The boy might have remembered it, the compass, as they were leaving. But he couldn't wait to get going, for it all to be over: the way his dad said, 'Hi there!' in that brittle, jovial way to Jim, and the way Jim dropped his eyes when he'd said Hi back, as if he understood all there was to understand about Dad, and didn't want to embarrass him by letting him know that. As if as well as despising him, Jim also - horribly - felt sorry for Dad. And the way his mother said hardly anything, and made her face blank whenever Dad spoke to her or looked her way, and kept shredding a tissue so bits leaked though her fingers to the floor. When they were ready for off she put her head in through the car window, and her eyes were bulging and wobbly with tears, and he thought he couldn't bear this: that this moment which he had looked forward to, longed for, as his moment of joy, was a moment of sadness for her. There was a silence. They both looked out through the open door at the Promenade des Anglais. A flatbed truck had arrived and workmen were unloading traffic barriers. Policemen in baseball hats waved at cars to slow them down. One workman walked towards the back of the truck as it drove slowly forward. For a moment they were moving at exactly the same speed in opposite directions; the man seemed to be walking but standing still, gliding his feet expertly along the distant horizon of the glittering blue sea.
     A plane droned slowly overhead. The gold stars on the blue background of the EU flag fluttered intermittently on a flagpole. Half of the promenaders on the sea front seemed to be wearing rollerblades. It was a calm, idyllic scene, but Sam was bored with it. He became aware of the weight of the book in his jacket pocket. It was a 1948 edition of "My Life and Loves" by Frank Harris, published in Paris, presumably because it had been considered obscene in England. Sam had found it in a bargain bin on the Rue de France for only ten francs. He'd started reading it in bed the night before while Helen was having a shower, and went on reading when she came out in a tee-shirt and knickers and moved around the bedroom, tidying up.And that terrible thing she had said to Dad: 'Now you will be careful? Don't go camping too near the edge.' Unforgivable - as if she and Jim didn't think that Dad could think of such a thing for himself.
     And then the worst thing of all: that brief but really awful moment when the car slid out of the drive and he felt, after all, he didn't want to go. That was another reason the compass never entered his head.