‘Vittorio promised to pick her up on his way home tomorrow,’ said Minna. ‘He knows the man whose land she was on. She’ll be quite safe.’

She repeated it a few times, until the dottoressa replaced the receiver. Sardinians were a primitive people, she told us. They believed in giants and elves, and that the little clouds behind the moon were the spirits of babies who’d died without baptism. The girl who came in to clean was eighteen, with two children and no teeth. The dottoressa herself was from the Veneto. But circumstances … The sentence remained unfinished.

She’d been married three times, she went on, the first to an Englishman. ‘I’ve forgotten his name. Ferdinand? Ronnie?’ When she heard that I was from Australia, she fizzed up again. This time there was no preventing her. ‘Derek?’ she said into the phone. ‘Derek? You must come over now. I have an Australian here. Fantastico, no?’

Derek resisted for a while but finally agreed to drop in later. ‘After dinner!’ said the dottoressa when she’d hung up. ‘Who can say if we’ll still be alive after dinner? Men are slaves to the past and the future. They understand nothing of Being.’ Derek was ‘very well placed’ at the Australian embassy in Rome, we learned. He visited Sardinia whenever possible, renting a house in the village. ‘There is a young man there, who is unhappily married,’ said the dottoressa delicately. She turned her rings and told us about her travels. Her mother was Russian. ‘I went to Leningrad after she died. My cousin was still there, living in a communal apartment. We drank tea. Snow was falling. My cousin said, “My dear, I am ready to believe everything you tell me about life in the West but not that you can eat fresh tomatoes in winter.”’ The dottoressa sighed. ‘You would not believe my adventures – even I doubt them these days. In Guadalajara, I once spent an entire night with a gun pressed here.’ She closed her eyes and tapped her fist against her breastbone. The gems in her rings looked archaic, the colour of pus or dried blood.

The dog lifted his head and fixed her with a commanding stare – it meant that his thoughts had turned to food, the dottoressa said. He shared her diet of steak tartare, and hard little biscuits stuck with sugar flowers. While disdaining most alcohol, he would occasionally accept a glass of very good champagne. As soon as the cork popped, he got to his feet, tilting perilously from a ruined hip. The smaller the bubbles, the dottoressa told us, the better the champagne.

There was leftover milk soup in the fridge, prepared by the toothless girl. The dottoressa urged us to try it: ‘It leaves the mind clear and doesn’t bloat the stomach.’ We opted instead for pasta with tinned sardines.