The following day the list continued. Mow the grass, beheading daisies and glossy buttercups, and water the pots on the patio that were withering in their cracked soil. Find passport. Buy a present for Jem and Juliet.

She got a bus into Covent Garden and wandered aimlessly down the streets and into the covered market. She considered an expensive glass plate, a wooden salad bowl with burnished swirls in the grain, a soup tureen, hand-painted mugs. There was a man on stilts juggling; his face was covered in sweat. A few feet from him a woman dressed in white, with a silvered face, stood absolutely still, but a vein bounced in her neck. A man played the trumpet in short, desperate blasts. A gypsy tried to push a sprig of lavender into her hands and cursed her when she turned away and went into a bookshop. Perhaps she should buy the book on pictures of the moon – lovely black-and-white images of the glowing white rock from far off and from its cratered ground. Or the book about remarkable trees. She turned to a photograph of a vast and ancient Banyan tree in the rain forest in Australia, its trunk hollow and vaulted as a church – perhaps the children would see that. It occurred to her that throughout their lives up to now, the things they had seen were usually things she had seen too. They had shared memory banks and stories. But after this holiday with Adrian and Frankie their heads would be full of unfamiliar images. She shut the book.

Up from the bookshop was a shop selling photographs, and she went in, the door ringing as she opened and shut it. Inside, it was dim after the dazzle of the street, and cool and quiet. Images beckoned from walls and shelves – an old woman’s bright eyes; a long road winding through spindly poplar trees; a child with a dirty face and on her lips a smudged slash of red lipstick; rain falling on a stagnant pool. They were all so expensive though, hundreds of pounds even without a frame. She turned to go but as she did so she saw a long, narrow photograph in the far corner and it stopped her in her tracks. Rolling red sand dunes under a darkly glowing blue sky, a blurred white sun casting shadows in lakes and pools. Irene crossed the room and stood in front of it, staring and unable to look away. She didn’t know how long she stood there. It was as if the world dropped away and all that was left was this inhuman landscape, where nothing could live and the sun scorched the sand and the sky hung above it like a shining shroud. It burned into her brain and she felt that she was empty of everything else – empty of tears, of grief, of sorrow and rage and empty even of weariness.