I was good at Badging, at the conference centre in Highbury – printing, issuing, organizing – and that summer I was sent to Tenerife to train staff at a Spanish hotel on the same system. At twenty-six, I’d never been on a plane before – we’d never stretched to foreign holidays, as a family – and I loved the flight out. I liked being up in the air where everything stops and you are largely ignored; where fellow passengers only glance at you cursorily and cabin staff are trained not to flinch. I wondered how Angela had felt on her maiden flight to Nova Scotia; how excited she had been. Leaving us.

When we landed and I caught the bus to the resort hotel, I was disappointed. It was cloudy when I expected blue skies and dazzling sunshine; it was dry and somewhat commercial looking, not lush and exotic. There was bushy scrub, dusty roundabouts, random mountains with no purpose; two-storey buildings with shuttered apartments above, estate agents and restaurants boasting egg and chips below. It was dull and I felt dull there, after the excitement and promise of the flight. In the mornings I taught the badging system; in the afternoons I lay by the kidney-shaped pool behind the hotel. It was the school summer holidays so it was always busy, with lots of children. Lots of screeching and lots of splashing. I liked hearing them.

One afternoon, a rare sunny one towards the end of the trip, I put my minidress over my head, stretched out on my front on my sunlounger and, with my left cheek squished against its stiff fishing-net-like material, stared through the fretted squares to the chalky-white tiles below until a big toe with fine blond hairs on it appeared.

‘Hello,’ said a voice. European. Sing-song. ‘Are you on your own?’ The sort of thing an escaped murdering lunatic might ask.

‘No,’ I replied, raising my head and looking up from under my dress. The man was very tall, silhouetted against the denim-blue sky. Glittering droplets of water on his body. Taut and honed. Silken-skinned. The kind of man the boys I liked at school probably grew up to be. ‘No, I’m not. I’m here with my husband and seven children. They’re just in the pool.’

I waved a finger airily towards the centre of the pool, where it was absolute carnage.

‘Oh, OK.’ I knew he didn’t believe me. ‘Would you like a drink?’

‘I’ve got water,’ I said, indicating the plastic bottle under the sunbed.