The sands curved north, the low tide glittering in the distance, and they’d followed the curve towards the headland, not talking much, their hands deep in their pockets, looking around. The further they’d got from town, the fewer people they had seen, though the occasional thwack of a golf ball or wind-torn shout reached them from the links to their left. He had felt his ears burn with cold, and wondered if they’d have to go much further. Beyond the headland, across the wide mouth of the estuary, lay the nature reserve, which was another broad sandy beach, but this time with visible sandbars shoaling out into the water, where the seals came to calf.

He’d thought he would begin by saying something about one of his female students, who had recently sent him an email signed with an X, a kiss. He’d thought he would say how uncomfortable this made him, which would allow him to get Claire talking about inappropriate communications between lecturers and undergraduates, a topic that was only a hop and a skip away from her and the teacher. But she had derailed him by speaking first.

‘I think it’s finished,’ she’d said.

A moment of blind desolation overtook him, before he realised that she was talking about her book.

‘Really?’

‘Yes, really,’ she’d said, as if he’d implied – perhaps he had – that she might be mistaken. ‘I mean, I need to check the index one more time. But basically it’s done.’

That would have been the moment to congratulate her, supplying, as he was expected to supply, the requisite excitement. But her readiness to read criticism into even the most innocuous response had annoyed him, so he’d only asked, ‘How do you feel?’

‘I don’t know,’ she’d said. ‘It’s … weird.’

They had reached the end of the sandy stretch, where the steep spine of headland broke up through the beach and jagged off into the sea. The little cliff path with its faded wooden signpost twisted away through the heather. Claire had set off ahead of him. Before he could stop himself (though why should he have stopped himself?), he’d told her not to climb with her hands in her pockets. She snorted over her shoulder, said she wasn’t going to slip, and he’d replied that nobody ever knows they’re going to slip, and could she just take them out, all right? She had continued walking ahead of him, her back stiff; then she had removed her hands from her pockets and held them out at her sides, exaggeratedly, as if she were crossing a beam.