A Coffin For Two

2

‘This isn’t working Oz, is it.’

Primavera put her drink on the tiled floor of the terrace, and propped herself up on an elbow. She was wearing the bottom half of a yellow bikini, and a sad and disappointed frown. There was something about the frown which made me forget all about the rest of her.

In most people’s lives there comes a moment when they are convinced that they have discovered perfection on two legs.

Invariably, absolutely without exception, they are wrong.

Nobody’s perfect. I know that now. But when first I clapped eyes on Primavera Phillips, I really believed that she was that one unique being. I went on believing that, all the way through our incredible adventure, right up to the moment when she saved our lives in that wood in Geneva, and beyond that … for a few more days.

Yes, I thought the sun shone out of every orifice in Prim’s body, until the moment when she put her proposition to me; the moment when, sat there in my old Nissan, with our client’s nine hundred and something thousand quid in a bag in the back ready to be returned to him, she stuck that gun (okay, it was empty, but just for one moment …) in my ribs and proposed that we should keep the lot. It came as a total surprise when she showed me that she was susceptible to greed and lust just like everyone else.

She really would have taken all of the money and run, leaving our client up to his neck in the ordure. For a while I almost ran alongside her. When you have that amount of dough in your hands, never being able to come home again doesn’t seem like much of a problem.

That was when my mum put in an appearance.

As I pondered the opportunity of being a near-millionaire, I saw her there in my car, quite clearly, over Prim’s shoulder. Just like Prim on the terrace, she was frowning and shaking her head with that sad resignation which came over her whenever I had done something really stupid, or when she had caught me in the act of it.

When I was a kid in Anstruther, my maw had a great knack of showing up at the very moment when I didn’t want to see her. Wee Oz and mischief tended to be synonymous, and my wrong-doings seemed to draw her like a magnet. I looked at my vision of her, over Prim’s shoulder in the car, and I remembered that awful pre-pubescent time, when inexplicable curiosities started to stir, questions that had never occurred before, about how boys and girls are different, and why, exactly.

There I’d been, crouched at the bathroom door, peering through the keyhole with one wide eye at my sister’s white bum and tanned thigh as she stepped carefully into the bath, managing without knowing it to answer none of my questions.

She hadn’t coughed, said ‘ahemm’ or anything. My maw wasn’t a theatrical person. I’d simply known that she was there from the way the hairs had prickled on the back of my neck. I fancy still that I heard a very quiet ‘pop’ as I unglued my eyeball from the keyhole and turned round.

She had worn the same expression then, a sad disappointed frown. She hadn’t said a word, just shaken her head and turned away.

Mac and Flora, my dad and maw, weren’t smackers. In all our childhood, they never laid a finger on Ellie or me. They didn’t even shout at us … well, hardly ever. Whenever either of us transgressed they simply let us know, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that we had disappointed them; we knew that they didn’t love us any the less because of our sin, but that it had made them sad because they loved us so much. That hurt more, and had a more curative effect than any leathering, I can tell you.

So I looked over my lover’s shoulder at my lost mother’s frown, and I knew that Flora Blackstone hadn’t raised the sort of lad who could run off with someone else’s money and live with himself thereafter. I realised, in a split-second spasm of remembered grief, the extent to which I’d missed her since she died. I realised too that I did not love Primavera Phillips more than I’d ever loved any woman who ever lived.

I still love her, though, and no mistake. In the end, after a very short, slightly heated discussion, we compromised. We did what my dad, Mac the Dentist, would have done in the same circumstances. I know this, because afterwards, I asked him. ‘Sure as hell, son,’ he said. ‘I’d have screwed the bastard to the wall too.’

Instead of heading into the sunset at high speed, like the thieves we would have been, we went to see our client. We told him the whole story of what had happened in our pursuit of his stolen money. We told him of the risk we had taken, and were taking still, in withholding information from the police. We told him how close we had come to dying, and of the grisly end of our would-be murderer.

As he sat there, white-faced, we told him, finally, that we reckoned that a third of the recovered proceeds was a reasonable price to pay for our continued shtumm.

And he agreed. On the spot, with barely a blink. I guess that when you’re facing bankruptcy, disgrace, maybe even an extended holiday in Saughton Prison, and two people walk into your office and offer you your life back, you know exactly what it’s worth to you.

So there we were, Prim and I, with well upwards of three hundred grand in a bag, and with the world as our mollusc. On top of all that we were in lurv. Maybe each of us had cast aside our rose-coloured spectacles, but still we only had eyes for each other.

Without any disagreement, we decided that we would regard our windfall as a gift from a grateful friend, and that the Tax Man could have his cut out of my stiff invoice to our grateful client. However, just in case the Tax Man didn’t agree with us, we decided that we should go to live out of his clutches for a while. We decided that we would go on a voyage of discovery, not just in search of new places, but of ourselves, of what we would become as a couple.

