The foam subsides and her hand plunges into the hot water. She rubs the flannel in circles over the curved surface of a copper bowl. Polishing pewter is not so satisfying: the yellow patina fades but not dramatically, leaving a milky shadow that must be buffed away. Copper, though, readily bares its new soul: the dark tarnish turns first green, then black, transferring onto the flannel, wiping away. With her cupped hand, Sylvia rinses the bowl clean. The warm water sheets off. The copper glows, pink and unblemished as the cheek of a baby. Like rubbing a fist against a dirty mirror—suddenly one’s face appears.

The foam subsides; racing waves rake the churning, spiraled intricacies beneath the water’s surface. Gulls mourn overhead, riding the relentless breath of the shimmering sea. High shadowless clouds belie the violent sun, icy white and still against so celestine a sky they register the shock of temperature backward, like the sudden gush of cold water from a tap that one expected to be scalding. And yet the sand is hot, blistering to the soles of her bare feet; hot from the grassy dunes and the salt flats skimmed by horseflies, from the pastel bungalows and the shell-pocked concrete bunkers where the postcard vendors and ice cream stands take shelter, hot right down to the dark wet shadow of the tide line where she walks, gathering seashells for little Frieda, ankled in the cooling Atlantic on the Côte d’Opale, the beach at Berck-sur-Mer, across the Strait of Dover from England and home and her one-year-old girl.

In its foaming retreat, the seawater tumbles a luster onto the dulled surfaces below. Chinese hats, crimp-edged keyhole limpets. Bubbles clear as glass, popping at the pinhole tidal retreats of whelks and periwinkles. Tiny, hinged clam shells, coral hued, open like butterflies: Papillons, they are called, on which she and Ted supped last night by the dozens, steamed with butter and wine until the shells lost their fingernail gleam. Sylvia collects a handful and places them in Dido’s wicker lunch basket with a chambered conch, echoing and secret as a fetus, and looks up, shielding her eyes against the harsh aluminum light.