The bearded man in the water was calling in French to the children. The door of the bathing machine opened and a blond-haired young woman with an ivory-white skin came out to greet us. She wore high-heeled beach shoes and the bottom of a cream bikini. Her face had a look of slightly shop-soiled elegance, as if she had neglected herself for too long in some intimate way. When she smiled the sunlight shone against a set of immaculate American teeth, from which the left canine was missing, bridged by an inferior piece of English dentistry. But she had a rangy manner that I immediately liked.

“Hello … I thought some little pixies had been cleaning the kitchen.” She swept Lucy into her arms and held the startled girl to her shoulder. “Are you a pixie?”

“No! Mummy…!”

“I think you are. You’ve been scrubbing and dusting and polishing…”

She chattered on in a pleasant New England voice as the pipe smoker ambled up to us. The children stared at him openmouthed, even more intrigued by the star-shaped scars across his abdomen and thigh than they were by his penis and scrotum. I guessed that he had been badly wounded during the war.

Seeing that we were English, he introduced himself: “Peter Lykiard. You’re from London? Good. I teach at Regent Street Poly.” He pointed to the couple in the water. “Robert and Muriel Joubert, from Nanterre. And this is Sally Mumford, one of my American students. She’s probably going to steal your children.”

“I’m definitely thinking about it.” The young woman lowered Lucy to the ground and welcomed us into the shade. With a cheerful flourish she produced a jug of sangria, tapas, and cigarettes. The French couple sunned themselves on the patio, their naked bodies inspected by the children with the measured eyes of experienced anthropologists. They had seen Miriam and me naked every day of their lives, but a different anatomy, however small the distinctions, held a universe of intriguing possibilities.

Sharing our hamper and wine cooler with this amiable crew, we sat drinking under the parachute canopy as Lykiard explained that he came down to Ampuriabrava every summer—though this, sadly, would be the last. The property developers’ bulldozers would soon level the site.

“This island will vanish, literally turn into cement. They’ll up-end the beach into half a mile of hotels and apartment houses.” He pointed to the pine posts like so many gibbets which the surveyors had staked into the dunes. “There’s a model of the whole complex in Gerona. They plan to consolidate the waterways with promenades of boutiques and bars, then sell off the housing plots to all those Düsseldorf dentists. Three years from now the place will be a film set, with a series of mock-antique Catalonian villages along the speedboat canals.”

“Miriam wants us to settle here—she thinks it would be good for my imagination.”