Lena had her own ideas of how things had developed from that moment. Once in the city, she imagined how it would have seemed to her mother …

The streets, with their squared-off junctions, were maddeningly similar to one another; sometimes a short flight of steps led up to another level, but Carina wasn’t sure if these were the same steps she had seen a few minutes earlier.

The next day, Stefan found her in another bar and took her home. He let her sleep on the couch; but in the early hours Carina was cold and asked Stefan if she could get into his bed. In the morning, Stefan had to join a ship; he told Carina he would be back in a week. She went and sat in the port, on a harbour wall with her feet dangling, as she sipped schnapps from a bottle. Men occasionally accosted her, but she knew how to drive them away. Why would Stefan want to live in such a place? Because it was by the sea, so he could always be escaping. But if he was so fond of water, she could have shown him all the barges and narrowboats that still unloaded in the saw-mill district at home.

Carina lasted only two days, sleeping alone in Stefan’s bed, before setting off for the railway station. Soon after she returned home, she knew that Stefan had left behind a souvenir of the night she had spent with him. Lena to be.

Laughing and crying as she pictured her mother’s hapless life, Lena came to a street she remembered. The chandlery was still there, though the model ships in the window didn’t look as well made as they had once been. Eventually, she came to the via dei Fabbri. A church tower was tolling seven when Lena recognised what she was looking for. She stepped up into a dark porch and pressed the button of a bell.

There was no answer and no sound in the tight little street except for a seagull’s cry. She rang again. A window was pushed up on the first floor and Lena expected to see a man in a white shirt with no collar, dirty old trousers and a waistcoat – a man neither young nor old, with dark curly hair and a lined face.

A woman’s voice asked in Italian what she wanted.

‘Signor Fontana.’

Lena didn’t understand the answer, but heard the word ‘No’ and the window slam.

At the end of the street was the restaurant where the three of them had had their one family dinner together. There were no longer fishing nets on the wall, but there were still candles stuck in empty wine bottles, and the place was doing good business. Lena sat at a table and asked for spaghetti with clams and red wine. The waiter didn’t speak German, but her needs were clear enough. When he came back with a bowl piled high, she asked if he knew Signor Fontana.