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here. He actually grew up somewhere else, on a different coast, in a village on the Isle of Wight, but a girl he met when he was young had a holiday home here and he got to know the area through her. When his parents were dead, he sold their house and invested the money in property here instead. For him, it was a breaking of ties, but I don’t think it was that big a leap – it’s still the same small, tight world he grew up in: the middle classes in all their faded red-trousered glory. He just swapped one privileged sailing community for another.
    South-London-on-sea, some people call it. It’s funny, that, how limited the imaginations of the wealthy few, how they all end up in the same handful of places on holiday. Lots of parents at my school have houses here or relatives in the area. Down here, in the summer with Zach, I was guaranteed to bump into someone I recognised. It made me uncomfortable, horribly self-conscious. I’d see them thinking, What’s that funny little librarian doing here? I wonder, with an abrupt sinking feeling in my chest, if I will see anyone I recognise now.
    I attach Howard to the lead and cross the last field to the path that runs down to the car park.
    A river trickles from the hill, under the bridge and on to the beach, spreading and turning silver across the sand. On the rocky inland side, plastic bags tangle in the weeds, a supermarket trolley is upended. Three boys, bikes spreadeagled, are using it as target practice. Locals? I cross the bridge to the short row of shops. Outside the Spar hover two mothers with a gaggle of small children. Holidaymakers – you can tell from the warmth of their ski jackets: goose-down padding, fur-lined hoods. (The local lads with the bikes are in T-shirts.) They are peering at a peeling notice on the door – an appeal for help in the search for a missing person. ‘God, can you imagine?’ the taller woman is saying almost under her breath. ‘Losing someone like that. Never knowing what’s happened to them. You’d search for them, wouldn’t you, everywhere you went?’
    ‘Unimaginable,’ the other woman says. She puts both hands on the shoulders of a small boy who has been trying to fit himself under the flap of the advert for Wall’s ice cream. ‘Do you think he’s dead?’ she adds over his head.
    I’d planned to buy a few essentials, but the women are blocking the entrance. I turn round, pretending to admire the view. A café-bar, the Blue Lagoon, tops the surf shop next door. On a whim, I climb the steps, Howard right behind me.
    It’s too early in the year for the balcony to be in use. The white plastic chairs are stacked to one side and the stripy umbrellas tightly furled. I push open the door to a hubbub. Families mainly, in smaller and larger groupings, spilling between the tables. It is a big, open-plan place, azure walls and bleached wood, model seagulls on sticks – a self-consciously ‘seaside’ form of decor Zach found nauseating. There’s a cloying smell of beer and slightly stale oil. Children are drinking hot chocolate. Somewhere a baby is crying.
    I sit at the bar, my back to the room, and order a coffee. I should eat but I have no appetite. The young waitress brings a bowl of water for Howard and kneels down to make a fuss of him. She is from Lithuania, she tells me when she straightens up; her parents live on a farm and have lots of dogs. She tilts her head while she is talking and there is a certain look on her pale, pinched face, a look you see on kids at school sometimes, an openness, a vulnerability, that makes me want to hug her. But we don’t talk for long because the owner emerges from the kitchen door. The waitress grabs a handful of menus and scurries off.
    I rack my brain for the owner’s name. Kumon? Something odd. When Zach came down to paint, the two of them would hang out, drink whisky, play poker.
    He’s seen me. He runs his hands through his greying surfer locks and then reflexively down the front of