"Stay with Jay, Asha," Emmy ordered, flinging the child at her brother.

"Who's that man, Emmy?" Jay shouted after her.

"Mum!" screamed Maya. "Mum, you're hurting me. What's the big rush?"

Passageway, kitchen, passageway. And then ... hall.

"Oh!"

Cathal was standing in the middle of the tiled floor, his bag at his feet. He didn't look much like an evil fairy in his blue canvas trousers and gray polo shirt.

"Cathal!" Maya shouted as her face lit up. She went to him without a flicker of hesitation and he put his arms out before he realized what he was doing.

"Maya, how you doin?'

"Great."

"Emmy." Cathal nodded and tried a smile.

"Cathal," Emmy said glacially.

"Mum?"

And there they stood at three points of a triangle. Mother, father and daughter. Together in the same room for the first time in their lives.

"Niall?" Emmy suddenly hollered up the stairs, still rooted to the spot. "Niall?"

Jonathan had left the house on purpose. He didn't want to be either a part of Sita's control freakery or a punching bag for Jay's anger.

"We're just asking you to be civil," he had said when Jay announced his intention to tell anyone who looked remotely like a real estate agent to get lost.

"Well, what about doing what I'm asking you to do?" his furious son had shouted. "You never ask me what I want! You just think about yourselves the whole time, don't you?"

"Well, what do you want?"

"You know what I want. I don't want to go back to fucking London."

"That is enough, Jay."

"Well I don't-"

"If I hear you using that word again, I'll-"

"You'll what?" Jay spat. "You're always saying you'll do something and you never bloody do. What word, anyway? Fucking? The word Niall uses all the time? The fuck word?"

Jonathan left him, screaming to himself in his bedroom. He couldn't get out of the house fast enough.

Because of the wind, Crannock beach car park was empty apart from an old red and black bus sitting in a far corner in what looked like a jumble of gas bottles, flexi-pipes and water tanks. The spot had been carefully chosen. It was sheltered and unobtrusive and he thought of Tamsin, even though he was trying not to. "God no, I've no desire to be a gypsy," she'd told him. Her words sounded distasteful now, like the memory of food poisoning from the one spoiled mussel in an otherwise delicious bowl of bouillabaisse.

He read the words on the back of the bus-Surfers Against Sewage-and realized it was the vehicle they had overtaken on the blind bend on the way to the manor, the one they had followed up the lane on their arrival at Bodinnick. He felt vindicated. Tamsin had made it sound as if the county was crawling with undesirables, and here was the only evidence of travelers he had so far seen, albeit three times. And it looked far from undesirable to him.

The girl bus driver with the sock on her head was nowhere to be seen, but in his desire not to intrude Jonathan swung his shiny gas-guzzling car as far away as possible, parking outside a wooden beach cafe.

He got out and headed for the dunes beyond, with the excuse of finding two or three large pebbles or small boulders for doorstops at the chapel and Bodinnick. At least he had something to thank Tamsin for. There had been a lot of door slamming lately, and it wasn't just the through-draft.

As he got closer, he could see that the confusion of pipes and bottles around the bus was in fact not a confusion at all but an ordered system of domestic supplies. There were curtains at all the windows, there was a chimney in the roof and boots by the door. Envy hit him so hard it hurt.

So simple living was alive and well, but just not at Bodinnick. The certain disappointment in himself that he always carried around had become even heavier lately. What use was he?

The irrational preoccupation with Tamsin had subsided, but there was something worse than anticlimactic about what had been left in its wake. Worse, he supposed, for the lack of climax in the first place. She had coaxed the one little glimmer of recklessness out of him, and although he knew he was better off without it he now felt utterly empty.

When they had got up from the sofa in her flat and walked back down the stairs, he waved good-bye to the part of himself he was leaving behind on the cushions, a part which had only just been born, a helpless wriggling little scrap of fantasy which would have needed so much nurturing it had hardly ever been viable. He wondered what Tamsin had done with it, whether she had nurtured it and grown it into the man she wanted it to be, created an entirely different encounter that she could tell her friends about, or whether she had scraped it off the canvas and binned it with the empty beer bottles.

She certainly wouldn't want to have anything to do with the bits that were left-the dull dependable bits, the Sita bit, the children bit, the chapel bit. The bits he needed to nurture and help grow into the man he wanted to be.