So I began to wind down my private enquiry business, leaving all my clients in good hands, with the proviso that one day I might be back. Prim put her flat in the hands of the estate agents, with instructions to sell. I paid off the loan on my loft and put it in the hands of Jan More, my childhood friend, youthful lover, and potential step-sister, with the request that she rent it out and send me some of the proceeds.

Next, with the same sorrowful reluctance I guess I would have felt on seeing a child off to boarding school, I delivered Wallace, my faithful companion and loft-mate, into the hands of my dad, the only other man I could think of who was daft enough to take on an iguana as a pet.

There followed an almost endless round of hugging, selective kissing and general goodbyeing: in Edinburgh to a smiling, tearful Jan and her lesbian lawyer girlfriend Anoushka Turkel; in Anstruther to my dad and Auntie Mary, Jan’s mum, the two of them an official couple at last, and to Ellie, gathering her two boys around her as she cut herself loose mentally from her useless, uncaring husband; in Auchterarder, to mum and dad Phillips, living happily in the time-warp that was Semple House, and to their younger daughter Dawn, the actress, as idyllically happy as Prim and I with Miles Grayson, her new leading man.

Finally, all goodbyes said, we fuelled up the nearly-new, one-careful-lady-owner Frontera Ozmobile and headed south … without the faintest bloody idea of where we were going.

We had taken much the same route into France a few weeks earlier, terrified, excited, fleeing — or so we had thought — from a relentless and murderous pursuer. This time was different. This time we sat on the dockside in St Malo, newly landed from Jersey on a sunny Wednesday morning in July, with the cheque book for our new joint account in Grindlay’s Bank clean, crisp and virgin in our luggage, and with our gold cards gleaming in our pockets.

‘This is it, partner,’ I said, giving Prim’s hand a squeeze. ‘Decision time. Where’s it to be? The Cote d’Azur? Tuscany? Greece?’

She wrinkled her amazingly cute nose. ‘Been there. Done all of them. Still got the Tshirts.’

‘Back to Switzerland?’

‘No!’ she said, firmly. ‘Never again. Ever!’ I nodded in agreement, breathing a sincere sigh of relief. Switzerland is the one place I never want to see again either.

‘France is expensive, even for us,’ she said. ‘Even though I speak the language. Spanish can’t be too difficult to pick up, though. Yes, let’s try Spain.’

I pondered her choice. I’d been to Benidorm. ‘Which part?’ I asked her, doubtfully. ‘It’s a big place. They say Seville’s nice, though,’ I added, trying as always to be constructive.

She looked at me, wrinkling her eyebrows this time as well as her nose. ‘Seville? In mid-summer? No, my love. I want to be able to get up in the morning and look at the Mediterranean, and I don’t want it too hot to got out during the day.’

‘Sod it! Let’s just drive. We’ll know when we get there.’

So we headed out of St Malo, more or less due south, picking our way carefully round Rennes, gasping as we climbed over the soaring bridge across the river in Nantes, and on towards Bordeaux and then Toulouse, more grateful with every kilometre for the air-conditioning which the Frontera’s one careful lady owner had been thoughtful enough to instal.

I wanted to stop just past Toulouse, but Prim, doing her best to be excited as a schoolgirl, insisted that we drive on until she could see the Mediterranean. It was touch and go, but as we approached Narbonne, we took a curve and there it was, the last of the daylight glinting on its flat-calm waters as it stretched out silver-grey in the distance.

We found a hotel in the old French town: it looked nothing fancy from the outside, but the owner’s eyes lit up as I flashed my gold card, and he showed us to his best room, en-suite, overlooking a leafy avenue, and with an impressive four-poster bed.

‘Oh yes,’ said Prim, as she saw it. ‘I think I’m going to like this.’

She did. So did I. Very much.

The next day shaped the next part of the rest of our lives. Yet it began just like any other in our new existence. We made love — you can’t practise hard enough, I always say — readied ourselves for the world outside, and had breakfast. Prim settled our bill with her card, said goodbye to our host in her excellent French, and followed me out to our car.

I watched her as she climbed into the Frontera. God, but she was beautiful; her denim shorts emphasised the curve of her hips and the tanned smoothness of her legs, her breasts swung heavily in her sleeveless cotton shirt as she pulled herself up into the high front seat. She smiled at me with her big brown eyes, a shaft of sunlight glinting through the glass roof on the tips of her blonde forelock. Just as I had every day of the incredible weeks since she had come into my life, I fell in love all over again.

‘Don’t take all day,’ she called with a hint of a laugh. I vaulted, almost, into the driver’s seat and as I strapped myself in she leaned across and kissed me. ‘Let’s go,’ she whispered. ‘Today we’ll find what we’re looking for. I can tell.’

