Because they had an audience, the temptation of denunciations won out. She said Alex spoiled occasions, like a child, to assert his own power; he said she smothered everyone, fussing over them, subduing them to her good intentions. When they all separated at the end of a soured evening, it was particularly awful because Christine and Alex had twin beds, so had to nurse their outrage separately, lying stiff and inert under the sheets; accidental collisions in a double bed could have helped to heal their breach. Neither could face the deliberate act of crossing the floor between the beds, risking rejection: they didn’t want to make friends anyway, they didn’t care for each other. In the early morning Christine woke to a bleakness like cold poison: she thought that she hated holidays, hated this ruined place with its beauty tied around its neck like a doom. Heroically, however, in bare feet she crossed the cold space of marble floor and climbed in behind Alex, putting her arms around his chest and pressing against his warm back where she liked to make herself comfortable, suffused in the pungent, sleepy heat of his skin. She did this partly in pragmatic spirit, to save the holiday. Although Alex didn’t say anything, he didn’t adjust his position away from her, and when they got up they spoke as if nothing had happened. Their antagonism passed. Alex even seemed, from that point onwards, to make efforts to be more sociable.

Nathan was innocently dismayed by his friends’ quarrelling. He knew that married happiness wasn’t perfect, but only because he’d learned this from films and plays, where its breakdowns were entertaining. Their performance was all the more shaming because Zachary and Lydia were always so pleasant together. Christine knocked sometimes, with puzzled curiosity, upon the smooth surface of the secret of her friends’ marriage, trying to test it, find out what it was made of. Who’d ever have thought, considering how selfish Lydia was supposed to be, and how capricious, that she’d make such a compliant and affectionate wife?

Alex and Nathan went off in the morning in search of the internet, and the three of them left behind ate dolci ebraici with their coffee on the balcony. The little cakes were disappointing but their vantage point couldn’t fail – crisp light, perfumed jasmine, mildly odorous breath of the water slopping across stone steps. Nuns in grey habits and schoolchildren erupted into the quiet, rising and falling over the pure arc of a bridge then passing on the fondamenta below. One nun pushed dog’s mess into the canal with the point of her grey umbrella. Zachary, who picked up languages so easily – as if they simply all lay dormant in him, rousing in response to suggestion – tried to translate for Lydia and Christine, catching the conversations in snatches.

— Something about a letter, a mother, a kitten, some homework …