In their own ways, too, Chloe and Pansy enjoyed their holiday. Kim immediately adopted Chloe as an ally. They were almost the same age and it gave the visitors much secret amusement to see Kim calling on their few extra years of life experience and appealing to Chloe for help in controlling her stepdaughter. Chloe understood at once that Kim was bored to death, and was lacking the resources within herself to provide distraction. Pansy would do no more than poke sly fun at her, but Chloe went good-humouredly on shopping expeditions, or plundering trips as Pansy called them. They came back and modelled their designer bargains with enthusiasm for the others. Two or three times Kim, generous with Masefield’s fortune, came back with ‘little somethings’ for Helen, and Helen had no choice but to accept them. The frivolous, expensive things looked funny in her cupboard alongside the worn skirts and shirts.

Chloe felt genuinely sorry for Kim and her luxurious dull life, and she felt pleasure in her own contrasting existence seeping back with every passing day. The very timeless tranquillity of Venice eased her unhappiness too by making it seem pitifully small.

They saw little of Masefield. He seemed to prefer the company of his papers and telephone to that of his wife, and even his daughter, even though he was always protesting that Pansy had so little time for him that he hardly knew her. Pansy herself spent most of her days reading on her balcony, a strange, eclectic selection of books that made Helen look at her with new eyes. One day it was Under the Volcano, another it was Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice.

‘Are you enjoying it?’ Helen asked.

‘Rather dry,’ was all Pansy would say. ‘Didn’t he have a curious private life, or something? Have I got the right bloke?’

Helen suspected that behind her careful smokescreen there was a Pansy that nobody knew at all.

One evening towards the end of their stay Masefield and Kim, resplendent in full evening dress, went out for an important dinner with important people. Masefield insisted that the three girls go out to eat too, at a restaurant of his choice. They heard him booking the table himself, and giving instructions that the bill was to be sent direct to him.

‘You’ll love it,’ he told them firmly. ‘Food like you get at Al Pescaor doesn’t come your way all that often.’

Relieved of their usual slightly awkward evening duties with the Warrens, they spent longer than usual in dressing up, and then went out laughing in the feeling of a special occasion.