Though he was stretched on the beach at Beg Meil in the brightest sunshine with another week of his holiday in Brittany to run, Sean McPhail was not at all happy. For some time now he had felt certain that the man sunbathing only ten metres away, lying just outside the arc of shadow thrown by his beach brolly, was actually ogling Carla who had been strolling by the seashore, naked but for her bikini bottom.

Carla McPhail was some years younger than her wealthy husband – twenty five to McPhail’s forty one - and the successful supermarket owner (he ran a chain in the North of England) already feared that he had married unwisely and that his attractive young wife was guilty of infidelity.

Not that the beautiful woman was behaving badly just then. She was actually by the seashore at that moment with the great man’s son, an endearing little boy of eighteen months ,playing in the smallest waves of the incoming tide; the child himself was fascinated by the long reef of seaweed which is a feature of that delightful fore-shore. The happy, naked little boy grabbed at one piece whose colour fascinated him and he held up the flapping web as though he had suddenly tamed it by removing it from the tide.

Carla bent a little and spoke lovingly to her son. She was a tall, elegant woman with long blond hair, a slender figure and somewhat heavy, pendulous breasts. Perhaps she hadn’t quite the figure now of a centre-fold pin-up the older husband had found so ravishing when he had met her - she was not quite the seductive, penniless creature he had divorced his wife for - and yet he was still deeply attracted to Carla. He was secretly afraid of losing her. His divorce had been one of stress and pain for all concerned. He had caused his wife and three other children deep unhappiness by his behaviour. He had also hurt his own devoted parents greatly; and yet Carla had seemed worth it - knowing her had awakened a sense in him of what being in love truly meant.

Or was he now getting his own just desserts? Truly she was so beautiful to him as she played the adoring mother paddling in the waves with their first born -

……….ogled by this spy from behind the shield of the brolly.

Just desserts for the ruthless business man who lay beneath his own umbrella propped up on one elbow, conscious of being the wrong side of forty, flabby and bald-headed. Two years ago the grande affaire of his life had been upon him; he had been as crazily in love as a schoolboy chasing after his first sweetheart, eager to discover all over again at forty, the delights of a first kiss and the pangs of missing her, of what it felt like to be driven into torment........

She looked up now - facing seawards. Perhaps the man in the dark glasses who lay on his stomach just a few metres away, facing Carla McPhail, felt frustrated, denied by the rear view of the young mother, longing for her to turn so that he might see the frontal view a voyeur on the beach most wanted. Sean turned from his wife now to consider this intruder who must inevitably have a mind well suited to the adult video and the temptations of casual adultery. Whoever he was, he had no one with him, no woman or children to make his being there respectable. Sean McPhail could bear it no more. He felt impelled to call across to the guy and tell him where to go ,and what he could do with himself. After all the stranger was eyeing the woman of no less a man than the great Sean McPhail. People knew McPhail to be a hard man, a man not to be messed with, a man whose birthright had been poverty - whose career had been that oft dreamed, but seldom realized, tale of rags to riches.

Some impulse, some need to release all the six-month-long feelings he had nursed of anger and jealousy moved him from the place where he lay.

There were scores of others along that beach, but the chief characters in the show-down kept their roles. Meanwhile Carla continued to be absorbed with the toddler and remained with her back to her husband as he rose from his mat and took rapid paces towards the peeping tom.

Sean had thought to shove the guy with his foot; but instead he bent over and shook the man roughly by the shoulder.

“Hey, you !” he said, forgetting the notion that the voyeur might be French. (Carla in any case was his translator and made the way plain in French and German despite being no more than a penniless student)

“Oi! Seen enough!”

He squatted down, his belly draping in ugly fashion over the edge of his shorts, and once more he shook the intruder, who was lying on his front, aggressively.

Certainly it gave the sinister stranger in the dark glasses quite a surprise. He must have been deeply shaken from his reverie, for he jumped like a startled animal as the heavy paw of the supermarket king fell on his shoulder.

“I said, ‘Have you seen enough of her?’ or are you deaf as well as perverted?”

With some deliberation the stranger turned himself into a sitting position removing his dark glasses as he did so to reveal the blind man’s eyes which had been a part of his birthright.

22nd July 1991