Irene steered the boat along the canal. Trees flicked slowly past on either side, stripes of shadow in her eyes. The sun was high and white, the water tea-bag brown, with small clouds of insects hovering above its surface, twigs and leaves bobbing at the side where they’d been washed by successive passing vessels. As if there was a television set turned down in the corner, she heard the voices of the others on the humming margins of her consciousness. Neil reading to Katherine, the same book over and over again until the words became a meaningless incantation. Mickey telling Lorrie about the man he’d known at university who’d set fire to his house when his wife left him. The faint scrape of pen on paper as Luke wrote or drew in his notebook. The far-off echoing call of a bird coming from the land which had become flat and watery as they approached the wetlands of the Camargue. The whine of invisible insects. The voices of people on other boats as they passed by. The snatches of music coming from a café on the canal’s edge, the sudden lament of wind through the thick rushes, and the steady, arrhythmic slap of water against the boat’s blunt bow. The landscape poured through her, the sun and the canal and the fields that seemed to be turning to water in front of her eyes.

After an hour or so, Neil took over and she and Lorrie went into the kitchen, put cheeses and pâtés out onto a tray, warmed the baguettes they’d bought that morning in the oven, filled a jug with iced water, cut tomatoes into wedges and dressed them with olive oil, salt and black pepper. But it was too hot to eat. Irene went and lay in her cabin with her forearm over her eyes to block out the light and for a while she fell asleep, lulled by the purring engine.

She woke with a jerk. Someone was calling her name.

‘Mummy, Mummy, Mummy!’

She swung her feet off her bed, bewildered, and stood up dizzily, the objects around her swimming. She laid her hand against the wall to steady herself. Where was she? Who was she?

‘Mummy!’

She stared at the small frosted window, the narrow shelf beside her bed where Great Expectations lay, no longer crisp but dog-eared, damp and stained, the hook on the door where she’d hung the small, royal-blue towel that she’d found folded on the bed when she’d arrived. She was on a boat, far from home. The child calling was not her child. She was nobody’s mother here.

Twenty-seven

In the glazed heat of afternoon, the landscape shimmered. Irene cycled steadily along the towpath, with Lorrie just behind her, and ahead Neil, and Katherine, sitting in the child’s seat and pointing at things, her hair whipping across her cheeks.