eat meat.’

She laughed again. ‘You have a strange way with words,’ she said.

He wasn’t sure if that was a criticism or a compliment, but it made him awkward.

‘We don’t have visitors,’ Joe said, by way of an explanation. ‘Apart from Pierre, and he doesn’t really count.’