Below us, in the bed of the drained creek, Edward and his team were digging out the last silt from the fuselage of the entombed aircraft. Sections of flat steel piling had been driven into the bed, forming the walls of a metal chamber. Their interlocked edges held back the silt from the remains of the aircraft six feet below the surface. When the estuary flooded, the excavation site filled with water, which drained away at low tide and allowed the team a brief two hours to resume their patient work.

I stood up and searched for any sign of David, who had become bored with the slow preparations. Delighted to see Sally again after so many years, and bemused by her transformation from sixties hippie into career housewife, he happily played hide-and-seek with little Jackie among the dunes. He ignored the excavation site, clearly disapproving of this morbid interest in old war wrecks.

“It’s like your bloody car-crash exhibition—Jim, you really started something there…”

“David, hold on. They were digging these planes out during the war.”

“Maybe—the next thing they’ll be hiring Olympia and laying out the debris of a 747 for everyone to pick over … You could help to arrange an Arts Council grant.”

Morosely, he wandered off to a small inn four hundred yards across the mud flats where the cars were parked. Since leaving Summerfield he had become almost puritanically strict towards himself and the world, with all the zeal of the recent convert. I sensed that he disapproved of his entire past life and felt that he was responsible, not only for having spent his childhood in Shanghai, but for my being born there as well. No penance could atone for this historical crime; a logic triggered in that cruel city had led inevitably to the death of the woman cellist on the Hammersmith flyover.

Leaving Sally, I strolled to the edge of the sand cliff and looked down into the pit. Buckets of silt were being hoisted from the watery bed, and Edward stood knee-deep in the dark ooze, ready to hose away the last debris from the engine and canopy of the aircraft. Most of the wings and tail were missing, lost when it plunged into the creek, but I could see the typical nose-heavy bulb of a single-engine World War II fighter.