We headed west out of Narbonne, down the autoroute towards Perpignan. We had been in too much of a rush the night before to appreciate the way the French landscape changes as you approach the Mediterranean. Now, driving along only a few miles from its coast, we were struck by the red rocks and soil and by the relative lack of vegetation, other than the ordered rows of the Languedoc vineyards. Prim pointed away up to her right, where a big sign in a field proclaimed that we were in Fitou country.

‘Driving through France is a bit like being lost in a wine-list, isn’t it,’ she muttered.

It was as if the mountains jumped out at us. I swung the Frontera round a long curve, and there they were, a new, sudden, skyline, taking our breath away in simultaneous gasps.

‘Big buggers, these Pyrenees, aren’t they?’

For once Prim was lost for a reply. She just sat there, staring ahead, her mouth slightly open, fingertips to her lips. I had never seen her awestruck before. Somehow it was nice to know that she could be.

There had been overnight rain, and the morning was bright and clear, early enough still for there to be no heat haze to obscure the view. They stood out jagged against the blue sky, with the sun lighting their eastern slopes, their ravines and their valleys showing as dark shadows cast by its glare.

They towered over us as we crossed the plain around Perpignan, until at last the road began to rise, taking us ever more steeply into their foothills. Just like the mountains, the border would have taken us by surprise too, had we not reached an autoroute pay station a few miles earlier. What did take us by surprise, though, was the big Aztec monument overlooking the vehicle lanes.

It seemed for a while that we had more chance of finding an Aztec than a border guard. If we had been expecting a fond farewell from France or a big hello from Spain, we would have been disappointed. There was no one in sight at the French control point. I drove through slowly towards the Spanish station, where a man in uniform sat, smoking a cigarette and reading a newspaper. He didn’t even look up as Prim waved our passports.

‘Hasta la vista, Jimmy,’ I called as we headed into Spain down another steep incline, away from a pass, the possession of which, I guessed, had been a strategic imperative for centuries, and which was guarded now by a man with a fag and the sports section.

A few miles along the road we came to a service area. ‘Pull in there,’ said Prim. A command, not a request.

I expected her to make for the ‘ladies’ sign, but instead she headed into the shop, emerging a couple of minutes later with a map, and two litres of bottled water. ‘Let’s do some exploring,’ she said.

Her expression was so intense that it made me laugh. ‘There’s more to Spain than this, love,’ I said.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘But one piece at a time, okay? I don’t want to leave those mountains behind just yet.’ She spread out her map, located our position and traced a line with her finger. ‘The next big town’s called Figueras. Let’s go past that, and head for the coast. Here, move over and let me drive.’

There was more than a hint of childish excitement about her enthusiasm. This was a new Prim, not the capable, well-organised woman I knew, whose every decision was weighed carefully and reached logically. I looked at her, and I loved her even more.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Gimme the map.’

She handed it over, and we swapped seats without getting out of the car, clambering awkwardly across each other, managing to avoid the obstacle of the big gear lever. I strapped myself into the passenger seat and we headed off, abandoning the autopista — the more you learn about Spanish drivers, the more appropriate that name seems to be — as the autoroute becomes in Spain, and taking to the punters’ free-of-charge highways.

I spread the map out on my lap and retraced our progress from the border with a finger. ‘This road bypasses Figueras. If you take the first exit south of that, and head east, then …’ She cut me off with a nod and a smile.

Past Figueras, we followed the signs for Roses, but found instead a place called Ampuriabrava. It was a huge marina rather than a town, a modern, concrete Venice, a network of wide canals with houses jammed together along their banks, each with a mooring rather than a garage. Prim pulled the Frontera to a halt and we climbed out, into the rising heat of late morning. We stared down one of the canals. There was a boat moored outside every house. I pointed to one of them, a long, three-masted schooner.

‘See that?’ She nodded, slightly awestruck once more. ‘Well, my lovely, we think we’re rolling in it, but I’ll bet you we couldn’t buy half of that bloody thing.’

‘No,’ she agreed. ‘But only you would think of buying half a boat.’ We headed out of Ampuriabrava in silence and followed the map south.

We found St Marti with our stomachs rather than with any navigational skills. We had driven through a narrow, dull town called San Pedro Pescador, then past kilometres of half-filled campsites, without, in all that time, clapping eyes on the Mediterranean, when all of a sudden a village loomed up before us, standing walled and rugged on a hill, with an ancient church as its crest.

Prim swung the car into an empty space at the roadside. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s take a look.’

‘Thought you wanted to be by the sea.’

She shrugged. ‘Right now I want to be beside a toilet. After that … I don’t know about you, but I’m bloody hungry. Anyway, if that map’s right the sea should be just beyond the village.’

