She pulls out her phone and listens to his voicemail message:

‘Just ringing to check you’re OK. I’m at Paddington, about to head over to the office. Wish I was still with you in Cornwall. I’m so glad it went well with Dr Varma. Don’t worry, your pictures will be hanging in the National Portrait Gallery soon – I just know it. Be careful and, you know, sorry I had to bail. I’ll make it up to you, I promise.’

It sounds like Rob, always telling her to be careful, ever optimistic about her art. She smiles to herself, glancing along the line of other customers. There’s only one outside table, a long, wooden bar from where you can look down onto the busy beach below. She needs to stop worrying. She’s got so much to be grateful for. At the far end of the table, a pair of binoculars has been provided by the café for admiring the view – or the tanned bodies on the beach. ‘Perv-oculars’, as Rob calls them. Everyone’s perched on chrome bar stools and Stretch is at her feet, his lead tangled around one of the legs. She realises how hungry she is. Bex is always moaning that she eats like a horse and never seems to put on weight. Must be her metabolism. Glancing at the man next to her, she abandons Stretch and her half-drunk coffee and goes to buy some flapjack from the café.

When she comes back, Stretch is whining and the man has gone. She slips Stretch a piece of flapjack, finishes her coffee and leaves, chatting with some people at the café counter on her way out.

‘I won’t be long,’ she says to her friend Mark, who runs the gallery around the corner. He’s got a dog too and she leaves Stretch and her phone with him whenever she goes for a swim. She’s wearing her costume underneath her jeans and heads down to the beach, where she strips off and plunges into the crowded waves. She likes to swim out to the floating platform, about fifty yards offshore. At Rob’s suggestion, she’s been swimming most days. Another healer, like art.

She makes her way through playing families and into deeper, calmer waters, wishing Rob was with her. They had fun last weekend, swimming at the secret cove. Happy days – before she started to have these doubts. She’s just being silly about the coffee, over-analysing everything. It’s good to be out here. The sea is crystal clear, shoals of silver fish passing below her, glistening as they twist and turn through shards of slanting sunshine. Below them, translucent jellyfish pulse hypnotically.

And then her calves begin to tighten up. Shit. Cramp.