The Comfort of Strangers by Ian McEwan

have been so frightened by it.’
    ‘Ah,’ said Colin.
    Mary waited. ‘Don’t you want to know what it was?’ Colin mumbled assent. Again Mary paused. ‘Are you awake?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘That photograph at Robert’s is of you.’
    ‘What photograph?’
    ‘I saw a photograph at Robert’s flat, and it was of you.’
    ‘Me?’
    ‘It must have been taken from a boat, a little way beyond the café.’
    Colin’s leg twitched violently. ‘I don’t remember that,’ he said, after a pause.
    ‘You’re falling asleep,’ Mary said. ‘Try and stay awake a moment.’
    ‘I am awake.’
    ‘When I was down at the café this morning I saw you on the balcony. I couldn’t work it out. Then I woke up and remembered. Robert showed me that photograph. Colin? Colin?’
    He lay perfectly still and his breathing was barely audible.

8
    A LTHOUGH IT WAS their hottest day so far, and the sky directly above was closer to black than blue, the sea, when they finally came to it down the busy avenue of street cafés and souvenir shops, was an oily grey along whose surface the gentlest of breezes pushed and scattered patches of off-white foam. At the water’s edge, where miniature waves broke on to the straw-coloured sand, children played and shouted. Further out there was the occasional swimmer lifting arm over arm in solemn exercise, but most of the vast crowd which stretched away to the left and right into the heat haze had come to sun itself. Large families sat round trestle tables preparing lunches of bright green salads and dark bottles of wine. Solitary men and women flattened themselves on towels, their bodies iridescent with oil. Transistor radios played and now and then there could be heard, above the babble of children playing, the falling sound of a parent calling a child’s name.
    Colin and Mary walked for two hundred yards over the hot, heavy sand, past lonely men with cigarettes and paperback books, past love affairs and through households with grandparents and hot babies in prams, looking for the exact place, near the water, but not too near the splashing children, away from the nearest transistor, and the family with two energetic Alsatian dogs, not too close to violate the privacy of the oiled couple on a pink towel, or to the concrete waste bin above which danced a thick cloud of blue-black flies. Each potential location was disqualified on at least one count. One empty space was suitable but for the litter scattered around its centre. Five minutes later they returnedto it and began to carry the empty bottles and cans and half-eaten pieces of bread to the concrete dustbin, but a man and his son, their black hair sleeked back with water, ran out of the sea and insisted that their picnic remain untouched. Colin and Mary walked on and agreed – this was their first conversation since stepping off the boat – that what they really had in mind was a beach which approximated, as far as possible, the privacy of their hotel room.
    They settled at last near two teenage girls whom a small knot of men were trying to impress by turning clumsy cartwheels and by throwing sand in each other’s eyes. Colin and Mary spread their towels side by side, stripped to their swimming suits and sat down facing the sea. A boat towing a water-skier moved across their field of vision, and some seagulls, and a boy with a tin chest strapped to his neck selling ice cream. Two of the young men were beating the arm of their friend so hard that the teenage girls cried out in protest. Immediately all the men dropped to their haunches in a horseshoe formation around the girls and introduced themselves. Colin and Mary held hands in a tight grip, working their fingers to reassure themselves that despite their silence, each was keenly aware of the other.
    At breakfast Mary had repeated her story about the photograph. She did so without speculation, simply the facts in the order they had presented themselves to her. Throughout Colin nodded, mentioned