I undressed and lay beside her, my hand against her shoulder. The faint, smothering odour of anaesthetic gas clung to the pillows, and I felt myself drifting back into the heady night from which Lucy had emerged.

“Hold me…” Miriam pressed my hands to her waist. She lowered the neck of her nightdress and exposed her breasts, their swollen nipples already quickened by the baby’s lips. She pushed back the sheet and drew the nightdress to her hips, reached down and held my penis in her hand. Knees in the air, she smiled as I massaged her feet and calves and caressed her thighs.

“Come into me…”

Lying on my side, I gently entered her vagina. Already its walls had contracted, and it held me in a firm embrace.

Lucy stirred, her larynx clicking. Miriam smiled at her, her hands on my chest as I moved softly within her. Life-magic breathed over us, over the sleeping child, over everything in the sunlit town.

The Island

7

THE ISLAND

I was swimming strongly, four hundred yards from the beach at Santa Margarita, when I saw the Estartit ferry steering towards me. Loaded with holidaymakers on their way to Cadaqués and the Dalí mansion at Port Lligat, it cut through the dark water where the Bay of Rosas met the open sea. Bolts of foam jumped from its bows and swept the passenger rail, cooling the legs of the German and Scandinavian girls gazing through their sunglasses at the lizard-backed hills.

A yacht passed me, its mainsail only inches from the water. A middle-aged French couple sat on the side decking in their yellow life jackets, watching me in a sceptical way. A pedalo driven by two teenage boys was as far from the beach, but I was well beyond the limit of most holiday swimmers. I had set out to swim across the bay from Santa Margarita, little more than a mile in all, but the French pair clearly took for granted that I was not going to make it.

Ignoring them, I swam on through the black, sunlit water, now and then glancing at the balcony of our apartment. After breakfast I had announced my decision to challenge the bay, and the children had been seized by the vastness of the project.

“Daddy, that’s at least … seventeen lengths!” Alice cried, thinking of the public swimming pool near Shepperton.

“More like a hundred,” I told her. “Or two hundred, if I swim back.”

“Two hundred! Daddy, you’re making up fibs again…”