I looked around. There were scores, maybe hundreds of cars by the side of the road and in the official parks. More than a few had wind-surfers on their roofs.

A tarmac path sloped up toward the village. Arm in arm we followed it, under a stone arch that looked a few hundred years old, and into a tiny square with a red monoblock walkway that still looked brand new.

I read the street sign. ‘Placa Petita. Wonder where the big one is?’

It wasn’t far. The red-brick road led us on up a narrow alley, shaded even from the midday sun. All of a sudden we were aware of a buzz of sound. As we reached the mouth of the alley it grew until it was almost a roar.

The pathway stopped as suddenly and unexpectedly as it had begun. We stood at the mouth of the alley and looked out into the square which was the heart of the tiny village.

It was filled with dozens of round wooden tables, and four times as many cane chairs. They sat out on gravelled earth, under huge parasols. Some were all white, others had a blue stripe. Spread out together they made the place look as if it was covered by a patchwork marquee.

The tables were jammed together tight and almost all of them were in use, by a congregation of the most casually dressed people I had ever seen in my life. All ages, all shapes, all sizes, none of them wearing many clothes. At least a dozen waiters danced nimbly among them, bearing trays of drinks and food. One of them swept past us, swinging three plates of fat, grilled sardines, slaked with garlic and olive oil, under our noses.

The square was bounded on three sides by old stone buildings. Every one of them housed a restaurant and bar, and each one seemed to own its own area of ground on which tables were set out, packed together tightly with just enough room to allow access. Above the parasols rose three young trees, with birds singing in their branches.

The old church stood at the head of the square. Its single great round window seemed to look down on the village like a benevolent eye. I couldn’t help myself; I smiled up at it, and nodded. I stood there for a while, beaming, trying but failing to pick out a dominant language among the noise.

At last Prim squeezed my arm. She grinned too. ‘A bit different from that concrete boatyard, eh? Come on.’ She pulled me up the path, which was gravel now, into the heart of the square, looking around for an empty table. ‘Over there,’ she said, pointing to her left, towards a space near the entrance to one of the restaurants, dragging me behind her as she made for it.

The waiter stepped up just as we got there. He was a tallish bloke, about my height, forty-something but with jet-black hair, and a long face which broke into a pleasant smile as he drew back one of the cane chairs for Prim. It didn’t strike me until later that he was less bronzed than I had expected a Spanish waiter to be. In fact it stood to reason, since he spent most of his summer under the parasols.

I was reaching into the back of my brain for my High School Spanish when he beat me to it. ‘Francais? Deutsch? Anglais?’ he asked. At once I realised why I hadn’t picked out a language among the hubbub. It was because there were so many of them being spoken at once. I shook my head as I sat down. He looked puzzled until Prim said, ‘Ecossais.’

‘Ah,’ he said, his smile widening. ‘Scottish!’

I know quite a few English people, but I only give this tip to the ones I like. So pay attention. When you’re travelling in France or Spain, always say that you’re a Jock.

‘This your firs’ time in L’Escala?’ the waiter went on, loosened up more than a bit.

We both looked puzzled. So did he, for a moment. ‘You not staying in L’Escala, no? It is the next town,’ he explained, waving loosely towards the south, ’beyond the ruins of Empuries.’

Prim shook her head and gave him her best schoolgirl smile. ‘We’re not staying anywhere yet. We’re still considering where to stop. But right now we’re only thinking about lunch.’

He smiled. ‘Of course. I am sorry. The menu.’ He bowed slightly and presented us with two thick brown folders, with leaves encased in plastic, each page with a wee flag sticking out to denote the language. We headed straight for the Union Jack.

So, on our first day in Spain we sat under the parasols in St Marti, eating salad and pizza, washed down with cold, gold beer. It was mid-afternoon when we paid the waiter and stepped between the tables, now mostly unoccupied, and out into the sun.

Most of the people leaving the restaurant had headed up another gravel path which led round the side of the church, past a two-storey villa with mosaic patterns on its walls, and with an almost flat roof. We followed them slowly in the heat, Prim with her arm wrapped around my waist. As we passed the house, the path took a sudden downward slope and there it was, the Mediterranean, spread before us at last. We stood beside a low wall bounding a crescent-shaped viewpoint, and gazed out dumbstruck.

I love views. All my life my favourite has always been the outlook from my bedroom in my dad’s house in Anstruther, across the Firth of Forth towards the May Island and beyond to the Bass Rock. But the first time that I stood beneath the crest of St Marti d’Empuries and gazed around the great crescent of the Golf de Roses, it took my breath away.

Looking north, Prim and I recognised at once the high-rise apartment blocks of Ampuriabrava, which we had seen close up earlier that day. Beyond, like white pearls set into the side of the mountain which rose steeply from the sea at the distant mouth of the bay, were the villas of the town of Rosas. A strip of golden beach ran round the circumference of the bay, almost from its northern tip, until it was cut by the promontory on which we stood, and from which a long stone pier jutted out three hundred metres into the sea. The water was blue and calm.

