‘Is it? All the crap she comes out with – it’s so boastful. And it can’t possibly all be true.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like she can drive a car.’

‘Okay. Fair enough.’

‘Like her sister’s at McGill.’

‘Isn’t she?’

‘Come on, Dad. You saw the way Valentina looked when Mum mentioned about Anouk’s scholarship. Like Mum had three heads. Corinne made it up the same way she makes everything up.’

Mark was silent, absorbing this new perspective. He thought about Corinne, wondering whether Eva’s assessment of her was altogether fair. He brought to mind the upward tilt of Corinne’s nose, the determined set of her chin. Something plucky about her that he liked. So what if she made up a few stories? It showed she had imagination and a type of bravery that he couldn’t help but admire. And something else occurred to him: that Eva had no understanding of what it meant to grow up ashamed of where she’d come from. She knew nothing of the desperation involved in escaping the net of an impoverished childhood – he and Abi had made sure of that. Their eldest child was now a confident young woman, and while he took pride in that, he felt slightly alienated from her too. Her self-assurance was so different from his latent insecurities. Beth had always been the one mirroring his personality. And it struck him that Corinne, in her own way, was like him too. There was something in her that he recognized: a discomfort within her own family that she couldn’t mask. He knew something of what that felt like.

‘Beth’s happy,’ Mark said, trying to placate Eva. ‘I say let’s just indulge her, if only for the next few days. At the end of the holiday, we’ll go home and then Beth and Corinne won’t be hanging around together any more. My guess is that after a few months they’ll have dropped all contact beyond being friends on Facebook.’

‘Fine. It’s your funeral.’

She was already slipping her iPhone buds into her ears, locking him out of her thoughts once more.

The museum was a giant industrial-looking complex on the banks of the river. According to the information booklet it had served as a munitions factory from the time of the Franco-Prussian War until it was abandoned in the 1960s. Now it was home to a museum charting the evolution of transport, but to Eva it still felt abandoned, a sepulchral silence filling the air, broken only by the sound of her flip-flops gently slapping on the concrete floor.