I remember how her face changed from pink to grey in a matter of seconds, becoming the same lumpy texture as the cereal growing cold in my bowl. She went quiet and pushed back her chair. As she stood up, I saw her eyes were filled with tears.

Ignoring me, she lurched towards the living room, her hunched shoulders shaking as if someone walked behind her brandishing an invisible whip.

Back on the beach, a crab poked a claw out of a hole, testing the air. Hilde the seal dived beneath the water. When she broke the surface again, she was almost close enough to touch. I felt Gerrit shift restlessly beside me, as if he had the same desire to know what her skin felt like – rough or smooth? Neither of us reached for her. The moment lengthened, suspended. Then with a flick of her flippers, she was gone.

As we walked back to the cottage, Gerrit offered to drop me off at the clubhouse on his way into town. He was heading out to the seal sanctuary to check on one of the seal pups that had fallen ill a few days before.

‘It’s meant to be my day off,’ he said. ‘And I know my assistant Marta can probably handle things. But I can’t relax unless I know for sure that everything’s fine. So I better go and check. I can never stay away for long, it seems.’

At his insistence, I hovered in the living area of the main house while he dressed and gathered up all the equipment he might need to treat the sick creature if its symptoms had worsened. I studied the cluttered bookshelves, running my gaze along the thin spines of yellowed Dutch paperbacks and the fragments of sea glass shaped like lost puzzle pieces, the crenulated shells and desiccated seed pods whose progeny were probably now as tall as this house. A handful of spotted photos sat languishing in tarnished silver frames. Most of the images were of Gerrit as a young man in the seventies, standing on beaches I didn’t recognise. There were quite a few of him without his shirt on which reminded me of the way I’d always felt seeing photographs of my dad during the same period. I wasn’t bothered by the near-nakedness but I found the idea of all that timelessness stretching out before I was born somehow unnerving, like seeing an image of the earth taken from space. The most modern photo seemed to have been taken at what I assumed was the seal sanctuary. Gerrit stood with his back to the camera addressing a group of spectators, a bucket in one hand and a microphone in the other. Four seals lay horizontally in the wading pool at his feet, waiting patiently for their meal. I looked for Hilde, but the seal was missing. The photograph must have been taken after she was released back into the wild.