We followed it as it curved south, past the remnants of an ancient sea wall, past the Greco-Roman ruins of which, we learned later, St Marti had been the forerunner. The semi-circle of the great bay was completed as the beach ended in another rocky rise. The town of L’Escala stood on its southern tip, no more than two kilometres away from where we stood. Its houses and shops seemed to shine, gleaming white in the sun. We looked for high-rise blocks but saw none. As with St Marti, the bell-tower of its church was the highest point on its skyline.

We must have stood there for five minutes, struck silent by the simple symmetrical beauty of the gulf, watching the motor cruisers as they cut white lines through the blue surface of the mill-pond sea.

At last Prim gave me a squeeze. I looked down at her. She was as lovely and happy as I’d ever seen her. ‘This is it, Oz,’ she said. ‘This is where I’d like to be.’

I laughed. ‘Christ, love, we haven’t been in Spain for half a day yet.’ I protested, but my heart wasn’t in it; because I knew that I felt just as she did.

Logic has nothing to do with it. Places are like people. There are millions of them, and you encounter new ones on a daily basis, but every so often you see one and you fall in love with it. That’s how it was the first time I saw my loft in Edinburgh. That’s how it was the first time I saw Wallace, my iguana, in Pet City. (It didn’t even matter when I found out that he was a bloke.) I looked once again across the bay towards L’Escala, and I thought about all the places and people I loved. Anstruther, Edinburgh, my dad, my poor mum, Ellie, my nephews: the place felt comfortable among them all.

So I wrapped my arms around Primavera, and I kissed her, ignoring the raised eyebrows and half-smile of a fat Germanic type a few yards away. ‘You sure?’ I asked.

‘Sure as I’ve ever been about anything.’

‘For how long?’

She smiled. ‘Who knows? That’s the thing about this trip. Voyage of discovery, remember. Let’s find somewhere to stay tonight, and take a longer look tomorrow.’

I looked back up the hill, towards the Casa Forestals, as the flat-roofed villa seemed to be called from the sign by its door, and St Marti. ‘That’s no more than a hamlet. There may be nothing there.’

Even Prim’s shrugs seem optimistic. ‘We’ll never know until we ask,’ she said, taking charge. ‘Let’s go back up and see our multi-lingual pal. He’ll tell us what there is.’

The square was quiet as we climbed back up to the village. I checked my watch. It was three forty-five; respite for the bars and restaurants before the evening rush, I guessed. Our waiter friend was seated at one of his own tables, at the door of his establishment. For the first time I read the name above the door. ‘Casa Minana — Snack Bar.’

He stood up as we approached, with a smile that struck me as more than simply professionally friendly. He offered us a table. ‘You like to drink? I am afraid that the kitchen is closed for two hours, but maybe a sandwich is possible.’

My partner, now in total command, shook her head. ‘No more food. But two beers, yes please.’ She sat down and I followed. He disappeared into the dark interior of Casa Minana, re-emerging a minute later with two frosted globes of Spanish lager.

‘Thank you,’ said Prim. ‘We were wondering; we’d like to stay around here tonight. Do you know if there are any rooms available?’

He frowned. ‘Normally there are zimmer … sorry’ — he corrected his linguistic lapse — ‘rooms there, and there.’ He nodded towards two other buildings on the square. ‘But is summer, and all is occupied. You try L‘Escala, yes? There are places there. Hostal Garbi, is very good.’

Prim nodded. ‘Thank you.’ He must have read disappointment in her eyes, for his face fell. All at once it brightened up again.

‘Unless you like to stay here for a few days. My family, we have a few apartments we rent in the summer. They are all occupied, but there is another next to them. A Dutch man, he asked me to try to sell his apartment for him, and he say that if anyone want it I can rent it. If you want to stay for maybe a week, I could let you have that.’

My Scottishness surfaced. ‘How much?’

‘The owner say forty thousand pesetas for the week.’ He paused, and my mental arithmetic worked that out as two hundred quid. ‘Is very cheap for St Marti in July.’ Suddenly he grinned. ‘Cheaper than we rent our apartments. Which is why…’

Prim smiled back at him and finished his sentence.’… it’s still empty and you are only telling us about it because yours are full.’

He blushed slightly and shrugged his shoulders. ‘Is business,’ he said, disarmingly. ‘Would you like to see it?’

Prim and I nodded spontaneously, and simultaneously. The waiter lobbed the tray on which he had brought our beer, and which he still held, across to a much older man who had appeared in the doorway as we spoke. The veteran caught it deftly, without a word, and took a pace outside.

