Hannah took another sip of wine and when she answered, her tone was cool.

‘You know Piet. He didn’t say much, just gave me the bare bones of the story. I was the angry one, not him. He made excuses for you, and he’s not the kind who bears a grudge. So we should forget the whole thing. Move on. We all do stupid things from time to time.’ She finished her wine and stood up. ‘The tide will be out tomorrow morning at ten. We could go snorkelling on the reef, if we get up reasonably early.’

Sarah had listened to the exchange in silence. Camilla had got off lightly, she thought, but yes, it was over now. Piet had grown out of his puppy love for Camilla, had been shocked into a different view of her. So there was hope, Sarah thought. And now Camilla was in love herself – amazingly and madly in love with Anthony Chapman. She had even slept with him, and her impatience to see him could barely be contained. He was on safari with clients, but he would join them at Langani. In the meantime, the days at the coast had been glorious. They walked miles along the beach each morning, slept through the heat of the afternoon, snorkelled in the coral gardens at the edge of the reef among shoals of tiny fish in impossibly vivid colours, skirting the drop where kingfish and barracuda and sharks patrolled the cobalt of a deeper sea. In the early morning they would sit on the low coral wall that bordered their beach house, and watch the fishermen guiding their long canoes through the mosaic of shallow water inside the reef, rolling up their canvas sails as they reached the beach, balancing the long masts on their shoulders, and spreading their nets out to dry across the white sand. Storks and gulls congregated on the edge of the water, squabbling over scraps of fish, and small boys sailed wooden replicas of their fathers’ boats in the rock pools. Beneath the shade of the palm trees, the women prepared fires for the fish and cooked pots of bubbling rice that would provide their sustenance for the day.

At sundown, Sarah and Camilla sat out on the verandah, while Hannah worked in the kitchen. She had brought David, her trainee cook, down to the coast with her, and she was trying out recipes for future guests at the lodge.

‘You’re ideal guinea pigs,’ she said. ‘You can taste the food and give us some ideas about how it would look on a plate if we were serving it in some place in London or Dublin.’