But change would soon come, and I wondered if I was equal to it. She had taken part in the Shepperton Players’ open-air performance of As You Like It, playing a spirited Rosalind like a feminist agitator. Already she talked of going back to her career in journalism. Watching her move impatiently around her kitchen, bored with the endless meals, I could see the mature and strong-willed woman in her forties that she would become. In a sense she would leave me far behind her, a problematical Peter Pan whose pockets were filled with a strange yellow earth …

For the moment she had set her heart on Spain. I guessed that Señor Robles had already shown her one of his villas in the hills above Rosas and Cadaqués. The Dalís might prove to be more demanding neighbours than Miriam realised, but I was happy to see her revelling in the attentive gaze of the melancholy Spaniards as she strode around the supermarkets of Rosas in her black bikini. An economy of pleasure and possibility was about to rule our lives.

*   *   *

A new Europe had sprung up along the beaches of the Mediterranean, in effect a linear city three thousand miles long and three hundred metres deep, that stretched from Gibraltar to Glyphada Beach beyond the eastern suburbs of Athens. The old Europe had shed its past, its hierarchies and snobberies. Here in this classless realm Lancashire typists shared bar tables with Stockholm accountants and Danish truck drivers. The beaches of Spain were Europe’s California, or at least its Florida. I liked its marina culture, its endless highways and apartment houses. This was the future that President Kennedy and the space race had helped to create, a residential zone laid down in advance for the science parks and high-technology projects yet to come.

In many ways there was something almost lunar about the white hotels, haunted by criminals running hash from North Africa, stealing antiquities, or on the run from Scotland Yard. After the sombre light of Northern Europe, the peculiar geometry of these overlit apartments seemed to lead us into a more abstract world where emotions were leached away. Even sex became more stylised. In the afternoons, while the children slept through the heat, Miriam and I would drink white wine in the kitchen. When she was pleasantly drunk, she liked to make love in the bathroom, taking up her positions against the mirrors and white enamel like a perverse gymnast. She watched me without expression, as if we were having sex in a space capsule hundreds of miles above the Earth, conceiving the first of a new race of astronauts.