After a year on the Costa Brava we would be totally decorticated, with that blankness of mind I could see in the faces of package tourists after only a week. Before leaving England we had seen Hitchcock’s Psycho, and the English secretaries in their bikinis behaved like so many Janet Leighs who had decided not to take that crucial shower but could no longer remember where they had left their lives.

“Jim, stir a leg!” Miriam called to me, arms covered with wet sand. “While we’re slaving away he’s lying there like a pasha. Tomorrow we’ll bring the dinghy here—the girls are going to be really impressed…”

Building this simple flight of steps was Miriam’s touching way of showing that she was serious about settling in Spain. Every morning the five of us set off in the inflatable, taking with us a picnic for the day. As I repaired the awning, stitching the ragged parachute silk, Miriam and the children cleared out the cabin and swept the patio. In the afternoon, after cold chicken and sangria, we dozed in the shade or swam with the children from the stone steps. The water-skiers sped across the bay, portable radios gleamed on the beach at Santa Margarita, and the mad ferryman aimed his bow at any passing swimmer.

*   *   *

A week later, when we landed on the island, new arrivals had occupied our beach hideaway. A small Citroën loaded with suitcases and camping gear had crossed the shallow water of the inlet and was parked on the sand. A bearded man and a young woman with a black shingle were swimming from Miriam’s jetty, watched by a tall, naked man in his forties with shoulder-length hair, a book in one hand and a pipe in the other.

Uncertain, the children stopped by the car. Henry pointed to the sticker pasted to the rear fender above the French licence plate: HAPPINESS IS OVERTAKING A 2CV.

“What’s a 2CV?”

“A kind of car—let’s say hello.”

“Why is happiness overtaking it?”

Alice peered through her fringe and took Miriam’s hand. “Are they the cannibals? Is Daddy going to fight them?”

“Of course not. It’s probably their house.”

The car was packed with bottles of Spanish wine, loaves of bread, and a clutch of paperbacks by Kerouac, Henry Miller, Ginsberg, and William Burroughs. Lashed incongruously to the roof rack was an expensive pigskin suitcase covered with the labels of New York and Chicago hotels. Had they stolen the case from some distracted traveller at Perpignan station? As the naked man waved his pipe at the children I was visualising a new breed of beach criminal, reading On the Road or Howl as he slid the tourist’s purse from her handbag.