Even her parents told her she’d overreacted. As if she’d deliberately been looking in the recycling for the bill – two plane tickets, but just one double room. To Capri, though Max had told her something about a training course in Dresden. One ticket was in his name, the other in that of his assistant. The one with the cheap hair extensions and boobs laced up ridiculously high. Julia hadn’t thought twice about it. She’d gone straight into the basement, grabbed the full laundry basket, driven it to Max’s office, where he worked as a lawyer, and tipped out the washing onto his dumbfounded lover’s desk with the words, ‘If you’re screwing my husband you can wash his dirty underwear too.’

That had felt good. For about twenty seconds.

‘Where are you?’ she heard Tom Schiwy ask, and was already annoyed that she’d answered the phone in the first place. She’d made a pact with her daughter to switch off their mobiles at the start of the holiday, but in the excitement of the trip she must have forgotten. And now Julia had one of the indiscretions of her life as a single woman in her ear.

Albeit one of the more pleasant ones.

‘I told you what we were doing for the half-term holidays,’ she replied, smiling to Lisa who was just going into her own cabin through the connecting door.

‘I’m just going to have a quick look around the ship,’ her fifteen-year-old daughter whispered. Julia nodded.

To Tom she said, ‘We’ve just come on board.’

‘Oh, shit!’

Her daughter’s liaison teacher sounded unusually agitated, almost worried.

‘What’s wrong?’ Julia asked, surprised, as she fell back onto the unbelievably comfortable box-spring bed that occupied almost the entire cabin.

Why are you calling? Didn’t we agree that we’d only contact each other in an emergency?

‘We have to see each other. Immediately!’

‘Yeah, sure.’ Julia tapped her head. She wasn’t going to leave the Sultan of the Seas all of a sudden, not for any man in the world. Lisa exhibited the full range of problems you could develop during puberty. She refused meals together, kept getting thinner, she’d had her nose pierced, undermined her position as top of the class with bad marks, and now only hung around with friends who dressed in the same vampire-like way that she did. Since her fifteenth birthday she had been cultivating a Goth phase, whereby only black, second-hand clothes were permitted. They should be as ripped as possible and so full of holes that even moths would starve feeding off them. It must be an unwritten rule of her clique that you couldn’t laugh or ever give your mother a kiss. A rule that, ten minutes ago, Lisa had broken for the first time in weeks.