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stands hands on hips, looking round, displaying the T-shape of hair on his muscled chest. The four of them potter for a further fifteen minutes or so, the man readopts his shirt, and they clamber into an old jalopy and drive off.
    â€˜I’m leaving to-morrow.’
    â€˜Ah…Come back again one day,’ says Gregory.
    â€˜Yes, I shall. Perhaps I shall.’
    For an Easter holiday the beach is surprisingly deserted. A couple walking dogs, three schoolboys sitting on scooters near the snack-van. We talk about the food situation, our experiences taking LSD, odds and ends. It’s very restful.
    â€˜They are going to pull down the Duke of Edinburgh Hotel,’ I say.
    â€˜Are they?’ Gregory responds vaguely. ‘That’s a shame. I haven’t been there for years. Here, let me give you this.’
    He pulls a bag from under a bush and forages in it and produces a small painting done on a square of hardboard. It is vaguely Islamic in manner, with some kind of gold lettering appearing out of a cosmic whoosh, but subtle.
    â€˜Oh, Gregory, that’s so kind. What do the letters say?’
    â€˜Don’t worry about that. It’s my own language. Look – the sun’s come out.’
    â€˜Your own language?’
    â€˜Yes. I invented a language. And an alphabet to go with it.’
    â€˜Gregory, excuse me for a moment.’
    I break away, churlishly in the circumstances. But it’s because I’ve spotted – guess who. He’s in the distance but I recognise the frowning one immediately. He must have dropped the family at home and come out again, for he’s by himself, walking with determined stride round the rocky headland where I spied him once before. As I jog across the beach he turns a corner out of my sight but I keep following, climbing energetically beyond the tar line. I’m excited. The Spanish poet Cernuda refers somewhere to being ‘sweetly confused, like a man anticipating some pleasure,’ and Eric Rohmer in one of his films mentions the torments of anticipation. It’s something like that, but more – I am in pursuit.
    The route grows more awkward, the rocks more extravagantly shaped. I’m slowed right down and find myself scrambling through what resembles a lunar landscape of mini-ravines and crags. I’ve never been this far round. Tumbled boulders form small enclosed spaces. Here and there, the stone has been worn flat by the diluvial lick – hidden sunbathing nooks in the season but now as silent as the grave.
    Pausing to catch my breath, I scan for indications. Perhaps he knew a shortcut to wherever he’s going, a secret passage through the maze of rocks. The terrain slopes sharply up from the shore and it looks as though in a couple of places there has been recent landslip…Then I register – not a noise exactly – perhaps a signal slightly beyond the range of the conscious senses – anyway a piece of information which causes me to climb carefully and peer between rocks.
    Not far away, in a sheltered scoop, I see him. His clothes have been removed and lie in a jumbled heap. He is naked, his shaggy haunches moving slowly against someone, who is also naked. The golden expanse of his back prevents disclosure of who the other is and anyway they are kissing softly, face to face. He stops, twists his torso, turns his head and sees me.
    Blood rushes up through my whole body, tingling hotly into head and face. He turns further. There is a flash of white teeth – he’s grinning! His erect penis bobs in the sunshine. He makes a gesture to me with his left arm and turns back to his partner, a young male. The gesture was entirely ambiguous. It could have meant either go away, you intruder, or come, join us in pleasure. When I was a little boy, if some uncertainty was frightening – if I thought I saw a ghost or someone’s behaviour confounded me – my whole instinct was to run towards the