Sibyl (si ∙ bil) 1. One of various women of antiquity who were reputed to possess powers of prophecy or divination.

— The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary

FOR A WHILE now, Sibyl Hadley has been watching the umbrella boy from her rented deckchair.

He is wearing a pair of long turquoise shorts patterned all over with big white flowers and tied loosely in front, with laces, like a pair of shoes. He has beads in his hair and a smooth golden chest and smooth arms with ropy veins visible beneath the skin, a rise and then a hollow around each low-lying hip bone above the dangling laces of his flower-splashed shorts.

He doesn’t seem to feel the cold – he isn’t, as far as she can tell, shivering even slightly in the wind, in the bright chilly sunshine. Sibyl herself is wrapped up like a parcel in layers of warm clothing – trousers and tights and a polo-neck sweater, a quilted waterproof jacket with the hood up. She has taken off her reading glasses and laid her book face-down across her lap in order to watch the boy as he goes about his work, planting the long metal spikes of the umbrellas in the damp sand, making sure they are securely buried and canted into the wind, then carefully unfurling their fluttering canvas shades.

He’d smiled at her when she’d gone to the door of his little wooden hut to pay for her deckchair, and when she’d given him the money for it and her thumb had brushed against the skin of his open palm, it had sent a rush of feeling through the whole of her body.

He’s busy now, locked in a struggle with the rising wind, trying to shake out the heavy folded shade on the last of the umbrellas, all of which, like the deckchairs, are available for rent, either by the day or by the hour. There. He’s done it. Sibyl watches him brushing the wet sand from his hands onto his shorts and shaking his beaded hair like a dog drying itself.

There are tears in Sibyl’s eyes when she looks away, out across the flat grey water of the Channel and over at the peeling ochre façade of the old casino at the far end of the beach near the town.

‘Dear God,’ she whispers into the wind. ‘How did I get so old?’

From the dining room of the Hôtel Mercure, Wade Abello looks out across the boardwalk to where the Englishwoman is sitting, bundled up in her deckchair with her book on her lap, looking out across the sea.

At the market in town this morning he has bought her a dusty rough-hewn bar of hand-made lavender soap. It is wrapped in a brown paper bag and he is holding it now in his enormous right hand.