“I can’t see that there’d be anything left for your imagination to do. In fact, it’s hard to visualise the lifestyles of these sober-sided Rhinelanders once they’ve set up their beachhead. When bourgeois life meets Surrealism head on, we know who wins.”

Children’s squeals came from the beach, where Henry’s sandcastle was holding out against the ferryboat’s bow waves. Sally was on her hands and knees, constructing an elaborate double bed of damp sand with bolsters and eiderdown, under which she tucked a delighted Lucy and Alice. I dozed while Miriam helped Lykiard and the Jouberts to unload the car. Lykiard worked in his unhurried way, pausing to refill his pipe and read a page or two of the books packed below the seats. Watching him put a friendly hand on Miriam’s waist, I realised how bourgeois we had become, with our rented flat, estate car, and loyal inflatable bounding behind us on its trailer. Even our attempt to clean the bathing hut had shown the same bijouising suburban strain. I had always smiled at my parents for taking an intact piece of Surrey with them to Shanghai, but Miriam and I were in the same export business. The real trapeze artists and daredevils on the scene were the Düsseldorf dentists.

At dusk the first marijuana smoke began to overlay the warm air, pricking at the children’s nostrils. Sorry to leave, we gathered our things together and piled them into the inflatable.

“Bye-bye, pixies, come again tomorrow,” Sally told the children as they sat in their life jackets. “We’ll do some more cleaning. We’ve got to dust and polish the whole beach—just look at this untidy sand…”

Miriam winced, but I warmed to this excitable American girl. She waded out into the water, the smoke from her loose-packed cigarette sending its scent into the evening. Holding it aloft in one hand, she tugged at the inflatable with the other. As we motored away I could see her generous, ironic smile following us across the waves.

*   *   *

“God, I feel so square,” Miriam told me as she gazed around our apartment, pastis in hand. “‘Do some more cleaning’—that was a dig at me.”

“In a friendly way.”

“Am I square?”

“My depraved and respectable wife?” I pressed her reassuringly against the refrigerator. “Miriam, the Jouberts work at a left-wing lycée, and he teaches modern literature at a fashionable polytechnic. They drive a 2CV and smoke pot. What could be more square than that?”

“You’re avoiding the point.” Miriam finished off the pastis and stared at the sandbar beyond the mole, a pale smudge along the shore of Ampuriabrava. The blazing driftwood fire we had left behind was a faint ember. “Let’s buy some pot.”

“Okay—I know you’re dying to be arrested by those handsome Spanish cops. Remember, Lykiard and his chums don’t have children.”