‘Right, well, that’s only because Mum doesn’t know what you’ll be missing.’

‘Excuse me?’ This was Ali. She reached for the bottle and refilled her wine glass.

‘I only mean, you didn’t go to university yourself,’ Michael said. ‘You didn’t even finish school. So you’re not the best judge.’

Ali laughed, without amusement. ‘No, Michael,’ she said. ‘It’s not because I’m ill-informed, it’s because I want Stella to make her own choices. She can go to NIDA next year, or the year after. They’ll take her – they’ve never auditioned a girl with her talent, that’s what they said.’

‘My point is,’ Michael said, ‘she’s too young to travel.’

‘I was only eighteen when you met me in Spain.’

Michael looked at his wife with an expression of incredulity that she should raise her own example to support her case. ‘Found you, not met you,’ he said. ‘I found you in Spain. And God alone knows where you’d be now if I hadn’t.’

Alison Connor had been sitting cross-legged on the ground, alone, in the shade of a stone archway within the medieval walls of Santo Domingo de la Calzada. She was wearing denim shorts, a plain khaki T-shirt adorned only with the words ‘Wild Willy Barrett’, and a pair of flat leather sandals. She had a cotton cap, also khaki, which was beside her on the floor, and a canvas bag, a kind of small satchel, which she wore diagonally across her body. Her face and limbs were tanned but those parts of her feet not covered by the worn leather of her sandals were the same pale grey as the dust on the street. Her dark brown hair was chopped to just above her shoulders, but rather haphazardly, as if she might have done it herself, with blunt scissors and no mirror. Her eyes were closed. She appeared to be resting, but she wasn’t out of place here; there were lots of footsore pilgrims breaking their journey in this lovely Spanish town, so the world flowed around and about her, as easily and naturally as a brook.

Michael McCormack stared at her until she woke up and looked at him.

‘Hi,’ he said. ‘How you going?’

She showed no surprise or concern at being observed by this stranger, only gazed at him placidly. He’d thought, at first, she might be begging, but he could see there was no cup for loose change, no sign hand-scrawled on cardboard. She was just a sleeping girl, who’d now woken up. He squatted, so that he no longer looked down on her. She had greenish-brown eyes and dark lashes, golden skin, a perfectly symmetrical face. He held out a hand, and said, ‘Michael, Michael McCormack,’ and, after a brief hesitation, she took it.

‘Alison Connor,’ she said.

‘Are you walking the Camino?’ he asked.