He had meant to park in town but had driven through the sheer activity of cars and people with an alienated numbness and had gone on to the beach car park. The school was out on lunch and there were kids everywhere in the small town and it was all too much for him. He sat there staring out over the gray, heavy water. He had realized that morning that there was no more toilet paper and could hardly believe that this would be the thing to drive him out. People were walking their dogs along the seafront. They looked red faced, braced against the tide somehow with the gulls lifting and dropping over the water behind them. Cars were parked around him and people sat in them drinking from flasks and watching the waves, the windows misting with condensation, and it was visible to him the quiet companionship of the old couples there, their simple togetherness act of getting out of the house to go for a drive and watch the waves awhile. They seemed to have the same comfortable look together as he had felt with her in the shed when it rained.
