‘Well, love, we never had any child seats to start with,’ Matt had said.

I stare out of the window at the olive groves as we drive past, the leaves rippling silver in the sunshine, the twisted trunks a glazed pewter, and feel bad about Dad. No one suggested that he come with us, but maybe it’s for the best; my siblings might have calmed down, after a day at the beach, and be a little more willing to forgive him.

I shout at Matt, who’s driving, to wind the window down and hang my head out in the breeze. Even the dust smells Italian. The kids start shrieking as gusts of air pummel them and make their hair stand on end. Matt closes all the windows and blasts us with air con. I lean my hot forehead against the glass; Lotte’s bony knee is digging into my ribs, and Chloe, whose lap she’s sitting on, is wriggling, lip-syncing to Selena Gomez, her headphones catching my ear, and it reminds me of all those other car journeys I’ve been on with Bethany and Amy as kids; shoehorned in the back, me in the middle, my sisters elbowing me, singing, smiling and squabbling.

We head in the opposite direction from the town, skirting round the tail end of the island and down a tortuously steep track between burnt sandstone-coloured cliffs.

‘Hey, doesn’t this remind you of Watchet?’

It’s a beach in Somerset that our parents used to take us to sometimes. It’s famous for fossils, not that any of us had the patience to look for them – too busy chucking sand at each other and skimming stones.

‘Er, no,’ Bethany says, laughing at me. ‘Did we ever go to Watchet when there was blazing sunshine?’

‘Of course we did!’

‘Do you remember that time Dad insisted we had a picnic on the beach and it was snowing?’ Amy says. ‘Mum was desperate to have a bit of time to herself to finish her painting, and he made us those terrible cheese sandwiches, doorstops of stale bread and wedges of butter, and forced us to get out of the car and eat them in a howling gale?’

‘It wasn’t actually snowing,’ I say.

‘There were drifts at the bottom of the cliffs, and sleet coming in from the Bristol Channel,’ Bethany says. ‘I remember crunching ice crystals in my sandwiches.’

‘You always bloody exaggerate.’

‘Oi,’ shouts Matt at me. ‘No swearing in front of minors.’

‘We’re here,’ says Joe, and we all pile out. ‘You won’t need your bucket and spade.’

I take a deep breath, half-expecting my lungs to burn with a rush of cold air, the smell of salt and vinegar and deep-fried chips, but the wind is warm, with a seaweed tang. In front of us, flat rocks stretch straight out into the water and, perhaps because there’s no sand, the place is practically deserted.