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chunks, shrimp, clams, crab legs and mushrooms, served with poured-over chowder in a hot French-style brioche.
    He walked across to the sliding glass doors that led out on to the balcony, and opened them. A warm briny wind was blowing off the sea, and gulls were sloping and crying around the steep sandy-coloured cliffs. He leaned against the wooden rail and breathed in the evening air. This was it. This was the dream. It was all so ridiculously idyllic that sometimes it made him grin to himself in shameless self-satisfaction.
    He had it all, or the best part of it, anyway. His own restaurant in a posh and profitable location; a talented and startling pretty girlfriend who loved him like crazy and wanted to marry him; a white 5-Series BMW with the personalized licence FISHEE, and a $568,000 house close to the University of California at San Diego with a hot tub and an olive tree and what his realtors had called ‘a tantalizing peek’ of the North Shore. A full peek would have cost him $30,000 more, and so far an actual view was financially out of the question.
    But think of it: his father had been a mail-carrier, and his mother had taken in sewing, and here he was.
    Lloyd didn’t really look the part of a restaurateur. He was very lean and tall, with a mop of grey-streaked hair and a prominent bony nose which had led his mother to describe him as ‘proud-looking’ and his father to call him ‘the yooman can-opener’. But now that his fortieth birthday was approaching, and he was lightly suntanned and psychologically well balanced and everything was well with the world, he had an air about him that was both distinguished and light-hearted. Celia always said that if Basil Rathbone had been both Californian and funny, then he would have been Lloyd Denman instead.
    He turned around and watched Waldo setting up his reservations book on the oak lectern beside the front doors. Waldo had smoothed-back hair, a clipped Oliver Hardy moustache, and a wide dark green cummerbund that made him look like a ribbon-wrapped Easter egg. He spoke to the customers with an amazingly over-the-top French accent, ‘Zees way, sair, see voo play—pardonnay mwuh, madarm,’ but in fact his name was Waldo Slonimsky and he was Lithuanian; the only survivor of his entire family. Sometimes Lloyd could look at his face and clearly see the plump lonely seven-year-old boy who had been brought over to America just before the war. Waldo had married, had kids, divorced, dated a few women the same shape as him. But Lloyd thought: when you’ve lost for ever the people you love the most, how can you ever stop being lonely?
    â€˜Waldo,’ he called. ‘Come on out here.’
    Waldo stepped out on to the balcony, tugging his cummerbund straight. ‘You want something, Mr Denman?’
    Lloyd nodded. ‘Yes, I do. I want you to drop everything for just a couple of minutes and come out here and take a look at the cove.’
    Waldo kept his eyes on Lloyd; obviously tense, obviously thinking anxiously about everything he had to do. Check the menus, update the wine-lists, call for two replacement waitresses because Angie and Kay had both phoned in sick. Sick, my ass, excuse my Lithuanian, surfing more like.
    Lloyd tried to encourage him, ‘Relax, look around. What do you think of the cove this evening?’
    Waldo glanced at it quickly. ‘This evening, it’s a nice cove.’
    â€˜Is that all? Just nice?’
    Waldo contrived to look around some more. ‘This evening, it’s a heck of a nice cove.’
    Llody laughed and clamped his arm around Waldo’s shoulders. ‘You know what your trouble is, Waldo?’
    â€˜What?’ asked Waldo, uneasily. ‘What’s my trouble?’
    â€˜You never stop to think how lucky you are.’
    Waldo plainly didn’t understand what Lloyd was trying to say to him. He shrugged, twisted the napkin that he always used for polishing