It’s cold in the truck. I hunch my shoulders into my jacket and check the heating dial on the dashboard. There are pockets of warmth coming from somewhere, but they’re no match for the night air leaking through the distressed seals of the cab’s windows. The temperature takes me by surprise. The last time I’d driven down this road it had been over a hundred degrees, hot enough to bubble the tarmac and melt the soles of my trainers, hot enough to sting the back of my throat and lodge there like some solid mischievous thing. It had been late September then and, on both sides of the road, grassland had rolled towards the hills like a golden sheet billowing in the wind. On the other side of the windscreen now, there is nothing to be seen. The road ahead is completely deserted and whatever might lie on either side of it hidden by the density of night.

Jack sighs from the back seat and I turn round to check him. His fringed suede water bottle, bought at the airport, is slung around his neck in a potentially lethal knot. His face is filthy. A still-life of the journey’s bribes and snacks. The corner of his mouth droops slackly and a trail of dribble has leaked down his chin onto his neck where it has dried into a chalky mark. He sleeps in his customary upright position, a pose I’d always assumed was the result of all those years imprisoned in unforgiving baby car seats, but recently have come to understand is simply a mark of his independence, his two fingers up to the adult world. Jack has always had a certain irritation and impatience at being small, as if his babyhood and now youth were no more than inconveniences unfairly foisted on him, and consequently he’s always treated them as something of an affliction, an accident of birth that he’d have to overcome, like a club foot or a squint.

‘When are we there?’ Emmy slumps self-pityingly against the opposite window. ‘I’m sooo tired.’ Her voice cracks with exhaustion and tears. As I prop her up again, she opens a cyclopian eye in order to fix me, the mother of all her woes, with a baleful accusing scowl.

How can my children possibly understand what’s going on? Why they’ve been dragged on this endless painful journey, away from their home, from their friends, their father – and for what? To spend a year in some jerry-built cabin in the middle of God only knows where because of a whim, some barely explicable desire for escape that I had no longer been able to ignore.

‘I still don’t understand why you insist on going on ahead,’ Robert had said for the umpteenth time as he’d kissed the children at the departure gate. ‘It could be months before I can get away.’