‘My name is Miguel,’ said our new friend, as we stood up. ‘Miguel Minana. This is my father. His name is Jaume.’ We introduced ourselves and shook hands formally with the two Minanas.

Miguel motioned us to follow and led us away from the snack bar, up towards the church then round to the left. We realised for the first time how small St Marti is, no more than three narrow, brick-paved alleys, linked at the foot by a fourth and opening out at the top into the square, and the area in front of the church. Our escort stopped at a plain yellow-painted wooden door at the top of the most distant alley, which even then was no more than thirty yards from the head of the square, defined by the low stone wall in front of the church. I looked up at the building, and took a wild guess that it was, maybe, two hundred years old.

‘This is it,’ he said, unlocking the door with a key from the vast bunch which hung on his belt. He stepped inside and switched on a light. A narrow stone stairway rose in front of us. ‘Is up here, at the top,’ he said, starting to climb. ‘Very nice apartment. All new furniture, new kitchen, almost everything new. The owner and his wife not speak any more. That is why he want to sell.’

The stairway took three turns before we came to the apartment. No other doorways opened off it, but it was lit by three slit windows one above the other on successive levels. There were two keyholes in the brown-stained front door, each concealing a heavy, three-bolted double lock. Finally after much sorting of keys, Miguel unlocked them both, stepped inside and threw a switch. There was a hum as the motorised shutters, which covered every window, rose as one, letting the sunlight spill into the flat.

‘Is very good, the way it faces,’ he said. ‘The sun only comes in the windows at the back, but unless you roll out the blind, you have it on the terrace all day. And this is the highest apartment on this side of the village, so it has no one can see in. You look round. See if you like.’

Both Prim and I had been expecting something old-fashioned. But at some point in the last twenty years or so the place had been gutted and rebuilt. We stepped into a big living area, with cream tiles on the floor and pristine, white-painted walls.

Doors on either side led into two bedrooms, the one on the left, en-suite. The other bathroom, and a spacious fully-fitted kitchen with washer-drier, fridge-freezer, halogen cooker, microwave and even dish-washer were set on either side of the entrance, and had good-sized windows which looked back down towards the square.

The living area was quality furnished, with two wide wood-framed sofas, with big, soft, pale blue cushions, a single chair, a round dining table set, and a sideboard. A television and video sat on a corner table, beside a big open fireplace, with, I noticed, a Sky satellite decoder, minus card. The stuff in the bedroom was of the same style and standard. I guessed that at some point while they were still together, the Dutch couple had gone to the local furniture store and bought the lot en bloc.

The living room and both bedrooms opened out onto a big balcony. In the larger bedroom Prim drew the muslin curtains aside, threw the double doors open and stepped out. ‘Oh!’ she cried out loud. ‘Bloody hell!’ So did I. The terrace was L-shaped, since the smaller bedroom, on the right, was set back from the line of the living room. A quick count of its floor tiles told me that it was around five metres deep and at least twelve wide. It stood above the tops of the trees which lay on the slope to the north of St Marti, giving a panoramic view which stretched from L’Escala on our right, right across the bay and on to the spectacular skyline of the Pyrenees with which Primavera had fallen in love that morning.

Miguel was standing behind us. ‘You like, eh,’ he whispered, with a smile. ‘You know, I think this is the finest view in all of Catalunya.’

I must have looked puzzled. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘You think that you are in Spain, yes?’

I must have looked even more puzzled. ‘And so you are,’ he went on. ‘But you are also in Catalunya. Spain is many places, many provinces. Here we are Catalans first, Spanish second. We speak Catalan first, Castellano second … although a few will not speak Castellano at all. We have our own flag, like the Spanish flag, the same colours, but different.’ He laughed. ‘We even have our own taxes … although many people, they don’ pay them!’

Prim tugged his sleeve. ‘You said forty thousand pesetas for the week?’

‘Yes. I can take Visa if you like. At this time of year Catalunya runs on Visa.’

She looked at me. A question. I nodded. An answer.

So we went back to the snack bar, paid the man with one of our shiny gold cards and moved in there and then. In time to catch the last of the evening sun, stretched out in our cossies — initially, at least — on the sun loungers which we had found with the rest of the terrace furniture. In time to discover that Miguel had been right when he said that our balcony, bounded by a low wall topped by a wooden rail, was completely private. There’s nothing on earth quite like sunbathing in the salty air of the Mediterranean with the warmth caressing the length of your body. But don’t just take my word for it. Ask Primavera.

Our voyage might have been over for the moment, but there was still plenty of discovering to do. We spent the next week exploring the region: the incredible detail of the excavated Greek and Roman cities of Empuries, the homely L’Escala with the narrow streets of its old town sloping down to a pocket-sized sandy beach, and its expanding marina where we encountered another expatriate Scot, running a very good restaurant with her Catalan husband, the neighbouring town of Torroella de Montgri, with its baking hot square and its leafy avenues … sorry, ramblas. In the process we found at least a dozen good places to eat, since neither of us was in a hurry to learn about supermarket shopping in Spain.