The wind was strong enough to whip the dry top layer of sand off the dunes, making him bow his head as he walked across the car park and up the railway-sleeper steps to the beach. But the sun was shining, too, and the clouds were dispersing quickly enough to give frequent blasts of the most unnatural blue. Once out of view, he brought his face to the wind, getting stung by the gritty dust.

From the ridge, where the sand was soft and sifted, blown in from the grassy tussocks rather than washed up by the sea, he could see for miles. The beach had graded itself not only in bands of color-demerara, corn, sludge-but in strand lines of seaweed and litter.

He began to walk down, looking for doorstop-size stones, and as his legs found a rhythm he began to feel better. He breathed in, feeling his lungs fill with fresh air, and he suddenly realized his chest pains had vanished. How long ago? Were they gone for good? Was this the first sign of progress?

He bent down to inspect a smooth small rock but its underneath was smeared with oil. One could ignore the occasional abandoned jelly shoe or bucket handle at the top end, the end where holidaying families with young children set up camp either through lack of imagination or stamina. But farther on, where the real grime began just as your feet stopped sinking into powder and instead began to crunch on the gritty shingle, the ugly detritus was so prolific that the scene could have been an artistic experiment in waste.

Rubbish imitating life, a collage of crap. Orange nylon rope lay in tangles between rocks, like families of dead octopuses. Oily lumps of rubber disguised themselves at a distance as large black boulders. Plastic lids, hundreds of them sea-rinsed to faded blues, pinks and greens sat like prize shells among the gray builder's gritstone. For some reason, he thought of the straw-yellow sand that he used to buy in sacks for the children's sandpit, and wondered what the hell toy shops did to it to make it so clean.

The flat, wet expanse stretched for quarter of a mile in each direction, book-ended by huge twin rocks rising from the spuming sea which seemed to be saying, "We were here first, and we will be here last, before human disregard and after it, too. We don't change."

Jonathan kicked a concertinaed water bottle and watched it scud across the hard ripples sculpted by the outgoing tide. Half a mile of human trash, dragged in and out twice a day, added to hour by hour, at sea and on land. The world was awash with scum.

He was halfway to the water's edge when the sound of crashing waves quickened his pace and made him want to run. In his head, he was in the salty waves, feeling the fresh foam wash him, smack him, sting him, stir up his anger, baptize him with something else, wash his infidelity away.

Had he really thought he would find something in the chapel? Or with a girl half his age? What? Satisfaction? The pleasure of change? Where would he find his purpose?

The chapel had given him a brief sense of it, but that was all. It was almost over now. Painting the chapel walls would take him another two days at most. He wanted to have done with them, inextricably linked as they were to Tamsin, but he was frightened. What then? Another project to keep the wolf inside him from the door?

He had maneuvered himself into his own tight spot, limewashed himself into a corner. He supposed he could throw himself into the children for the last few weeks. But what did he want to do with them? Why couldn't he find himself? Why? Why? Why?

He shouted the words into the wind, which swallowed them up and took them away from him as if he'd never even uttered them. He held his arms outstretched to feel the force-six rush off the sea.

Such indulgence made him oblivious of the two figures who had appeared from the distant dunes hauling two black binbags behind them. They saw him, though, as they saw most comings and goings on the beach, and for a while they watched him. Something about his flailing arms and his closeness to the water concerned them.

"Do you think he's all right?" the girl with the stripy sock hat asked her boyfriend.

By the time Jonathan turned to walk back to the car and resigned himself to make the peace at home for his unexplained departure, the young couple had decided he wasn't about to walk into the ocean and end it all, so they had stopped watching.

At which point he noticed them. They would walk a few steps, bend over, pick something up and then move on. They were moving across the sand in a straight line, too far apart to be holding any reasonable conversation.

Somehow, with the entire beach between them, the three of them migrated toward each other-a mutual curiosity that would never have found its way out in the city. When they got close enough to view each other in detail, Jonathan saw that the lad with the fuller bag was picking up litter. He was about twenty, with matted dirty brown dreadlocks under his huge hooded fleece. His beard was darker than his hair, thin and soft and tufted. He had a ring in the rim of his nostril. The other was the girl bus driver and she seemed to be collecting seaweed. He was surprised to see she was about eight months pregnant.

"Hello," he said, nodding. He intended to walk on, but found himself stopping.

"Hi," the girl smiled. She was very pretty. Her blond hair was in thin plaits and her skin had a rosy antenatal glow.

"Sorry about that. I thought I had the beach to myself."

"Sorry about what?" Her young voice betrayed privilege.

"All that running and jumping."

