An impromptu arithmetic lesson followed, one of the few in which they had ever taken an interest. They watched me walk into the water, convinced that their father would never return. I could see them on the beach below the apartment, sitting in a row on the rubber inflatable, arguing over my exact position. I waved to them, and saw Miriam, in sun hat and black bikini, wave back, then a semaphore of little arms. My heroic status was guaranteed at least until teatime.

I pressed on towards the cape, carried to the west by the strong counterclockwise current that circled the bay. The Estartit ferry was less than a hundred yards away, turning towards the quay at Rosas, where it would collect its last batch of sightseers. The helmsman stood behind the open windows of the bridgehouse, surveying the pedalo-filled waters like a hunter at a turkey shoot. He noticed me trailing my small wake, and then altered course straight towards me.

Was he drunk? I waited for him to spin his wheel, but the bars of his moustache were fixed on me like the arms of a range finder. The ferry captains of the Costa Brava had been deranged by the endless tourists, like the waiters and taxi drivers, hovering all summer on the edge of a mental explosion. An isolated swimmer impaled on his bows would be no more than a butterfly on a windshield. The ferry sped towards me, the dull murmur of its propeller carried through the water. Switching to my fastest crawl, I swam at right angles to the vessel’s path. Passengers were leaning on the forward rail, waving to me as if I were determined to kill myself.

The ferry passed within a dozen feet, a clamour of engine noise and clinking beer bottles, its wash sending a cloud of diesel fumes into my face. Exhausted, I lay in the rocking wake. The beach was six hundred yards away, and a row of unfamiliar hotels faced me across the water. Our apartment house had moved along the bay, and Miriam and the children were lost behind the lines of umbrellas and beached pedalos. The current had carried me beyond the concrete mole that marked the end of the Santa Margarita beach. Already I could see the undeveloped shoreline of Ampuriabrava, an area of grass-covered dunes, creeks, and mosquito inlets.

Giving up any hope of swimming across the bay, I rested on the current, and began the long swim to the empty beach. The concrete mole cut off my sight of Santa Margarita, and I wondered if Miriam had seen me apparently disappear under the ferry’s lethal bows.