On our seventh night in St Marti, as on all the others, we brought our evening to an end at a table outside Casa Minana, enjoying the buzz of the people and the cold of the draught Estrella beer. As our friend passed by with a nod and a smile, Prim stopped him with a touch on his arm.

‘Miguel.’ She hesitated, for about half a second. ‘What would it cost to buy the apartment?’

He looked down at her, suddenly solemn. So did I. ‘To buy it?’ he repeated.

She nodded.

He glanced across at me, then back at Prim, all the time scratching his chin. ‘An apartment like that, in this village,’ he said at last, ‘it cost maybe fourteen, maybe fifteen million pesetas.’

I gulped. Millions of anything have that effect on me. I looked across at Prim, watching her concentrate as she converted mentally to sterling.

‘But the Dutchman,’ Miguel went on, ‘he say to me, get me nine million and I will be happy.’ He paused. ‘That is with the furniture, the cups, the saucers, everything.’

We both liked Miguel, he had befriended us, and given us a couple of mines full of useful information about places to go, things to see, and even places to eat — not a hint normally thrown out by a restaurateur. But both of us looked at him as if he was Tommy Cooper at his funniest.

‘Nine million!’ I gasped, when at last I could. ‘For a top quality, furnished two-bed apartment in an exclusive village, with one of the finest views in Europe. Christ, Miguel, that’s forty-five grand in real money. Forgive us, but what’s the catch?’

He smiled and shrugged. ‘Senor Oz, Senora Prim, I assure you there is no catch. Things between the Dutchman and his wife are very bad. She is not a good woman. She run off with another man, but she wants all his money. He say to me that the more he sell the place for the more he will have to give her. So he say to me to find someone I like, someone who will enjoy the place, and who will not tell anyone in the village what they pay for it, and to sell it to them for nine million.

‘You are interested, yes? If you need a hipoteca … Sorry. How you say? Mortgage, I know a man in a bank.’

Prim looked at me and nodded. If I had said no I would have been deeper in the shit than the Dutchman. So instead, I said, ‘Yes, we’re interested. No, we don’t need a mortgage.’

Miguel beamed. ‘Good. That is very good! I will phone the Dutchman now and tell him.’

He disappeared into the bar, leaving us staring at each other, stunned. ‘Can you believe it?’ Prim whispered.

‘Just,’ I replied, ‘but to be on the safe side, we’d better find a lawyer, pronto.’

Miguel reappeared five minutes later, still smiling. ‘Everything is okay. Nine million is okay. He says he hopes you have better luck there than he did. Before he left he gave me power of attorney, so I can go to the notario with you to pass the escritura.’

He had read my mind. ‘But you, you should have a lawyer. Just so everything can be explained to you.’ He passed me a card which he had been holding between his fingers. ‘You go see this man. He is in L’Escala and he is lawyer for a lot of British people here. He is very good, very honest.’

His name was Ray Lopez, half Catalan, half English, all lawyer. We saw him next morning, and found that a phone call from Miguel had beaten us to it. Sr Lopez looked into the local and regional registers and pronounced everything as ‘Appropriate, Senor y Senora,’ and five days later Sr Osbert Blackstone and Sra Primavera Phillips were joint owners of the apartment of their dreams.

The dreams continued through the summer. Every morning we walked along the three-kilometre road to L’Escala, for coffee in the open air, either at the Casablanca by the beach, or at El Centre, beside the old church. Most afternoons we spent swimming in the sea and sunbathing on the beach below St Marti, or lying naked on the beds on the terrace. On alternate nights we would cook for ourselves, at home, or eat out, at one of our growing list of restaurants, occasionally with members of our circle of English ex-pat acquaintances which had developed out of a couple of introductions made by Ray Lopez.

Weeks turned into months as we enjoyed our idyll beneath the Spanish sun. It was there, on the twenty-first of September, that I clambered over the milestone of my thirtieth birthday. In the course of it all, we became sybarites, Prim and I. Without our realising it our voyage had turned into an exploration of the limits of self-indulgence, and in the process we were turning ourselves into different people.

I suppose that it had begun to dawn on us both, but as usual, it was Prim who said it first; on the terrace, in the still-hot autumn sun, on the day after my birthday.

‘This isn’t working Oz, is it.’

I took a swig of my beer, from the bottle as usual, and frowned back at her. ‘What the hell do you mean? We’ve got quarter of a million in the bank in Jersey, we’ve got a house a lot of people would kill for, in a place we both love. We screw each other’s brains out every day … like half an hour ago for example. We’ve got no ties, no worries, no responsibilities. And you lie there with the Piz Buin glistening on your brown bosom and tell me that it isn’t working.’

