He gazed at Elspeth, whose eyes were still closed in the appearance of sleep, but who had moved her arms and who was awake behind the shut eyelids. Matthew had been told that in every marriage there was a dominant partner – Angus Lordie had said that to him – and that if you looked closely enough you could always work out who this was. It was a subtle matter, Angus had said, but it was always there. But what did Angus know of marriage? If ever there was a bachelor by temperament, then it was Angus. At least he – Matthew – had some experience of marriage now, wore the ring Elspeth had given him, could write “married” the next time an official form asked for his status.

They got up together and went outside for a swim in the hotel pool. Then, refreshed, they walked the short distance to the beachside restaurant that had been recommended to them. The woman in the hotel had been as good as her word and had insisted on a table near the window, and now they sat looking down over the beach and the sea, a glass each of chilled West Australian wine at their side.

Matthew raised his glass to Elspeth. “The beginning,” he said.

She reached for her own glass. “To the beginning.”

“Shall we swim tomorrow?” he asked. “I don’t mean in the hotel pool. Shall we swim down there, off the beach?”

They had seen people swimming when they went for their walk earlier that day and also one or two people surfing, catching the waves quite far out and riding in until the waves collapsed in a maelstrom of sand and water.

“I’ve hardly ever swum in the sea,” said Elspeth. “I swam in Portugal once and then a few times when I went to Greece with a couple of girlfriends. We went to the islands. Corfu. Places like that.”

“But you’d like to swim here?”

“Of course I would. It looks very inviting.”

Matthew smiled, reaching out to take her hand on top of the table. “Don’t you think that we could just stay here? I could run a gallery. You could… well, you could do whatever you wanted to.”

She looked out of the window. “You can’t just go somewhere and not come back. Not these days.”

“Yes, you can,” said Matthew. “What about those football fans who went off to watch Scotland play in Argentina and never came back? They married local girls and stayed.”

Elspeth sighed. “That’s different,” she said. “People like that are very uncomplicated. They don’t think things through. They see that alcohol is cheap and they decide to stay.”

She paused. “It would be very nice to be that uncomplicated. To live for the day – not to think about what lies ahead.”

Matthew thought about this for a moment. “Goethe deals with that in Werther,” he said. “He was interested in the question of whether we could ever be happy if we worried about things.” He looked at her gently. “But of course there’s a world of difference between Goethe and the average Scottish football fan.”

It was an observation that nobody could deny. Now the waitress appeared. As she handed them the menu, she looked out of the window, out towards the beach. The waves, whipped up by a storm somewhere far out at sea, were pounding heavily on the beach, producing a low rumbling sound.

“Surf’s up,” said the waitress.

“I can’t wait to go swimming in that,” said Matthew.

“Be careful,” said the waitress. “You can get rips when it’s like this. Carry you right out.”

She opened her notebook, fiddling briefly with the tip of her pencil. “And then there’s the Great Whites.”

“Great White whats?” asked Elspeth.

The waitress looked at her pityingly; poor uninformed Pom. “Great White sharks,” she said. “They’re out there, and sometimes they come in a bit too close for comfort. People get taken, you know. Right off the beach. Sometimes in water that’s no deeper than this.” She held a hand at the level of her waist, watching the effect of her words. “My brother’s friend was taken a year or two ago. He was a surfer and the shark took a great bite out of his board. He almost made it back in on a wave, but the shark came for him again and that was it. It’s their element, you see. We’re the ones who shouldn’t be there.”

Matthew gazed out over the water, over the darkness. The tumbling lines of surf were white, laced with phosphorescence against the inky sea beneath. Their element.

Outside the restaurant, when Matthew and Elspeth made their way out after their meal, the night had that smell of sea, of iodine and foam, of churned-up water, of air that was washed and washed again in salt.

Matthew breathed in deeply, drawing the heady mixture into his lungs. “Let’s take off our shoes and walk along the beach,” he said, nodding in the direction of the darkness. “And then we can go up onto the path above the dunes, later on, and get back to the hotel that way.”

She took his hand. “Yes.”

“I feel wide awake,” he said. “It’s ten, or whatever, but I feel wide awake.”

She had read about jet lag and printed out a chart which purported to prevent it. “We shouldn’t have slept this afternoon. They say that you should try to stay awake until night-time.”

Matthew was not listening. He had run a few steps ahead of Elspeth, relishing the yielding of the sand beneath his feet. Now he turned round to face her, and she was a shadow in the darkness. There were lights off to their left, above the dunes, where the houses faced out to the sea, and there were the lights of the restaurant behind them. But for the rest it was dark, and filled with the sound of the waves.

“The Southern Cross,” called out Matthew, and pointed. “Look. Down there.”

She turned her head. The lights of Perth yellowed the sky immediately above them, but towards the horizon the sky became darker and more filled with stars. She saw where he was pointing and identified the tilting cross.

“That way,” said Matthew, “is nothing. Just the southern oceans and Antarctica. All that empty sea.”

She shivered. We were tiny creatures on small islands of land; suddenly she felt vulnerable.

Matthew had stopped walking and had dropped his shoes on the sand. Now he began to roll the bottoms of his trouser legs up. “I’m going to get my feet wet,” he said. “The water’s so warm. Have you tried it? It’s gorgeous.”

She shook her head. She did not want to get her feet wet, not now; there would be plenty of time for swimming tomorrow, when the surf would be less boisterous perhaps. Matthew shrugged. “You don’t have to,” he said. “Just see that my shoes aren’t carried away by the tide.”

He took the few steps needed to bring him to the edge of the water, where the waves, their energy spent, rolled in a final tiny wall up the beach. He felt the water sucking around his feet and the movement of the sand beneath his toes, as if the sea were trying to undermine him. They walked on, Elspeth in the moist sand above the water line, Matthew in the shallow rim of surf and spume, the sea at its highest just below his knee.

They were alone, or almost alone. A man walked past with a dog, a large black creature that tugged impatiently at its leash; they came out of the dark and disappeared back into the dark. Up on the path above the dunes an occasional figure could be made out against the light from the houses beyond or caught in the beam of a passing car. There was a wind now, the ragged end of the storm out at sea, but unusually warm, like the breath of an animal.

Matthew saw a piece of driftwood floating a few feet out, tossed about by the waves. Deciding to retrieve it, he pulled his trousers further up – and took a step towards it. As he did so, a wave, considerably larger than the others, suddenly swept in. From being in no more than eighteen inches of water, he now found himself in several feet, the water rising quickly up to his waist. Then there was another wave, also larger than the others, and he felt it at his chest. He tried to turn but lost his footing and felt himself go down in the water. He looked towards Elspeth and shouted. She was waving her arms about. He shouted again. “I’m…” But now he seemed to have lost the sand beneath his feet; he was out of his depth and the water seemed to be dragging him. He kicked out sharply, expecting the movement to get him safely back into the shallows, but the dragging was more pronounced now and there were more waves, so hard upon one another, tumbling over his head, buffeting him. They should be taking me back in, he thought, but they were not.