"Looked pretty sane to me, mate," her boyfriend lied. They hadn't met at school, that was for sure. He wore bracelets made of bike chains, and there was a thread of red shiny wire woven expertly in and out of the links. "It's big enough, innit? Makes better sense than sitting in a bloody deckchair all day."

The girl laughed and twisted the neck of her binbag. "We're trying to clean up a bit."

"It could do with it. I noticed how bad it was on my way down. I saw a syringe back there."

"Oh, you didn't pick it up, did you?" the girl asked, making him wonder how good a private school education she had rejected.

"No, I didn't," he answered unsurely.

"Very sensible." She waved her hands at him. They were both wearing heavy-duty gloves. "Don't touch anything like that without a pair of these."

"No, good point."

There was a lull, then Jonathan spoke again. "What are you doing it for? Fun, or money, or social conscience?"

"Because no other fucker will," the boy said, putting his thumb and forefinger on his nose ring and tugging it, but there was something stage-managed in his anger.

"Is that your bus in the car park?"

"Yeah. It's knackered at the moment, though. We tried to move on the other day, but I think I clipped the sump pump on a boulder or sumfin' and then we got wheel spin 'cos the sand was so wet, and, well, she couldn't help me push it, could she? Not like that."

The boy raised his eyebrows with a proud smile and Jonathan noticed that they were pierced too. "So I gave it some welly, and I think I fucked it."

Jonathan knew it was the point in the conversation where one would normally commiserate, give a mild verbal pat on the back and move on. But he didn't want to.

"D'you want a hand to get it going again?"

"Nah, you're all right, mate. We're not in any hurry to go anywhere. Not unless it's to the hospital for the baby and we'll get a better bus to take us then, I think."

They were walking together now. Jonathan bent down to pick up an unidentifiable gnarl of plastic.

"I really wouldn't do it if you haven't got gloves."

Jonathan nodded. I'm married, a father, he wanted to tell them. I have actually got a life.

Back in the car park, he watched her tip out the contents of her bin liner. A repellant heap of tampon applicators, nappies, condoms, loo fresheners and plastic strips from sanitary towels fell out, trapped in seaweed.

"That's what happens when people use the sea as a bin," she said. "We'll dry it out and set fire to it."

"The toilet, Mog, not the sea," said her boyfriend affectionately. "People use the toilet as a bin. That's how all this crap gets here. They don't just chuck it straight in the sea, do they? They might think that was too bad. But they don't think it's bad when they chuck it down the bog, do they?"

"We shouldn't really be taking the seaweed as well," said Mog, removing a glove to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear. "The sandhoppers need it, and the squat lobsters and the birds and everything. But this lot was so revolting."

"Doesn't look fit for anything very much, does it?" Jonathan said. "Are you sure it's a good idea, dealing with all this toxic stuff when you're pregnant? You're careful, are you?"

"Dean makes sure I am, don't you?" she said, clipping back on an ear cuff that had fallen off.

"Yeah, course. Sure you don't want a cup of tea?"

Shyness stopped him accepting. "Maybe next time. I should go."

"See you again, then. Bring your gloves."

"I will."

As Jonathan got back in his car, he wondered how soon would be too soon, and what made some people get to the point quicker than others. And he still hadn't got his doorstops.

"Mum won't open her sewing room door," Maya whispered to Niall on the landing. "She keeps saying she'll be out in a minute, but I've been waiting here for ages."

"It's not your fault, sweetheart," he told her, suddenly so incensed with Emmy's behavior that he banged on the door without effect. It had always been about extremes with Emmy-she had the capacity to be both happier and sadder than anyone else he knew-but this was getting silly.

Maya looked at him with her nose screwed and her lips slightly curled. "Who says I thought it was?"

Niall laughed, relieved. "No one. I just thought-"

"Oh, God!" Maya groaned. "Grown-ups are always 'just thinking.' I don't care whether she comes out or not. I want to go outside, and I've promised I will ask first."

"Since when?"

"Since Cathal came. Don't ask me. Eggshell rule." She shrugged.

"Right. Cathal? What's he got to do with it?"

"Search me. What's wrong with Mum, anyway? I thought she'd be happy now you and Kat have split up."

"Oh, we have, have we? Who told you that?"

"I heard Kat tell you to, you know, the 'f' word you're so fond of."

"That doesn't necessarily meant we've..." he said feebly.

"But you have, haven't you? I looked in your room and you've put her stuff in a box."

"I think I ought to tell Kat before I tell you, don't you?"