“Are you from one of them?”

“One of what?”

“One of those countries. Between here and the Urals.”

“Oorals. Yes, perhaps.”

That was an odd answer, he thought. Or maybe her sense of geography wasn’t so strong.

“Fancy a swim?”

“A swim?”

“Yes, you know. Swim. Splash splash, front crawl, breaststroke.”

“No swim.”

“Fine,” he said. He hadn’t meant it, anyway. “Bill, please.”

As he waited, he looked back across the damp concrete to the shingle. A beach hut had recently sold for twenty grand. Or was it thirty? Somewhere down on the south coast. Spiralling house prices, the market going mad: that’s what the papers said. Not that it touched this part of the country, or the property he dealt in. The market had bottomed out here long ago, the graph as horizontal as the sea. Old people died, and you sold their flats and houses to people who would get old in them in their turn, and then die. That was a lot of his trade. The town wasn’t fashionable, never had been. Londoners carried on up the A12 to somewhere pricier. Fine by him. He’d lived in London all his life until the divorce. Now he had a quiet job, a rented flat, and saw the kids every other weekend. When they got older, they’d probably be bored with this place and start acting the little snobs. But for the moment they liked the sea, throwing pebbles into it, eating chips.

When she brought the bill, he said, “We could run away together and live in a beach hut.”

“I do not think,” she replied, shaking her head, as if she believed he meant it. Oh, well, the old English sense of humor — takes a while for people to get used to it.