She doesn’t even own a kaftan, so she’s thrown a large white shirt over the top of her swimsuit and has wrapped a sarong around her waist. It’s an all-in-one costume, so she doesn’t have to reveal the loose grey skin she’s left with, after her sudden weight loss last year, and she knows she’ll end up with vicious tan lines. The whole outfit is too hot and she envies Chloe’s spare body, the way she can sling on a spaghetti-strap vest without any lumps or sags or stretchmarks showing.

She keeps thinking of her father, struggling down the track with his suitcase. The children haven’t yet asked where he is, but they will. She sighs. She wishes Nick hadn’t brought him, but at least he went after him. He’ll make sure David gets home safely. But then, of course, how could Dad get back, unless Nick goes with him? It’s a ferry ride, a taxi, a train journey even to reach the airport. Her father couldn’t do it on his own.

She’s not surprised when she hears the car pull up outside the house. She goes and stands at the corner, in a pool of shade, and watches her brother helping their father out of the people-carrier. She waits for Nick to carry David’s suitcase up to his room and then come back down the stairs.

‘Hey,’ he says. ‘I couldn’t…’

‘I know. Let’s go for a walk,’ she says.

They go round the far side of the apartment where Luca and Joe are staying, through scrubby grass, stiff with seedheads and vetch pods, and past row after row of olive trees and shrubby juniper bushes, the land rising steeply and sharply, the earth dusty and red-gold. She half-imagines she can see the scalloped roof of Carlo’s farmhouse, but she knows it isn’t possible from this angle.

‘There weren’t any flights,’ Nick says.

‘You didn’t try, did you?’

‘He couldn’t get home by himself.’

Standing behind the converted barn, she sees how crude it is – the rough attempts to plaster the walls, blue plastic tubing erupting from the ground. There’s coiled black hose beneath the olives, cigarette butts and shotgun casings, the occasional glint of a glass bottle; detritus left by farm boys who must have been standing right by the holiday house. They walk round the back of Maregiglio.

‘Matt’s going to kill me,’ Nick adds.

‘Or Dad.’

‘Or both of us.’

She’s not sure what’s worse: Matt’s rage or his emotional absence.