Here, though, the iron bars of routine and habit we’d been so imprisoned by in the city have begun to soften and bend. In our brave new world, early mornings are spent wallowing in the old copper bath. The generator boils the water up hot. After we get out, Emmy and I stand on the deck in our towels, looking down at our cooked lobster feet steaming on the wooden planks. As the heat seeps from our bodies into the cool morning air, we watch the sun climbing round the edges of the mountains. This morning I noticed a smudge of nail varnish on my big toe, like a souvenir from another, different life.

‘I can clean that off for you, Mummy,’ Emmy offered, ‘when I have time.’

And time is what we now have. Time is everywhere, ours to spend how we please and we’re making good use of it. We explore the hills around town and play on the carcasses of mining equipment. We collect grasses to press (Emmy) or set up rusted cans on rustier barrels and throw rocks at them (Jack). We moon around like lovesick teenagers, waxing lyrical about the view or going on and on and on about the beauty of the mountains and the glorious sounds of silence (me) until the children’s eyes roll back in their heads and they start choking on their tongues.

These days it’s goodbye to those hellish evening meals where the children stare in mute fury at their enemy in its cold green uniform of vegetable, whilst Anneka, our duo-syllabic au pair, squats at the table like a prison wardress, denying probation, removing pudding privileges. These days, thanks to the ratification of the Treaty of Nursery Food, we are allowed to live on tinned chicken noodle soup and macaroni cheese for a further two weeks and moreover we get to eat it whilst playing the Memory game or Boggle or painting our bedrooms in lurid colours. (Emmy and Jack – green and pink, me – mustard.) These days it’s goodbye to the hurrying, begging, shouting, pleading, cajoling of children into bed because there’s an evening plan, a dinner to be cooked for Robert’s business cronies, or just something better to do; these days, of course, there is nothing better to do. Here in Temerosa we all go to bed at the same time, at around nine o’clock. Sometimes even eight-thirty! Good Lord – will the debauchery never end? And if it’s all a little strange and new for them, then stranger and newer for me is that, for the first time in my life, I’m finding sole motherhood addictive.

‘Night night, John-boy,’ I call from my room. ‘Night night, Mary Ellen.’