The road ends at a gate. The boy waits in the car while the man gets out. Beyond the gate is the open moor, pale in the early evening with bleached end-of-summer grass, bruised here and there with heather and age-old spills of purple granite. The boy, though, is not looking that way, ahead. He is watching the man: the way he strides to the gate, bouncing slightly in his boots, his calf-muscles flexing beneath the wide knee-length shorts, the flop of hair at the front and the close-shaved neck as he bends for the catch.
     The boy is intent. Watching Dad. Watching what Dad is. Drinking it in: the essence of Dadness. "How do you like your tea, weak or strong?" Sam asked Helen, slightly surprised that he didn't already know the answer to this question.
     "Weak, please." Helen glanced at him. Her clear blue eyes shone in the bright sunlight. Then she looked back at the Promenade des Anglais.
     "Well, you pour as soon as you like, then, " said Sam. "I'll let mine stew a bit."
     "All right."
     Sam studied Helen's profile for a moment. Her nose, he decided, was a bit too long. But nevertheless she was very pretty. She was in fact undoubtedly the most attractive woman he'd ever been out with. And so it was a shame and a complication that he was starting to dislike her.
     The man pushes the gate with one arm, abruptly, too hard - the boy misses a breath - and sure enough, the gate swings violently, bounces off the stone wall and begins to swing back again while the man is already returning to the car. But then it slows, keels out once more, and comes to rest, wide open, against the wall: the man judged correctly after all. The boy is relieved. And, as the man drops into the driving seat something in the boy's chest gives a little hop of joy and he cries excitedly, 'Oh, I brought my torch!'