They all smiled at each other. This was just what they wanted to hear, coming from a long, cold English spring.

‘Look at all the tiny roadside shrines,’ pointed out Nell, fascinated by the plethora of crosses and painted icons, often with jam jars of flowers in front of them. Moira began explaining that Christian shrines had often been converted from earlier ones to Apollo or Athena.

Ten minutes later the driver negotiated his way into a huge car park, packed with cars, taxis hooting and coaches disgorging large groups headed by umbrella-wielding guides.

‘Can this really be Zanthos?’ Moira stared out of the window, for once struck by no appropriate classical quotations. ‘I mean, it was tiny! There can’t have been more than five hundred people living here.’

‘Zanthos very busy now,’ endorsed their driver. ‘Season starting very early. Was week after Easter, now big ships come from beginning of March.’ He drew up in the far corner of the car park. ‘This address you give me.’

He pointed to a house down a narrow turning. It was a charming house – dazzlingly whitewashed with the classic bright blue painted windows and front door, the exterior covered in pink and purple bougainvillaea. It had just one obvious drawback: it was only yards away from the fume-filled pandemonium of the car park.

‘Good God.’ Dora shook her head. ‘It’s like bloody Piccadilly Circus!’

‘There was supposed to be a sea view!’ Penny blurted, on the edge of tears.

‘There probably is, from the roof,’ Nell, ever the diplomat, reassured, a skill honed over many years of dealing with angry patients and harassed doctors. ‘Come on, let’s go and see inside. Is the owner meeting us here?’

They started to unload their bags from the taxi. ‘Zanthos quiet place in evening,’ the driver informed them. ‘Go to Lefkas for having fun!’

Dora shuddered. At that moment, the front door opened and a smiling Greek lady appeared on the doorstep. ‘All the single ladies!’ she greeted them, in what Nell supposed was a tactless reference to Beyoncé’s megahit song. She led them into an interior courtyard with a pebble mosaic floor, fashioned at one end into the shape of a fish. ‘Is very old way of making floor,’ their new landlady informed Nell, who was studying it and wondering if it would work on her small patio at home. ‘Is called hohlaki. Need great skill.’

‘I’m sure it does,’ agreed Nell.

As promised, there were four bedrooms and two shower rooms, one on the ground floor and one upstairs, and a roof terrace which did indeed have a view of the sea – if you could mentally blot out the row after row of cars and coaches in front of it.

‘Oh dear,’ Penny sighed, Colin’s words about her inability to organize anything ringing in her head.

‘Not OK?’ asked the landlady, visibly disappointed.