‘Thank you, my dear. We got into the kitchen table, really a perfect boat, I can’t think why they don’t make more like it, flew by the steps – oh, did the Padre catch a dreadful cold? Such a splash it was, and that was the only drop of water that we shipped at all.’

‘No, but he lost his umbrella, the one you’d given him,’ said Georgie, ‘and the Padre of the Roman Catholic church found it, a week afterwards, and returned it to him. Wasn’t that a coincidence? Go on. Oh no, wait a minute. What did you mean by calling out “Just wait till we get back”?’

‘Why of course I wanted to tell you that I had found Elizabeth in my kitchen,’ said Lucia.

‘Hurrah! I guessed you meant something of the kind,’ said Georgie.

‘Well, out we went – I’ve never been so fast in a kitchen table before – out to sea in a blinding sea-fog. My dear; poor Elizabeth! No nerve of any kind! I told her that if we were rescued, there was nothing to cry about, and if we weren’t all our troubles would soon be over.’

Grosvenor had put some fish before Lucia. She gave an awful shudder.

‘Oh, take it away,’ she said. ‘Never let me see fish again, particularly cod, as long as I live. Tell the cook. You’ll see why presently, Georgie. Elizabeth got hysterical and said she wasn’t fit to die, so I scolded her – the best plan always with hysterical people – and told her that the longer she lived, the less fit she would be, and that did her a little good. Then it got dark, and there were foghorns hooting all round us, and we called and yelled, but they had much more powerful voices than we, and nobody heard us. One of them grew louder and louder, until I could hardly bear it, and then we bumped quite gently into it, the foghorn’s boat I mean.’

‘Gracious, you might have upset,’ said Georgie.

‘No, it was like a liner coming up to the quay,’ said Lucia. ‘No shock of any kind. Then when the foghorn stopped, they heard us shouting, and took us aboard. It was an Italian trawler on its way to the cod-fishery (that’s why I never want to see cod again) on the Gallagher Banks.’

‘That was lucky too,’ said Georgie, ‘you could make them understand a little. Better than if they had been Spanish.’

‘About the same, because I’m convinced, as I told Elizabeth, that they talked a very queer Neapolitan dialect. It was rather unlucky, in fact. But as the Captain understood English perfectly, it didn’t matter. They were most polite, but they couldn’t put us ashore, for we were miles out in the Channel by this time, and also quite lost. They hadn’t an idea where the coast of England or any other coast was.’