She clenched her jaw. ‘Well it isn’t. We’ve found our place, sure. We’ve had our holiday, too. But it’s got to stop sometime.’

She had thrown me into a grim mood. I resisted. ‘Why has it got to stop?’

The frown grew deeper. ‘Well … our cash won’t last for ever.’

‘No? Where we have it, we’re earning a minimum of fifteen grand investment income. Jan’s starting to bank another four-fifty a month in rent of the loft. That’s twenty K without touching our capital. So!’ My voice rose of its own accord. I’d never snapped at Prim before. Come to think of it I don’t remember ever snapping at anyone before. ‘Why isn’t it working?’

She swung her legs round and sat on the edge of the lounger, pulling her knees up to her chin. The frown had gone, replaced by what looked like a plea in her eyes. ‘Because I, at least, need ties, need worries, need responsibilities. I need to be doing something. And so, if you’d think about it, do you.

‘When we met you were dynamic.You couldn’t stop moving if you tried. You swept me off my feet.’

‘As you swept me,’ I said. ‘As you still do.’

‘Fine, but if we become stagnant there will come a point when I don’t. Oz, we’re too bloody young to opt out. You say we can live on what we have now, but if we have kids … when we have kids … what then? What sort of role models would we be?’ She was in full cry now. ‘Remember that English bloke Trevor. The one we met at Gary’s restaurant.The fellow who’s been here for years, doing little or nothing, but knowing everything. How’d you like to have him for a father?’

‘Aw, come on!’ That was a sure sign that she was winning the argument. She knew it, and she closed in for the kill.

‘The last couple of months have been great, sure. But I’ve got to the stage when I’m conscious that all I’m really doing is sitting on my steadily widening arse watching you doing the same thing. And am I wrong or is the sex not quite as magic as it was at the start?’ She had me there.

‘Oz, we have to think about what’s ahead. It’ll be winter soon, even here. It’s time we got back to work.’

With a very ill grace, I gave up. ‘Okay, so what’ll we do?’

She beamed at me. ‘Why don’t we do what we’ve shown we’re good at? Investigations.’

I stared at her. ‘Investigations? Here? But we barely …’

She waved a hand, as if she was brushing me aside. ‘Let me finish. I mean investigations here for people in Britain. You were a private enquiry agent in Edinburgh. There’s no reason why we can’t do the same thing in Spain for people in Britain. All we have to do is widen the definition a bit. If a UK company wants some market intelligence we’ll do that. If a lawyer wants a witness interviewed, we’ll do that. If a travel company wants resorts checked out we’ll do that. If a parent wants a missing kid found, we’ll do that.’ All the time she spoke her smile was getting wider, and her eyes brighter.

‘We’ll place small ads in British newspapers,’ she burbled, ‘in the business sections. Something like “Phillips and Blackstone. Spanish Investigations. You want to know? Let us find out. Replies to a box number.” We’ll use the Telegraph, Sunday Times, Scotsman, Herald, and a legal magazine. We can mailshot the big law firms in London and Scotland, through a post office box here. It won’t cost all that much to try, and I’m sure it’ll be a winner.’

I looked across at her. I was on my fourth San Miguel of the day. The light in her eyes was beginning to hurt mine.

‘Couldn’t you just get a job nursing?’ I said wearily. ‘In Gerona or Figueras, maybe. Couldn’t we just buy a bar that I could run? That we could both run?’

She looked at me. Now the brightness of her eyes had turned into lasers, cutting me open. ‘Sure we could do that, Oz. I could go out every day and force myself to do a job I swore I’d never do again. Then I could come home at night — or worse still, be there all day — to watch you sat on your barstool, pontificating and turning into a replica of that arsehole Trevor.

‘You said it all really: “Couldn’t we just …”’ She twisted the word like a knife. ‘You meant find something, anything, to occupy our time. Well, you can become a cabbage if you like, Oz, but I won’t stick around to watch. If we’re going to stay here long-term, and I’d like to, we have to get a life that makes the most of our strengths, rather than indulges our weaknesses. Laziness is an easy vice to pick up. I can see it taking hold of you, and I can feel it growing in me.’

I finished my San Miguel in a single swallow, took another from the ice bucket, twisted off the top, and stared across at her, unsmiling. Temper tantrums were strangers to me. I had a feeling that I was about to say something very bad, something about once a nurse always a sergeant major, something about not trying to run my fucking life. It didn’t occur to me for a second to look for a funny line to divert her with laughter. It didn’t even occur to me that I might have looked a wee bit ridiculous, lying there naked and quivering with petulance.

I took another swig of beer, then a deep breath, as if I was fuelling the tirade to come.

‘Senor Oz! Are you there, please?’