But now she said, as if there had been no period of silence between them, 'Neil's my friend, OK? Why do you want to talk about him anyway?'

'I don't. But I wish he'd civilize his living arrangements. That caravan is in direct line of my bedroom windows. It's an eyesore'.

'You'd need binoculars to see it from your windows.

And so is your bloody great power station an eyesore. That's in everyone's direct line; we all have to look at that.'

He put out his hand to her shoulder, warm under the gritty film of sand and said with mock pomposity: 'It's generally agreed that, given the constraints imposed by its function and the site, the power station is rather successful architecturally.'

'Agreed by whom?'

'I think so for one.'

'Well, you would, wouldn't you? Anyway, you ought to be grateful to Neil. If he didn't look after Timmy I wouldn't be here.'

He said: 'That whole thing is primitive. He's got a wood stove in there, hasn't he? If that blows up you won't last a minute, all three of you, particularly if the door jams.'

'We don't lock it. Don't be daft. And we let the fire go out at night. And suppose your place blows up. It won't be just the three of us, will it? Bloody hell it won't. Not only humans either. What about Smudge and Whisky? They've got a point of view.'

'It won't blow up. You've been listening to his scare-mongering nonsense. If you're worried about nuclear power ask me. I'll tell you what you want to know.'

'You mean while you're poking me you'll explain all about nuclear power? Oh boy, I'll certainly be able to take it in.'

And then she turned to him again. The pattern of sand on her shoulder glistened and he felt her mouth moving over his upper lip, his nipples, his belly. And then she knelt over him and the round childish face with its bush of bright hair shut out the sky.

Five minutes later she rolled apart from him and began shaking the sand from her shirt and jeans. Tugging the jeans over her thighs, she said: 'Why don't you do something about that bitch at Larksoken, the one suing Neil? You could stop her. You're the boss.'

The question – or was it a demand – shocked him out of his fantasy as crudely as if, unprovoked, she had suddenly slapped his face. In their four meetings she had never questioned him about his job, had seldom mentioned the power station except, as on this afternoon, to complain half seriously that it spoilt the view. He hadn't made a deliberate decision to keep her out of his private and professional life. When they were together that life hardly entered into his own consciousness. The man who lay with Amy in the dunes had nothing to do with that burdened, ambitious, calculating scientist who ran Larksoken, nothing to do with Alice's brother, with Elizabeth's ex-husband, with Hilary's ex-lover. Now he wondered, with a mixture of irritation and dismay, whether she had deliberately chosen to ignore those invisible keep-out signs. And if he had been unconfiding, then so had she. He knew little more about her now than when they had first encountered each other in the abbey ruins on a blustery August evening less than six weeks earlier, had for a minute stood and gazed and had then moved silently towards each other in a wordless, amazed recognition… Later that evening she had told him that she came from Newcastle, that her widowed father had remarried and that she and her stepmother couldn't get on. She had moved down to London and lived in squats. It had sounded commonplace enough but he hadn't quite believed it and nor, he suspected, did she care whether or not he did. Her accent was more Cockney than Geordie. He had never asked about the child, partly from a kind of delicacy but mainly because he preferred not to think of her as a mother, and she had volunteered no information about Timmy or his father.

She said: 'Well, why don't you? Like I said, you're the boss.'

'Not over my staff's private lives. If Hilary Robarts thinks she has been libelled and seeks redress I can't prevent her from going to law.'

'You could if you wanted to. And Neil only wrote what was true.'

'That is a dangerous defence to a libel action. Pascoe would be ill advised to rely on it.'

'She won't get any money. He hasn't got any. And if he has to pay costs it will ruin him.'

'He should have thought of that earlier.'

She lay back with a little thud and for a few minutes they were both silent. Then she said as casually as if the previous conversation had been trivial small talk which was already half forgotten: 'What about next Sunday? I could get away late afternoon. OK by you?'

So she bore no grudge. It wasn't important to her, or if it was, she had decided to drop it, at least for now. And he could put from him the treacherous suspicion that their first meeting had been contrived, part of a plan devised by her and Pascoe to exploit his influence with Hilary. But that, surely, was ridiculous. He had only to recall the inevitability of their first coming together, her passionate, uncomplicated, animal gusto in their Iove-making to know that the thought was paranoid. He would be here on Sunday afternoon. It might be their last time together. Already he had half decided that it had to be. He would free himself from this enslavement, sweet as it was, as he had freed himself from Hilary. And he knew, with a regret which was almost as strong as grief, that with this parting there would be no protests, no appeals, no desperate clinging to the past. Amy would accept his leaving as calmly as she had accepted his arrival.

He said: 'OK. About 4.30 then. Sunday the twenty-fifth.'

And now time, which in the last ten minutes seemed mysteriously to have halted, flowed again and he was standing at his bedroom window five days later watching the great ball of the sun rise out of the sea to stain the horizon and spread over the eastern sky the veins and arteries of the new day. Sunday the twenty-fifth. He had made that appointment five days ago and it was one that he would keep. But lying there in the dunes he hadn't known what he knew now, that he had another and very different appointment to keep on Sunday, September the twenty-fifth.

Shortly after lunch Meg walked across the headland to Martyr's Cottage. The Copleys had gone upstairs to take their afternoon rest and for a moment she wondered whether to tell them to lock their bedroom door. But she told herself that the precaution was surely unnecessary and ridiculous. She would bolt the back door and lock the front door after her as she left and she wouldn't be gone for long. And they were perfectly happy to be left. Sometimes it seemed to her that old age reduced anxiety. They could look at the power station without the slightest premonition of disaster and the horror of the Whistler seemed as much beyond their interest as it was their comprehension. The greatest excitement in their lives, which had to be planned with meticulous care and some anxiety, was a drive into Norwich or Ipswich to shop.

It was a beautiful afternoon, warmer than most in the past disappointing summer. There was a gentle breeze and from time to time Meg paused and lifted her head to feel the warmth of the sun and the sweet-smelling air moving against her cheeks. The turf was springy beneath her feet and to the south the abbey stones, no longer mysterious or sinister, gleamed golden against the blue untroubled sea.

She did not need to ring. The door at Martyr's Cottage stood open as it often did in sunny weather, and she called out to Alice before, in response to her answering voice, moving down the corridor to the kitchen. The cottage was redolent with the zesty smell of lemon overlaying the more familiar tang of polish, wine and wood smoke. It was a smell so keen that it momentarily brought back the holiday she and Martin had spent in Amalfi, the trudge hand-in-hand up the winding road to the mountain-top, the pile of lemons and oranges by the roadside, putting their noses to those golden, pitted skins, the laughter and the happiness.