He eyed me for a long moment, neck-deep in water.

‘You still look a bit hot, love.’

I put a hand to my cheek, feeling the heat radiating from my skin. I was still hot from hurrying back up the hill. But I knew now what I was going to do, what I should have done days ago, when I first saw the messages on his phone: I would make him show me. And tell me everything.

As calmly as I could, I said, ‘Where’s your phone, Sean?’

Daniel clambered onto his back, hanging on with one hand and slapping the water with the other.

Sean said, ‘My what?’

‘Your phone.’

‘Why?’

‘Thought I heard it ringing.’

He looked at me again, with something in his eyes I couldn’t quite work out.

‘Dunno. It’s there somewhere. Underneath the lounger?’

I looked.

‘Nope.’

‘Is it under my book, on the table?’

I moved his book, hat and T-shirt from the table.

‘It’s not here, Sean.’

‘Uh-oh,’ he said, an undertone of regret in his voice. ‘Oh no. What an eejit.’

‘Who’s an idiot?’ Daniel said indignantly.

‘I am. You’re never going to guess what I’ve gone and done.’

Still standing in the deep end of the pool my husband reached down into the water, into the side pocket of his swimming shorts, and pulled out his phone.

*

‘It says here,’ Daniel said, studying his iPad, ‘that if you put it in a bowl of rice for eighteen hours, then it will come back to life. The rice takes all the water out of it, or something.’

Sean’s mobile phone lay, lifeless, on the kitchen table next to him. It had refused to switch on since being submerged in the pool, refused to power up, refused to do anything. He picked it up and pressed the power button again. Nothing.

‘I think it’s a bit beyond that, Daniel.’

‘Have we got any rice, though? Says here it has to be uncooked rice. Or you can use,’ he hesitated over a word, “cows-coss”, whatever that is. Is that from cows?’

Sean looked over his shoulder at the iPad’s screen.

‘Couscous,’ he said. ‘Nah, I think Mr Samsung is properly done for, mate.’

‘And you need to get a vacuum cleaner and suck out the water from the charger hole and the headphone jack and all the other holes. And a hairdryer. We could borrow Mummy’s hairdryer?’

Sean shook his head.

‘Not to worry, Daniel. I’ll be all right without it.’

‘But you need a phone, Daddy. You can’t not have a phone.’

‘I didn’t have a phone when I was your age. I survived.’

‘Yeah, but that was like the olden days.’

‘The eighties.’

‘Was that before or after the Vikings?’

‘The New Romantics, you young whippersnapper.’

‘Oscar in my class dropped his phone in the toilet once and he made it work again with rice.’